Nothing could have prepared her for this. The blackness is rich and thick, like velvet. The sun is a white star and the earth an immense orb revolving silently around it. The moon hovers nearby. It is a rock, but also the ghost of a rock. Everything is still but at the same time in motion.
Dawn, when it falls upon the planet, appears as an arc of blue so vivid that it is shocking. Then the sunlight chases the darkness over the sphere, revealing the white arteries of rivers, luminous oceans, bleeding deserts, the geometric scars of farmlands and cities; all protected by a radiant layer of atmosphere.
She had seen images of it, but the reality is altogether different. It is as if she had been watching a lion on a screen and then the creature itself was suddenly panting in her living room, its fur framed by muscle and bone, its breath heavy with the odour of flesh, its yellow eyes inhuman.
Things have never seemed so real, but at the same time unreal. Floating near the transparent ceiling of the cupola, she feels like she is dreaming. She has broken free. She has escaped the sordid weight of herself. She is a pure spectator, akin to a heavenly spirit. She approaches the camera fixed at the apex of the cupola and observes her likeness in the depthless surface of the lens. It is this disembodied image of herself that she wants beamed back to the earth.
She presses her hands against the cold glass. She sees where topsoil has stained the ocean alongside the deforested island of Madagascar. The depleted body of the Aral Sea is exposed to her, as is the smog over Beijing. A vast cyclone covers the north-western coast of Australia, the outer areas of cloud pocked by soundless bursts of light. Then the world falls into darkness again, its cities like the embers of smouldering fires.
It is then she remembers why she is here. She will be the first to leave all earthly problems behind. She will make a clean start. It is time to quit orbit. It is time for her transition to the new world.
She feels a muddying confusion, almost like panic, as if she has forgotten something of utmost importance – but the opportunity for hesitation is long gone. There is no choice anymore. She leaves the cupola and floats back to her operation seat in the illuminated alcove of the control room. She straps herself down.
To escape the pull of the earth, there is an acceleration, both mysterious and atrocious. The lights are extinguished, and she is pressed deep into herself in the inscrutable darkness, becoming heavier than she thinks she can endure. She is almost sure that she falls unconscious. Certainly she drifts into a kind of sleep, although there are no memories or dreams. The emergence back into wakefulness is marked by a feeling of disease or disgust, abiding in her flesh and bones. It is not what she had expected.
The lights flicker on. She squints at the shining ceiling. She sees the glassy eye of the camera lens embedded there and makes out her reflection. She is bound to the padded chair in her pale jumpsuit, some grotesque unfortunate from a bygone age. She is a blight in the immaculate space. This is not what she had envisioned.
She allows herself time to recoup. She remains in the reclined seat, her head cushioned in a stout brace. With the pressure against her ears, she can hear a fleshy percussive noise, her heart sounding like something unborn. She lifts her head and observes the undulating zipper down the front of her suit, rising and falling with each breath. Something has gone wrong.
She unbuckles herself and gets to her feet on the gleaming floor. Her weight is cumbersome in the new semblance of gravity. She listens to the reverberation of the ventilation fans and takes in the metallic taste of the air, like the vile residue in her mouth when she coughs sometimes. Her nausea is strong. She feels as if she is standing still, but in fact she is being spun and hurled through endless space and time. She had understood the plan, the mechanics of it all, how she would be sent on her way, but now she feels only as if she is in a carnival ride gone wrong.
She looks around her. The space is so white that at first it is hard to distinguish anything. Then she makes out the circular walls of the control room. There are a number of doors. One of them returns her to the cupola. There she sees instantly that the view has changed. It is all gone. Looking at the hemisphere of glass above her she sees only blackness, unbroken by any stars.
The dome looks close, much closer than before, its blackness like morbid ceiling paint. The radiation shield has closed over the craft. Beyond is eternity, silent as an iceberg. She will never see the earth again.
Her nausea settles into a dead weight in the pit of her stomach. She leans against the wall of the cupola, triggering the release for the door. The door slides shut, and she is sealed in. The blackness is so dense that it is like blindness. She cannot even see herself. She lowers herself cross-legged to the floor, heavier and sicker than she has ever felt before.
How brief her life on earth had been, she thinks. It is as though it had never happened.
