How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  A wind had started blowing, from inland up the Hudson, and it was dusty. I had half an hour to get to the Central Park entrance on Seventy-ninth Street, meet the three people I’d flown over with, and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see its controversial exhibit “The Green Hills of Earth: Landscape Painting before Ozone Depletion.”

  My mother had never joined any of the new political parties in Siberia. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she never voted again. As I walked along the streets of New York after leaving the goggles shop, I remembered standing once in front of our house in Irkutsk, watching people walk to the church/museum to vote in a confusing election with candidates from fifteen political parties, and my mother would not go. I could not understand that. She had talked to me so often about how communists could force successful adaptations in society, but now she would not adapt herself to a new society. Remembering that made me suddenly realize that she had been just like me — or that I was just like her, after all: we both wanted the world to stay the way it had been. My mother’s world had been communist, and she hadn’t wanted it to change. All those years ago, I felt her watching me when I finally set off down the street to vote, and I seemed to feel her eyes on my back again as I walked down these streets in New York City. I felt it so strongly I turned around once, and an old woman was behind me, but she was black and dressed in an ankle-length black skirt and a long-sleeved, green silk blouse and burnoose, the kind of fine clothes my mother could never have worn because she hardly saw such things in the stores of Irkutsk through most of her life and when they did come she didn’t have the money. The black woman smiled at me, and I hurried on to the park.

  Savka Avilova, my old friend, stood waiting in front of the park entrance. I could tell it was Savka, even in his abayeh and burnoose. He always stood in a crowd with confidence and interest. I walked straight over to him. “Nadya, how could you tell it was me?” he asked.

  I just smiled. “Where are the others?”

  “Inside. Come with me to get them.”

  I looked up at the protective dome that covered the park. “No,” I said.

  Savka grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to the entrance. “Smell the air,” he said.

  The air flowing out of the park smelled of growing plants. Humus. Faintly of lilacs, though it was not their season.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “No,” I said again. “Take away this dome and the plants in there would die. I don’t find that beautiful. I remember those trees growing without domes over them.”

  Savka left me and went in after the others. I walked away from the park entrance, back to where the air smelled of dust and exhaust and people who could afford to bathe only once a week, even in summer heat. I bought the week’s Time at a newsstand. The cover story was on the new coastal settlements in Antarctica after the ice cap had melted. I didn’t turn there first. I started reading about the underwater Swedish cities, and the underwater mines they were developing, and their underwater farms. The Swedes all planned to move into the Baltic. A hundred feet of seawater was the best defense against UV radiation for any fair-skinned man or woman.

  I had started reading about the state of Missouri’s plans to build a dome over all of Saint Louis when a blind woman walked by, tapping the sidewalk with a metal rod torn from some rusted machine. “I’m hungry and thirsty,” she kept saying. “Will someone please buy me food?” No one bought her any food. None of the street vendors handed her anything, especially not a glass of water. She kept tapping her way down the sidewalk. “I’m hungry and thirsty,” she said again and again. Midwestern accent. She’d come here from some desertified part of Iowa.

  I bought a hot dog and a Coke and carried them to the blind woman. “Here’s some food and drink,” I said. I told her what I’d brought. She reached out above the food, so I put it in her hands. She did not wear goggles. There was no need. Her eyes were UV-blinded, white, the color fading from her irises, like my mother’s eyes before she died of skin cancer. My mother had looked at me with those fading eyes and asked me to drive her to Lake Baikal one last time, before she couldn’t see it anymore. We spent the day on a rock high above the lake, watching the sunlight on the water, and the clouds reflected there, and when my mother spoke to me that day it was the first time I could hear the skin cancer in her voice: low, and dark behind her words.

  “Nadya,” Savka called, behind me.

  I turned. Savka waved to me. The other two were with him. I left the blind woman and walked back to them: Yegor Grigorovich, Gomel State University, specialist in the treatment of advanced skin cancers; Aruthin Zohrab, Novosibirsk State University, noted for his work in developing UV-resistant strains of wheat; and Savka, Moscow M. V. Lomonosov State University, dreamer, theorist, believer in man’s ability to restore the ozone layer.

