Electric Velocipede 27

by John Klima

  He was alone, except for the Broken soldiers who slept obediently in his truck.

  “The other dacha, then,” she said, and started in that direction. I followed, frightened by her zeal. If Apolek was out here, so close to Volkov, were they working together? My old hate for the commander flared up again, brighter now, from jealousy. Ice cracked under our feet. We were not stealthy.

  Night came on us fast, while we walked. Many times we were sure we heard someone following us, but sound moved strangely through the trees. We could see the dacha, a dark spot at the end of the road, but the closer we got, the more it faded into the spreading night. No lights were on inside.

  “You asked why I came,” Zinaida said, stopping as we climbed the walkway to the front door. “Do you still want to know the answer?”

  “No,” I said, pulling her inside by the hand, and kissing her hard, even as I nudged the front door with my foot and found it unlocked, too excited about what we would find inside to care about anything else.

  #

  Zinaida lit a candle. We watched our breath cloud out into the frigid darkness of the dacha. I looked for a lamp, and found three. I laughed out loud, when they were all lit, at the sheer size and splendor of the place.

  His rucksack lay abandoned beside the door, spilling out books like entrails.

  “You look upstairs,” she said.

  He wasn’t in the first of the three bedrooms. A window was open. A curtain flapped. As if the whole place was waiting. As if the murdered count who lived there would come through the door in the morning and bring summer with him.

  The light from my lamp found Apolek in the second bedroom, in a wine-colored velvet chair, with the painting in his lap.

  “Apolek!” I said, and rushed forward, but he did not move.

  “What is a painting in the dark?” he said. On a table beside him stood a glass of ice.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Why did you leave?”

  His coldness kept me from coming closer. And asking: why are you sitting here in the freezing dark? I wondered if Apolek was a ghost.

  “I spent so long in darkness,” he said. “I looked at the paintings, but I didn’t see them.”

  “What did Volkov say to you?” I asked.

  Apolek made a perplexed face, but it passed quickly. He was still transfixed by the painting. I imagined him frozen there for days, wasting away and shivering himself to nothing while he stared at it.

  He said, “Volkov didn’t say anything to me. I left that night, straight from the Spasskaya mansion, without speaking with him.”

  “He doesn’t know about the painting?”

  “Not from me,” Apolek said.

  “You haven’t spoken with him since?” I asked.

  “How would I do that?”

  “Christ, Apolek, he’s followed you. You didn’t know?”

  Apolek looked up at me for the first time. “He’s here?”

  “He’s at the dacha at the end of the lane,” I said, still wanting to rush over to him, still not daring to.

  “He’s keeping an eye on me,” Apolek said, standing up, resigned. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Come back,” I said. “We can work this out.”

  “Not after this,” he said. I thought he meant his own foolish flight from Moscow, but he was staring at the painting.

  “I need you,” I said, at last. “I’m not finished . . . becoming. I’m stuck halfway between man and beast.”

  “So shall you always be,” he said. Apolek reached out his arm and touched a candle to mine, lighting up a gaunt face shadowed by a surprisingly thick growth of beard. “So are we all.”

  From outside, I heard the rumble of a truck approaching.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked. “You know what they’ll do to you. To throw it all away—”

  He handed me the painting.

  I looked at it.

  This time, I could see. For four, maybe five full seconds, I understood.

  Two bodies, male and female, mostly naked, grappling. Was it love? Was it violence? Where did they fit into the larger composition, now lost, severed by the bayonet of a brutal long-ago soldier?

  But the story did not matter. What mattered were the bodies. The twist and reach of the limbs. The glow of the flesh. The flush of the cheeks; the wideness of the mouth. Nothing mattered more than what the body wanted. And the body did not just want sex. It wanted friendship. It wanted beauty.

  Looking at the painting, I understood everything. It was like what I felt when Zinaida danced, but turned up ten-thousandfold. I would have risked what Apolek risked. Life on earth as a human made sense. We are beasts, and we will never understand what we need, what we want, and why, but we will always obey.

