Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Korolyov like a boy on a first date appeared with flowers and a folded typescript a few minutes before we were scheduled to turn out our lights. Solovyova had just finished her toilet.

  “Is this our pep talk, Chief?” she teased. Korolyov smiled to himself, riffling his typescript. “It's an inspirational talk from the Chief Designer himself,” he said. We sat, and he stood at the foot of our beds and read what he'd prepared. We were both touched by his awkwardness and care. He reminded us that this was why we had foregone marriage and children. He reminded us that he had asked us to be morally prepared for spaceflight. When it came to this kind of endeavor, woe to the egoists and hedonists, he said. For there was no one so frail and defenseless.

  We both waited. “What a strange, strange country we live in,” Solovyova remarked. He chose not to respond before going on: this was not so much a culmination as a beginning, he said. He wouldn't sleep a wink tonight, but he was sure that we would. “Thank you, Chief,” Solovyova answered.

  “I guess I'm finished,” he said. “That's the bed Gagarin slept in,” he added on the way out, indicating mine.

  “I know,” Solovyova said. “I told her she should have it.”

  He turned out the light and left. He'd been rescued from the gulag during the war and put to work in Tupolev's prisoner design bureau, where he'd become a favorite of Khrushchev's for his designs of intercontinental ballistic missiles. But his dream had been spaceflight, and he loved quoting Tsiolkovsky's dictum that the Earth was the cradle of mankind, but one didn't live in the cradle forever.

  We could hear him moving about in the other cottage. “He'll be a wreck by tomorrow,” I offered, but Solovyova chose not to answer.

  During our night in the maintenance room I had told Bykovsky between kisses that I wanted him to see my old farm— the far corners overrun with prickly gooseberry bushes and the pond where one could jab a stick at the green epidermis of algae and watch an aperture of black water open and close. The creek with its boulders and the dark yawning overhangs. “What a good idea,” he murmured, distracted. I'd found his mouth again, remembering a malicious-looking goat roped to a peg, and being entrusted as a very small girl with a bucket of warm, foamy milk, my father watching me negotiate it as best I could over a steep and muddy track.

  16 June 1963 Morning

  The doctors knocked on our door at 07:00 and inquired how we'd slept. “As always,” Solovyova answered. I was having trouble finding my voice. They supervised calisthenics before breakfast, then performed a final preflight medical check and administered an enema. Next, we stood around shirtless while they glued sensor pads to our torsos. These same doctors would also be analyzing our voice communications for signs of fatigue and stress. As always, we found their attentions unpleasant but did not want to be the sort of person who if offered an apple would complain about its size.

  Technicians helped us into our spacesuits and held out paper for me to sign. One even presented his work pass. Helmets on, visors open, we boarded the bus, a matching pair of cosmonauts: me with all the luck, and Solovyova with none. We sat together in the otherwise empty seats. When the bus pulled up at the gantry's base, we peered at the infinitely high tower and cavernous flame trench. Finally Solovyova said, “I wish you all good fortune,” her voice breaking. According to tradition, one should kiss the departing traveler three times on alternate cheeks. We banged against one another with our helmets, then rose and left the bus.

  There we were greeted by Korolyov and Kamanin and the Central Committee. “I'm miserable that I can't be up there with you today,” Korolyov said, smiling. He had tears in his eyes.

  “Someday we'll fly together to Mars,” I told him. We hugged, and I shook hands with the rest of the Committee.

  “Everyone's crying today,” Kamanin observed.

  “That's it, then,” Korolyov said. Solovyova climbed back onto the bus, and I stepped up into the gantry lift. I could see her staring through the passenger window in the other direction. Then the lift doors closed and up I went.

  When they opened there was blinding sun and horizon all around me. The tiny circular hatch of the Vostok and two technicians broke up the view. I tottered forward. Several kilometers away in the bright sun, some blue spruces surrounded a small white crypt with a gold cupola.

