Dmitri Volkov was seventy-three years old and he could not remember whether he had been to space.
He had the — what were they. Scrapbooks. Yes. Three of them. Leather. Or leather-like. He had bought them or been given them or — no. He had bought them. At a shop on — the name was. He could see the street. The awning was green. Or blue. The awning was the color of something he had seen from above, which was either the Caspian Sea from orbit or the tablecloth at his mother's kitchen from the height of a six-year-old, and these two memories had merged sometime around his sixty-eighth birthday and he could no longer separate them.
He had the scrapbooks. Three of them, leather-bound, organized chronologically. Photographs of a man in a flight suit who looked like a younger version of himself standing next to spacecraft that he recognized from documentaries. Certificates with Cyrillic text and official stamps. A medal in a wooden box, inscribed with dates that corresponded to missions he could describe in considerable detail but could not, with any certainty, claim to have experienced.
The problem was not memory loss. His memory was excellent. He could describe the interior of the Soyuz capsule — the arrangement of the controls, the smell of the recycled air, the way the earth looked from four hundred kilometers up, a blue that was not any blue available at ground level, a blue that existed only at the precise altitude where gravity's hold weakened and the planet revealed itself as what it was: a drop of water suspended in the dark.
He could describe all of this. He simply could not confirm that he had been there.
"The memories are present," he explained to the young man who had written to him from a bookshop in Prague — Viktor, his name was, a man interested in the unreliability of personal narrative, which was, Dmitri reflected, a polite way of saying he was interested in how people lie to themselves. "I have the memories. I have the documents. I have the medal. But when I reach for the certainty — the feeling of 'yes, this happened to me, I was there' — it's missing. Like a word on the tip of your tongue. Like reaching for a glass that was there a moment ago."
Viktor's letter back was three pages long and began: "Dear Dmitri, I have been married twice and I am not certain either of those happened either."
Dmitri lived in a modest apartment in a building that had survived three regimes and carried the scars of all of them in its plasterwork. His neighbors knew him as the retired cosmonaut, which was how he had been introduced to them twenty years ago and which he had never corrected, because correcting it would require knowing whether it was accurate, and knowing whether it was accurate was precisely the problem.
He watched Tarkovsky’s Solaris every April — not for the science fiction but for the final shot: the son kneeling before the father on an island that is and is not real.
He hired Aleksandr Sokolov to attend the funeral.
Not a real funeral. A symbolic one. Aleksandr — the professional mourner from Moscow, a man Dmitri had heard about through a chain of recommendations so unlikely that Dmitri had stopped questioning them — arrived on a Wednesday in October.
"What are we mourning?" Aleksandr asked.
"My certainty," Dmitri said. "I want you to mourn the fact that I went to space. Or the fact that I didn't. Or the fact that the distinction has become meaningless."
Aleksandr nodded. He had mourned stranger things.
He sat in Dmitri's living room and he mourned.
His grief was real. It was always real.
Dmitri watched him. The grief moved through the room like weather — arriving, building, then slowly thinning. When it was done, Aleksandr opened his eyes.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
Dmitri considered this carefully. He looked at the scrapbooks. He looked at the medal. He looked at the photograph of a man in a flight suit standing next to a spacecraft.
"I feel," he said, "as if it doesn't matter."
"Whether you went to space?"
"Whether any of it happened. The memories are here. They sit in my chest like stones in a pocket. The experiences — real or not — shaped who I am. If I didn't go to space, then someone else went, and their memories found their way to me, and I've been carrying them for fifty years, and that's — that's not less real. That's just a different kind of mission."
Aleksandr smiled. It was not a professional smile. It was the smile of a man who had spent his career mourning and had just witnessed something rarer: a person who had found a way to stop.
"The funeral is over," Dmitri said.
"Yes."
"Would you like some tea?"
"Very much."
They drank tea. The cup was warm in Dmitri’s hands — a simple warmth, requiring no confirmation. Outside, Moscow did what Moscow does in October: became grey and golden simultaneously.
Dmitri did not look at the scrapbooks again that afternoon. He didn't need to. The memories were his, regardless of their origin. The mission was complete, regardless of whether it had happened.
That night, unable to sleep, he opened the scrapbook to a page near the back. He had looked at every page a thousand times. But this page showed a photograph he had never seen: a man in a flight suit, floating, arms spread, laughing. The man was him. Or was not him. The laughter was real.
Dmitri closed the scrapbook. He did not open it again. The earth continued to be that impossible blue.