Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  He saw the needle go into the old woman’s arm. What did she think it was? A simple pain-killer? a tranquilizer? Something inoffensive? An increased dosage. That’s all it would take, he thought. A mistake, he would say; an accident, a terrible accident. You don’t have the courage to be a fool, he thought. You don’t even have that, do you? You don’t have the courage to kill her before … before whatever.

  He tried to read Glazkov’s paper again. The words streamed together in a sequence of nonsense. A sudden draft caused him to shiver, caused the papers to rise very slightly from the table.

  A door had been opened behind him.

  Quickly he turned his face to look.

  There were shadows beyond the light, uncertainties. Was it Andreyev and his wretched assistant? They moved forward but still the reach of the table lamp did not define them.

  “Andreyev?” he said.

  It was, even if he did not know it at the time of asking, the last word he would speak in his life. One of the shadows moved in an abrupt, quirky fashion, a hand raised in the air. Domareski saw a simple flash in the darkened dining car, and as he felt a violent pain in his skull, as he experienced a remote awareness of bloodstains flying across Glazkov’s papers, he lowered his face to the table linen, down and down and down—a sinking man whose last gesture was to overturn the table lamp, as if what he wanted most was to hurry the onset of his own darkness.

  Like a flawed piece of apparatus in an experiment that has gone quite wrong, a cracked retort, a broken pipette, something no longer useful in laboratory terms, his body was thrown into the snowdrifts between Biysk and Slavgorod.

  3

  1.

  Rayner sometimes thought his wife made love with one eye fixed to some imaginary stopwatch, that she handled his flesh as if she were wearing surgical gloves. She seemed both intimidated by the physical act and aloof from it at the same time. He thought of someone performing an operation: open-thigh surgery. Her orgasms were quick, strangulated little things, a brief outcry and then a slide into a silence that suggested embarrassment. An atavism of sorts, he imagined: Isobel, Victorian wife, raised on a diet of conjugal manuals, wifely etiquette, how to behave with a lustful husband during “the bad time” of the month.

  He rolled away from her and looked at his wrist-watch on the bedside table. Seven-thirty: a sexual duration of seven minutes. Turning back, he glanced at her. She had the kind of beauty that suggested something rare preserved in formaldehyde; alabaster afloat in crystal liquid. She turns heads, he thought. When she strolls through a room—ah, how the heads do turn. But at the heart of this beauty there were chips of ice. Now, drawing the stiff linen sheet up over her small breasts, she lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke.

  “These damned sheets are so cold,” she said. “This entire hotel’s such a drag.”

  Saying nothing, Rayner got out of bed and went to the window, wondering if the room were bugged, if perhaps somewhere a concealed camera had recorded the recent marital contrivance. He looked out into the sleet, a sky of slate, electrical conductors swaying on the tops of buildings; in the distance, rising like slabs, were apartment blocks. You could think of better cities to be in than Moscow, he thought. You could think of French food, Italian wine, the Aegean Sea; instead what faced you, from the confines of this monstrous hotel, was a city trapped in its own dreariness.

  He turned to look at her, conscious of his own nakedness through her eyes: it was not a point of view that entirely pleased him. A little flab—less than some men his age, but that was a cold comfort; the pectoral muscles beginning to sag. Do I end up as one of those men with boobs? Bermuda shorts, Palm Springs, an electric golf cart, and tits, tits of all things? Isobel blew a perfect oval of smoke and Rayner had the odd desire to shove his middle finger through it.

  Isobel sighed and, still clutching the white sheet to her breasts—as if Rayner were not her husband but some stranger who had improperly hauled her ashes—stepped out of bed and went in the direction of the bathroom. He listened to running water, pipes knocking. You fall in love at twenty-two, he thought. You think she is the most angelic thing ever to have been set down to grace the planet, her sweetness is almost terrifying; and somewhere down the length of fifteen years you lose it. How? Consider, Rayner. Does it sift through the old hands like your proverbial sand? Does it reach this state of affairs through the relentless accumulation of marital detritus? Or is it something even more simple, more sickening—like waking one day to find the fever forever gone?

