The Last Hiccup

by Christopher Meades

  Sergei raised his chained hands in exhilaration. “Vladdy, my boy! Is it really you?”

  Vladimir was almost too stunned to speak. “Yes,” he said.

  “Oh, how long I’ve waited to see your face again. I always knew you’d return.”

  Sergei’s eyes shifted.

  He leaned in close.

  “You haven’t come here to kill me, have you?”

  “No,” Vladimir said.

  “Because they’re sending someone to kill me — that’s the rumor anyways.”

  “Please,” Vladimir said, “you must tell me what happened. Why are you in here? Why are you hiccupping? Did I give you the hiccups?”

  Sergei let out a wild laugh. “Of course not, my boy. You can’t catch the hiccups from someone.” His laughter descended from uncontrolled hilarity into a slight, humorless gurgle and then disappeared altogether. For the first time since he entered the room, Sergei seemed to notice that Vladimir was still hiccupping. A sadness filled his expression. “So no one was able to cure you after all, were they?”

  Vladimir took a seat at the table. He beckoned Sergei to join him. With great caution, the doctor sat down across from Vladimir.

  “I found peace in my soul in the Waterfall of Ion . . .” Vladimir launched into a long, detailed account of the past ten years. From the carriage ride delivering him into the valley at the base of the great Burkhan Khaldun mountain, to the death of Tomchar under the waterfall, to Gog’s silence and the path he forced Vladimir to walk every day, to the year he spent in the wild, culminating in his forced entry into the Waterfall of Ion — Vladimir lay the last decade bare before Sergei.

  The doctor listened intently. When it was all done, Sergei’s eyes turned red. He slammed his fist on the table. “That blasted Alexander!” Sergei hit the hard metal surface three times until Vladimir was forced to reach out and take his hand. Sergei leaned forward, their hands still linked, and whispered in Vladimir’s ear. “I know I can trust you,” he said between hiccups. “You were like a son to me. You would never hurt me. You would never take their side, would you?”

  “Never,” Vladimir said. “You helped me when I was a little boy. I’ll never forget that. I would do anything for you.”

  “Good,” Sergei said. He let go of Vladimir’s hand. Sergei looked back down the hallway to ensure they were alone. He glanced under the table and shifted his eyes around the room. Finally satisfied, he looked Vladimir square in the eye. Sergei stopped hiccupping. Just like that. In a single instant, his hiccups disappeared, leaving Vladimir’s convulsive yelps to fill the air alone.

  Vladimir’s eyes grew wide. “How did you do that?”

  Sergei rubbed the long gray whiskers on his gaunt face. “I’ve been faking them this whole time.”

  “For how long?”

  “For eighteen months now — a full year and a half,” Sergei said.

  Vladimir couldn’t tell whether Sergei was proud of his accomplishment or heartbroken that it had come this far. “Why would you do that?” he said.

  “Because of Alexander, that cad!” Sergei exclaimed. He slammed his fist again in anger.

  Vladimir cast a brief glance at the open doorway. Ilvana still hadn’t come back. “Please,” he said. “Explain everything to me. Start at the beginning.”

  Sergei rubbed his eyes. They seemed to have aged a hundred years since Vladimir last saw them, their esteemed influence fading and leaving an unhinged turmoil in its place. Sergei heaved as though he might begin to convulse. He scraped his fingers along the sides of his face. “I will start, as you suggest, at the beginning,” he said.

  “In the evening hours before Alexander stole you away from the hospital,” Sergei said, “I suffered both my greatest indignity and what would amount to the greatest triumph of my entire life. I caught Alexander in the arms of my wife. Technically she was my ex-wife, but that is no matter. She was my wife. We exchanged vows before a priest in a garden under cherry trees. She promised to love me until death do us part, in sickness and in health, in front of two hundred witnesses. My grandmother was there. Members of congress were invited. Several attended. What matter is it that years later we signed a piece of paper stating the marriage was null and void? We took vows in the name of Christ! And then to find her in Alexander’s arms, to have her kiss his lips and dangle off him as though she were some new appendage he’d grown out of his kidney — what heights of humiliation was I expected to accept? What manner of man would I be if I stood by impotent and weepy-eyed as they cavorted shamelessly in front of me?

