by Josh Weil
The day before, it had been Dima staring down at the holes his hands had made, the strange shape his splayed body had imprinted in the bank. Mud had clung to his neck hair, slicked down his back. In his underwear, he’d hunted the shallows for the rest of his clothes. By the time he’d given up, the mud had dried to a crust on his back, silt sifting down into the water with each step. Sliding his bare arms through his rucksack’s straps, he knew it would be a long time before he saw his brother again. Knew, splashing south in nothing but wet underwear, it would be a while before he’d want to.
He stayed close to the bank, screened by the reeds, until the river turned and, climbing out, he made his way along the drainage ditches, through the woods, up the embankment of the access line. At the tracks, he stepped onto a rail, hoping to relieve his root-and-rock-torn feet. Instead, the steel seared them. Scrambling off, he stood looking at the burning metal, the smear of blood from his gouged soles bright in the sun. But it was on his face that he felt the heat. His forehead. His eyelids. He shut them. Her fingertips.
He had intended to take the tracks back to Petroplavilsk, to hide between the walls of buffer woods until, beneath the less revealing mirror-light, along the city’s side streets, he could, unclothed, sneak home. Where these days his mother hardly seemed to know him, where his brother no longer came, where the only soul he ever spoke with was the bird. Home. He could hear Volodya’s voice, could feel again the sadness with which the word had filled him then. Because, the fat man had said, we’re your friends. And Fedya: We’re your people. And Vika, too: You just don’t know it yet. But how could they be after the way they’d used him? The memory made him want to sit down, stay there, stop thinking. Because how was what his brother had done, or stood by and let be done to him, any better? Dima took a step, as if to shake the thought, leave it behind. Because if that was true so was this: all his life he’d never felt the need for friends, could never comprehend how others created out of nothing anything close to what he and Yarik had always simply had. Have, he told himself. But when he took another step it was in the oppsite direction. Away from the city. Down the tracks towards a distant place where they seemed to disappear.
And here he is, this tall skinny man, all shaggy hair and black beard and bony body and underwear, trying to step from railroad tie to railroad tie. Strange storklike stride, awkward and long. And sometimes, when the trees darken him with shade, when their shadows erase a section of sun-gleamed line, he steps up, balances on a rail, sets one foot before the other, lifts his arms.
Hours to reach the end of the Oranzheria, and an hour’s walking after that, and all the while he watched the woods for the spot where they’d turned off. Any other time of year the tracks and forest would have been already illumined by only mirror-light, but here the midsummer sun still hung in the tops of the trees, its redness slivering through their boughs, shadows masking the wood’s edge from Dima’s memory. Still, he recognized the sound. That far faint whine of wheels-on-rail. Even as he turned, he knew, somehow, it would be her. A small dark spot coming on. Beneath the already risen mirrors, below power lines strung like strips of sunset, amid the growing sonance of her speeding rail-board, she took shape: jeans flapping loosely at her legs, metal glints all up her sternum, her hood blown off, her bangs flying, her face suddenly there.
In the silence left by her heel-thudding stop he felt her eyes all over him. His underwear, his nothing else.
“The poet”—her hands sprung open, as if presenting him—“reappears!”
He resisted the urge to swing his rucksack off his shoulders, bring it around to cover his chest. “I was just out here . . .”
“Just out here?”
“. . . looking for the place where we got off last time.”
“And to think,” she said, “all this time we’ve been looking for you.” She flicked a finger against his bare chest. “What happened?”
He folded his arms over the place where her flick had hit. “Why don’t you tell me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?”
“Me?” She pushed her shock of bangs out of her eyes. “I was down at the park waiting for you to pick up the story.”
“I mean the video.”
“Oh.”
“Why—”
“Then you mean us. The way we opened our group to you, risked smuggling you into our house, showed you everything that we’re about. Gave you our trust. Not to mention the gun. Which you shot.”
