The Best of Electric Velocipede

by John Klima

  “Hello?” said my secretary, already terrified. Babies cried and people squawked in the background. The late-night call to his collective flat had caused the precise ruckus I desired.

  “Go to the office,” I said.

  “It’s—”

  He fumbled loudly, perhaps for his watch, but I barked: “You’re finished, if you don’t call me back within two hours with the information I need.”

  I could hear the scritch of pencil on paper as he took down my request. An hour later he called me, from the office, from the other side of Moscow. The Asset Maximization department of the Ministry of Culture owned two dachas, a mile apart, a day’s journey from Elektrograd. One of them was already signed out. To Commander Volkov.

  I slammed the phone down hard, as if my loyal secretary would feel the blow on his back.

  *

  “It doesn’t work,” Apolek told me, eight days before he vanished.

  “What doesn’t work?” I asked.

  Midnight; homeless clerks snoring over heaps of paper in the Ministry. Hallways smoky from soldiers burning old documents to keep warm.

  “Reconditioning. The Pavlov Boxes. The effects . . . they’re unstable. After a while, men who’ve been reconditioned begin to experience severe physical and mental side effects. Muscle spasms, severe insomnia, immune system failure. Suicidal tendencies. Madness.”

  “How bad can it get?”

  “Bad,” he said.

  “Dead bad?”

  Apolek nodded.

  I didn’t ask how he knew. I never did. From the day we met I believed that Apolek knew absolutely everything.

  “Even now, they’re building tens of thousands of Boxes, all over the country. Putting boys of all ages into them. Trying millions of different reconditioning regimens. Creating all kinds of monsters. All kinds of terrifying offshoots. Volkov thinks he can fix it with more reconditioning, so whenever it starts to happen to one of his men, he throws them back into a Box for several days. It makes the symptoms go away, but only for a very little while, and then they come back much worse.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what to do or think or say. It had never occurred to me to doubt the Boxes, or reconditioning, or the whole grand Soviet plan of human perfectibility.

  “I shouldn’t have told you this,” Apolek said, burrowing deeper into the fur-lined jacket he had stolen.

  “So . . . all the men who’ve been reconditioned . . . they’ll . . .”

  Apolek nodded. His eyes showed pain, loneliness.

  “All of us?” I asked.

  “All of us.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “I don’t know, Nikolai.”

  Which he had never said before.

  He clasped my neck with one hand. “I used to think we could put the pieces back together ourselves. Help each other survive this. You know? I used to really believe that.”

  *

  Dreams of blood woke me up, savage gleeful glorious violence, human bodies shredded like paper.

  “They say you can’t cry,” she said, sitting up and watching the fire. “After you’ve been reconditioned. Is that true?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, sheepishly shifting my body so the outline of my erection would be invisible beneath the blankets. And that’s when I saw that both my arms were sticky with blood, from where I had scratched the skin off.

  Zinaida said, “But you haven’t. Since.”

  “No.”

  “Do you love your work?” she asked. I had no sense of what time it was. Faint light edged the horizon, but it could have been a distant city.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “What do you love about it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you love helping the great Soviet state create a proletarian paradise?” Zinaida asked.

  “Sure,” I said, and she laughed.

  “He is why,” she said. “Tell me about him.”

  “Apolek,” I said, and saying the name actually helped. “He’s my best friend.”

  “Why?”

  Why. So many questions I could never even ask myself, let alone answer. “I’m missing something,” I said. “Apolek was helping me find it.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I don’t know. Something essential.”

  “But he had it,” she said.

  “He never knew his father,” I said. “I think that’s the secret. His mother was impregnated and abandoned. That’s why he’s such a good man. He said men are beasts by nature, ugly violent creatures. Women are different.”

  She snorted, delicately. “He seemed to hold quite a position of power, for someone so young.”

  “Apolek was a prodigy,” I said. “A reconditioning marvel. They started him small. With young children, it either works very well or not at all. Volkov gave him the keys to the kingdom.”