  “You were talking to that blind woman?” Aruthin asked.

  I nodded.

  “Have you read a newspaper today?”Yegor asked. “The U.N. Commission on Blindness estimates fifty million people have gone blind in China. Another hundred million may go blind in the next ten years.”

  “How can that country go on with so many blind people?” Aruthin asked. “What will they do with them?”

  Nothing, I thought. Nothing. I remembered the first time my mother and I had seen a blind Chinese. He had walked across the border and all the way to Irkutsk, somehow, in the fall ten years before. Mother took him into our home. Neither of us spoke a word of Mandarin, and he knew no Russian. I made him some tea and put the warm cup in his hands, and he held it and tried to stop shaking from the cold. We let him sleep by the stove after supper. He kept holding the teacup — he wouldn’t let go of it. In the morning, he was gone. He hadn’t taken anything. He’d set the teacup in the middle of the table. We looked for him, but we couldn’t find him on the streets around our house or downtown.

  “The museum is just up the street,” Savka said. “We should get in line.”

  We started walking toward the Metropolitan. A line of people stretched from its doors, down the steps, and up a hundred feet of the sidewalk. Everyone in line was waiting to see “The Green Hills of Earth.”

  “There are still lines,” I said. “After five months of exhibition.”

  “A silly exhibition, fifty years too soon,”Aruthin said. “Most of us in this line can remember the Earth as it was. I am going because I love the Constable landscapes on loan here, nothing more.”

  “At least now we can appreciate your Constables,” Yegor said. “Landscape art was undervalued before ozone depletion.”

  They went on like that, the two of them. Savka and I stood behind them, in line, listening to them talk about art, moving forward step by step.

  “What made you give up?” Savka asked me, quietly, suddenly.

  “I haven’t ‘given up’!” I said. I was angry with him for asking such a question, for suggesting such a thing. “My life has been the study of biological diversity and how to preserve it. I will not give up on that.”

  “But you wouldn’t come into the park to see the diversity preserved there.”

  He couldn’t see the world the way I saw it. He thought that domed park a good thing. “We had so much,” I said to Savka. “And we have lost so much.”

  We listened to Yegor and Aruthin talk about art, and to the noise of the traffic on Fifth Avenue. We didn’t talk for a time. But I knew Savka well enough to know he wouldn’t let this conversation just end. He noticed the Time I was carrying.

  “You were in Antarctica, weren’t you?” he asked. “What is it like?”

  “Cold,” I said.

  “Just cold?”

  Where could I start? He was reading me like I knew he could. I’d seen things in Antarctica I hadn’t told anyone about. “There’s still a lot of ice — at least it seems that way to me,” I said. “The sea is completely free of ice.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At Mirnyy. I was there in the summer, so there was always light,
glinting off the ice. The glare is softer in the mornings, and the ice looks deep blue then — almost purple.”

  We walked ahead slowly, maybe five feet, then I looked at Savka and decided to keep talking, to tell him about what had made me flinch in Antarctica: make him see that I hadn’t given up though I’d been hurt. “I walked out my first morning there,” I said. “I wanted to look at the sea. The morning was quiet. There was no wind. Then I realized it was too quiet — no seabirds were hunting fish. There were no birds at all, I thought, at first.

  “But there were still some birds. There were still penguins. I came around a bend in the beach and saw hundreds of them lying there, blind, starving. Many had already died, and the stench was terrible. I knew the penguins were starving when I went to Antarctica: the phytoplankton extinctions led to the extinction of krill the penguins fed on and there was nothing left for them to eat. But it never occurred to me that the penguins would go blind. I hadn’t realized how the suffering of their looming extinction would be compounded. Two chicks had just hatched, and I watched them stare up at the sun and try to walk, and I realized they were being blinded, even then, just out of their eggs. I knelt so that my shadow was over their heads for a time and tried to think of a way to save them, but there was no transport for them to a zoo and no way to nurse hatchlings at the base. I had to leave them. I stood up and looked around and I was standing in the middle of all those hundreds of dead and dying penguins, and I could do nothing for them. Nothing, Savka. Nothing.”

