Dmitri stands up. His mother looks at him and hisses for him to sit, but Dmitri whispers that he is only taking off his jacket. He is a man who knows what to do, and he takes off his jacket and drapes it across his seat, which means he is turned around, facing the rest of the audience, and after he fixes his jacket he stands up straight for a moment, and then he turns and sits down.
There. Kamil knows where he is now, he is certain of it. Kamil is looking at the back of Dmitri’s head, his neck, his shoulders. The lights go down and Dmitri puts his open program on his lap so that his dick can be hard if it wants to be hard, which it does. The orchestra, which is not in an orchestra pit but somewhere behind the curtain, begins to play.
He cannot go to the hotel tomorrow, to the room where Constantinople was seized.
He cannot not go.
On the day of Dmitri’s twelfth birthday, they’d been on vacation at their cousin’s house near Novorossiysk. His father had been on the International Space Station, and made a special plan to celebrate with them. His father had calculated when he could look out the window of the cupola on the station and be passing over just where they all were. And they had brought their father’s pair of night vision goggles with them so they would be able to look into the night sky and see the light of the station passing over. They went outside at the right time, and held sparklers in the air, and they’d seen the light of the station, and waved their sparklers. “I felt I could see you,” his father said later. “Just knowing that you were there, looking up at me, and I was looking down at you. It was one of the best moments.”
They had been able to see his lights, but he hadn’t seen theirs. The Black Sea, yes. The lights of Novorossiysk, yes. But not their individual sparklers. His father couldn’t see him then, and could not see him now. His father wasn’t even in space now, looking down. His father was in Japan. After that, his father would be in Utah. And then, his father would possibly go to Mars and become one of the most famous people ever on the planet. They were all very proud. The thing about pride, though, is it doesn’t fully occupy you. It’s like holding a sparkler. Basically, you just stand there with a light in your hand and look up.
The curtain rises, and the show begins. Dmitri looks at the things happening on the stage, but he does not see them. He imagines the back of his head, and the back of his neck, and the back of his shoulders and wonders what they look like to the man who is watching him, in the dark.
YOSHI
Yoshi settles with himself that he is grateful. Yes, it would have been nice to spend the entirety of his last two days in Japan with his wife, but Madoka could not walk away from her work for an entire day merely because he happened to have some free hours. They will have all day tomorrow, and they have had many evenings, or partial evenings, in the past seven weeks. Helen and Sergei have not been so fortunate. Yoshi moves through his house, consciously taking in the colors, the objects, the textures of things. It will be a long time before he is here again, and in a few months, he will not have any of these creature comforts. This glass bowl with flowers in it, for instance, and these candlesticks, a wedding present. Yoshi focuses on the candlesticks, but they are not quite the right objects to evoke emotion. One does not miss candlesticks.
For Eidolon, he will be allowed a very small bag for personal items, less than one kilo in weight. He will take something from nature, if it will be approved: his favorite acorns. Q. phillyraeoides, Q. dentata, C. cuspidata. The acorns will be a reminder of the trees that he loves, and are something he can hold in his hand. Later on, for the real mission, they will be acorns that have been to Mars.
Yoshi continues his tour through his small house. He and his wife have very compatible taste, preferring to live with light colors and no clutter.
Sometimes Yoshi does picture himself seated in a deep, tufted armchair, wearing a heavy silk dressing gown and brocaded slippers, surrounded by towers of dark bookcases and telescopes, and carved tables covered with maps and botanical drawings, a faithful midsize canine at his feet. He would not call it a fantasy, but perhaps it is that. He has not even told Madoka of this image.
It is too bad his wife could not have spent more time with his crew so they could know her. The day at Meiji-mura would have been a good opportunity, but she had insisted he go alone. “It will be better with just the three of you,” she said. “You won’t be able to talk as freely if I’m there.”
This was prescient of her. His crew had talked freely, or as Prime might put it, they had deepened the context of their rapport and created a shared experience. If Madoka had been there, Sergei might not have taken the opportunity to speak about his divorce, and—in the presence of one who bore all the burden of astronaut life and none of the joy—they might have felt the need to temper their enthusiasm concerning Prime Space.
Yoshi thinks he will use the remaining time before his wife’s arrival to attend to some household chores so that tomorrow they can devote themselves entirely to each other. There is not a great deal to do—accustomed to travel, Madoka and Yoshi leave light fingerprints—but there is laundry to put away. Yoshi unclips a pair of his wife’s underpants from the drying line and considers how best to fold them. He recalls watching with wonder, early in his marriage, as Madoka briskly converted a fitted bed sheet into a perfectly neat rectangle. He had not even known that was possible, and she had moved too quickly for him to study her method. He still does not know how it is done, has deliberately left it as one of life’s eternal mysteries, a romantic acknowledgment on his part of the unfathomable depths of his wife.