THE LAUNCH
BY KIRILL STORCH
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Alex sat inside of his apartment with the radio buzzing in the background. A half an hour after six in the evening, when the sun was trapped under the smoke-stacks, a broadcast was sent to every citizen. Yula was doodling on her notebook when it happened; her gaze vacant as two fingers shook on a colored chunk of lead. Sketching ideas for a tattoo, she was oblivious of the broadcast. Alex got up and turned the knob to increase the volume.
“Good evening, this is citizen.” A voice said.
“Good evening,” Alex replied.
“I am currently on the outskirts of town, near the oil refinery. We will be launching soon. I’d like you to come down.”
Alex nodded.
“It’s important that you come within the next forty-five minutes.” The voice added.
Alex put on a dark coat and a silvery scarf. He walked to the window and, after pushing it open, allowed his hand to hover numbly in air. Earth's moon became visible on the horizon. Cold and barren, the moon would soon become illumed and pregnant with a fiery pulse. Alex walked over toYula and shook her by the shoulder. She put down her notebook.
“I’m going to the outskirts of town,” he said, “for the launch.”
“You’re going out fucking now?” Yula asked, “do you know how dangerous it is after the sun sets? There’s ruffians all over the streets. Plus it will be really cold! You’re seriously going out now?”
“I’m not asking you to come.”
Yula shook her head. “But you are.”
She neatly put away her colored lead and got up with her evening gown flowing. Without bothering to take it off, she wrapped a gray parka around herself and donned a white, woolen hat. As she was strapping on her boots by the door, she turned her head to look at Alex. A light sat in her eyes and seemed like a neon glow trapped in a glacial prison.
”I really wish you wouldn’t do this,” she finally said as they walked down the stairs and outside onto the town’s single street. “Why do you have to see this?”
A piece of raveled cloud, which seemed like a pink, pixilated strip of lace, swam through the pomegranate skies. A deep chill began to descend on the town as the earth turned. When they spoke, it seemed the pauses between their breath were subsumed by the trembling presence of the coming night.
”Don’t question men. Why do you always have to listen to stupid goth music?” Alex asked.
”Goth music was created hundreds of years ago, and it connected people in a time where nothing else would.”
“Well, following orders is even older than that. And it also connects people.” Alex said.
“Fine.” Yula said.
“When all is said and done, Goth music will perish but following orders will still be the norm.
“I guess you might be right about that…”
“Of course I’m right.” Alex slipped one of his fingers into Yula’s sweaty palm. “But who cares about what perishes and what survives? What does it matter? All we should care about is the moment, what’s going at the exact moment we are in. I mean, people fight and die, but at the end of the game, the face of the earth stays the same. Do you understand?”
The street of the town winded around a small hill and to the oil refinery. It was a rusted structure, about 400 feet tall. The government had long ago allowed the great complex to fall into disrepair. But against the pitted beams of steel, stood a reinforced concave created out of plastic cables. These supported a long, olive-green rocket, with the letters “Sov 32” branded in red upon it. The rocket was almost as tall as the refinery itself and ended in a narrow point. At the very top of it, one could make out a single, round window—tinted and accessible via the ladder on the control pad, which was a set of narrow beams used to access the rocket.
Citizen was alone on the control pad, his form illuminated by a green glow. As Alex and Yula climbed into the elevator, which was really just a cage of meshed wires, they saw his distant form come closer. He was alone in the entire vicinity and it appeared he was taking measurements. His radio lay near a microphone.
The first star quivered on the edge of the horizon and it seemed as if a silence lay on them so far away from the ground. Below, they could see the rooftops of their town.
”What do you think?” Citizen asked them as they stepped out of the elevator.
“It’s truly amazing.” Alex replied.
“It’s extraordinarily rare for anyone to see something like this. The ol’ girl really looks ready to go. There was that giant storm this morning too. Like, I was so sure I’d have to postpone the launch and now I’m really stoked to finally see it happen.”
“You look pretty stoked, man.” Alex said. “But fuck man, I came out of the house for some action, let’s stop the dilly-dallying and get this show on the road.”
”It’s gonna take a while, Alex,” Citizen told him, “I have to take some more measurements first. And then arrange the launch protocol. When it’s done correctly, we will see it take place slowly. This is a jettison-5 fuel and it takes a while for it to ignite.”
