Story #4: The Gondolier – May, 2024

An astronaut drifts away from his ship.

Image courtesy of Ben Wakeman

I – THE FATHER

Commander Kozlov’s father, Sergei, gripped airplane armrests as if he were on a rollercoaster ride, but he had an affinity for the stars. His friends called him a “space buff,” and his wife teased him about being a “stargazer,” but as a professor of Ancient Greek at Princeton, the father quietly thought of himself as a spacephile.

“Philos means mutual friendship, but another word, agape, would be even closer,” he wrote his ten-year-old son, Mikhail in a birthday card: “ἀγάπη is a deep love shared with no expectation of it being returned.”

In 1977, the week Mikhail was born, the first of two Voyager spacecraft was launched for Saturn. The coincidence charmed Sergei, and he began to cut newspaper clippings of the four-year mission for his infant son. Then, in a surprise to everyone, the two spacecraft exceeded their anticipated lifespans and the mission continued on for decades. At the time of his father’s death in 2008, the two probes still radioed messages from the barren fringes of our solar system.

On his deathbed, Sergei presented his son with the deteriorating photo album. While Mikhail waited patiently at his father’s hospital bed, Sergei taped a final picture onto the last black page and closed the album with a trembling inscription: “ἀγάπη – In infinite beauty there is infinite sadness.”

The picture he taped on his last day was the “Pale Blue Dot,” a photo taken from one of the Voyager probes. In 1990, at the direction of Carl Sagan, the Voyager spacecraft was pivoted gently away from the dark heavens and back towards its ancestral home, already four billion miles away. In the celebrated image, the Earth appears as an ephemeral dot the size of a single pixel.

But there was more to the father than poetry.

In the margins of a half century of his Voyager clippings, he had also scribbled crude diagrams and notes on termination shocks, interstellar mediums, solar winds, thermal cycling, orbital debris, and microgravity. As he grew, Mikhail developed an equal and parallel passion for the stars with his father, if one focused on man’s role in near space rather than the infinite heavens.

In 1998, Mikhail graduated from the US Naval Academy. In 2002, he arrived at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He spent six months on the ISS in 2004 as a flight engineer. In 2011, he floated 80 yards from the ship untethered. At the time he was only the third astronaut to venture that far. In 2017, NASA named him a mission commander.

Out of earshot, crews joked about his “ice testicles.” After three stints in orbit, a Flight Director dubbed him “Ice-T” during a raucous post-mission banquet toast. The nickname intended to honor his fearlessness took because it hinted at the emotional distance he maintained from the moment his teams entered orbit. His crews simultaneously resented him and sought his approval like a father figure.

During his first spacewalk after his father’s death, Mikhail wrote his father’s name and the “infinite beauty” inscription on the backside of a laminated photograph of the Pale Blue Dot. He released the image into the heavens with a flick of the wrist and it tumbled gently away from him, spinning end over end into eternity.

“The heavens and the Earth, the heavens and the Earth,” he whispered as it tumbled. There was also poetry in the son.

As Mikhail drifted untethered through space over the final two hours and fourteen minutes of his life, he looked at the bright blue-green dream of Earth and thought repeatedly of his father’s inscription.

The sadness was crushing.

II – INTO THE INK

“You’re okay, Rodriguez, you got gripped. It will pass. Breathe.”

Mikhail was coaching rookie astronaut Alex Rodriguez through his first spacewalk. Rodriguez was the only member of their five-man crew with the skills to fix the jammed gimbals that oriented the space station’s solar panels. Without them, they could not maintain the ship’s flow of power.

But thirty seconds in and five feet from the hatch, Rodriguez looked away from the vessel’s surface and down towards his feet. Below the toe caps of his pressure boots and the dangling Kevlar tether that kept him from floating into the cosmos, the blue-green swirl of Earth loomed into view like a surprise deity. The view was too much for the first-timer. Rodriguez became so overwhelmed with terror, he froze.

“You got gripped. It can happen to anyone,” Mikhail explained. “Pretend you’re in the pool at Houston. Keep everything simple: you’re a guy with a fancy soldering gun, a couple wires and 8000 volts running near your fingertips. What could possibly go wrong?”

Out of character, Mikhail joked with him, probing for the psychological key to calm his young flight engineer. Understanding his crews was a strength, but Rodriguez looked back at him without expression.

So, the key for Rodriguez was not humor. Mikhail regretted the choice at once, in the same way he regretted having Rodriguez outside the ship or on the mission in the first place.

A new tack:

Mikhail pivoted from jocularity to command. “Let’s do it. Into the Ink we go. Follow me,” Mikhail ordered crisply. Mikhail pushed off away from him and towards the deployment ledge of the solar panel. He landed softly there. His own umbilical tether floated lazily after him. Turning back, Mikhail hand-signaled at Rodriguez like a traffic cop to say, “Your turn. Go.”

