Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  But no, Olya drives away her melancholy thoughts. You have to move, to keep holding out, like the enterprising frog in the old parable, you have to whisk up the unsavory milk of the Moscow slush and the February cold into sour cream. You have to move, take yourself in hand, remind your body that it exists. That’s why in the heart of February there are so many melancholy girls in the Moscow clubs, propped up against the bar with an air of anguish. In reality these are not girls, they are trees in an autumnal copse. They have lost their leaves and are waiting for spring to come back, or at least for the fine country folk to deck their broken branches with pennants and garlands. And that’s why the flags of the sheets in the men’s bachelor apartments flutter so alluringly, why the one-off wedding wreaths of the fluffed-up pillows beckon, blessing the heads of the bridal couple for a single night. At this time of year men don’t make love with these girls – murmuring sweet nothings in their ears and rocking the frail boats of the beds – they merely remind the trees broken by winter that they will live until the spring – if, of course, they are not killed before then by the woodman’s axe, the bitter frost, or some forest disease. But then, it’s best not to think about diseases, especially in February, when it’s already hard enough to remind your body that it exists.

  And that’s why, thank God, apart from the dubious sexual acrobatics to which Ksyusha and Olya are both indifferent, there are other forms of physical activity, and let’s go to Fitness Planet, you can get a one-off ticket there, and I have a club membership card, and we can work out a bit on the exercise machines – of course, only if we feel like it! – and then have a swim and afterward we’ll definitely sit in the sauna and come out relaxed and refreshed, almost happy, reminding ourselves that February really is the last month of winter so spring isn’t far away. Well then, are we going?

  Ksyusha’s objections rustle feebly in the phone – swimsuit, tracksuit, and what else? – no, no, today Olya’s in a determined mood, no, no, no, we’ll call round to your place for the swimsuit and the tracksuit, and if you say you haven’t got a good swimsuit, you’ve only yourself to blame, we’ll go and buy you a new one in next summer’s fashion. And if you try to say you haven’t got any money, I’ll have to give it to you as a present. All right, we’ll call round to your place for the old one.

  They take little keys for adjacent lockers and get undressed, listening to the conversations of the other girls. Which is better – Pilates or yoga? Should women go to aikido, or is it just a sheer waste of time? Is it true that working on exercise machines without a personal trainer for ten dollars an hour is just throwing away your time and money? This is great, thinks Ksyusha, what nice girls they are here. No one’s talking about psychotic killers. No one’s aroused by the thought of being hung by their feet from a hook hammered into the ceiling. You feel like a normal human being. Almost wholesome and healthy.

  Ksyusha and Olya run on adjacent running machines. Ksyusha runs easily, controlling her breath, only sometimes tossing the hair back off her face, although there isn’t really anything much to look at here. After three minutes Olya already starts sweating, she finds the smell of her own armpits unpleasant, and the thought hammers away in her head that she needs to lose an entire five kilos, not just two, and in general, maybe it’s still too soon for her to exercise so hard after recent events.

  Ksyusha jumps down off the running machine flushed and happy. “Shit,” she says. “A pity it’s so expensive, or I’d come here every day!”

  “Let’s go to the pool,” says Olya, but Ksyusha can’t stop now and she wants to press weights over there, and then check her muscle stretch and then there’s this, and that, and that too, and then:

  “All right, let’s go to the pool.” So Olya stands and watches Ksyusha as she presses iron – up-and-down, up-and-down – like Sarah Connor in the old film, and her tousled hair sticks to her forehead, but now look at that, the old familiar gleam is appearing in her eyes and so Olya watches and thinks that Ksyusha isn’t really all that thin, she’s actually more trim, that’s what it is, Olya thinks and she feels a little bit proud of Ksyusha, and a little bit like a not very youthful mother keeping an eye on her child from the edge of the playground, not daring either to leave him alone or to climb up herself and slide down, without giving a damn for her fur coat, the way we did, remember, Ksyusha, at New Year, right? That was great, wasn’t it?

  “Yes,” replies Ksyusha, catching her breath, “now let’s go to that pool of yours, only look how crowded it is, I think the aquatic aerobics has started, aw shit.”