  “I picked up a swirling mass of red, pink and purple wine and I dashed it upon her. Oh, Vladimir, I can’t tell you what exhilaration it is to strip someone of their dignity after they’ve deliberately stolen yours.” For a single moment Sergei’s eyes recaptured a little of their old shine. “I was dragged from that place and tossed in the street like a dog. Two thugs roughed me up in an alley. They left me to crawl to my car, bleeding and battered, with bruises all over my face. But I didn’t care. They could have killed me then and there and I would have died happy.

  “That evening I returned home and the first thing I did was give my maid Tatiana a stiff pounding from behind. Oh, don’t look at me like that. The poor dear had pined for me for months. I had at her like an untamed beast and then collapsed in my bed, covered in sweat, blood and semen. Covered in life! As I penetrated my maid’s large, supple entry, never could I have imagined that at that very moment, Alexander and his cronies were stealing you away. How appropriate it was for Alexander to do his dirty work in the basest of all hours, where criminals and drug addicts roam free and the meek and incredulous rule the dark of night.

  “When I arrived at the hospital the next day, my first action was to go to your bedside. I’d hardly slept, so great was my worry. I knew after that afternoon at Markus’s office, there was something deep inside that you couldn’t control. A darkness had crept into the innermost reaches of your soul. I had to find you, to speak to you, to reason with you, to care for you not as a physician, but as a father would. You weren’t in your bed. I stormed through the hospital floor you’d called home for two years, searched every room, peered in every deserted crook and cranny. I summoned all available members of the staff and we divided into groups. When our search of the hospital revealed nothing, we stretched out into the streets. I had orderlies, nurses and police officers — every able body I could find — searching for you. It was no use. You were gone.

  “Only as the day became night did I realize that Alexander was also nowhere to be found. You were missing and Alexander had taken an unexplained leave of absence for three weeks’ time. This was no coincidence. I knew immediately what he’d done. I called an emergency meeting of the hospital’s senior staff. They had to be made aware of Alexander’s treason. Before these men, I gave an impassioned speech quoting both Bakunin and Chaadayev and thoroughly depicting the empirical evidence at hand. You can imagine the ache in my heart when my presentation fell on deaf ears. No one would believe me. Word of the incident at the ballroom had spread and my impeccable reputation was now entirely suspect. The hospital board members insisted that I stay home from work until I abandoned my obsession with Alexander’s misdeeds.

  “For weeks I languished in bed. The agony of it all was too much to bear. Alexander had robbed me of my wife, Asenka, and now he had stolen my son — perhaps not by blood, but in the innermost reaches of my heart, you were my child, Vladimir.

  “When Alexander returned from his mysterious absence, I accosted him outside the hospital gates. Would you believe that he denied everything? He looked me straight in the eye and proclaimed he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what had become of you. He conjured up an absurd story about having attended a conference in Yekaterinburg all this time. That duplicitous charlatan! I had it in my mind to do away with him right then and there with my bare hands. And I would have too if reason hadn’t intervened. You see, as strong as I was in my better days, I knew deep inside that n
o matter how badly I wanted to tear him from limb to limb, it would’ve been exceedingly difficult for me to defeat Alexander in an evenhanded bout of fisticuffs. Instead, I returned to the hospital and lodged formal charges. I burst through the office of the police and told them to arrest Alexander Afiniganov for kidnapping. I took my complaints as far as the Kremlin.

  “No one would believe me! They thought that I was in the wrong, that I was the evildoer! The incident at the Isirk Ballroom preceded me. My good name had been ruined.

