“Down the hallway,” he said. “They said you were coming.”
Slava cursed the Dolins under his breath. When it came to their own secrets, a crowbar wouldn’t do it, but in other situations, they were guileless as schoolchildren.
“What is this, a bribe?” Slava said. “You don’t have proof.” He tried to manufacture a sneer but didn’t believe himself. One didn’t need proof to at least call the Claims Conference.
“A bribe?” the boy said, worried. “What for?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Slava said quickly.
The boy looked around and reached into the back pocket of his jeans. Slava stiffened, which only increased the boy’s nervousness. He strode toward Slava and thrust a stapled printout, folded in half, into his free hand.
Oleg Smeshko, the title page said. Slava flipped through the rest—twenty pages or so. The font was large and baroque. Slava saw a sentence he did not like: “His brain thought it would explode.” Then something with more promise: “The smoke curled from his cigarette like silver panty hose.”
“Can you read it?” Oleg said, studying the pavement.
“You wrote this?” Slava said.
Oleg nodded.
“Why didn’t you just knock on the door when I was there?” Slava said.
“They would tell my parents,” Oleg said. He rubbed a sleeve under his nose.
Slava looked again at the story. The bags in his other hand were a stone, though they produced a not unpleasant scent: rolls, chicken, pickles. It would all go in the trash. “You’re not hungry, are you?” Slava said.
“Hungry?” Oleg said, blinking. “I can eat at home.”
“Let’s sit down,” Slava said.
Oleg looked around. “Where?”
“On the curb.” Slava pointed. “Are they going to wonder where you are?”
“No, they think I went to my friend’s.”
“Have you called the friend and told him to cover for you?”
Oleg frowned and shook his head.
“Here,” Slava extended his cell phone.
While Oleg dialed, Slava sat down on the edge of the pavement and looked at the story. “Expensive Trips Nowhere” was the title; that could stay. Slava wrenched a scallion roll from one of his bags, a pickle from a plastic container, then a shred of chicken, stuffed it all together, and handed it to Oleg when he got off the phone.
“You’re not eating?” Oleg said.
“Not for several days,” Slava said. “They kill your body with this food. I was five pounds less before I started—you know.”
“Is it hard?” Oleg said, biting cautiously.
Slava looked over at him. “The letters? It’s hard to figure out what to write. But the writing makes up for it.”
“Do you get paid?” Oleg said, chewing.
“Paid?” Slava said. “No.”
“Then why do you do it?”
Slava laughed and said nothing. They sat watching the street, the occasional car blazing by, leaving the echo of Russian songs in the air. Two elderly men in house slippers shuffled past, arm in arm, evening walk. “They’ll freeze off their balls sitting on the pavement like that,” one said to the other as they passed.
“What’s the story about?” Slava said. He pointed at the bags. Oleg nodded, and Slava started making another roll.
“It’s this chip that goes in your head,” Oleg said. His large black eyes became larger. “It’s a trip you can take wherever you want. Another country, another planet. In your mind, I mean—it’s like you’re really there, and when you get back, you have the memory of being there. Without your body ever going there, you understand?” Slava nodded. “Do you understand?” Oleg repeated.
“I understand, I understand,” Slava said.
“But this guy gets stuck,” Oleg went on. “And it’s about him trying to get back to earth.”
“Like Odysseus,” Slava observed. This drew no recognition from Oleg. “And what happens? He gets home?”
Oleg gave Slava a wolfish grin, bit into his new roll, and said, “You have to read it!”
Slava nodded admiringly. He liked sitting there—the day had lost some of its heat; he was not expected anywhere; he was briefly invisible.
Oleg stopped chewing. “Can I read one?” he said. “A letter.”
Slava looked over. “Sure. You just have to keep it between us.”
“I promise,” Oleg said, his eyes full of seriousness, then stuck out his hand, and Slava took it. The skin was moist, a newborn’s.
