Underworld (105 page)

But it's not the music, he says, or the band and its trappings. And I think I know what he means. It's the sense of displacement and redefinition. Because what kind of random arrangement puts a club such as this up on the forty-second floor of a new office tower filled with brokerage houses, software firms, import companies and foreign banks, where private guards hired by various firms to patrol the corridors sometimes shoot at each other and where the man at the next table, with a bald dome, slit eyes and a jut beard, turning this way at last, is clearly a professional Lenin look-alike.

We take the elevator down and go out to the street, carrying our luggage. We can't find a taxi but after a while an ambulance comes along and the driver sticks his head out the window.

“You go airport?” he says.

We get in the back and Brian goes to sleep on a collapsible gurney.
About twenty minutes later, out the glass panel on the rear door, I see a huge billboard advertising a strip club.

INTERACTIVE SONYA

Nude Dancing on the Information Highway

We get to Sheremetyevo and the driver wants dollars of course. I wake up Brian and we go into the terminal and manage to find the man from the trading company. He tells us there's no particular hurry because we're at the wrong airport anyway.

“Where should we be, Viktor?”

“No problem. I have arranged. You went to club?”

“The club was very interesting,” I tell him. “Lenin was there.”

“There is Marx and Trotsky too,” he says. “Very crazy thing.”

This is what I thought after we arrived at the military airfield and boarded a converted cargo plane that went bucking down the runway and lifted swayingly into the mist. And after the plane reached cruising altitude and I got up and found a window slit in an emergency exit behind the port wing and pressed my face to the glass to gather a sense of the great eastern reaches, endless belts of longitude, the map-projection arcs beyond the Urals and across the Siberian Lowland—a sense mainly of my own imagining, of course, a glimpse through falling dusk of whatever landmass was visible in the limited window space.

And this is what I thought after I sat down again.

I thought leaders of nations used to dream of vast land empires—expansion, annexation, troop movements, armored units driving in dusty juggernauts over the plains, the forced march of language and appetite, the digging of mass graves. They wanted to extend their shadows across the territories.

Now they want—

I explain my thinking to Brian Glassic, who sits on the opposite side of the aircraft facing me. We're on parallel benches like paratroops waiting to reach the drop zone.

Brian says, “Now they want computer chips.”

“Exactly. Thank you.”

And Viktor Maltsev says, “Yes, it's true that geography has moved inward and smallward. But we still have mass graves, I think.”

Viktor sits near Brian, a slim figure in a leather coat. We have to shout at each other to converse above the noise that drones and rattles through the hollowed-out interior of the massive transport. He tells us the plane was originally designed for mixed loads of cargo and troops. There are dangling wires, fixtures jutting from the bulkhead. The aircraft is all cylinder, all ribs and slats and shaking parts.

“It's a company plane, Viktor?”

“I buy it this morning,” he says.

“And you will use it to ship material.”

“We fix it up good.”

His trading company is called Tchaika and they want to invite our participation in a business scheme. We are flying to a remote site in Kazakhstan to witness an underground nuclear explosion. This is the commodity that Tchaika trades in. They sell nuclear explosions for ready cash. They want us to supply the most dangerous waste we can find and they will destroy it for us. Depending on degree of danger, they will charge their customers—the corporation or government or municipality—between three hundred dollars and twelve hundred dollars per kilo. Tchaika is connected to the commonwealth arms complex, to bomb-design laboratories and the shipping industry. They will pick up waste anywhere in the world, ship it to Kazakhstan, put it in the ground and vaporize it. We will get a broker's fee.

The plane comes into heavy weather.

“There's some concern in Phoenix,” I tell him, “about the extent of your operating capital. The kind of safety equipment we're talking about to move highly sensitive material can result, Viktor, in expenditures that are quite dizzying.”

“Yes yes yes yes. We have the expertise.” He unzippers this word with a certain defensive zest as if it sums up all the insufficiencies that have mocked him until this point. “And we have the stacks of rubles that are also quite, I may say, dizzying. You didn't read Financial Times? I will send you.”

Brian is lying on his side wearing his coat and gloves.

“I forget,” he says. “Where are we going exactly?”

I call across the heaving body of the plane. “The Kazakh Test Site.”

“Yeah but where's that?”

I shout. “Where are we going, Viktor?”

“Very important place that's not on the map. Near Semipalatinsk. White space on map. No problem. They will meet us.”

“No problem,” I call across to Brian.

“Thank you both. Wake me when we land,” he says.

I look at him carefully. It's cold and we're dead tired and I look at Brian. The knowledge of what he's been doing, the calculated breach of trust—I want to stay awake while he sleeps so I can watch him and fine-edge my feelings and wait for my moment.

Viktor takes a bottle of Chivas Regal out of his overnight bag. I do a mime of polite applause. He goes to the flight deck to get some glasses but they don't have any or won't share them. I go through my bag and come up with a bottle of mouthwash and take off the cap and lurch across the aircraft shaking out the grooved plastic piece as I go. Viktor pours some scotch into the cap and I return to my seat.

We have no seat belts and the passage is growing rougher. I have the bottle of mouthwash wedged upright in my bag so the stuff won't spill. We are the three of us alone except for the person or persons flying the aircraft and I think we feel a little forlorn in the huge tubed space, more like people in a shabby terminal late at night than lucky travelers aboard their plane. I sip my Chivas from the cap, listening to the shaking structure around us, the minimum ribbing, a sort of endoskeletal arch that makes every groaning noise in the hymnal of manned flight. The scotch tastes faintly of gargled mint.

“What did you do before you joined Tchaika?”

“I teach history twenty years. Then no more. I look for a new life.”

“There are men like you in many American cities now. Russians, Ukrainians. Do you know what they do?”