“Then why’d you ask us up here so soon?” Yula asked sourly.
Citizen stared at her. “Please don’t question me, “he said.
The entire mess of wires and dials that Citizen kept up there on his launch pad was labyrinthine, like a pit of oily snakes. He walked around it, careful not to step on the blinking lights, and after checked various meters with his long fingers, strolled over to the edge of the pad and wrote something down . He would keep doing this over and over again. It was imperative to transmit a signal to every part of the rocket and he was calculating the amount of space that required. He was a genius in physics and able to visualize the spatial plane exactly as it was.
Citizen was a patient man. He spent ten minutes doing the final checks before he crossed his arms and said “I think I can start now.” He walked over to a gigantic, red lever and pulled it down. Alex took out his single cigarette and, having forgotten his lighter, stuck it in his mouth where he chewed on it. Yula just focused on Citizen’s head. The thing people noticed most about it was the pattern of white, lightning-shaped scars he had. His back was also massive. Well? Is it happening? Is this rocket going to launch?
They all just stood still. A rumbling noise began at the base of the rocket, echoing off of the bars of the refinery before fading out. And then there was nothing else to be heard. “It must have been a failure,” Yula said to herself. “He must not know what he is doing.”
Alex was about to think the same thing when the noises picked up again and a stream of white gas erupted from the base of the rocket far below. It was a windless night and the gas was like a white line drawn to the sky. “Something must be working down there…” Yula thought, “but I still don’t see the rocket moving.”
The silence persisted. Even Alex, who usually had something to say, just stood against the guardrail and watched noiselessly. Yula plunked down onto the steel reinforcement which served as the floor. Citizen just put his hands in his pockets and played with something in there, probably a watch.
It wasn’t surprising that at this time Alex began to consider an old radio broadcast played to him as a child. It was about the great Arctic explorer, Pyotr Fregenevich. He traveled in solitude through the vast expanses of the North Pole and one day, when he was very tired, was forced to stop and build an igloo. It was important for him to have some kind of shelter less the elements kill him. Ever since he heard it, Alex was unable to forget that radio broadcast. His parents would tell him to stop talking about it, but he couldn’t. It was always present in his fantasy life and it felt as if he himself was present for that terrible scene: Pyotr, building an igloo and laying in it-- feverish-- for 74 hours, suffering exhaustion and hypothermia. With what little strengthe he had left, he could only construct a tiny igloo. Smoldering from the sickness, each puff of his breath condensed and froze upon the walls. Pyotr eventually regained consciousness, only to find the igloo too small to get out of. Alex knew what Pyotr must have felt, he may as well have put his eyes upon Pyotr’s eyes and witnessed the distant, tribal flames which danced inside; the fire which burns upon the day of death. The most wicked fact of all though, was that Fregenevich, as a learned man of the academy, surely understood that laying in that igloo would kill him. Most people discounted this view, but the facts were all there. Pyotr knew he was going to die, either from the elements or his sickness, so he chose to live for an additional 74 hours for no apparent reason. He must have felt those few days of life were worth it. But why would he chose to suffer the remainder of his life in that shrinking igloo?
Alex’s parents hated him for obsessing over this broadcast. “That’s fucking ridiculous, Alex, “they said to him, “it’s a very creepy thing to think about at your age.”
And yet it was true. Alex knew it to be true. Little else in the world was as plausible: Fregenevich wanted to die while suffering and be fully conscious of his death.
“Uh, Sir Citizen, sir?” Yula asked “I don’t think it’s working.”
“No, it’s doing fine. Do you see the blue light about two hundred feet down, and the line of smoke parallel to it. That’s what the first part is supposed to look like.”
“My asshole is tight with anticipation,” Alex said.
“That’s disgusting.” Citizen told him.
”Are you sure this thing’s going to work?”
“Yes.”
“How did you even learn how to do something like this, Sir Citizen?” Yula asked.
“I was in the academy of aeronautic engineers. I had plenty of time to pick people’s brains about the details of space travel.”
“Woah,” Alex sad, “in the academy?”
“Well, that’s not the only way I learned. I mean, some of this stuff there is no way to learn. You just have to figure it out through trial and error.”