“If you get good grades,” Slava said, “your parents won’t bother you about your stories.”
Oleg nodded gloomily.
“You’ll go to college, won’t you?” Slava said.
“I’m just going to Brooklyn College.”
“Go farther.”
“With what money?”
Slava tossed into the roadway a fleck of pavement he had been working loose with his nail. “Write a letter,” he said. “That’ll be enough for a semester somewhere. You can figure out the rest.”
“My grandparents don’t qualify,” Oleg said. “We’re not even Jews.”
The Dolins had conveniently neglected to share that they were having theirs made up, at least that.
“In this letter, you can be whatever you want,” Slava said cautiously.
Oleg, his face darkened with doubt, nodded. If Slava said to stop eating, return home immediately, and confess to his parents that the practical person they were grooming was cuckolding their plans, Oleg would have done it. So this was what it was like to have a younger brother.
Slava brought the papers to Oleg’s eyes. “You see this?” he said. “‘Curled from his cigarette like silver panty hose’? Change ‘panty hose’ to ‘stocking.’ Isn’t that better?”
Oleg nodded.
“You don’t have to agree because I said so,” Slava said. “Is it better?”
Oleg nodded again. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Slava said. “It just is. Better yet: ‘A stocking of smoke curled from his cigarette.’ Okay, finish this sentence: ‘The heat hangs in the air like a—.’”
“Like a stocking,” Oleg said obediently.
“No, no, something new. Cigarette smoke curls like a stocking; heat doesn’t look like a stocking. It doesn’t look like anything. It’s invisible, but it won’t go away.”
“The heat hangs in the air like a bad thought,” Oleg said.
Slava clapped him on the back. “You see?”
The boy smiled diffidently.
During this period, Slava continued to finish his nights at 322 West Ninetieth Street. Arianna didn’t volunteer to spend the night at his apartment, and though he occasionally reminded her of the unfairness of this arrangement, in truth he had come to prefer her apartment, only that his refrigerator was full, as Slava had to economize on lunch, and hers was congenitally empty. She ate only takeout, Slava parting with more cash in a night together than on his own in a week, though he didn’t bring this up to Arianna, and she never seemed to think of it.
The rest of her apartment, however, was filled with irrefutable evidence of human habitation. None of it was plain—even the wooden lattice that the original builders had installed to give the studio the sense of a one-bedroom; Arianna had painted it white and carved the tops into the crown of a skyline. Then she dotted the panes with black marker all the way down to the floor—windows. “This is what I do when I veg,” she explained. “I like to think about what’s going on in the windows. What’s going on in this window?” Her nail tapped a black dot. “They’re arguing,” she answered herself.
She loved the city. It made her quiet—her words—an inconceivable idea to Slava because it was so incredibly noisy, though it was this comment by her that made him notice, returning late from Brooklyn one Sunday night, the stone prairie into which the Upper West Side turned at that hour, the bright vitrines gleaming madly for no one. New York gets weary, and New York does sleep. She returned to Brentw
ood twice a year: Passover and Rosh Hashanah. She couldn’t bear it any more frequently—its empty streets made her too lonely, refilled her with the uncomfortable noise of her childhood and youth. Even though she had lived in New York for seven years and knew the parts of it that she wanted to know—she rarely left Manhattan—she continued the introductory walks she had taken as a new arrival.
He envied her love of New York, a feeling he had never experienced for it, or any place, having left Minsk too soon to have any feelings about it save for an unfocused dread of bodily harm due to his being a Jew and the magic scent of the lilac bushes that clotted the yard. Perhaps that was why he didn’t mind coming to her, he would reason as he lay in bed next to her, she long asleep. In the small space of her home, the cat darting around like a fiend, the television on to no discernible purpose except to vanquish the silence, he could draw off the sense of home she felt in the city, the way poor people in poor countries got light by siphoning from the municipal wires. He never spoke about this to her. He was resentful to a degree; it wasn’t as if she was born there. She was an émigré, too, of sorts. But her relocation was to a place that was meant for her all along—somehow she had sniffed out the right destination all the way from Los Angeles. Slava had neither liked nor disliked the place he was born. He noticed it as a trout notices water. He understood that he was in some place only when he was let out at JFK. And this place he hadn’t chosen, the way Arianna had chosen New York. Did that mean he had to keep looking? But he couldn’t smell what place was right for him. Instead of exhausting him into sleep, this pinballing forced an ever wearier wakefulness, and many mornings he woke blearily tired.
