#4 – "The Gondolier" – May, 2024 (Part 2)

An astronaut drifts away from his ship. The conclusion.

Image courtesy of Ben Wakeman

This is the concluding section to May’s story. Link to Part 1 directly below.

"The Gondolier" – May, 2024 – Part I

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IV – THE POWER GRIP TOOL

He was drifting further and further away.

After gathering his courage, he eventually made the choice to turn towards his destiny. Mikhail wound his torso and twisted so that he would spin backwards and face into the Ink.

Within moments, his father’s “obsidian void” drove the black spike through his heart. It was like a faded sheet of ancient fabric began to tear apart inside of him. He forced his eyes shut and pivoted his direction back towards the visual safety of the ship and Earth. He fought for a reserve of calm – and he was able to master his fear, but the first cloud of fog appeared on the bottom right edge of his visor.

He had always hoped that when pressed up against it he would be “the third thing,” the thing he’d explained to Rodriguez, that he would “see God” or whatever it was the others were lucky enough to see. He’d hoped that he would feel streaming waves of love for the majesty of space, for the blue marble, for all of that. That he never had was his lonely secret.

He saw space for what it was: endless and unfathomable. He was, in the end, a #1. He was agoraphobia, terrified of dark scale.

He switched off his comms for a moment lest the ship hear his breathing or involuntary sounds that gave away his fear. They’d see his heart rate and respiration on his readout, but the sounds that escaped him would be his own.

Mikhail tried to dampen the fear by focusing on something, anything.

He saw the still, cloud swept expanse of Asia. He must have been looking somewhere at Moscow where his father was born. Then he thought of America, his father’s dream, and his own country by birth and conviction. The American flag. The NASA logo. Symbols he cared deeply about.

But all of it was empty.

There were no symbols out here. There was no America. There wasn’t even an Asia. There were no maps. Nothing meant anything else. For the first time in his life everything was simply real.

They couldn’t teach you real in Houston, because they didn’t know.

Rodriguez might have known.

When Mikhail came back on comms, he pronounced his own death to Houston to spare them having to say it for him. He looked at the soft green countdown digits on his wristwatch. He acknowledged his fate as a simple fact without the slightest drama.

“So, I’m looking at two hours and fourteen minutes, team.”

*

He drifted for another half an hour. During it, Mikhail settled into an improbable, easy conversational rhythm with his crew, but every second of it, Mikhail was aware of the tearing fabric of eternity opening a hole behind him. For all of the surreal easy chatter with Houston, it loomed.

“Well, I hope you’re getting all this on video.”

Mikhail’s comment started as black humor, but the humor missed and turned bitter. “Don’t let Alex operate the camera. I don’t want a video for the ages shaking like an earthquake. We’re only going to get one take to get the finale.”

There was no response from Cooper. She interrupted on a tangent.

“You asked earlier for me to be direct, so I’ll be direct, Commander. Control thinks you’re going to have four to five pretty tough minutes after you lose power. The pressure suit will release on the extremity pockets first. You’re going to hear the fans and pumps stop. The HUD will go. There will be a limited variety of sounds.”

“And comms?”

“Yes, you are going to lose us, hopefully late, Mikhail. We’ll be here with you,” she said and paused. “We are still trying to reach Amanda.”

Mikhail heard a brief snippet of conversation between Cooper and someone else. It broke in and out through the static. Cooper was giving orders sharply. She was the new commander. Of course she was. It was all so surreal.

“Stop video, Bruce. I don’t care. Cut Houston. This is private. Me and the Commander,” Cooper said.

“They’re cut, Mikhail, and no one can hear me on the ship. I can only talk one-to-one for a moment here,” Marie said.

She spoke slowly and clearly. It was like she was worried he wouldn’t get something. In the end, he was being treated like a child, too. It was all so disappointing, dying like this.

“You have the PGT, Mikhail. You can use it. We won’t tell Amanda. Ariadne will never know. I’ll die with it as our secret. And if they do, then nobody will think worse of you. You can make it fast. You can go on your own terms if you want, I mean... I need to go back on comms.”

