Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  When Revmira found out, she screamed. Gleb’s side of the sheets still smelled like him, but that would only fade. His clothes hung in the closet. On the top of their dresser, there were his childish prizes, his medals from the All-Union Pioneers and his school certificates.

  At the funeral, there were photographs of him. A shut box that tormented her with what it did or did not hold. Revmira was ten when her grandfather died; his body had stayed for three days on display in her childhood home, and she could touch his skin, stiff as cardboard, which scared her and soothed her at once to feel. But Gleb, who had not been wearing a seat belt, had to stay in the state morgue until the service. Pieces of him could be missing. She did not know. She never would. Picturing him that way made her think she might go mad.

  Vera Vasilievna covered all the mirrors in the apartment, like Revmira’s family had in Esso—but Gleb was not an old man, he was twenty-two, he was immaculate. “You’re my child now,” Vera Vasilievna told her. “You’re all I have left.” Though when Gleb had first brought Revmira home his mother wept over his seeing a native girl. They threw fistfuls of dirt into his grave. It was impossible. His mother was shaking, and Revmira knew she should put an arm around the woman’s shoulders, and she could not. Instead Revmira stood with her dirty hands folded. Everything around her was just an imitation of what he had been.

  Revmira moved to a room in a friend’s apartment. To keep herself sane, she had to keep going, so she gave away their wedding presents, the dishes they ate off, the clothes he saw her wear, until the only scraps left of their life together fit in one buckled bag. She finished her degree, found a job, paid her bills, made her dinners. She watched Gorbachev speak about openness and change on her television. And all the while she was screaming. She never stopped. In her mind, she was still twenty-one and ten months and two days, and it was just after seven in the morning, and Gleb had been lying next to her an hour before.

  The bus delivered her to the hospital’s triage desk by eight. The nurse getting off shift briefed her: this many beds open, this many appointments to expect, this or that piece of gossip that had surfaced overnight. Revmira draped her coat over the back of the desk chair and nodded along. There were only two men sitting along the wall of the admission department, which was no more than a corridor, really, a narrow green-painted hall. Any sick people who could afford it bought themselves seats in the waiting room of a private clinic. After the other nurse left, Revmira called one man over to the triage desk so he could state his symptoms. He opened his mouth and the sickly smell of booze washed over her. “Sit down,” she said. She waved the other man up, reviewed his paperwork, and had him follow her upstairs for an exam.

  Through the morning, patients came in clusters: brusque Valentina Nikolaevna for radiation therapy, a teenager whose appendix was near bursting, a snowboarder who broke his leg and was wheeled to the elevator with lines of snow on his jacket sleeves. Revmira assessed them all. She directed people for X-rays, for ultrasounds, and to the surgical floor. Doctors called down to manage prescriptions. Revmira called up about the patient flow. One man entered the admission department with a crossbow bolt through the meat of his right shoulder, and she had him fill out his papers with his left hand before she sent him forward.

  As the hall thinned out to one or two again, she had time to tidy the top of the desk, lining up a stapler with the long edge of her notepad. She let her brain go neat and blank. Artyom texted her to say that he was being called in for a mountain rescue. She texted back good luck. Out the door, the street was sunny. The air was practically vernal. Eventually a trainee came down to cover her for lunch.

  In the break room, Revmira picked up a magazine to read. Rather than attending to its pages, though, she held the magazine over her soup and recalled the summer day, before their last year of university, that she and Gleb got married. He in his suit and she in her plain little heels. Her hair braided over her shoulder. The way he held her after they said their vows—she had wanted to have his children that instant.

  Good, probably, that they didn’t end up pregnant. If she had stood at his funeral with a baby in her arms—where would she have gone afterward? What would she have done?

  When Artyom, years after, found out he couldn’t have children, Revmira had already lived too long for the news to surprise. That loss piled up with the rest. In any case, Kamchatka was no longer a place to raise a family. Just look at the hole in her cousin’s life where a daughter belonged. The communities Revmira grew up in had splintered, making them easy places to be forgotten, easy places to disappear. Revmira’s parents had raised her in a strong home, an idyllic village, a principled people, a living Even culture, a socialist nation of great achievement. That nation collapsed. Nothing was left in the place it had occupied.

