The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  Ruben had never told her about Tigran’s death at all. He’d lied to Avo to keep him away. Only now did Mina find out, straight from Avo’s own lips, and he knew by the way she sat. The way her legs buckled and folded, the way she planted herself right there in the middle of the roof in a puddle from yesterday’s rain, the same rain it always was, soaked up and spilled, soaked up and spilled, again and again for all of time, the same rain they’d once lain in, playacting lovers, the same rain she sat in now, a woman who knew for the first time the truth.

  Avo dropped beside her. His big legs too battered to fold. He lay flat on his back, like taking a pinfall after a finisher in the middle of the ring.

  Ruben had never told her. Sitting up, she looked down at Avo splayed out on the roof. She hardly recognized him. The wide, hairless scar where his eyebrow once was. Underneath it, his eyes had changed. Who was this man who claimed to know her? Who was this man who had killed Tigran? What other lives had he stolen from her without her noticing? She could’ve gone to Paris with Tigran, she might’ve won that tournament of hers, she might’ve become someone, she might’ve been in photos clipped by girls from newspapers, she might have lived a life that amounted to the ambitions of her mentor, of herself, a wild life. Instead, this. She would not forgive Avo now. She would not brush aside his crime or hug him goodbye. She would only say, cool as glass, as if speaking to no one at all in particular, “You shouldn’t be here.”

  One day Avo hoped to find the right words. The heart didn’t break so much as fold in on itself, the heart a coward and a shelter all at once. He was lying beside her on his back, just the way Angel Hair had taught him. One, two—what could he possibly say to stop the count? Sitting above him, Mina seemed to be floating.

  She was as cool as glass and out of reach.

  He sat up on his knees. “You don’t know what I’ve gone through to come back to you,” he said. “I won’t just leave like this. It was an accident. And I meant to tell you right away, but I couldn’t imagine adding to your pain. You look like you don’t believe me, but I’m being honest. I’ve come all this way through hiding and hell, and I can’t just leave you again. I want you to say something to me. Talk to me. Tell me what you’re feeling. Tell me what I can do or say, ask me anything and I’ll explain.”

  Mina stood. She dried her hands against her pants and breathed so deep a breath that her back cracked. She said, “This isn’t our year.”

  “I’m sorry,” Avo said, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t said it yet, that it was the most obvious little sentence in the world to say, and he’d ruined its meaning by waiting too long to say it. What an insufficient little sentence it was, I’m sorry, like a blanket too small to cover the feet. If only he could stretch it, draw out from it more yarn, more thread, his apology might have unspooled to become the one he’d been waiting to hear all his life without knowing it, an apology not for a specific crime but for the ambivalence of life itself, for the way life seemed to wander on whether the truth was buried or excavated, whether the dead were mourned or forgotten, whether villains went heroized or heroes went vilified, whether or not the objects of our love revealed themselves to be the source of all our anguish, whether or not justice was real as pain or love. I’m sorry.

  Today, Mina thought, she would take the children to the ski lift. She left the roof and listened from bed for the sound of the train, arriving like a paling in the east.

  22

  Paris, France, 1983–1988

  The day following the explosion at Orly, a heat wave swept over Paris. Ruben, alone in his hotel room, read the paper and then fanned himself with the news he’d made. Of the eight dead, only two were Turks. Fifty more in the terminal were injured. According to one witness quoted in the article, “The noise made less of an impression. It was the flames.” Men on fire had hobbled through the airport, and now a heat wave was spreading over the city, and Ruben took off his glasses and fanned himself. There was a pounding at the door of his hotel room. His partner, Varoujan, had gone out early in the morning and had not come back. The door was coming unhinged. Ruben drank the last of his vinegar. He folded his glasses neatly into his shirt pocket. Then he went to the front door and greeted the police.