Beneath his folded arms he could still feel the faint knock of her finger. “You used me,” he told her.
“True,” she said. “Though I don’t remember using you quite as hard as this.” This time her finger found his belly. “What I want to know,” she said, “is what happened to Dima.” Dropping her hand, she plucked his underwear waist, let it snap back. “To his clothes.”
Watching her smile he knew he wouldn’t tell her. But when she reached to him again her smile slipped away. Beside the hurt where he knew his jaw must have begun to show the bruise, he could feel her fingers hovering.
“To you,” she said, the last of the mirth leaving the black of her dark eyes, something seeping in its place that he hadn’t seen before, but that, seeing it now, made him want to see it again. Maybe it was simply that—the wish to hold her almost-softness there, the fact that as he spoke it stayed, softened even more—that made him tell her all that had happened, from the foreman’s first words to the spectacle of him sprawled out in the mud. While he talked she seemed to take him in anew, too. Maybe it was only his cuts and bruises—she touched the skin over his jaw, stared at his torn-up feet—because when he was done she sat down on the rail beside him, started unlacing her shoes. Then, tossing them onto the gravel, she stripped off one of her socks.
They were striped, purple and gray, far too small, and when, sitting on the rail, he’d worked them over the wreckage of his feet the heels hung from his soles in two loose flaps. Retying her shoes beside him, Vika reached over and swatted one of the wattles. Then grabbed his foot and, shaking it, let loose a burst of rooster’s crows. Laughing, she stood. “You know what they say about big feet.” She kicked his other one. Waited. Rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t,” she said, and, dropping her chin, peering down at her chest, started popping open her row of safety pins.
Standing, he told her, “It’s OK,” set an outspread hand over hers, as if under his fingers her own would have to stop. But they kept moving beneath his skin so that he couldn’t help but be more aware of hers. “I’m not cold,” he told her.
“You will be,” she said.
He could feel each pin unlatch, as if what she touched transferred straight through to his fingers. Then her fingers were out from under his, working lower, and there was just her chest beneath his palm. He drew his hand back. Bending a little forward, she shucked the sweatshirt off. Struggling with the sleeves, her arms hooked behind her, and he could not help but see the way her breasts pressed against the undershirt she wore, the way age had torn it at the neck, the underarms, thinned the fabric nearly to gauze: twin circles dark as new moons showing through, and, below, where her navel would have been, another—faint shadow—red as Mars.
When he looked up from it her eyes were looking down. They seemed to take him in a little lower than where he’d stared at her. He tried to shift away from her grin. “I guess it’s true,” she said and tossed the sweatshirt to him.
Tying it quickly around his waist, he turned it so the back hung down in front, an oversized loincloth equiped with a hood. That just made her laugh again. And setting one foot on her rail-board she gave her haunch a slap. “Come on,” she told him. “There’s room on here for three.”
They rode together, him behind her, both with a foot on the board, her pushing at the ties with her other, his sock-foot hovering helplessly. The ridge of her hips rocked beneath his hands, the neck of her shirt blowing open at her nape. Every now and then her leg, reaching back, would brush into him, rush his blood, unt
il, to slow it, to steer his thoughts back to something that would set him straight, he told her the thing he had left out before: that his brother had been there. “On the bank,” he shouted into the wind, “watching.” Saying it hurt so much it worked: he could feel his blood drain out, and, suddenly, he wanted to lean forward, rest against her back, let her support him for a second. Instead, he just shifted a little closer, shouted over her shoulder a little more: how worried Yarik was, how he hated knowing that, the way his brother couldn’t comprehend the choice Dima had made. “Sometimes,” he said, “I see the way they look at me. Such hate. And I think I understand.” Speaking so close that her bangs fluttered back almost into his eyes, he told her how, walking the rails that afternoon, he’d wondered if the foreman who’d berated him had been right, if there was something wrong with him, something skewed, a flaw in who he was, a moral failing in how he was choosing to live his life.