  “And you? How young did they start you?”

  The orphanage. The stink of shit and puke, all the time, everywhere. The men from the Ministry, who chose ten out of a hundred by watching us all fight and picking the most savage. I was twelve and I would have slaughtered every one of those boys for the chance to get out of there.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m not like him. I’m an animal. He’s a man.”

  “Even wolves mourn their dead,” she said.

  “He’s not dead,” I said.

  “People die.”

  “But not him.”

  “Why not him?”

  “Why are you here?” I said, spitting out the words. “You hate us. You won’t get your painting back. Your stupid husband will still be dead. When we’re finished here, you’re going back to that camp. So why are you here with me?”

  “Because you dragged me along.”

  “Yeah, well. Go. Leave if you want to.”

  “I’d be dead in a day,” she said, and then touched her hand to the buzz-cut on top of my head. “You are so young.”

  “Don’t touch me,” I said. Unconvincingly.

  “You never felt manipulated?” she asked, standing up, stretching long lovely arms. “By the men who put you in that Box? By the government? By him?”

  I lowered my head. All the sentences in my head involved swearing, and angry as I was I knew that swearing was wrong. It was one of Apolek’s simplest rules.

  She put a hand on top of my head, then tilted it back until she could see my eyes. “I was a dancer,” she said.

  I looked away. “So what.”

  “I’d like to dance for you.”

  I said, “Do what you want. But if you think you can mess with my mind so much you can steal your stupid painting when we find it, you’re wrong.”

  What did I know or care about dance? Who cared what the body did? But I watched her. She moved like a phantom, dancing. Her body was smoke, the flimsy ugly dress an extension of the wind. Her body made its own music. My head filled with sad stories and long-buried lullabies.

  “That was wonderful,” I said, an unaccustomed lump in my throat. Dimly, dumbly, it occurred to me to wonder, really wonder, why she was doing any of this. I felt like I had a lot of weeping to do, and I did not know how to start.

  Then she ruined it all by letting the dress slip from her body, and stepping toward me in the last fading darkness of that night.

  *

  An eight-hour walk, from the station to the dacha. Scorched skeletal trees on both sides of us. The cold here was crueler, cutting through even the thick clothes I commandeered from the town’s tiny army depot. We found Volkov’s dacha and crept up close. He lay asleep on a couch, camouflaged by empty bottles. All of the tracks in the snow seemed to come from one pair of boots.

  He was alone, except for the Broken soldiers who slept obediently in his truck.

  “The other dacha, then,” she said, and started in that direction. I followed, frightened by her zeal. If Apolek was out here, so close to Volkov, were they working together? My old hate for the commander flared up a
gain, brighter now, from jealousy. Ice cracked under our feet. We were not stealthy.

  Night came on us fast, while we walked. Many times we were sure we heard someone following us, but sound moved strangely through the trees. We could see the dacha, a dark spot at the end of the road, but the closer we got, the more it faded into the spreading night. No lights were on inside.

  “You asked why I came,” Zinaida said, stopping as we climbed the walkway to the front door. “Do you still want to know the answer?”

  “No,” I said, pulling her inside by the hand, and kissing her hard, even as I nudged the front door with my foot and found it unlocked, too excited about what we would find inside to care about anything else.

  Zinaida lit a candle. We watched our breath cloud out into the frigid darkness of the dacha. I looked for a lamp, and found three. I laughed out loud, when they were all lit, at the sheer size and splendor of the place.

  His rucksack lay abandoned beside the door, spilling out books like entrails.

  “You look upstairs,” she said.

  He wasn’t in the first of the three bedrooms. A window was open. A curtain flapped. As if the whole place was waiting. As if the murdered count who lived there would come through the door in the morning and bring summer with him.

  The light from my lamp found Apolek in the second bedroom, in a wine-colored velvet chair, with the painting in his lap.

