Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  He sees Nathalie watching them and glances away, a gesture that is half anger, half apology, and wholly familiar. Michael Thomas comes over and asks her to dance. He's been leaning against a wall since the party began, tapping his feet to the music and looking longingly at the people on the floor. Passing by him earlier, handing out hors d'oeuvres, she even heard him humming along loudly to “The Way You Look Tonight.” Now he stands before her, wide-eyed and eager. She shakes her head. Michael Thomas seems like the kind of person who's had dance lessons and isn't afraid to use them.

  “Please?” he says. “Just one dance? I love to dance at weddings.”

  “I'm not really much of a dancer.”

  Beside her, Martin gives her a nudge—actually, less a nudge than a poke in the ribs, sharper and more forceful than she would've expected.

  “Go ahead, dear,” he says. “Who knows how long it'll be until Leda and I get married again?” He pushes her in the direction of Michael Thomas's skinny arms. She relents. Michael Thomas takes her hand and bows an exaggerated introduction. The two of them step and swirl, paired and clasped. She was right about him: he has technique. People head to the edges of the room, making room for them. He spins and dips her, and by the time the song finishes, she's breathless and grateful not to have been injured.

  When Michael Thomas bows and retreats, Nick comes over and hands her a drink. “Impressive moves,” he says.

  “It was all Michael Thomas,” she tells him.

  Together they watch him scouring the room for other partners. Leda and Martin are dancing together now, cheek to cheek, eyes closed in rapture, swaying only the slightest bit. Nathalie sips her champagne and observes the happy couple. Next to her, Nick smells of cologne and sweat and shrimp canapés and wine; the rhythm of his breath as familiar as her own. She knows the two of them won't dance tonight. They'll stand side by side, as if on guard, waiting until the others are through.

  Land of the Midnight Sun

  Maxine was the good child; her little brother was the problem. When he kept getting in trouble at school, their parents conferred and took drastic steps. The doorbell rang one Saturday afternoon when Maxine was home alone, doing her trig homework. Her mother was working at the hospital and her brother was wherever he went when he left the house. Nobody knew what he did with his time. Maxine opened the door, and there was a boy standing on the porch; she'd never seen him before. On the street behind him, a horn honked and a car drove away.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “I am Yuri,” said the boy, and just stood there. He was thin and dark-haired, pale-skinned, with high, prominent cheekbones. Despite the warm October weather he was wearing a wool sweater. Dark circles under his eyes made it hard to guess his age.

  “Is your parents at home?”

  “No.”

  Maxine noticed a black suitcase on the ground, bound by a leather strap. Yuri looked to the left and the right, as if checking the truth of her story. Finally he looked back at her. “I am exchange student,” he said. “I live in your house one year.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Then, if you like, you may come to Soviet Union and live in my house one year. But only if you like,” he continued. “It is no obligation.” His accent was halting and twisted, like nothing she had ever heard.

  “I know nothing about this,” Maxine said.

  “It is glasnost program.”

  “It's like nobody tells me anything,” she said.

  “You have a brother,” Yuri stated flatly, and fished a piece of paper out of his jeans. “His name is Brian. He is for me the exchange host.”

  “Nobody calls him Brian,” Maxine told him. “We call him Bat.”

  Yuri gazed at her with his exhausted eyes. He reached into his jeans pocket again and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, then sat down on the porch and lit one, throwing his match onto the rock lawn.

  “Because his room is like a cave,” Maxine said.

  Yuri nodded. “You are talking of the mouse with wings.”

  “Yes, exactly.” She left the house and sat down next to him and waited until he was done smoking. Then she picked up his suitcase and led him to Bat's room. It was pitch black in there and smelled like an armpit. She usually avoided it.

  “Well, here's your new home,” she said. “You can watch TV if you want.”