  Word of his arrest—one of dozens in the wake of the bombing—reached every corner of the diaspora, and soon there wasn’t an Armenian in the world who hadn’t come to an opinion about Ruben Petrosian. A restaurateur in Watertown, Massachusetts, invented a cocktail in his honor called Twisted Justice (equal parts vodka and arak, with a twist of lemon), and a mural featuring the circular lenses of Ruben’s glasses stretched across the facade of an Odessa bakery.

  The vast majority, however, came to a different conclusion about Ruben and his crew. These Armenians, who previously were sympathetic to ASALA’s cause, whose support of ambassadorial intimidation and even violence had been abstract but nonetheless real, revolted against the specificity of Ruben’s crime. The two Turks who were killed were ordinary citizens. For most Armenians, this was unforgivable. Their great epic of justice had been debased into the petty anecdote of vengeance, and support for ASALA dwindled.

  This new pressure forced ASALA itself into a split. Loyalists to Hagop Hagopian argued that the time for moralizing had long since come and gone, while a new faction led by a young American leftist named Monte Melkonian argued for a renewed focus. (Reading Melkonian’s name in the paper one morning, Mina said out loud to her husband, “I met him once, on a train blocked by a mudslide.”)

  As it became clear that the diaspora had rejected Hagop Hagopian’s ruthlessness, the only question remaining was which side of the line claimed Ruben Petrosian. He had committed the attack at Orly, after all, and was largely responsible for the carnage there. But keen readers of the news pointed to evidence suggesting that the bomb had been designed originally to detonate while the plane was in flight. Instead, the bomb had exploded early, while still at the gate, saving—as it were—nearly two hundred lives. Ruben Petrosian had either ruined the bomb accidentally, or he’d sabotaged the attack at the last moment. Both stories were plausible, and a debate among the diaspora ensued.

  Whether Ruben himself had an answer for the question, no one knew. Reporters could not reach him behind the bars at Fleury-Mérogis.

  As he awaited sentencing, his mother sent him a few platitudinous letters, empty but for the smell of rain. He didn’t expect Mina or anyone else from Armenia to contact him in prison, but he did find himself longing for a note from Hagop Hagopian. No logistical risk had been too obstructive for Hagopian to take in the past, and yet not a single word of thanks or morale from the man for whom Ruben had sacrificed so much came to his cell in France. Because of this, he embraced the idea that he was forgotten even among the inmates, and it was in this place of self-pity and abandonment that he met the conspiracy-minded prisoner known only as the eccentric.

  “They’re hoarding the tobacco,” the eccentric muttered in the mess hall. He soaked his bread in his water and refused anything more. The meat, he had decided, was contaminated with chemicals. The vegetables—pumped with estrogen. He dipped his bread and glared at the Algerians at the other end of the hall.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” one of the other Christians at the table said in French. “Those zealots don’t smoke shit. Death cult, the whole lot. Anything that reminds them of life is banned and scorned.”

  “They’re not smoking the tobacco,” the eccentric said. “They’re hoarding it. Buying it and keeping it out of reach of everyone else.”

  “And why would they do a thing like that?”

  The eccentric placed his wet bread in his mouth. Kept it in his lower lip. “No cigarettes, and everyone will be on edge, everyone will feel desperate. And just when we’re at our least, that’s when they’ll strike.”

  “Ah, your so-called great conversion,” the other Christian said to the rest of the table. “Our friend needs a conjugal visit, stat. All his semen is backed up in his brain.�
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  All the Christians at the table laughed. Except for the eccentric, dipping his bread in his water. Except for Ruben, dipping his.

  According to the article, witnesses at Orly had mistaken the explosion for the last of the Bastille Day fireworks. Only when they saw men and women on fire, sprinting through the terminal, did they realize their mistake.

  In prison, Ruben tried to picture those passengers running through the terminal on fire, but he couldn’t. Not exactly. He could envision only a specific couple—a man and a woman—caught in the flames. He could see them so clearly in his mind, holding each other in their individual agony, that he could name them.