  And then it was gone. My head spun so fast I almost fell over. Zinaida had come up the stairs, and stood beside me, one hand on my shoulder, similarly mesmerized by the painting.

  “You brought her here?” Apolek asked, pulling away the painting. I felt her stiffen, when it was gone.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I took her. From the camp. She would have died in there. And I needed—”

  “Why did you bring her here?”

  I had never heard fear in Apolek’s voice before. My head spun worse.

  “Because I—”

  Zinaida stepped forward. Her sadness fell away, a wedding veil no longer needed. In that moment, for the first time, grief was not stronger than rage. And I smelled what I should have smelled the whole time, except that it was hidden behind her sadness and my own blind failure to understand who she was and what she wanted. I smelled an all-consuming violence, a bloodlust strong enough to make all other concerns insignificant.

  “You,” I said to Apolek. “You’re the one who—?”

  But he didn’t move. And I couldn’t move. Only Zinaida moved, and she moved like a phantom dancing. She darted in, ducked low to snag the dagger from my belt, spun fast around him. One lightning-swift slice of the arm was enough. Blood gurgled out of Apolek’s open throat.

  I crumpled to the floor with him. I held his hand. I stared into his eyes. I waited for something, some wise final words or a sudden rush of complete understanding as his spirit left his body and entered mine. I got nothing. I don’t know how long I knelt there. Until Volkov came through the door, with four Broken soldiers close behind him.

  “No,” he said, and then said it again and again, faster and faster.

  Volkov pointed at Zinaida, and the Broken stepped forward. The stink of his rage made me gag. “Rip her to shreds,” he said, and although I screamed for them to stop, that’s exactly what they did. At least they did not smell of rage. The Broken kill dispassionately.

  It took a long time.

  I wondered if my offshoot would survive. If—after Volkov took me back to Moscow and locked me in a Box until my spirit shattered, and I emerged as one of the Broken—my sense of smell would still be with me. I hoped it wouldn’t. I hoped nothing would.

  My head stopped hurting. I looked at my hands, and knew—my reconditioning was gone. The painting had wiped it away, cleanly and swiftly, and leaving no fatal time bomb inside me.

  I wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t break down like a faulty machine, like every other soldier spat out of a Pavlov Box.

  Volkov crossed the carnage, to kneel beside Apolek. His rage was gone. He held the boy’s head in both hands. I still had my superhuman sense of smell, somehow stronger than ever. I had never been able to smell grief before.

  “I thought you hated him,” I said.

  “He hated me,” the commander said, his hair and eyes as black as mine. “He’s always hated me. I tried to make him into something he’s not.”

  I swallowed, several times. “You’re his father.”

  “Yes.”

  “He knew?” I asked.

  “He did not.”

  Dagger and painting were filthy with blood. I picked them both up. I handled the painting like Medusa’s head, turning it away from
my line of sight, and Volkov’s too. I wondered what the Broken would see if they saw it. I felt certain it could bring them back to life. As if it could save us all, the tens and hundreds of thousands of fine young men who would otherwise break down and die under the weight of their botched reconditioning.

  “Is there a special Box?” I asked. “A special process, to turn a man into one of the Broken?”

  Volkov looked at me, his red face comprehending nothing.

  I did not dare to look at the painting again. If I did, I’d lose my nerve. With the dagger, I cut a long slit from top to bottom of the painting, then squatted to remove the glass flute from the lamp and hold the canvas square face down atop the flame.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “Ready for what?”

  “To be broken.”

  Promise me you’ll make it quick, I wanted to say, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t deserve quick. I had destroyed my best friend, and I deserved to suffer. But I hoped he’d do it soon. I wanted to stop feeling what I felt.

