God Lives in St. Petersburg (18 page)
He gestures. “That emu could just hop that ditch and go bananas out here, couldn’t it? Kick little kids from now to St. Patrick’s Day.”
She nods sagely. “Ah, yes. The savage emu.” But she thinks about it, her eyes slitting. “Maybe they’re tagged. Electronically.”
Tagged. Technology again. Franklin is inexplicably saddened. At least with cages one knows where one stands. He does not know why, really, he hates technology, a hatred Kyrgyzstan had only hardened. Perhaps, like any other bigot, he needs hatred’s reflexive, vulgar reassurance of preservation.
They continue their exploration of Discovery Trail, stopping to gaze up at a pair of red pandas snoozing in the treetops. These creatures are a curious dog-fox blend, the stopgap work of a stagnant evolution. “Cute,” she says, just as one of them yawns to reveal a wicked mouthful of yellowy incisors. Franklin laughs, too hard, and Elizabeth walks ahead, leaving him there. They police opposite sides of the trail, taking in the next few stops alone. Franklin is staring with unseemly fascination at a porcupine snacking upon a twitching grasshopper when he hears Elizabeth say, “Well,
this
is depressing.”
He turns. She is standing before the bald eagle exhibit, shaking her head and making soft, aghast sounds. Twenty feet ahead of her, ballasted by talons clutched around the thin trunk of a wind-cripple sapling, sits a bald eagle. No. Not sits. Not stands, either. There is no satisfactory verb for its nonflight state. Franklin feels an unaccountable quickening of his pulse. This is just a bird, after all. But
bird
is wholly unable to communicate the essence of this animal. It is as wide in the torso as he is, invincibly silent, motionless. Its bright yellow beak ends in a sinister down-turned spike. The eagle seems somehow aware of its national-mascot status.
Elizabeth’s distress has only deepened. “God. It’s so
sad.
”
Gently Franklin turns her five degrees to the left. “Have a look at the plaque.”
This eagle’s foot was caught in a trap set to
catch fur bearing animals. In addition to
its foot injury, it experienced a wing injury
which prevents it from flying. We are caring for this eagle because it cannot live in
the wild anymore.
“I don’t care,” she says, throwing up her arms. “They should just kill it, then. Put it out of its misery. You can’t take care of something just because it’s
hurt.
” By the last word, she is shouting with gallant conviction. A nearby family shies away with telepathic simultaneity.
Franklin wills the anger from his voice. “You didn’t seem too torn up about that pigeon. Or those emus.”
His refusal to allow her this hypocrisy summons wide-eyed hatred. “It’s
different
,” she says.
He turns back to the crippled eagle. The sky above it seems as open and blue as a taunt. Perhaps all we owe those we love are nods when confronted with vanity, smiles in exchange for blind sanctimony. Never itemizing. Never using weakness as collateral. Why, he wonders, should love need signifiers? True love. An inexplicable qualification, a near tautology. There is, after all, no
true
hate, no
brotherly
indifference, no
puppy
lust. We engrave love with names to preserve it in the hierarchy of our memory, the most absolutist graveyard. We name it so that it might not die. His voice sinks to a pitch of détente. “Maybe it likes it here.”
“What choice does it have?” she says, bitterly rhetorical.
“Come on,” he says, after a moment. “One more stop.” He takes her cold, limp hand, but she doesn’t budge, her sandals rooted to the ground. He simply looks at her and tugs her lifeless arm. Finally she shakes her head, her face speeding from fury to composure in a heartbeat. They are living by that heartbeat, minute by minute. Nothing is promised beyond that.
He remembers, now, reading in the
Daily Journal
how Potter’s Park had volunteered for the yearlong gig of babysitting an elderly Siberian tiger named Ajax while the Cincinnati Zoo remodeled. A small block of text buried behind AP bulletins from Srebrenica and Tehran. For some reason he knows that the Cincinnati Zoo saw the last passenger pigeon die under its vigil. My God: Why does he know this? A book, he recalls, read months ago. A history of zoos, one of the hundred titles quietly acidizing on the shelves of the American Chamber of Commerce’s tiny Bishkek library.
Ajax has been given Potter’s Park’s celebrity suite. Franklin wonders if, somewhere in the zoo’s untrafficked bowels, there is a lightless cell filled with a displaced brown bear. Ajax’s grounds are as rolling and wide open and dandelion splotched as an upper-middle-class lawn. A farrago of long Stonehengish slabs of rock form a shelter beneath a shady stand of trees near the back. The cat makes good use of its space, stalking imperially from one quadrant to another, telegraphing its direction changes with a head-lifting sniff of the air. Ajax’s muscles, all of them, from the long plates of his flank to the tight bunches around his neck, are splendid enough to trigger pinwheels of creationist awe. His stripes are brilliantly diverse, some tapering into spear-heads, others jagged like lightning bolts, others yet arabesque swirls. Age has given over Ajax’s coat to an uncertain gray-edged white. Elizabeth is breathless, drilling her fingers into his hand. This is the only animal they’ve seen that seems to think of its captivity as temporary.
“Wow,” she says simply. “
Look
at him. It’s like he’s biding his time or something.”
Nothing alive, it occurs to him, can be truly broken. Suddenly, as though testing her, he lets go of Elizabeth’s hand. Without hesitating she stuffs it under her armpit and shivers.
He stares at Ajax. His long, unkempt whiskers are filthy with curds of meat. Who trims them? It seems a question in search of a punch line: Where does a two-ton elephant sit? Ajax, he thinks. From the Greek, of course, its journey into the King’s English leaving it as roughed up and unrecognizable as the name Jesus would be to a first-century Galilean.
Aias,
from
aiai:
pain that is selfinflicted. A useful distinction. Aias the solider who did not know when to stop fighting.
