by Josh Weil
“Where are you taking me?” he said into the broad back.
“Shh,” Volodya said. And in a half-whisper, “You’re like a child.” He pinched his voice: “‘How much longer? How much longer?’”
Dima thought he heard, over the footsteps in the gravel, the big man chuckling.
“I should spank you,” Volodya said.
And Dima told himself it wasn’t funny, he knew it wasn’t funny, and yet he felt it was, and he knew that was bad, knew that that was what was replacing the sickness in his stomach.
“I should let Vika spank you,” Volodya said. “She would like that.”
Which was definitely not funny. Which was what was wrong with him in the first place. He tried to make himself feel it, bunched his brow, clenched his jaw, as if with the muscles of his face he could keep the resolve he’d found lying on the railcar’s floor from seeping out, but it was gone, evanesced alongside the nausea, smoothed out with the soothing of the cramps, and trying to fake it all he felt was silly. No: what he’d felt before was the truth. This was false. For the fact was he was being carried on the shoulder of a man who’d just a short while ago been choking him—that was the fact.
“Vika, come!” Volodya called in a whisper cranked up for distance. “I have his ass here waiting . . .”
And as the man’s words dissolved in giggles, Dima could feel them burbling off the shoulder like bubbles blown in water, could feel them against the skin of his stomach, rolling up it, tickling—and it felt good, that was a fact, too—and he lay there jouncing with each step, trying to keep his own laughter from shaking out of his nose.
“Mister Boss-man!” Volodya said, like it was a joke, and they both laughed like it was a joke, and it wasn’t, Dima knew that.
“It’s not funny,” he told the fat man.
“I know,” Volodya said. “You want to hear something funny?”
“No,” Dima told him.
“Then I’ll tell you something sad.”
“No,” Dima said again. “Tell me where we’re going.”
“Listen,” the fat man shushed him, “there once was a time when there weren’t any watches.” He giggled. “Sad,” he said, as if to scold himself. “Imagine: not in anybody’s pocket. Not dangling from any chain. Not even clocks. Nothing. A time before the time of time. Think about that.”
Dima told himself to keep his mind, instead, on where he was being carried. “Volodya—”
“Do you know when the first clock was made?”
“Vladimir Vyacheslavovich—”
“The fourteenth century. Do you know who made it?”
“Where are we—”
“Bosses,” Volodya said. “In the very first factories. You know what they called their new timekeeping things?”
Dima tried to not think about it, and in his trying not to began to, and suddenly it seemed important that he answer, but all he could think was a time before the time of time, a time before the time of time, the phrase afloat in his brain.
“Werkglocken,” Volodya said. “Made from—”
“A time,” Dima said, “before the time of time.”
The fat man puffed a wet laugh. “Nooo . . .” he said. “From bells.” And with one big hand he whapped at one of Dima’s dangling feet. “Bong! Time to get to work. Bong! To take a break. Bong! Better get home.”
They were giggling again. “This isn’t supposed to be funny,” Dima said.
“Listen!” Volodya scolded him. “Before the Werkglocken, there was just the sun—goes up, goes down—sometimes later, sometimes earlier, and everybody knows when it’s up and everybody knows when it’s down, and nobody can say it’s an inch past sunrise without it sure as hell being an inch past sunrise. Do you see?”
Dima nodded behind Volodya’s back.
“They couldn’t control the sun,” the fat man said, “so they replaced it. Made time something that wasn’t ours. Something that was spent. Not just passed, but spent. To spend time. That’s when they started saying it.”
“To spend time.” In Dima’s ears it sounded more sad than he could understand.
“Yes,” Volodya said. “And what can be spent can be bought. Owned. They made time into something they could own.”
A time before the end of time, Dima thought, and it sounded even sadder. Hanging there, head flopping, he watched the gravel go by a meter below his face, and it struck him for the first time in years how strange the mirror-light was—the actual light, hazy and harsh, blanched and clear—and he thought, A dark before the end of dark. He thought, An us before the end of us. He shut his eyes.