  Revmira stirred her cooling soup. Modern life had buried the lovers she and Gleb had been. She ended up back at the wedding registry office ten years later; though she and Artyom were married in the same building, they stood in a different room, before a different officiant, under the laws of a different state. All the spots she and Gleb went to as newlyweds—kissing each other before the Bering monument, at the city center, or on top of St. Nicholas Hill—were now covered in graffiti and trash. Even the university changed. Revmira had to stop by every fall to pick up student medical records. The first time, she went to the classroom where she met Gleb and found the space filled by strangers.

  He died and the whole Soviet Union followed. Revmira’s country, her young face, the entire course of her life had changed. Since she started at the hospital, she had sat next to more than a hundred patients to help them go, so she now knew death well: the release of breath, the rattle, the calm. Her parents went the same way, one after the other. And she missed them. She had resigned herself a long time ago to missing all the people who left her. There were many, many. Vera Vasilievna, too. But Gleb was the only one who had been perfect. He was the one whose death shocked her, who kept shocking her year after year.

  It would have been easier if she had died with him. Not better, necessarily, just…easier. If she was in the car, too. She had imagined it so many times.

  Back at the triage desk, she thought of that. His car, the road, the icy dark before dawn that day. Their wedding, his arms around her, the little boy they could have had, the little girl. February 27. Even when Revmira was awake, she was dreaming.

  Her cell phone vibrated. The screen showed the name of the wife of another man in Artyom’s crew. Revmira ducked her head to take the call. “Yes, Inna?”

  There was a second of silence on the other end of the line. Inna said, “Something’s happened.”

  Around Revmira, the people in the waiting room muttered and sighed and moaned. Under her forehead, the desk was smooth. Cold. Revmira kept her face down. She waited.

  “They radioed in. They’ve been trying to reach us. Reach you. Artyom was hurt,” Inna said. “I’m sorry, Reva. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her voice continued.

  Inna said a rock. She said his head. She said knocked out. She said no pain. The team medic tried to revive him. He was already gone. It happened too fast, Inna said.

  Folded in her chair, Revmira looked down at her scrubs. Her cotton-covered knees. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Inna said a rock. There had been a rescue, a lost skier. She said they found the skier. And then a rock fell. She said his head. No pain. An accident. His skull. The curve of his neck, his jaw, his face looking at her this morning with the window soft and white behind.

  “I see. I see,” said Revmira.

  She hung up. Someone came to the desk and she waved him away. She had forgotten to ask where Artyom was now. Should she call back? She unlocked the phone and looked at Inna’s name in her call list. This was crazy. She opened up a text to her husband. Her fingers moved slowly over the letters. She had to tell Artyom what this woman had said.

 
; Artyom was hurt. Inna told her that. But Revmira would take him as an invalid. She would take him weak. Diminished. As long as he was living.

  She looked up and Inna was in front of the desk. Revmira looked at the clock on her computer. Time had passed.

  “I came to take you home,” Inna said. Her eyes were red. “They’re still in the mountains.”

  “Okay,” said Revmira. “I understand.”

  Inna went away. Someone touched Revmira’s shoulder. It was the trainee, saying she would take over. Inna was there again. Revmira made sure not to forget her coat. They went outside. Artyom was dead.

  Revmira concentrated on buckling herself into Inna’s car. It was hard to do. Her hands were strange. She focused on her fingers, her bending knuckles. The parchment color of her nails against the seat belt.

  Since Gleb’s accident, Revmira had hated cars. Now she had to hate rocks, too. Rocks. Snow. The sound of her cell phone ringing. Sugar stirred into her coffee. The smell of breakfast filling their kitchen. She had thought she was strong, but she was not. She was not. Not anymore, not without him.

