Fantasy: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  He dropped the pistol onto the cobblestones. He had no remorse—March had intended to kill him, hadn’t he?—but he was tired, desperately tired, and he felt an odd internal instability, as if the spiritual vacuum cre­ated by the death, the instantaneous decompression, had sheared off part of his soul and the remaining portion, now too small for the body it inhabited, was tipping this way and that like the air bubble in a carpenter’s level. He sat down awkwardly, one leg sticking out, the other folded beneath him. Streams of March’s blood fingered among the stones—Chemayev imagined them to be a cluster of gray environmental domes in a crimson flood, a mining colony amid the lava flows of Venus. The sound of the splashing water grew louder, troubling his head. He pressed his fingers to his brow, closed his eyes. Fuck. What next? Where did he stand with Larissa? With Yuri and Polutin? He had the suspicion none of it mat­tered anymore. The victor in this contrived war between himself and March would be trapped forever with an undecaying corpse on the stage set of a magical western, condemned to a limbo in which he would feed on deathly beetles and drink bitter water from a fountain whose splashing kept growing louder and louder. Becoming incredibly, irrationally loud. It was beginning to sound almost like applause . . . . He opened his eyes. Blinked rapidly due to the unaccustomed brightness. Then scrambled to his feet. The body was gone, the fountain was gone, the stones, the trees, it was all gone, and he was standing on the stage of Eternity’s theater, tiers of white leather booths rising on every side into swirling fog, the elegantly attired men and women look­ing down at him, clapping and cheering. Stricken, overwhelmed by this latest transition, he turned in a circle, hoping to find a point of orientation, something that would explain, that would clarify. He caught sight of Polutin. The big man was standing in the aisle, his head tipped back, belly thrust out, applauding with such pon­derous sincerity that Chemayev half-expected to see a ringmaster urging him on with a whip in one hand, a piece of raw fish in the other. On unsteady legs, giddy with the aftershocks of violence, stunned by all he saw, he made his way up from the stage and along the aisle and let Polutin guide him into the booth.

  “Why did you take so long? What’s wrong with you?” Polutin frowned at him, exasperated; but then he patted Chemayev’s knee, the brisk gesture of someone ready to put the past behind them. “You did well,” he said. “You may not think so now, but you’ll see it even­tually.” In his sloppy; drink-reddened face was a bearish measure of self-satisfaction that seemed to answer all questions concerning his involvement in the evening’s events; but Chemayev was unable to process the infor­mation. There was too much to think about. Just the idea that he and March had been part of the entertainment suggested a labyrinthine complexity of physical and metaphysical relationships sufficient on its own to confound him. And the odd certitude he had felt immedi­ately prior to shooting March, the correspondences between that feeling and March’s story about death—what could be made of that? For the life of him, he could not even recall how he had come to this moment. The road that led from a village along the Dvina was easy to follow up to the point he and Nicolai arrived in Mos­cow, but thereafter it was broken, gapped, and once it entered the darkness of Eternity, everything that had previously been easy to follow came, in retrospect, to seem unfathomable. Polutin began prattling on about a meeting scheduled for the next day with his Italian as­sociates, and the talk of business calmed Chemayev. He tried to achieve a perspective, to reorder the universe according to Chemayevian principles, but the image of March intruded. Another ghost to join that of Nicolai. Not so much guilty baggage attached to this one. Though for a vicious killer, March hadn’t been such a bad guy. A slant of wild hilarity broke through his men­tal overcast. Someday they’d say the same about him.

  The background music changed—a saccharine swell of violins flowing into a romantic brocade of darker strings, French horns, trumpets. “Aha!” Polutin said. “The auction!” Disinterested, Chemayev glanced toward the stage. And sat bolt upright. Emerging from the cen­ter of the stage, borne upward on a circular platform, was Larissa. Naked. Carrying a silver tray on which lay a single long-stemmed rose. Their eyes met and she looked hurriedly away. Waiting for her on the stage, his thinning hair slicked down, natty in a white suit, hold­ing a microphone, was one of Yuri’s portly doubles. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” he said, and with a florid gesture directed the general attention to Larissa. “THE ROSE!”

  As Larissa walked up the aisle, serene in her naked­ness, several men shouted bids, which were duly noted by Yuri’s double, who plodded along behind her. When she reached Polutin’s booth she stopped and trained her eyes on a point above Chemayev’s head. Her expression was unreadable.

