The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  Gregoryan smiled, finishing his cigarette. “That’s a good one.”

  Galust stomped his cigarette out, too, but found himself sticking around. “I’ve got a million more,” he said.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” Gregoryan said, and Galust said, “One quick one, okay.”

  Mina zipped Araksya into her little coat. Galust wasn’t home in time, and they’d skipped dinner, and all day the gray sky had teased rain, and if she waited another minute, she’d be late to the recital and caught in the worst of the storm.

  “We need to leave now,” Mina told her mother-in-law, tugging at the fingers of her gloves.

  “I’m not leaving without my son,” Galust’s mother said. “And you, a woman arriving at an event without her husband—I’ve never heard of such a thing. I’ll wait for him, I’ll do what you should be doing. You go on, you go on without me. I’ll wait for him here. God forbid I ever see a concert again before I die. I used to go to concerts every month. People knew me as the lady who went to concerts.”

  “This isn’t a concert, Mom, it’s just kids having fun.”

  “Not a concert? Look at your daughter’s gown. I hate that shade of green, but you chose it anyway. It won’t look nice on the stage.”

  “She’s not going onstage, Mom. This is her cousin’s recital. We’ll just be in the audience.”

  “And watch, her father will run to join you straight from work and leave me here all by myself.”

  Mina apologized, but there was no heart in it. She took her daughter by the hand and led her down the elevator of the tallest building in Kirovakan, and as soon as they stepped out from under the awning, the rain broke free over the city. Mina lifted the hood of her daughter’s coat, leading her by the hand between the battered domes of umbrellas rushing from the streets to the covered shelters in the city square. She watched her daughter admire the hazed and glowing world. Mina had always loved the city in the rain. City rain allowed a kind of rebounding vision, the way bats twisted echoes into shapes. Everything—the sloping roofs of Volgas and Ladas parked along the motorway, the eyelid awnings of butchers and cafés, the bouquets of streetlamps—appeared outlined in a colorless glow. Haloed, like her daughter in her hooded coat, as they climbed the steps of the recital hall.

  Sometime between the first and second drink, Galust had invited Gregoryan home for dinner with his family, and between the second and third drink, Galust remembered the recital.

  It came to him in the middle of a joke Gregoryan was telling, the panic. Maybe, he thought, he could blame his faulty memory on the unexpected visit. Gregoryan had thrown him off his routine. But what was his excuse a month ago, when, for the first time since receiving it, he’d forgotten to wear the pin in his lapel to work? Or two weeks ago, when it had happened again? Or just last week, when he’d taken a break to go to Mano’s shop for a new carton of cigarettes? He’d smoked the same brand for forty years, but on the walk over to Mano’s, he couldn’t remember the name. He could picture the case—blue and white box with a yellow continent in the corner—but the name escaped him. He took it as a blessing that Mano had the case waiting for him, as usual. Galust didn’t need to stand there in his embarrassment, trying to recall the brand as if reaching for an olive at the bottom of an empty jar. He’d thanked Mano and stared at the word splashed across the case. Belomorkanal. It hardly rang a bell. Three packs a week for forty years, and the name hardly rang a bell. In the office that day, he’d torn out a page and done the math: almost 125,000 cigarettes. The number astonished him almost as much as the fact of his forgetting. When he’d told Mina, she’d laughed, and so he’d laughed, too. But now he’d forgotten his niece’s recital. Where would the forgetting stop? The terrorizing idea came to him that one day he’d forget the name of his little fish. Galust slapped money onto the table. His daughter—Araksya, Araksya, Araksya—was with her mother at the recital hall, and he was supposed to be there with them. He’d forgotten.

  The two men ran together to the tallest building in Kirovakan to fetch Galust’s mother.

  “Who is he?” said his mother, dressed in a blue gown. “Why are you late? The recital started forty minutes ago! If I’d known you were bringing a guest, I’d have gone myself. I like to see concerts, you know. Something different for a change. I’ll go put on my shoes.”