  Ah. God knows. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked once more at his watch. There was a meeting with Lindholm in half an hour; in the course of the meeting Lindholm would sit with the kind of expression of discomfort that suggests a man is seated on his hands. Let it be. Lindholm, even here in the Soviet Union, was still the Vice President; and somehow you had to overlook the fact that he was a Kansas hick who, Rayner imagined, would have been in his element staring at storage silos or calculating porcine percentages.

  “The plumbing is shitty,” Isobel said.

  Rayner closed his eyes. Sometimes he sent himself back through time to a point when he had been a young man on the lower rungs of that seemingly endless ladder known as the State Department; this younger Rayner—darkly handsome, trim, desirable—had a gorgeous loving wife, fine prospects, a future that suggested the American Dream could, with the right kind of luck and labor, become a reality. He invented his own time-travel device, his capsule; and it made Isobel tolerable for a time. But it also brought regret, a sense of—ah, shit, things could have been different, Rayner. Things could have been somewhat better.

  In a white bathrobe, she stepped back into the bedroom. She said, “It beats me why we worry so much about a country that doesn’t even have a decent plumbing system.” And she opened the closet, fingering various dresses that hung in a shimmering array.

  A plumbing system, Rayner thought. It’s all a question of priorities, my love. They regard the transport of human effluence as being of less strategic merit than the megaton capacity of an ICBM. How do I explain that to you, darling?

  She lit another cigarette and stared at her dresses. “What time is the dinner?” she asked.

  “Nine,” Rayner said.

  “God.” She touched the various garments. Rayner knew that she hated them all, that she was given to a kind of vicious dislike of dresses whose only crimes were that they had been worn once. At times, he perceived his life in terms of Isobel’s charge accounts.

  “The whole thing’s preposterous anyway,” she said. She was holding a black silk dress against her body, turning this way and that in front of the mirror. The black material was magnificent against her pale skin and Rayner, despite himself, felt the kind of desire that goes nowhere except into a painful knot.

  “Dear old Lindholm, I mean—well, he’s a nice old fuddy-duddy in his way, but this entire trip is useless. He knows it. We know it. Our friendly Soviet hosts know it. So why bother?”

  “The Veep was promised a trip. He got his trip. It keeps him happy. It makes him feel he’s a part of the great decision-making process we call democracy. He chats with the Russians and they chat back. Lindholm goes back to D.C., gets his pictures taken at the airport, reports to the Old Man, then he sinks back into his neat little box of obscurity again. Simple?”

  “Stupid,” Isobel said. “The black one, do you think?”

  Don’t ask me, Rayner thought. I only want your body. If there was some hope of response.

  “Or the yellow?”

  She went through the dresses, holding them against her body, making faces at herself in the mirror, throwing them down on the bed: rainbows of silk and rayon and cotton, a heap of rainbows. Rayner thought of the discarded cocoons of weird exotic moths.

  “Shouldn’t you get ready for your meeting?” she asked.

  He walked back to the window. Sleet whipped the night. Moscow, Moscow—why was he ensnared here, here in the most embalmed capital of Europe?

 
“I think the black,” Isobel said. “Yes. Definitely. The black.”

  Rayner looked at her, remembering her insistence on accompanying him this trip. I will not put up with the horrors of Washington in January, she had said. Stick that in your diplomatic passport and smoke it. Now she did nothing, it seemed, except bitch: a whole lifestyle constructed out of verbal sniping.

  “What do you think of the black?” she asked.

  She looked so tantalizingly beautiful that he had to struggle to remember: she has a heart of crushed ice. And love seemed to him just then an appalling conundrum, a joke of God’s—as if the human heart were a kind of whoopee cushion capable of creating not only humiliation but, worse, painful confusion.

  2.

  It was not exactly clear to Rayner why Maksymovich, the First Secretary of the Central Committee, found Kimball Lindholm so apparently fascinating; why Maksymovich, who stooped as if he carried a burden of lead between his shoulder blades, should continually watch Lindholm through half-moon spectacles in a manner that suggested intense interest. Nor was it clear why Maksymovich should make himself so available, so accessible, to the Vice President when it was well known that the First Secretary had little regard for the niceties of diplomatic protocol. When Kimball Lindholm made a joke—usually unfunny in its original English and presumably without any humor in the translation—Maksymovich would laugh, his thick body shaking; he would take off his tiny glasses, rub his eyes, wipe the lenses of the spectacles with a small rag, and blink at Lindholm as if to say: Stop, it’s too painful for me to laugh anymore.