“Drive taxi,” he says.

I notice the way his eyes leap to catch mine, slyly, a brief merged moment that allows him to mark my awareness of his superior status.

He is drinking from the bottle.

I see the plane as if from some protected position in the sky. It is a swift shape hurtling through the dark—I felt sure it was dark by now. It is a mass of dark metal racing through the rain and wind as if in a swift scene from an old black-and-white movie, scored with urgent music.

Viktor asks me if I've ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says, how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don't know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight. They had to convince themselves with numbers and bulk and mass.

“And the U.S.?” I say.

Eyes flicking my way, happy as carnival lights. It was the U.S., Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.

I watch Brian sleep.

“You have your own capitalist tools now. Don't you, Viktor?”

“You mean my company?”

“A small private army, I hear.”

“Also intelligence unit. To protect our assets.”

“And scare the hell out of the competition.”

He tells me that the name of the company was his idea. Tchaika means seagull and refers poetically to the fact that the company's basic business is waste. He likes the way seagulls swoop down on garbage mounds and trail after ships waiting for the glint of jettison at the bow. It is a nicer name, besides, than Rat or Pig.

I look at Brian. It's better than sleeping. I don't want to sleep until I'm finished looking. Traveling with the man from Arizona to Russia, side by side through all those time zones, sharing magazines and trading food items from the little peel-off receptacles, my dessert for his radishes because I'm fit and he's not, Sky Harbor to Sheremetyevo, all those hours and oceans and pales of plotted land, the houses and lives below—maybe it was just the seating arrangement that made me want to wait before I confronted him. It's much too clumsy to accuse
a man who's sitting next to you. I wanted a quiet face-to-face in a cozy room somewhere.

I see us hurtling through the dark.

I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste. I don't know exactly what. He smiles and puts his feet up on the bench, something of a gargoyle squat. He says maybe one is the mystical twin of the other. He likes this idea. He says waste is the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground.

All those decades, he says, when we thought about weapons all the time and never thought about the dark multiplying byproduct.

“And in this case,” I say. “In our case, in our age. What we excrete comes back to consume us.”

We don't dig it up, he says. We try to bury it. But maybe this is not enough. That's why we have this idea. Kill the devil. And he smiles from his steeple perch. The fusion of two streams of history, weapons and waste. We destroy contaminated nuclear waste by means of nuclear explosions.

I cross the body of the aircraft to get my cap refilled.

“It is only obvious,” he says.

I see that Brian's eyes are opened.

I return to my seat, an arm out for balance, and I sit carefully and pause and then knock back the scotch and blink a bit.

I look at Brian.

I say, “The early bomb, Brian, they had to do the core material in a certain way as I understand it. They had to mate this part to that part. So they could get the chain reaction that's crucial to the whole operation. One design had a male element fitted into a female element. The cylinder goes into an opening in the sphere. They shoot it right in. Very suggestive. There's really sort of no escape. Cocks and cunts everywhere.”

I see our plane racing through the wind and rain.

Because I knew unmistakably now, I was completely certain that Brian and Marian, whose names sound so nice together, a good friend now and again, that he and my wife were partners in a deep betrayal.
In my jet-crazed way I could almost enjoy the situation we'd found ourselves in. I was so time-zoned, dazed by fatigue and revelation, so deep in the stink of a friend's falseheartedness that I started talking nonstop, manic and jaggy, babble-mouthing into the plane noise, hinting—I hinted insidiously, made clever references. Because I knew it all now, and here we both were, and there was no place he could go to escape our homey chat.

At the gate we are given badges to wear, gauzy strips that register the amount of radiation absorbed by the body in a given period. Maybe this is what makes the landscape seem so strange. These little metered tags put an element of threat into the dull scrub that rolls to the overwhelming sky.

Brian says the gate resembles the entrance to a national park.

Viktor says don't be surprised there will be tourists here someday.

The car is driven by a Russian, not a Kazakh. He wears pressed fatigues and carries a radiation meter to go with the two badges clipped to his shirt. Far from the road we see men in white masks and floppy boots bulldozing the earth and when we come to a rise we are able to see the vast cratered plain of recent underground tests, depressions of various diameter but all seemingly well-figured—pale-rimmed holes formed when dirt displaced by the blasts slid back into the gouged earth.

The driver tells us that the test site is known as the Polygon. He tells us a few more things, some translated by Viktor, some not.

Farther on we see signs of the old tests, aboveground, and there is a strangeness here, an uneasiness I try to locate. We see the remnant span of a railroad trestle, a sculptured length of charred brown metal resting on concrete piers. A graveness, a spirit of old secrets gone bad, turned unworthy. We see the squat gray base of a shot tower, most of it blown away decades earlier, leaving this block of seamed concrete that rises only seven feet above the stubble surface, still looking oddly stunned, with metal beams ajut. Guilt in every dosed object, the weathered posts and I-beams left to the wind, things made and shaped by men, old schemes gone wrong.

We ride in silence.

There are mounds of bulldozed earth around a camera bunker daubed with yellow paint—yellow for contaminated. The place is strange, frozen away, a specimen of our forgetfulness even as we note the details. We see signs of houses in the distance, test dwellings blown off their foundations with people still inside, mannequins, and products on the shelves where they'd been placed maybe forty years ago—American brands, the driver says.

And Viktor says this was a point of pride with the KGB, to assemble a faithful domestic setting.

And how strange it is, strange again, more strangeness, to feel a kind of homesickness for the things on the shelves in the houses that still stand, Old Dutch Cleanser and Rinso White, all those half-lost icons of the old life, Ipana and Oxydol and Chase & Sanborn, still intact out here in this nowhere near Mongolia, and does anyone remember why we were doing all this?