Unintentionally left blank
My grandfather piloted Soviet landers on Venus. Each of them lasted mere hours before succumbing to the corrosive hostile hell of the planet so ironically named after the goddess of love.
Stationed in the vast arid steppes of Western Crimea, he was a senior communications officer serving within the USSR military apparatus. His job was to transmit control sequences to the landers and receive response data from them. In other words, he and his team were to make the space between Earth and Venus disappear. If commemorative photos are any proof, he succeeded.
The space between him and my grandmother, however, was filled with void impenetrable to any form of human communication. They slept in different beds, briefly encountered one another three times a day for meals, and spent most days in the enclaves of their rooms keeping busy with their little routines. Venus, distanced forty million miles away from Earth, was still closer to him than his own wife.
Together in marriage but apart in soul, they raised two daughters who went on to build disconnected families of their own. Both had failed marriages. Both masterfully put up walls of suffocating vacuum between themselves and their husbands. Both generously supplied their children with emotional payloads that would later wreck lives.
Heavy family history wasn’t my only inheritance. Going through my grandfather’s books and work archives taught me how to dream. Those vestiges of the Space Race made me imagine futures and possibilities beyond the bleak reality that I had to endure, as a son of a Russian army officer who barely made ends meet in the post-Soviet economic ruin.
I dreamt of becoming many a thing. An astrophysicist. A software engineer. A roboticist. An entrepreneur. None of them happened. Years passed before I noticed the insidious creep of dreamlessness. My dreams became smaller, shrinking in size with every failure and with life’s every “not today, my dear”.
Eager to escape the grip of fate that I had no intention to live out, I poured all of my energy into STEM studies as engineers and researchers had higher chances of leaving Russia. By the time grandfather died, I moved from Eastern Europe to Asia, then to North America. I wandered for years, working better than average jobs and making above average money. Meanwhile, the rusted remains of landers that had received my grandfather’s instructions were still up there, commemorating the dreamers of the glorious space age whose geniuses propelled their metal bodies above the Karman line, through the void, into the caustic clouds of Venus.
Before the first Soviet mission to Venus succeeded, twelve had perished. Years of work, turned into fireballs and space debris. Despite the calamitous launches of those first vehicles, their creators never stopped inventing better ways to traverse the cosmos. They never stopped dreaming — I did.
Twenty six years ago, I dropped my first word of fiction into a skinny green notebook, the kind that Russian kids used at school. It was supposed to be a story about a rock band that gets sent back in time to battle dinosaurs. I wrote half a page and gave up. “There are no writers in our family,” said my dad. He simply couldn’t fathom why a kid from a family of engineers would be interested in anything but hard sciences and technology. His words didn’t stop me from writing, but they did stop me from finding meaning in it. This is how the dreamlessness began.
In the years since then, I penned little more than pointless blog posts of narrow intellectual and emotional range. If I wanted to write, I needed to get as far away as I could. I needed a life unencumbered by the misbeliefs of my family, and the path to that life was marked by the goalposts of education and career. Looking back, there was hardly a day when I was excited about any of them. Interested? Sure. Genuinely, holy-crap-I-can’t-get-enough-of-this excited? Never. I now doubt if those goals were ever my own.
Years after cutting family ties that required more commitment than a short weekly WhatsApp call, I was finally free to dream again. That freedom had a price: I was so caught up in my personal space race, longing to put thousands of miles between my troubled legacy and my unsettled self, that I left too many pages blank.
It took me two and a half decades, three continents, and plenty of therapy to regain the trust of and to reconnect with the nine-year old boy who dreamed of writing a story about time travel and dinosaurs. As it turns out, severed ties with one’s self are the hardest to repair.
In the final years of the Soviet Union, my grandfather built TVs and ham radios from scrap electronic parts that he could find on the grey market. When I was a kid, I thought that this was his way of connecting with people thousands of miles away. I now know that this was his way of connecting with himself.
The radio pulses which the Soviet landers beamed back to Earth decades before I was born are still reverberating through the universe, long after their creators have passed. There, they mesh with the ham radio conversations that carry my grandfather’s voice. Ever floating through the void, those signals are the beacons that remind me to open a laptop at the end of a long work day and to fill the blank space of my text editor with words.
Most launch failures happen during liftoff. The first few minutes of the flight define the fate of the mission, and its duration is directly proportional to the chance of success. The pile of books on characterization and plotting on my desk reminds me just how much I’ve yet to learn. I’m tens of thousands of words away from finishing a story — such is the distance to cover. So far this flight is nominal.
Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash.
