The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

Yarik bunched all the handles of his bags in one fist. Reaching over with his other hand, he grabbed Dima’s, too, one by one, until he could lift the whole huge mass away from his brother’s legs. The bus braked, shook on its engine, shook the bags.

  “That’s the worst of it,” Yarik said. “I don’t know how to protect you, I don’t . . .”

  The groan of the doors, the shuffling of passengers as Timofei pushed through, the space opening up behind him.

  By the time he stepped down onto the street, his son was already running. Towards home? Away from him? “Timofei!” he called. The boy was heading for the playground. “Timofei!” He knew his son could hear him, knew that if Timofei turned to look, he’d stop, come back, knew his son understood that, too. He watched the back of the boy’s head, blond hair shaking as he ran. Behind him, the bus moved off. He could feel it inside him, as if the sound were something he had swallowed, more and more muffled as it wound through him, deeper, quieter. That long-ago morning, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to pick up the cat, or pull the rod out, or even cover it. That night before, he had heard them out there beneath his window and done nothing.

  “Timofei Yaroslavovich!” he shouted, then started to walk, lurching a little with the weight of the bags. He knew the look his brother had given him back on the bus: Can I come up? But at the doctor’s his wife was waiting for Dima to meet her, to take their mother home. He was growing used to finding reasons to turn his brother away.

  Over in the playground, Timofei was climbing the bear, its thick spring shaking beneath him, and Yarik was about to call out again—come back, help carry, it wasn’t the time to play—but his son wasn’t playing. Hunched over its head, the boy pounded his fists against the paint-worn face, reached into the animal’s mouth, and, gripping its upper jaw, wrenched with all the small strength of his arms, all his weight, a yell breaking loose from his thrown-back throat. Beneath him the bear rocked, its mouth gaping, too.

  And his son’s shouting followed the dying sound of the bus down Yarik’s throat, into his belly, deeper. What he had felt from the moment Timofei was born, what a father feels for his first child—the only thing he’d ever felt like that was what had been between Dima and him all those years ago out on the farm. When, he wondered, had he started to feel older than his twin? How had the mere minutes between him and Dima stretched into years? Their father’s death? Their mother’s collapse? The night they’d stolen the skiff and rowed out onto the lake?

  It hadn’t been night at all, of course, but morning, March, still dark. Dyadya Avya must have been the one to send out the police, but when they brought the boys off the search boat the two policemen found their uncle asleep on the gravel strand, curled over the groove the rowboat’s keel had dug, an empty bottle beside him. One policeman kicked his side. Avya grunted, snorted, slept on. The policemen contemplated the shivering boys, the driverless farm truck, then dragged the passed-out peasant over, hauled him onto the dirt mound in the back, told the twins to get in the cab. Instead, they’d huddled inside the covered truckbed, beneath its flapping canvas, and ridden out of the city holding their sleeping uncle tight.

  One policeman had driven the Ural truck, the other following in the yellow Moskvich, past the few lit windows in the old postwar apartments—a family drinking tea, a woman tugging a sweater over a child’s head—through the newer section of the city, wood buildings given way to concrete slab that gave way to dark trees whipping by as the truck gained speed, the road rattling them into dawn. Halfway home, they’d passed the sanitarium. First the smell—the sulfur waft of healing waters bathers had flocked to in pre-Soviet times—then the pointed tops of towers, chimneys black against the ashen sky, the rows of windows awake behind their bars, peering back. And on the rush of wind there came the calls: strange and wild as the whoops and chatter of circus animals let loose, sounds both boys knew were the cries of those kept in there with their mother. The tailing cruiser’s headlights lit their uncle’s ghost-white belly, his shaking jowls, the patch of hair a mist above his chest. Across it, Dima’s eyes had looked so scared. That dawn, listening to those sounds, watching Dima go back to staring at the receeding sanitarium, Yarik had reached over, touched the rough wool blanket on his brother’s back. Bratishka, he had said. Little brother. It was the first time he’d used the name. And Dima had turned to him, the look on his face as unfamiliar as the word, so strange that Yarik had known his brother had heard not only what he’d said, but what he’d meant to say: I’ll take care of you, he’d thought, in the headlights, in the cold. It will be OK.

