The Great Glass Sea (53 page)

Then her head was out from beneath his cheek. A strange sensation, her breath on his chin, as if his skin, covered so long by his beard, was learning again how to feel.

“But look!” she said.

The words were a puff of warm breath, and he jerked a little, peered at her.

“But look!” she said again.

Her face was turned to him, waiting for something, and he whispered, “At what?” In the faint moonlight, he couldn’t quite tell if her eyes rolled.

“The door,” she said. “It’s open?” She paused, waited. And then: “A footstep?”

He smiled. “A nimble footstep!” he said. “You’ve memorized it?”

Her laugh was the first nervousness from her he’d ever heard. “Are you kidding?” Her hands lay flat against his chest. She pressed them there a little more firmly. “But you have.”

The Khazar khan, Ratmir. Ruslan’s rival. Asleep inside a castle, lured there by a keep-full of maidens. “‘And through a silvery ray of moonlight,’” Dima said, “‘a girl darts. Now’s the time for dreams to spread their wings and fly!’”

“Really?” Vika said, all mock surprise, and, inside his coat, leaned into him.

“‘Wake up,’” he went on. “‘This is your night of nights!’”

“‘Uh-huh,’” she said.

“‘Yes, wake up—don’t waste precious moments!’” He couldn’t make out the sound she made through the sound of his own swallowing. But he felt her shake her head. She had placed her ear in the space between his neck and chest, as if trying to hear the vibrations of his throat: “‘The covers slid from off the bed; damp forelocks fringed his flaming temples.’” Her lips were on his throat. “‘The girl stood over him in silence . . .’”

Vika opened her mouth and closed her lips around his Adam’s apple. When she spoke he could feel the flutter of her tongue against it. “Go on,” she said.

“‘And on the bed where the khan lay . . .’”

“You skipped ahead,” she told his skin.

“I know,” he said.

“Good,” her tongue told him.

“‘She leant one knee . . .’”

“Like this?” Vika said, and she was on her knees between his bent ones.

“‘She breathed a sigh . . .’” He could feel her breath on the soft skin beneath his jaw. “‘. . . then bent her head down to him . . .’” Her hands slid up his chest, cupped his face, drew his own head down. “‘. . . trembling and unsteady . . .’”

“And?” her lips said.

“‘And with . . .’” He paused.

“With?” she said.

“‘. . . with a mute and hungry kiss . . .’” Her lips were almost touching, tracing the movement of his own. “‘. . . she cut his dream short—’” And he couldn’t keep from smiling at the stanza’s last two words: “‘Lucky man!’”

He felt her smile with him. “I’ll say,” she said.

But did she? She was kissing him so hard he was sure no sound could have escaped.

“I don’t know about you,” she said, her tongue writing the words on his, “but I can’t remember the last time I fucked someone beneath the stars.”

And he would have reached down, stopped her hands, but they were inside his coat, and his were outside, holding her, and when she slid her fingers between his legs, feeling him, he didn’t know what to do. Half his body tried to hunch away, and the other half of him turned it into an arc down to her, and he told himself it was to press her still, but her lips were pressing back on his and it was as if the pressure was released in the stroking of her hand, and for a moment he let her. Then he pulled his face away. He tried to focus on the stars.

“‘The valley around here was lonely,’” he said. “‘Secluded and engulfed in shade. Stillness . . .’” He reached down and held her arm. “‘Stillness.’” And she was, her hand, the whole of her, watching him. “‘Stillness had seemingly held sway there since the inception of the world.’” Still looking up at the stars, he asked her if she remembered that part of the poem.

“No,” she said.

“It’s the part where Ruslan finds the Khazar khan again. Finds Ratmir has given up the warrior life to live in that little cottage, by the river, fishing, happy.”

He didn’t know where her hands were, except that they were no longer touching him. “And?” she said.

He met her eyes. Crouching there, watching the faint hint of her face in the darkness of his coat, he told her how that part of the poem was what he thought of when he thought of the old miri. Of the dream of an age of new ones. “When we were young,” he told her. “In our twenties. My brother and me. We lived like that. We had . . . we
have
a dream. A farm. Our uncle’s old—”

“And me?” she said. “What do I have to do with any of this?”

“It’s just—”

“I don’t. What does
this
have to do with—”

“Vika.”

“It doesn’t.” Her hands reached up out of the coat’s collar between their necks. “Ivanushka,” she said, and grabbed the lobes of his ears. She shook them, just hard enough to jerk his head. “Ivanushka the Fool. This isn’t like that. This isn’t anything like that.”

“I know,” he said.

And she flattened her hands against his temples, squeezed. “There’s room in here,” she said, “to want more than one thing.”

Between her palms he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t you see? That’s what’s happened to everything. Everyone wants too much, everything becomes nothing.” It was as if the word knocked loose her hands. “What you want to have, what you want to
get,
you lose your focus and you lose everything. That’s
why
the miri worked. They were small. They were focused. They—”

“Look at me.” Her eyes pulled at him as strongly as if she had bent his face down with her hands. “I am focused,” she said. “I’m focused on you. Now. Half an hour ago, I was focused on getting into the headquarters. Tomorrow, I’ll be focused on something else. I can want to get fucked-up with my friends, and I can want to shake up this fucking world, and I can want to take off my clothes and dance under the stars, and I can want to fuck you here, tonight. And,” she said, “I can want to fuck someone else tomorrow.”

