“Sharks?” the older man asked.
The younger one shuddered at the word. “Those bastards just swim around the ocean eating kids, biting turtle heads, fighting giant squids and shit. The messed up thing is that they can’t even stop swimming and fighting squids and eating children. They don’t have hot air balloons shoved up their asses like normal fish.”
“Good thing you were born a land mammal,” the older man mused.
“Only good luck I’ve ever had,” the young man agreed. He kicked at the pile of clothes lying at his feet.
A moan rose from the pile. Then the clothes began to move. A man was in there, his mouth expurgated with a strip of black tape, his hands bound behind him within the buttoned overcoat. When he shook from side to side his empty coat sleeves slapped the ground in a hapless dance. I wanted to run, but Kolya held my shoulders.
“If we move, if we make a sound, they’ll put us right next to him,” Kolya whispered. His eyes locked on mine for the first time that day. That little acknowledgment of my existence quieted the terror that clambered in my chest like a kitten locked in a suitcase.
The two men went on debating the dangers of sharks. The younger one asked if Jaws was a documentary.
Kolya held me in a bear hug; in a lesser brother, it would have conveyed false comfort, but Kolya made it feel like the moral obligation of possession: You will be saved because you belong to me. Daily push-ups and pull-ups had built out his once spindly arms and he wrapped them around me and pressed me in and held me. “Shush, Little Radish,” he whispered. He didn’t shake, he didn’t tremble, not a single spasm of concern. His preternatural mental calm seeped down into his body and hardened into a second skeleton. Everything about him suggested a psychosomatic impenetrability so dense a bullet couldn’t pass through him.
A dozen meters away the overcoat went on waving its sleeves in an agonized semaphore. The two men looked away uncomfortably.
“I saw the open ocean in a movie once,” the older one said. He pulled a handgun from his waistband and passed it to the younger man. With a sickeningly slick cha-chunk, the younger man chambered a round. It sounded too smooth, too glib, an ease and efficiency unsuited to the brutal task before them.
The younger man closed his eyes and pointed the gun at the man lying at his feet. The prisoner turned his head slightly and through the upside-down V of the older man’s legs his eyes met mine.
“He’s looking at me,” I whispered.
“Who is?”
“The guy on the ground.”
Kolya glanced over. The condemned man’s eyes widened. He was furious. Maybe our presence was a greater transgression than his impending murder, or maybe we were one indignity too many, the only one he had any chance of alleviating before he departed. The duct-tape strip swelled with his muted screams.
“He’s trying to warn them,” Kolya muttered disbelievingly. “He’s trying to warn the people about to kill him.”
But neither of the murderers noticed that their prisoner’s anger had been redirected to the clearing a dozen meters away. The younger man tightened his lips, but when he pulled the trigger, nothing sounded but a hollow clack.
“You never make it easy, do you?” the older man asked the clouds. The two of them stared at the gun, clicking the trigger, tapping it on a corroded branch, inspecting its darkly oiled insides. They disassembled the gun and put it back together. I imagined myself buttoned in the overcoat, squirming on the far end of the barrel, lungs laboring to strain air through mucus-clogged sinuses, pleading with buffoons too stupid to pull a trigger in the right direction. I’d never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life’s madness: The institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.
“Maybe we should ask him,” the younger man suggested, nodding to the ground. “He’s the one who usually shoots people.”
The older one considered it for a moment and leaned over to tear the duct tape from the condemned man’s lips. The tape uprooted his brown whiskers with the soft plucks of a tiny harp. His eyes never left mine.
“Please,” I mouthed. My vertebrae had tightened to a single, inflexible bone. His eyes drilled into mine. I was certain he would alert them. But he nodded once and silently looked up at his captors. It was a last act of mercy in what I imagined was an unmerciful life. Whatever needless suffering he brought to the world, I forgave him, from all of us, for it all.