  In the driver’s seat, Inna started the engine and wiped her cheeks. She looked up through the windshield. Her jacket whispered as she moved. “It’s this weather,” Inna said. “Loose ice. Avalanche weather.”

  Revmira folded her hands in her lap. She could not get control of them. Cold air blew on her from the vents. It was February 27.

  “This is fate,” she said out loud.

  Inna sniffed back tears at the steering wheel. “What?”

  Revmira looked out the window at the heaps of blackened snow bordering the parking lot. Water trickled out onto the asphalt. The sun was high above them. She thought of the rock. His head. No pain. Last weekend napping on the couch in the afternoon, her legs pinned between his, their faces close together. His breath on her cheek. Once he woke up, he asked her if she was comfortable. They had talked about headlines, currency devaluations, parliamentary decisions, the Golosovskaya sisters. “If I were their kidnapper,” she told him, “I’d bring them north. No one watches the villages. You could bury bodies right on your property in daylight hours without anyone noticing.”

  Artyom had kissed the creased skin below her eye. “My morbid, brilliant woman.”

  She carried death into their marriage, brought death with her up to this day. Quietly, into the glass of the window, she said, “Our suffering is fated.” She should have expected this from the very beginning. She had met Artyom, that excellent man, and condemned him.

  The parking lot rolled away, other cars gathered around them, city buses pulled over, traffic lights turned green. Inna took the long way home, past the cinema, and Revmira did not correct her. Snow piles rose and fell beside them like ocean waves. In front of her and Artyom’s building, Revmira took out her keys. Inna plucked them away to unlock the doors. I can do that, Revmira wanted to say. I know how to do all of this. I’ve done it before. Instead she followed Inna into her own apartment.

  The younger woman went straight to put on the kettle. Inna had decided to be capable. It was easy for Inna; the man she loved was alive.

  “Excuse me,” Revmira said. Her voice sounded so polite. She took her phone into the bathroom and called Artyom’s sister.

  “Oh,” his sister said and started to weep. The sound of it, rhythmic, desperate, hurt. Revmira pressed the phone harder to her ear. She had not cried yet. She had to listen. “Have you seen him?” his sister asked.

  “No,” Revmira said. She knew how searches worked. “No, they’re coming back from the mountains. It’s quite— It’s difficult. They bring the one they rescued first. It’ll be a few hours.”

  “Maybe it’s not true.”

  The bathroom sink was flecked with Artyom’s hair. He had shaved this morning after Revmira left. This world was built for people to suffer. “It’s true,” Revmira said, and the sister wept harder.

  Inna waited in the kitchen, so Revmira, after getting off the phone, went into the bedroom and shut the door. At the top of their tugged-up blanket was Artyom’s pillow. Revmira touched it. Soft. On the bedside table, there was his book. His glass of water—she picked that up and drank it.

  She put the empty glass on his side of the blanket, and the book there, too. They made little dents in the wool. Then she opened up the bedside drawer to find a pocketknife, his spare sunglasses, a bottle of vitamin D supplements. She put those on the bed. It was nice to see his things laid out. She could do that. She had nothing else to do. She went to their dresser and pulled out his sweaters, his pants, the white undershirts, the worn briefs. Artyom was in his house clothes when she last saw him. Navy athletic pants and an old T-shirt. She fetched those from the laundry basket. She did not know what he wore to work today, but she would find out soon enough.

  She wanted to see his body.

  The pile on the bed looked small. She went to the closet for more.

  She should gather his things. She should stockpile memories. She met Artyom when she was twenty-nine, when her former classmates had already made themselves mothers and she, still young, had nothing but her job and her buried history. She frightened people. But Artyom was not disturbed. He was a friend of a friend; they were introduced at a party. He had trained as a biathlete outside Moscow and returned to Kamchatka after too many years of fruitless competition left him thin, fair-minded, strong.

  They slept together sooner than a month after they met. In the blackness of Artyom’s bedroom, his parents out and his sister a wall away, Revmira peeled off his clothes. His knees and shoulders were bound up in muscles. She ran her fingers over their cords. When she explored his chest, she felt his heart, that athlete’s measured muscle, pounding. His breath was quick. His body betrayed him.