She didn’t need to elaborate. His PGT, the power grip tool, could be used to drill into his suit. The extreme depressurization would end his life in a flash.

He imagined it and then, out of nowhere, he was engulfed with anger. “Tell that motherfucker, he’s got me gripped now,” he practically shouted. “No, never tell him that. I shouldn’t have had him out here. It was my fault. And then I wasted the fuel. Fuck. I must have wasted the fuel. Fuck.” He was shouting into the tight, dead-sound confines of his helmet.

“Did I waste the fuel? Did I do something wrong? Was I trying to be too perfect about stopping his spin?”

“You saved Alex’s life,” she said. “You did what you could.”

“I did what I could,” he repeated bitterly. “I don’t want to die out here. None of us belong out here. Fuck.”

He spit out every word like he wanted everyone on the planet to understand. That the whole world would eventually hear all of this recorded filled him with shame.

V – AMANDA

“I’m walking to set out the safety triangles, Mike. I’m by the Fairfield Mall. I’m going to light a flare. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me,” Mikhail’s wife told him.

Amanda had pulled over to the side of I-295. 18-wheelers must have been racing past her. He knew every foot of that stretch. There was no safe verge by the big turn into Fairfield. There was no way she was lighting flares.

“You’re a terrible liar, Mandy. Get back in the car and get off the highway. Off the highway... God, you could have fixed the fucking panel, Mandy, and I wouldn’t be dead in an hour twenty-two.”

He would say the thing he was going to say, but he couldn’t say it yet. She always said it first, and he knew he should be the one this time, but she beat him to it.

“You know how much I love you, Mike.”

He couldn’t get anything right. The noise swelled in his suit and drowned out the whirs and hisses of the fans and cooling systems, all the hopeless mechanical, heating, filtration, electrical business of life support.

Her words and the spacesuit soundscape were too much. Mikhail cut comms with the ship. His inner voice counseled him, if indifferently, to take sixty seconds to lose it, not a hair less or more, and then to pull himself together and get back on comms.

He watched the blurry clock the whole time, whelping into his helmet, moving from grief to anger then back to grief again, but then he surprised himself by pulling it together exactly at the sixty second mark.

“So, Ice-T can grieve on a schedule,” his inner voice noted. “There is something left to be proud of after all.”

The vessel was only a dot now. Maybe he made out the bump of the panels, but, of course, the size of the Earth hadn’t changed at all, and it would still be huge at the end, mammoth and indifferent, hanging in the void pointlessly.

*

“Where’s Ariadne? Does she know?”

“I need to jump off the phone for just a moment to call her, Mike.”

“Is Belle Nuit tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, I should have been there, Mandi. If I’d only been there.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Mike. It doesn’t matter. There are other girls that know the part. She’ll understand. She needs to talk to you.”

“Do not pull her out of that performance, Amanda.”

“Mike, I have to. I’m going to.”

“Do not pull her out. This is a dying man’s last request. My one request, Amanda. Promise me you will not pull her out. Say it. Out loud.” Before he could control himself, he was yelling at her.

A long pause that could have gone either way on the request.

“OK. I won’t pull her out, but are you sure, Mike? What should I tell her? Tell me what I should tell her.”

She started to cry.

“I’ll think of something. I have an hour eighteen to figure it out... Thank you, Amanda.”

*

Mikhail broke the very long silence with a joke: “I think I just saw my dad paddle by on a photograph of a Pale Blue Dot.”

Amanda did not laugh, but her voice cut back in through the static. “You are the whole planet right now, Mike. You are all of us. My God, Mike. You’re everyone who ever was.”

“Please, don’t take her out of that performance. Promise me again you won’t.”

They were speaking across each other. “You’re the best man, I’ve ever met, Mike. God knows you’re the bravest. You’re the best. I don’t know how else to say it. I love you so much. I’m sorry to lay all of that on you, but you need to know.”

She kept going: “You are my heart moving through space right now, Mike. Tell me you love me, Mike.”

