Work Text:
There are no stars in the city. Looking up, you’re lucky to see any satellites through the skyscrapers’ auras. Light bleeds, from the city, and as the child sat upon his apartment complex’s rooftop, he could only imagine what was beyond.
In his lap, clutched in his soft unworked fingers, he held his space helmet tight. He wasn’t supposed to have a space helmet. But his father must have noticed the doodles he left in margins, and his father’s museum ran an exhibition on the Cosmonauts just a handful of months ago. So, when the child came home from school to see a Cosmonaut helmet sitting on their dining room table under a translucent white bow, he nearly screamed with joy. Just to think of where it’d been - what space dust still graced its crown - Battery City, according to the exhibition, hasn’t sent anyone to space since the 90s. When they had, it was the utmost feat of mankind. To send their best into orbit, to explore the empty blackness above, to protect Earth from above, nothing could symbolize their greatness more. To conquer the Zones is one thing. To conquer the universe is to declare yourselves a god.
But there are no stars in the city. And no one had been to space since the 90s.
The child’s Cosmonaut helmet was still too big to fit him comfortably. A deep gray dome with a black reflective visor that flipped down over its front, the rim listed government agencies too classified for him to know anything about; “Vandenberg Air Force Base”, “SLC-6”, and “NASA”, among other worn and illegible texts. However, what piqued his interest the most was on the inside of the helmet, hidden beneath a layer of padding which had become unglued over the years. In black marker, scribbled in natural handwriting, was a crude drawing of a spider followed by the text: “Here’s to the wars”.
The child fiddled with the ventilation hose wrapped around the helmet’s side. He would be heading back down soon, for dinner with his family. The child’s thick hair was pulled back into a tight knot at the base of his skull, and he was still wearing his BL/i issued uniform; a white dress shirt and black pants with tags that scratched at him. In this landscape of grids, how could they expect him to wake up tomorrow morning and do it all again?
When he closed his eyes, he could finally see the stars. When he closed his eyes, even though he’d never felt them himself, he could hold the colorful nebulae orbiting above. He could lose himself like this, and sometimes he wondered if he belonged there at all.
When he was five, he didn't understand the way his peers spoke to him. Not because of the words, but seemingly the speech itself. Hidden layers and meanings he couldn’t connect. “You’re too literal” was what he was told, but that wasn’t it. When he was a bit older, he could already tell he wasn’t built for the same schedule as the rest of them. A school day was enough to exhaust him. How anyone managed to keep up their act for so long, he couldn't grasp. Maybe he would feel softer among the stars. He imagined them soft. Like floating underwater, the stars wouldn’t feel like much more than bubbles, carbonation against his skin.
He was told that the sun was a star too, but in all his textbooks and hours studying he wasn't sure he believed it. The sun was too real, for one thing. It existed every day where he could see, empty and cool. The stars on the other hand were ghosts. If he were lucky, they would be hidden under the city too. He was supposed to memorize his multiplication tables by tomorrow morning, but it wouldn't be worth it. The task was impossible anyway. His cosmonaut helmet asked to be worn among the stars. He declined again.
If the stars were real - and merely invisible - was multiplication real too? He hoped not. At the museum's space exhibition, they said it would take eight minutes to notice if the sun went black. They said it takes eight minutes for its light to reach Battery. They said it takes approximately half a second for the city's generators to light their farthest neighborhoods. They didn't say anything about the stars' light.
Stars are made of gas, the child knew. The world feels like it's made of gas. Tomorrow his worksheet would be on the 8x multiplication tables, and he only knew three of them by heart:
Eight times one is eight.
Eight times two is sixteen.
Eight times nine is seventy-two. The city launches satellites into the desert at a seventy-two degree angle bi-nightly.
He didn't know how anyone else could stand to act the entire school day long. Eight hours and it was grueling. On the rooftop he could finally relax, and his atoms brightened. To make matters more complicated, his medication made it more difficult to act at school, making him nauseous and lightheaded and distant. His doctors said it was only a matter of time before they had him medicated properly, but he wasn't completely sure what they were medicating in the first place. Just last week he fainted in third period. He was starting a new dose tomorrow at five-hundred milligrams of SSCIs.
He put the helmet on. Visions of space dust graced the backs of his eyelids, and he could see the nighttime suns like fireflies. Cold midnight air pressed him down and he floated.