  “Apolek!” I said, and rushed forward, but he did not move.

  “What is a painting in the dark?” he said. On a table beside him stood a glass of ice.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Why did you leave?”

  His coldness kept me from coming closer. And asking: why are you sitting here in the freezing dark? I wondered if Apolek was a ghost.

  “I spent so long in darkness,” he said. “I looked at the paintings, but I didn’t see them.”

  “What did Volkov say to you?” I asked.

  Apolek made a perplexed face, but it passed quickly. He was still transfixed by the painting. I imagined him frozen there for days, wasting away and shivering himself to nothing while he stared at it.

  He said, “Volkov didn’t say anything to me. I left that night, straight from the Spasskaya mansion, without speaking with him.”

  “He doesn’t know about the painting?”

  “Not from me,” Apolek said.

  “You haven’t spoken with him since?” I asked.

  “How would I do that?”

  “Christ, Apolek, he’s followed you. You didn’t know?”

  Apolek looked up at me for the first time. “He’s here?”

  “He’s at the dacha at the end of the lane,” I said, still wanting to rush over to him, still not daring to.

  “He’s keeping an eye on me,” Apolek said, standing up, resigned. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Come back,” I said. “We can work this out.”

  “Not after this,” he said. I thought he meant his own foolish flight from Moscow, but he was staring at the painting.

  “I need you,” I said, at last. “I’m not finished . . . becoming. I’m stuck halfway between man and beast.”

  “So shall you always be,” he said. Apolek reached out his arm and touched a candle to mine, lighting up a gaunt face shadowed by a surprisingly thick growth of beard. “So are we all.”

  From outside, I heard the rumble of a truck approaching.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked. “You know what they’ll do to you. To throw it all away—”

  He handed me the painting.

  I looked at it.

  This time, I could see. For four, maybe five full seconds, I understood.

  Two bodies, male and female, mostly naked, grappling. Was it love? Was it violence? Where did they fit into the larger composition, now lost, severed by the bayonet of a brutal long-ago soldier?

  But the story did not matter. What mattered were the bodies. The twist and reach of the limbs. The glow of the flesh. The flush of the cheeks; the wideness of the mouth. Nothing mattered more than what the body wanted. And the body did not just want sex. It wanted friendship. It wanted beauty.

  Looking at the painting, I understood everything. It was like what I felt when Zinaida danced, but turned up ten-thousandfold. I would have risked what Apolek risked. Life on earth as a human made sense. We are beasts, and we will never understand what we need, what we want, and why, but we will always obey.

  And then it was gone. My head spun so fast I almost fell over. Zinaida had come up the stairs, and stood beside me, one hand on my shoulder, similarly mesmerized by the painting.

  “You brought her here?” Apolek asked, pulling away the painting. I felt her stiffen, when it was gone.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I took her. From the camp. She would have died in there. And I needed—”

  “Why did you bring her here?”

  I had never heard fear in Apolek’s voice before. My head spun worse.

  “Because I—”

  Zinaida stepped forward. Her sadness fell away, a wedding veil no longer needed. In that moment, for the first time, grief was not stronger than rage. And I smelled what I should have smelled the whole time, except that it was hidden behind her sadness and my own blind failure to understand who she was and what she wanted. I smelled an all-consuming violence, a bloodlust strong enough to make all other concerns insignificant.

  “You,” I said to Apolek. “You’re the one who—?”

  But he didn’t move. And I couldn’t move. Only Zinaida moved, and she moved like a phantom dancing. She darted in, ducked low to snag the dagger from my belt, spun fast around him. One lightning-swift slice of the arm was enough. Blood gurgled out of Apolek’s open throat.

  I crumpled to the floor with him. I held his hand. I stared into his eyes. I waited for something, some wise final words or a sudden rush of complete understanding as his spirit left his body and entered mine. I got nothing. I don’t know how long I knelt there. Until Volkov came through the door, with four Broken soldiers close behind him.

