The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

Author:Anthony Marra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

WE SAT between our two beds on legless chairs propped on book boxes (our father had used the screws that had held together the legs to mount a clock). Rugs draped over the wallpapered walls. Sometimes they slipped from their nails in the middle of the night, falling over us as we slept as second, stifling blankets. A poster of the periodic table hung between our two beds. I had changed my socks and washed my feet. My insides felt pureed.

Kolya hunched forward with his elbows pinned to his knees and his mouth drawn into a tight expression of concentration. Whenever he thought deeply, he looked constipated.

“What’s it like being dead when everyone else is still alive?” I asked.

“Like being alive when everyone else is dead,” Kolya answered. His back stiffened. He shot to his feet. “That’s it! One of the exhibits can be about the last person alive. You know how Dad told us he’d foiled an American plan to nuke Kirovsk? That wasn’t the whole story.”

He dropped to a knee beside me.

“Tell me,” I pleaded.

Kolya leaned back and his shoulders sank into the blubbery mattress. “Dad didn’t tell you about the backup plan. The last resort. The answer to the question: What if the world ends today?”

“He told you?”

“Of course. I’m his favorite son. See, after the Americans took the moon, Khrushchev came to Dad and was like, ‘Look, Dad, we’re fucked. The Yanks are playing baseball and building shopping malls on the moon. What do we do?’ And Dad told him his plan.”

“Tell me,” I pleaded.

“Dad’s idea was to build a capsule that could keep a man alive for twenty years. The Americans might kill all life on earth with a nuclear war, but the last living man would be a Soviet citizen, up there, in space. Khrushchev had one of those expansive Russian souls novelists are always writing about. He loved it. But Brezhnev put him in an old folks’ home before he could authorize Dad to build the thing. So we’ve got to do it.”

We rushed to the ticket office to tell our father.

“My true heirs,” he said. “Born scientists. You’ll go far.”

When the museum closed for cleaning that Sunday, my father towed the rusted skeleton of a lorry cabin onto the warehouse floor. “The capsule!” he declared. I examined it from various vantage points. It didn’t resemble a lorry cabin, much less a capsule. More like a decapitated whale’s head that had spent several years on the ocean floor first as food, then as shelter, for an extended family of eels. “It needs a little work,” my father admitted, but his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis.

We transformed the lorry cabin into a capsule with tinfoil. Kolya taped one end of foil to the hood, slid the roll onto a broomstick, and circled the lorry as the silvery scroll unfurled behind him. It took sixteen rolls and hundreds of revolutions. Kolya orbited, until the cabin became a fully bannered capsule. With black shoe polish, we carefully drew USSR across the bow.

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