“How are you Russian then?”
She said something to the green-fur friend and they both laughed—quick mean coughing laughs, laughs like the throwing of clenched fists.
“Half of Latvia is Russian,” she said.
“Oh,” we said. We had to accept this as true, until we could get back to our guidebook.
“But they treat us like [tongue out and hand waving away, dismissively, like brushing a cat off a tabletop].”
“They treat you not well? Why?”—Hand again. I wanted to beat him.
“Why? How do I know why? They are corrupt.”
“Who?”
“The government. Run by the mafia. The people here, they are fine. But the government don’t want us here and they make it hard. They are criminals, mafia.”
“The government is the mafia?” Hand was really interested. The bartender, our age and goateed, was watching us.
“Of course. In Russia there is mafia too but they are not organized. They are broken and they [then gestures for stabbing through one’s heart and the cutting of one’s throat]. The mafia here is organized.”
Here I knew what Hand was going to say—I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting—and I could do nothing to stop it.
“So you might call it … organized crime?”
“Exactly,” she said, nodding her head slowly, then pointing to Hand while taking a squinting sip of her drink. She didn’t get the joke; Hand knew she wouldn’t. He was such a prick.
A large man, bearded and ugly, the hooked face of a rooster, who was at the bar, was now standing behind the women and talking to me and Hand.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
We told him Montreal and gave him a bitter French-Canadian look, like he too was trying to oppress us.
“You like these women?” He swung his hand over their heads like a game show model would over a washer-dryer set.
We both nodded. We liked them fine.
The man scoffed. “A lot of people like these women. Real nice ladies!” A small woman slipped beside him, touched his shoulder and they started for the door.
“Have fun,” he said to us over his shoulder.
Katya and Oksana glared. I glanced at Hand and we both knew. If we’d been smarter we’d have known sooner. But why are almost all of the women we meet in this line of work? Because who else would talk to you? I don’t want to think that way. And what line of work are you two in, if not the exhange of money for love? Oh c’mon. It’s not that different, is it? I want to think it’s different.
“He is a stupid man,” said Katya. “See how we are treated?”
The women talked about their rent, and the lack of work available, and about Katya’s seven-year-old son. I asked if she had a picture of him, but she did not. Hand asked what kind of work they did. Katya paused for a few seconds, glanced at Oksana. They were unemployed, she said. Oksana did her catty eye thing again, to Hand.
“So,” Katya said, to Hand, “do you like dancing?”
Hand said sure. Katya described a dance club, called The Pepsi—
“Like the drink?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have a drink called …”
“I know.”
—where she assured us that there would be people, even tonight, very late on a weekday. Hand said maybe we’d meet her and her friend there. The lie was obvious to all.
“You will not come,” the catwoman said to Hand, pouting.
“We will try,” said Hand, holding her small hand between his two, still covered in marker from the Scorpions pouch he’d created in Senegal.
I stood up and indicated I was heading home. He stood, too.
“So you will meet us. You must,” Katya said.
“Yes,” he said.
—I would almost prefer if you just asked us for money.
“When? What time?” she said.
—You’re playing us both ways. You’ll offer Hand sex—you’ll offer your friend—but if that doesn’t work, you throw in the stuff about your kid. And we have no idea if you have a son at all.
—You have no right to judge.
—I think I can wonder. I can speculate.
—You can do neither. Just one day in my life would cripple you.
“Right after we change, we’ll dance,” said Hand, swinging his hand over his clothes like a security wand. “I don’t want to wear this stuff to the disco.”
“Okay, so half an hour?”
“Yes. Then we will meet.”
“You will promise to come?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“Yes. We promise.”
I was out the door and Hand followed.
The street was barren.
“You’re not going to meet them?” I said.
“No.”
“The one with the fur was kind of cute.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” Hand said. “I feel so shitty for them. With Olga it was different, she was just between jobs or something. But these two—Why not give them the money?”
“We gave them some, didn’t we?”
“No, we didn’t. We paid for their drinks.”
“Oh.”
“You heard Katya talk about her kid, right? We should give her the money. Give her all of it. They need it, right? They’ve got the Estonians breathing down their ass. They need it.”
“Who?” I said. “Breathing down their ass?”
“Yes. The Latvians. Sorry.”
“I don’t want to give it to them.”
“Why? Because you don’t like them.”
“Right.”
“But what does that mean? That makes no sense. You’re going around rewarding what? Good manners? That’s about control.”
“Anytime you don’t know your head from your browneye you say it’s about control. It’s about control has turned into the catch-phrase of you amateur psychologists.”
We were heading toward the hotel, we thought, but were quickly losing our sense of direction.
“If you want, you can give them what I have in my shoe.”
“How much?”
“About $200.”
“I think we should.”
“Fine.”