  “My niece is singing,” Galust told Gregoryan.

  “I can leave, no problem.”

  “Perfect,” said Galust’s mother.

  “No, Mom. It’ll be over soon, we’re already late. I’ve asked my new friend to dinner, and we’re still on for when we get back. He’ll come with us to the recital, if he doesn’t mind, and we’ll all have dinner together after.”

  “And who will make the dinner? Not your wife, whose borscht is hardly edible.”

  “We’ll go to Mano’s on the way back and bring food home.”

  “And spend money when we already have perfectly good food here?”

  “We’ll plan during the walk, Mom. We need to leave now.”

  “I’m ready,” she said. “I’m waiting for you!”

  The theater was full. It was only a little amphitheater near the city square, but it was raised in sophistication by the number of people and the manner of dress in the audience—fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts and grandparents and cousins in fine suits and gowns, bearing flowers for the talent they called their own, standing and talking in large groups in the aisles or else craning their necks and turning in their seats arranged in rows. The whole enterprise seemed holier than the playful, childish exhibit Mina had anticipated, rather more like a christening than a show, and suddenly, she regretted her raincoat and the ugly simple dress she wore beneath it, and her lack of earrings, and her showing up alone, without her husband. She recognized some of the parents in the third row, including her sister, and smiled and waved hello from a distance and covered her chin.

  Leading her daughter, Mina began her search for consecutive empty seats. She had to ask a whole family to move down the aisle to make room. She thanked them for this as if they’d pulled her from a lake of fire. Still, only three empty seats were in the row. She planted her daughter into one, took another herself, and draped her raincoat over the empty seat beside her to save it for Galust. The chair would be wet when he arrived, but at least it would be a seat. Galust’s mother could stand in the aisle.

  The lights dimmed, and the last of the gossips took their seats. Twice she had to whisper—and then repeat, louder—an explanation that the seat next to hers was reserved for her husband, and she could feel the eyes of the people standing in the aisle staring at the wet coat draped over that chair as the notes of the first song ended and the first footfalls of choreography began, and she tried to focus her attention on the children on the stage, avoiding the eyes she could feel in the dark. She took to pretending to be Lot’s wife, convincing herself that turning to look for Galust now would turn her to salt, and she watched the children dance, and she prayed for a delay before her niece appeared on the stage.

  And then it came—a long wispy breath of music, a single note hovering in the air before collapsing into a trill—the melody her niece had been practicing for months. And the lights came up a little in the front, and the jeweled leaves on Talin’s gown reflected blue light into the audience, and she held the duduk at her lips like a pipe, straightforward and parallel to the stage. She was alone up there. The melody was a child’s melody, whole notes and half notes and one tricky part with quarter notes—played on a child’s duduk, miniature in size, just half the apricot wood of a standard instrument. The pitch was higher, like a record sped up, and some of the notes came through the reed as purely as breathing. Then she sang. Talin was alone up there, shining. Blue light on the faces in the crowd, none of which belonged to her uncle, and she was alone up there and shining.

  Cheers and whistles. Whistles and cheers. Mina blew kisses. You didn’t see Uncle Galust? He was just over in the aisle, taking pictures. Blew kisses. Blew
kisses.

  Somewhere in the middle of a choreographed song about different species of birds living in the same tree, Mina felt a hand on her shoulder. She was reflexively ready again to explain that the seat was taken, but she saw that the hand belonged to her husband. Galust moved her raincoat and sat in its puddle. He leaned over and kissed her on the shoulder. He said, “Did I miss Talin?”

  Their family’s song. Mina took his hand. Squeezed. Yes, he’d missed it. He lowered his voice. “A man came to my office late.”

  Another squeeze. Explain later.

  “He had a burn on his face. I felt terrible.”

  “Please,” Mina whispered.

  “See? He’s just over there.”