Quietly, slowly, his words shaking with Volodya’s steps, he said, “Where are you taking me?”
And Volodya told him, “Home.”
He thought of Yarik, then, walking away from the tram earlier that day, burdened by the plastic bags, and he could feel their weight, feel each jolt in his own sack of a body, each step thudding against the inside of his skull. His head seemed impossibly heavy.
Into it came the sound of footsteps, and then the tips of the feet flicked into his sight, one canvas shoe, the other, the first again, mesmerizing. Until he tilted his neck up, looked behind, and saw her, saw himself bent over Volodya’s shoulder, butt in the air, and, shoving at the small of the man’s back, he grunted, “Let me down.”
It felt good to get on the ground again. His legs felt good, his stomach fine, his head wonderful.
“You feel OK to walk?” Vika asked him.
“I feel great,” he said.
“Then you’re about to start feeling a lot better.”
He glanced at her, and it was true, and that truth was so strange it scared him back to some sense, at last. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“You’ll see.” She tried to take his hand.
He pulled away. “You don’t like to reveal things, do you?”
“Come on,” she said.
“You know why?”
“The others are way ahead.”
“Because you’re wrong. If everyone wants what you say they want, then why haven’t we already made the world that way?” She was wearing her rucksack on her shoulders and his, too, slung over her chest, and he suddenly wanted it back. “Because,” he told her, reaching for it, “it wouldn’t work. It never has. It doesn’t—”
She pressed her palm to his mouth. He let her, let her fingers slip over his chin, through the hair at his throat, along the flat bone down the middle of his body onto the softer place above his waist, and when they got to his waistline they curled around the top of his pants. She tugged. “Come on,” she said again, “you’re still unsteady on your feet.”
Ahead, the tracks snaked out into the open, and beyond them there was the beginning of the access line, and, above, the sky was shaky with false stars, and in front of it all: Vika, walking backwards, pulling him.
If you could only see, she said and, imagine if, and her voice felt the way her hand had on his lips, and he listened to her tell him how it would work, how it already had: Ireland in the Middle Ages, ancient Icelandic thorpes, medieval cities free of rule, governed only by groups of neighbors, no laws, no central control. She told him how serfs had taken refuge there, how, centuries later, cities had cropped up again, a brief boom in anarchist communes after the Spanish Civil War. But mostly she talked of Russia. Before the Bolsheviks, the Decembrists, the tsars, the Code of Law, even the existence of the serf, here when all there was were small farming villages, the world of the mir. That was what they called the lands around each village: the mir, the world. The dirt streets they shared, the icehouses, ovens, woodlands and pastures and wells, all shared. One household borrowing another’s horses to plow a patch of the communal fields, another bringing bread made from yet another’s rye, long lines of men and women sewing flaxseeds side by side, threshing it in communal barns, butchering communal livestock, stooking communal stacks of hay: the world, the mir. And outside the mir another mir, surrounded by other fields, enclosed by othe
r woods, another and another, unknown to any sovereign, ungoverned by any hand, a Russia made up of thousands of little worlds.
A Russia, Dima thought, before the end of Russia.
They had come to the rusted fence where the rail yard stopped. One after another, sets of tracks hit their concrete buffers and ended, too, sudden as time ceased. Except for one. It ran on, out, past the fence, dwindled into the distance. To either side of it a barrier of hemlocks grew, planted by the Consortium in preperatory years, a darkness-indifferent woods, branches swaying as if from a breeze blown down the access line. Dima could have stood all night watching the forest undulate if it hadn’t been for the faint buzz growing in his ears. He followed the sound upward: the power line, the towers, the wires swooping and rising into the distance, cresting and falling like waves. Which would make him underwater. Which would make the tracks beneath the wires, their shadows cast upon the lakefloor. Which would mean they weren’t solid at all, just strips he could stir with the brush of his hand. When he stooped down to touch them, Vika let go of his pants. The rail was solid.