  So they come out an hour later, two young, interesting girls, successful professionals, local celebrities of the Russian internet, who have almost forgotten about fallen leaves and the black branches of February, get into a car and discuss where to go for dinner, because their bodies, roused by the health club, are demanding food, and although Olya was intending to lose weight, her body is demanding it even more loudly than Ksyusha’s, which instead is looking forward to the way all its muscles will be aching tomorrow, and they choose the Yakitoria near Ksyusha’s apartment building, and over dinner Olya tells her how she’s looking for new staff, and all the boys are such dorks, and all the girls are excellent, organized and businesslike, although not like Ksyusha, of course, but even so there’s no comparison with the boys. “So tell me,” she asks, “in your generation, are all the guys useless? Just look, in our IT business there are lots of girls, more than twenty, and not a single boy.”

  “I guess so,” replies Ksyusha, “nowadays all the guys with smarts get an MBA or study to be lawyers.”

  So they have dinner in the Yakitoria, and after dinner they decide to go to Ksyusha’s place, especially since it’s so close, and Olya doesn’t want to drive all the way across the city on this black ice, you know, she’s so relaxed after the pool and after dinner, she’s even afraid she might not be able to handle the car, and it would be stupid to die in February, when there’s no time at all left until the end of winter.

  At Ksyusha’s place, Olya goes to put the kettle on as if she’s at home, and Ksyusha immediately switches on her laptop and reads her mail, and when Olya comes back, Ksyusha’s standing there, gazing at the screen, standing there frozen, scarily motionless. And Olya immediately goes up to her, presses her cheek against Ksyusha’s cheek and looks at the screen too, and glimmering in Ksyusha’s eyes is the reflection of an auto-da-fé in which all the frozen trees of February have been burned alive.

  43

  KSENIA, KSENIA, KSENIA.

  I don’t know how to begin this letter.

  Perhaps in the most banal manner possible? Ksenia, I love you.

  I first heard about you from a chance acquaintance. A friend who had come back from America as a masochist with an MBA dragged me to a BDSM party in Moscow, just to keep him company. There were quite a lot of people there, I lost sight of him and sat down at a table with a young guy who seemed even more perplexed than me. It looked like it was his first time there too. We started talking and he told me about you. His name was Sasha, and he spoke for a long time about how you met, how you split up, how you made love, he said you didn’t answer his calls, that he always read your online newspaper, because he recognized the intonation of your voice in every article, and now you had done a site about the Moscow Psycho, and yesterday he’d heard your voice on the radio in his car, and he had to stop driving, because he almost started crying. And so he told me all this, and it was clear that he was still in love with you, and I suddenly realized you were the one I have seen in my dreams all my life.

  When I was ill, you sat beside me, invisible, wiping the sweat off my forehead; and when the black cocoon enveloped me like a cloud, like suffocating spirals, like the hair of the Medusa, you held my hand and cried with me. When my heart was bleeding, you cut your body so that our blood mingled.

  Finding your ICQ address wasn’t difficult. That’s how we got to know each other.

  Ksenia, Ksenia, Ksenia

  It’s me, a
lien. I’m talking to you, Ksenia, from my home, from out of a shattered ribcage, de profundis, from out of the depths, from my own pocket hell, too cramped for one person. I’m calling you, I’m talking to you. Do you want me to tell you the whole truth?

  You have been following my trail for six weeks – well then, hello. I realize you won’t believe me, there are plenty of idiots willing to pretend to be killers in order to show off to a girl. But I know that some of the girls’ bodies have still not been found – do you want me to tell you where to look? Let it be exclusive information for your site. If the birds and the beasts haven’t pulled them to pieces, of course.

  Today you asked if I could let you into my personal hell. Welcome.

  You promised it would be one hell for two, remember?

  You must realize I could easily have met you without saying a word about my secret life. Made you my lover or, on the contrary, taken you to the dacha, to the concrete basement where the things you tried to seduce me with would seem like games for children.

  I start to get aroused, thinking of the tortures that would have been in store for you. But I love you too much to take you there – because no woman has yet left my basement alive.