  The shopping bags pulled at his finger joints, his elbows, shoulders. The handles dug into his skin. That year, orphaned out at Dyadya Avya’s, it was as if he stepped into the role for which their mother, in her hurry to grow him up, had unknowingly been grooming him. What a relief, then, to be so needed for something he was so able to give. A good weight. Back when it had been the only one he had to carry.

  Now, it seemed as if the difference between them had somehow grown into a decade, as if he were holding all that time in the handle-straining bags. Out in the playground the bear’s back was empty, its spring gone still. Somewhere in the building’s stairwell his son was running up the flights. Five stories up, he could see their kitchen window glazed with mirror-light. Soon, his wife would be home, their children hungry.

  At Dyadya Avya’s table, he and Dima had eaten from the same bowl. In the bath basin, they had scrubbed each other, poured water to wash off soap. Playing rugby in the village, they had blocked for each other, Dima a third arm for Yarik, Yarik an extra shoulder catching the blows meant for his brother. And when they visited their mother, they gripped each other’s hand, held tight, went in.

  He stood still as the bear, the bags around him motionless, his hands going numb. I’ll take care of you. It will be OK. For how long now had he been lying to his brother? The excuses for not inviting him up. What he’d left out about becoming a foreman. Everything about Bazarov. A month ago, when Yarik had been taken to see The She Bear. Last week, when Yarik had seen him again.

  The billionaire had been standing in nothing but his underwear. Briefs. Maroon. Peering through the window of the car sent to get him, Yarik had wondered if the man matched even his undergarments to his boots. If the briefs would make his eyes look a little red-tinged, too. Or would his irises seem burnt around the edges, picking up the deep tan of Bazarov’s bare chest, belly, legs? Or just gray as the lake stretched out behind the nearly naked man.

  It was the kind of summer day when the northern world feels the need to remind its people they’re never far from winter. Gusts chopped the lake, blew off the water, tore through the trees, shook the driver’s suit as he opened Yarik’s door. Standing up into it was like stepping into a slap. Yarik squinted past the chain-link fence, the open gate, to the billionaire standing there at the edge of the loading dock. Bazarov. His boss. The night that Yarik had told Zinaida how he’d gotten his promotion, that was what she’d said: your boss? And hearing the question in her voice, he’d been unable to keep at bay the ones that had been hounding him. Lying beside each other on the bed, beneath their drying post-celebration sweat, they’d tried to imagine what lay inside The She Bear’s mind, what a man like that could possibly want from a man like Yarik. Because—when Zinaida said it it seemed so clear—his boss hadn’t handpicked one of his many thousand workers, brought him to a mansion, made him tea, just to impart a bit of good news, indulge a tender heart. Maybe he wanted a local’s perspective on Petroplavilsk. Maybe he wanted an infiltrator among the ranks. A spy, Zinaida had said, smiling. Or, shrugging her small shoulders, maybe just a friend. But why, Yarik objected, would he choose me? And, her smile widening, his wife had raised her eyebrows—maybe more than a friend—before slipping back beneath the sheets.

  Now, his boss was gesturing: bare arms scooping at bare sides, flinging out, almost as if miming the act of treading water. Through the man’s wind-whipped hair, Yarik could just see Bazarov was sh
outing something, something he couldn’t quite make out, then nearly did, was on the verge of understanding, had understood just enough to wish he didn’t, when the driver spoke up and made it clear: “Take off your clothes.”

  Yarik stared at the driver. Then at the nearly naked billionaire. Not because he thought there was anything to his wife’s joke that night, but because he couldn’t help but wonder if the dockworkers would. Bazarov had selected to strip not where the old folks used to sunbathe on the rocks, not at the gravel beach where Yarik used to launch his brother off his back, but smack at the edge of the wharf: cranes loomed above, swung cabled crates, slabs of steel; mammoth warehouses hunkered beneath their rusting roofs; half-built ships rippled with the movement of their crews; all around the dockworkers milled, shouted to each other, tried not to stare. For a second, Yarik took it all in. Then he handed the driver his gloves, his hard hat, and stripped.

  When he reached Bazarov the man was grinning so wide his goatee seemed shrunken. His chest was covered in fine blond curls, the bronzed skin beneath all goose-fleshed. Yarik’s own chest hairs felt as if the chill wind was trying to yank them out.

  “Cold?” Bazarov asked.

  Yarik shook his head.

