Katherine awoke in a hospital bed. She could tell by the flimsy mattress, the thin blanket. Behind her head, something beeped faintly and steadily.
The first thing she did was sit up and gasp. “The baby—where’s the baby?”
Someone was sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed. A few different someones were here with her. They’d drawn the blinds, leaving the room dark, lit only by a single long fluorescent bulb over the sink. She rubbed her eyes. Three men, the same Russian men who’d hired her in the first place, had been watching her sleep. Two leaned against the greenish wall, their arms crossed. They wore dark suits. The one sitting close to her, the bald one with glasses, had on a white lab coat.
“The baby is fine,” said the bald one.
She put her hands over her face and wept. Shadowy memories came back to her. They’d put her in a big car or truck of some sort, where she’d lain across the back seats, screaming. The pain had been like nothing she’d ever felt before; it had been so engrossing and hypnotic in its power that she’d been unable to worry about the child until now. She’d been unable to grieve over what they’d done to her, what Sergey had done to her, unable to berate herself for not having figured it all out sooner. She had been unable to do anything but scream for the doctors, when, finally, they brought her here, to put an end to the pain. She’d gladly have had them put an end to her if that would have made it stop.
She’d been close to death. She could sense it now. The membrane between life and death felt thin, a gossamer curtain, and still close; she could reach out and touch it if she wanted. She could still step over that cliff, if she wasn’t careful.
She wiped her eyes and inhaled. It seemed impossible for the baby to have survived. “The baby’s fine?”
“Yes, it thrives, in fact. The nurses have been taking extra good care of him.”
“Him!” It had been a boy, all along. A boy tucked under her rib cage as she’d slept on the moon. As she’d slept on what she’d thought was the moon. How could she trust anything they told her from now on? “Bring him to me,” she insisted, trying to sit up further. Tubes and wires connected her to the bed. “Prove he’s alive. My baby.”
At once one of the men who’d been standing was at her side, pressing her down by the shoulder against the pillows. “No, no,” he said, an infantilizing grin on his face as he ticktocked his finger back and forth at her.
“We have some particulars to discuss first, Miss Livingston,” said the bald man.
“I’ll say you do.” She lay back, looking at the drab ceiling. She’d heard the hospitals in Russia were poorly run, dirty, crowded, and it seemed the rumors were true. Water stains marked the ceiling in a kind of map. She thought of the craters on the lunar surface, the ones Sergey had supposedly been measuring.
Sergey. He’d dissuaded her from asking for a star chart. He’d pretended he didn’t know what lay behind the locked door. What else had he pretended?
“Captain Kuznetsov,” she muttered. She clenched the threadbare blanket in her fists. “He knew all along. He was part of this.”
The bald man cleared his throat. “Yes, he was aware of the true nature of the study.”
“The study?” Her bosom ached. Her body felt as if it had been blown up, like a balloon, and deflated; now she ached with the force of the stretch. She wanted the baby.
She realized, as her eyes adjusted to the room, that she desperately longed to be back in her lunar habitat as well. It had been home to her for more than a year. And now even this dark chamber provided far too much stimulation, with its beeps and lights and people. The ceiling felt too low and crowded, the blanket was not her hibernation sack, the pillow was not her pillow. There was no Sergey beside her, no baby in her womb. Her breathing came fast and hard. “It was a study?”
“Yes, an isolation study. You and Captain Kuznetsov thrived in isolation far better than anyone expected.” He didn’t laugh, nor did the other two men, but she could hear the humor in their voices. They’d watched everything that had occurred between her and Sergey. It had all taken place in a lab.
“Why in hell wouldn’t you simply have told me that? Why couldn’t I willingly participate in a study?”
“We had to see how you would behave if you believed without question that you truly were separated from all humankind but one. Call it an…Adam-and-Eve re-creation.”
The other men snorted.
“If you’d known we were watching, you might not have behaved with such a…lack of inhibition?”
She turned her face to the wall. She felt as if she might be sick.
“If you’d known there were doctors and nurses on just the other side of the wall, you’d have called them in much sooner, yes?”
“Sergey knew. Sergey didn’t call them in. You put your faith in him, but not me.”
“Ah, but Sergey did call us, did he not? The man lost his nerve.” He mumbled something in Russian to his comrades, who chuckled under their breath. “What he wanted from us was obstetric training. He demanded we let him out of the soundstage for a few hours once.”
So that was where he’d gone, the morning she couldn’t find him. “The visio-telespeaker.” She cleared her throat. “The camera. Could you see us when it was turned off? Could you hear us?”
She watched the man’s face. A twitch of irritation appeared under one eye. “At those times, no. Captain Kuznetsov was given specific orders not to turn off the visio-telespeaker, only to pretend to do so. At times he obeyed us. But at times he did not.” His yellow teeth showed, a simpering, pitying smile. For her. “It appears he is either a very good actor, or he did care for you a bit, Katya.”
“Don’t you dare call me that.” She clutched her hospital gown closed. The idea of them watching her made her want to change her skin. “So…the newspapers, the public’s reaction—all of that was a lie?”