The only thing that Slava preferred back on his side of the island was its river. Sometimes, before heading to work, he would take a detour and head across the park before heading downtown to the office. Across this river, if you kept going past Queens and Long Island, eventually, you would come to Europe and then, a little beyond it, Slava’s Minsk. Was it any more his by now than New York? Over there, he would be finished with army service by now, probably married, probably a child, probably two. Would Grandmother still be alive in this replacement life? he wondered. Maybe the blood from transfusions went bad only if you took it outside of the Soviet Union. Maybe the blood didn’t work anywhere else.
Arianna had asked once what he was working on all those evenings at the office. Trying to look her in the eyes, he said he didn’t want to say that much about it, would that be all right? It was a family story but unformed, and he didn’t want to jinx it. She nodded and ran a hand down his cheek. She never asked the question again. He burned with guilt mixed with satisfaction at the mastery of the lie: He had looked her in the eyes, asked her permission not to explain, ostensibly left it in her hands; of course she would do what he asked. He had thought hewing as close to the truth as the lie could afford—a family story—would lessen his burden, but it increased, as if he were teasing her without her knowing.
If ever Slava returned from Brooklyn before she was asleep, their late dinner together often ended with her heading out for a short walk. “To where?” he would say. “I just got here.” She never reminded him that she had spent hours waiting for him. “Just a little one,” she would say with a smile, and off she would go, her head already in the street. She would return a half hour later, coffee in hand—it didn’t keep her up—or a newspaper, or bananas, or nothing. Once she came back with a small painting that a late-night seller had insisted she take because he wanted to know that she had something of his. It depicted, in bright, tropical colors, a pigtailed girl jumping over a puddle.
Slava called for her from the couch one evening, her hands on the shoelaces of her sneakers. “I want to come with you,” he said guiltily. “Wherever you’re going.”
“Just to the park and back.”
“I’d like to come with.”
“Of course you can,” she said. “I didn’t know you wanted to.”
“Why would you think that?” he said.
“You don’t have to do what I do.”
“Don’t we?”
“Slava, let’s not argue. Do you want to come?” She paused, a knee on the floor, a sneaker untied. Her face brightened. “Can I take you somewhere? I think you’d love it.”
“To the park?”
“You’ll see. We need a flashlight.”
“A flashlight?”
“Just come with,” she said.
They walked east. He took her hand in his, and she answered: They were going to try. The streets of the Upper West Side were falling quiet with the temporary exception of Broadway. They crossed Amsterdam, then Columbus—they were going to Central Park. But when they reached its edge, she kept going: in, past the perimeter.
“In the dark, Arianna?” he said.
“Don’t be a codger.”
He tried to erase his discomfort. “Are we uncovering your high school time capsule?”
“You’d have to go to Brentwood School for that. The closest right-end bleacher if you have your back to the school.” She marched through the darkness as if it were daylight, twigs snapping under her sneakers.
Slava looked longingly at a vanishing streetlight. “What did you put there?” he said, his shoes crunching through Walden.
“A pack of Marlboro Lights. I can’t wait to have one when I dig them out in twenty years.” It wasn’t entirely dark, due to occasional streetlights, but Arianna was maneuvering away from the lights, looking for tree cover. “Do you know why I love the park?” she said. “It’s the only place in Manhattan with no street signs. This could be Eighty-Fifth or Ninety-Fifth. Now they’ve started putting maps on the lampposts, telling you where you are. I want to rip them down.”