“If I went to the academy, I wouldn’t be fucking around with rockets in this bum-fuck town. I’d work in the city and make some real money on a government-sanctioned project.”
“That is where the money is.” Citizen admitted.
He was right about the light as a precursor. Several rows of greenish, pink fire fluttered in tight spirals and a whirring noise resounded. Yula stared in disbelief. It was really going to happen: a rocket launched into the nothingness of space. From nothing but a few pieces of steel, metalloids found in the dirt, an object would hurtle into the void glimmering above. There was nothing to do but observe this phenomenon, trembling as the rocket shook with increasing severity. “Those who invented Goth music,” Yula thought, “must have feared their own unconscious in this way.”
“So dude,” Alex said to Citizen. “You look like you’re from the capital.” He sounded like he was just meeting Citizen for the first time. “Where you there when they declared the war on Afghanistan?”
“Uh, I really don’t run in public circles. Plus I won’t go back there ever again.”
“Well you’ll always look like you’re from there.”
“Is there a specific look we have?”
“Oh, totally,” Alex said, “it’s so apparent to everyone but you.”
”Whatever, at least I don’t look like some American, surfer dork trying to pin stereotypes on people with an education.”
“Fuck, always so fucking serious. You can really be mean when you want to. Anyway, I wasn’t implying anything like you look bad. It’s more of an affect you have I guess,” Alex said. “But seriously, I’m sure you must have seen some of the earliest pronouncements of the war, I mean that city runs on politics. Do you know anyone who was deployed there?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Citizen said. “Let’s have a drink.”
”Ooh, good idea.”
“Are you going to have any?’ Citizen asked of Yula.
“Not too much.” Yula said.
Citizen walked over to a filing cabinet. Up above he could now make out three stars. There was nothing left of the sunset but a creamy glob of light on the shivering hills. He twisted the bottle in his hand and started pouring three glasses. Handing them out, they toasted and drank.
”Fuck, this stuff will burn right through to your gullet,” Alex said. “We should have brought wine.”
“The store is out of wine,” Citizen replied. “This is the only vodka they have that’s not in a can.”
”I think I might have something better,” Yula offered, presenting a few pills from her pocket. She put one in her mouth and swallowed. These thick tablets were doctor-prescribed pain medications for her wounded shoulder. She sought the centripetal force of the chemical acting upon her seratonergic pathways and guiding her mind into euphoria. Citizen and Alex both took a pill. As the medicine coursed through their physiology, an energy expanded beneath them – it was in long, fiery overtures: the rocket moaned a lonely song, taking the time to whirr through each of the long, independent launch sequences. There was still no telling when it would take off.
Yula didn’t know what to say at a time like this. Actually, with the effect of the medication, she just felt like laying down. She did so, putting her head at the bottom of the guard rail so she could still stare at the rocket. Soon the vast colossus settled there would propel itself into the expanse above, perhaps never to be seen again. “It’s amazing things this big can just disappear,” Yula thought, “it’s just like my mom and dad…upped one day and just…left me.”
That happened to her in the Summer of 1987, when she was only 14 years old. Her father was a factory manager and her mother, a housewife. After living with her aunt for a while, she realized she never wanted to see another member of her family again. There was an iron train which steamed across the tundra and to the Northern section of the Kamchatka peninsula. There lay an isolated town, built because of an oil boom that the government had predicted but never happened. They built the town for the employees of a refinery which only stayed open for several months. It turned out there was much less underneath the earth than they imagined. The folks in town were nice enough and they offered her a job at the toll booth which guarded the road out of town. She never wrote anyone back home that she had left and for all they know, she may have died.
It wasn’t certain why her family had to leave. Everything seemed great. They would go on walks together through the park and get ice cream. Sometimes they both held her hand and picked her up so she seemed to be floating along the street. But once they came home and saw that their apartment had been ransacked. Another time, her dad had found powdered polonium in his underwear.
Around the same time, her personality began to change. Whereas she was very well-situated and cogniscent growing up, in adolescence she became more difficult. Long bouts of depression along with emotional outbursts were not uncommon. She became increasingly rageful and started to lie manically to get her way. She didn’t want to but felt compulsed by a force she knew nothing of. She was not a bad person but simply spiraled out of control due to a neurochemical imbalance. Life this way was unbearable.