  Her attention left the dancing children. There in the aisle—standing among a dozen strangers, among a dozen smaller people whose blooming lives advanced untethered from hers, whose love had never belonged to her and never would—there he was. He was. The blue light from the stage washed his face browless and bare, but there, smiling a blue smile, he was, and the split in their histories began to curl and splice, and the children sang in chorus from the stage, and she felt the muscles in her face mirroring his, signaling a blue smile of her own, and she knew all at once about the roundness of time.

  “You know him?” Galust said.

  Another squeeze. Let the children finish their singing.

  And when they did, the children broke free from behind the curtain and spilled from the stage to their families in the crowd. Talin ran straight to her cousin, and Galust picked both girls up and began his loving lies. I heard you, Talin-jan, you sang beautifully. Mina picked at the blue leaves on her niece’s gown, saying, “Angel, angel,” and she saw that Avo was no longer where he’d been, standing in the aisle. In fact, he was nowhere at all to be found in the theater. Without explanation, she started toward the door, pressing herself through the small gaps between people. Outside, night had come on, and the rain had been brushed aside by a cool and feathered wind, and she wrapped herself in her own arms as she spotted him, thinner than she remembered, smoking at the curb, saying her name.

  She went to him. She unwrapped herself from herself and went to him.

  “You know each other?” Galust asked when he came outside, carrying their daughter.

  Three

  20

  Los Angeles, California, 1989

  Late Wednesday afternoon, staked out in my Ranger at a gas station near her apartment, I waited for the woman with the dice. I’d given her ten minutes to make her excuses and join me, and already ten minutes had passed. I kept checking the rearview mirror, hoping to see her turn the corner out of the neighborhood, red fanny pack tied around her waist like a championship belt. I kept waiting, as we’d say in the business, for the pop at the sound of her music.

  Meanwhile, Fuji was likewise waiting for me. By now he’d been at that jewelry store long after I’d told him I’d be back to get him, and the image of his searching out the window just as I was searching in my rearview mirror, impatient and lonely, broke my heart. Back home, my business had been stripped away, and it occurred to me, as I waited for Mina, that Fuji and I would have to invent a new kind of life for ourselves when we returned.

  For now, again and again, I checked my mirrors. Instead of finding Mina there, I found myself remembering the morning I’d tried to teach The Brow Beater to drive. I’d told him to adjust the mirrors for his height, and maybe that was the connection. Back then we were still driving the Catalina, hadn’t traded it in for the truck. We were someplace in Wyoming where cliques of wild horses flattened the grass to shining at the foot of the snowcapped Bighorns. We’d stopped for gas seven thousand feet above sea level, and I remember watching from the pump as The Brow Beater stayed in the warmth of the car, spinning between his fingers one of those arrowheads he collected.

  Even the enormous mountains of his hometown were half as tall, he’d said. I left to use the gas station bathroom, and when I came back, I found him way up on a snowbank behind the pumps. It was March 1980, not long before he disappeared, and the sky was huge, and the patches of snow on the ground reflected the sun so strongly I could hardly see him up there. He was looking down on the city and dreaming about something, I can’t say what. When he came down to use the bathroom, I stepped into his boot prints and climbed the snowbank right up to where he’d been standing.

  Wasn’t the world supposed to look smaller from way up high? But the sun was directly overhead, and nothing cast a shadow on the snow, and everything—the flickering bed of sagebrush, and the train tracks hollowing a path through them, and the mountains, and the metallic blasts of horse trailers behind cars on the highway, and a few strangers looking up at me from the gas station, shading their eyes with a hand as if saluting—everything was saturated by this flat golden tint, and all the world seemed made of the same stuff, and it stretched on from me to the snow slopes and beyond, and wasn’t the world supposed to look smaller? No, the golden world seemed endless. Timeless, too. I imagined those early settlers, those colonizers, coming west for gold. I pictured a man who’d heard about the mines near South Pass, Wyoming, arriving too late, a man who’d come to this place for one reason, who’d abandoned his family and the woman he loved for something that no longer existed. I pictured that man alone and ashamed. Up on that snowbank over the golden everywhere, alone with the vast sameness of the world, I’d traveled through time to be there, sifting alongside the forlorn prospector. I was with him at his final flash of hope, a discovery of golden flakes in the reservoir behind the gas station that had long since gone dry, golden flakes no one else could see, because he simply had to see them. Maybe word got out—gold!—and others arrived in droves and huddled around his shimmering hands. How long did they rejoice before they realized the gold was fool’s gold or—worse—imagined altogether? How long before they saw his cupped hands less as an offering and more as a begging? How long did they watch him strain the invisible stuff between his fingers before they understood he’d gone mad?