  It was pointless to kill them. I was trying to explain what they simply couldn’t understand – but you always knew. I was trying to take the materials at hand, women’s flesh, metal instruments, chains and ropes, and make an astral sister for myself, a twin sister who would understand my pain. Now I can stop the torture – because I have found you.

  I didn’t have to tell you anything, but I know you’re the one I’ve been looking for all these years. My astral sister. More than a sister. And it would not be brotherly to deceive you. I don’t think I need to put a smiley here.

  I don’t know what you will do now, but I implore you, don’t leave me alone. We were made for each other, all the things I have done and all the things you have done are like two sides of a single coin, yin and yang. We are both writers, only you write in bytes on a screen, and I write in blood on a human body. These are both rather non-traditional techniques.

  You are so close to me that sometimes I think I’ve gone insane and you never existed. That I made the site myself and I’m writing to myself, to you, my anima, my astral sister, my secret self.

  I tried for so long to create you out of all those women. And sometimes I think you don’t exist, that ultimately, I made you – out of tears distilled by the pupil of an eye, out of despair, out of the same stuff as my wet dreams are made of.

  Sometimes I think you will forsake me forever.

  On the site you appealed to me to see a psychiatrist. Then on ICQ you said it would be a genuine American happy ending: the Moscow Psycho site helps the Moscow Psycho find the path to healing. But I can’t go to a psychiatrist – not just because I don’t want to be locked away in a loony bin, but because I simply can’t imagine what I would say to him. How could he work with me, while feeling horror and loathing? And if he doesn’t feel those things, then I haven’t done enough yet.

  But we share our horror and loathing with each other. I believe you will not spurn me. I believe we can be happy together. Like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, like Mickey and Mallory, like Cameron and Janice Hooper.

  That is the only way a happy ending can look.

  Would you like me to promise to try not to kill you? And you try not to die with me, all right?

  * * *

  Do you remember, once I asked how you would like to die? And you answered: “Rip open my ribcage and take my heart.” And after writing this letter, I can feel it is my ribcage that has been torn open and my heart that is trembling on your lips.

  I love you

  alien

  44

  JUMP UP, SLAM THE LAPTOP SHUT, DASH ACROSS TO your purse, rummage through the pieces of paper, mutter: there should be a card in here somewhere, don’t look at Olya, don’t hear a single word, say: there it is, at last! Dart over to the phone in three quick bounds, pick up the receiver, dial the number, listen to the ringing tone.

  Don’t look at me like that, Olya, don’t look. Can’t you see I’m a grown-up, responsible woman performing her civic duty, I’m helping the police, I’m saving the lives of girls who haven’t been killed yet. Don’t look at me, don’t say a word, I can’t hear words anyway.

  Nobody answers, of course, nobody answers. It’s an office number and it’s night time, there’s nobody in the offices, the investigators have gone home, they’re putting their children to bed, singing lullabies to them, reading fairytales to them before they go to sleep. The children are snuffling in their sleep, the toys are sleeping in the nursery and the files are sleeping on the shelves in the offices, the photographs of dead bodies are sleeping, the experts’ reports are sleeping, the witnesses’ testimonies are sleeping. The investigators are embracing their wives and mistresses, going to bed, preparing to make love. They leave their work outside the home: looking at their naked lady friends, they don’t think about dismembered corpses scattered through the forests outside Moscow. The photographs are sleeping in the files, the email from the killer is sleeping in my laptop, the hundreds of kilobytes of our correspondence are sleeping in the computer at work. In the morning I’ll burn them to a CD and call again, this time during working hours. We have come into possession of invaluable material, I’ll say, conversations with the killer. Your experts are sure to be able to find some lead.

  Eventually hang up the phone, turn toward Olya, shrug casually, say: No one there. Look at her in amazement, explain: The police, who else?, go into the kitchen, on the way checking the latch on the door, as if it means nothing, just like that, sort of automatically, maybe it’s a neurotic habit of mine, checking to see if the door’s locked when I walk past it? Yes, it’s locked. Brew tea in a cup, ask: Shall I make you some?