“That,” she shouted back, “is so fucked-up!”
For a second he thought she meant the way he’d turned to his brother in order to distract his mind from her, but she went on—“The morality of work!”—and, though he could feel their speed in his beard, in the breeze they made together, it seemed, as he tried to catch snippets of the words blown back at him—“. . . once they make you think like that . . . policing yourself . . . mind-set of slaves . . .”—as if it were her voice itself that shook his beard, brushed against his shoulders, his bare chest. “Capitalists,” she said, “Communists,” and something sank in him—that he had told her what he had and she’d replied with this. Staring down at the rail slipping by beneath them, the ground a blur, he heard her saying, “. . . all they have in common . . .” and, in the smoothness of their glide, felt a tremor, faint and passing fast, but undeniable. “Coercion,” she said. Up ahead, where the woods followed the tracks around a curve, the last red of sunset reflected on the trees washed out with a brighter light. The branches lost their shadows. Around the bend a star flared on. “Economic.” He glanced from the light to her. “Political.” He looked ahead again. “It’s all the fucking same.” Behind the headlight: two sky-lit windshields, a massive bank of shadowed steel, the train all heavy hurtling velocity. She was saying something about consumption, production—“. . . same as what is worshipped now . . .”—and Dima’s foot was hovering in its sock, about to bang down, slow them—“. . . the same slave idea . . .”—shove himself free, when the horn blast blew and the board juddered and the speed rattled out from under it, bursting towards them instead in the shape of the train, and she was off, him stumbling after, the two half-scrambling, half-tumbling down the embankment, his rucksack slapping at his back, her rail-board slamming into the gravel as they slid to a stop, flipped onto their fronts, watched the train crash by above.
Beneath its thunder, Vika slid close, her face closer. “Look at them,” she shouted. And if he swiveled his head to watch a window, he could see the dim shapes of passengers. “They’re the ones whose lives are skewed.”
The wind blown off the train was cold, rushed over his skin, prickled his flesh everwhere except his ear; there, her breath was warm.
“Fucked-up,” she said, “as my family.” He would have looked at her then, but his ear didn’t want to leave her breath. “My grandmother was a Hero of Socialist Labor. My father was awarded The Order of Labor Glory. Had the medal. For making shit that no one needed. But making a lot of it, working hard at it. Virtuous as your brother.” He looked at her. With his ear towards the tracks, the thunder was louder. “You know where my father was today?” she shouted over it. “Mongolia. The Gobi Desert. Mining. His big chance in the new life. He left three years ago. My mom went with him. And fuck me.”
And fast as thunder rolling away into the sky, the train was past.
“I was sixteen,” she told him over its receeding wind.
In the quiet, he asked if she ever saw them.
Her smile was a short, aborted thing. “It’s six thousand kilometers from here.”
“Don’t you miss them?”
Turning to the tracks, she pointed at the quickly disappearing train, showed him the shape of someone clung to the last car’s ladder: faint face of a figure twisted around, as if to watch them back. “You and me?” she said, her breath on his ear again. “We’re the ones trying to live right. To live straight. The way others look at us? The way they treated you today? It’s because they know it. And they want it, too.”