  “You see, Vladimir, it is my curse that I alone could perceive the iniquitous black fog of hypocrisy that coiled behind Alexander as he walked, the way it merged with dark corners in unlit rooms and interfered with the illumination of anything daring to resemble the truth. This curse destroyed me. The hospital grew tired of my constant accusations and fired me outright. Days after my medical career crumbled to dust, I learned that my maid was with child. She refused any suggestion to terminate the pregnancy and insisted on seeing the birth all the way through. Those four and a half minutes of pleasure — no not pleasure: the exorcism of my rage in which I thrashed Tatiana against the washbasin in her room — they were my undoing as much as anything that happened at the ballroom. I waited the full nine months until the baby was born, praying all the while for it to somehow look like my elderly driver Afin. No such miracle occurred. When this bastard child emerged, it was like looking into a mirror. The boy was mine. With great reluctance, after months of enduring Tatiana’s pleas, I made an honest woman of her. We married in a simple civil ceremony on a Wednesday afternoon.

  “Vladimir, I can’t begin to understand the pain you’ve experienced. And nothing I’ve gone through could possibly compare. But can you imagine for just one moment what it’s like to have loved someone as deeply as I loved Asenka, to have achieved a profound, intimate connection on all levels — emotional, spiritual, sexual — only to have your partner’s love turn sour and ferment like a nasty boil left to fester in the sun? And then to be forced to spend your married days with some simple-minded imbecile who loves you unconditionally no matter how vicious you are? It is an unbearable truth in life that love thrives on stillness. What we are made to endure in the here and now is damned by the fading color of the past.”

  Sergei had begun his diatribe with conviction, but with each word his bravado faded into hollow pathos. Sergei’s voice — once strong and assertive — now flowed in waves; it soared to a crescendo, crashed and doubled over before fading like the tides. Unexpectedly, ferociously, it would rise again.

  “Tatiana nursed the baby into a small child as my riches faded. For years my status at the hospital had protected me from the ills of Stalin’s economic upheaval. After my dismissal, I was no longer immune. What’s more, my outward display of indignation at the Kremlin caused my name to be placed on a list. Before dawn on a Tuesday morning in early spring, government agents stormed into my home. At gunpoint, they took possession of the house my father had left me. I was given a paltry sum and forced to move into a small apartment overlooking a meat-packing plant. Tatiana and our son came along, of course. To my great surprise, so did Tatiana’s mother, a deaf elderly Ukrainian woman with an odorous foot fungus and two cats who trailed her every move. She lived in the walk-in closet in our apartment, cooked her meals on the radiator, and whenever one of her cats misbehaved, she would throw it off the balcony and then have the audacity to insist that I purchase a new one when the creature failed to survive the fall.

  “Looking back with the keen eye of hindsight, my fall from grace began when Alexander won that prestigious golden plaque for finishing first in our class at Tomsk University. If I’d somehow bested him, if I’d managed in some way to eclipse his scholastic supremacy and miraculously won that plaque, my life would have turned out quite differently. I would have been the more revered doctor. I would have been invited to the Isirk Ballroom that night and had the pleasure of watching Alexander carried out by his boots. He would be sitting here in this damned asylum, not me!” Sergei waved his chained hands absently in the air. “But I never won that plaque. It never sat on the wall in my study. Life was simply that cruel.”

  He cleared his throat and looked expectantly at Vladimir.

  Vladimir stared in wonder at his doctor. “But you didn’t tell me how you came to be in this place,” Vladimir said. “Why have you been faking the hiccups? What became of Alexander?”

  Sergei’s eyes turned a slight shade of yellow.

  “I haven’t even told you the most outrageous part of all. Years after he stole you away, Alexander actually had the audacity to publish a paper on your condition. That insolent zadnitsa linked the symptom of incurable hiccups to the disease of mental illness. I knew this wasn’t true. At least, I knew there was no way for him to verify that your hiccups and the malaise in your mind were inextricably linked. I rallied against his findings; I did everything in my power to discredit them. There was a flaw, you see, in Alexander’s evaluation.” Sergei balled his fingers into a fist. “Not once in his paper did he mention that your hiccups continued while you slept. What careless work. Such inexact reporting from a medical professional purported to be the preeminent genius of his generation. I told everyone who would listen about Alexander’s carelessness. I carried his paper with me and described its corrigendum to random passersby on the street. I showed doctors and nurses, entire committees full of medical practitioners. In the end, my outcry fell on deaf ears. Alexander’s paper was well received. It won awards. A new condition had been discovered. They call it Vlad’s Syndrome.”

