Moscow but Dreaming

by Ekaterina Sedia

  We exit together.

  “I’m Fedya,” he says.

  “I’m afraid of zombies,” I answer.

  He doesn’t look away.

  6.

  The lecturer’s eyes water with age. He speaks directly to me when he asks, “Any other resurrection myths you know of?”

  “Jesus?” someone from the first row says.

  He nods. “And what was the price paid for his resurrection?” “There wasn’t one,” I say, startling myself. “He was a zombie.” This time everyone stares.

  “Talk to me after class,” the lecturer says.

  7.

  The chase across all the stairwells in the world becomes a game. He catches up to me now. I’m too tired to be afraid enough to wake up. My stomach hurts.

  “You cannot break the covenant with chthonic gods,” he tells me. “Some resurrection is the punishment.”

  “Leave me alone,” I plead. “What have I ever done to you?”

  His fake eye, icy-blue, steely-grey, slides down his ruined cheek. “You can’t save them,” he says. “They always look back. They always stay dead.”

  “Like with Euridice.”

  “Like with every dead woman.”

  8.

  Fedya sits on my bed, heavily although he’s not a large man but slender, birdlike.

  “I could never drive a car,” I tell him.

  He looks at the yellowing medical chart, dog-eared pages fanned on the bed covers. “Sluggish schizophrenia?” he says. “This is a bullshit diagnosis. You know it as well as I do. Delusions of reformism? You know that they invented it as a punitive thing.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” I murmur. It’s not. Injections of sulfazine and the rubber room had to have a reason behind them.

  “They kept you in the Serbsky hospital,” he observes. “Serbsky? I didn’t know you were a dissident.”

  “Lenin is a zombie,” I tell him. “He talks to me.” All these years. All this medication.

  He stares. “I can’t believe they let you into the university.” I shrug. “They don’t pay attention to that anymore.” “Maybe things are changing,” he says.

  9.

  “Are you feeling all right?” the lecturer says, his yellow hands shaking, filling me with quiet dread. Same beard, same bald patch.

  I nod.

  “Where did that zombie thing come from?” he asks, concerned.

  “You said it yourself. Chthonic deities always ask for a price. If you don’t pay, you stay dead or become a zombie. Women stay dead.”

  He lifts his eyebrows encouragingly. “Oh?”

  “Dead are objects,” I tell him. “Don’t you know that? Some would rather become zombies than objects. Only zombies are still objects, even though they don’t think they are.”

  I can see that he wants to laugh but decides not to. “And why do you think women decide to stay dead?”

  I feel nauseous and think of Inanna who kind of ruins my thesis. I ignore her. “It has something to do with sex,” I say miserably.

  He really tries not to laugh.

  10.

  In the hospital, when I lay in a sulfazine-and-neuroleptics coma, he would sit on the edge of my bed. “You know what they say about me.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, my cheeks so swollen that they squeezed my eyes shut. “Lenin is more alive than any of the living.”

  “And what is life?”

  “According to Engels, it’s a mode of existence of protein bodies.”

  “I am a protein body,” he said. “What do you have to say to that?”

  “I want to go home,” I whispered with swollen lips. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  He didn’t answer, but his waxen fingers stroked my cheek, leaving a warm melting trail behind them.

  11.

  “I thought for sure you were a cutter,” Fedya says.

  I shiver in my underwear and hug my shoulders. My skin puckers in the cold breeze from the window. “I’m not.” I feel compelled to add, “Sorry.”

  “You can get dressed now,” he says.

  I do.

  He watches.

  12.

  The professor is done with chthonic deities, and I lose interest. I drift through the dark hallways, where the walls are so thick that they still retain the cold of some winter from many years ago. I poke my head into one auditorium, and listen a bit to a small sparrow of a woman chatter about Kant. I stop by the stairwell on the second floor, to bum a cigarette off a fellow student with black horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Skipping class?” she says.

  “Just looking for something to do.”

  “You can come to my class,” she says. “It’s pretty interesting.” “What is it about?”

  “Economics.”

  I finish my smoke and tag along.

  This lecturer looks like mine, and I take for a sign. I sit in an

  empty seat in the back, and listen. “The idea of capitalism rests on the concept of free market,” he says. “Who can tell me what it is?” No one can, or wants to.

  The lecturer notices me. “What do you think? Yes, you, the young lady who thinks it’s a good idea to waltz in in the middle of the class. What is free market?”

  “It’s when you pay the right price,” I say. “To the chthonic deities. If you don’t pay you become a zombie or just stay dead.”

  He stares at me. “I don’t think you’re in the right class.”

  13.

  I sit in the stairwell of the second floor. Lenin emerges from the brass stationary ashtray and sits next to me. There’s one floor up and one down, and nowhere really to run.

  “What have you learned today?” he asks in an almost paternal voice.

  “Free market,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. “It will end the existence of the protein bodies in a certain mode.” A part of his cheek is peeling off.

  “Remember when I was in the hospital?”

  “Of course. Those needles hurt. You cried a lot.”

  I nod. “My boyfriend doesn’t like me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “If it makes it any better, I will leave soon.”