  The technicians waited patiently. When I was ready, they hefted my shoulders and I swung my legs over the rim of the hatch and squeezed into the ejection seat. Then they hauled at my straps and connected the life support systems.

  I checked my suit pressure and communications line. Through the latter they were piping in American jazz. Above me I could hear the hatch being manhandled into position and the screw-down bolts secured. A palm-sized mirror sewn into the sleeve of my suit allowed me to check its progress. On my right was the radio set, telegraph key and attitude control; on my left, the retro sequence switch panel.

  The music stopped, and Korolyov said in my earpiece, “Fifteen minutes.” I sealed my gloves and pulled down my visor. The music didn't resume.

  I sat. My orbital plane would differ from Bykovsky's by 30 degrees, so we'd approach for only a few minutes twice during each orbit. But during our encounter on the opposite side of the world, we could talk, unmonitored. He'd been in space for forty-five hours. I tried to compose my first words to him but imagined instead Solovyova on her sad trip back to the observation bunker to strip off her suit.

  Korolyov announced a delay. I leaned my head back inside my helmet. He said it had to do with a problem with the telemetry. He estimated it at forty minutes, and asked if I wanted the music again. I told him no. I removed my gloves and pulled my notepad from my toiletries box and recorded the above.

  17 June 1963 Night

  The pen, attached by twine, drifts away when I stop to think, only to be reeled back time after time.

  I have now been in space thirty-three hours. Thirty-three hours ago, following the delay, Korolyov announced launch key to go position; air purging; idle run; ignition. There was the helicopter whine of the pumps injecting fuel into the combustion chambers and the engines firing up. The rocket shook and caterwauled as the mechanisms adjusted to their inconceivable stresses, and when the gantry's hold-down arms disconnected, I felt a jolt and heard Korolyov report on the ascent. “How are you?” he asked. “How are you?” I asked him back. I was squashed into my seat, shaking like someone on an apple cart, and found it difficult to talk. There was a sharp drop in the g-load as the booster shut down, shoving me forward against my straps, then a bump as it dropped away, the noise resuming with the g-load. When the third stage shut down and fell away, I felt the weightlessness as a buoyancy in my muscles, as if nothing took any effort at all.

  The vibrations stopped. The capsule was a marketplace of fans and pumps. It was rotating gently, and through the porthole came a shock of indigo, replaced just as quickly with an ardent black. Tereshkova, I thought. You're in outer space.

  I saw the sun. Clouds. Islands and a coastline. The light blue of the horizon was violet at the edge of its curve. Beyond that were stars. When the sun appeared again, the illumination was so intense I had to turn away.

  “Hello, Seagull,” Bykovsky called. I leaned forward against my straps and looked out the porthole, as though he were waving.

  “Hello, Hawk,” I answered. Stars wheeled across my line of vision.

  “Did you ask something?” Korolyov wanted to know. He'd heard my weeping. “No,” I told him.

  Kamanin announced to us both that our greetings were being broadcast around the world. Someone right now was running to my parents' farm to tell them that their little Valentina had just appeared on the television.

  We exchanged pleasantries. We told everyone how we were doing. Within minutes we were transferred to Petropavlovsk on Siberia's coast, and then soon after that we swept out over the Pacific and into the vast shadow of the half of Earth that was asleep. Transmissions from below flickered and buzzed and went dead. The fans and pumps were still whir
ring all around me.

  “I've unsnapped,” Bykovsky finally said. “Try it. It's wonderful.”

  “I'm here,” I told him. My capsule rotated through two full revolutions. We had only seventeen minutes of privacy on this orbit. “I'm here,” I repeated. My earpiece hissed again for a count of fifteen.

  “Hello,” he finally said, and even in that one word I could hear the forbearance.

  What had I expected? I wasn't sure. I still wasn't sure. We hurtled through our planet's shadow. “This is Seagull,” I told him, more plaintively than I wished to.

  “The slightest push sends you in the opposite direction,” he reported, adding that he'd now been unstrapped for nearly ninety minutes.

