The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  Once, Surik brought a rolled-up tube of paper to Ruben’s apartment and unfurled it to reveal a poster of Cher, the most famous Armenian in the world. The others got a laugh out of it and pasted it to Ruben’s bedroom wall. Ruben didn’t laugh, but he put his hands up in defeat. They must have been confused by Hagopian’s giving Ruben a second chance—Ruben himself was—so he decided to leave the poster up as a sign of goodwill. He knew he was theirs, in a way. At a decent hour, they’d shuffle off for the night, each man in his own direction, and Ruben would lie in bed, finally hungry, beneath the image of Cher, and he would try again, and fail, to sleep. And then again the buzzer. And then again the khash.

  Some nights, he woke from brief unmemorable dreams and imagined where his cousin’s cousin had been taken. Where he himself had taken him.

  Some nights, he took to his knees beside the bed and prayed. Not for forgiveness but for the courage to keep faithful. So that the sacrifices he’d made might be worth something in the end.

  It was his job to communicate with ASALA affiliates in different cities around the world, and he spent most of his working days on the phone or at the desk, writing cryptically worded letters. Sometimes, during a break for coffee, or during a long, dull drive to the north of Athens for a small-arms trade, the conversation would turn to him, and in those moments, Ruben tried to keep his cigarette in his mouth so he could justify his mumbling.

  “How come you don’t have a girl?” Hamik sometimes asked. Or Zatik would say, “You can’t live only for work, little man, you have to have family. I would be a psychopath if I didn’t have my wife, my children, to come home to.” Surik would laugh. “We can talk about a wife later, but at least tell us you’re getting fucked every once in a while.”

  But Ruben had never slept with a woman. That is, unless you counted the nights when, kneeling at his bedside in prayer, he’d look up and catch the almost tropically humid gaze of Cher. She seemed to be judging him. For being a small man on his knees, begging for strength. In the photograph, she had her hair blown out in enormous black curls. He was twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. He’d never, not once, even so much as kissed a woman in a meaningful way.

  “Are you not into women?” Surik once joked over breakfast, and Ruben threw his spoon into Surik’s face, chipping a tooth. Martik put his hands on Ruben, but Surik laughed and told him to ease off. “So sensitive, Ruben-jan. Now I know where the line is for our little stoic. I was only joking, of course. How else can we get through all this struggle but to laugh every once in a while?”

  “The Turks are laughing enough for all of us,” Ruben said.

  “Huh,” Hamik said. “I can see why Hagop likes him.”

  “Okay,” Zatik said, “but we’ve known him for a long time now, we’ve welcomed him into our family. We need to know one story about him, no? All we’re asking is five minutes without the Turks. Okay, Ruben-jan? Tell us about the girl you gifted your virginity. Tell us about that lucky girl.”

  It was the word lucky that reminded him. He heard himself say, “She was lucky. She was the luckiest girl in Armenia.” The men laughed, but he went on, explaining how she seemed able to control dice with her mind. He remembered the story Avo had told him, about their night on the roof. They were teenagers on the roof of the tallest building in Kirovakan. It was the first time either one of them had been touched. Ruben told the story word for word, except he replaced his brother’s name with his own.

  “And her name?” said Zatik.

  “Her name,” Ruben said, “was Mina.”

  Avo was dead, he knew. By sending him to Martik’s place, Ruben himself had killed him.

  But the act of telling his story, the act of imagining himself in Avo’s skin, making love to Mina on a roof with a view, seemed to give him life again. He couldn’t do that, not literally, but this was at least a gesture toward that miracle, the gesture of incorporation. Avo’s story plaited naturally into his. A revival and a revision, a revisitation. It felt real. Leaving Mina, Ruben told the Four Eeks, was the only sacrifice he’d struggled to make. Much harder than turning in his traitor brother to Hagopian. He and Mina had plans to marry after he returned. He wanted her to know where he was, to visit him, but he was living underground, and he ran out of time. She was married now, and he wanted to believe she was right to have stopped waiting for him. To fall in love with someone else. A paper shuffler by the name of Galust. Ruben wanted to believe that she was right to do what she did. But he was lying to himself. She was wrong to betray him, and she should feel hopelessly, irrevocably ashamed.

