The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  But—a light. There, on the ground floor of the tallest building in the city, a light in the window. And in the window, a desk, and at the desk, a girl. Writing. A girl, writing in the dim light at a desk in the window, and Avo saw that it was Mina.

  He hadn’t seen her in months. When she returned from Paris, he knew, she’d been pestered by the authorities and by her family and by everyone else eager to know about Ruben’s disappearance, and because Avo knew Mina would’ve had nothing to do with all that, he’d avoided being yet another person looking to her for answers. He hadn’t seen her since the day she’d come back from the airport, hadn’t talked with her since the Black Sea, and now, through a dim window in the middle of the night, he was afraid that she would see him and—just as in the tent—be frightened by his looking in on her. So he decided to keep walking.

  But soon, maybe thirty steps past her window, Avo heard footsteps splashing behind him on the road.

  “You can stop avoiding me,” Mina said.

  “You’ll get sick,” Avo said. Mina was standing there in a nightgown, no coat.

  “I didn’t know he was going to stay in Paris,” she said. “I would’ve warned you. I know how close you two were.”

  He lifted his coat and told her to get in. “You’ll get sick.”

  Mina stepped beneath his raised jacket. She didn’t even need to duck. He said, “Take your hands off your chin.”

  She did. Put them around his waist. Up near her shoulders. He craned low to kiss her. They kissed. The jacket tipped. Doused them in rainwater.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “About Tigran.”

  She pressed her forehead to him and leaned there for a while. Finally, she looked up and said, “Do you want to see the city from my roof?”

  They had to be quiet. The elevator’s rattle and whine would wake everybody in the building, floor by floor, so they took the stairs. Twelve flights. Mina’s rain-soaked nightgown swishing up ahead of him. On the roof, their breathing was heavy from the steps. The wind made interesting shapes with the rain, and they kissed between those shapes, and they promised to stay there together, and they kissed, and she asked him to be careful, as careful as an act of spontaneity could be, and they laughed and then laughed at their laughing, and on the floor of the roof in the windswept rain they made interesting shapes.

  Mosquitoes never bit her, and the dice always rolled in her favor, and as he spent increasingly prolonged stretches of his days with her, Avo began to have some luck of his own. His supervisor at the factory announced that he, Shorty, was being transferred temporarily to the headquarters in Moscow, and that, for the price of feeding and looking after his two cats, Avo was free to live in his apartment in the meantime. Then, one day on his way to work, Avo found a hundred-ruble note on the street. A fresh bill, just lying in the road, the bust of Lenin in profile, looking off into the distance as if looking everywhere and nowhere, gazing outward and reflecting deeply, all at once. Waiting for Avo to lift and pocket and spend him on—on what? On Mina, no doubt, the source of his good fortune. He added the money to his savings and used it to buy a brand-new record from a man who sold them out of his car down an alleyway called Proshyan Street. Songs in the Key of Life. The man selling the record said it was the greatest music since Bach. From then on, when Mina came over to Shorty’s apartment with her sister’s record player, they’d play with the cats—Shorty’s two, and Mina’s, whom she brought along—and listen to Stevie Wonder over and over again, and sometimes they’d talk over the music, and sometimes they’d lie on the floor with the cats on their chests, just listening. When they talked, they talked about everything but the past. They talked about family and marriage, about children, about the possibility that one day she would coach the backgammon club at school, and he would coach the wrestlers. The one time Mina mentioned Tigran, it was to say she’d gone to visit his widow, searching for an old collection of dice she’d learned about in Paris.

  “She looked for them everywhere,” Mina said, “but they’d vanished. Avo, I felt terrible. She looked for them everywhere, and I couldn’t get her to stop. Watching her slowly take to her old knees to search under the bed broke my heart all over again.”

  She thumbed a tear from the corner of her eye and let Avo palm the crown of her hair.

  When Shorty returned from Moscow, those soothing times threatened to end. Avo complained about having to move back to Ruben’s old house in the village in the hills, and Mina asked why they couldn’t find an apartment of their own to move into.

  Avo laughed. “Are you proposing to me?”