Elizabeth looks over at him as though she doesn’t know what’s just happened. As though the casket in her mind has not just been filled. “Seen enough wildlife?”
The day’s heat clogs his throat. He nods.
Her smile trembles. “Let’s go home?” In the final syllable is a terrible cognizance that tears her smile in two. Home. A reflex word, summoned by striking a shared joint now withered and dead. A certainty they can at last share. After an awful half-second hesitation, she squeezes his bicep and walks away.
He wonders, as he follows her, where he will go. What he will do. But he feels a supernal calm, a numbing reconfiguration of his chemistry. He falls behind, until they no longer have even the illusion of walking together. When, much later than love would have allowed, she finally turns to find him, to pick out his face from the sudden orbiting crowd, he feels latitudes away from her, his radar gone black, at an utter loss to name this loss. Her eyes find his. She smiles.
There you are. Are you coming?
As his hand lifts, he knows nothing but the solace he will take from the sad, lovely girl who comes to him, sometimes, behind his eyes, and tells him how much she loves him. And he will live, for a little while, on that imagined bit of love, until he no longer needs it, or her, or the girl whose face she wears. This girl. You.
Author’s Note
These stories were written in the following order: “Aral” (1997), “The Ambassador’s Son” (1997), “God Lives in St. Petersburg” (1998), “Animals in Our Lives” (1999), “Expensive Trips Nowhere” (2000), and “Death Defier” (2002). Students of Central Asia will note that many of the stories misrepresent not a few of the region’s factual particulars. The United Nations has never dispatched to the Aral Sea anything like Amanda Reese’s doomed troupe of scientists from “Aral,” for instance. “The Ambassador’s Son” and “God Lives in St. Petersburg” fiddle creatively with the geography of Tashkent and Samarkand, respectively. “Expensive Trips Nowhere” affronts as boring the Almaty of 1997 or so, not the vibrant, interesting city of today. “Death Defier” describes the uncertain situation between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in mid-November of 2001; while it is, in some ways, reflective of what was happening during that time in northern Afghanistan, no Afghan or Tajik folk remedy I have ever heard about involves medicinal grass. (The folk remedies of which I am aware are, if anything, far weirder.) These and other distortions—while we are at it, the Potter’s Park Zoo of “Animals in Our Lives” will surely disarm anyone who has visited the actual zoo in East Lansing, Michigan—are intentional.
The Russian in this book has been transliterated in accord with
written
rather than
spoken
Russian—with two exceptions:
“sevodnya”
(
today
) for
“segodnya”
and
“shto”
(
what
) for
“chto.”
I thank Boris Fishman, Minsk’s loss and our gain, for his help here.
“Expensive Trips Nowhere” draws heavily on (and in two places directly from) Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; Viktor’s memories were helped by Svetlana Alexievich’s
Zinky Boys:
Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War.
“God Lives in St. Petersburg” is indebted to the Pauline scholarship of Wayne A. Meeks. “Death Defier” was strengthened by readings of Sherwin B. Nuland’s
How We Die
and Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva’s
The Bang-Bang Club.
My profound thanks to the editors who first published these stories (in many cases years after they were written and following dozens of rejections): Ted Genoways at the
Virginia Quarterly Review;
Askold Melnyczuk and Eric Grunwald at
Agni;
Betsy Sussler and Suzan Sherman at
BOMB;
Ronald Spatz at
Alaska Quarterly Review;
Lee Epstein, Eli Horowitz, and Dave Eggers at
McSweeney’s;
and Calvin Liu at
Bullfight.
Thanks, finally, to Heather Schroder, Dan Frank, Jenny Minton, and Andrew Miller, for everything.
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Harvard University Press: Excerpt from “536: The heart asks pleasure first” from
The Poems of Emily Dickinson,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and Trustees of Amherst College and Harvard University Press.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from “Two Look at Two” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Excerpt from “The Road Not Taken” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, © 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
God Lives in St. Petersburg
TOM BISSELL
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University, he taught English in Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps volunteer and then worked for W. W. Norton and Henry Holt as a book editor. He is also the author of
Chasing the Sea
, a travel narrative, and (with Jeff Alexander)
Speak, Commentary
, a collection of fake DVD commentaries. He is a contributing editor for
Harper’s Magazine
and
The Virginia
Quarterly Review
. His work has appeared in the
Pushcart Prize Anthology
,
Best American Travel
Writing
,
Best American Science Writing
, and
Best
American Short Stories
. He currently teaches in Bennington College’s low-residency MFA program and lives in New York City.
ALSO BY TOM BISSELL
Chasing the Sea:
Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
Speak, Commentary:
The Big Little Book of Fake DVD Commentaries,
Wherein Well-Known Pundits Make Impassioned Remarks
about Classic Science-Fiction Films
(with Jeff Alexander)
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The stories in this collection were previously published in the following: “Aral” in
Agni
; “Expensive Trips Nowhere” in
The Alaska Quarterly Review
in slightly different form; “Animals in Our Lives” in
Bullfight
; “God Lives in St. Petersburg” in
McSweeney’s
and the
Pushcart Anthology XXIX
(W. W. Norton, 2004); “Death Defier” in the
Virginia Quarterly Review
and
Best American Short Stories 2005
; “The Ambassador’s Son” in
BOMB
and in the anthology
Wild East: Stories from the
Last Frontier
(Justin Charles & Co., 2003).
Permissions to reprint previously published material can be found at the end of the book.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Bissell, Tom, [date]
God lives in St. Petersburg and other stories / Tom Bissell.
p. cm.
1. Americans—Asia, Central—Fiction.
2. Asia, Central—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.I78G63 2005
813’.6—dc22 2004052232
eISBN: 978-0-307-42603-1
v3.0