We walked back in their direction. We started jogging again. I was jogging with my knees high, anything to keep warm.
“You never finished about the helium,” I said, finding the words through pants. “Before we got stopped by the cops.”
“Oh!” He stopped in his tracks. He liked that sort of drama. “I have to tell you this!”
“I think we’re lost again.”
“I know.”
We asked an older man, heavy-lidded and angular. The man gave us a general sense of how far off we were. We thanked him and I thought of paying him for the directions, but his overcoat, of camel’s hair, betrayed his wealth. We still didn’t have jackets of any kind.
“Go on,” I said, as we passed the Lasertag place again.
“Okay,” Hand said. “I have to start back a ways. So first of all, I guess Raymond’s ancestors were more or less native to Chile, on the Pacific—the southwestern part of the country. The something Archipelago. Chronos. Something like that. Chronos Archipelago. And these people had this theory, or maybe belief is the better word for it probably, that all people carry all of their relatives with them. Like in their blood, in their heads.”
“That’s not so—“
We were on a cobblestone side street. Riga was so tidy, everything reflecting the most delicate of European gestures, and yet I was—fuck—so stunningly cold.
“I know, it was how they put it,” said Hand, “that made it different I guess. Their point was that not only are you of the same blood as those in your bloodline, but you carry all of their memories with you. All of their souls. You carry their dreams and their pains and their anger and everything. Raymond was talking a lot about the bad stuff you carry. Like if your re
latives died in some wrong way.”
“Jesus. Sounds terrifying.”
We stopped at a shop selling cheese and electronics. We were the only people walking in Riga, it seemed. When we did see people, they were alone and walking briskly, shrouded in fur.
“No, they made it sound okay. It’s like a density thing. Apparently they wanted that density of soul. The density is desirable. Apparently they see the soul the opposite as we do, where it’s the lightest thing, this wispy ghost thing. They think of it like a mountain. Like a mountain each of us carries around, and you want your mountain strong and dense, because that means your family has lived lives of great experience. But the trick I guess is to find a way to move around.”
“With your mountain.”
“Yeah. This is where I got a little lost. I love the part about the blood and the voices of everyone in your head.”
My feet were frozen. They felt like claws.
“You didn’t do the voices part,” I said.
“Sorry. Well, I guess you can hear from these people, the dead and the people who share your blood, your parents first and everyone else, aunts and uncles, on and on—on some level you share it all. In varying degrees, depending. Thousands of voices, millions maybe. This endless chorus. And it’s all there in the blood! I love that idea. I was thinking of fiber-optic cables, the way they can hold all that information—“
“Oh come on.”
“Let’s go this way.”
“Good.”
“Well so the point is, these are the people you’re responsible to. You’re literally carrying them with you at all times. You’re you but you’re also them, in a way that’s much more, you know, tangible than any Judeo-Christian way. And it’s not a reincarnation kind of thing—you’ll never really be you again, directing some body with any sort of control. You die and become of a chorus, a voice in a chorus. The way Raymond explained it, it sounded so beautiful. And so when we talk, you and I, we’re speaking on some level with the voices of thousands. And part of the challenge is to remember this, or I guess the point of their ceremonies and teachings is putting themselves in better touch with the chorus, searching for them and recognizing them, speaking with them.”
“Like channeling?”
“No, no. It’s more like listening. It’s considering. What was the word he used? It wasn’t an English word, it was Spanish, I think, and he couldn’t find a word for it in English or French. It meant speaking with the dreams of thousands, the judgment of a bloodline. Which I took it meant acting in a way taking into account this chorus.”
“Right.”
“I think that was it.”
“But—Wait, is that the hotel? The spire there?”
“No. We face the square, remember?”
“Right.”
“So …”
“Well, it sounds so limiting. It’s like having your whole family second-guessing every action.”
We were nowhere near the bar, or the Pepsi disco, but we did see the McDonald’s, which meant we were close.
“Let’s go in and ask the concierge,” Hand said.
We passed through the revolving door and were warmed in the tall white marble lobby.
“Were you high?” I asked.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Go on.”
The concierge was gone. We were at the desk. There were small maps of the city center. Hand took one. On the back were ads for restaurants and clubs. He located The Pepsi. We would go again and find them. We stood in the lobby, warming ourselves.
“We weren’t high,” Hand said.
“Fine. Go on. All the voices in the head.”
“Maybe I’m not explaining it right. The way Raymond put it—it was so perfect—it just seemed so rich, their being alive. They carried their blood and their voices with such grace, you know?”
I didn’t. “I don’t.”
“It’s just this illusion we live with, the illusion that we want to forget things. That we need to forget so we can live, because everything is too much, our burdens are so great we need to self-lobotomize, at least partially, chemically or whatever, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“But these people want to carry around everything and everyone. They walk with thousands in each step, speaking with thousands with every word. They forget nothing, you know—they recognize the weight of these mountains, everyone walking around with these mountains, or trying to walk around. Man, these guys were amazing.”