“Yes” was all he had.

“Well, that will have to work then, Commander Mikhail Kozlov.” He heard her laughing through tears. She said thank you to someone, then she was blowing her nose. They both fell quiet, the silence of eternity creeping up on them.

“Be Love,” she said.

“Be Love” was their wedding vow.

This time he chose not to cut comms and let go. What did it matter? He was what he was: another nameless soul moving into the Ink.

It was waiting for him like it waited for everyone.

It was all Ink.

All of it.

“No, that’s not true. It’s not all Ink,” his voice said.

“Ari’s the gondolier tonight.”

VI – “BELLE NUIT, O NUIT D’AMOUR”

The first year she appeared in Belle Nuit, she couldn’t have been more than five. She had started ballet the previous fall. Every year in the spring it was the same show, the students cycled through the parts year after year, bigger and bigger parts as they grew, then up and out to wherever it was that they all went.

Years prior, the ballet studio owner had choreographed three different pieces of opera into separate ballet scenes. All that was long before Ariadne was in classes there. Mikhail didn’t know much of anything about opera or ballet, but he knew the dance music they used was a barcarole, a gondolier’s song. Ariadne had taught him that when she couldn’t have been more than eight. And he’d been to an opera once in D.C. and could barely stay awake, but after twelve years of the spring concerts he knew Belle Nuit. He knew the composer was Offenbach.

That first year of ballet, Ariadne was a “star carrier,” one of fifteen or twenty tiny ballerinas that always held the black helium balloons with the white painted stars. The choreography only required that the ballerinas spin every now and then, scurry here and there, make their stars bob up and down, then clear the stage.

The audience would predictably laugh as the youngest ballerinas filed off, one after the other in enthusiastic, broken rows.

After the first performance, Mikhail had teased Amanda that they were paying a lot for Ariadne to learn to hold a balloon, but their daughter was serious about it, set on hitting her marks, holding her arm straight, keeping the balloon aloft. Everything always executed exactly as instructed. She told her mom and dad that she was standing on a fondamenta as the gondola passed.

“Fondamenta is an Italian word,” she instructed them very seriously. “It’s the path by the canal.”

Ariadne loved ballet out of the gate. All of it. The pink clothing. The slippers. The dance movements to practice in the family room. She tried to learn “spotting” on the walls to hold her balance long before she was ready.

And from the moment she watched the older girls plié and tendu from the side of the stage’s floating canal, she wanted to be the lead role, the gondolier herself. This was before she could even pronounce it properly, before she could find Venice or, for that matter, Italy on a map.

She boldly made no secret of her ambition, and he knew why. The gondolier was, quite simply, the star. She danced her solo behind a thin flat slat of “gondola” wood on velvet-wrapped rollers. Offstage helpers tugged on strings to direct the rolling slat of gondola about the stage. It was an elegant and successful effect. Somehow they invisibly guided the gondola to change directions exactly in time, even if the fading colors of the camouflaged cables were beginning to show after years and years of spring performances.

While volunteers made the canals shift from behind the scenes and others navigated posters of Venetian buildings along the back of the stage, some of the middle school children, in toe shoes for the first time, danced on and off the stage. Ariadne had danced many of these parts.

Towards the end of “the opera ballet,” the gondolier paddled – danced – through the San Marco piazza and then out into fanciful, wafting black bed sheets on the stage floor that stood in for the Venetian “lagoon.” Finally, at the end, the gondolier danced off towards the starlit island backdrop of San Michele.

In years when they were lucky enough to have a male lead, he leapt about as the moon, behind and then around the gondolier, then up and over a camouflaged black ramp into the “sky.”

The stars bobbed and tugged on their black balloons. The gondolier spun and leaped beneath and then past the moon, navigating through hanging ribbons of black curtains and then, finally, offstage.

A couple years later, when she couldn’t have been more than ten, Ariadne was staring at her congratulatory red roses in the rear-view mirror, and out of the blue she told her mother and father that the head teacher tells the gondolier a secret right before the very last performance.