  Surik, Hamik, and Zatik sat back. Looked at each other. Finally, Zatik scratched his beard and said, “Little stoic, the next time you tell that story, slow down during the sex part, and maybe speed up the rest?”

  By May 1983, when Hagopian called with his plan for the Turkish Airlines terminal at Orly Airport, Ruben had all the contacts he needed in Paris to arrange Zatik’s trip. Zatik had finally finished building The Truth, and Hagopian wanted the bomb for Orly. The boss believed this attack would be the turning point for the war against denialism. Zatik was adamant that he be in Paris to set off his beloved bomb himself, so he tried to arrange plans for his wife and children to be sent on vacation in mid-July, just in case they became implicated. But Zatik’s wife didn’t want to leave. She was in the middle of a book she was writing on parenting a child with Down syndrome. Not to mention, she continued, that she was in the middle of parenting a child with Down syndrome. Zatik couldn’t budge her. He would have to stay in Greece.

  “Ruben,” he said one morning over khash. “You’re going to be the one to do it.”

  Ruben knew better than to ask why. Surik and Hamik were in charge of the entire Greek operation, and Martik, who hardly came to breakfast anymore, didn’t seem the traveling type. Ruben was the only one whose job could be done at a distance, so there was no choice to be made. Still, he reached into his coat pocket to retrieve his bottle of apple cider vinegar, holding his own wrist so the bottle didn’t tremble as he drank from it.

  Surik patted him on the knee. “You’ve done this before, Ruben-jan.”

  “Not like this.”

  “It’s the same,” Hamik offered gently, “only this time, a button instead of a trigger.”

  “It’s not the same,” Zatik said, indignant. “The Truth is my masterpiece. You can’t just push a button. You have to know it, you have to study it, you have to love it. It has to be timed and done perfectly so that it actually goes off, and goes off when you want it to go off. In the air.”

  Passengers would die. Not ambassadors. Not representatives. Just—passengers. Ruben would be the one pulling it off. He scooped another spoonful of cow. “I don’t know how I’ll eat anything in Paris if I can’t have this. Can Hayk come with me?”

  “Poor Hayk,” Hamik said. “Let’s not implicate him even further. He’s got a gun in that kitchen, and we don’t want him to have to put it to use. He’s been so good to us.”

  Ruben remembered the one missing Eek. He said, “I’ll go to Paris. But I’d like to visit Martik’s place before leaving.”

  Surik, Hamik, and Zatik went silent. They focused on their hooves. “His place isn’t on the way,” Surik said.

  Zatik swallowed. “You don’t have time, you have to study.”

  “And besides,” Hamik said, laughing, “Martik doesn’t treat his guests very well.”

  By the time Ruben returned to the hotel, Varoujan had finished the paper. “Let’s go watch the fireworks tonight,” he said, slapping a local page. “There’s a bridge with a great view.”

  In the evening, having learned from the altar boy’s mistake, Ruben led his partner to the metro well before dusk. Crowds had already begun lining up along Pont de l’Alma, but the two of them were small enough to find space at the rail near the southern end. Waiting for the sun to set, they felt the depth of the crowd behind them grow. In Syria, Varoujan said, he’d once seen a man kiss a horse on the nose, nothing devia
nt but strange nonetheless, tender and—seeing as how he remembered it all these years later—somewhat moving. Sometimes, when he was bored, he liked to imagine what adventures that man and his horse had been through, what risks they’d taken together that had created such a bond. He liked to imagine them crossing rivers. Imagine them splitting their last apple, lost in the woods. When the sun finally dropped, when the darkness settled in around the famous tower and the lights along the bridge reflected in the river, when the first squeals of gunpowder sounded and the first bursts of color flowered in the sky, Varoujan was still talking about that man and his horse.