He looked for Vika to let her know the news, but she was already disappearing into the shadows of the trees. Straightening up, he looked for the others. They were gone. No: he could hear them rustling in there. One by one, they came back out, the branches shifting, a shape separating from the trees, hurrying up the slope back to the tracks. Each of them carried some sort of board, wide as a spread hand, long as an arm, and, coming closer, he made out, beneath each plank, some piece of metal catching a curve of gleam. Wheels. Dima stopped, stared. Fedya was the first to set his on the rail—a heavy thunk—the others following with a clattering of metal on metal, and then a whooshing, a hiss, the sound rolling louder and louder towards Dima.
“That one,” Vika called to him, “is yours.”
They rode the outside rail in single file, Fedya then Vika then Dima, Volodya behind him so he wouldn’t get left. Dima watched the woman in front, the way she set one foot a little back on the board, used the other to push at the ties as they flicked by—it wasn’t hard; he just had to keep his balance, his distance—and when she stopped shoving and planted both feet and sank bent-kneed and low and let it glide, he did the same: the four of them flying down the rail, the trees whipping by in silent speed, a picture of the wind that rushed at Dima’s face, shook his beard, went wild through his hair. Squinting into it, all he could make out was a blur: her hurtling, the rails streaking, the ties flickering by, the streams of power lines like flight paths of birds somehow made visible to him, visible as the mirrors above, and then, suddenly, he could see beyond them, through the nighttime haze, make out the Milky Way, the distant planets, the pristine blackness of space.
Somewhere his father was smoking his pipe. Somewhere he was whittling a story out of wood. Somewhere his uncle was standing barefoot in the sun in the middle of a field, his toes burrowed into the dirt, down to the coolness, down to the coolness, and what was left of his mother but love for him? What did his niece know but the softness of his beard? To whose leg did his nephew cling? Who was as forgiving as his brother’s wife? What more could he want than to feel, even now, below his feet, the shaking of Yarik’s shoulders before the launch into the lake, even here, the wind rushing by as they slid beside each other on their skates, to know that no matter what the world did to itself, what it might try to do to them, there were places in it, in him, in his brother, where it could never reach.
They went on. The rails went on. The trees blurred by. Nothing but the walls of the woods and the causeway between them and the woman in front of him hurtling down it and the man behind him coming on.
It was a shock to hit the Oranzheria. Its high glass plain came into view like the shore of a continent glimpsed from far out at sea. Bright as ice beneath the mirror-light, hovering above the tops of the trees, its edges stretched as far as Dima could see. Only straight ahead, where the access line cut through, was there a gap. They shot into it. From beyond the buffer of hemlocks came the distant clangor of heavy machines, the roar of threshers, the din of a thousand voices, as the endless line of glass, broken only by the tops of the tallest trees, streamed by. In front, Fedya flung his arms out to either side, flipped it all the finger. Ahead, Vika did the same. Behind him, Dima knew, Volodya must be, too. He stretched his own arms out, stuck up his middle fingers, and, grinning into the wind, rocketed through.
Over an hour later, they came out the other side, blew by the outer reaches of the Oranzheria and into the sudden quiet of the still-standing woods. Not long after that, they stopped. His left heel bruised from using it as a break against the thwacking ties, Dima followed the others down the embankment into the trees. Here, the mirrors’ reach was new enough that there were still birches, aspens unfurling freshly budded leaves, pines strong and healthy as if grown from Consortium seeds. Beneath the boughs they hid their rail-boards. Nobody spoke. It was darker below the canopy and he hustled to keep from losing the others behind the scrim of pines, until the scrub cleared and they were scrambling down the dirt of a dry creek bank. Walking along the sandy bottom, the sound of the woods began to change. Between the rustling of their footsteps he heard music, the distant murmur of a radio or TV.
