A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

  “That’s why you are so intriguing.”

  They reached the Grozny garage two hours later. Two dour-faced men met them at the door holding Kalashnikovs, one still three weeks from killing the other in an argument that would begin over driving directions, and Sonja feverishly hoped that the smuggler’s love for Alu the Turtle still surpassed his loathing for Alu the Unluckiest Younger Brother in History. Three trucks sat at the end of the concrete tarmac. The brother led her to the first truck, whose shot-off lock clung by a half-broken, glimmering grip. He lifted the door and shined a flashlight into the trailer. A Red Cross first-aid kit sat in the circle of yellowed light. The circle spread to illuminate torn cardboard boxes and hundreds, no, thousands of first-aid kits. “These were stolen,” she said.

  “Of course they were, and not without some headache, I’ll have you know. But as you said, nearly all of what you asked for can be found in a first-aid kit.”

  “What happened to the drivers?”

  “Why do you care?”

  She could feel him testing her, ready to blunt the slightest edge of moral outrage with a lecture on relativism in war, or maybe with another example of his contempt for Alu. She unsnapped the first-aid kit and surveyed the contents. Four absorbent compress dressings, eight adhesive bandages, a tube of antiseptic ointment, a breathing barrier, two latex gloves, a gauze roll, a thermometer, a packet of aspirin, and a scissors. She closed the lid, refastened the clips, had nothing but gratitude to give him. For all she cared, the drivers could be hog-tied and beaten, since she now had the ointment to disinfect their cuts, the gauze to bandage their wounds, even scissors to cut through whatever magical threads held them three meters off the ground.

  “What about the morphine?”

  “I nearly forgot.” He pulled a black nylon duffel bag from the front seat, set it on the bumper, and unzipped it. A plastic-wrapped brick of white powder lay at the bottom. “Morphine is too expensive,” he said, handing it to her.

  “What is it?”

  “Heroin.”

  The word alone weighed ten kilograms. This powder had been boiled and squirted between Natasha’s toes twice a day for eight months. My god. And for the first time in how many days, she breathed the relief of knowing Natasha was safe at home, barricaded behind a water-glass moat, safe from the fangs of dragons. “Is it unadulterated?”

  “Not enough sugar in there to sweeten a cup of tea.”

  “I asked for morphine.”

  “And even had you done me the favor of lobotomizing Alu while he was under your care, I wouldn’t get you morphine. Heroin is much cheaper.”

  “I want something else, then.”

  “So do I. There are only a few departments open in your hospital, yes? If you rent me some unused space, we can continue this arrangement.”

  “For what?”

  “My wares.”

  “No guns, drugs, or people.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I keep them at home. No, mainly national treasures looted from city museums that can be sold abroad.”

  “Fine. I want an ice machine. The hospital has been without one for several months. A bearded man at the bazaar is selling a nice one from the Intourist Hotel. Feel free to be rough with him. And where are the books I asked for?”

  “You’ve chosen the wrong profession,” he said, enjoying her stubbornness. “You’re a natural swindler. You’d run me out of business. I’ve had difficulty finding them, but they should come in shortly. A third cousin in the West is asking for them from Amazon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I haven’t any idea. This kid can make your books appear from the ether. He’ll run me out of business, too.” He shook his head. “The whole world is conspiring to run me out of business.”

  “And another thing.”

  “Now you’re really beginning to annoy me. If you keep it up, I’ll have to bring my brother with me next time.”

  “I want new clothes.”

  And he laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Two weeks later Sonja returned from the hospital wearing a maroon cashmere sweater, tan leather boots, and a pair of one-size-too-tight jeans displaying curves that the chemistry professor would have found a whole hive nesting on, had his eyes still worked. The weight of the psychology textbooks strained the rucksack straps against her shoulders. Her left hand, wrapped around a glass of ice, was numb.

  In the hall she stopped at Laina’s door, wanting to leave the ice for her neighbor. The murmur of voices inside stopped her. She crouched to the keyhole. Were Laina’s hallucinations speaking back to her?

  “There were twelve chariots in the sky today? That’s two more than yesterday.” Natasha’s voice basked beneath a sun that never shone when she addressed Sonja. It was good to hear Natasha care, even if it wasn’t for her.

  “Twelve,” Laina said. “I think they’re up to something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who knows? Trying to steal the Moon to sell at the bazaar. Protecting the skies from Federal planes. Maybe trying to figure out how to get their horses down from the clouds.”

  Natasha’s voice softened. “In the winter of the war, before I went to Italy, when the bombing was at its worst, I was afraid the apartment block would be hit. So I lived in City Park. I remember the City Park Prophet once said everything that isn’t darkness or death is a vision. I remember he said we are all God’s hallucinations.”

  “I remember once, on my birthday, when I was a child, I came into the kitchen and saw a huge wooden box on the table,” Laina said. “I was so happy. I couldn’t imagine what wonderful present lay inside such a big wooden box.”

  “What was it?”