  “Do you have nausea?” he asked.

  “Do I have nausea?” I said.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  There was a series of clicks in my ear. “I'm performing one of my procedures,” he said.

  When I was a small girl, one of my evening chores was retrieving the goat that strayed to browse the garden between two tumbledown houses that frightened me. Each night, my father would say, “Oh, I'll go with you.” And then, when I waited: “Go! I'm not going.” And every single time, I'd say to myself as I went, Stupid: you took the bait. But next time you'll be smarter.

  “I'm doing my stretching exercises,” Bykovsky informed me, and then his responsibilities absorbed his attention for the rest of the time we were in shadow, and I made no further attempt to distract him.

  Our code phrases for communicating our condition, given that the Americans were listening, were as follows: a report of “feeling excellent” signified all was well; “feeling good” conveyed there was some concern; and “feeling satisfactory” meant that the mission might need to be terminated.

  “How are you, Seagull?” Korolyov said once radio contact was reestablished. The sun broke around the bottom of the world like the arc from a welder's torch.

  “I'm feeling satisfactory,” I reported.

  “You're what?” he said. “Say again, Seagull?”

  But I chose not to answer. There were frantic attempts to reestablish contact.

  “Hawk, Hawk, please contact Seagull,” Korolyov urged, spinning toward me so far below.

  “Seagull, this is Hawk,” Bykovsky said after a moment. “Is everything excellent?”

  “How are your experiments?” I answered. My gloves seemed steady on the switches before me.

  “I think something may be wrong with her receiver, or she may have selected the wrong channel,” he told Korolyov.

  He also reported periodically that he was continuing to pay close attention to his physical regimen. In that same period of time I failed to activate my biological experiments, failed to participate in my medical experiments, and failed to keep an official log, writing for myself instead. Solovyova tried to raise me, and when she did I reached for my radio but then eased my hand back. My helmet chafed my shoulders. I wished I had toothpaste. I was supposed to photograph the solar corona but the film cassette stuck in the camera and I cracked the inner window with the lens attempting to remove the cartridge.

  “Seagull, are you there?” Korolyov pleaded.

  “I think she's asleep,” Bykovsky finally told him.

  18 June 1963 Night

  The second-day crisis was that I failed to perform a major goal of the mission: manual control of the spacecraft. Korolyov was frightened that I would be lost should the automatic reentry system fail. Nikolayev and then Gagarin himself were brought in to instruct me from the ground. Gagarin was a gentleman about it. There are two guidance systems for establishing orientation for retrofire: one uses an automatic solar bearing, and the other is manual and visual. My task was to hold the Yzor orientation viewport level with the Earth's horizon for fifteen minutes, but it refused to stop bouncing and slipped out of my crosshairs. “There it goes again,” I'd say with equanimity, while below they tried to keep the exasperation out of their responses. My eyes filled with tears and just like that the tears went away.

  I had meat mixed with sorrel or oats, and prunes and processed cheese for dinner. The bread was too dry.

  19 June 1963 Night

  A few minutes ago I passed the lights of Rio within the blackness of Brazil. This morning I was successfully talked through the manual control by Nikolayev. I remember him as a smug and unpleasant person with jowls and the darkest razor stubble I've ever seen. Everyone is much relieved below. They're bringing me back early.

  I've often considered what kind of first impression I make. I assume that I initially evoke a measure of intrigue before people get to understand me and become repulsed.

  In my most recent exchanges with Bykovsky, I feel as though I've been able to detect with great precision brutality and remorse tinged with diffidence and pity. Some I haven't had the heart to report, even here. None of this should surprise me. Only my loneliness now generates fear. Otherwise I'm an uninteresting and aching surface.

  During that first party for the cosmonaut finalists, I found Bykovsky and Ponomaryova holding hands as they touched an exposed wire in her portable radio set. “Come on, you try it,” they said.

