The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  The train was set to start again, and all the sounds of life seemed caught in its gears. What a relief to hear them.

  He slept the fifty kilometers to Kars, the end of the line. He could’ve—should’ve—switched trains, bought another ticket, kept going west without a pause. But the conductor’s description of the city as an Armenian graveyard had sparked his curiosity. Plus, he could use the rest. He had a long journey ahead of him through eastern Turkey, through what used to be Armenia. From Mersin, he would return to America and live the rest of his life there. What was the harm in spending one night in the old, old country?

  He found a small, cheap hotel. The Turkish clerk did his best to accommodate him despite the barriers in language. He even offered a few Armenian words, which Avo accepted as an act of kindness if not a kind of apology, the closest he’d ever get. He thanked the clerk and went to his room.

  He showered. He opened a map on the bed. The size of the world, it just—amazes.

  In the lobby, he asked the friendly clerk for a recommendation for dinner. He mimed a spoon and bowl, and the stranger laughed like an old friend.

  From there he followed the hand-drawn map to an outdoor bistro called Kedi ve Köpek Kafe. The food was like Ruben’s mother’s cooking. The waiter must’ve pitied his scar, because he brought over extra desserts. Baklava, rolled into scrunched and honeyed tubes the way his mother had made it. Free of charge. Avo licked his fingers clean. He had hardly any money to spare, but he left a tip. It was the most American thing he’d done since leaving. It was practice for what he would become.

  He imagined and savored Ruben’s ire. Free money to a Turk. Payment to the indebted. Not the act of a real Armenian.

  A stone building in the distance caught his attention, reminding him of the conductor’s story. Avo went there and followed the perimeter of the building, looking for Armenian letters in the stones. He found some etchings here and there—nothing clear enough to read—except here, maybe, along this alley, this little gulf between buildings.

  And just as he said the name of his brother—his cousin’s cousin—Ruben himself materialized. No—it was someone who looked a bit like him, small and peering around the corner of the building made of stone. The man’s leer was different than the passing stares of the earlier strangers in the street. Less curious. As if he had seen Avo before.

  He had. Avo hadn’t recognized him without the green cap or the dog on the leash. But the young Turk with the fat face certainly recognized him. He’d left the dog at the border and taken the train just after his final rounds. He’d followed the tall Armenian with suspicious papers from the train station to the hotel to the bistro to here, this deserted alleyway not five blocks from the young Turk’s home in Kars.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, but Avo didn’t speak his language.

  “Do you speak English?” Avo tried.

  “It looks suspicious,” the Turk continued, “rooting around in the dark.”

  “I don’t understand. Do you speak Russian?”

  “I’m placing you under arrest,” the young Turk said, and removed and displayed his badge.

  “I’m a visitor,” Avo said, raising his hands. “I’m a visitor. I’m going back to my hotel now.”

  Behind him in the alley was a wall so high not even he could scale it. He kept his hands shown as he stepped slowly toward the Turk.

  “Don’t move any closer,” the gendarme said. He pulled his jacket aside to show off his gun.

  Avo stopped. He said, “I only came down this way to see the stones, bro. I heard there was history in the stones.”

  “You think you’re a big man, you don’t have to follow the rules. No respect for my country.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Your papers are forged. My superior bought it, but not me. He told me to go home. But I knew you’d be up to something suspicious. Inspecting the security of the buildings.”

  “Bro, I’m just going to move past you very slow, okay?”

  “In the news all the time. You Armenians. I won’t let you hurt my family, my country. I won’t let that happen, you understand?”

  Avo understood the word Armenian and the poisonous way it was said. There was no talking his way out of this.

  “I’m going to sit down,” he said. “I’m going to lie flat on the ground, so you can check and see, bro. I’m not armed.”

  But as soon as he went to bend over, his stomach exploded into pain. Crushing, the greatest he’d felt. There was no way to explain it other than to say it couldn’t possibly have happened all at once. The pain was too vast. It must’ve been growing, that pain, for many years, for longer than he’d even been alive.

  The young Turk took several quick steps closer before shooting again.

  25

  King County, Washington, 1989

  It’s November, and I’m home.

  I’m expecting a visit today from the local chapter of the Audubon Society. I’ve agreed to turn the old breeding stables into a residential bird sanctuary, thanks to a compromise with the chapter’s community engagement manager. Consultations happen today, with construction slated to begin next month. By the spring, we should be ready for all kinds of birds—thrushes and swallows and some I can’t begin to name.

  I never did make it to that bungalow of Johnny Trumpet’s, though I got close. I took Mina home, where I confessed to her what I’d done to The Brow Beater. In the clearest English she’d ever spoken, she told me to leave. I did. I spent the night in my truck near the jewelry store, and climbed the stucco steps early Thursday morning to explain my disappearance to Valantin, to apologize, and to pick up Fuji. But as I talked to Valantin, her aunt took a seat near the window, rocking Fuji in her arms. She had her eyes closed under a square of sunlight falling through the pane, letting it warm her face, and Fuji was in the light, too. At one point, without opening her eyes, the old walnut pressed her lips against the top of Fuji’s head, all fluff and lavender from the bath she’d given him. Fuji—my oldest. A companion through and through. He was loved, and he was warm in the old walnut’s arms, and warm in the square of light, and I asked if she’d keep him and care for him, and she said, in her language, that she would.