The rookie astronaut still couldn’t unstick, and Mikhail came close to calling it and lifeguarding him back to the hatch, but he was struck by an insight. Under great stress, Rodriguez might need to be treated like a child. Mikhail took a moment to calculate the new approach, then tried again. This time, he whispered confidentially, never mind that they were on comms, and the crew would hear the exchange.

“You’ve got this, Alex. You’ve got this. I know you do.” It was as if he was cheering a depleted runner through the last mile of a marathon.

It might have been the surprise of his commander using his first name or the fatherly warmth, but Rodriguez gave a thumbs up, took a breath and pushed off. He landed at an off angle, but Mikhail had time to catch his tether and arrest the young astronaut’s trajectory. He reeled him in and settled his astronaut onto handholds on the solar panel. Then Mikhail bumped his helmet face to face against Rodriguez’s like he’d thrown a touchdown pass and the kid caught it.

Their faces weren’t a foot apart. It wasn’t good. The interior of Rodriguez’s helmet was thickly fogged. The kid was hyperventilating.

They were already thirty yards from the hatch.

*

While he waited for the young flight engineer to settle himself, Mikhail remembered teaching his daughter, Ariadne, to swim to the pool lip in the deep end.

She’d grinned ear to ear that morning. They were at the Y. She’d only learned to doggie paddle thirty minutes before, and he hadn’t had a chance to finish congratulating her on this second milestone before she launched off from the cement edge of the pool again, this time directly into the heart of the pool.

It was a mistake, and he forced himself to grip the pool’s edge while she worked through it on her own. He willed himself to be a teacher and not a father.

But when Ariadne got too far out and realized she couldn’t make it back, she surprised him. She had the calm to flip onto her back and float. Then she called for him. He swam out to her slowly without saying a word lest he disrupt something he couldn’t even explain. While he glided her back in smoothly on her back, she’d already passed through a brief squall of tears and arrived at a single word of explanation.

“It was a mistake she won’t make again,” he told his wife that evening.

He was in bed. Amanda was by the door of the master bathroom. They still lived on Darrel Lane then.

They both shook their heads at their daughter’s courage.

“She really just said ‘Oops,’ Mike? That’s incredible.”

*

Five minutes passed. Mikhail and Rodriguez floated casually. They talked through it.

“You want to know what they don’t teach you at Sonny Carter?”

The kid shook his head “no.” The fog in his helmet was clearing, a good sign.

“There are three things that can happen out here on an EVA the first time. One, you get agoraphobia. Two, you get claustrophobia and you want to tear your suit off. You got number two.”

“Yeah. It got me. I don’t know why. I felt trapped for a moment. Sorry,” Rodriguez said, clearing his throat from the stress. The pitch of his voice remained elevated, but he was settling.

“What’s the third thing?” Rodriguez suddenly asked.

Mikhail grinned. “The third thing is you’re out here having a religious experience. I think we can rule that out for you, Alex.”

He couldn’t remember ever using a crew member’s first name. Rodriguez would never be out here again. His career in space was over. The kid must have known. Still, Rodriguez laughed at his Commander’s teasing and risked shifting to a single hand on the panel grip before turning his head back to look at Mikhail.

“You were the religious experience, right?”

“You’re wrong there, Rodriguez. The heavens picked out a demon for me.”

Mikhail didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t Rodriguez’s business what he experienced in his first walk, but stare too hard into the Ink, and it will drive a black spike through your heart. Ten seconds after that you’re crying because you think you’re seeing God.

Nothing prepares you for any of this.

III – NEWTON’S THIRD LAW

Rodriguez was an electrical engineer. He should have known not to touch a rubber panel guard. The first thing they teach you is that static electricity should frighten you a lot more than space debris, and it’s a lot more dangerous than claustrophobia. Touch something that isn’t grounded and you can light up like a Christmas tree.

But the kid did touch something.

It couldn’t have been too strong a charge, but his cold-welder still spun from his hand. The torch cartwheeled in slow motion towards his tether. At the same time, the shock knocked Rodriguez from his grip on the solar panel, and he drifted backwards from his handhold.

It was hypnotic. Nothing ever had anything so slow happened so quickly.

The cold welder stretched Rodriguez’s tether taught, and then the tip of the torch seared the line. The line glowed like a fuse and cut Rodriguez free. The tool pirouetted somewhere offstage and cascaded into the void. Sliced from his cord, the young engineer drifted a meter past the far edge of the panel and then beyond. Ten yards of cord followed him absently.

“Stay calm, Alex. I will get you. Do nothing. That’s an order,” Mikhail barked out.

Rodriguez didn’t listen.