  The explosions went off in the sky. Varoujan said something, and Ruben had to lean in and ask him to repeat himself.

  “I know he wasn’t really your brother,” he said into Ruben’s ear.

  Confused, Ruben said, “Excuse me?”

  “The traitor. He wasn’t really your brother, right?”

  Was the bridge collapsing? Ruben removed his bottle of apple cider vinegar from inside his coat. He sipped from it.

  “I’ve heard conflicting reports,” Varoujan said directly into his ear.

  “Like what?” Ruben said. He pictured himself throwing the man off the bridge.

  “There are rumors, is all. You don’t have to worry. I understand. That kind of love is rare. Two people, you know. Or a man and his horse. I wish I had that. With a woman, of course, in my case.”

  But Varoujan had it all wrong. How could Ruben explain the texture of his love for Avo? Not the easy love it had been mistaken for, but something else, something holy and rutted, a deep recognition. On the bridge, he felt a sudden readiness to be done with ASALA, to go back to that church. But he also felt that his inability to quit was a kind of testament to his love for Avo. Quitting now would evaporate Avo’s sacrifice, ironing flat the holy texture of their love.

  But how could he explain?

  “He wasn’t my brother,” Ruben said, “but he wasn’t that, either. He was another myself.”

  All night the fireworks cracked, and Ruben was awake to hear them. Every now and then, he stirred from his bed to sip from his bottle, and the dark blue shadows falling over Varoujan in his bed, on the other side of the room, made it impossible to see if his partner was asleep. In fact, the lump in the other bed, covered by a thin summer sheet, could’ve been anyone. In the morning, Ruben washed his socks in the sink, showered, and dressed himself. He followed Varoujan to the lobby, where they checked out. Stepping into the backseat of the taxi to the airport, he squished in his wet socks.

  Varoujan sat in the front passenger seat, and he wouldn’t stop talking to the driver, another Algerian. Varoujan stretched in his seat and explained how he used to be a cabbie back in Syria, where he used to drive important men between meetings, used to pretend he was a horse-carriage driver in a story by an old Russian, used to imagine little ghosts of himself leaving the car with every passenger he dropped off, so that every stop left him a little less of himself. On and on he went, as if the Algerian were paying attention, as if the Algerian, whose father had been one of two hundred immigrants gunned down by the Parisian police in a massacre in October 1961, had asked a single question.

  Still Varoujan went on, and Ruben sat quietly in the backseat with The Truth in a briefcase in his lap. He remembered how, outside the drugstore in Greensboro, North Carolina, Avo hadn’t said a single word. Avo hadn’t explained himself, hadn’t defended his choice to tip off the professor, hadn’t even asked to be allowed back home. The day had been bright and green but cool, and as they’d waited for a car outside the drugstore, prisms of color hovered in the wet trees.

  And there was Avo, not saying a word. He didn’t say, for example, “The beard suits you, Ruben-jan. You look older. More sophisticated. Still small, bro, but good.”

  Bright but cool. “It’s sneezing weather,” Avo didn’t say. “Nothing at all like home.”

  The plan had been to take a motel near the airport and leave the next morning for Athens. But something caught Ruben’s attention. Avo didn’t ask what it was. He just followed Ruben’s gaze to a park beside the precinct, where many pairs of men were playing chess. And backgammon. Ruben didn’t say, “I haven’t played in I don’t know how long.” He just started walking. And Avo followed.

  At an oak table near the entry to the park, two black men were at the backgammon board, rolling dice. Both men were bundled in thick coats and scarves over their mouths. Gray eyebrows on one, playing ivory. A younger man on the other side, playing mahogany. Mittens cupping their dice.

  Mittens hitting the timer. Pigeons mulling about their boots, looking for crumbs that had fallen there a long time ago.

