I regained sight just as the core ejected me, then my wits as I passed the core’s calm atmosphere and collided with the storm of raging dust. The core had ejected me back into the world at the speed of a launching shuttle. The spiraling dust particles cut into my gloves and chest, forced cracks into my visor. I set my hands upon the helmet’s lock, considering a swifter end.
Death in Space would be a brief affair. For ten seconds, I would remain conscious. During this time, gases in my lungs and digestive system would cause a painful expansion of organs, leading to a rupture of my lungs and the release of oxygen into my circulatory system. Muscles would bloat to twice their current size, causing stretch marks and bruising. The sun would burn blisters into my cheeks and forehead. Saliva would boil off my tongue. After these ten seconds of agony, my brain would asphyxiate and my consciousness would melt into the surrounding darkness. Cyanosis would turn my skin blue, my blood would boil, my mouth and nasal cavities would freeze until finally, the heart would cease to function, rendering me an exquisite corpse, a dry, gaseous Smurf at the altar of the Milky Way.
I was ready for this quick passage when I felt a tap on my back. Hanu? was soaring with me, his skin gray and shriveled, like a potato cooked in hot ashes. A blister appeared above his right lip. We were to move on together. I removed my hands from the helmet. Soon enough, the dust would cut through the suit far enough to depressurize it, and I could still have a cosmic death. I would use my ten seconds to remove the suit and follow the example set by Laika—allow for the vacuum to embalm me and preserve me as a wax figurine for future generations of explorers.
“The Beginning has rejected us,” Hanu? said.
“It seems that way.”
“We did not belong,” he said.
“You love your riddles.”
The terrorizing fury of Chopra’s dust turned to nothingness. We shot out of the cloud completely, once again subjects to the Zen of Deep Space. There could not be much time left now, but I refused to check my suit, refused to check the oxygen count. I focused on my friend. Suddenly, I feared boredom more than death. If my friend died before me, what was there to do with the rest of my time? With the entirety of the universe in front of me, without his voice I would have nothing to guide me as I choked. I reached for one of his legs and offered the jar of Nutella from my pocket.
“Yes, this will do,” he said.
I struggled to find words that were profound, some famous deathbed babble, but if existence could be so simply played out by language, why would we spend our lives trying to justify our right to breathe?
I changed my mind.
My words should not be profound. Instead, I called back to the quick village wisdom of my grandfather’s drinking buddies, eight liters of beer in, their heads closer to the table’s surface with each passing minute. Wisdom about chickens faring so well without heads, or about Grandmother’s strudel always having too many raisins and not enough apples, or about giving the middle finger to God’s hands so horny to grab the soul, or about Icelandic songs always sounding as though they were composed on whispering ships sailing through ice, or about the inside of the very planet we occupy burning as hotly as the surface of the sun yet here we complain about a scorching summer day, or about being so afraid to ask girls to dance as boys while being too brazen, even rude, to ask girls to dance as adults, the unifying postcoital feeling of thirst, when two spent bodies stinking and leaking with nature crave bread and, greedily, another orgasm to reaffirm the fragile chemistry of love. Had the pub closed and taken away this only method of socialization, these village miners and butchers would surely have taken to traveling the Earth like old-school philosophers, exchanging barfly wisdom for pork chops. How could I contribute to this phenomenon? Perhaps with the greatest wisecrack of them all, one that could keep me awake for so many nights—energy cannot be annihilated, and thus matter cannot be annihilated, and thus all we burn and destroy remains with us and within us. We are living dumpsters. We have run out of antimatter, and now the eternal game is one of Tetris—how do we organize the self so as not to choke? I laughed. Hanu? understood.
In the distance, flashes of red. Was the universe on fire? Was it all to end now, with me the fresh pub dialectician? A lovely thought. From the distance and the darkness, a dragon soared, its sharp nose sniffing for easy flesh. Perhaps this was death. I knocked on the hard plate covering my chest, felt the echo of the vibration in my lungs. If it was not death, and the last living dragon was slain by Saint Ji?í so many lifetimes ago, there was only one other option. The nose belonged to a space shuttle, headed for me like the bayonet of a mad soldier. Its beacons saturated the universe like bordello light bulbs, flickering hellishly and seductively, tirelessly to a beat. I was an island, a bastard floating the river in a poorly woven basket, my umbilical cord having been crudely sliced with a pair of rusty shears. Surely, the colors of the spacecraft and the flag singed into its side along with a proud name were a fata morgana, a vision to keep me distracted upon the hour of my death.
“Do you see them?” I asked Hanu?.
“Rescuers,” he said.
NashaSlava1. The words rested next to the stripes of white, blue, and red painted onto its side. Russia. Hell. The grinning chancre of my history.
Instinctively, I swam forward, attempting to get away. Impossible. The ship approached silently and swiftly, easing its speed as it came near.
“You do not welcome the rescue,” Hanu? said.
“I want to be here. With you.”
A hangar door along the ship’s fat midsection opened, and something loomed in its darkness. A robotic arm slid out of its lair, smooth with the movement of muscle and joint. A cybernetic octopus seeking me with its eyeless gaze, as its fingers quivered like wheat awns in storm winds. As a child, I had run from my grandfather whenever he mowed the lawn, putting as much distance between me and the spinning blade as I could. I hid in the wooden shed, between stacks of freshly cut firewood, inhaling its sweetness and pulling splinters from my fingers. Now I had no earth to run on, no structures between which to hide. How I longed for firm ground, for the strain of muscle pulling resolutely toward the center of something, anything.
“You may live,” Hanu? said weakly. “Why do you resist?”