  Mina went to cover her chin but grabbed her heart instead. “I think I am.”

  And Avo asked her father’s permission, which he gave, and he asked Ruben’s mother if she had a ring she could spare.

  “I have this one,” she said, returning from her bedroom with a thin silver band, a triangular jewel set in the center. “It’s not a real diamond, I’m afraid. It’s cubic zirconium. But it’s beautiful, no?”

  “It really is,” Avo said, and he thanked her, and he held the little ring in his palm so tight that it must have left a cut in his skin. “I’m so lucky you took me in,” he told Ruben’s mother, and he thanked her and thanked her and thanked her again.

  Mina was holding the ring to the light when Avo found his latest piece of luck, which arrived in the form of a postcard.

  The sender’s address was in Beirut. The photograph showed a grand plaza by the sea, with palm trees and hotels and, in the foreground, a long white bus emblazoned with a red stripe. On the other side of the postcard, a short message had been written in a sloppy Armenian scrawl:

  Mr. Gregoryan,

  How is the old man—dead still? Maybe he’ll come alive in the new year, just at the stroke of twelve, as in a children’s story! Impossible, I know, but what’s the harm in checking?

  Yours,

  Shirakatsi

  The postcard must’ve been from Ruben, but Avo had no clue as to its meaning. For a minute or two, he felt the cautious relief and anger he might’ve felt if Ruben had appeared in the room. Then he returned to the mystery of the note’s meaning and the vague familiarity of the name Shirakatsi.

  Where had he heard it before?

  For days, he kept the postcard in his pocket at home and at the factory and on his long walks through the city after work.

  One night in December, Mina joined him. It was in the strange in-between season, after the rains but before the snow. The air felt wrung out and empty.

  “The name on the postcard sounds so familiar,” Avo said. “Shirakatsi.”

  As soon as he saw the look of recognition on Mina’s face, the way she turned her head slightly but kept her eyes on him, he remembered where he’d heard the name.

  “Funny,” Mina said. “There’s an old mathematician called Shirakatsi. He wrote proofs.”

  They were walking in a kind of cuddling way, with Mina buried under Avo’s arm, and it was warm but also awkward. To be held by another person while you’re in motion—Mina said she preferred to stop and sit. But Avo was walking faster now, thinking of Ruben. Mina told him to slow down, that she couldn’t keep up with his giant strides. Then she said, “I wonder if Shirakatsi’s got a living descendant. But how would he know of you? Maybe . . .”

  She kept talking, but her breath became a mask in the windless cold, and Avo could see less and less of her as she spoke, and his mind returned to the postcard. What had Ruben meant?

  Something about an old man? The new year? He could sort out the details of the message later, he reminded himself. For now, he should be glad that his brother was safe. His brother was safe and hadn’t abandoned him after all.

  While Mina recalled biographical details of Shirakatsi’s life, she noticed that Avo wasn’t paying much attention to her. He was preoccupied with Ruben, the sender of the postcard. Who else could it have been, she thought. It was obvious Avo had solved the mystery, too, when she mentioned the old mathematician. She rambled on
about the life of the old scholar, inserting fictional details now as she went along—did Avo know that Shirakatsi had trained a pet rat who refused anything less than the finest Greek cheese?—and she felt, for the first time since their night on the roof, that she and Avo might not spend their lives together. Just like that, Avo could fall into her past. She’d imagined so many futures with him, and he’d done the same, had told her an imagined future one morning not long ago, picking lemons at dawn. She’d worn her favorite yellow scarf, knitted by her mother. She’d let Avo bend low in the tall grass between the trees. She’d climbed onto him, one leg at a time over his shoulders, and he’d lifted her. At his full height, she’d pressed her thighs around his neck. It might have been the very last hour of the lemon season, and the sun was still nothing but a low glow in the east—lower than she was, it seemed—a low glow like a hum you could see, and she was as tall as she’d ever been, plucking lemons from the tops of trees. Not thinking to cover her chin. And he’d told her a future in which they traveled the world together.