Then the train was gone and her breath was gone and on his beard he felt her hands turning him to look at her and her face was so close. “Dima,” she said, “there’s nothing wrong with you.” So close he could barely focus on her black eyes, her bad-toothed smile. “Except”—her fingers touched his shoulder, brushed down his arm—“that you’re all bumps.” Her touch vanished only to reappear on the bare back of his thigh. “A plucked bird.” She pinched his hairs. And, pulling back into sharpness, said, “Don’t you have anything in here?” This time the tug came from his rucksack strap. He shook his head. But she was already asking, “What do you have in here?” Up off her elbow, she rose, swung a leg, was suddenly over him, sitting on his back. While she unbuckled the straps he tried to breathe. Her crotch pressed down on his rear, his underwear so thin he could feel the roughness of her jeans, her thigh muscles tightening with each yank of a strap, the way her whole body shifted over him when she loosed the top and leaned forward to peer in. An armful of soybean pods he’d stolen from the Oranzheria, a sack of strawberries, a few cucumbers lost among the pilfered ears of corn, smothered by the heavy head of a sunflower he’d snapped off to harvest its seeds back home. Nothing that would explain why, without another word, she sat back, stood up, stepped off. He watched her shoes pass by him: small cascade of stones. By the time he’d gotten to his feet she was halfway to the tracks.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She turned back. Behind her belt, against her belly, she’d shoved the sunflower bloom, the big head mashed halfway inside her jeans, the other half a golden mass of petals spread in a semicircle over her middle. “To our picnic spot,” she said and, turning, climbed the rest of the way up to the rails.
From afar it glittered, the border between the mirror-lit world and the darkness of the one beyond, shimmered as if all the stars lost from view inside the city had been swept out to the edge in swaths of dust. But it was insect wings. Billions of them. Drawn each night towards the perimeter of that perpetual light. A mass migration met by the birds and bats who fed on it. In flocks thick as fog they circled the inside edge of that outer ring. While the moths and beetles and winged bugs flew in, a lepidopteric storm, ceaselessly swept into the coruscating verge.
When Dima and Vika first arrived, the line between the mirrors’ sphere and the rest of night was still blurred by the last lingering of near-solstice light, but as they sat at the edge of the bog where she had brought them they watched the border of insects and birds begin to build itself in the air around. Slowly, the zerkala’s glow seemed to grow more bright, the darkness sifted down beyond, while over the wide open soggy field, the stunted plants and small reflecting ponds, the glimmering gathered: a thin gauze laid over the darkening distance, slowly thickening into a cloud until at last it was a shaking wall of wings. From far out in the field the sound blew back to them: an ocean washing up against the rock on which they sat. In silence. For hours.
It must have been past midnight before she spoke. “If you were working,” she said, “you wouldn’t be here.”
He had untied her sweatshirt from his waist and put it on, the sleeves too short, the shoulders too high on his, the front stretched across his chest, clasped there by the couple safety pins that reached. Against the chill in the air and the warmth of her so near he had lain the rucksack across his lap. In hers, she held the sunflower head.
“If I gave a shit about my work,” she said, “I’d be sleeping.” Her fingers dipped, picked out a seed. “Instead of here with you.” She split the shell. “I nev
er would have stood around in the park.” Flicked the husk. “You never would have stood there on that statue.” Slipped the seed between her lips. “We never would have even met.”
He watched her chew.
“You know what sucked?” she said.
And he looked at her eyes again.
“Waiting there for you.” She dug at the sunflower head. “For days. Along with everyone else. Though they gave up, quit coming. I was there today. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before that.”
“Why?”
This time she handed him the seed. “The same reason they all were. Only I cared about it more.”
His fingers turned the hard shell. “It’s just a poem,” he told her. “Just a foolish—” She reached over, snatched the seed back from his hand. He said, “It doesn’t even mean anything.”
“It does to them. To us. To listen to it. It’s not what it’s about,” she told him. “It’s what it is. It reminds us, standing there, drifting off from everything else. Maybe of how it was before. Maybe how it could still be. Not the fable. Not the fucking poem. But the time to listen to it. The kind of life that would let us.” She turned to him, leaned in, and he could feel the weight of the seed head slide against his leg, the petals slick and soft on his skin. “All those people?” she said. “They didn’t come for a poem, Dima.” She was so close, now, that she had to reach out with her empty hand and spread it against his chest to hold her weight. “They came for that. They wanted that.” In her other hand she held another seed. “They just didn’t know until you showed them.” This one was already shelled. “You made them feel it,” she said. “And then?” She held the seed an inch from his mouth. “You disappeared.”