  1 August 1964

  What else, that day, did I not do? I still remember. I failed to signal the correct working of the solar orientation system. I remained silent throughout reentry. I did not report retrofire or the separation of the capsule. I was told there was quite the panic down below throughout all of this. I focused instead on the roaring sound of the hot air, the bacon-in-the-pan sound of the thermal cladding in the reentry inferno, and the jouncing which was like a springless cart being galloped down a rutted gully. Then outside the charred porthole I saw white sky and the hatch over my helmet blew away like I'd been shelled and the ejection rockets thundered in a blur of daylight and I saw the burned capsule falling away below as I was separated from my seat.

  Against regulations, I opened my visor and looked up, and was struck in the face by a piece of metal. I saw a river and some haystacks. I saw a rail line, with a locomotive. I saw small figures running to where I would land.

  At the press conference we faced one hundred and three correspondents. Bykovsky had landed two orbits later. I was asked about the stitches in my face. I told the correspondents that we were proud of what our country had accomplished. I said that I'd felt no fear. Three different correspondents asked if I'd been lonely, and I answered that I'd known my loved ones were even closer than everyone thought, watching me fly. I told them that, descending on my parachute, I'd sung “My Country Hears, My Country Knows.” There were ten questions for me for every one for Bykovsky. At one point I turned to him and joked, “Oh, were you up there, too?” and occasioned a roar of laughter. I learned later that Khrushchev had been delighted with my performance.

  This was before the contests with the doctors and the interviews with Korolyov—all devastated disappointment—and the honors, ending with our tour of Bulgaria, Mongolia, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, Ghana, and Indonesia. Bykovsky asked that his wife be allowed to accompany us, but Kamanin rejected the request. It was before I received the news of my arranged marriage to Niko-layev, considered the cosmonauts' most eligible bachelor; before the first state wedding in Soviet history, presided over by Khrushchev himself; before the birth, just a few months later, of my little Alyona, a girl who provided proof that space travel interfered with neither love nor fertility.

  Of course my diary had been found and read immediately upon my return. But before we were separated forever, Seagull and Hawk were allowed their one trip together around the world, chaperoned by the KGB. We had already separated—we had separated in space—but we still had our walks. On one we traversed a rough track overgrown with honeysuckle and mayweed, leaving our pursuers behind. A wolfhound, very meek and companionable, had attached herself to us. It was entirely quiet except for her panting and the calls of the KGB. We lay with our heads thrown back. Bykovsky mentioned Solovyova, who'd asked him to contact me when her le
tters had returned to her unopened. “Why was that, do you suppose?” he asked, when I refused comment. “Though it's none of my business,” he added. We talked about how we'd learned about sex. According to my high school friend, it took an hour, and if a couple did it for two hours, they had twins. We kissed for the last time. I asked if he would remove my virginity, and after some reassurances, he did.

  I remember how much I'd loved the new teacher who'd arrived to teach physics after the war. He was a gangly and sweet man who could float pins on water and make electricity by combing his hair, which had gone prematurely white. He was so happy we were happy. We were happy because we were grasping those simple things that seemed miraculous. We were happy because at such moments we no longer belonged to only ourselves, but were beginning to experience what other people could see and feel. We were reminded that those sorts of feelings were so brief that it was as if their beginnings touched their ends. And even then I was given a glimpse of how I'd always turn my back to what was offered; how I'd never fully grasp, flailing, at whatever charities the world was able to dispense; how what I thought was my reach was really only my attempt to dismiss, to expel, or to disavow.

  Courtesy for Beginners

  Summer camp: here's how bad summer camp was. The day I arrived I opened my camp trunk and changed my shirt and just stood there alone and breathing through my mouth in the four-man platform tent, just me and the canvas smell and the daddy longlegs, and then I thought that I was the person who I least wanted to be with, and I stepped out into the cooler air. There was nowhere to unpack anything, and even I wasn't so scared that I could hang around in the tent. It was like 104. Sweat ran down the backs of my knees. The black metal stays on the tent ropes were too hot to touch.