The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “Sweetheart, please—tell the story, don’t relive it.”

  “The details are important! I want you to feel the moisture on the outside of the bottle.”

  “The only moisture is our drool as we fall asleep.”

  “A wife who talks to her husband like this in front of another man. We’re in different times, my friend.”

  Avo smiled. “Go on.”

  “So I’m in the bar, killing time, when a very old man walks in. I can tell right away that he’s Russian—he had those beady Russian eyes but also enormous features otherwise, with hair as white as Siberia and a mustache that would make even Stalin say, ‘It’s a bit much.’ Well, this old man sits next to me and asks if I speak Russian. I do, a bit—my father used to speak it around the house. This man wants to know if I’ve noticed an increase in the area’s seismic activity, if I’ve felt the ground shaking more frequently than in the past. At this, I point to the drunks at the bar and say, ‘They’ll be so relieved to hear it’s not just them.’ And when he laughs, that’s when I know the Russian is not a crazy person. That’s how you can tell the sane from the insane—laughter. Crazy people don’t laugh at jokes, you understand. Their laughter is either absent or totally uncalled for. I learned that as a boy, when there was a crazy man in my grandfather’s village we used to—”

  “Don’t you dare start another story in the middle of the first one,” Mina said. It wasn’t beyond her that she was performing, too, a kind of cantankerous-wife routine, but the performance was fun, and she was slightly drunk, and she imagined she could be behaving much worse than this, demonstrating her wifehood to the boy she once was engaged to marry.

  “Okay, so—I tell the Russian I haven’t noticed anything shakier than usual, and he seems relieved. He explains that he’s a geophysicist, one of a number of scientists who’ve been traveling between Moscow and Yerevan for decades, measuring what he called hydrocarbons in drill sites across the Araks and Octemberian basins. You’re looking at me skeptically, love. I remember every word he said! My memory is my calling. Anyway, he and his team had been drilling sites for oil and natural gas, sites Moscow had identified as having ‘exploration potential.’ He said they’d been drilling since the 1930s, and despite oil fields in Azerbaijan and Georgia, they hadn’t found anything yet in Armenia. It took two years to dig one well to two thousand meters, and dozens of these sites had wells as deep as five thousand meters. All, apparently, for nothing.”

  Avo stood up, insisting it was his turn to fill the glasses.

  “I told the Russian there was no harm in that, no harm in looking, that the thrill of exploration was inherent in men, and a lot of other bullshit a kid who thinks he’s a man might say out loud without shame. But the Russian said I was absolutely, one hundred percent wrong. There was a great, great deal of harm in all that digging, and if I hadn’t felt it shaking beneath my feet yet, I would soon. He said he’d warned Gosplan early on about the excessive drilling. He projected massive earthquakes in the region as a result. But his warnings went ignored, the drilling continued, and he remained among those at the helm. Now, as he was nearing the end of his life, he said, he regretted his life’s work. He’d promised he’d never stop searching for oil in Armenia, and he regretted keeping that promise. He said it was the worst promise he’d ever kept. He drank his beer, and it was as if an idea occurred to him mid-gulp, because beer almost came out of his nose when he asked me that question I started with: the best promise I’d ever kept. I remember I said something about my wedding vows, how my wife and I were struggling to get pregnant, but how I was keeping my promise to love her through health and sickness, good times and bad. And we’d had enough to drink by then that we started to joke about how our problems were more alike than they’d first appeared, drilling with no luck and all that. I see you looking at me, love—thinking, Okay, a fine story, Galust-jan, but where’s the point? Well, a story isn’t a pencil, love. It doesn’t need a point to work. When my father was sick, and it looked like I would never be a father myself, I thought of that Russian, and I made a promise I had no business making. I swore that one day I would have a son and name him after my father. I was already in my mid-forties, and the chances were slim. I had no business making that promise. But I felt compelled to say it, and I believed it. And now I’m fiftysomething, I still believe it, and I intend to keep it. When it happens, it will be the best promise I’ve ever kept, because of how improbable it is, and because of how much luck and love it will take to come true. It will be like striking oil in Armenia.”

  The end had come for Spartacus. Mina went to the record player and put on a new album, one of the few British albums she’d kept after all these years. Pink Moon. She wondered if Avo recognized the music. She couldn’t say. He seemed not to notice much of anything as he finished his drink. Finally, he said it was getting late, that he should be going. The last train to Leninakan would leave soon. He had a friend there, he explained, an old boss of his named Shorty who’d been transferred to the factory his parents once worked in. He wanted to visit his uncle there, too, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving all those years ago.

  “How long will you be there, visiting him?” Mina said. She wanted to tell him not to bother visiting if it was only going to be a few measly hours.

  Avo said, “Just to say hello, I think.”

  As if returning were an event only in the life of the returner.

  “Not a bad idea to be where you started,” Galust said. “I wish my Russian geophysicist was here, we could ask him if there’s some sort of scientific reasoning for why it feels so right to be on the land where you originated.”