  When the eccentric was released, Ruben cried in his cell. He’d never spoken a word to the man, knew nothing of his origin or his crime, and yet mourned his loss like a friend. In that way, Ruben remembered the eccentric longingly, and the triggered memory of one or another of his conspiracies brought a feeling of reassurance and warmth. The Algerians were hoarding every shred of tobacco in the canteen, went the thinking, and the homosexuals were tampering with the faucets in the showers. Strands of the plague were splashing back from the toilets, and the visiting imam was recruiting terrorists. The bunk mattresses were washed in chemicals that dimmed the population’s wits as they slept, and the Bibles made available to inmates were coated in contagions and lice.

  The overarching theme of the conspiracies was the intended suppression of Christian values, and although Ruben hadn’t believed in many of the eccentric’s specific accusations, he did begin to find evidence supporting the general concern. When an inmate called Moreau was found with a weapon whittled from the back of an old canvas, for instance, and his paints and supplies were confiscated, Ruben blamed the confiscation not on the weapon-making but on the images of Christ and Mary adorning many of Moreau’s portraits. When Muslim prayer mats were brought into what had once been called the chapel, Ruben privately worried over the so-called great conversion. Like all diatribes, spoken or left unsaid, Ruben’s new thinking seemed directed more at himself than at others, an overeager bird fluffing its feathers in anticipation of a predator who, somewhere in the invisible distance, might at any moment appear. He began to tell some of his observations to the Christians at the table, going on in the way people explained dreams, undeterred by the blank faces of the audience, practicing a kind of upside-down curiosity: this must be the answer, so what might be the question?

  Although some prisoners began to call him the “new eccentric,” Ruben differed from the original eccentric in one significant way. Unlike the mysterious origins of the former eccentric, Ruben’s reputation preceded him. Early in his stay, rumors had spread that he’d worked closely with Arafat, or that he’d been a gunman at Munich in 1972, when he was just a teenager. Although some of the prisoners would ask for details, Ruben had decided to say absolutely nothing about his past. He’d let his cohorts go on guessing, which, for a while, they did. He enjoyed it, the mysterious power that came with owning a mysterious history. But as the others’ interest in him began to fade, as his silence and seriousness became the burden to companionship they had always been, as his obvious boredom with his lewd compatriots turned his bright mysteriousness into dull vagueness, he grew tempted to explain. Yes, he wanted to say, he’d been a leader in the attack at Orly; yes, he’d worked directly with Hagopian—who had worked directly with Arafat—on a number of occasions; yes, he’d even once been rumored to be a possible successor; yes, he’d been so loyal to the cause that he’d sent his own brother to hell.

  But in the face of his budding urge to sell his details for a friendly face, he held his tongue. He tried to forget his past altogether, and to focus instead on what else, if anything, he might notice that was meant to go unnoticed. But of course the remembering continued.

  Ruben had never asked Avo a single question on the subject of his parents. The Leninakan factory fire had been more a national tragedy than a personal one, and because it had been known by everyone, because he assumed Avo was reminded of it everywhere, avoidance seemed the more thoughtful approach to take.

  Only once did Avo bring up the subject of his parents on his own. They were still young. This was not long after the day they’d spent listening to Yergat and his redheaded wife, Siranoush, up in the hills. Now Avo had led Ruben to a pond. To teach him how to swim.

  A pond. A puddle. A small ravine filled with rainwater.

  The afternoon was clear, which was rare, so it’s improbable that they were alone. Families and children must have gathered in droves, but that’s not how Ruben remembered it. He remembered being alone with Avo, just the two of them at the edge of that pond.

  Avo removed his shirt and pants and fell with a great splash into the water. “Don’t worry,” Avo said, standing in the pond. Feet in the mud, water up to his neck. “Doesn’t get deeper than this.”

  But water up to one boy’s neck was water over another boy’s head. “I can’t swim,” Ruben said. Did he say it? He must’ve said it.

  Avo would teach him. One day they would go to the Black Sea together, but for now that ravine full of rainwater was the greatest ocean they’d ever seen.

  Not long before, Siranoush had read their fates in a bowl of milk. Had accused one of them of being a phony.