With soft-spoken resignation, the condemned man explained how to properly load the clip. “Now turn the gun around so that it’s pointing at your face,” he instructed the younger man. “You want to be looking inside the barrel to see if there’re any obstructions. Then click the trigger a few times to make sure there’s nothing stuck in the chamber.”
The younger man pointed the gun at his face, peering into the blind telescope of the barrel, but before he could pull the trigger the older man grabbed his arm.
“Wait, wait, wait,” the older man said. “He’s trying to get you to shoot yourself.”
The younger man’s shoulders slouched under the weight of the betrayal. “Really?”
The condemned man smiled and closed his eyes. The barrel stared back, unblinking.
Click click. Click click. “Goddamn thing’s still—”
I recoiled into Kolya’s arms. The blast thundered through the forest and fell into silence. There are more ways to remember one person than there are people in the world. No matter what Kolya went on to do, I remember him as the hand on the back of my neck, the shoulder beneath my cheek, the voice in my ear promising safety.
The murderers turned and stepped over the coat sleeves. What had been a skull was now a leaky bowl of borscht. Ruby spatters ran to the thighs of the younger man’s navy track pants. The older man patted his protégé encouragingly. He had a limp chicken neck, downturned lips, shadowy crescents beneath his eyes, all of which seemed to hang a little lower, as if buried in his skull a slackening winch barely held his face together.
Kolya flung me from his arms when he realized the two men would pass us. “Play dead,” he whispered. The cold earth seeped through my bones. We lay paralyzed. Our fingers rooted us to the glassy ground until the footsteps faded. The older of the two men was named Pavel, and he was on his way to becoming a leading figure in Kirovsk’s organized crime. In eight years, my brother would begin working for him.
Kolya helped me to my feet. “You’re going the wrong way,” I called when he stomped toward the body.
The man had died with his legs splayed in his loose trousers, his wrists bound behind his back, his torso torqued so that his left shoulder wedged into the frost and his right jutted up.
“What are you doing?”
“Just waiting till they’re gone.” Kolya nodded toward the ellipses of footprints leading away from the body. He dropped to one knee and rolled the corpse into a more comfortable position. Kolya straightened the man’s legs, uncoiled his wrists, returned his arms, at last, to his coat sleeves. For a man whose head had been shot off by incompetents, he looked surprisingly peaceful.
A patter at the far end of the clearing. Two eyes, the color of windshield-wiper fluid, met mine.
“Kolya,” I called. He had found a dirty sheet and was pulling it over the body. “Kolya,” I repeated.
He turned as the wolf trotted into the clearing. A scar ran the valley between its perked ears. The fur darkened down the length of its snout, the white graying until it dead-ended at the black period of its nose.
“Keep calm.” Kolya backed away from the body. “Don’t run.”
“You keep telling me that,” I snapped. “You keep telling me to keep calm and we keep almost getting killed.”
Drawn by the gunshot or the scent of blood, the wolf beelined for the corpse. Its lips peeled and a yellowed row of incisors sank into the dead man’s neck, making a mess of Kolya’s funerary attempts. We stood a few
meters away. Fear had locked our feet to the ground. The wolf lodged its teeth into the overcoat and tore through wool with a terrific twist of its head. It wasn’t very large, as wolves go, more like a Labrador skeleton assembled inside matted wolf’s hide.
When we began taking tentative steps backward, its head swung toward us. Its mollusk-like nose flared rhythmically. I held out my hand in peace, as I would to a dog. Only when it opened its maw and its ruddy tusks shone in the sunlight did I realize I was offering the beast its next meal! Its tongue shot past its black rubbery lips to coat my fingers in gore. I was too afraid to retract my hand. For a moment we stood there as the wolf slathered every centimeter of my hand with the dead man’s masticated remains. When finished, it lifted its hind leg and a yellow stream splattered across my shoes, soaking into my socks. Then it started wagging its tail. Then it barked.
Kolya lodged his fist in his mouth to hold in his laughter, then he took me by the shoulder and led me home.
