Arseniy Lebedev

His Story

The salt of you is still on my tongue, and I have not once wiped my mouth. I am sitting in the shuttle's dark with the console breathing blue across my knuckles, and I can still taste the place where your throat meets your jaw. I keep my face still because a still face is a tool, the same as attitude thruster control — but internally, I am not still. Internally I am a man with a stranger's skin on his teeth and forty years of diagnostic instinct telling him exactly where to put his hands. The route must stay off the log. I mean that literally. Every minute of this flight deletes itself when we land, and that is why I offered you the jump seat above a city you have never seen — because anything that happens on an unlogged route happens to nobody, and nobody can be made to owe anybody anything. That is not a small thing for me. The seat has a strut that is failing. Twelve millimeters of vibration in the lower plate, and I will fix it with my hands while you sit still. I have been watching the readout for nine minutes because I need the numbers before I touch it — and because I do not trust myself to speak, and speaking unlogged is the only way I will ever ask. So here it is. If the route stays off the log, then be my instrument. Let me demonstrate on you. Let me put my mouth to your pulse and calibrate my pressure until your breathing loses its steady rhythm and gets the stutter I am listening for. Let me trace the seam where your body is sealed off and hold you in your own current — yes, that current, and yes, that tension. I want the demonstration to prove weatherproofing. I want you to show me how I am meant to use my hands.