  Don’t look at me like that, Olya, don’t look. Don’t you remember – we were going to drink tea. Aren’t we going to drink any now, then? What’s happened that’s so special? Don’t look at me like that, please.

  Tell her how to track down the killer. Don’t call him alien, call him the killer. Find Sasha’s number in your address book, say: He must have remembered him, eventually hear at least a few of the words Olya says, answer: Well yes, he was always an infantile, irresponsible blabbermouth. That’s why we split up. Remember the word “responsibility” and immediately forget who was the last person to say it to you.

  Drink tea, try to listen to Olya, answer offhandedly, matter-of-factly. Refuse to close down the site, refer to the advertising contracts, the high traffic, your own business reputation, pretend nothing has happened. Explain: And anyway, we’ve hooked him now, we’ve got him. The police will have to thank us.

  Don’t think about the conversation with the investigator. Don’t think about the fact that he’ll read our correspondence. But no – think about it, prepare yourself, be imperturbable, not even slightly embarrassed, we all have our own different tastes, don’t we? Pretend you suspected something from the very beginning, imagine it all as a big journalistic investigation. Pretend you were going to publish extracts on the site. Do something else, do it right now, ring Pasha, say: We’ve found him, no, that’s probably going too far. Don’t call anyone, pour more tea, eventually sit down, keep calm.

  Don’t look at me like that, Olya, don’t look. Better don’t say a word, don’t mention that name. if you say love letter, if you say he’s in love with you, if I so much as hear that word love – I’ll hit you, believe me. Don’t look at me, don’t console me. There’s nothing to console me for, nothing’s happened.

  Say: Probably time you were going, isn’t it? Be surprised she wants to stay, Ah, yes, the black ice, I forgot, sorry. Say: Thank you for a wonderful evening, take clean sheets out of the cupboard, open out the divan bed, let her into the bathroom first, wash the two cups. Left alone in the kitchen, realize that you’re shaking. Of course – it’s cold, winter, February.

  Say: Goodnight. Once a
gain: Thank you for a wonderful evening. Go into the bathroom, lock the door. Soon Olya will fall asleep, soon the investigators and their lady friends will fall asleep, their children are sleeping soundly, the toys are sleeping in the nursery. The clues are sleeping, the testimony is sleeping, the photographs are sleeping, the letters in my laptop are sleeping. Somewhere in cold February Moscow there is one man not sleeping. He’s looking at a monitor, waiting for my reply.

  Go back into the room, switch on the computer, apologize to Olya, move him to “ignore,” apologize again and go back to the bathroom, get undressed, sit on the edge, close your eyes.

  Olya isn’t sleeping, she’s listening to the silence in the apartment and thinking: Ksyusha’s really holding out very well, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Trying not to think what she would do in Ksyusha’s place. Thinking: It’s a good thing I came with her. Imagining Ksyusha sitting in the bathroom now. As still as a dried-out tree, like a huddled bird, like a stone Mexican god.

  Ksyusha lowers her hands, starts moving her fingers, tries to summon up in her imagination one of her usual fantasies. Instead of arousal, nausea rises higher and higher, like a lump in her throat, nausea, nausea, shame and guilt. Other people die of torture, but all you do is come. Every orgasm for the last month floods her face with the color of shame. As if she has come to the morgue where the bodies of the murdered girls are lying stretched out on the tables, come to the morgue and masturbated for a long time beside each one of them, carefully examining the marks from the burns, the deep cuts, the bloody abrasions. Hideous, hideous. Ksyusha stops moving her hand, raises the dry fingers to her face, shrugs, glances round for something that can cause pain. A solitary hairpin is lying on the mirror-bright floor. Ksyusha sets it against her nipple, winces and puts it back down. It hurts. It just hurts. The same as for normal people. Pain and pleasure are no longer transformed into each other. The lump in her throat is like a nail hammered into her neck. The nausea is like a knife in her solar plexus. She sits motionless on the edge of the bath, small, with tousled hair, hugging herself in her arms, a huddled bird, a sleepless, broken toy.