  The men played, and Ruben watched the way a magician inspected a trick being performed. “You in?” asked the gray man, the winner. And Ruben switched places with the younger man. The pigeons fluttered half-heartedly, making room. Everything was reset—the board and the clock, all that dwindling time recharged with just the punch of a mitten.

  “How did you find me?” Avo didn’t ask, but Ruben answered anyway.

  “Hagopian wouldn’t let me back until I found you,” he said. The man across the board raised an eyebrow but kept playing.

  “Two years,” Ruben said, taking his turn. “Failing again and again. Until I met the most vulgar man. He led me to you.”

  Avo didn’t say a word, but Ruben could feel he hadn’t left.

  “If you come with me, Hagopian will let us explain. You can go home.” He could sense his brother stirring, getting ready to run. That was when he said, “Mina is married, Avo.”

  He didn’t turn to see Avo’s reaction, but he felt the sphere of his brother’s heart expand and shrink, seeking another like a signal in the night. When Ruben was sure Avo wouldn’t run, he added one more point to punish him for the past two years. “She knows,” he said. “About Tigran, I mean. It’s over, brother. I told her what you did.”

  His opponent played his turn. When his mitten came down, time was restored.

  Ruben led Varoujan out of the cab and into the terminal gates, where they traded luggage. Varoujan took their bags to the Luxair check-in counter. They’d be boarding soon on their way to Luxembourg. Meanwhile, Ruben took his briefcase to the nearest restroom, where he locked himself into a stall, swallowed the last of his apple cider vinegar, and began his work.

  Zatik had given him the instructions so many times that the twelve-volt lead acid battery at the center of the device had always seemed to him a purely mathematical object. But now, his hands trembling, his thoughts returning to what Avo hadn’t said—not a word of righteousness, not a word in defense of mercy—the battery looked more like an organ in a vivisected body. There was a life in it, in the cylindrical remote detonator fitting into his palm like a vertebra. In the lining of the briefcase, the Eeks had stitched the names of victims of the genocide. In ink, Ruben had added the names of Yergat and Siranoush, and there seemed to be more life in this meticulously and lovingly built object of death than there was in the line of passengers at the gate.

  Varoujan was waiting for him at the Luxair gate, a few hundred paces from the Turkish Airlines gate where Ruben dropped off The Truth.

  “We should be boarding in no time,” Varoujan said. “If all the bags were checked.”

  “I left mine in the gate,” Ruben said.

  Varoujan grabbed his shoulder. “You’re kidding. It was supposed to go on the plane.”

  “Planes crash and burn all the time,” Ruben said.

  For the first time in years, he felt comfortable in his body. His skin was soft and matte, like it used to be when he was a child.

  He said, “My way’s more memorable.”

  Varoujan sat with his head in his hands. Then he rushed out of the gate area, on through the terminal, out to a taxi stand. He knew, just as Ruben knew, that their plane to Luxembourg wouldn’t board on time.

  16

  Los Angeles, California, 1989

  Wordlessly, Mina l
ed me from the roof to her apartment and then closed the door behind us. The apartment—in the laced light of one curtained window at the front—bloomed into view. Floral portraits hung in gold-latticed frames on the walls, petaled patterns stretched between the fabric of an armchair and its matching couch, and even the carvings at the feet of the coffee table seemed to bring the whole room together like a trellis in a garden. Pink and yellow and eggshell frills skirted between the furniture and the carpet, and the oven in the kitchenette where we were standing was still warm with the day’s baking, rich with the botanical smells of basil and thyme. When Mina dropped a large weight in my arms, I thought for a minute she’d given me a bouquet of dark roses. But the roses purred against my collarbone, and I saw that I was holding a cat, my cat, who’d grown black and long and slender. “Hold him,” Mina said, “so if they’re coming in to see us, they’re seeing why you’re here, for him, not for me.”