  Now, walking awkwardly in the nooks of him, she kept from crying by rambling on about her fictional Shirakatsi.

  “And in his will,” she said, “he left all his money to that pet rat, for all the cheese in Greece.”

  Avo, looking everywhere but at her, said, “I didn’t know that.”

  Maybe he felt guilty for not listening, for not being fully present. He stopped and picked her up and blew his lips into her neck, which sometimes made her laugh. He said, “I’m sorry the ring is cheap and fake,” and she told him what she always told him when he promised her a real ring in the future, that her ring was perfect, that the only way to make it cheap would’ve been to try and pass it off as real.

  “Tell me again about our travels,” she said, and Avo, letting her down softly, said, “In America, we’ll have horses and cows and enormous hats, and watch movies at night and listen to music all day, and you’ll take high-level math at the university while I write you poems, and in exchange for them you’ll—”

  “I’m not doing anything for a poem. I’m sorry, I’m spoiled, but I expect free poems.”

  “Fine, and I expect some things for free, too.”

  “Idiot,” she said.

  “Backgammon lessons, is what I meant. I swear, your mind is so filthy for a girl from Kirovakan.”

  And on and on they went, believing in the story they were telling.

  According to the close-up of the Spasskaya Tower on the TV in Mina’s apartment, twenty minutes separated 1974 from 1975. Mina had been penned into the small kitchen with her sister and mother and several aunts and female cousins, all of whom worked elbow to elbow like cogs in a clock tower to make spreads of the desserts they’d baked. In the main room, the children had fallen asleep in the spaces between the men, who surrounded the TV in stoic furniture made of beechwood and textiles. In the corners of the windows, triangles of frost grew like mold, mirroring the pyramids of pomegranates and nectarines arranged on the table. “I’ve got to go out for a minute,” Avo told the men, grabbing his coat. Mina’s father told him there was no need to leave to smoke a cigarette, lifting his own as proof. But Avo said he enjoyed smoking in the cold, which was true. He said, “I’ll be back before Mina gets out of the kitchen,” and took a nectarine on the way out.

  The streets of Kirovakan carved through the pinched walls of plowed snow. For the past few days, instead of going on long walks after work, Avo had gone straight to Ruben’s parents’ house in the village to reread the postcard. Again and again, he’d been unable to make meaning of it. He wished Ruben had been more direct, but he enjoyed the idea of Ruben’s needing to use pseudonyms and riddles. It was exciting to think of him as a wanted defector, to imagine his journey from Paris to Beirut. The international travel meant he must’ve had the help of professional smugglers, which made the whole scenario even more thrilling. Avo did wish, however, that one of those professionals could have passed a more straightforward message through the censors. It was a pity that a spellbinding tale of escape and life on the lam was diluted into this children’s story, a “dead old man” to identify before the “stroke of twelve.”

  What was the point, Avo thought, of asking if a dead man was still dead, anyway?

  He thought he’d memorized the note, and recited it aloud from memory: “‘How is the old man,’” he said, “‘still dead?’”

  The night before, though, he realized he’d mixed up the quote. It wasn’t still dead—it was dead still.

  How’s the old man—dead still?

  Dead still—the phrase was more awkward this way. Avo’s brain kept fixing it the other way around. Or else putting a pause in there: Dead, still? Dead still without the pause seemed to mean something else altogether. Dead still.

  “Like a statue,” Avo said to himself, and he was so proud of himself for figuring out where Ruben wanted him to go that he almost told the whole story to Ruben’s mother.

  Instead, he made the plan to leave Mina’s apartment before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

  Now, in the snow, he checked his watch. He arrived at the city square with fourteen minutes to spare. A crowd of people had gathered there, and city workers were preparing the night’s fireworks. At the center of the crowd stood old Kirov, the city’s namesake—the old man, dead still, who might come alive in the new year—bronze and snowcapped like an old survivor full of bones.