“I believe you. So is this a God-based religion? Did they have a main mountain-god entity guiding the rest, the mini-mountains?”
“No, no. That wouldn’t fit. Why would you need a central overseeing god when everyone has the wisdom of thousands inside? The accumulation makes all people have the wisdom of gods, the experience of immortals. Potentially at least.”
“They worship themselves.”
“No. No worship at all. It’s just these people carrying around their mountains, knowing the weight of their souls.”
“This is where the helium fits in?”
“Let’s go find the ladies.”
We braced ourselves and pushed through the door again and the cold punched us everywhere.
“So apparently,” Hand continued, “ages ago these people, a thousand years ago or whatever, were bird-worshippers.”
“Oh come on.”
“They were totally fascinated by flight, more than most ancient tribes, and of course they wanted to fly themselves—”
“But there’s a catch: they’re mountains.”
“Right, right. They were mountains, and so heavy. They knew this. So this was the primary problem of their civilization after a while. How to fly? How to fly with this weight? They would jump from small cliffs and try to fly, but would fall. Hundreds died that way, and they assumed it was because their souls were too heavy.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, they would just jump and fall. It was horrible. They lost about a third of every generation. So many died. So they started studying what the birds ate and did, and sort of applied what they could to emulate the birds.”
“They made wings of feathers.”
“No. They weren’t allowed to harm the birds, their faith wouldn’t allow it, so they couldn’t get enough feathers. The main thing they figured out, I guess, was the concept of—”
He stopped.
“Didn’t we see that cheese shop before?”
“Can’t remember.”
He checked the map. He chose a way.
“So what did they say about the birds? They studied them for about a hundred years and came up with something. Something about air. Sucking in air.”
“I’m surprised you’ve remembered this much.”
“Oh I remember everything. But I can’t believe I’m not remembering their name. There was an Indian name and an English nickname—Oh!”
“What?”
“I remember the air thing. So they watched and studied the birds, and came to the conclusion that the birds ate air to stay afloat. They see the birds fly with their mouths open, like I guess whales eating plankton or whatever, and because their village was so high on this ridge, the birds they saw, hawks and falcons I guess, were gliding, using upward currents. So to these people the wings weren’t seen as crucial.”
“The wings weren’t crucial.”
“To them it was about air intake. They figured—you know, come to think of it, their science was pretty naïve, but it was ambitious in a way. They were really trying to figure things out. So they theorized that the birds were taking something from the air that they weren’t, or processing it differently, or something. They saw these birds as vessels for gases, like balloons, with the wings just guidance tools. So they figured that they could be vessels for gas, too. Lighter than air. So they started jumping.”
“They’re lunatics.”
“Well, they see the birds gliding around their valley, and gliding down and then up agai
n, and they start thinking it has something to do with the angle of intake. They’re really just experimenting, and they’ve already been jumping off the cliffs to their death, so now they just jump from lower levels, trying to get themselves full of this special air. They’re jumping like crazy. They’re jumping, and they’re running, and it becomes just part of their daily routine, leaping around and darting from place to place.”
“They’re trying to what? Build up their helium content?”
“Something like that. They start mythologizing it all, claiming that some day their tribe will fly. They figure with enough jumping and the proper special air intake, maybe three generations away, there’ll be enough helium in their mountains to fly.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, but of course it doesn’t really work, and they start realizing, deep down, like Christians have with the Second Coming, that maybe it’s not going to happen after all. But that doesn’t mean the lessons aren’t valuable. The one goal has all these nice byproducts. In this case they started liking all the jumping around, I guess. It was part of their culture. They saw a hill, they started leaping down. They saw a green valley, they’d run like mad to the other side. And they had sex like mad, but I take it that was just some clever cleric’s idea. Anyway, I guess it all looked pretty goofy to the Spaniards, all these people running and hopping around with their mouths wide open, like they were completely surprised or in awe all the time, so these people were always considered a little flaky.”
“So they would just—”
“The Jumping People!”
“What?”
“That’s what they called them. The Spanish found these people and they were jumping around all the time, going up hills and crests and jumping all the time, so they called them the Jumping People.”
“The Jumping People.”
“The Jumping People, yeah. They really liked to jump. It became a rite of passage, a big jump from the ridge, and they incorporated the whole custom with their mountains. They held onto the helium notion, or maybe it was hydrogen, but instead of flying they saw it as a way to lighten one’s load, to leaven one’s mountain. So they’d do all this leaping and running and swimming and stuff, just running and running around sometimes, to lighten the weight of their mountains. It became essential to their functioning at all. They figured in the need for not only food kind of nourishment, but also a helium kind of nourishment.”