  Flames from the burning painting singed the hair from my hand, and still I held on to it. I held on until the burning was too much to bear. Now that it was gone, definitively destroyed, I realized what I had done—that without the painting the Pavlov Boxes would quickly cripple the state, bring it to its knees as its best young men died in droves—but that wasn’t why I did it. I destroyed the painting because it killed Apolek.

  “Oh, Nikolai, no,” he said. His face shattered, crumpled. “You’re all that’s left of him.” Volkov fell forward, his arms tightening around me and his hairy face wet against my neck. He heaved with sobs. My body remembered, and I felt unaccustomed water spilling from my eyes. I had forgotten how hot tears were. We stood like that, dumb and broken, two beasts grieving.

  THE END

  Bones

  by Helena Bell

  The wheelchair man died alone in his trailer beside the Suwannee River. After four days, no one had noticed and no one had come to collect his body to bury in the little graveyard beside the highway. Because he was dead, he no longer needed sleep and so one night he stuffed his beige nylon suitcase with all of his saved lottery winnings and moved to New Orleans. He bought a little camelback house on Magazine Street beside the Necromancer’s bookshop. The little house had fourteen foot ceilings and a slate roof. Contractors came and peeled away the circus wallpaper from the second floor nursery to reveal ripped plaster and rust red brick.

  "This will be my room," the wheelchair man said.

  When they laughed at his next request, the wheelchair man fired all of his contractors. What he asked them was this:

  I want you to build staircases. Stairs of varying heights and shapes. I want round metal ones and grand marble ones and I want a miniature piano to be placed in the entrance hall so when you’re at the top, wherever you are, you look down and feel you have been trapped inside an old Anderson print. I want rickety stairs which lead to old closet doors that no longer open and sturdy stairs which lead to doors which lead to doors which lead to new stairs. I want the stairs to intersect in such a way that it feels like a long walk around an impoundment with rushes and white herons painted on the walls. I want music to play as you walk, and on the prime numbered steps, the sudden feeling of weightlessness as if you have died and are now ready to reach the next stage of existence. I want you to cut a square hole in the roof so on sunny days the sun shines on the stairs to help them grow, and when it rains, the water cascades into a pool filled with Spanish Mackerel.

  The second set of contractors built three staircases one beside the other in a row. The first was painted blue, the second pink, and the third yellow.

  "These are the children I will never have," the wheelchair man said.

  "What, your thing don’t work no more?" the contractor asked. The other men laughed with him and the wheelchair man showed them the door.

  Whenever the wheelchair man wanted to go to his room he stood in the entrance hall and said, "Going up!" No one ever came, and by the fourth day he decided to rest in the kitchen curled next to the refrigerator.

  The third set of contractors consisted of one man who worked slowly. He walked each room, marking the walls and saying "You picked a good house. It has good bones." When the wheelchair man asked if he thought he could fit all the staircases he said, "We shall make them fit, Bobby."

  The wheelchair man’s name was not Bobby, but he had gone so long without being called anything he said to himself Bobby is a good name. It has good bones.

  Ashley, who called the contractor Pop though he was not her father, came by twice a week with sandwiches from the place on Annunciation St. She and Bobby sat with their backs to the refrigerator and tried to hum in perfect harmony.

  "Think if we hit the right frequency, the doors will open and cokes will fly out?" she asked.

  "You are young enough to be my granddaughter," he said.

  Sometimes Ashely brought a watercolor set and painted the oak trees overhanging the front porch. Bobby asked her to hang these on the walls by the blue staircase so that walking up you felt like you were ascending branch after branch after branch. When she finished with oak trees she painted Bobby and Pop and the stray cats that wandered down from the university. She went to the zoo and came back with elephants and alligators and voles. When they too filled the walls she switched to murals on the floor and scrimshaw on the railings. Bobby asked if she shouldn’t be in college somewhere, but she said that she’d dropped out years ago to run away with her boyfriend.

  "Oh," he said.

  "He was dying," she said.