“She can’t tell anyone but her mom and dad – and only if they ask. Only the gondolier knows the secret.”

*

Ariadne was seventeen.

She’d won the part. Of course she’d won the part. She would be the 2024 gondolier.

Ariadne.

Their only daughter. His only daughter. He told people they’d named her after the mythical girl with the thread, and his own father insisted he’d had a hand in it, too. He said he was the one that suggested his son and daughter-in-law name his granddaughter after the Ariadne constellation. Maybe that was true, too.

Ariadne, the navigator of labyrinths and canals.

Fourteen minutes.

VII – THE GONDOLIER

Two months before, the two of them had a fateful conversation. It was rare for them, but that afternoon father and daughter argued when he dropped her off in the half-moon drive of the ballet studio drive. She’d pressed him on it, and he let her know he would not be able to attend Belle Nuit. He would be on a three-month mission.

“There’s simply was no getting out of it. I’m sorry,” he said.

At first her hurt came back at him as anger, but then she wouldn’t get out of the car. He could hear Amanda in the anger. She was so much like her mother. Ariadne ordered him to park like he was the child, and then she folded her head into her arms over the dashboard and cried.

When he touched her shoulder, she tugged away from him. It shocked him. She’d never been so mad at him or so wounded, and he didn’t know what to do, so he retreated and sat there. After a long silence she pulled herself together and gathered some things from the passenger floor and angrily stuffed them into her dance bag.

Without looking at him, she said she would have to tell him the gondolier secret since he wouldn’t be there for the performance.

“The gondolier secret isn’t really a secret anymore. Everybody knows it,” she said.

“Do you already know it?” she asked suddenly, turning to him for the first time.

“No. I have no idea,” he’d said.

“It’s about the gondoliers. They aren’t who you think. They aren’t all about American tourists and honeymooners. Someone is going to come up to me in the wings and tell me right before I go out that the Venetians used the gondolas to bury their dead out on the islands. There was nowhere to put bodies in the city because the city was sinking. So the gondoliers were the ones that paddled the dead out to the islands. That’s where the gondolier is going. There were coffins inside the boats. They’re basically driving hearses.”

She looked away from the car for a second. “The gondolier isn’t about romance at all really. Well, it is, and it isn’t.”

She had gathered her composure. “The idea is that the teachers tell you before you go on, so you feel what you’re dancing in your heart.”

His daughter looked away from him for a minute. She still didn’t get out of the car.

“I can’t believe you’re not going to be there. I’m going to be mad for a long time, you know.” She turned and stared right at him, and shook her head up and down so he understood she wasn’t kidding. “Anyway, I have to go. I don’t really know why they call it Belle Nuit.”

“I do,” Mikhail said.

*

When there were five minutes remaining and he was ready, Mikhail Kozlov, “Ice-T,” the Commander of the May Serenity Orbit mission, said a brief final goodbye and cut comms for the last time.

He closed his eyes and took a breath. With the slightest torque of his upper body, he rotated away from the Earth to face into the Ink.

When he summoned the courage, he opened his eyes. The stars were waiting for him. They were in front, and they were above and below, and left and right – as they had always been, as he had always known they would be.

He faced them.

He imagined wind. He imagined water.

He took a moment and did the best he could to remember Belle Nuit’s melody and tempo.

With a slow exhale, he pretended to grasp a long oar and push off, sweeping the imaginary paddle in a slow, wide arc at his side. The motion would be unmistakable. With every stroke, Mikhail felt the tug and heard the soft whir of the gyros pulling and holding him straight and tall.

In his mind, he paddled through paper canals, past the first-year students on the fondamenta. He paddled through black balloons. The moon danced up and over him.

He paddled out from San Marco and into the rippling black sheets of the watery lagoon. Stars bobbed in his eyes.

He paddled into nothing, and he paddled into everything. He let memories of his wife and daughter sweep through him like starlight.

He thought of infinite beauty and infinite sadness.

Then, together with his father and his daughter, the gondolier paddled into the stars, pulling the Earth behind him in his wake.

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