  Maxine's mother made enchiladas that night and they all ate dinner together, in the dining room. This was such an unusual occurrence that Maxine and Bat stood in the kitchen beforehand, momentarily baffled, until their mother gestured to the chairs around the table. In their house people tended to be preoccupied by individual activities—work, school, juvenile delinquency, as the case may be. They rarely ate meals together, were rarely even home at the same time. Maxine enjoyed this setup as a rule, especially when it freed her own days from scrutiny, but she liked it less when Russians started showing up on the doorstep unannounced. She sat down across from Yuri, who had taken a nap that afternoon but still looked tired.

  “Yuri, these are enchiladas,” her mother said. “A local specialty. It's Mexican. We are very close to Mexico, I guess you know that.”

  “Ah, yes,” he murmured, looking out the back window as if he might see Mexico right there. Maxine followed his gaze: there was nothing to look at, just some faded rosebushes blooming into the alley, then the square backs of other houses, all the same-looking houses in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

  “I didn't make them too spicy, because I thought you might not be used to it. But if you do like hot food, you can put the salsa on it. Salsa comes from the chile pepper. Do you have chile peppers in Russia?”

  “Chiles are a New World crop, Mom,” Maxine put in.

  “Oh, shut up, Max,” Bat said, and Yuri looked at him. Bat was slumped in his chair, hair falling over his eyes. He also looked exhausted. Last year he'd been suspended for selling speed out of his locker; school administrators took it away from him, and since then he had had no energy. Their parents thought this could all be traced to their divorce.

  Yuri lifted some enchilada with his fork. Strings of cheese stretched down to the plate. He chewed carefully, swallowed, and smiled. “This is delicious, Mrs. Watson.”

  Maxine's mother beamed at him. “Why, thank you, honey,” she said.

  On Sunday, as always, Maxine and Bat had dinner with their father at Furr's Cafeteria.

  “Ah, the Russian's here. Welcome,” he said to Yuri, extending his hand. “We're real happy to have you.”

  “Thank you,” said Yuri.

  They picked up the wet plastic trays and pushed them along the metal counter, past the salads and Jell-O. Yuri watched Bat carefully, Maxine saw, and said to each counter person, “The same as him, the same as him.” He wound up with a plate full of starches, macaroni and cheese and fried potatoes, but seemed satisfied. At the table he gulped down two glasses of Coke, then went back with Bat for coconut cream pie.

  “So, Yuri, what part of Russia are you from?” their father said.

  “Like you know any part of Russia,” Bat said.

  “I live in the very far north,” Yuri said. “I like the weather here.”

  “Okay, I seen this on the TV,” their father said. “That's the land of the midnight sun. In the winter it stays dark, but in the summer, the sun shines all the time, right? Way into the night.”

  “Yes,” said Yuri. He took a fork to his pie and tried it. When he smiled, the chocolate sprinkles caught between his teeth were as dark as dirt.

  Yuri stuck next to Bat all the time. There was one other exchange student that year, a Swede who was living in Happy Valley and called Yuri on the telephone a few times, almost singing his name in his lilting accent, but Yuri discouraged his advances. He explained at the dinner table that he had come to America to meet Americans, not Swedes. At school Maxine sometimes saw Yuri and Bat drifting down the hallway together, or smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Bat said he thought that Yuri was a spy, a Soviet agent brought over b
y their parents to watch his movements. “We're living in a police state,” he whispered.

  “You are like paranoid,” Maxine said.

  Yuri seemed to enjoy the desert. Bat had just gotten his license and bought an old Chevy Malibu—probably with his drug money, Maxine thought—and the two of them spent a lot of time driving around outside town, Yuri staring quietly at the juniper and yucca, the pink and pocked brown of the rolling canyons. They drove to the falls at night and swam in the turquoise water, or threw rocks at the ducks in the Pecos. All this Bat reported to Maxine, speaking in a hushed tone, when they met in the hallway at home.

  “He's my shadow,” Bat said. “But I have to say he's not a bad guy.”

