It is January 14, Old New Year in the Russian calendar, a day of feasting and carol singing and fortune-telling. The astronauts must celebrate. Perhaps none of them wishes to celebrate; perhaps they all think they would prefer to lie on their person-sized slabs in their wedges and reread messages from home, or marathon-watch a television series, or don sim helmets and stroll along the cliffs of a virtual Cornwall. The brain looks for comfort like a newborn, seeks pleasure like a greedy child, abandons reason like a lovesick teen. Even the kind of brain that recognizes the value of delayed gratification—or has been rigorously trained to accept it—even that brain is capable of justifying slothful regression.
Sergei believes that complete transparency about his role as commander is crucial to his success as commander, so he does not try to trick or cajole his crewmates into having good times. He says, “Prime believes it is important for us to celebrate and have communal recreation activities, especially during times when we might be tempted to withdraw because we are missing Earth and our families.” He does not say, “I believe,” even though he does agree that it is important. It is too easy to become dull without realizing that you have become dull. Depression and listlessness are marked states, but boring is a slow disease.
Over the years, the International Space Station has acquired a supply of holiday decor, but on Primitus, size and weight are commodities too precious to be squandered on the premanufactured items of celebration. The astronauts have done their best. Five pieces of paper had been sacrificed to make snowflakes for Christmas, and these still hang over the dining table along with a chime constructed from shiny tools, and utensils not in use. Sergei had programmed the large screen in the Galley/Recreation wedge to play a scene of snow falling. Their mascot, the green alien, has acquired a tiny red paper Santa/Grandfather Frost hat. The astronauts have made alterations to their own appearances to mark the Old New Year. Helen wears a towel on her head, babushka-style. Yoshi sports a mustache made from black electrical tape. Sergei has made himself a beard out of a wad of flameproof insulation. For dinner, they enjoyed rehydrated pork dumplings.
Sergei places a tray of screws and nuts onto the table. “My sister Galina was the fortune-teller,” Sergei says. “Because she was the youngest and we had a tradition in the family that it was always the youngest girl who did this. We had a game, with beans. The beans were put in a special bag, and you shook it, and then you reached in and grabbed a handful and let them fall into a pot while you made a wish. Then my sister would count the beans and if the number was even, your wish came true, and if odd, too bad.”
What happens when you become dull is you forget that the story you are telling must be interesting to other people, or you forget that you have already told the story. You say, “I may have told you this” and proceed anyway, even if your listeners appear to recognize the anecdote. Or you tell no stories at all. Sergei produces a clean sock and puts the screws and nuts he has collected into the sock.
“Helen is the youngest woman here,” Sergei says. “So she shall count the beans.” He is feeling homesick for people who do not require translations or explanations, even though both Helen and Yoshi are conversant with Russian holidays, have celebrated them with cosmonauts before. Helen and Yoshi probably know more about Russian traditions than a lot of Russians. But for them it will always be knowing about these things, not simply knowing them. Sergei thinks of his youngest sister, Galina. She had been the prettiest and the sweetest of his sisters, and now she was fat, and a lesbian, and lived in Germany. He didn’t mind about the lesbian and the Germany. Russia was not the place to live if you were gay. It was one of the reasons.
Well.
Galina was very bitter against their parents for various things that they’d all had to put up with. She had something that she called her “personal story” and she did nothing but tell this personal story over and over again. Sometimes she called it her “voice” or her “truth.” Sergei had felt very bad for Galina when he heard her personal story the first time, but now it was just annoying.
Thinking of his sister makes Sergei feel depressed, which he was already feeling this week, a little, because of missing his boys. It’s not a problem. Being depressed is not the worst thing. It depends on how you address the feeling. Perhaps Sergei is luckier than his crewmates. Americans always desire happiness, so they fear sadness, unlike Russians, who can draw strength from mourning. The Japanese too, Sergei understands, have an easier relationship with melancholy. Sergei is very glad that Helen is a woman and not a man. Depressed American men on spaceships are embarrassing.
“Do you have your wish ready?” Helen asks Yoshi.
“When I was little, I wished I would be a cosmonaut, so this is very powerful magic,” Sergei tells them. “That was my wish every year, except for one year, when I wished that Ama Yevchenka would fall in love with me. Of course, it was always a joke, no one took it seriously, but there was always a moment, just when you reached in the bag, that maybe you were serious. A wish is always serious, even if the game is silly.”
He would never sit around with his family and tell fortunes again. Not with the family he grew up with. His childhood was not only over, but tarnished. “You all wanted me to be the pretty little girl,” Galina had screamed at their mother. “Your sweet, pretty little girl. Always happy little girl.” She had a point. Sergei would be honest and say that he much preferred Galina when she was happy and pretty and sweet and not a bitter, angry, fat person.
