The universe deceives us with its peace. This is not a poetic abstraction or an attempt at twopenny wisdom—it is a physical fact. The four layers of Earth’s atmosphere rest in their respective places like a four-headed Cerberus, guarding our precious skins from the solar poison thrown in our direction every second of each day. They are stoic guardians, as invisible as they are unappreciated by everyday thought.
As we prepared for reentry, I sat next to Vasily, who filled out a crossword on his tablet and paid no mind to our shuttle burning swiftly toward Earth. Klara and Yuraj sat in the front and handled the controls while speaking cheerfully in Russian to their mission command. As the shuttle flipped onto its belly, I looked out the deck window to see for the last time what we officially classify as outer space: the final frontier until a new frontier beyond it is discovered. It stared back, as always, with its insistent flickering, emptiness, lack of understanding for me or the necessity of my being.
We burned at a temperature of 1649 degrees Celsius, pushed through the mesosphere, the graveyard of dead stars and Earth’s shield against rogue meteors, with the nose of the shuttle angled up. The air was too slow to clear our path in time and thus eased our fall. With the engines disabled the ship was now more of a sophisticated hang glider, using Earth’s physics to slice through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. Deep below us, somewhere in Moscow, or perhaps in the surrounding towns, a handful of people were bound to hear the sonic boom, two claps less than a second apart, the drumroll announcing our return. They would dismiss it as construction noise and move on with their day, placated by the silence of their media stations, their government. The pronounced S momentarily disrupting their skyline view—the unavoidable signature of the phantom astronauts—would be simply another weather anomaly ignored during a workday.
For 130 kilometers, we fell. The mesosphere—the protector. The stratosphere—eerie, calm, stable, and dry, the place without climate. A purgatory, occupying the properties of Space and yet a part of Earth. A deceptive non-world, a no-man’s-land between the trenches. Then the troposphere, the last line of defense, from the Greek tropos, signifying change. The keeper of the world’s water vapors and aerosols, a place of chaos, rising pressures, weather patterns. Perfect as the layer closest to human contact. Humanity summarized in a single sphere.
The Earth rested. There was no sign of the billions of volatile souls thrumming on its surface. We were so close to its oceans, its continents that contained the country that contained the city that contained the hospital in which I had entered this world, nude and small. The hospital now torn down and replaced by the offices of a snack machine manufacturer. Would I ever get to visit the place again, see the patch of dirt on which I had come to be?
The vision of my future life entered around my spine and made its way through the lower intestine, abdomen, lungs, and throat. Like a shot of bourbon traveling backwards. A Russian hostage, a man reduced to a state secret. And if I were, eventually, to return to my own country, what kind of life would await me? Dissected, intruded upon, loud. No peace in sight, no peace at all to continue my serene life with Lenka. I made eye contact with Vasily. He knew.
I couldn’t accept it. If I made it back to Earth, I had to be a free man. It had all been taken away. Personhood, physical health, perhaps my sanity. I didn’t know what happened to my wife. No further infringements would happen, at least not with my permission. Vasily’s god had advised me. I wouldn’t be a subject to Russian whims.
I unstrapped myself and jumped at the controls, shoved away Klara’s arms, and activated one of the ship’s engines. NashaSlava1 turned and leaped, like a gazelle with a thigh torn to pieces by predatory teeth. I fell backwards onto the ceiling. Klara shouted, Yuraj unstrapped himself and dropped onto me, then wrapped his forearm and elbow around my neck with staggering efficiency, bound not just to pacify me but to kill me, grunting with frustration pent up during these months of isolation. I flailed my arms; life had begun to leave me, when suddenly more weight landed upon us. All I could see was torn gauze and Vasily’s fists beating at the back of Yuraj’s head.
“… avariya posadka, ya povtoryayu…” Klara shouted into her microphone, and I wanted to shout in turn, I’m sorry, but how did you expect me to sit and wait?
Blood poured into my eye and I was no longer weighed down. Yuraj had released me, and off to my right he screamed and pawed at his neck as Vasily spit out a piece of skin and meat. He had struck a major artery, and Yuraj’s blood was pouring out heavily.
“The prophet will live,” Vasily said. “I am the apostle.”
The body must not be violated! I wanted to shout at Vasily, but it was too late. I had done this. It had to be finished.
The ship flipped back onto its belly, and Vasily and I crashed into the seats. Something cracked within Vasily’s body, but he made no verbal indication of pain. Yuraj, barely breathing, was bleeding to death.
Klara looked back while holding the yoke with both hands, veins cutting through her forearm muscles as she tried to steady it. “Jakub,” she said, as though she didn’t know to whom the name belonged. She had gotten to know and trust a fellow phantom but she couldn’t have guessed how much I wanted to come back home. I longed for the moment we had first sat over a meal together, the way I’d studied the sweat drops on her body and the way she’d pretended to ignore it. When we had thought only the best of each other.
Again I leaped toward the controls, beat at the keys, the screen, the panels, with my fists and cheeks and elbows. Klara dug her fingernails into any exposed piece of flesh she could reach, but she refused to unstrap herself, this genetically determined phantom astronaut trained for mission in the womb, and so I had a free rein. Once again NashaSlava1 spun around, and again, and through the glass whirled those green fields of Russia, towns separated by hundreds of square miles of agriculture and nothingness.
Klara’s fingers found their way into my mouth and she grabbed my tongue, eager to rip it out.
Vasily slapped her hand away from behind, his bloody teeth ready to strike again, and I shouted, “No, apostle, enough!”
He retreated back to appraise Yuraj, who was pale and barely moving. Vasily caressed Yuraj’s cheeks, whispering, “You too could have heard the god.”