  “A casket. My aunt was inside.”

  Sonja bit her knuckle. When they were children they had pretended to have a third sister, a black-haired girl named Lidiya. Like Alu, the ghost sister was never around, and in her absence they had teased, chided, scorned, blamed, and hated Lidiya so they could love each other more simply.

  “I’m afraid to leave the apartment,” Natasha was saying. “I’m afraid of the city. There’s just so much open air now. I’m afraid of nearly everyone. I don’t know why. Everyone scares me but you. Even Sonja can be scary. Sometimes, if I let myself think about Italy, my body shuts down. It’s like I’m not in charge anymore, my brain turns off, and I have to lock myself in my room and barricade myself with furniture. I feel so stupid. I’m such an idiot.”

  “Do you see the chariots?”

  “No, not yet. I see a wallet, though.”

  “A wallet?”

  “Yes, there was this man, and when he was dressing his wallet fell out of his trousers and he had a picture of his children in one of those plastic credit card flaps. That was the day when I gave up.”

  “It’s good to talk about these things. It will keep the chariots and wallets of the world honest. They will know we see them, and are not afraid to sound like madwomen.”

  “Yes, I like talking with you.”

  “We’re staying alive.”

  Sonja stood and walked to the flat, afraid of what she might hear next. At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. She raised the glass to her lips. The water was clean.

  CHAPTER

  8

  FIVE HOURS AFTER his first successful amputation, Akhmed’s hands stopped shaking. The frost-caked road glared up at him, the more menacing since he’d seen, up close, what it could do. He had sawed straight through that poor man’s leg. He had
n’t been able to grip the saw until Sonja’s fingers had wrapped around his. Until hers had pushed his hand forward. The man he had imagined himself to be had died the moment she set the blade against the bone and pushed his hand forward. He was one more instrument for her manipulation. Her face had hardened with a marble-like resolve unmoved by both his and the other man’s suffering. As if she hadn’t known that leg belonged to someone. As if she hadn’t known the hand she held did as well. Pushing the blade forward, she had observed him as if he were the patient. And he had been. As the saw teeth caught on the bone, she had performed a second surgery, one less bloody but no less brutal, excising from his heart the impulse to run, to cower, to let the man bleed to death rather than face the horror of saving him. The amputation had left both patients lighter.

  Watching for the slightest rise in the road, he still felt more like that young man than he did that doctor. He was nothing like Sonja. She was the strangest Russian he’d ever met, a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside a set of unattractive but very white scrubs. What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all. If he never again saw the beige corridors of Hospital No. 6 he would call himself lucky. But he had to go back in the morning; he had an agreement. A woman so casually capable of cutting off a leg was capable of throwing out an orphan girl.

  Two hundred meters away, at a crook in the road, a diffuse fan of headlights turned into view. He ran. Birch trunks divided the beam into pale yellow blocks as he sheltered behind a half-rotted log, sucking on snow to mask his breath. Once the headlights passed he glimpsed the red of Ramzan’s pickup heading toward the city. He bit his knuckle, unable to recall its Latin name. Ramzan couldn’t know. He couldn’t. When the taillights shrank to a distant scarlet flush he returned to the road, massaging the soreness between his thumb and index finger. In that busy afternoon his palm had had two more opportunities to callus.

  A half kilometer from the village the flicker of a campfire jumped through the underbrush. With the pickup truck halfway over the horizon, curiosity rather than fear led Akhmed back into the forest. He crept with the faith that the flames spoke louder than the frost beneath his boots. There, in the clearing, a man made of shadow passed pamphlets to that shivering brightness. The dogs, lounging beside the fire, heard him before the man.

  “It’s Akhmed,” he called over the dogs’ growl. Never had he understood the obligation Khassan felt for those filthy, diseased animals. His son made him a pariah, but the dogs weren’t helping. Another handful of pages fluttered into the fire. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  Khassan was studying the sheet of paper in his hand, where in the fifth sentence of the second paragraph, in the gap of a missing comma, he found the sorrow of his life. The sentence described the upbringing of a minor eighteenth-century tribal leader, and it would be the last time human eyes would read the name of the tribal leader’s mother. “A punctuation error,” he said, with the tremble of more ominous inaccuracy. “I’ve read through that paragraph hundreds of times and never caught it.”

  “Don’t do this,” Akhmed said. He could have reached out, caught it, and kicked snow on the fire, but the page with the punctuation error was already smoke, and the name of a mother who died two hundred and twenty-three years earlier was already lost. He emptied his lungs but his sigh wasn’t finished; it went on emptying him. One spring day, when Akhmed was a child, Khassan had led him to a logging field a half morning’s walk from the village. Men with roaring orange saws had leaned into beech trunks and the trunks had spumed clouds of sawdust and groaned as the green treetops toppled. He was eight years old and the stumps were shorter than he was. “Hundred years to get that tall,” Khassan had said, and turned for home.