  Avo took a seat at Kirov’s plinth. He watched the Manukyan boys take turns being pulled along on their sled, and the Barsamyan sisters and the Mirzoyan girl shuffling messages into the snow with their boots. A hundred more just like them, tiny, bundled people playing in the snow while their parents smoked cigarettes near the steps of city hall. This was what they’d all survived for, the one night they could spend together looking ahead and not back. Avo recognized most of the people in the square, and as he waited for midnight, a few people came by to say hello, or to offer something to eat or drink. He was surprised to find how warm he kept, sitting in the cold. But his size always made him feel hotter than most, and his heart was beating quickly now, and he accepted a few walnuts from Mano Najaryan, a coworker at the factory, and he tossed the nectarine he’d taken from Mina’s place to Mano’s daughter, and he felt as though he could stay in this place for about as long as old Kirov could.

  When the clock tower rang in the new year, the people of Kirovakan sparked the first of their fireworks. Missiles lifted greenly against the current of the falling snow. Avo didn’t follow the streaks long enough to watch their inevitable explosions. Instead, he stood and turned to inspect the statue, which was supposed to “come to life” at midnight. Avo didn’t believe Ruben’s clue literally, but he did expect something to occur at old Kirov’s feet. He checked the statue—still nothing—then returned his attention to the crowd, waiting for someone—a messenger? Ruben himself?—to emerge from it toward him. What did he see? The awed faces of children and parents glowing under the detonations. Snow gathering in eyelashes. A hazy group laughter thrumming between the pops and whistles. No one, nobody, coming to meet him.

  When the celebration finished, the families packed their blankets and sleds and went home, already back to thinking of the past. The city workers cleaned up after them and packed the fireworks, and then they went home, too, leaving the square empty, save for Kirov and Avo, who was finally starting to feel cold.

  The thought of Mina waiting for him, angry or hurt—or worse, the thought of her not noticing he’d disappeared—hung a catch in his throat and almost moved him from his seat. But another idea, the prospect of his brother’s having arranged a spectacle for him, kept him frozen.

  Still, he didn’t know how much longer he could wait. Just a little while earlier, when the clock was arranged just slightly differently, the postcard in his pocket had felt like a hand reaching down a mountain to pull him up. But now it was beginning to feel more like a boot kicking snow from above. In his heart, Avo had blamed Ruben—in part, he told himself, in
part—for Tigran’s death, and now he worried that Ruben had known. Ruben was punishing him, Avo realized, by sending this stupid riddle, by driving a splint between him and Mina. At once, Avo was furious with Ruben for setting him up, and with himself for falling for it so readily.

  His skin went numb. The catch in his throat swelled to pain. He started to leave.

  “Good night, Kirov-jan,” Avo muttered to the statue, tipping his cap as he walked away, and then said it again, louder, amused with his own performance. He took a few steps down the road, only to turn back dramatically. “No, brother, I can’t stay. I understand, I understand—I’d love to talk all night with you, too, but I’ve got work in a few hours, and you’re not as young as you once were. Look at your hair! White as snow!”

  To his delight, Avo’s silly performance was beginning to dissolve his anger for real. He was even—maybe he’d have been embarrassed if anyone had been watching—enjoying himself. “Here, brother,” he said, climbing onto the statue’s feet. “Let me fix you so you’re young again.”

  Avo stepped onto a bronze fold in the statue’s pant leg and reached up. It took all of his outstretched height to reach Kirov’s head with his fingertips to brush away the snow.

  “There you go, old comrade,” Avo said. “Old age doesn’t suit you. Be it pigeon shit or snow, I’ll be here to keep you young. Don’t pity me—I’m in love!” Avo laughed again and decided to top off his performance with a kiss on Kirov’s cheek. He grabbed the bronze face with both hands, puckered up, and leaned in for his kiss good night.

  Which was when he found, rolled into Kirov’s nostril, a gray envelope.

  When she told the story later, Mina remembered one conversation under the ski lift in particular. When he’d been at his best, Avo said, wrestling for the Junior Olympics team, he’d had visions of becoming a national hero. “I couldn’t imagine anything better than to be loved by many strangers. Now I can imagine something better.”

  It was sweet, she said, but she was curious about his original goal, the one about the strangers. “I had that dream, too,” she said. “I guess we used to be competitive.”