She met Alex a few weeks after moving to the town. He was riding his motorcycle in swimming shorts and forgot to bring a wallet. He spent a long time at the toll booth explaining to her why tolls weren’t fair to begin with and that the booth should be on the road into town, not the road out of town. Lonely Yula just watched him speak, focused on his full lips and stringy, blonde hair. Alex didn’t do too much in life, he smoked large quantities of pot, listened to Pink Floyd, and did part-time mechanic jobs at which he mostly drank and only sometimes finished what he set out to do. He tried going in for an electrician’s education at the technical school but dropped out both times. If he really wanted to, he could move back to Vladivostok where his family lived but he hated the city and only felt at home near the ocean. All he needed in life was the churning seas, mountains, and a few good friends. Of course, people were getting tired of offering him jobs he wouldn’t finish and he hadn’t been able to do any work all month. He lived off his meager savings and had no other plans for making money.
Alex and Yula met Citizen after they started dating. Citizen was at least fifty years old, pudgy but muscular, and always wore army fatigues and had a military hair cut. He rarely took care of his hygiene but smelled of engine oil and chemicals from the refinery, so this was not an issue. The boots he walked around in looked like they were made as far back as World War I.
Citizen was of course an oddity in the town, and somewhat of a local legend. “He’s kind of like a scientist,” someone once told Yula, “but I don’t think he does anything for the government. I mean, they abandoned that oil refinery so he’s not here for that. Somehow he survives on his work though. Once every few years, this car comes screeching from the hillside at 75 miles an hour. Can you imagine that? 75 miles on one of our old Ladas? So he walks up to the driver of the car, who stops in the middle of town, and gives him a bunch of metallic objects and the man hands him a wad of money. Which he uses frugally on groceries and paying for his room each month. I mean, have you ever seen the ways he looks? Like a man who had something cut out of him. But all in all, I think he’s a decent person. Sure, he’s creepy, but he goes to church, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink much, and always helps out with community projects.
Citizen drove out of town on his scooter every single day. The toll booth Yula managed was small and the road out of town rarely saw more than a few cars a day, those belonging to grocers or lumberjacks. Citizen always took time counting out exact change and even though most people chatted with her at the station, Citizen was always quiet, never mentioning the destination of his daily pilgrimage. This, in addition to what people said about him, created a certain mystery, which was inapproachable from any angle.
Finally, on a bright morning, she worked up the courage to talk to him. Where did he go each day? What was his profession?
“I’m an artist he told her,” idling on his scooter, “I work on my art at the oil refinery.”
“What kind of art do you do?” Yula asked.
“Real, dynamic art. Something that works and can be put into motion.”
“You just seem like a really…interesting guy,” Yula told him. “I hope you don’t mind me prying. I know it’s rude, it’s just that I’ve never seen anyone live in the way that you do.”
Citizen was taken aback by this and stood with a vacant look in his eyes. Past Yula’s blonde head, was the watery glass of the toll booth, and beyond that, a long line of black willows glued against the powdery-blue skyline. “Uh,” he said, “thank you, I guess?”
”You don’t have to thank me,” Yula said sassily, “I guess I should thank you.”
With that, Citizen revved his engine and sped towards the hills and to the refinery. Yula’s curiosity hadn’t really been satisfied.
That same day, Yula was struck by a shelling rod which flew from a rooftop and landed on her shoulder. The kid that threw it was never caught. She was driven by her landlady to the next town over where the community doctor saw her at his home. He checked her out for all of two minutes and assigned her a glass bottle of pain killers, each pill as thick as a small stone.
When she took one at home, alone, that night she finally felt free-- for the first time in her life. She didn’t even know she could feel so comfortable with herself. Laying there, in her cramped room with the radio on, she was willing to forgive herself anything and looked forward to the days ahead.
”Uh, Sir. Citizen,” Yula asked, “when this rocket finally takes off, won’t you feel kind of empty?”
“Huh, why?”
“Well, like I don’t know. Staring at this rocket for so long makes me feel like there’s more too it than what I just see. It seems like there’s a part of me in there, sitting inside the tip. Can anyone even fit in there?”
“There’s one seat.”
“Oh, gosh, I’m too stupid to explain this, but, what I’m trying to say is I feel this vague…dis…disquitement coming from inside of me.”