  Ruben shed his clothes and then waded toward his cousin. His brother. He did exactly as he was told. He submitted his back to the sun. He stretched his arms forward and his legs back and let Avo cradle him by the belly.

  The day was clear. There must have been others around in droves. And yet they were alone. The water was cool and thick, the opposite of flame.

  His left arm arched while his right arm pulled. Again and again, in cycles. He inhaled from the side and exhaled into the water. His feet went on pittering.

  And just then, as Ruben took off from his brother’s arms, it happened: Avo spoke for the first and only time about his parents.

  Did Ruben know that Avo’s mother had been the first female factory worker in Leninakan?

  That his father had been the joke of the city for letting his wife work a man’s job? Avo’s father would join in on the laughter and say, “The only job that’s exclusively a man’s job is to wipe his own ass. And you know what? If she had that particular ambition, I’d let her have that job, too!” Even as a little girl, everyone told him, his mother had possessed the rarest, loveliest combination: a skeptical mind yet an open heart. Avo wanted to be like her.

  Of course Avo couldn’t have told him all this on the day at the pond. There must’ve been many people there. A rare day of cloudlessness. The water so nice. But how did Ruben learn these details? Where and when had he heard them?

  Not until the day after Orly did he remember that he’d misremembered.

  It was a year or so after the day he’d learned to swim. Late at night, he’d left his village for the long walk into the city. He didn’t have a flashlight. He was equipped only with the memory of the path. He’d gone to talk with the statue of Kirov in the square. His oldest friend. They hadn’t been alone together in years, not since Avo had arrived.

  He sat beside Kirov and heard footfalls in the square. At that hour, he was afraid the steps belonged to a group of boys who would hurt him. He hid behind the statue.

  The sound of laughter curled around the plinth. He heard the voices of Avo and Mina and looked quickly enough to see them hand in hand. Again Ruben ducked behind the statue and listened.

  They sat at the other side of Kirov. They were whispering, but Ruben could hear every word.

  “What do you remember,” Mina said, “about your parents?”

  It was the question Ruben had never asked. The question, he realized just then, he should’ve asked.

  “My answer’s kind of pathetic,” Avo said.

  “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I do. Actually, I appreciate you asking.”

  “Why do you say pathetic?”

  “I think it’s a shame t
hat my memory of their death is bigger than any memory I have of their life.”

  “But you were a kid.”

  “I had fifteen years with them, and I remember almost nothing except the fire.”

  “Almost nothing?”

  And that was when Ruben heard the details he’d incorrectly remembered hearing at the pond.

  “You know what caused the fire?” Avo said. “A spark from a boiler explosion. The boiler hadn’t been checked in years. Afterward, inspectors said the boiler had been too weak for the pressure it was under.”

  Mina didn’t say anything. She knew exactly when to speak and exactly when to listen. Maybe, Ruben thought, that was the source of her luck.

  “You want to know a joke?” Mina finally said, and Avo laughed. “That wasn’t the joke yet,” Mina said, getting another laugh.

  “Sure,” Avo said. “Shoot.”

  “Three dogs are swimming in a lake . . .”

  A joke, Ruben thought. At a time like that. She had his heart in her arms, cradled on the surface of a great depth, and she was using that time to make a joke.

  The laughter changed. It was almost tearful, from Avo’s core rather than from his face. But the laugh-cry seemed less like a split than a seal. They weren’t halves coming together but two complete hearts colliding to create a third. Ruben, hidden, listened. It was a music more complex and stirring than any two reeds could muster.

  The last of yesterday’s fireworks—that’s what the witnesses thought, hearing the explosion.

  Not long after his eavesdropping, Ruben decided he would try it—what Mina had accomplished—at the Black Sea. He would ask Avo to open his heart about the death of his parents.

  He would hear exactly the same answer, but it would be different, directed at him. He would try to create a new third heart with his brother. But at the beach, he delayed, and then came the matter with Tigran, and then Paris, where Hagop Hagopian offered him a different kind of fullness to join, and then, and then, and then.