“And did Ama Yevchenka fall in love with you?” Helen asks.
“Yes, of course. But she cut her hair, and I did not love her with the same force.”
They all laugh.
It would kill him, it would absolutely kill him, if all Dmitri has in his soul when he is Galina’s age is a story of how people had hurt him. It would also be very sad if Dmitri became fat. Ilya you could almost see becoming fat quite late in his life, after a dancing career. Not fat, but with a hard, protruding belly that he would be proud of and that women would find attractive. When Ilya was a baby he would often stand with his feet apart and his belly thrust out, smiling, very proud.
“I am ready,” Yoshi says. “I have my wish.”
“What is it, Yakov?” Sergei asks. It is his joke to call Yoshi Yakov sometimes. People like to have family nicknames.
“We are supposed to name our wish out loud?”
“No.” Sergei shakes his head.
Yoshi is always very willing. Sergei thinks that, of the three of them, Yoshi has adapted best to their environment, is the most genuinely content and happy. Helen’s performance is very good, but sometimes Sergei has spotted a watchfulness that might also be anxiousness, or near anxiousness.
They would all be perfectly happy if any of this was real.
Helen and Yoshi bend forward as Helen counts. Sergei has given them a silly children’s game and because they are two of the most capable people in the current population of people, they will do their best to play it well. Sergei wishes that he had something better to give them.
“There is another tradition,” he says, “for Old New Year. It is to plunge into cold water. A lake or a river. At midnight. I have done this with my sons, when we would vacation in the Crimea. Dmitri hated it, but he would try to hide this and be brave. Ilya loved it. They won’t do it without me. Of course, they can’t where they are now. New Jersey is not the Crimea. They’d get arrested.”
And the Crimea was not the Crimea anymore. Miss Earth? Pfuff. The things he missed were mostly ghosts.
His father had made him do the New Year’s plunge. For purification, he said. Jumping into a pond in northwestern Moscow in January is no joke. Sergei had been afraid.
How do you help your son conquer fear without hurting him? Sergei was not born with courage. He’d had to force himself. He’s needed to hate himself, hate the weak part, conquer it.
And so, he had taken his own sons to do what he had hated doing himself. The first time, they were so small. When he next sees Dmitri, they will maybe be the same size. But that first run into the sea in January, Dmitri had needed to tilt his head almost all the way back to look up at him. Ilya too, but Ilya didn’t look up so often. Dmitri had gripped his hand, trying to tell Sergei that he did not like what was happening, this thing his father was making him do. Sergei could barely hold on to Ilya, he was angry that his father was holding him back. Sergei had looked down at Dmitri and wondered if all his weaknesses had been siphoned off and gathered in this small person, and he had wanted to beg his son’s forgiveness. And he’d looked down at Ilya and seen the self that he’d fought so hard to acquire, and he’d envied him. He takes no credit for the joy that Ilya feels but must accept all the blame for any suffering of Dmitri’s. “It is not so cold, the water,” he’d said to him. And to Ilya, “Don’t let go of my hand,” because already his hand was loose in Sergei’s grip. But they still did turn to him, and await his signal. Would they turn to him now? No, they were too old, and his signal was not so important. But there had been a time when they had, and he’d told them when to run, and the feast of that epiphany was the sound of his sons’ laughter and their high, fierce shouts, like wolves, and the sight of those skinny legs and knobby arms that returned to him, to be carried out, and the way they held him without noticing they were holding him.
“There are lots of polar bear clubs that do New Year’s plunges in the States,” Helen says. “I know that’s not quite the same as what you’re talking about, but you’ll find a place in the States to take them, next year.” Because Helen is not often soft, her softness is sweet.
She finishes counting Yoshi’s screws.
“Good news, Yakov,” she says. “You’re getting your wish. You will be an astronaut when you grow up!”
Sergei thinks that Helen must be a very wonderful mother, and that her daughter is lucky.
“Your turn, Sergei,” she says, repacking the sock with screws.
Sergei looks at the window. Earth is an undistinguished disk now. Always there has been this question: how will it feel when the Earth cannot be seen, when the cosmonaut travels so far away that he cannot see his home? The answer is that he will mostly stop looking out the window.
What will fuck you up is never what you think is going to fuck you up. Maybe nothing will fuck you up. Anyway, he’s not thinking of Earth, he’s thinking of his sons. For this, also, he must not gaze mournfully at that which he cannot see. Sergei turns from the window.
“Make a wish,” says Helen.