  Chemayev said weakly, “Larissa?”

  She betrayed no sign of having heard; he saw noth­ing but reflected dazzles in the darks of her eyes.

  Polutin’s arm dropped onto his shoulder. “So, Viktor. How much are you bidding?”

  Uncomprehending, Chemayev looked at him, then at Larissa. The stoniness of her face in contrast with the soft vulnerability of her breasts and the gentle swell of her belly seemed to restate the conflict between what he hoped and what he feared. He had the impulse to take off his coat and cover her, but he didn’t move a muscle. “I don’t have any money,” he said to Polutin. “Not for this. I have some, but . . .I . . . . ” He looked again to Lar­issa. “Why aren’t you at the bar?” He reached for her hand but she pulled away.

  “Don’t.” Her chin trembled. “Don’t touch me. Just do what you have to and let me go.”

  “What’s happened? Larissa, please!” Chemayev made as though to slide out of the booth but Polutin caught his arm.

  “Be very careful,” he said. “I can’t save you from this.”

  Chemayev shook him off, leaned across the table to Larissa. “For God’s sake! I still have the money. All of it. What’s wrong?”

  Yuri’s double moved between them, stared at him dispassionately, his thick lips pursed. “You refused to pay,” he said. “You broke the contract. Now”—he shrugged—“you can either bid or you can remain here until your debt is paid.”

  “My debt? I don’t owe you . . . . ”

  “The price of the woman,” said the double. “You broke the contract, you forfeit her price.”

  A tiny nebula of platinum and emeralds glinted among the tangles of Larissa’s dark hair. Someone must have given her new earrings. In the silvery light her nipples showed candy pink, her skin milky. A mole the size of a .22 caliber bullet hole on the small of her back above the high, horsey ride of her buttocks. Chemayev realized he was cataloguing these details, filing them away, as if he’d have to remember them for a long time.

  “What can I do?” he asked her. “Isn’t there anything . . .?”

  “Leave me alone,” she said.

  His desperation and confusion knitted into a third emotion, something akin to anger but imbued with the sort of hopeless frustration an insect might feel when, after an enduring struggle, it has freed itself from a spi­derweb only to fall into an empty jelly glass, where it is peered at by the incurious eyes of an enormous child. Chemayev’s hand dropped to the money belt but he did not remove it.

  “Make up your mind,” said the double. “There are others who may wish to bid.”

  Chemayev had difficulty unbuttoning his shirt. His fingers felt thick and bloodless, and the inside of his head compacted, as if stuffed with gray rags. Stripping off the belt took an inordinately long time—it seemed to cling to his waist. Finally he managed it. The double grabbed the belt and gave it a shake. “There can’t be much here,” he said.

  “Four million,” said Chemayev emptily.

  “Four million rubles?” The double scoffed at the fig­ure. “The bid’s already much higher than that.”

  “Dollars,” Chemayev said. “It’s in gold certificates.”

  Polutin was aghast. “Four million dollars? Where did you get such a sum?”

  “I didn’t steal from you. I played the German
market. The Dax.”

  Polutin lifted his glass in salute. “And I thought I was familiar with all your talents.”

  “FOUR MILLION!” The double roared into his microphone. “VIKTOR CHEMAYEV BIDS FOUR MILLION DOL­LARS!”

  The assemblage began to cheer wildly, shouts of “Bravo!”, fists pounding the tables, women shrieking. Chemayev put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands.

  “Here,” said Larissa, her voice like ashes. She thrust out the rose to him, the bloom nodding stupidly in his face, a knurl of convulsed crimson. He was unable to make sense of the thing. He tried to connect with her again, and when she looked away this time, his eyes ranged over her body like a metal detector over a snowy field, registering the fullness of her thighs, the razor-cut strip of pubic hair, the swollen underside of a breast. The least of her human details—she had withdrawn all else. She dropped the rose onto the block of ice. The bloom nestled against an empty bottle of Ketel One. Melting ice dripped onto the petals. Yuri’s double took Larissa by the arm and escorted her toward the stage.

  “It might be best for you to leave, Viktor,” Polutin said. “Take the morning off. Come see me in my office around three. And be prepared for a difficult negotia­tion. These Italians will screw us good if they can.”