  I’d twisted my Time into a tight roll. I unrolled it, then rolled it back the other way to try to get the bend out of it. It was something to do with my hands.

  “You two are a somber pair,” Aruthin said.

  “Here is the museum entrance,” Yegor said. “Get out your money.”

  We paid and went inside, staying in line for “The Green Hills of Earth.” After a time I asked Savka and the others to save my place, and I walked off toward the ladies’ room. But once around a corner, I just sat on a bench and looked at the crowds of people coming in to see paintings of an old Earth.

  Someone tapped my shoulder, and I looked up at somebody in a burnoose, wearing goggles inside the museum. “Are you just going to sit here, lady, or will you come with me now to talk to the Xavier-Briggs people?”

  It was the man with the Jersey accent. I was sure he was a man, now, after his touch. I did not scream. I did not cause a scene. I did not even get very angry. I just knew, then, that it was time to talk with them, time to start my work. In his abayeh and burnoose, the man looked like a medieval monk waiting to receive my confession. But I had nothing to confess, except that I was tired: very, very tired of working for something that would never be. The world would all change now, and I would help mold that change. That was my choice. I did not know what my mother would have thought of my decision. But I was younger than she, and maybe different from her after all, because I was voting again — I realized that now — I was voting in the new world I would help to be born.

  I sat up straight, threw back the hood of my chador, pulled off my goggles (I’d forgotten to do all that again, once inside), and spoke to the man. “Wait for me outside,” I said. “I want to look at these paintings. Then I will go with you to talk to your people.”

  I tried not to imagine him smiling in the shadows of his burnoose.

  I looked away and imagined, instead, the Sphenisciformes nocturnalis that would come, the nocturnal penguins, with their large owl eyes and their thick lids, waking at dusk to tumble into a dark sea. There they would feed on UV-resistant krill I would develop, if I could, and if not krill, something. I would find something to change for them so they could eat in the blackness of their new world.

  I took my place in line and went with Savka and Aruthin and Yegor to look at Constable’s The Hay-Wain and The Grove at Hampstead and the soft sunlight in those paintings. We walked along past the works of so many other landscape artists, and somewhere between Frederick Church’s Heart of the Andes, with its sumptuous trees, and Van Gogh’s A Cornfield, with Cypresses, I opened my Time to the article on Antarctica and looked at each photograph. In years to come, the photographs from Antarctica would look very different. These had no penguins.

  | Go to Contents |

  THE THING ABOUT BENNY

  ABBA, FÄLTSKOG LISTING 47: “DANCING QUEEN,” DAY 3. EN ROUTE FROM THE AIRPORT.

  Benny said, apropos of nothing, “The bridge is the most important part of a song, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, me trying to drive in all that traffic and us late, as usual. “That’s all I think about when I’m hearing music — those important bridges.”

  “No, really.” Benny looked at me, earphones firmly covering his ears, eyes dark and kind of surprised. It was a weird look. Benny never has much to say, but when he does the company higher-ups told me I was supposed to take notice, try to figure out how he does what he does.

  The light turned green. I drove us onto North Temple, downtown Salt Lake not so far off now. “Bridges in songs have something to do with extinct plants?” I asked.

  “It’s all in the music,” he said, looking back at the street and sitting very, very still.

  “Messages about plants are in the music?” I asked.

  But he was gone, back in that trance he’d been in since L.A. Besides, we were minutes from our first stop. He always gets so nervous just before we start work. “What if we find something?” he’d asked me once, and I’d said, “Isn’t that the point?”

  He started rubbing his sweaty hands up and down his pant legs. I could hear the tinny melody out of his earphones. It was “Dancing Queen” week. Benny’d set his player on endless repeat, and he listened to “Dancing Queen” over and over again on the plane, in the car, in the offices we went to, during meals, in bed with the earphones on his head. That’s all he’d listen to for one week. Then he’d change to a different Abba song on Sunday. When he’d gone through every Abba song ever recorded, he’d start over.