He tried to maneuver himself back to the ship with his jetpack thrusters, but in his haste he put himself into a slow spin which he then compounded by trying to counter with an opposing thrust. At the same time, he continued to drift away from the ship.

At the JSC they called controlling your movement with the thrusters “popping the backpack.” Movements disconnected from the ship were “space ballet.” But astronauts in space for the first time quickly realize that it’s almost impossible to teach an astronaut to “dance” in a swimming pool.

When push came to shove, and Rodriguez needed to be as delicate as a ballerina on point, he spun himself around like a breakdancer.

Mikhail couldn’t rescue his flight engineer tethered. As it was, his own cord barely reached to the outer edge of the panels. Adrenaline that had been gathering and shaking on the tip of his own internal eyedropper suddenly released. There were now two frightened astronauts.

His fear surprised him, but he knew how to slow down. There was always time to settle. Even with Rodriguez drifting, he took a slow breath. Then, with calm and focus, he unclipped his spacesuit carabiner from the tether and pushed off. He softly adjusted his angle with his own thrusters. He reminded himself he’d done this before.

By the time Mikhail reached him, Rodriguez had drifted a hundred and fifty yards from the ship. No astronaut had ever been this far away from a vessel, and certainly not two astronauts at the same time.

Regret over what he did next flashed continually over the next two plus hours. If only he hadn’t approached from the front. If only he had treated Alex as a drowning man out of the gate, it wouldn’t have happened. If only he’d grabbed the tether and not the man. Looking back, the “if onlys” were endless: mistake after mistake after mistake.

The young engineer, as he should have predicted, grabbed onto his commander in clawing desperation. Then Rodriguez foolishly popped the thrusters on his backpack with his commander dangerously close to the nozzles. The Earth began to spin wildly around them, orbiting them like their own private moon. Mikhail had to fight his way free of his flight engineer with a rough shove, compounding the problem, but luckily he was still able to grab his engineer’s tether to keep them both connected as he cleared him.

Rodriguez’s tether begin to rotate in his hand like a rope, and the muscle memory of endless practice rescue sessions took over. As the cord reached its peak tension and then began to turn him, Mikhail gently pulsed the thrusters so that the tether wound the other direction. This was ballet.

Back and forth. Over and over. It was almost meditative. If you don’t slow a panicking spinning astronaut, they’ll crawl right towards you. Mikhail didn’t want or need to get anywhere near his panicking spacewalker.

The process took far longer than he anticipated, but he gradually stilled them both, winding and thrusting and unwinding. Once stable he would navigate them back to the ship.

The ship was easily three hundred yards away now and appeared significantly smaller.

“Shhhh,” Mikhail whispered to Rodriguez the whole time like he was soothing an infant. “Shhhh.”

And then suddenly, when half a tank of fuel for the thrusters should have remained, somehow, against all instrumentation, he ran out of fuel. The heads-up display confirmed it.

“Minor development, Houston,” Mikhail announced with dark humor.

*

Newton’s Third Law had never been clearer.

They couldn’t both return to the ship, but either could push the other, the pusher floating off in an equal and opposite direction.

Now it was all over except the physics.

The ship would have time to course correct with its own thrusters to get close enough for Dupree to perform a rescue. His second-in-command Cooper was good. She could gently redirect the ship. There was a chance for one of them. A strong chance.

Mikhail never considered another course of action. He certainly wouldn’t have let a crew member be the one pushing him. It was Rodriguez that was going home.

“Do you trust me, Alex?”

“I do, Commander.” The kid was shaking his head “yes.”

“Good. Curl up into a ball, as tight as you can make it. I will save you,” whispered Mikhail, soothing the larger man as Mikhail now approached Rodriguez on the tether.

Alex tucked up into a fetal position exactly as he was told. He pulled his knees into his body, wrapping his arms around them and settling his forehead in as much as was possible in a bulky spacesuit. Soothed into fetal infancy, he’d done as he was told at last.

“Yup. Just like that,” he whispered. Briefly, Rodriguez’s imploring face angled towards him through the orange of the visor. Mikhail took a final look at the man, at any man and said, “You’re going home, Alex.”

Mikhail delicately pushed his crew member, directing him to the ship, and with equal and opposite force he pushed himself into the heavens.

Five minutes later, after the flight engineer’s slow motion cannonball drift towards the ship, a cheer went up in Mikhail’s helmet. He was too far away to witness the rescue now, but they’d done it. They’d caught him.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Alex was panicking somewhere in the safety of the airlock.

But nobody was coming for Mikhail. He wouldn’t have allowed it. Houston wouldn’t have allowed it. There was no Hail Mary plan.

'“This is it,” an ancient inner voice observed indifferently.

There were no more tasks, no more missions, no more men, nothing to focus on but the hopelessness of his situation and the black expanse that awaited him.

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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