  Vladimir shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Suddenly, the reactions to his hiccups in the hospital corridors made sense.

  “I knew the moment he published that paper that Alexander had to be punished. It became, to me, an inevitability,” Sergei said. “At first I might have been satisfied with his dismissal from the hospital, perhaps even a waning of the medical community’s esteem for his genius. As time passed, I began to daydream of his banishment to some foreign, dark and dreary land where he spoke nothing of the language and after years of constant misery and loneliness, Alexander became a drunkard, reviled by a throng of scurvy-laden locals who treated him as nothing more than the common village idiot. Children would chase him with sticks and old ladies would hurl soggy, pestilence-ridden produce at him.

  “Oh, if only I’d conjured up some underhanded scheme to disgrace my rival. I had it within me to design a tragic end to his omnipresent dignity. Yet each time I sat down to plot and conspire, to develop ruses and strategize demeaning predicaments in which to thrust that priggish fiend, a lethargy would envelop me. My lack of enthusiasm became my downfall.

  “I began waiting for God or fate or destiny — any of these phantasmic forces — to strike Alexander down. Each morning when I rose and read the newspaper, I searched the obituaries for news that he’d been felled by a random flying hockey puck or perhaps that he’d died in some humiliating accident in a roach-infested hotel room involving a belt hung from the ceiling, a hermaphroditic prostitute and a live farm animal. No such news ever came. Instead, a year and a half ago, an announcement appeared in the newspaper. Alexander and Asenka were to be married. After years apart, they’d rekindled their old flame following a chance meeting at an event celebrating Stalin’s signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany. I couldn’t help but be distraught. I looked at my child wailing under the kitchen table — eight years old and still an imbecile — my devoted spouse who couldn’t string three sentences together and her senile mother tottering about in the background.

  “I knew then that Alexander had to be destroyed.

  “There comes a moment in every man’s life, my boy, when you realize that scheming — the very act of planning your vengeance — will only lead to a lifetime of scheming and bear absolutely nothing: no glory, no embarrassment of riches, no fruits of your labor. Only he who acts will reap what he has sown.

  “I stormed from my apartment and traveled to the hospital. The
hour approached noon as I arrived at the staff cafeteria. There, sitting smugly at the end of a table eating a lunch of dried figs and ham was my nemesis Alexander. A tempest formed in my brain, with swirling black clouds and bright streaks of light. I stomped over to the cutlery bin and grabbed the sharpest knife I could find. My mind erupted in chaos. The world lay dead and black. I walked over to Alexander and, without even announcing myself, stabbed him in the side of the neck. He fell to the ground and I leapt upon him. Over and over I stabbed him. Blood spurted in living streams of red. Alexander was helpless to defend himself. Quickly bystanders intervened and I was thrust off his quivering body. An emergency bell sounded and swarms of doctors ran in to try to save him. They were helpless. He was too far gone. My enemy — the beast who’d ruined my life and perpetually plagued my nightmares — had finally been vanquished.

  “I stood in front of the teeming mass of my former colleagues, my arms constrained and the knife ripped from my hand. Looking into their accusing eyes, I knew they would never understand that I’d been forced to do this, how in truth I had no other choice. The lot of them seemed about to lynch me when I did the only thing I could think to do.

  “I hiccupped.

  “A few seconds passed and then I hiccupped again. And again, just as I’d watched you hiccup, Vladimir, all those years ago.

  “Whispers started almost immediately amongst the crowd.

  ““Listen to him.’

  “‘Do you hear that?’

  “‘He has Vlad’s Syndrome.’

  “I kept hiccupping as the police came and arrested me. I sustained my ruse through a brief pretrial hearing during which a panel of psychologists determined that I did indeed have Vlad’s Syndrome. Later, I continued my voluntary convulsions as they sealed me away in the psychiatric ward of what used to be my own hospital. I’ve kept hiccupping until this very day.”

  “But isn’t it difficult to pretend to hiccup every waking hour of the day?” Vladimir said.