Yes, he thought, and that was why the dream she had—she and Volodya and Fedya and those before them, all the way back to Bakunin and before that—
that
was why it had never happened. Why it never would. Her eyes looked so large in the moonlight. He thought, looking into them, that they seemed the eyes of a child. That she wanted the way a child wanted. The way he might have when he was very small, before his father fell through the ice, and his mother was sent away, and his uncle lost his world, and he had begun to lose his brother. Because she was wrong: there wasn’t room for more than one thing. Life knew when you were losing focus, or looking away, or simply for a moment shutting your eyes, and that was when it crept in and with its dark knife cut out your heart.

She was talking again about Korochun. How when she was a girl they had done things they never would have on any other night, and he stopped her.

“My papa,” he said.

She waited.

“My papa was the one in the grave. We were ten.”

She went so still she might not have been there, might have somehow slipped out from his coat—and then she moved and he was sure she was going to. But when she stood she pulled him up with her. Her hands were on his lapels, then working at the knot in his tie, got it lose, slid it off of his neck, and she undid the top button of his shirt and then the next and all the way down until she had untucked it and the warmth off the front of her was filling the space in front of him. Then she reached up. He felt it in the rising of her breasts against his skin. He waited for her hands to touch his face. They didn’t. Instead, they went to her own, slid under her wig.

When she had slipped it from her head, she reached over and did the same with his hat. With one hand, she settled his hat on her. With the other, she placed the wig over his head. The machines had started up in the Oranzheria again. He listened to the glass-muffled din. He watched her watching him. She had begun to shake her head.

“Nope,” she said. “No, it’s no use. You still don’t look like me.” Then she leaned in and kissed him. When she was done, she backed away, broke his arms apart, was out. “Maybe you’re right,” she told him. “Maybe, for you, you’re right.”

There was the pale barely visible shape of her while she searched for her clothes, and then her dress was over her head and there was just the paleness of her legs and arms and neck, and then she must have slipped into her coat: there remained only a suggestion of her face. And then she turned and that vanished, too.

Up there, slipping between the last faint suspiration of the world and the breathless infinitude of space, the mirrors had all, one after the other, ten, then twenty, then half a hundred, then the rest, simply shifted their wings. A tiny movement. The glassy fields of quilted Kevlar twitched. And were still again, the zerkala again tracing their paths through the exosphere, their captured light cast down in the same beams that for years now had been strung like lambent threads from the mirrors to the earth.

But not to Petroplavilsk. The circle of luminescence swelled outward, yawned a hole, a ring around the empty center it used to light. Now it lit new land. Fir trees stiffened their branches. Spruce needles reached out, antennae feeling the effulgence. Whole forests of white birch trunks glowed. All around them, the circle’s edge coruscated above new borderland fens. Night animals—raccoons and polecats and Ural owls—that had retreated from the ever-spreading light now fled the new refracted ring, back towards the darkness that had fallen inside it. Over the Oranzheria they flew, and across the lake, clouds of nightjars and bewildered bats, came loping down the access line, stumbling along Otseva’s boggy shores, returning in a horde. With them came humans, too. Villagers unable to sleep, farmers distraught at livestock gone half-mad, loggers and fishermen and old hermits who had lived all their lives far back in the woods and now came doddering out, confounded by what the world had done.

In Petroplavilsk, the people watched them come, watched the white hares and stoats and arctic fox streak across the snow, apparitions from an earlier age when it wasn’t strange for animals to change the color of their coats, remembered a time before the zerkala, realized how much the mirrors had changed them. They called it The Revisitation, and they meant the returning animals and the refugees and the reemergence of poverty and the coming of the dark, but mostly they meant the way it stirred inside them a reconsideration of their own lives. These were the days of first true snow. The darkening of skies, the blanketing of roads. The sun hardly showed. Each morning it rose a little later, each evening set a little earlier, lighting the city for less and less of each spin of the earth, and soon there would be hardly any light at all.

Before, at night, the mirrors’ beams would help to melt the snow. Now it piled up, no lamps to guide the snowblowers, no headlights on the plows. Without the Consortium, there was no money for new streetlights, the city spending all it had to keep government buildings from going dark, portable lights along the two most vital boulevards, no other way to get anywhere, except by foot.

People came out with flashlights, would have brought snow shovels, too, but who, for years now, had shoveled their own snow? So worn out from work, who wouldn’t pay a company with armies of snowblowers to roar it clear in minutes? No one could now. Now they turned flashlights off when the moon came out, worried about the cost of replacing batteries, wished they had saved more. They canceled their satellite TV, took away their children’s phones, stopped buying anything but food. On the shelves the delicacies went unpurchased—sundried tomatoes, gourmet coffee, purple-veined radicchios big as hearts and starting to brown—and then went for the same prices as the cans of fish, ordinary cabbage, and then were gone, the rest going. And when even the pickles and potatoes stopped selling, families skipping meals to make it through the month, people started to panic.

But, above, the stars were beautiful.

Small groups of men and women walked beneath them in the streets, flashlights flaring on at sounds in the dark—a snarl, a hiss, something crying out—beams catching eyes bright as bursts from the muzzle of a gun. Sometimes it was. Along what streets the police could drive, they used their flashers for light, and on the others they went by foot, big flashlights burning batteries, said they would continue until their paychecks stopped. Crime came back to Petroplavilsk. Fear with it. People stayed in, hunkered around what few lamps they had, the TV showing clips of their darkened city, news anchors hinting it was their own fault, politicians hedging about when they might step in to help. Everyone knew they wouldn’t. Everyone worried how long it would go on. If they had to be out on the street at night, they gathered in groups, hurried past the crude snow shelters the refugees constructed, igloos trembling with the glow of the fires inside, or gone dark and still, worrying the people passing even more.