  I realize that I would miss him. He followed me since I was little. “Is it because of the free market?” I ask. “I’m sorry. I’ll go back to the chthonic deities.”

  “It’s not easy,” he says and stands up, his joints whirring, his skin shedding like sheets of wax paper. He walks away on soft rubbery legs.

  14.

  “Things die eventually,” I tell Fedya. “Even those that are not quite dead to begin with.”

  “Yeah, and?” he answers and drinks his coffee.

  I stroke the melted circles in the plastic, like craters on the lunar surface. “One doesn’t have to be special to die. One has to be special to stay dead. This is why you like Euridice, don’t you?”

  He frowns. “Is that the one Orpheus followed to Hades?”

  “Yes. Only he followed her the wrong way.”

  15.

  There is a commotion on the second floor, and the stairwell is isolated from the corridor by a black sheet. The ambulances are howling outside, and distraught smokers crowd the hallway, cut off from their usual smoking place.

  I ask a student from my class what’s going on. He tells me that the chthonic lecturer has collapsed during the lecture about the hero’s journey. “Heart attack, probably.”

  I push my way through the crowd, just in time to see the paramedics carry him off. I see the stooped back of a balding dead man following the paramedics and their burden, not looking back. Some students cry.

  “He just died during the lecture,” a girl’s voice behind me says. “He just hit the floor and died.”

  I watch the familiar figure on uncertain soft legs walk downstairs in a slow mincing shuffle, looking to his right at the waxen profile with an upturned beard staring into the sky from the gurney. The lecturer and zombie Lenin disappear from my sight, and I turn away. “Stay dead,” I whisper.
“Don’t look back.”

  The rest is up to them and chthonic deities.

  EBB AND FLOW

  I sit in my underwater palace, looking through the window at the schools of bright, silent fish drifting in the crystal water, I listen to the sweet music played by jellyfish and seahorses, and I remember. After the love is gone and all the tears are cried out, what else is left to do?

  This story does not have a happy ending; they almost never do. The only happy stories you will ever hear are told by men— they spin their lies, trying to convince themselves that they cause no devastation, and that the hearts they break were never worth much to begin with. But I am the one who lives under the sea, keeping it full and salty. I, the daughter of the Sea kami Watatsumi. I, who once had a sister and a husband.

  I wouldn’t have met my husband Hoori no mikoto if it weren’t for his foolishness. Back on land, he was a ruler of Central Land of Reed Plains, but still he loved to hunt. His brother, Hoderi no mikoto, was the best fisherman their young country had ever known. But Hoori was not content with what he had. He talked his brother into trading their jobs for a day.

  Hoderi could not use his brother’s bow and arrows and found no game. Hoori was even less successful: not only did he fail to catch any fish, he also lost the fishhook his brother prized above every other possession. Hoderi was upset at the loss, and Hoori swore that he would find it.

  He spent days searching the beaches, digging through the mounds of withered kelp, looking under the weightless pieces of driftwood pale like the moon, turning over every stone, round and polished by the sea into the brightest azure shine. But he didn’t find the hook.

  He went home and looked at his favorite sword for a long time. It was a katana of the highest craftsmanship, worth more than half of all Japan. Hoori always talked about his weapon with tears in his eyes, as if it were a child or a dear friend. And yet, his love for his brother was stronger than his love for his weapon. He shattered the katana into a thousand pieces and molded each into a sharp fishing hook that shone in the sun and were strong enough to hook a whale.

  But Hoderi was not consoled. No matter what Hoori did and how much he pleaded, Hoderi remained firm: he wanted his hook, and no other.

  Hoori grew despondent and spent his days wandering along the shore. The soft susurrus of the waves calmed his troubled heart as they lay themselves by his feet, lapping at his shoes like tame foxes.

  He noticed an old man sitting on the beach, throwing pebble after pebble into the pale green waters. Hoori recognized the old man as Shiotsuchi no kami, the God of Tides.

  “Why are you so sad?” the old kami asked.

  “I lost my brother’s fishhook,” Hoori said. “And he would neither talk to me nor look me in the eye.”

  Shiotsuchi nodded and snapped his fingers at the waves. Obedient to his will, they brought him many stems of pliable green bamboo. Fascinated, Hoori watched as the waves reared and spun, shaping the bamboo stems into a giant basket with their watery fingers.

  When the bamboo basket was ready, Shiotsuchi helped Hoori into it. “I’ll command the tides to carry you to the palace of the Sea God, Watatsumi no kami. There is a well by the palace, and a katsura tree growing there. Climb into the tree, and you will be taken to Watatsumi no kami. He will be able to help you find the hook, for he is the ruler of all sea creatures.”

  Hoori thanked the kami and settled into the basket. It carried him along with the tides, and the small round waves tossed his bamboo vessel about, playfully but gently.

  They carried him all the way to the palace made of fish scales. My home, my life, where my sister and I sang and played under the watchful eye of our father, where all the creatures were our playmates, and even rays would never hurt us but let us ride on their shining backs. Seahorses tangled in our hair, and jellyfish subserviently let us pummel their bells as if they were drums. We dressed in finest silks and sealskin, and never knew a worry in the world.