  They both stood up to shake hands and to say good night. Mina, however, remained seated. She sipped her vodka.

  Just then her mother-in-law came in, dressed in a nightgown, complaining about the volume of the music. Then, before going to bed, she said, “I’ll make a bed for the big man on the couch.”

  “I’m leaving, actually, but thank you.”

  “You’re not leaving this late in the night. The neighbors will talk.”

  “Mom, he’s going.”

  But she’d already gone to the closet and returned with blankets and sheets and pillows for the couch.

  “It’s too small for him to sleep there,” Galust said.

  Mina sipped her drink. She said, “Let him decide.”

  “I’ve slept on worse,” Avo said. “This is too kind, really.”

  Galust said, “Your train is leaving in just a few minutes. I can drive you to the station right now, if you say so.”

  “He won’t say so,” his mother said, “but can’t you see he’d prefer to leave in the morning?”

  “We can’t force him to stay if he doesn’t want to stay,” Galust said, reaching for his car key.

  Avo crouched to examine the couch and then looked up to Mina. “If I’m not in the way.”

  And when Galust’s mother kissed Mina good night, Mina braced herself for whatever pithy shot she was about to receive in her ear. But when she spoke, Galust’s mother said only, “Good night, young girl.”

  He would take the train in the morning, then. He’d lie on a couch in the home that, in another life, could have been his. He’d lie and pretend to sleep, pretend to wake in the morning, eat breakfast beside the daughter who could have been his, the mathematically inclined little fish of a man twice his age, an old widower from the same city he’d come from himself, a man who seemed, genuinely, to understand his good luck in ending up with Mina, a man who seemed to understand how tenuous a hold he had on the fortunes of his life, including this long and comfortable couch that could’ve belonged to someone else instead. The music had finished an hour ago, and the vodka just after that, and the family in all its generations was asleep, and the lights were off. Avo covered his feet with one blanket and his chest with another. He waited in the dark for daylight and for the long-delayed goodbye he would give Mina and her family. Her family and nobody else’s.

  Bu
t he didn’t have to wait for daylight to pretend to wake up, because at some point in the quiet night, Avo heard the patter of feet against the hardwood floor. A shadow approached the bookshelf bearing the liquor, and then the figure fixed a drink. Fixed two.

  “Help me with the door,” Mina said, carrying the drinks there. Avo removed his blankets and held the door open for her. Quietly, he followed her out and down the hallway, past the elevator to the stairwell. Up and out they went to the best view in the city, the rooftop of the tallest building in Kirovakan.

  “We were both performing a little all night,” Mina said, handing him one of the drinks. “I figured now we can be real.”

  The rain had cleared, and the lights of the city—dependent, Galust had mentioned during drinks, on hydrocarbons imported from Russia—glinted in all directions.

  “Tell me what happened to your face,” Mina said.

  “You can imagine.”

  “I’m sorry. I want to be real with you,” Mina said.

  “You can be. You should.”

  “It’s so strange to see you again. I didn’t think I would.”

  “You have a good life.”

  “I do. I have a good life. I love my family. Galust loves me and treats me well. I’m very lucky.”

  “You always have been.”

  They looked out onto the city and drank.

  “When I saw you at the theater,” Mina said, but the end of the sentence never came.

  “Mina.”

  “I didn’t think I’d love my husband. I could respect him, I thought, and I could care for him. But he’s been so good to me and to our child that I really do love him. And I would never hurt him.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to.”

  “What I’m saying is, he’s almost sixty. And he’s been forgetting things lately. My parents think it’s nothing, but my sister says her husband thinks it might be early signs of something more serious. So I’ve been worried about him lately, and then you showed up, and a decision was made right there inside of me as soon as I saw you in the theater. Do you understand, Avo? I want to be real with you. I know it’s terrible, but can I be real with you?”

  “You can be real.”

  “You left that party in this building, and I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I was told I’d be able to send for you, but I had to protect you first.”

  “You said our year would come, and I waited as many years as I could.”

  “I was lied to. I couldn’t put you in danger.”

  “I waited for you, and if you’ll do the same for me now, if you’ll wait for me, then maybe we can live a second life together, maybe we can—”

  “After Galust—”

  “Don’t say it. I hate to think of it. It’s terrible.”

  “And if he lives until a hundred?”

  “We’ll be seventy. And we’ll start then.”

  Avo laughed. What was time, he thought. Just a gas, filling its container. And he could live with this container. With this container he could live.

  “And in the meantime,” Avo said, “I’ll get my old job with Shorty in Leninakan? You and I will visit? We’ll be friends?”

  Mina said, “I want to be real with you.” She knelt so she could set down her glass.

  “I want that, too,” Avo said. He held her by the arms. She had to stretch herself and pull him down by the neck to look into his eyes. His burn was terrible. A fat pouch over the eyes. She touched it softly, once, twice.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  He couldn’t even feel her touch on the scar. Instant, visible pain could fade. His other pain—invisible and slow and disbelieved—would grind him to his death.