  “No,” he said, and then said it again and again, faster and faster.

  Volkov pointed at Zinaida, and the Broken stepped forward. The stink of his rage made me gag. “Rip her to shreds,” he said, and although I screamed for them to stop, that’s exactly what they did. At least they did not smell of rage. The Broken kill dispassionately.

  It took a long time.

  I wondered if my offshoot would survive. If—after Volkov took me back to Moscow and locked me in a Box until my spirit shattered, and I emerged as one of the Broken—my sense of smell would still be with me. I hoped it wouldn’t. I hoped nothing would.

  My head stopped hurting. I looked at my hands, and knew—my reconditioning was gone. The painting had wiped it away, cleanly and swiftly, and leaving no fatal time bomb inside me.

  I wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t break down like a faulty machine, like every other soldier spat out of a Pavlov Box.

  Volkov crossed the carnage, to kneel beside Apolek. His rage was gone. He held the boy’s head in both hands. I still had my superhuman sense of smell, somehow stronger than ever. I had never been able to smell grief before.

  “I thought you hated him,” I said.

  “He hated me,” the commander said, his hair and eyes as black as mine. “He’s always hated me. I tried to make him into something he’s not.”

  I swallowed, several times. “You’re his father.”

  “Yes.”

  “He knew?” I asked.

  “He did not.”

  Dagger and painting were filthy with blood. I picked them both up. I handled the painting like Medusa’s head, turning it away from my line of sight, and Volkov’s too. I wondered what the Broken would see if they saw it. I felt certain it could bring them back to life. As if it could save us all, the tens and hundreds of thousands of fine young men who would otherwise break down and die under the weight of their botched reconditioning.

  “Is there a special Box?”
I asked. “A special process, to turn a man into one of the Broken?”

  Volkov looked at me, his red face comprehending nothing.

  I did not dare to look at the painting again. If I did, I’d lose my nerve. With the dagger, I cut a long slit from top to bottom of the painting, then squatted to remove the glass flute from the lamp and hold the canvas square face down atop the flame.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “Ready for what?”

  “To be broken.”

  Promise me you’ll make it quick, I wanted to say, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t deserve quick. I had destroyed my best friend, and I deserved to suffer. But I hoped he’d do it soon. I wanted to stop feeling what I felt.

  Flames from the burning painting singed the hair from my hand, and still I held on to it. I held on until the burning was too much to bear. Now that it was gone, definitively destroyed, I realized what I had done—that without the painting the Pavlov Boxes would quickly cripple the state, bring it to its knees as its best young men died in droves—but that wasn’t why I did it. I destroyed the painting because it killed Apolek.

  “Oh, Nikolai, no,” he said. His face shattered, crumpled. “You’re all that’s left of him.” Volkov fell forward, his arms tightening around me and his hairy face wet against my neck. He heaved with sobs. My body remembered, and I felt unaccustomed water spilling from my eyes. I had forgotten how hot tears were. We stood like that, dumb and broken, two beasts grieving.

  The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown

  Caroline M. Yoachim

  The magician’s table was covered by a sheet of plywood, four feet square, completely wrapped in aluminum foil. Sugar magic was messy magic, and the foil made for easier cleanup. Scattered across the aluminum were misshapen chunks of candy, the seeds from which the carnival would grow. And grow it did.

  Overnight, as the magician slept, sugar melted into candy sheets that billowed up into brightly colored tents. Caramel stretched itself into tightropes and nets, and green gumdrop bushes popped up to line the paths between the tents.

  The carnival glittered with sugar-glass lights. The Ferris wheel was made of chocolate with graham cracker seats and a motor that ran on corn syrup. Out near the edge of the table, a milk chocolate monkey rode bareback on a white chocolate zebra with dark chocolate stripes. The monkey did handstands and backflips while the zebra pranced in a slow circle.