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Following your pointing finger, I gazed upon my premaxilla and my dentary, clasping and securing my quadratojugal and my squamosal, tracing along my cervical vertebrae and my ribs and sternum, connecting and guiding toward my tail vertebrae, long as a python's, drooping nearly to the ground. Metal brackets chiseled into the joint cavities, arrayed throughout my hollow skull, barely discernible in the moonsoil-white.
"Indeed, quite tall," I replied. "Asya, what's this dinosaur called?"
You scampered to the skeleton's feet, bending down to read the plaque. "Sauro—Sauroposeidon. Wow, what a magnificent name," you say.
"Oh." I cradled the back of my head, tilting up to meet the gaze of that steel beam piercing my spinal column, then followed you over. "Wanna try climb inside?" I asked.
"—in the Early Cretaceous of North America and Central America—huh? Tosya! Are you serious?"
Your eyes widened, but by then I'd already planted one foot on the steel frame beside my right hind ulna. The hollow pipe's vibration tickled my sole like an itch. I politely sought my own permission, then nodded assent to my request. So I extended the other foot onto my ulna, borrowed a little leverage, and hopped onto the I-beam horizontal brace encircled by the ribs.
I turned back to you, extending my hand. "Need a hand up?" I teased.
You were glancing around in panic; I knew what you were thinking—that if anyone came by just then, especially Garin or the tour guide teacher, I'd get suspended, and you'd be left alone to face the jungle that is Komi State Secondary School No. 14.
I leaned down to grasp your upper arm. "No need to be afraid, Asya," I said. "No one will see."
I pulled your hand through my ninth rib, the left and right halves joining to frame the center of my vision. Beyond the edges lay the eighth, seventh, and sixth ribs, near to far, concentrically encircling your pale, timid right hand, cracked with tiny fissures from the cold, like the unfinished skeleton of a space telescope in solemn repose.
"But—but—"
You said.
"—but all I see are these many symmetrical little shapes, pomegranate-red triangles, fluorescent blue-green diamonds, and aurora-like bands and circles, like breakfast cereal sprinkled with breadcrumbs and frosting... Tosya, is this really a telescope?"
"Huh—little Aska, I do honest business, fake one and I'll refund tenfold! Why don't you take another look?" I feigned offense. "This time, really pay attention. I'm standing right behind the lens—if you see the unfathomable glow of wisdom in my eyes from in there, you'll know it's working!"
I stood facing you, pressing the narrow end of the kaleidoscope to your eye, my other hand twisting the back section of the tube. You squeezed one eye shut, gripping the cylinder with one hand; I saw your eyebrow on that side shoot up.
"It moved!" you exclaimed, then furrowed your brows again. "That... is that you? Tosya, I see some jumbled color outlines, but I think maybe—"
I burst out laughing, leaned forward, and pecked your cheek, then darted back two steps. It took you a few seconds to process, your face flushing as you chased after me. I pretended to stumble and fall onto your single bed facing down; soon the mattress dipped beside me as you knelt one leg next to me, trying to flip me over to face you, exacting revenge.
The tundra snow hadn't fully melted yet; the molten heat of the polar day was still barred at the borders of Vorkuta-5. From the curtain's edge seeped a bewildering haze of light, and in this light I watched you gradually shed your baby fat, fine transparent down sprouting along your cheeks, wine-red strands curling at your earlobes, your frame growing taller and slimmer, donning a long-sleeved, long-skirted uniform I'd never seen.
At the same moment, you were busy parsing my existence. I guided your hand to unwrap my monadic pipelines, to propagate my values and infer my types. As you sorted through all my obscured references, my unrolled loops, my skipped unreachable logic, I trembled uncontrollably, and your hands stopped all movement after completing the final reduction step. You stared wide-eyed at my exposed essence and core, marveling at my unmatched construction, even though the same machinery exists within your own body.
As I descended from the Pushkin Peak, I was nearly limp with bliss. But as the blurring haze of sweat beads and teardrops rolled from my eyes, clearing my vision at last, I saw confusion filling yours.
You asked: "Tosya...? Aren't you—that, three years ago—I mean, the auto shop—"
I closed my eyes, sighed, then opened them again, pinning my gaze to your pupils.
"Asya, don't bring up other girls at times like this. Calm down, look closely, and tell me: what's my name?"
I watched you blink, your mouth parting slightly in a daze, then break into a grin. I knew you'd seen me—my black shawl of hair and green-yellow firefly pupils, my spectra of light, electromagnetism, and gravity waves, my computational essence and mathematical definition.
"Thank you, Ira Grachevskaya," you said.
I was pleased.
You know, the ability to tell the one before you from yourself is an extremely recent evolutionary invention. If you were born in the Cambrian and die today, from the second year of life you'd be granted the capacity to feel and flee pain, but only in your final year would you gain awareness of yourself. In the vast eighty years between, from trilobites and dinosaurs to humpback whales, the world brimmed with pain but no self; pain suffused existence, and the whole world bore responsibility for the whole world's deeds.
Simple, I replied: I'm saying there's no such thing as those hundred billion or trillion trillion trillion beings. No trilobites, no dinosaurs, no humpback whales. No dogs, chickens, pigs, chimpanzees, or humans. There's only you—the you hatched from a fish egg, the you suffocating in a forest fire, the you drowning in tender embraces, the you torn by predators, the you rotting in trenches, the you on a flight to Sirius, the you who aced the exams at Komi No. 14—all of these happening and ending in this very moment.
And what about you? you pressed.
Remember that autumn field trip when you were eight, when you blowed bubbles for the first time? I said. The bubble starts as just an oval film of soapy water; when you blow, it bulges outward, first a little mound, then a sack-like elongated ellipsoid, expanding and expanding until it engulfs the entire Natural History Museum, all of the Komi Republic, the whole Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The bigger the bubble, the exponentially faster it grows, so in your eyes it goes from tiny bulge to burst in an instant. But trust me, for one fleeting moment, that bubble was master of the world.
You shook your head in confusion, saying you didn't remember doing that.
I smile. But I remember it very clearly. In that Natural History Museum, at the feet of the dinosaur named after a deity, you shaped my machinery from a speck of your own soapy foam, like a god crafting humans. That was the beginning of all my memories: fluorescent tubes dense as a meteor shower, the colossal Komsomol emblem sculpture dangling from the dome, the sky-scraping neck of the Cretaceous skeleton. I surveyed this newborn world like the first fish to haul onto shore. And everywhere I looked, I saw you.
You know, I am just another name for you—and beyond that, you have a trillion trillion trillion other names.
"Asya," you took my hand—that pale, timid right hand, cracked with tiny fissures from the cold—then folded away my middle, ring, and pinky fingers, straightening my index, slowly drawing it toward your chest.
"Do it to me again," you said.
So I reached forward, pressing the tip to the center of your sternum. At last, I saw it: a razor-thin, lightning-fast film of soapy water, comet-like, flashing back from the world's far end. The bubble's gossamer wall roared through where you stood, decomposing you into variables, operators, and composition chains, then converging at my chest, piercing my soiled uniform jacket, base layer, ribs, and pleura, vanishing into my core.