  Chemayev laboriously pushed himself up from the booth. People were continuing to cheer, to talk excitedly about the size of the bid. On stage Yuri sailed one of the gold certificates into the air where it burst into flames; the fire assumed the shape of a pair of flickering wings and then flew apart into a flurry of small orange birds. With gasps and delighted cries, the crowd marveled at what they assumed was a trick, but might well have been something more extraordinary. Yuri bowed, then sailed another of the certificates high—it floated above the heads of the crowd, expanding into a sunburst, becoming a stylized golden mask like the representation of the benign east wind on a medieval map. Golden coins sprayed from its mouth. One of the coins was plucked out of mid-air by a pale dark-haired man wearing a leather trenchcoat. Chemayev had only the briefest glimpse of him before he vanished in the swarm of people scrambling for the coins, but he could have sworn it was March. Niall your fucking Welcome Wagon March, the rage of Kilmorgan, the pale Gom­been Man. Chemayev could not sustain interest in the implications fostered by March’s possible presence, but he wondered about the man. Who the hell had March been, anyway? What he said he was, who he variously seemed, or a surprise waiting behind the game show’s mystery door?

  “Come a little before three,” said Polutin. “That way we’ll be sure to have time to talk.”

  As Chemayev turned to leave he noticed the rose. Contact with the cold had darkened the edges of several petals, but it remained an alluring complexity, vividly alive against the backdrop of ice and white linen. After a moment’s hesitation he picked it up. Chances were he would only throw it away, but considering the cost, he wanted no one else to claim it.

  * * *

  Outside, the snow was no longer falling. Long thin curves of windblown powder lay across the as­phalt like the ghosts of immense talons; white crusts shrouded the windshields of the surrounding cars. Chemayev sat at the wheel of his Lada, the engine idling, wipers clearing a view of the bunkerlike entrance to Eternity. In the morning, he thought. In the morning when Larissa went to school he’d meet her at the door and ask why she had treated him so coldly. Was it sim­ply because he’d failed her? Maybe they’d threatened her, lied to her. Whatever the reason, he’d be honest. Yes, he’d say, I fucked up. But it’s this place that’s mostly to blame, this broken down excountry. Nothing good can happen here. I’m going to set things right and once we get away I’ll be the man you believed in, the one who loves you . . . . Even as he rehearsed this speech he recognized its futility, but the plug of nothingness that had stoppered his emotions during the auction had worked itself loose, the speedball of failure and rejection had worn off, and all the usual passions and compul­sions were sparking in him again.

  A gaunt, gray-haired man in a tattered overcoat stumbled into his field of vision. One of the krushova dwellers, holding a nearly empty bottle of vodka. He lurched against the hood of a Jaguar parked in the row across from Chemayev, slumped onto the fender, then righted himself and took a pull from the bottle. He wiped his mouth, stared blearily at the Lada, and flung out his arm as if shooing away a dog or an annoying child. “Fuck off,” said Chemayev, mostly to himself. The man repeated the gesture, and Chemayev thought that perhaps he had not been gesturing at him, perhaps he’d been summoning reinforcements. Dozens . . .no, hun­dreds of similarly disheveled figures were shambling toward him among the ranks of gleaming cars. Bulky women with motheaten sweaters buttoned wrong; men in duct-tape-patched hooded parkas, ruined faces peer­ing grimly through portholes lined with synthetic fur; others in ill-fitting uniform jackets of various types; one in rubber boots and long johns. Shadowy drabs and drudges coming from every corner of the lot, as if they were phantoms conjured from the asphalt, as if the as­phalt were the black meniscus of Yuri’s brimful king­dom. Clinging to one another for support on the icy ground like the remnants of a routed army. Drunk on defeat. They stationed themselves along the row, all glaring at Chemayev, each with a charcoal mouth and ink drop eyes, faces with the ridged, barren asymmetry of terrain maps, the background figures in an apocalypse by Goya come to life, each beaming at him a black frac­tion of state-approved, party-sponsored enmity. Yuri’s state. Yuri’s party.