  Maxine didn't see either of them very much. She was a junior and taking AP English and practicing for the SATs. More than anything she wanted to go away to school, someplace east, with leaves changing in the fall and tall brick buildings stacked with dusty books, anywhere away from the desert, from Furr's and JCPenney. Her history teacher, Mr. Vasquez, was coaching her on the SATs. He was a short man whose receding hairline revealed dark freckles on his head as it went. She wondered whether they'd been there his whole life, waiting under his hair, or had come into existence only as his scalp came into contact with the sun. In class he wheezed nervously and coughed a lot, but one-on-one, talking with Maxine about her education, he grew passionate and raised his voice. He felt strongly about her future. He talked about the Ivy League, which she always pictured as a huge dome, like a football stadium garlanded with vines, spanning all the New England states.

  “The SATs are your passport out of here, Maxine,” Mr. Vasquez said, and she very much wanted this to be true.

  On Thanksgiving, Yuri took careful bites of the sweet potato and marshmallow casserole. “This is delicious, Mrs. Watson,” he said. He said this about everything. Maxine suspected he'd been coached.

  On Christmas Day he went into Bat's room and brought out small wrapped gifts: for Maxine and their mother, beaded necklaces; for Bat and their father, Communist Party watches. One had a hammer and sickle where the twelve should be, and the other had a tank. Bat got the tank version and loved it, showing it all around school. Some guy whose father was in the reserves called him a Communist, and after the fight Bat came home with a bruised cheek and a black eye. But he kept wearing the watch.

  Yuri received letters from the USSR, odd, blocky handwriting on thin blue paper with many stamps, a single page folded over itself to make an envelope. One night after dinner he reached into the pocket of his jeans and unfolded one of these. Inside was a picture of his two little sisters, ten-year-old twins with black hair in braids.

  “They're adorable,” Maxine's mother said.

  “Bat will meet them when he comes to Soviet Union to live with us.”

  “Well, we'll see about that,” she said.

  Maxine's mother came home from work and propped her aching feet in their nurse's shoes up on a chair. Maxine brought her a glass of iced tea. Her mother sipped it and asked her to spend more time with Yuri and Bat.

  “I'm afraid they're becoming too attached,” she said.

  “I thought you wanted them to be attached. You wanted Bat to have a friend. You imported a friend for him from another country.”

  “Don't be so dramatic, honey.”

  “I have things to do.”

  Maxine's mother drained her tea and raised an eyebrow. “You're seventeen years old,” she said. “Get out of the house.”

  So Maxine took the boys to the Living Desert, where they wandered listlessly down the nature trail and stared at the antelope. The antelope stared back just as blankly. Yuri stumbled and stuck his hand into a prickly pear, its spines puncturing his palm, but he said he was fine. They went up to the cages at feeding time and watched a snake choke down a bird. Then they walked around the nature center, looking at rocks split open to show the minerals inside.

  “Okay, this is boring, Max,” Bat said.

  “Yeah, it is boring,” Yuri echoed. His accent had picked up a Southwestern tinge, making him sound like a Russian cowboy. They went to the Dairy Queen and had blizzards. This was what there was to do in Carlsbad. Out of here, thought Maxine, looking at the white plastic chairs and the soft-serve machine. Soon.

  She offered to take them to the Caverns, but Yuri refused, explaining that he was afraid of the dark. She didn't believe this for one second—he spent hours at a time with Bat in his murky room, listening to Pink Floyd—but she didn't protest. The boys went off together, arguing about something. Bat's face was less pale than it used to be, with all the time they spent out in the desert. Yuri, too, looked less pale, the circles under his eyes having faded to light purple. When she saw them now she remembered being with Bat on the Fourth of July, driving down to the beach with their parents to watch the fireworks over the Pecos, Bat as a little kid, with a summer tan and still Brian then, laughing his head off at the explosions.

  Then Yuri knocked on her bedroom door, late.

  “Bat's sick,” he said. “He drank too much beer.” He led her outside to Bat's car, where her brother was slumped heavily against the passenger window.