She should be looking ahead – it is what she has been trained to do, a habit in which she has come to trust – but sitting in the dark she finds herself almost paralysed. She ought to be following a new routine, enacting life, this afterlife, as it is to be from now on, but she has no wish to move. She is not even sure that she can. It feels as if the hardness and coldness of the floor is merging with her legs. Her chest and throat are becoming rigid too.
Looking up, she notes the green glow at the centre of the ceiling. It is the power signal on the rim of the camera lens. The light is too weak to provide illumination, but it lends the blackness around her its texture. She is a statue buried in a catacomb.
She should open the door to the control room and let its light enter the cupola, this sole room exposed to the elements, but she has no desire to do this. She has been cast into an abyss. This is no fantasy of starlight and glittering dust. Let people see what awaits them after life on earth. Let them cleave to each other. Let them cleave to their home in fear.
The anger is irrational and strong, a resurgence of life, but it leaves as quickly as it comes. In the blackness her body becomes frigid again. She thinks of her own home, remembering not her apartment in Moscow but the farming town in Finland where she grew up. It was less a town than a collection of timber houses built in fields hard-won from the taiga forest and, in times gone by, from their Russian neighbours.
She closes her eyes – it is easy in the darkness – and sees the skeletal trunks of the birch, pretending to the winter that they do not exist. The pine and spruce are burdened by snow. She hears the sliding of her skis, smells the freezing air, feels the weight of ice on her eyelashes. The sky is only half-lit. She spies a lone elk in a white clearing, its antlers stark as an outcrop of rock. The wings of a black grouse break the silence.
She used to ski for kilometres through the forest to get to school.
In spring the snow ruptures and thumps from the trees, melting into slurries of earth, releasing the stench of things dead and buried. Summer crawls out as if it had been waiting. The mosquitoes come in swarms, rising from the soupy ground. She feels the sticky grass on her calves, smells the pine needles and soil, hears the sucking sounds of a creek somewhere. The sun is eternal. In her bedroom fox-skins hang from the wall. Even there she cannot escape the reek from the barn of her father’s pigs, sulphurous and cadaverous.
That stink had followed her everywhere.
She opens her eyes to the void. The ventilation system hums like a refrigerator. She had hated everything about her home, she recalls. At least she could admit it. Everyone who lived there hated the place, though they kept silent as if it was a national virtue.
In the warmer months farmers dragged what they could from the earth to feed themselves and their beasts; in winter they cut down trees with calamitous machines. Drinking was another kind of labour. People took to it early and stuck with it until the end. Every Sunday they gathered to receive the promise of another life from an old man whose hands, as he raised a chalice of wine towards the pine ceiling, trembled as much as those of his parishioners. The age of pagan worship had well and truly passed. Still, child after child was born onto that patch of earth. People were no better than animals.
She crosses her arms over her abdomen. There is a faint scar on her torso, shaped like an inverted crucifix, a reminder of her own sordid mistake, when life briefly had its way with her. It does not require her attention.
She stares until she feels as though the black air is silting into her eye sockets, into the cavity in her skull. Life, she thinks, never cared about anyone. It was the biggest animal of all.
Immersed in the darkness, she knows that she has escaped. But it does not feel as it should.
Something has gone wrong, but she does not understand what it is. Her body is cold, like stone, though she feels sick to her core. She wants nothing more than to lie down and retreat from it all. It happens, she knows. Back home, men were found under bridges every winter. Her father was one of them. Drunk on cheap alcohol, cowering from the night like some kind of ape-man, he drowned in his vomit.
He had been too weak to survive. The Finns had a word for his kind: nassu. She remembers how he showed up at her confirmation, lurching into the pine church in his funeral suit. His blonde hair was sticking up in tufts. The stink of him was faint but nevertheless present: pig-shit, sweat, alcohol. She and her mother had not seen him for days. Steadying himself at the end of her pew, he had begun stroking her hair, the colour of his own, his fingers clumsy on her skull. ‘Niin kuin vauvan,’ he had mumbled to the old pastor at the altar. Like a baby’s. She had been fifteen.
She liked to think that she had never believed the earth was anything other than a rock circling the sun, but the truth was, dressed in her white gown that day, she had hoped to be one of God’s children. She had turned to look at her mother in a pew behind, the lights from the ceiling burnishing her hair, which in those years was brown as soil. ‘Anna hänen olla,’ her mother had said to her and then to those around them. Let him be. The pastor had continued with the service, and she had pretended that her father’s hand was not upon her, that his stench was not contaminating everything. When she got home, she had fled to the sauna and washed. She never went to a service again.