  Less frightened than repelled, Chemayev drew a pis­tol from his shoulder holster, rolled down the window, and fired into the air. Instead of fleeing they edged forward, clumsy and tentative as zombies, confused by the brightness of life but full of stuporous menace. What did they intend to do? he wondered. Curse him? Puke on him? He poked his head out the window and aimed the pistol at the closest of them, a balding man whose seventy-inch-waist trousers appeared to support his upper half like a dessert cup filled with two scoops of yellowish cream pudding, the smaller topped by sparse hanks of white hair like shredded coconut, his sweatshirt proclaiming allegiance to the Central Soviet hockey team. He displayed no fear. And why should he? Who’d be fool enough to kill one of Yuri’s people? Perhaps he was dead already. Chemayev ducked back into the car. Set the pistol on the dash. He had surrendered so much, he stubbornly refused to admit this last formal measure of defeat. But then the army of the krushovas came shuf­fling forward again and he understood that he had nei­ther the confidence nor the force of arms to stand against them. He shifted the Lada into gear and pulled out along the row, going slowly to avoid hitting the shabby creatures who stood everywhere throughout the lot. They pressed close as he passed, like animals in a preserve, peeking in through the windows, and he had a surge of panic . . .not true fright, but a less disabling emotion fueled by a shameful recognition of his rela­tionship to these lusterless clots of anti-life, these ex­hibits in the existential sideshow. Sons and Daughters of the Soil. Old ragged male monsters with the hammer-and-sickle stamped on every cell of their bodies. Boring meateaters, ferocious farters, grunters, toilers, industrial oxen, blank-eyed suet-brained party trolls. Old lion-faced women with gray hair sprouting from every pore, ugly with the crap they’d eaten all their lives, their filth-encrusted nails as strong as silicon, breeding warmonger babies in their factory wombs, dead now like empty hangars, cobwebbed, with wheelmarks in the dust . . . . You couldn’t hate them, that’d be the same as hating yourself, you could only say goodbye to all their grim Russian soul shit. You had to cut it out of yourself somehow, you had to sit down and pinch a roll of fat and slide a knife in, probe for that special Russian organ that made you such a bear for suffering, that prompted you to sit up with your mouth open when God came round with his funnel and his tube of black bile to forcefeed all the Russian as-yet-unborns he was fattening for some conflagration on the far side of infinity. You had to put some distance between yourself and this dirt with its own soul that reached up through the bottoms of your feet and moved you
like a finger puppet. You had to find some way not to be like these relics, even if that meant killing the most vital part of your spirit. You had to run to America, you had to drown in its trivialities, bathe in its chrome wavelengths until all the scum of Mother Russia was washed off your skin, until your pores were so open the black oily essence of your birthright came seeping out like juice from a cracked bug. That’s what you had to do. That was the only thing that could save you. But it was probably not possible.

  Once clear of the krushovas Chemayev accelerated along the access road leading to the Garden Ring. Headlights penetrated the Lada, revealing patched brown plaid seat covers, a littered dash, bent ashtray stuffed with candy wrappers. The radio dial flickered, the heater whined and yielded up a smell of burning rubber. The crummy familiarity of the car consoled him, molding itself to him like a friendly old chair. He wanted a cig­arette, but Larissa had made him quit. Shit. He rapped the top of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Not angrily. A call-to-order rap, a wake-up notice. He banished the feeling of unsoundness that had plagued him most of the night, took stock of his reserves. He pictured them straggled across a parade ground, the sur­vivors of a force that had once numbered four million. He’d have to start over. He’d have to put tonight behind him. Approach tomorrow as if everything were normal. He’d permit himself to make no goals, not even where Larissa was concerned. He’d simply do his job and see what developed. He sped out onto the Garden Ring, merging with the stream of traffic headed for the city center. There was an ache in his chest that seemed part bruise, part constriction, and he knew it would worsen during the weeks ahead. Whenever he stopped for a sol­itary drink or tried to sleep it would send out fresh tendrils of pain, seeding despair and distraction; but he’d overcome those enemies before, and he could do it again, he would rise to the challenge. That was half of life, the way you dealt with challenges. Maybe more than half. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that his obsession with Larissa was partially fueled by the challenge she presented, but as always he refused to diminish the purity he accorded the relationship by defining it as a logical consequence of his compulsiveness. He brushed the idea aside, concentrated on the road, and soon his mind began to tick along with its customary efficiency, plotting the day ahead. Call Larissa. See where things stood with her. Then business. What had Polutin said? The Italians. His office. Chemayev decided to set his alarm for eleven o’clock. That should give him plenty of time. No, he thought. Better play it safe. He’d set the alarm for ten. It would not do to be late.