Citizen assumed an abandoned look. Finally, he spoke: “The vague disquitement isn’t in the rocket. It was born up above.” He pointed to the starry shores. “It spread from there, from the banks of heaven. At first it started out like an orb of rain traveling across the countryside. Then it melted upon our windowsills and filled up all of the earth. We’re nothing more than ships floating on top of it; coal-fed ships with the tillers broken. And eventually the water will fill up even that.
“…uh, sure.”
“We have to understand why it’s there, however, that feeling. I think the only reason anyone undergoes any suffering is to learn. They say as deep as your pain goes is as deep as your love goes. It takes a certain type of person to understand that.”
”Are you that type of person?”
“No, I wouldn’t say I am. I talk about it intellectually of course but I don’t think I live what I say. I’ve never been able to forget about my pain.
”What do you think of all this?” Yula motioned with her arm to indicate the scaffolding, switchboards, and Citizen’s pile of notes.
“ I’m obsessed with it. I’ve spent the last four years trying to orchestrate this flight. This is the first independent launch in the history of our country possibly, at least the only one I’ve ever heard of. Why else would I give up my whole life to do something like this? The only reason is that it seems important. I mean, I don’t really have much left to go back to now, now that I’ve spent so much time doing nothing else but this.”
The roar of the engines was now deafening; quieting the sound of their voices. Several of the large plastic cords attached to the rocket snapped off from the pressure billowing below. Citizen ran over to the command consol and punched in an analog code using the thick, iron keys on the aged keyboard. A rusted set of gears spun the platform upon which they stood to the left, along the perimeter of the oil refinery tower and far from the caustic gases of the rocket. Yula looked over to Alex Growing impatient with the rocket’s initialization process, he had kept drinking. Now that the rocket was about to take off, he’d passed out drunk.
Soon all was bathed in a holocaust of light. And the veins of the metal colossus shimmered with the fluidity of movement. It screamed on its upward trajectory and, in the moments after Yula dared to open her eyes, she saw it shaking slowly on the passage through night. In just 80 seconds, it was gone.
After catching their breath, Citizen and Yula looked at Alex who was snoring noisily; sprawled over a pile of wires.
“I guess he drank a little too much,” Citizen said.
”Yeah.”
“You gonna be ok without him?” Citizen asked.
“I’ll be alright. I just…I can’t believe he would go and sleep through something like this, why is he fucking like that?’
“There are really no answers to something like that. I mean, if we search for ‘whys’ we’ll just find an infinite chain of them. And the original ‘why’ is usually called ‘how’ in this language. But when we find that reason, it doesn’t comfort us.”
“He’s not really a bad guy…”
“Sure, I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, it’s just that he’s still…learning, he can’t always control the things he does.”
“Well he doesn’t have to be a fucking moron either.”
The two of them watched the base from which the rocket took off. The image was shaky, as if on a television which was poorly tuned. There were still pockets of diffuse light from the splattered, burning fuel. It illumed the oil refinery in an alien glow, which came from nowhere in specific but touched everything all at once.
“Hey can I ask you something?” Yula said. “I sort of have to get it off my chest and, it’s about you.”
Alex snored loudly. “What could you want to know about me?” Citizen asked.
“Uh…do…you…have a girlfriend?”
Citizen blinked a couple of times and wiped a bit of soot from his chin. His gaze darted around a bit before settling on Yula.
“I don’t think we should really be discussing that.”
“Why not?”
“You’re too young.”
“No-- I mean no, I’m not trying to hit on you or anything. It’s just that, your life seems like your so by yourself, do you have any relatives or anything?
“I’ve been married. Twice.”
“Are you divorced now?”
“Yep.”
“Do you still see your ex-wives?”
“I see one of them. I might go see her this winter.”
“Where does she live?”
“Leningrad.”
”Where in Leningrad?”
“On the edge of the city. The part with all the crumbling walls. It was scathed during World War II and no one ever bothered rebuilding it.”
The sky was boiling and Citizen focused on the star-scape, hoping to spot the twinkling dot which may symbolize his rocket.
“I don’t really want to talk about it.” He told Yula.
“Ok.” She said. “But there’s just one more thing I want to tell you: you deserve one. A girlfriend I mean.