  “It hurts because they could’ve taken an eyebrow from someone who had two,” he said, getting Mina to laugh. When she picked up her drink and went to stand by the railing, he saw the city behind her, all light and dark, pure as then and now. How lovely, once in a while, to see no blend, to feel the clear-cut difference.

  “He’s something of a hero in town,” Mina said. “Ruben, I mean.”

  Avo drank, waiting for her to continue.

  “Now that he’s in prison, I mean, he’s a hero. I swear, we only respect martyrs.” She turned away from the city and looked up at him. “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” Avo said. “I’m just— I didn’t know he’d been arrested.”

  “In Paris. Avo, where have you been all this time?”

  He struggled to begin. He said, “I made a friend in America, and a long time ago, he took me to this place in the desert. New Mexico.”

  “Isn’t Mexico as ‘new’ as America?”

  “I know, I know. Everything that makes sense in that country is terrible, and everything that’s nonsense has a kind of grace to it. I think I’d like to go back one day. If I don’t end up here or in Leninakan, I’ll go back to work with my old friend.” He told her his name.

  “What was in New Mexico?” Mina asked.

  “When I was there, we went down into these enormous caves, as far below the surface of the earth as a person can get. I wrote you a postcard from there.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I had a plan. Saving money for a new passport, for new everything. I was going to come back. I wanted to let you know.”

  “You sent it from underground?”

  Avo laughed. “In every way.”

  “Here’s a question,” Mina said, and she held one elbow in her opposite hand. “It might sound cold, but it’s not.”

  “I won’t take it that way.”

  She drank. “What else are you here for, Avo?”

  “Else?”

  Mina covered her chin and then took her elbow again. She said, “I get the sense that you’re here for something else, too. There’s no such thing as a new life and an old one, Avo-jan. You know that. Our lives aren’t metaphors, halved or broken or split. Our lives are our lives, whole if they feel complete, whole if they feel incomplete. Why did you stay in America so long and not come straight here?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “But you could now? Your obstacles hadn’t changed, had they?”

  “Mina.”

  “It sounds cold, but I don’t mean it that way. I just feel there’s something else. You keep avoiding it. Ask yourself. Either you’re being incurious, Avo, or you’re not being real. Can I give it a try?”

  “Mina.”

  “And it might sound cold.”

  “I won’t take it that way.”

  “Okay,” Mina said. She swallowed another swig of her drink. “When you left, you chose Ruben over me. That’s how I always saw it. Whether you think of it that way or not, I always saw you as someone who confused love for something you could only loan out to one person at a time. You could only love one of us completely, you thought, and so you made a choice. And although I never thought of love that way, I understood, and I never blamed you for making that choice. It hurt me, it ruined me for a while, but I never blamed you. Ruben was your brother, after all. I understood. But now—if I’m being real—I’m getting a little upset that you’ve come back all this way and you still won’t have the decency to tell me why you’re here. You won’t tell me that you’re back so you can shed your guilt. You won’t tell me that you’ve come to see me happy in what you call my new life so you can twist that happiness into something you deserve credit for. Your choice, which you regretted, isn’t regretful after all. Your choice led to all of this, my family, my baby, my happiness. And now you want me to thank you. To thank you. That’s what I think you’ve come here for, if I’m being real. And I don’t mean to be cold, but, well, Avo, here you go: Thank you. I’m so glad you left me without saying goodbye all those years ago. We were young and stupid and impatient for love, we didn’t know what real love was, and you saved me from myself. Now I know better, and I wouldn’t have been able to recognize real love without your fake love to compare it to. So, once again: Thank you, Avo-jan. Thank you.”


  The city careened into silence. In the dark hills, they both knew, the rain was coming.

  “I know what’s underneath all of this,” Avo said. “I know the actual pain we’re not talking about, and it has nothing to do with my leaving. Ruben told me. He told me that he told you the truth. The reason I couldn’t face you when I left.”

  “What Ruben told me at my wedding was nothing. Confusing love for pity—I didn’t need your pity then, and I don’t need it now, Avo.”

  “Ruben probably didn’t tell you the whole truth, then. That I didn’t mean to—”

  “Please, let’s go back to—”

  “I didn’t mean to kill Tigran. It was an accident. Ruben probably left that part out, am I right?”

  Mina didn’t blink, didn’t move a centimeter. And yet Avo could see that suddenly, she had changed. She was the same woman she’d always been, but different, as if she’d been stolen and replaced by an invisible horde of angels. A new, bullish glaze crossed her eyes, the eyes of a stranger.

  “I only meant to injure him,” Avo went on, hoping that more explanation might bring Mina back. “Ruben told me he told you all of this already, but I want to be clear. I only meant to break his hip or his leg, so he couldn’t travel with you to Paris. I know that’s not a pleasant thing to admit, either, but I was a kid, and now I want you to know the whole truth. Since we’re being real, you know. I’m sure Ruben didn’t mention the part where it was an accident, that I never meant for what happened to happen.”

  The way she sat. That was how he realized she hadn’t known. That Ruben had lied to him.