  Rayner had the sense that a palm was being greased: a snow job taking place. It puzzled him—but then he was accustomed to the seemingly inexplicable changes in policy that frequently took place behind the closed doors of Kremlin rooms. After a time you simply stopped looking for a logic; tomorrow’s policy might be the opposite of today’s—and there would be no contradiction involved.

  He found himself staring at Lindholm. The little man was huddled close to his interpreter, a look of some mild bewilderment on his face. Across the table, the First Secretary scribbled something on a note pad: a doodle created out of interlocking circles. Rayner sat back in his chair and looked quickly around the room. Save for a grainy portrait that depicted a group of rather indistinct figures, and a Soviet flag that hung loose from the ceiling, the walls were bare. Rayner gazed a moment at the pale hammer and sickle on the red background.

  Besides Maksymovich and two nondescript men whose functions had not been made plain, besides Lindholm and the interpreter—a fragile man with flesh the color of an eggshell—the only other person present, apart from Rayner, was Haffner, the Assistant Secretary of State. Haffner was a creature of strict protocol; he sat in an oddly stiff manner, as if the national anthem were being played and he alone were capable of hearing it. He had all the slightly strange reality of a wax apple. And somehow Haffner’s presence added to the general sense of futility that Rayner had felt from the very beginning. Lindholm had no power, no real power; but somewhere along the way—during the course of the campaign, during the final stages of the Convention, whenever—he had been promised a trip to Russia. And this was it. One could imagine the AP photographs in The Wichita Eagle, your very own Kimby Lindholm sitting at the nerve center of true power. It would, Rayner thought, give the farmers something to chew over. But why was Maksymovich putting on such a show?

  Rayner looked back at Lindholm now. The Vice President, who had been asked to run on the ticket with Mallory because of his apparent appeal to that large section of the American populace who refused to admit that Eisenhower was really dead, was speaking to the interpreter; he spoke slowly, more slowly than usual, and Rayner found his attention drifting back, back to Isobel, back to the black dress and the pale skin and the vicissitudes of what, for want of any better word, you might call loving.

  “It’s my own personal feeling,” Lindholm said, watching the interpreter, waiting, “my own personal feeling that the business of America is America.”

  Rayner felt Haffner become more stiff than was normal. Phrases such as “my own personal feeling” caused Haffner to have nightmares; Rayner was convinced of this. He heard the Assistant Secretary quietly clear his throat, a form of warning. But Lindholm was back home, stalking the wheat fields, scanning the prairies, chewing tobacco with his natural constituents. Rayner closed his eyes. He was amused. Lindholm did not have the good sense to know a blunder when he collided with one.

  The interpreter spoke to Maksymovich, who smiled, nodded, raised a hand to his glasses. Lindholm apparently took this as a sign of encouragement to continue.

  “I don’t believe Americans have any business with foreign adventures, or interfering with some godforsaken hole in Africa, or sending troops halfway across the world just so some crackpot dictator can be kept in power.”

  Ah, sweet Christ, Rayner thought. Haffner leaned forward, suddenly animated; he took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Rayner gazed at Lindholm, waiting for the next mistake. But Maksymovich was talking and the interpreter was listening, waiting. A comedy of errors, Rayner thought. Hilarity in high places. It was always possible that the little man from Kansas had imbibed too much vodka, of course.

  Haffner said, “The Vice President is talking off the record, of course—”

  But the interpreter ignored this. He was already beginning to translate for Lindholm the words of the First Secretary.

  “The First Secretary finds it hard to understand your position, Vice President.… He wants to point out that your own views conflict somewhat with … the policy speeches of President Mallory … who does not seem to believe there are limits to American imperialism.”

  Rayner stared at Maksymovich. Lindholm, as if needing guidance, as if conscious of having overstepped a line of demarcation, turned to Haffner. American imperialism, Rayner thought. How would Lindholm wriggle out now?