  With her fingers tight on the closet rod, she began to cry. They last had sex on Wednesday. Today was Sunday.

  How did Artyom want her, even then? How did he manage to survive for so long? For months after they were married, she appreciated him, his long legs, his service, and then all at once she fell in love. They were on the bus together. It was snowing the way it used to and never seemed to anymore, those flakes so dense that the driver followed the road not from sight but from habit. Three blocks from their stop, Artyom turned to Revmira, flipped up her collar, and pulled her jacket zipper to her chin. He tugged her hat down on her forehead and ran his fingers around her wrists to check the seal of her gloves. Then he took her hand and faced forward. Swaddled up, she felt herself—alive. Finally alive. The blood in her body was a rolling boil.

  She had sat there warm and thrilled and terrified. She had believed new wonders waited. Her only bare skin was the strip around her eyes, and the world outside looked so fresh, so clean. So promising. After Gleb died, she was alone, alone, always alone, and suddenly, on a plastic seat in a crowded bus, she found that someone else was with her. She’d exhaled with joy into her jacket collar. Artyom.

  Her husband. Her rescuer. He had done his duty. Now Revmira was supposed to keep going without him. She wiped her face and went into the kitchen. When she entered, Inna stood up, phone in her hand, and said, “They’re on their way.”

  “All right,” Revmira said. She took his mug and plate from the drying rack.

  In the bathroom, she grabbed his toothbrush, razor, cologne. The face lotion he used—she added it all to the pile.

  For nearly all of the past twenty-six years, she had busied herself with Artyom’s kindness, their careers, the mealtime conversations, the assistance they offered others. She looked at the rest of the country falling apart but believed that she and Artyom could last. She was wrong. Artyom’s twelve-hour shifts, Revmira’s work at the hospital, their appeals to authorities—those were the acts of an earlier age. Those things were useless. In the end, they did not protect anyone.

  She went back to the closet, pulled out Gleb’s suitcase, and heav
ed the case onto the blanket. Its bulk pressed on Artyom’s belongings. She opened the case, snaps biting into her fingers, and saw some objects she had forgotten, some others she could not forget. She needed to be with these things of her husband’s. All of it together was everything she had left. The letters he wrote her. Faded record sleeves. His winter hat, his civil passport. She emptied the old case out, then she put it down on the blanket and crawled onto the bed.

  Boots, buckles, papers, and scarves. After Gleb’s accident, she thought she would die. She thought she had. This date took him and pulled her down after, grief determined as gravity. But now she would live. She had to. It was what she did: live while others could not. There was no pleasure in it.

  MARCH

  Three wordless days after the kitchen flooded, Nadia and Mila took off from Esso’s provincial airport toward Palana’s. They had their own row to themselves. Mila, five years old, spent the plane ride eating cucumber slices and drawing figures with ever-larger breasts. She drew two big circles in her notebook and laughed, then drew two bigger circles around those and laughed again, then set her mouth in concentration to draw two even bigger circles. Peering over her daughter’s head, Nadia asked, “No men?”

  Quickly Mila drew another, wider person. She added two tiny nipple dots to the chest.

  “I wasn’t telling you to add one,” Nadia said.

  Mila put her pen back to the page and circled those dots with breasts. “Wonderful,” Nadia said and looked out the window at the white ground.

  They were already past the central mountain range that penned in Esso. Nadia had spent the last few days bartering with their pilot so this twin-engine turboprop, halted by a blizzard after leaving Petropavlovsk, would take her and Mila along for the last leg of its trip north. In the village they left behind was Chegga. His garbage palace of a rental house where they had spent the last three years. The newly broken radiator pipe, the tile floor yellow under ankle-deep water. The last sentence Nadia spoke to him—“Call the landlord,” she had said on Tuesday—and the note she slid under the frozen honey jar on the kitchen table today.