  He’d abandoned his home on a trick of the heart, on a story he’d stopped believing. I wondered what condition a man like that could return home in.

  When I got back to the car, I told The Brow Beater that, after almost two years in the passenger seat, it was time for him to learn to drive.

  The Brow Beater squeezed into the driver’s seat and cranked the rusting door shut. He hunched, elbows digging into his hips. I said, “Turn and check over your shoulder,” but he couldn’t afford the space. I watched him suck in his gut and almost dislocate something just to find the seat lever.

  “You got it,” I said, but The Brow Beater leaned on the door until it popped open and fell out.

  “I can’t, bro,” he said, stretching his legs.

  “You got it, big fella,” I said. I buckled my seat belt. “We’re not leaving till you learn.”

  “You just want me to drive, bro, so you can sleep.”

  Maybe I should’ve joked with him, said, “You’re damn right—it’s about time you carry your weight in this marriage,” but we’d been on the road so long, and lately, he’d become distant and quiet, less curious about his new country, less willing to play along with ribs and jokes, less interested in making me feel like I had a responsibility to him, a responsibility to teach him something, to break him in. All he seemed to care about in those last months was his money, and I wanted him to think bigger than that. I got out of the Catalina and said, “I want you to learn because you need to learn, all right? Every American should know how to drive a car. You want to be an American, don’t you? You should enjoy the open road in front of you with your hands on the steering wheel like free will itself, like a big circular shield against fate, you know? I want you to learn because you should want to by now. You’ve been here long enough, haven’t you? You speak English good enough, you get paid good enough. You gotta understand. Out here, a car’s not just a car. This isn’t like where you’re from, where the government issues every family
a ball-and-chain Volga so you get to the meat-processing plant on time, okay? Out here, a car’s a portal, you understand. A car is independence. A car is not having to spend your whole damn life waiting for someone else to join you. So do you want to be an American or not?”

  He tried, but not for himself. I could tell he was trying for me. He stalled again and again, and the Catalina went from the gas station to the pharmacy, a quarter mile or so down the road, before he cut the engine.

  “Okay, bro,” he said. “I think I learned it. You drive again.”

  “Let’s get on the highway,” I said. “You’re not driving if you don’t have a little speed.”

  But The Brow Beater said, “I’m done, bro.”

  That was when I reached over and put both of my hands over his one hand on the wheel. It was like we were praying together, two nonbelievers in a Pontiac Catalina. I said, “This is just like Gil. I took him out a few times in our dad’s 1942 Buick Super, and he wanted to quit after a few stalls. He was only twelve, mind you. We got into a fight, and he punched me right in the forehead, and if you look close enough, you can still make out a little dent right there above my left eyebrow. He was a kid, but man, he had diamonds for knuckles. Only reason he learned to drive that day was because he had to take me to the hospital to get stitched up. Me, bleeding and writhing all over the passenger seat, Gil absolutely freaking, trying to time the clutch and keep blood off our dad’s leather at the same time, stalling and screeching all the way to the hospital. So don’t tell me you can’t do it, big fella. That was a challenging driving lesson. You’ve got it easy. Wide-open roads, no speed limits this far out in the country. Gil would’ve killed in this setting. My brother would’ve peeled out of the gas station and—”

  “Bro,” Avo said, so quiet I couldn’t ignore it. I had to lean in to pay attention. “Your brother is dead. I am not your brother, bro.”