  And, as if picking up the movement, Bazarov began to shake his own. Just a little, a shiver rippled up his neck, and then a little more so that his locks began to tremble, until his entire face was quivering, his ears, his cheeks, his whole body tensed, every muscle flexing, his head vibrating as if hit by a seizure. He stared at Yarik. His lips burst into shaking. The sound he let out was half horse’s neigh, half motorboat.

  When he stopped, his eyes were wet with held-back laughter. His voice was bright with glee: “You know what you need?”

  Yarik started to shake his head, thought better of it.

  “A paddle!” Bazarov said. He said it with such a shot of joy that Yarik’s body jerked, as if his bare skin was anticipating a smack. But, instead, the man bent down, came up holding what looked to Yarik like a pair of double-headed oars. One of which Bazarov thrust at him.

  He had never been in a kayak. Over the pier-side, tied to the dock, there were two of them, long red missiles of boats. Bazarov climbed down, got in, untied his rope, shoved off, all while telling Yarik about stirrups and rudders and steering, and by the time the man raised his paddle above his head, shouting over his shoulder something about holding it in such a way so far apart, Yarik was still trying to figure how to get in.

  “What about this rubber thing?” he said.

  From the front of his kayak, he heard three thumps—Bazarov tapping the boat’s nose, pat, pat, pat—and looked up to see the man already shooting away.

  For a long time, Yarik followed the figure so distant he could just make out the gold of the man’s hair, the white paddle-blades rising and falling far ahead. They looked like seagull wings, the billionaire swift and sure on the surface as the birds in the air. Sometimes it even seemed the man was slaloming, playing with the waves. The same that slapped the side of Yarik’s boat, beat at him through the bottom, tried to shove him back. Hacking at them, breathing spray, he fought the wind that tried to grab his boat, spin it around, almost wished it would; he’d keep paddling, back to the dock, the car, climb in, slam the door shut. Instead, he shouted at each cold slosh of water, sometimes at the man up ahead. As far as he could tell, the billionaire never once looked back. Then he was too far away to see even if he had. The paddles were distant flashes of light, Bazarov barely a blur between them. And, for what seemed an even longer time, Yarik followed that. His shoulders burned, his back ached. He wished he’d worn his work gloves. Ahead, the other kayak had become barely a spot of red. He stopped paddling, his breath tearing up his chest, his boat seesawing on the waves. The other boat was gone.

  They had been staying far enough into the lake to be out of the algae but in sight of the shore—the distant line shifting from city to suburbs to the ceaseless, glinting strip where the Oranzheria came to Otseva’s edge—and he knew he could go on, keep the shore to his left, meet Bazarov eventually; eventually the man would come paddling back. He could almost see his grin, the way the man had mocked him, shivering, on the dock. Nothing of friendship in that act. Even the idea of it seemed as foolish now in the cold wind of the gray day as his wife’s insinuation had that night. The waves knocked at the boat like a memory of the man’s hand, three small pats. Nothing friendly in that touch. The wind blew lake spray across his back and brought a memory with it: the way Dima, crouched on his shoulders, waiting to dive into the lake, used to signal he was ready to be launched. And Yarik, under water, would echo the count back with his fingers against his brother’s feet. Tap, tap, tap. Swaying there on the surface of the lake, his own surface stretched tight from the cold, he wanted those boys back.

  But he knew the only way to reclaim someplace for them, to set aside some corner of the world where they could return to, was to go forward. That was what his brother didn’t seem to understand; what their uncle had been unable to see; what their father had been unwilling to: when all the world was moving ahead, just holding on was falling behind; striving to stay the same was the same as giving up.

  The paddle had torn his hands, and his shoulders felt ready to rip right off, and his teeth were clenched against their chattering, when he finally caught up with the billionaire. They had gone so far for so long that the shore had shed the glass. To Yarik’s left the land was a long strip of dark green trees. To his right, Lake Otseva opened up, gray to the horizon. In between, the red kayak floated. Bazarov had stretched out, his feet crossed over the boat’s long nose, the paddle resting on his chest like the bar of a bench press.

  “You know,” Bazarov said, “the last time I went kayaking with someone was with Pavel.”

  With? Yarik thought. Went with? He wanted to shove the man’s boat, but he just waited, his kayak bobbing, the ache oscillating in his muscles, the rucked skin on his hands starting to stiffen up. Far out on the lake, one of the oligarch’s berg-sized ships droned. From the shore, almost too far away to hear, there came the low wash of wind through firs. And damned if he was going to ask who Pavel was.