Citizen looked at his feet and started clicking switches with his left hand. “Hey Yula. Answer me this. How are you planning to get down from here?”
“What? I don’t know. How are you planning to get down?”
“The elevator is over there.” He pointed to the oil refinery tower upon which the rocket used to lean. The platform they stood on was at least 50 feet away, connected to the main tower by two iron beams and a system of gears.
“I only positioned the gears to move one way.” Citizen said.
”Well how are you going to get down?”
“I can always climb I guess. But I don’t really care if I come down this very instant or even if it’s any time tonight. I wasn’t scared of being close to the rocket, I just made the platform move away because of you and Alex. What I’m more scared of is the earth. What’s going to happen when I come back down.”
”But I can’t climb down, I have a hurt shoulder.” A brief shadow flitted across their faces and Citizen clumsily moved his leg, scattering a pile of papers. A surreal sheen was cast on the rails as Citizen turned on a flashlight to search around on the floor. The metal grid created a leaden mosaic upon his face.
”There’s so much darkness down there. Far more than up here. Down there, people are hungry, they’ll do anything they want to you. They’re all obsessed with their own dreams and eager to impose. Like lunatics… I try to escape them but I never can.” Citizen said.
Yula didn’t respond.
“It’s always the same thing. I move into a new place and try to make friends. But then I start suspecting people of things. Things they didn’t even really do. Then, when I sleep at night, I feel every clot of my blood hovering over a void. It’s night time. I try to open my eyes but I can’t, I’ve already fallen asleep. Only it isn’t real sleep, it’s a type of suffering which I endure over and over again. I’m sitting on top of a radio tower and… I’m sitting on top of a radio tower and broadcasting something to the world, which I see only in shades of black and white. Then I walk downstairs and see water gushing out of the toilets, flooding the entire radio station. Outside, upon the gray wastes, there are these giant lizards climbing- dinosaurs from the mesozoic era, long dead already, climbing the wastes and moaning.
Yula looked down at the gap between her and the elevator. It seemed unfathomable.
“I get this everywhere I go. The same dream.”
“When did it start?”
”When I first hit puberty,” Citizen said, “when I first lusted after a woman, when my mom start treating me differently, getting angrier around me, more afraid. I used to think that it was just a phase, that soon I’d be cured and be like everyone else. But you can’t say no to the powers within. At the end, they always have their way.”
Citizen sighed.
“I don’t mean to burden you.”
”It’s not a burden for me.” Yula said. She walked towards the vodka and poured herself another cup. The mixture of pain medication and vodka put a slight imbalance in her gait, “please, tell me more.”
The puddles of light had faded out; the familiar image of the rocket now a vacant space. Citizen took the papers he was looking for and tossed them over the edge. They had no use now; the experiment was over. He started wrapping up wires and placing them in a wooden box.
“I once heard a radio broadcast…” Citizen told Yula, “about our great explorer, Pyotr Fregenevich.”
”Who died in the igloo.”
”Uh-huh. I was so sure, for a long time that you could actually suffocate in the cold because your breath solidifies. I would never sleep with my blanket over my face on cold nights. I feared that ice would form along the blanket and grow all the way into my throat, through to my stomach even. And I would lay dead under my blanket, a little kid, like a fleshy rose on a vine of ice.
”Can’t that really happen?”
“No, it’s just an old wive’s tale. Evaporation is too diffuse to condense into something solid. It’s completely made-up physics.”
“So it’s just a complete lie?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“No, I just really believed it…that was dumb I guess.”
“Well in a way I can see why you thought that. Unconsciously, he did die from the ice, from the suffocation.”
“What?”
“Not physically. But being alone out there, walking on the drifts. Communicating only with the overturned bowl of the sky– completely isolated from other people. He was totally alone. You know they pulled the money for his exploration like eight months after he left? He couldn’t afford to take anyone with him. He was supposed to report in to the Tsar at the Winter Palace before his journey. I think it was in 1808. But instead he went to see his mistress in Murmansk. Because of that, they didn’t give him the money he needed. But he still went. Alone.”
Yula didn’t really know what to say.
“I feel like that now,” she admitted.
“But you still have some purpose,” Citizen told her.
“Maybe... What do you think your purpose is?”