  We didn’t know that he was coming.

  On that fateful day, you did as you were told. My maid came to the well to fetch me a cup of water—even under the sea we need sweet water to drink. She saw your reflection in the well, and she ran, fearful of strangers, but not before you tore a piece of your jade necklace and dropped it into the cup she carried.

  She brought the cup to me and told me about the stranger in the well. I barely listened as I tilted my cup this way and that, watching the sun play across its golden sides, reflecting from the sparkling jade through the transparent water. It was green and beautiful, and I smiled as the reflected sun dappled my face, warming it. Surely, no evil can come from someone who had a stone like that, I thought.

  I called my sister, Tamayoribime, and showed her the stone. She beamed. “Where did it come from, Toyotamabime?” she asked me.

  I told her of what my maid told me, and we went to investigate, our arms twined about each other’s waists. We found you in the branches of the katsura tree, the spicy fragrance of its leaves giving you the aura of danger and excitement. You smiled at us and spoke as if you were our equal.

  “Come down from that tree,” Tamayoribime said.

  You did as she told you, although the smile wilted on your face, and your forehead wrinkled in consternation. I guessed that you were not used to being ordered about.

  “Please, honored guest,” I said. “Come with us so we may introduce you to our father, Watatsumi no kami.”

  You nodded and looked at me with affection. I lowered my gaze before yours, and you smiled.

  We led you through our palace, and you grinned in wonderment, tilting your head up to see the cupping roof of the palace, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and decorated with fine drawings done in the octopus ink. You gaped at the tall posts of sandstone and whale ivory holding up the roof, at the twining kelp around them, at the bright lionfish that guarded access to my father’s throne room. The guardian let us through, and you stood in astonishment in my father’s awesome presence.

  He was a great kami, and he lay coiled atop a sealskin and silk tatami, his skin shining bronze and green, his great bearded head, larger than your entire body, resting on a mound of silk pillows and red and blue jellyfish. A jade incense burner exhaled great clouds of pungent smoke, masking the strong salty smell of my father.

  “Come in, Land Prince,” my father boomed, his voice shaking the intricate panels of fishbone decorating the walls. “Come in and sit down on my fine tatami, and tell me what brings you here.”

  But you kept silent, your mouth half-open in fascinated attention. My father winked at me, and I called in our entertainers—singing fish, dancing crocodiles, and squid who did magic tricks. Flying fish, tuna, and octopus put on a play for you, and two eels played koto and shamisen by twining their flexible bodies around the instruments’ necks and plucking the strings with their tails. You clapped your hands in time with music and laughed like a child. Then your eyes met mine, and you blushed.

  My father, who never missed anything that occurred in his palace, sent Tamayoribime and me out with a flick of his tail. He wanted to talk to you kami to mikoto, I guessed and obeyed. We left the palace and ran through the forest of kelp, shouting for all the fish to come out and chase us on a pretend hunt. It was dark when we came back, and my father announced that I was to become your wife.

  I looked into the marble floor studded with starfish and did not answer. I never argued with my father; I did not know how.

  And so we were married, and I came to love Hoori. I showed him all the secret places my sister and I loved: a grotto of pink stone with a white sand floor, adorned by pearly yellow and blue snails that dotted the walls, gleaming like precious stones; I showed him a large smooth rock where octopi wrote their secret letters in black ink, their tentacles as skillful as the finest brushes; and a dark cave that went down into the bottom of the ocean for miles, gilded with shining algae and populated by phosphorescent moray eels. For our amusement, seahorses staged battles and races, and squid swam in form
ation, shooting giant ink clouds shaped as flowers to celebrate our love.

  Tamayoribime, my sister, rarely joined us on these excursions. Although still young, she understood that the bond the land prince and I shared was not for her to enjoy. She smiled every time she saw me, but I could see the sorrow of her hunched shoulders as she fled to the kelp forest, alone, with only fish for company. My heart ached for her loss, and I wished that gaining a husband did not mean losing my sister. Hoori and I were inseparable, and she grew more distant from me every day, her face close but unreachable, as if it were hidden behind a pane of glass. Hoori had severed the only bond I’ve ever known and thus increased my attachment to him; all the love I used to lavish upon my sister was his now.

  Days passed, and before we knew it, three years had passed since Hoori first entered our palace. I realized that I was pregnant, and told Hoori that he was soon to become a father. He was jubilant at first, but as my belly grew so did the unease in his eyes. He sighed often, and one day I asked what was wrong.

  He told me that he missed the land and was thinking about returning home. “Only,” he added, “I still haven’t found my brother’s fishhook. I cannot go back without it.”

  “Is this why you came to my father’s palace?” I asked.

  He bowed his head. “Yes. Only the time here was so delightful that I have forgotten my purpose. Please, Toyotamabime, talk to your father on my behalf.”

  I obeyed his wishes, as I always did; he was the pearl of my heart, my beloved, so how could I refuse him, even though he wanted nothing more than to return home and leave me behind? I cried as I told my father of Hoori’s plea.

  His great fins fanned slowly as he listened to my words. “Well,” he said. “I will find that hook for him.”