  When Pop had been working for one year and a day, the only square footage that did not start at the bottom and lead up was a small bit of space around the refrigerator. Here, Pop suggested, should be an elevator.

  "Only if the GE can come too," Bobby said.

  The elevator had four buttons but the doors only opened on the first floor. Up and down Bobby and the refrigerator would go, all day long.

  Bobby confessed to Ashley that construction had siphoned most of his winnings away, and if she was only being nice to him to get into the will, she best move on.

  "Why don’t you open the house to visitors," she said. "Like a museum."

  Ashley led the tours. For the young and out-of-towners, she began with the simple straight staircases that went right to the top floor without break. As they huffed and leaned against each other she slid down the railings to set out lemonade and begin the next tour. Bobby greeted them each as they made their way back down, passing out glasses and saying, "So glad you could come."

  Bobby asked them to write down their thoughts in the guestbook, and each night he read them aloud to himself as he rode the elevator.

  13. Yesterday I counted 1325 steps. Today there are 1328.

  22. Try the second landing on the left. It’s my favorite.

  131. Congratulations! You have crossed the state line of Georgia in a most unusual and surreptitious manner.

  132. She fell and I wasn’t quick enough to stop her. But then she got up and everything was all right.

  If he closed his eyes, Bobby could feel the legs of strangers moving all around him. He sat, the center of the wheel of feet and toes and the movement of people who all knew where they were going and how to get there.

  For one week, Ashley stayed away and Bobby closed the house to all but the most regular of visitors. They asked after Ashley and Bobby wondered if maybe she was the reason they had come at all.

  Pop said Ashley was looking to see if her diabetic ex-boyfriend had died. She’d received a call from someone who asked her never to call back.

  "It’s not that she still loves him or nothing," he said. "She just wants to know."

  Bobby once knew a man who faked his own death so his wife could use the insurance money. The investigators found him running fishing charters off the coast of North Carolina nearly a decade later and brought him home in a silver car. The son never spoke to his father again, an
d Bobby could understand why but on the whole he thought fake deaths were better than real ones.

  "It’s a miracle," he wanted to tell the boy. "The father you thought you had lost has been found again."

  Bobby now understood that since no one had noticed his passing, there was nowhere he could pass onto.

  289. Without the weight of others’ memories, we drift like an empty net on the surface of the ocean.

  The owner of the bookshop next door was a woman named Kathleen who wore leg braces and brought Bobby a newspaper and coffee every morning.

  "And who are your people," she asked.

  "Them," Bobby said as boy after girl after grandmother walked through the front door of his house.

  Kathleen’s father had been a doctor in a town Bobby couldn’t pronounce. He’d given Kathleen an experimental polio vaccine which hadn’t worked like he’d hoped and killed himself years later from the guilt.

  Because Kathleen was a bit like he was, Bobby let her ride in the elevator with him and they strained their ears for bits of gossip and stories you only tell when you’re walking up and down stairs in a strange person’s house.

  Bobby asked Kathleen if she was afraid of dying alone and she replied that she wasn’t afraid of anything. When he asked her why, what she told him was this:

  When I was a young woman, a boy took me to see The Birds. When I got home, I told my mother how scared I’d been in the dark of the theatre, a strange man’s hand on my knee, she having just found my father in the garage with the shotgun poking out the back of his head. That night she came into my room while I was sleeping carrying my old baby mobile strung with blue and pink silk birds. She waved it in my face screeching, "The birds are coming! The birds are coming!" Now every time I feel afraid, I remember my mother coming for me in the night and I push the thoughts away.

  Ashley came home with a pale face and started her tours in the middle of a sentence. She led them up the round staircases and divided them into teams to play scavenger hunts. Find a three leaf clover growing in the wall. Bring back the fur of a limp platypus and the whisper of its name. She placed a green recycling bin on the front porch for the guests to fill. She buried each one in the backward beneath a tree where the mockingbirds gathered.