  “Check in,” Benny said.

  “What?”

  “The Marriott.”

  I slammed brakes, did a U-turn, did like he’d asked. That was my job, even if we were late. Benny had to use the toilet, and he would not use toilets in the offices we visited.

  I carried the bags up to our rooms — no bellhop needed, thank you. What’s a personal assistant for if not to lug your luggage around? I called Utah Power and Light to tell them we were still coming. Then I waited for Benny in the lobby. My mind kept playing “Dancing Queen” over and over. “It’s all in the music,” Benny’d said, but I failed to understand how anybody, Benny included, could find directions in fifty-year-old Abba songs to the whereabouts of plants extinct in the wild.

  Benny tapped me on the shoulder. “It’s close enough that we can walk,” he said. “Take these.”

  He handed me his briefcase and a stack of World Botanics pamphlets and motioned to the door. I always had to lead the way. Benny wouldn’t walk with me. He walked behind me, four or five steps back, Abba blasting in his ears. It was no use trying to get him to do different. I gave the car keys to the hotel car people so they could park the rental, and off we went.

  Utah Power and Light was a First Visit. We’d do a get-acquainted sweep of the cubicles and offices, then come back the next day for a detailed study. Oh sure, after Benny’d found the Rhapis excelsa in a technical writer’s cubicle in the Transamerica Pyramid, everybody with a plant in a pot had hoped to be the one with the Cancer Cure. But most African violets are just African violets. They aren’t going to cure anything. Still, the hopeful had driven college botany professors around the world nuts with their pots of begonias and canary ivy and sword ferns.

  But they were out there. Plants extinct in the wild had been kept alive in the oddest places, including cubicles in office buildings. Benny’d found more than his share. Even I take “Extract of Rhapis excelsa” treatment one week each year like everybody else. Who wants a heart
attack? Who doesn’t feel better with his arteries unclogged? People used to go jogging just to feel that good.

  The people at UP&L were thrilled to see us — hey, Benny was their chance at millions. A lady from HR led us around office after cubicle after break room. Benny walked along behind the lady and me. It was Dieffenbachia maculata after Ficus benjamina after Cycus revoluta. Even I could tell nobody was getting rich here. But up on the sixth floor, I turned around and Benny wasn’t behind us. He was back staring at a Nemanthus gregarius on a bookshelf in a cubicle just inside the door.

  I walked up to him. “It’s just goldfish vine,” I said.

  The girl in the cubicle looked like she wanted to pick up her keyboard and kill me with it.

  “Benny,” I said, “we got a bunch more territory to cover. Let’s move it.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and followed along behind me, but after about five minutes he was gone again. We found him back at the Nemanthus gregarius. I took a second look at the plant. It looked like nothing more than Nemanthus gregarius to me. Polly, the girl in the cubicle, was doing a little dance in her chair in time to the muffled “Dancing Queen” out of Benny’s earphones. Mama mia, she felt like money, money, money.

  I made arrangements with HR for us to come back the next day and start our detailed study. The company CEO came down to shake our hands when we left. Last we saw of Polly that day was her watering the Nemanthus gregarius.

  ABBA, FÄLTSKOG LISTING 47: “DANCING QUEEN,” DAY 3. DINNER.

  The thing about Benny is, he never moves around in time to the music. I mean, he can sit there listening to “Dancing Queen” over and over again and stare straight ahead, hands folded in his lap. He never moves his shoulders. He never taps his toes. He never sways his hips. Watching him, you’d think “Dancing Queen” was some Bach cantata.

  I ordered dinner for us in the hotel coffee shop. Benny always makes me order for him, but god forbid it’s not a medium-rare hamburger and fries. We sat there eating in silence, the only sound between us the muffled Dancing Queen having the time of her life. I thought maybe I’d try a little conversation. “Hamburger OK?” I asked.