WE SAT between our two beds on legless chairs propped on book boxes (our father had used the screws that had held together the legs to mount a clock). Rugs draped over the wallpapered walls. Sometimes they slipped from their nails in the middle of the night, falling over us as we slept as second, stifling blankets. A poster of the periodic table hung between our two beds. I had changed my socks and washed my feet. My insides felt pureed.
Kolya hunched forward with his elbows pinned to his knees and his mouth drawn into a tight expression of concentration. Whenever he thought deeply, he looked constipated.
“What’s it like being dead when everyone else is still alive?” I asked.
“Like being alive when everyone else is dead,” Kolya answered. His back stiffened. He shot to his feet. “That’s it! One of the exhibits can be about the last person alive. You know how Dad told us he’d foiled an American plan to nuke Kirovsk? That wasn’t the whole story.”
He dropped to a knee beside me.
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
Kolya leaned back and his shoulders sank into the blubbery mattress. “Dad didn’t tell you about the backup plan. The last resort. The answer to the question: What if the world ends today?”
“He told you?”
“Of course. I’m his favorite son. See, after the Americans took the moon, Khrushchev came to Dad and was like, ‘Look, Dad, we’re fucked. The Yanks are playing baseball and building shopping malls on the moon. What do we do?’ And Dad told him his plan.”
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
“Dad’s idea was to build a capsule that could keep a man alive for twenty years. The Americans might kill all life on earth with a nuclear war, but the last living man would be a Soviet citizen, up there, in space. Khrushchev had one of those expansive Russian souls novelists are always writing about. He loved it. But Brezhnev put him in an old folks’ home before he could authorize Dad to build the thing. So we’ve got to do it.”
We rushed to the ticket office to tell our father.
“My true heirs,” he said. “Born scientists. You’ll go far.”
When the museum closed for cleaning that Sunday, my father towed the rusted skeleton of a lorry cabin onto the warehouse floor. “The capsule!” he declared. I examined it from various vantage points. It didn’t resemble a lorry cabin, much less a capsule. More like a decapitated whale’s head that had spent several years on the ocean floor first as food, then as shelter, for an extended family of eels. “It needs a little work,” my father admitted, but his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis.
We transformed the lorry cabin into a capsule with tinfoil. Kolya taped one end of foil to the hood, slid the roll onto a broomstick, and circled the lorry as the silvery scroll unfurled behind him. It took sixteen rolls and hundreds of revolutions. Kolya orbited, until the cabin became a fully bannered capsule. With black shoe polish, we carefully drew USSR across the bow. A maroon dentist’s chair became the pilot’s seat. We used a fishbowl for the portal window, a rusted desk fan for an air filter, a busted radio for communications, a cassette-tape deck for last messages.
The summer was a twenty-four-hour afternoon. For three months the river thawed enough for ships to pass, and newly canned goods and sugary cookie-like lumps replenished produkti shelves. It warmed enough to walk outside with only a heavy coat, scarf, mittens, and fur hat, so warm that drivers held tar-soaked torches beneath their cars for a scant two minutes before the sludgy gas tanks thawed. Ah, summer!
We played in the museum when there were no visitors, which was nearly always. The sun streamed through sooty windows spaced along the second story.
“Cosmonaut Kolya,” I murmured, descending to the basement of my vocal range. “The moment we have feared has arrived. Reagan declared on American television that rather than surrender, he would destroy the entire earth. He was facing the wrong camera. We doubt his sanity.”
And Kolya would snap to attention, clucking his tongue as he clicked his silent rubber heels. “Comrade Alexei, I am prepared to venture into the vastness and bring the wisdom of Lenin to all alien life.” He marched to the capsule and gave a stern-faced salute to an invisible flag before hunching inside. I secured him to the dentist’s chair with straps cut from a rucksack and set a motorcycle helmet on his head.
“One final thing, Cosmonaut,” I said, flipping up the helmet visor. I would give him a cassette tape, or a notebook, or a file containing instruction on further adventures to be had in deep space. “Open this only in case of emergency.”