Slava looked up at the trunk of a nearby streetlight: There it was, in laminate. Following impulse—he wanted to do something heroic for her—he sprinted toward the light and wedged the map out of the holder.
“Slava!” she yelled. “Put it back.” He knew the expression—an awkward surprise—even at a distance, and wedged the map back. They walked in silence the rest of the way. Finally, Arianna paused at the edge of a stand of oaks, the closest light three hundred yards behind them. “This is good as it’s going to get,” she said. “I haven’t done this in a while.”
“Could I be allowed in on the plan now?” he said.
She faced him. “Another thing about the park—the homeless have the best view in New York.” She pointed at Central Park West, whose peaks glowed dimly beyond the perimeter. “And us,” she added.
They walked through the oaks into a clearing, concealed from a bike path by a series of boulders. The grass sloped gently. Slava looked around uneasily.
“No, up,” she said.
He followed her eyes. It took him a moment to understand what she wanted him to see, but there they were, as nowhere else in the city: stars. Not many, and the ones you could make out were feeble, occasionally erased by a passing wisp of cloud, but then they emerged once more, charming in their earnest junior performance, like children playing at adulthood. Arianna was beaming—they were her children.
“You come here by yourself at night?” Slava said, incredulous.
“When I was young and stupid enough to walk in Central Park alone at night,” she said. “I haven’t done this in years. Come on the grass with me.”
Slava looked around. They hadn’t seen a soul since entering the park. His eyes were adjusting, the darkness turning from black to blue. Nervously, he settled next to her. The grass was careful, the mowers of the Parks Department reaching even this far.
“When I was little,” she said, “my father would take me in the backyard, we would lie down just like this, and he would make me find shapes in the clouds. A dinosaur, a briefcase, an apology. Or we would go to the beach and I would tell stories about the waves. The sea is a tongue spitting out seeds. The sea is a head rushing with thoughts. The first time I wrote a poem, it was from one of those days.”
“What does
an apology look like?”
“Gnarled over. Hunched.”
“You miss him,” he said.
“He’s different now. He would be embarrassed to go look at waves with his daughter.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They don’t tell you why they change.”
They listened to the city hum somewhere out there, past the line of light that waited beyond the edge of the park. Waited like a bad thought, Slava thought, remembering Oleg, and smiled. In his sci-fi story, Oleg had unconsciously melded the Odysseus story and the failed 1991 anti-Gorbachev putsch, in which the leader of the unfree world learned, upon reaching his vacation site in the Crimea, that power had been seized in the capital. By the time Oleg’s hero, sleekly but rustically named John Strong in concert with the technological but agrarian future, had reached his mind destination of Usuria (a bizarre blend of “usury” and Illyria—Slava was getting an analyst’s glimpse into the writerly mind), the codes had been rewritten wherever they were written, temporarily suspending all mind travel and stranding in-transit “expeditioners” like John Strong. Slava had sent Oleg edits and, as promised, one of the false letters. Oleg sent back a revision, a second story about the manager of a Japanese café franchise on the moon, and an unshy suggestion on how to improve the Holocaust letter, amusing Slava. Fifteen miles south of Central Park, there labored newfound kin to Slava, a secret operative.
“They say that if you can make out the Seventh Sister, the tiniest one,” she said, “you have twenty-twenty vision. Up there.” Arianna extended a finger, but his vision was not twenty-twenty. “After Atlas had to carry the world, Zeus turned his seven daughters into stars so they could keep him company.”
Slava propped himself on an elbow, as if to get a better look, but really he was studying her. In sneakers, gray tights, and a hoodie, somehow cold even in this heat, she was more beautiful than a woman dressed up. Despite the confusing tenseness between them, this fact presented itself without reservations. He wished to embrace her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he kept his distance, at least he was being true to the fact of his betrayal, not pretending to give while he withheld so much.
A Replacement Life Page 17