  The Vice President stared at his hands. Rayner waited. From somewhere, doubtless, the little man from Emporia would find inspiration. Haffner continued to blow his nose.

  Lindholm said, “Please make it clear to your First Secretary that I’m expressing, uh, my own personal views …” And here, oddly, Lindholm laughed. “In my country, a man is free to express his own views.”

  So that was it, Rayner thought. He had pulled the old freedom of expression out of his hat; the tired rabbit of democracy. Well, it was worth a shot—even if Rayner could barely keep from smiling. Maksymovich’s expression did not change. He listened, was silent for a moment, then said, “President Mallory has been highly critical of Soviet activity … I refer you to his policy statements on Soviet activity in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and in Cuba. He apparently feels that Soviet help, that any aid we offer to those countries trying to establish a revolution—he feels strongly, I understand, that all this is quite immoral. Am I correct?”

  Lindholm listened. He looked once again at Haffner, who, sitting with his eyes closed, appeared to have succumbed to a trance of embarrassment.

  “President Mallory has made his position plain,” Lindholm said.

  “And yet you differ from him?”

  Lindholm smiled, as if all at once he felt himself to be on safer ground: the quicksand was behind him now. “Hell, we don’t always agree. We don’t always agree.”

  There was a silence in the room now. Rayner watched the First Secretary—a strange inscrutability, a face of secrets, of knowing what nobody else knew. And for a moment, without quite knowing why, Rayner felt unnerved.

  Then Maksymovich pushed his chair back and stood up and smiled. “I think it’s time for us to eat.”

  3.

  He woke, his throat dry, his head aching—the dehydration of vodka. The room was dark, he had no idea of time. He sat up, listening. He could hear sleet hammering on the window and the sound of Isobel breathing and he could see, by what little moonlight fell into the room, her pale outline, her dark hair spread on the pillow. I think he fancied me. Your old
Maksymovich or whatever he calls himself. I think he really took a shine to me.

  The dinner, Rayner thought. Something had happened at the dinner. He sat upright on the edge of the mattress. His muscles ached. He went into the bathroom and ran his head under the faucet, splashed his face, soaked his wrists.

  Asked me all kinds of questions, old Maksy did.

  Rayner raised his face from the basin, looking at himself in the mirror. A squandered look, a pallid expression: he had seen better days. What kinds of questions, Isobel? Did you give him your telephone number back in D.C.? Stuff like that?

  He leaned in the bathroom doorway. She slept on her back, her head tilted slightly to one side. Some were personal, some were impersonal. You jealous fucker, Rayner thought. Grow up. Wise up. You’re not a kid skulking around. Good old Maksy. He was just being palsy, no? A new chum, a pretty American lady. No more than that, right?

  He asked, Did we have any kids? What kind of house did we have? Things like that.

  No, Rayner thought. This wasn’t the thing troubling him. Something else. Kimball Lindholm: but that was a darker area, he had mapped that territory already. Kimball getting downright drunk and trying to look dignified; but he had seemed more like a statue cut out of granite that way, something that would disgrace a public park in Emporia, a landing pad for pigeons. No, it wasn’t Lindholm, it wasn’t anything to do with how Lindholm had launched into another of his set speeches—how he would have stayed out of WW II, how he wouldn’t have sent any of his boys off to fight any goddamn foreign war: your standard red-neck, cracker-barrel nonsense. Kimball’s party piece, that was all.

  Something else, Rayner.

  He asked me if I’d ever met Mallory.

  Did he now?

  He wondered what the American people thought of Kimball Lindholm.

  Rayner lay down. He placed his hand flat against Isobel’s thigh. All at once he wanted her, cold or otherwise, he wanted her very badly. Drunk, the great alcoholic cancellation. Way too drunk. He remembered how, during the dinner, Maksymovich had caught his eye—something in the look, a quality of sudden hardness, a glint: like old Maksy was saying to him, I am perhaps the most powerful man in the world, and if I choose to flirt with your wife—what can you do about it? Drunk drunk drunk. He stared at the dark ceiling.