She is not the daughter of such men. She rises in the black pit of the cupola and fumbles along the wall for the release to the door. The white control room appears in front of her, a floodlit bank of snow. She raises her arm to defend herself. When her eyes adjust to the gleaming light, she observes her chair, with its abandoned padding and bindings. It looks like a thing thrown clear from a crash site.
She assesses her body. She is colder than she has ever been, though there is no shivering. The nausea is enduring. There is a weight in her chest, as though a fist is pressing against her sternum, and there is a pressure in her throat. It is as if something powerful is trying to erupt from her flesh.
She glimpses the reflective lens at the apex of the white room. She must take care of herself. She crosses the lustrous floor and presses the release to her sleeping cubicle. She falls to her knees at the side of the bunk inside and unlatches a drawer beneath it. The medical supplies are kept there. She removes a transparent tube of pills.
She has never had a sedative before. They have always struck her as dangerous. She watched her father, night after night, drink himself into oblivion. He would sit in the kitchen alone, tipping the liquid from one bottle after another into his mouth, until he was bleary-eyed and could no longer see.
She saw him, though, when she crept past in the hallway to go to the bathroom: slumped and snoring on the wooden chair. She saw her mother too, tending to the pigs in the morning when her father was too wretched to get out of bed, or on those occasions when he simply disappeared. Her mother, a midwife, had her own work to do, but the pigs made such a racket when ignored. Their grunts and shrieks rose from their hidden sties like the noises of the damned.
Her mother might have accepted life as it came – she helped the pigs give birth as much as she helped women do the same – but, unlike her mother, she refused to even enter the barn. It was the eyes of the animals that bothered her more than anything: the way they looked at her from beneath their pale lashes, their snouts hovering just above their own shit on the earth. Not that it mattered. They were bred to be killed.
She thrusts the chalky pills into her mouth and forces herself to swallow. Then she dims the white lights in the cubicle and curls up on her side on the thin mattress. The room is still too bright for her liking. It reminds her of the witching hours of summer, those hours after midnight when the sun cannot be seen but its light silhouettes the creatures of the forest that ought to be in darkness, that ought to have their time in hiding. She stares at the pallid wall and focuses on the cold surface of the pillowcase against her cheek, waiting for her body to become numb.
The bed grows soft. The tension in her chest and throat releases, and her respiration finds a rhythm in the steady reverberations of the ventilation system. She is breathing easily, as if breathing is the easiest thing to do. She is barely responsible.
There is horror at her failure, at the miscarriage of her transition, but it is a distant feeling, as if she might have dreamed the whole ordeal. She is aware of the space outside the vessel and her distance from the earth, vaster than anything she can imagine, but her horror of that has subsided too.
There is no pain. She can remember everything without fear: even that she once fell pregnant and lost a child. She had been in a science laboratory at the university in Moscow, when a burning pressure had grown in her abdomen. She had walked to the hospital in her white coat, along streets wet with spring melt. The pain had become excruciating. It was a long walk; that is what she remembers most. Yet it also feels as if it took no time at all.
She was lucky not to be killed by the child. After the operation, with the scar fresh and sore, the nurse had led her downstairs to the morgue, pulling out a single drawer in a wall lined with steel cabinets. The stored foetus looked prosthetic, a prop for a film. Days later, in the hospital chapel, a priest, in a grotesquely extravagant gown, conducted a group funeral. There were no fewer than six small coffins arranged at the base of the golden crucifix. The corpses had already been cremated in the hospital incinerator, and the white coffins at the front of the room were empty, ready to be used again. Still, the would-be parents, hunched on the pews, had cried as if those babies were there.
The father of her baby had sobbed with them, a sound like her father made when he was drunk sometimes, loose-lipped and wretched. Some time later in her apartment, drunk himself, he sat opposite her at the dining table, flicking the stubs of one lit cigarette after another in her direction. It was a novel kind of violence. When the cigarettes came close, she simply batted them away. Soon he got up and left. She was glad not to see him again. It had all been a mistake, her body leading her astray, as it had done from time to time in those days.