  “I was thinking of someone I lost many years ago,” Khassan said. “She called me a coward once. It wasn’t what she said, but the way she said it. As if her judgment just passed through me. As if I were a cloud.”

  The fire had thawed the overhanging branches. Droplets sliding down the slender fingers turned to steam before landing in it. Nothing Akhmed could say would put this man back together. “You were a good husband,” he said. “Your wife loved you.”

  Khassan looked confused, as though he hadn’t been thinking of his wife at all, and reached to the ground for another stack of pages. “My wife didn’t, but thank you,” he said, nodding to the fire. “Forty-four thousand three hundred and thirty-eight pages. It took five hours to count. Over twenty trips to carry them. No wonder these pups are so tired.” He knelt and patted the bald dog’s stomach with an awful affection. “Each page averages three hundred and fifty words. That’s fifteen million words I’ve written.”

  “There are more words.” The firelight twitched across their faces. It was all he could say.

  “There are more writers.”

  “You can’t do this.” He spoke from a fear that closed his stomach into a fist, helpless like a child, his emotions a magnification of what he detected in the elder. If Khassan lost hope, where would Akhmed find it?

  “You wouldn’t understand, Akhmed, but you might, if you reach my age. I was thinking of the stories my mother used to tell me about princes and warriors who went to great measures to ensure their names would endure, and were punished by Allah for their pride. I want to be forgotten. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”

  “What are you saying?” Akhmed asked, though he didn’t want Khassan to say any more.

  “I’m saying that I want to disappear.”

  Once, while hunting in these woods, Akhmed came upon a doe flopping on the ground and struggling to breathe. A distended pink wound spread her hind legs, and her snout held a long line of anguished groans, and to end her suffering he aimed for her neck. But before he pulled the trigger, the sac-wrapped end of a fawn split open the wound. His jaw slackened. He set the rifle among the leaves, hid his forefinger behind his back, ashamed of what it had nearly caused, and watched one life begin where another had nearly ended. And now, with the final sheets curling on the coals, fear rose to wonder as he witnessed a moment of equal profundity. Not once for as far back as he could recall had Khassan ever admitted to a shortcoming, a mistake, not even a lapse as trivial as a missing comma. Tonight he confessed total failure.

  The returning headlights stretched their shadows across the clearing too soon to have gone all the way to the hospital. As the beam of light swung toward them, he saw, briefly, paw prints in the ashes of fifteen million words.

  Held aloft by distant tacks of starlight, the night was a blackout curtain concealing Ramzan’s truck until it was too late for Akhmed to turn back. Ramzan climbed from the cabin, lit a cigarette, and stared at what had been Dokka’s house as Akhmed approached.

  “Have you seen my father?” His face dipped into the orange orb with each inhalation. If he had the flat face of an ogre, or the many heads of a hydra, Akhmed might understand. If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake-hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramzan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand. They had been born in the same village, had gone to the same school, had their knuckles purpled by the same meter stick, kicked the same soccer ball down the same dirt patch where in summer the grass grew thick enough to block a penalty kick.

  “What do you really want?” Akhmed asked, too tired to be intimidated.

  Ramzan frowned, his cheeks the white of pounded metal. “Just to talk,” he said. “It’s been a lon
g time since I’ve spoken to anyone. Two weeks. I keep a notebook and sometimes I write things down, and you can fake a conversation that way, for a little while, but—”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Akhmed interrupted.

  “The last person I talked to was Dokka. Two weeks ago. I came by to ask if he wanted more firewood. And now look what happened. Our poor friend. What did he get himself into?”

  “Nothing. He couldn’t kill a loaf of bread with a butter knife.”

  “And I’m told the girl, Havaa, even she was disappeared. But not by the security forces, praise Allah. No, she was taken by someone else. Someone else took her, but I don’t know who. I think I have my finger near him. Or her. He could be a she. But I think he is a he. A him. A—”

  “Where was she?” Akhmed asked, as calmly as he could manage.

  “The security forces didn’t find her. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.” Ramzan paused only to breathe. “Not in the living room or bedrooms or under the floorboards or in the closets, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.”

  “Why do they even care?” he asked, hoping Ramzan, who sold information, might give a small piece for free. “What could they possibly want with a child?”

  “No one is off limits because there are no limits. The why and what aren’t for us to consider. Those are questions for philosophers and imams and not for people like us, whoever we are.” His lips glowed in amber light. “The who and the where are all we must know and all we must answer.”

  “I don’t see the why and what of a child.”

  “There you go, Akhmed. Asking the wrong question. She’s wanted. That’s it. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is where she is and with whom.”

  “If I see her I’ll tell her you’d like a word.”

  “You’re being smug, smug, smug.” Ramzan’s lanky arm wrapped around Akhmed’s shoulder and the sweet, decadent scent of deodorant wafted from his underarm. The first time Akhmed became fully aware of his own odor had been on his wedding night, when, pressed against her in bed, awkward and struggling and generally doing it all wrong, he noticed Ula tilt her head to the open window.