The man’s smile disappeared, and the two men behind him shifted. They seemed to grow a little bit taller. “This is the other particular we would like to speak about. In the eyes of the public, the pilot lunar program was a reality.”
Katherine crossed her arms. “I can’t imagine what’s stopping me from disabusing the public of that notion.” But even as she said it, as she watched the men looming over her, she knew that they could do anything they wanted to maintain her silence. They’d arrange to have her killed, here and now. She’d be no more than a smudge on a Soviet sidewalk. They could tell the world she’d passed away in childbirth. It happened often enough. It could have happened to her.
None of the men said anything. They waited in silence, allowing the reality to settle, like a cloud, above their heads: she had no power here.
“My dear,” said the bald man, “you cannot say anything, because no one would believe you.”
“Not in the USSR, perhaps, but in my country, people would believe me. I’d tell them I was tricked by the Soviets. The U.S. would just love to break the story that the Soviet lunar landing had been faked.”
Again, that simpering smile. Again, the men were silent, allowing something to settle over her, but what?
“You aren’t going to let me leave, are you?” she asked. “You’re going to ship me to Siberia.”
Still no response. The men waited.
She was beginning to grow restless. Her lungs worked overtime. “You’ll let me take the baby with me, won’t you? Oh, please, will you let me take the baby to Si—”
Her hands had been grasping the rails at either side of the bed. Her thumb had brushed a little sticker on the rail, the manufacturer’s sticker.
nilsson’s hospital equipment, the sticker read. lincoln, nebraska.
The men continued in their silence as her eyes darted around the room. A clock ticked quietly on the wall, made by the Boston Watch Company. There was a tray beside her bed, holding a thermometer and a bowl of green Jell-O. She reached for the thermometer with a shaking hand. It measured degrees in Fahrenheit. On the wall, a map of the hospital, clearly marked exits—in English. How had she not seen it before? How had she missed all the signs, again?
“I’m in the United States,” she whispered.
“Bingo!” the bald man burst out, clapping his hands together. “That is what Americans say, yes? Bingo?”
“I’m home.” Her voice was barely audible. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this news.
“Close to home,” he replied merrily. “California. My dear, where else would we have found such an expert soundstage? Ah, do not be too hard on yourself for not noticing your moon was no more than a secret room in a Hollywood backlot. They do good work, the CIA, do they not?” The other two men nodded, though one of them rolled his eyes. “Yes, the program began with us, but once your CIA got wind of what we were doing, they realized you might be more useful to them as an enemy than as a friend. And so they gave us a bit of help. Happens more frequently than you think.”
Katherine lifted a paper cup of water, shakily, to her dry lips.
The man continued, “You might say your work has been a joint program for us, a tool of propaganda for both the KGB and your Central Intelligence officers. For us, you are heroine; for the U.S., antiheroine. The anger toward you is apparently so great in your country that your Congress is shoveling money into the American space program. Besides that, they have had record numbers of young people applying to work as astronauts. Especially girls.” He had a twinkle in his eye, which disgusted her. “Think of what you have done for the American girls!”
“It’s all based on a lie, though. What will they do if I expose the lie?”
“Ah, but is it? Whether or not you were really on the moon, my dear, you agreed to work for the Soviets! You defected!” His finger punctured the air righteously. “I would not say you are in a strong bargaining position, but, luckily for you, they are willing to bargain.”
“Please,” she said, weary now, “please just bring me my baby.”
The man stood and adjusted his white coat. “I believe I hear him coming as we speak.”
She burst into tears when the door to her room opened, and a young woman, unmistakably an American woman, with high-teased hair and a broad grin, came in holding a wailing bundle. She laid him across Katherine’s chest with a flurry of well-meaning instructions that Katherine ignored, and with a warmed bottle that Katherine pushed aside. Instead, she opened her gown and pressed the baby’s face to her waiting breast. He latched greedily, his tiny rosebud lips suckling against her, releasing a pressure valve that she hadn’t realized needed to be opened. She sighed in relief.
“Oh, honey, you don’t want to do that,” said the nurse. “Here, let him have the formula, it’s more balanced.”
“Get out of my room,” Katherine barked at her. The nurse’s face fell, but Katherine refused to feel guilty. She was tired of being told what to do. Silently, the nurse tucked the blanket around the baby and under Katherine’s forearm. Katherine gazed at him. His head was covered in soft, dark down; his eyebrows were barely perceptible. His cheeks were downy, too, and red. His little nose turned upward. He was the image of Sergey.
“I’ll leave you with your visitors,” the nurse said quietly. As she retreated, Katherine noticed the men. More men in suits, more strangers, coming toward her. These would be the Americans, though she could hardly tell the difference between them and the ones who’d just left her. These were the men who were supposed to protect her, and yet they’d used her just as badly as her supposed enemies had.
She did not cover her chest or the baby. She had already been exposed. Now she would choose when to expose herself.
As they came closer, the men in suits, she already knew what she would ask for. She would ask for an island home. Lord knew the United States had plenty of those in its collection, plenty of isolated spots where they could tuck someone away. She would ask them to send her somewhere warm and pleasant. Somewhere she could be alone, she and this little copy of the man she’d thought she loved. She’d go somewhere no one could find her, not even Sergey himself. And she would begin again.