Vika turned to him. “You want an answer?” she whispered. “Why the old way failed? Why our way never gets a chance?” Taking his hand she pulled him up, over the lip of the bank, onto the forest floor.
Through the trees, he could see colors flashing, giant TV screens. Out of the creek, he heard it: the bombardment of loudspeaker ads.
“Why do you think,” Vika whispered, “the Party wouldn’t let us out to see the West? Why do you think they were so scared of even letting pictures in?”
Beside them, Volodya whispered, “To make us want what we don’t know we want until we want it: the genius of capitalism.”
“Spit on it,” Fedya said.
“Indeed.” Volodya nodded in the dimness. “But admire it, too. Because that, my expectatory friend, is the piece upon which the entire enterprise rests.”
They moved off through the trees, whispering as they went.
“Always increasing,” Vika said.
Volodya added, “Ever expanding.”
“Fucking America,” Fedya spat. “Hardest working fuckers in the world. Make three times more shit every hour than they did just fifty fucking years ago.”
“So why”—Volodya lifted a bent birch trunk for them to walk beneath—“are they working more hours? Not a few, not even a week’s worth, but months. Months more every year. Why?”
Behind Dima, Vika said, “Because more productivity just means more work.”
“Spit on that.”
Dropping the branch, Volodya whispered, “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Unless . . .” Vika started.
And Fedya finished: “. . . for every fucking hour some wage slave works to make more shit, he’s also wanting to buy more shit.”
“More production,” Volodya said, “means more products must be bought, means the worker must have more money to buy them, means he has to work more hours to get it, means . . .”
“He’s making,” Fedya said, “more fucking products.”
“More profit,” Volodya added.
“But,” Vika chimed in, “not for him.”
“Because?” Volodya asked.
“Because,” Fedya said, “he’s buying the fucking products.”
They came to the edge of the woods. Scrub pines and thin saplings and the bramble-filled field that had been cleared around the outside of The Dachas. The concrete walls climbed up towards the backs of the mammoth TV screens, loomed high above the guard station set on its concrete blocks below, a green steel shell punched with a single door, the square hole of a window. It glowed, the bulb-light shifting with the shadows of men moving inside.
Outside, in the woods, the four of them drew close together.
“But what if,” Volodya whispered, “the worker stops, sto
ps wanting more, becomes simply satisfied?”
“Then,” Fedya said, “the system is fucked.”
“Or,” Vika said, “it’s got to make him unsatisfied.”
“What if”—Volodya dug in his rucksack—“his wants are fulfilled?”
“Then it’s got to make him want new wants.”
Out of his bag, Volodya brought a handful of what looked like swimming goggles with their sides painted black. One by one he handed them out. “The rotary phone,” he said.
“The push-button phone,” Vika said.
“The cordless phone.”
“The mobile phone.”
“The wireless earpiece,” Fedya chimed in.
“Good one,” Volodya told him.
“The television?” Fedya offered.
“The color television,” Volodya said.
“The flatscreen television,” Vika said.
“The recordable television,” Volodya said.
“Fucking cable,” Fedya said.
All three had put their goggles on. They looked at Dima, the black-painted rims and sides making their eyes, just visible behind the plastic, look lit by penlights. Fedya motioned for Dima to put his on. When he did, he found he could only see straight in front of him; all his peripheral vision was blocked out. He turned his head to face Volodya. The fat man was digging in his bag again. “What about the zerkala?” Dima said.
“Of course,” Volodya answered. “Soon, we’ll all want our very own orbiting imitation of the sun.” He had taken out a small metal box and now he flipped the top. Inside sat a clear cake of wax. “Unless,” he said, taking out a pinch, “we simply stop.”
“You mean,” Dima whispered, “stop wanting?”
“No.” Rolling the wax into a ball, Volodya took a second pinch. “Of course you don’t stop wanting,” and passed the box on to Vika.