  “Who drove home?” she said.

  “I did.”

  “You know how to drive?”

  “I have seen Bat do it.”

  They dragged Bat into the house and laid him on the bed.

  There was vomit matted in his hair. His lips hung slackly down to the blanket and he started to drool. “We have to keep him on his side, so he won't choke on his vomit,” Yuri said. “I learned this at your school.”

  “I'm glad American education's so useful,” Maxine said.

  They arranged Bat on his side, and he snorted a little.

  She got a bucket from the hall closet and put it on the floor next to the bed. “Well,” she said. “Good job, Yuri.”

  They went outside and sat on the curb in front of the house. It was three o'clock in the morning, in April, and the air felt humid and warm. Yuri smoked a cigarette. When he was done he lay down on his back on the thick grass and looked at the stars. Maxine wanted to ask him about the constellations, whether they looked the same from the USSR or different, but when she started talking she realized that he was asleep.

  The next morning Bat couldn't leave his bed. He tried claiming he had the flu, but the stench of beer on his clothes gave him away.

  Maxine's mother lectured him for a long time. Then she turned to Yuri. “I thought you were different,” she said bitterly. He looked confused and said nothing. “I thought you would help him.”

  “Give him a break, Mom,” Maxine said. “He's not from here, he doesn't know.”

  He stared at his shoes, as if they were discussing some other, absent person.

  Maxine decided it would be good to get him out of the house, so she drove him out the winding road to the Caverns. “It's the only place you haven't been in Carlsbad,” she said. “People come from all over the world to see this. You have to.”

  Yuri lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. He shrugged. “If I have to.”

  She led him down the winding steps to the mouth of the Caverns. Families lingered in the sun outside, pressing the audio guides to their ears. Inside, it wasn't very crowded and they followed the spotlit path into the dark chambers. Maxine had been here a million times. The air was clammy and smelled acridly of bat guano.

  “At sunset,” she told Yuri, “the bats fly out into the sky, hundreds of them. The sky is all blue and orange and pink and full of bats. They spend the night looking for food and then come back in.”

  “Like your brother looking for beer.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”

  “Will they attack me, the bats?”

  “I think they sleep during the day.”

  “Also like your brother!” Yuri grinned, and she smiled back at him.

  She tugged at his sleeve, shyly, and walked to the start of the trail. Secretly, and even though i
t was always full of tourists, she liked the Caverns. She liked the twisted, gnarled formations, the marble colors in them, the improbable shapes. She liked the ones that stretched from floor to ceiling in tensed arcs, like rubber bands. They looked like they could move—and they were moving, in a way, if you thought about it; they were the movement of water made visible.

  “The water drips all the time,” she whispered to Yuri. “Can you hear it dripping? It leaves deposits behind. It takes years and years to make these things. Stalactites are from the top, stalagmites are from the bottom.”

  Yuri grabbed her hand, and his palm was sweaty. “I do not like caves,” he said.

  “It's okay,” she told him, “Come on. It's a little slippery, so walk slow.” She pulled his reluctant hand and led him farther down. The path circled lower and lower until it brought them to the darkest part of the cavern. The formations were barely visible, pale and pink, like shy ghosts. Above them people stood higher on the trail, their voices echoing through the chamber. The lights up there looked as clustered and distant as a faraway town, as Carlsbad did when you were driving in from Artesia. Yuri stood behind her. He put his hands on her hips.

  “Do you feel okay?” she asked him.

  He nodded and his hair brushed against her cheek. He clasped his hands over her stomach. She thought of his two sisters, their braids flying as they ran across the snowy steppes, their pale faces turned to the sky. She thought of the beaded necklace he'd given her, curled up in her jewelry box for safekeeping.

  “You are very pretty,” he said in her ear.

  She loved his accent. He put his hands on her chest, one palm cupping each breast, his fingertips making tiny, almost unbearable movements over the fabric of her shirt, like water flowing in slow, insistent drops. She stood still.