  “That,” the man said, goggles covering his eyes with reflections of sky, “was a long time ago. And also it was on the Black Sea. Have you ever been to the Black Sea?”

  “No,” Yarik said.

  “To the Caspian?”

  “I’ve never been anywhere. Once, to Moscow, when I was—”

  “On the Caspian,” Bazarov went on, “they have one of these. But theirs is up on dry land.”

  “One of what?”

  Slowly, the rest of his body staying still, Bazarov turned the paddle parallel to him, slid it down into the hole from which he’d drawn his legs, left it sticking up at a low slant. He let go, lay there, blade swaying against the sky.

  “Have you ever heard,” Bazarov said, “of the Caspian Sea Monster?”

  Then he rolled off the boat, slipped down the side, and splashed into the lake. Where—his hair floating like a patch of golden algae, his back like the top of a rock, his maroon rear, his legs, his kicking feet—he disappeared. For a moment, the water he’d churned shook Yarik’s boat. Then that was gone, too. Carefully, Yarik dipped a blade, drew a little closer to where Bazarov had been. Staring down, he could see browns and greens below, thought he caught a glimpse of something pale moving in the dark. Then: nothing. The depth. The murk. The silhouette of his own reflection. He looked over at the other boat listing lazily on the waves, the paddle knocking, knocking. For the first time since that long-ago night in the stolen rowboat, he felt the enormity of the lake, the power rippling across its surface, the unknowable everything beneath.

  Something broke the surface. He heard it like a seabird landing next to his boat, and when he jerked around to look, there was Bazarov, treading, breathing hard. He lifted the goggles; they rested on his forehead like a second pair of gleaming eyes. His own eyes were the color of the lake, quiet, almost cont
emplative.

  “Well, this is it.” The man shook his head, flung his wet hair from his face. “Each time I forget what a beast it is. A hundred meters long from head to tail. Stretched out on the bottom like some huge eel.”

  Yarik leaned over a little to look. A tug on his paddle: Bazarov drawing himself closer to the boat.

  “It’s down there,” the man said.

  “Where?”

  “Right under us.”

  “Mr. Bazarov,” Yarik started. The man made a face, as if he’d been hurt. “Baz,” Yarik said, “what are we talking about?”

  And Baz smiled. “Give me your paddle,” he said. Hanging an arm over it, he reached up, yanked his goggles off. “Really, you’ve never heard of it?”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Then”—Bazarov held out the goggles—“swim down and see.”

  The Caspian Sea Monster. Somewhere in the far reaches of his mind, he had heard of it. But he couldn’t see anything. The water was too clouded with particles of plant life rotting away in the lake, too murky with tannins, stirred-up silt, the churning of the waves. He could feel them moving above him, and then he couldn’t, and, his hands stinging, his arms aching, his lungs so full of air it fought his strokes, he swam down. Down towards the ever-darkening depths, the water getting colder and colder, and the light from above leaving him until it seemed he was swimming into nothing but black. Had it been a thing out of his old uncle’s fairy tales? A creature from the fables his father had carved on his boat? He could almost see his father’s mouth, the black mustache, the hole between the open lips, saying the words, could almost hear them.

  By the time he saw it through the murk, he was so close a few seconds more and he might have touched its back. That was what he’d thought was the blackness of the water beneath him. That was what had seemed the unseeable bottom of the lake. That was how big it was. His arms stopped moving, his legs stilled, and, for a second, he was suspended there, staring down at what looked like a blue whale’s back, so wide he could barely make out where it sloped away at the sides, so long he couldn’t see the beginning or end of it at all, only a few places where scales seemed to glint, where the slime that he sensed smothering the rest of it must have been washed away. Then his lungs burst. The last of his air erupted from his mouth, his chest crushed in on itself, and he was kicking, thrashing for the surface, away from whatever was down there. As he flailed upwards, he kept his head bent, his eyes on it, his own voice telling him it wouldn’t move, couldn’t, wasn’t alive . . . But was that a shiver? A ripple? His sight blurred, the goggles pressing into his sockets, and then his breath was gone and his arms were unable to work and the lake water burst into his nose, filled his throat . . .