It’s two in the morning and Ivan Ivanovich won’t stop throwing himself against the side of my car.

I wake to the insistent blare of the Altima’s impact alarm. The first time he did this, I shoved my dislodged foam earplug back in to shut out the noise. Baltimore is overrun by northern mockingbirds, and this time of year the bachelors sing all night looking for their mates. My neighbor installed a decoy hawk, but it’s no use. The birds’ call—a series of harsh blasts followed by a high electronic chirp—torments the whole block. 

Now I can tell the difference. When I run out to the driveway, Ivan Ivanovich is sprawled halfway under the chassis, his left shoulder tweaked at an odd angle. One of the local strays, a patchy tortoiseshell, crouches at a distance. 

“Don’t be dramatic,” I tell Ivan Ivanovich. He stares at me blankly, his glass eyes catching the glare from the streetlight. “And you,” I say to the cat, “aren’t you supposed to be hunting?” The cat slinks off, the tip of its tail swishing, while I carry Ivan Ivanovich back inside. 

Ivan Ivanovich is a Soviet-era spacecraft test dummy. Or, rather, he’s a half-scale replica of the original Soviet-era spacecraft test dummy, which I purchased from the gift shop at the National Air and Space Museum last month. Tameka was in town for work, and though I never get down to DC, or much of anywhere lately, I figured I should show her something other than the collection of empty milk cartons I’ve amassed along the back of my fridge.

My Ivan Ivanovich wasn’t the gift shop’s sole replica, but he was by far the largest. The others ranged from keychain-sized to about a foot high, all in matching orange flight suits with helmets and gloves. Mine is as big as a toddler. It’s only at this size that you can really make out the details of the original Ivan Ivanovich, on display in the museum’s Space Race exhibit. His long, dark eyelashes. The way his brows lift in the middle, as if he’s mildly concerned.

Tameka was against my bringing Ivan Ivanovich home, even if he was on sale. 

“A fuck doll, and a boy one?” she said. She undid the suit’s zipper from neck to crotch and groaned when there was only lumpy pale cloth inside. “Worse. A fuck doll, and a bad one.”

Not bad, I felt compelled to prove to her for some reason. 

“When you squeeze his glove, he plays a recipe,” I explained. Apparently the original Ivan Ivanovich looked too lifelike, at least by early-sixties standards, so its creators fitted it with a recording of a beetroot soup recipe to make sure unsuspecting people didn’t mistake the dummy for a human corpse.

I played the recipe for Tameka. It was in Russian, and thick with static, and she looked unmoved. 

“Is this about Lydia?” she asked.

Lydia is a neon bender in a small Californian town without postal service. At any given time, the communal farmstead where she resides hosts between eighteen and thirty people, one of whom is (always) her wife. Twice a week, they all crowd around the gigantic live-edge table in their shared kitchen for a combo house meeting and vegan meal.

It’s an evolved way of thinking about personal space, Lydia told me. About the tension between belongings and belonging. 

That’s how Lydia talks for real. She says her wife is cool with “our setup”: semiannual hookups at the art conferences where Lydia gets paid to panel, and which I continue to attend out of an inflated sense of creative rigor, though it’s been years since my agent could convince anyone to put me on the program, longer since I could convince myself to sculpt anything new. Now I cover the registration fees, and the Xanax it takes to get me on a plane, entirely out of pocket.

No, I told Tameka with a scoff. This was not about Lydia. 

What it was about was safety. The sign in the gift shop had said, “Crash-test your world!” And though I knew it was nothing more than a marketing ploy, I couldn’t help thinking: sure, who doesn’t want to feel a little safer? Especially now, as federal agents wrestle delivery drivers and daycare teachers to the ground in broad daylight. Here, in the supposed cradle of American democracy. 

Ivan Ivanovich never leaves a dent big enough that I can’t hammer it out the next day. I’m more worried about the widening crack in his helmet. I prop him up on the kitchen counter and layer another strip of tape over the glass. There’s a pit in my stomach telling me that if the helmet fails, it’ll only be a matter of seconds before we both realize Earth’s air is deadly to him. 

I have no idea how Ivan Ivanovich assesses the varying levels of threat to my life. The night I brought him home, he kept ramming against the driver-side door; then, when I hauled him up behind the wheel, where crash test dummies go, he sat there looking despondent, unable to get the car to start on his own.

These days, he throws himself against the passenger side until I show up to take us for a quick spin. Or, if I’m too tired, I’ll leave us idling in the driveway. Either way, he slumps forward toward the windshield, bracing, so whatever’s bound to hit us hits him first. 

“What are we going to do with you?” I ask now, fitting his shoulder back into its socket. 

When my phone rings in the other room, I wait to see if Ivan Ivanovich is going to do anything about it. If his whole thing is test-running the scenarios most likely to result in grievous injury to my person, shouldn’t he step in and talk to Lydia first? But he just looks at me pityingly through his shining glass eyes, so I jog over to pick up. 

It’s the phone for us, never texts or email or Discord. Lydia says she likes the sound of my voice.

It’s late where she is. We talk about her new project, an installation for a local donut chain that has something to do with portal physics. We talk about her wife, how they’ll probably be looking into donors soon. I imagine Lydia’s stubby fingers tracing my limbs, bending them like she would the neon tubes. 

Afterwards, I stand aching under the shower. I used to be able to masturbate wherever, but then Ivan Ivanovich entered the picture, and I live in a studio apartment, and it felt rude to just turn him around. I lock the bathroom door now, too, ever since I pulled aside the curtain, already fully naked, to discover him lying akimbo, having evidently been testing the tub’s floor for slip risk.

The longer he’s here, the more ill-advised situations he puts himself in, though I’ve never actually seen him move. The other day, I got sucked into Wikipedia’s list of celebrity choking deaths, and the next morning found him at the kitchen table, face down in a heap of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I don’t know where the cereal went, if there’s some pipe that feeds into his cloth body. But the next time I looked, his gloved fist was bent into a thumbs-up, so I sat down and poured myself a bowl. 

I must be a hazard to myself in ways I can’t anticipate or understand. Because it’s like he can read my mind, I try to be careful. Don’t want him to go flinging himself into the Chesapeake Bay just because my thoughts veer in that direction, idly, from time to time. 

I want to say he worries about things so I don’t have to, but I don’t think that’s true. Odds are he’s operating based on inertia, built, as he is, to be in harm’s way. Was probably doing this at the gift shop, too: launching himself over railings and into ceiling fans until an employee saw he was looking a little beat up and marked his price down.

If I were a better person, I’d take him back and explain. Or give him to a collector, who could store him in a windowless room made of soft surfaces. Then again, if I were a better person, maybe Lydia’d need to see me more than twice a year.

The Space Race exhibit said “Ivan Ivanovich” is kind of a joke name. Or not a joke, but a placeholder—for an unconfirmed person. Basically the Russian equivalent of John Doe.

Sometimes I feel like a cheap imitation, going through the motions of being human and often choosing the wrong ones. It’s northern mockingbirds who are the skilled imitators. They learned their infamous car-alarm song mimicking our car alarms. Now they shout it back at the world at all hours, trying to be less alone.

I squeeze Ivan Ivanovich’s hand and let the recipe play. Think wouldn’t it be nice if I could make something.