The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (15 page)

My father had begun lending sweaters to Kolya. As Kolya grew, the neck and shoulders of the sweaters slowly stretched, giving my father the appearance of a man incrementally disappearing when he wore them once again. But that morning, my father looked years younger, taller, larger. His eyes were bloodshot rivets of inspiration. He paced before the charred stove top.

“This is it, boys!” he exclaimed. “The exhibition that will send the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics to the dustbin of museum history.”

My father was an outer-space freak in a city roofed by pollution so dense he’d have to drive a hundred kilometers to see starlight. A few years earlier, in what was a moment of either personal courage or mental collapse, he had quit his comfortable position as a furnace technician to pursue his dream of
opening a cosmonautics museum. His passion was rivaled only by his ineptitude, and he presided over the Kirovsk Museum of Inner and Outer Space as its founder, director, docent, archivist, press secretary, ticket inspector, and janitor. Quartered in an abandoned warehouse adjoined to one of the city smelting complexes, the museum was not only the kingdom of my father’s unfulfilled ambition, but my playground, my classroom, and, in the lofted flat above it, my home.

If you haven’t seen the museum, let’s say it’s one of the world’s most unique science museums and just leave it at that. If you have seen it, my apologies. You could say my father built a Potemkin space station, that he forged every exhibit, that he had an intensely one-sided rivalry with the Moscow Cosmonautics Museum. You could also say that compared with the greater inhumanities of our city, my father’s misdemeanors are so trivial they seem virtuous.

“What’s he on about?” Kolya asked my mother, the family bilingual who translated my father’s ravings. She stood at the sink. A postcard of the Black Sea had been pasted above the tap. As the discolored water softened her fingertips, she stared into the breakers unfurling over a sandy strip. Perhaps she strolled along the white-painted promenade, a slender leash wrapped around her wrist, a lady with a lapdog. Perhaps she imagined a summer romance, the thrill of unfamiliar hands, the unknown warmth of sunlight on her shoulders, the gasp of seawater on her toes. Sealed within the worn postcard edges was a sunlit world where my mother splintered into thousands of imagined selves, none of whom answered Kolya’s question.

“The End!” my father declared. He punctuated the
declaration with a blow to the kitchen table that scattered the silverware.

“The end of what?”

“The end of everything. An exhibit on all ends, from the end of a day to the end of a life, a civilization, a planet, a universe. It will put the museum in the guidebooks.”

The museum had opened the previous year with my father christening the front door with a thrown bottle of saccharine Soviet champagne. It had hardened into a puddle of frozen glass that had resulted in the broken hip of our third visitor. My father dropped to one knee and clamped his hands on our shoulders. As we huddled together, linked through the chain of his grip, the current of his fervor sank into our muscles. “Go to the forest. See if you can find anything we might use.”

The floor of White Forest had filled with waste in the decades since its construction. Over the years Kolya and I had found a collection of refrigerator doors, a dozen leaky barrels of toxic waste, a file cabinet filled with classified documents, knives and bullet casings in police department evidence bags, a cat caged in a kennel, a drunk driver sobbing in the car he had somehow skewered to a steel tree limb, and an electric heater in perfect working order. Most of the displays in the Hall of Inexplicable Phenomena came from the debris.

The last house we passed before crossing a wide field to reach the forest edge belonged to Lydia’s family. She was the same age as Kolya, twelve or thirteen then. The metal skeletons held on to late spring snow. Broad plastic leaves wilted from a few barbed branches. Like the sky, the snow, and the
insides of our lungs, these too had yellowed. They sagged over us like the spineless skins of a nuclear people.

“What are we looking for?” I asked. Except for a few hypodermics we poked each other with, we hadn’t found anything worth keeping. “This is stupid. Where are we even going?”

“We’ll know what we’re looking for when we find it,” Kolya answered loudly and slowly, as if I were both deaf and dim-witted. A note of vexation pulsed beneath the equanimity of his logic. I was afraid I’d disappointed him. You’re probably thinking that I’m a high-density, dehydrated slab of manliness, a testosterone prune, if you will, but as a boy I was a plum. My family nickname was Little Radish: Even as a taproot, I didn’t rise to the stature of greatness. I was terrified of nearly everything, from atomic war to other people’s belly buttons, Kolya’s displeasure most of all. When he was annoyed, he’d look just over my head when speaking to me. It made me feel shorter than I already was and embedded the conversation with an expectation I failed to meet unless I stood on stilts. We carried on. Ten minutes later, we heard voices.

“You’re not scared, are you?” The rasped question carried the ghosts of ten thousand cigarettes.

“Scared of sharks,” answered a second, younger voice. Through the gaps in the trees, we saw the two men standing a dozen meters ahead. We crouched to get a better view. The first man must have been in his early thirties, wearing the circular spectacles and pressed trousers of a gulag-bound academic. A deep cleft made his chin look like a small dog’s testicles. The other man wasn’t even a man, a fifteen- or
sixteen-year-old in a tracksuit, his hair slicked into an aerodynamic wedge, his upper lip feathered with a mustache as useless as a brush missing half its bristles, his little teeth swallowed by gummy arches.

“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.