The wall in her cubicle begins to look thick and blurry. Her body on the mattress is barely present to her anymore. She remembers how she and her friends, as teenagers, thought that sex might save them. That feeling of power made the world momentarily seem larger than it was. The romance, though, was short-lived. Her friends began to have children, who would grow up and have their own children, and so on – all on the same patch of earth. Life was using them. It wanted to live, just for the reckless sake of it, at the cost of anything, of anyone.
So many babies were born; the earth was a factory for them. When she was still a child, her mother, unable to leave her at the farm alone, had sometimes taken her along to births. Through doorways she had glimpsed woman after woman, working through their pain in the closeted warmth of saunas, each one of them riven by the gluttony of life as it begat itself over and over again. Their infants were born in gushes of flesh, protesting as the air filled their lungs, as they felt the weight of themselves for the first time.
Then there were those who emerged silent as fish.
She imagines her child, spilling into her abdomen four months into term, asphyxiating in the hostile atmosphere of her body. She had a double uterus, she told her mother some weeks later on the phone. She was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet of her apartment near the university in Moscow. She had not told her mother that she was pregnant; she had not wanted to admit that she had ended up in such a common bind. Her mother was alone in the farmhouse. Her father had died years previously, and the animals were gone. There was silence, and then her mother replied: ‘Niin kuin yksi isäsi porsaista.’
Like one of your father’s pigs.
The wall across the floor from her bed becomes one with the hazy whiteness of the room. Her body is a distant memory. She closes her eyes, hoping for a dreamless sleep, like the one she had under anaesthetic, when she had been set adrift from her pain, released into the ether until there was nothing of her left.
It is only towards the end that her body returns and, with it, a dream. She is pushing at the sides of a box, which are strangely soft. It is a struggle to wake. The white walls of her sleeping compartment appear and disappear like the white walls of the coffin in her dream. When she finally surfaces, she is lying on her back in the confinement of the cubicle. The room is dim, the ceilings and walls the uniform colour of plaster. The door to the luminous space of the control room is discretely closed. Her compartment has a clear finitude, unlike the space in her dream. It is, she realises, because of the obscene weight of the void outside.
She catches the eye of the lens embedded in the low ceiling. She knows that she should get out of bed. She is supposed to follow diurnal rituals, regardless of the fact that there are no longer days and nights, no longer time, except for that time buried in her terrestrial body, in the bodies of every creature borne of the earth.
She wipes the dried spit from the corners of her mouth. Her body feels calm and slow, like when she awoke in hospital after the surgery all those years ago, but there is something else lurking inside. She does not understand why it has not been removed. It is best to keep still.
Perhaps she has woken from the sedative too soon. She remembers once seeing a bear emerge early from its winter sleep. It was in the forest behind her childhood home, the world there still blotted by snow. It was standing behind a frozen pine, lost like a sleepwalker.
She listens to the electric sound of the ventilation system and takes in the battery taste of the recycled air. She thinks of the vast emptiness just outside the membrane of the walls, of her remoteness from the earth. Her chest grows heavy, and tension mounts in her throat once more. She crosses her arms over her abdomen. It is her body, she realises. It is trying to betray her.
She remembers the dogs, on her last night on earth; how they tried to lure her into doubt. She had been quarantined at a complex at the launch site in the snow-strewn Kazakh steppe. Lying in an old steel-spring bed in a windowless room, she had listened to the staccato bursts of fireworks, erupting in the icy sky. The world had been celebrating her impending escape, but the dogs had begun lamenting. They had started straightaway, with the first explosions, though their howls had continued long afterwards, as if, once the fluorescent arcs had drawn their attention to the night sky, they could not forgive what hung over them.
She recalls the granite statue of the dog she had seen in the lobby of the complex when she arrived. A stray captured in the streets of Moscow, it had been the first living creature blasted away from the earth. It had died alone in its capsule, surrounded by a titanic blackness, before the vehicle crash-landed back on earth.
She observes her reflection in the fathomless surface of the lens above. Laid out on her white bunk, in her grey bodysuit, she looks like a corpse in a mortuary. She is not dead. There is something stuck in her throat, pressing to get out.
She opens her mouth.
The squealing is so high-pitched that her ears ache at the alien sound. Then the snorting and grunting come, beginning in spasms in her abdomen, before squeezing through the cavities of her nose and mouth.
The camera transports her body back to the earth.