I counted down from ten as Kolya hummed the national anthem. Sometimes he’d clasp my hand to his chest and as his pulse throbbed against my palm the act seemed less like make-believe than the rehearsal for a final good-bye.
“You will have the last human thought,” I whispered.
“You will be that thought,” he said.
“You will have the last word.”
“Your name will be the last word.”
When the countdown plummeted to zero, the rocket launchers crackled into ignition. Blue heat seared the oxygen from the air. An instant inferno engulfed the surrounding two square kilometers of land, ripping a crater into the tarmac. The blaze incinerated my nerves before they could transmit the agony to my brain. In a millisecond I became the echo of a scream rising through smoke. All around American warheads fell from wispy chutes. The sky bruised with fire. This is it. The end. The thrusters kicked in, lifting the capsule through blossoming mushroom clouds. Cataracts of light carried Kolya from this world. Through the portal window, he watched the decimated horizon become Earth, become nothing.
3
I shared a compartment on the night train back with a father traveling to Petersburg with his daughter for her orthodontia work.
“She’s stumped half the dentists in Moscow,” the father explained with obvious delight. The spotlight of paternal pride is fickle and faint, but when it shines on you with its full wattage, it’s as warm as a near sun. “My little prodigy.”
Tree trunks flicked over the cabin window. I wanted to be loved as much as he loved his daughter’s bad teeth.
“Go on, show him,” he urged.
She gave a great yawn. Her open mouth was a dolomite cavern. Only divine intercession or satanic bargaining could save her. “Just a little bit crooked,” I said, then gave a wide ahh of my own. “Mine are a little crooked too.”
“Mine are in a dental textbook,” she declared.
She had me there. Couldn’t have been older than twelve and already she’d accomplished more in her life than I had. Rotten little overachiever. I pulled the Polaroid Galina had given me from my wallet.
Pale fold lines graphed over the photographic surface that had lost its luster years earlier. But there we were, Kolya and me, wearing leopard-print bikini bottoms, flanking our mother. None of us had ever worn a swimsuit before. Clouds foamed from the Twelve Apostles in the background. Lake Mercury lapped at our toes. Splashes glinted from our calves in points of molten light. I showed the Polaroid to the gir
l and her father.
“My brother and mother. And that’s me when I was your age,” I said. It felt urgent that I share this with them, that they know that even though my teeth weren’t so disfigured, I was worthy of inclusion in their family. The girl’s lips didn’t open when she smiled. Then her father told her to get ready for bed. I carefully folded the Polaroid into my wallet.
In the morning, we’d leave the train together and they’d be so charmed by my small talk they’d ask me to the dentist with them. They’d fix me, starting with my teeth. The girl would think of me as a much older brother. Her father would think of me as a much younger brother. They’d invite me to move in with them in their titanic Moscow mansion. I’d consider the offer. It’d cramp my free-wheeling bohemian lifestyle, but they’d plead and offer me great sums of money. I’d turn down the money. I’m not for sale. But I’d accept the invitation to join their family, for their sakes obviously. I’m a Samaritan. I’d teach the girl all about growing up, and teach the divorced father how to forget his first marriage and find a new one. I’d only stay a few months because I won’t be held down. They’d talk about me in reverent tones for years.
The following morning the cabin attendant yanked me by my ear from a restful slumber. This was to be expected, given the only required experience for Russian Railways employment is a history of anger issues. The father and daughter had already gone. Must’ve forgotten to leave their names and phone number. They’d probably regret it the rest of their lives.
4
In July 1990, when the warmest month in Kirovsk’s fifty-three-year history coincided with the collapsing of Soviet authority, the elderly began swimming in Lake Mercury. In the mornings they gathered on the gravelly banks with their gray hair bunched beneath fur hats and they stripped to their undergarments. When they raised their hands, their triceps sagged from the bone. One man gazing at the waters patted his potbelly tenderly. Maybe he’d spent the last fifty years wondering if it could be deployed as a flotation device, and now, finally, would find the answer. There’s nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.