Citizen looked around at the empty perimeter as a cool wind picked up. “I don’t really know.”
By this time Yula was drowsy from the substances in her blood. She slumped down near the radio signalizer and allowed her head to rest on the wire meshing alongside Alex’s. Citizen sat down on the other side of her, slurping another cup of vodka. His smell was harsh but not completely unpleasant. A patch of white hair grew inside of his ear, which had turned red from the cold.
“So do you still consider yourself an artist?” Yula asked Citizen softly, after allowing him to settle in.
”I can’t be an artist, I don’t think my thoughts matter.”
“Well, it’s not about that. It’s about will you do any more artistic projects or not?”
“I think that was probably my final work. This country is on the verge of collapse anyway. And I could never do something like that again, there’s no way I would have access to the resources.”
“See, that made sense, your thoughts do matter.”
“It’s more complicated than that. It’s like the same reason I couldn’t make the control pad just move back to the oil refinery.”
“Like, you can’t move back in time, only forward?”
”Sort of.”
Citizen adjusted his weight and moved a little closer to Yula.
There were no more stars in the sky. A cloud bank rolled in from the Sea of Japan and subsumed the moon. The last fires of the launch had fizzled out and the signal lights of Citizen’s machines flickered only sporadically now. Yula arched her shoulders just a little bit as she felt Citizen’s weight in the periphery. Her small back was no more than an inch away from Citizen’s shoulder. She breathed heavily.
“Can I tell you something else?” she asked.
”Yea.”
“This is like, really personal.”
“Ok.”
“Uh…um.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmm…”
“What is it, Yula? Tell me.”
“I don’t know if I should, it’s really sad.”
“Well it’s better you just tell me. That’s at least better than keeping it inside, right?”
“I Guess so.”
“So…what is it?”
“Uh, well… it’s just that…there’s nothing left inside of me. I think I’m all used up.”
Citizen nodded.
“You know?” she asked him. And then hot, hard tears were squeezed past her eyelids, which shut with a fierce denial. Her make-up, which was applied sloppily, drained into the moist liquid on her cheek. Citizen reached over with the edge of his shirt to wipe it up. Then he put a heavy hand on the small of her back. With his finger, he could feel a large, blue vein throbbing on her shoulder.
After a long while, Yula spoke again: “I’m like a chunk of black lead. There’s just not much color left anymore.”
”I think I might be like that too.” Citizen said.
“No way,” she said.
“Seriously.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“So what should we do?”
“Nothing we can do.”
“Do you think we have real mental illnesses?”
“I don’t know.”
Part of the oil refinery, a gigantic, vertical beam which supported a fourth of the structure, trembled. The supporting elements, having been burnt to slag by the launch, slowly collapsed to the ground.
“So is there really no way down from here?”
“No.”
“I think I might not mind dying out here. Looking at the open skies from the top of this tower, as my insides crumble away, and just, having my eyes trace the direction where the clouds come from.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking when I built this thing.”
Citizen didn’t take his hand off of Yula’s back. He just kept moving it around in a short, robotic circles, occasionally letting his big finger bury into her shoulder muscle.
“We should have gotten onto that rocket,” Citizen said.
“That would have been nice. Then we would be free.”
”I think our chance slipped by us. We didn’t even realize it was a possibility when we watched that thing take off.”
“Was there room in there for two people?”
“For someone as small as you? Sure.”
Yula couldn’t hold off the exhaustion anymore. She slipped further into sleep and her body slid down the side of the rail, with the entire lower half now upon the floor. Her last memory was Citizen’s meaty arm wrapping its bulk about her.
”He’s nobody that I would really want to know,” Yula thought to herself as she began to sleep, “if things were normal, I would rather have never met him.”
A gust of wind surged upwards, picking up some sulfuric ash from the bottom of the launch site and bringing it to hover near Citizen’s eyes. One of the ash flakes was still flickering with an orange glow. It was the last living record of the rocket’s existence.
“You can sleep now, little one.” Citizen said quietly, “you can sleep.”
After Yula had been sleeping for a while, Citizen reached across her lap to the buttons on her parka. He undid each one and, after that, untied the cotton belt of her evening gown. With an empty look in his eyes, he pushed his finger down her milky skin and across a bristly clump of hair.
~ FIN