  From there I drove east into the desert for a hundred and fifty miles and parked on the side of the road in the shade of a brambling patch of Joshua trees. About half a mile down the road, I saw Johnny Trumpet’s bungalow, its yellow deck like a blade on the horizon.

  When I was in Tucson, living the gimmick with Joyce, holding on to a fiction that seemed to keep my brother alive but in actual fact degraded him again and again, Johnny Trumpet had taken my call. No one else in the business had been willing to give me another run as a manager. Only Johnny Trumpet believed in me enough to bring me back onboard. I would always be grateful to him for that, but I knew now that I didn’t owe him more than gratitude.

  So, after finally arriving at his bungalow, with hardly any time at all to spare, I put the truck in drive. I kept the wheels straight, heading even farther east.

  At the jewelry store, Valantin had brought out a first-aid kit to patch up my face. As she rubbed hydrogen peroxide into my wounds, she caught me focusing on one jewelry case in particular. “Every time you’ve come in here,” she said, “you’ve eyed those lapis lazuli earrings.”

  I told her they reminded me of a girl I used to know. “A girl I should’ve apologized to a long time ago.”

  “Have them,” Valantin said, and when I asked if she was sure, she said, “A fair trade for the cat.”

  I left Johnny Trumpet’s bungalow in the desert and drove with the earrings clutched to my heart all the way to Tucson. The adobe house looked just as I’d remembered it, rockscape in the yard and a hand-painted signboard (“Joyce’s Geotherapy”) pitched near the door.

  She must’ve seen me in the window, because I didn’t get to ring the bell. She came to meet me outside.

  I gave her the earrings. She rolled them between her fin
gers and then tossed them into the rocks.

  I said, “Business is that good, huh?”

  “They’re fakes. Whoever sold them to you ripped you right off.”

  “I deserve it, I suppose.”

  “What do you want, Terry?”

  Now that she was older, I could see how beautiful she was. She was my sister. “You’re the last one who knew him,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “Gilbert?” she said. “He’s still around.”

  She invited me inside and made us tea. All evening we traded stories about Gil. I’d like to say we laughed so hard we cried and cried so hard we had to laugh, but the truth is we just remembered him, and that can be a quiet thing, too.

  When she walked me out at the end of the night, she tiptoed barefoot along the rocks to retrieve the earrings. It took us twenty minutes to find them, but there they were, blue and silver as the dust between stars. She put them on as I was getting into the truck. Fake or not, they sure did shine her up.

  In the end, I’m drawn back to one memory in particular, the time I followed The Brow Beater to the center of the earth. After a long stretch on the eastern seaboard, we’d looped back toward the Southwest. He was in the passenger seat, folded in on himself and breathing on his knees. Out the windows, we couldn’t see a thing but the whole country ambling past, every plot of land a home that wasn’t ours yet. After whole days spent flickering past hypnotizing rows of soybean and corn, we were kicking up dust in the desert. Countless acres of sediment and sagebrush surrounded us, and every now and then, a mesa lifted the horizon like a nail pried out of a floorboard. In the distance, a mountain range appeared in blue and gray arrowheads.

  Arrowheads—I’d watched The Brow Beater reach into his red fanny pack to pay for a few of them at a roadside boutique in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A woman with hair that reached her shoes explained the whole crime of westward expansion in just under fourteen minutes. She gave him a good price on those arrowheads, told him loud enough so I could hear that she’d charged him less than she did the white folks who stopped by. A little tax she collected, penny by penny, that might in a trillion years make a dent in the debt that’s owed.

  This was just before the caverns in Carlsbad. The Brow Beater had read about them in a book. I veered off the highway and up a winding crest. From the parking lot, I followed him to the mouth of an enormous cave. “Finally,” I said, “an entrance big enough for your giant ass.”

  Together we went in. We looked back out at the pinhole of light through which we’d come.

  Then it was just darkness, and descending, descending. Strangely, ahead and below became synonymous. We made our way by the dim orange bulbs placed periodically along the railings. The path spiraled deeper. The air, cool and damp, pressed us along. Great formations reached like fingers from the ceiling and the floor, desperate to touch. The top fingers dripped, and the bottom fingers collected, and in that way, they spent eternity growing closer. Some ancient pairs touched tip to tip, and a few had spent so many lifetimes reaching that they’d become single luminous columns. We continued on, descending for what felt like forever and which, in a way, was. A bolted placard claimed that every step down the sloping path was a step backward in time. The thought was an unnerving and thrilling one. What secret origin story lay waiting for us at the bottom? The absurd idea occurred to me that my brother might be waiting for me at the bottom of the trail, that we’d reversed the arrow of time, that a person from my past had come back to meet me at this point in my journey, just as the stalagmites and stalactites did their dripping and reaching, that the people we called family could come from the other side to take us home again.

  But when we arrived at the bottom, the truth seemed even more absurd than the fantasy I’d conjured up. The truth was that, at the center of the earth, there lived a little gift shop. I held a T-shirt against my chest, checking the size, and The Brow Beater rested against the commonest blue postal box. There was even a bathroom, which I used, and I came back wearing my new shirt. “You’re not going to buy anything?” I said, and The Brow Beater ignored me. He was turning a squeaky rack of postcards. Eventually, he did buy one, along with a stamp. He scribbled an address with so much confidence, I figured it was his own home. The rest of the message he wrote mostly in that language I hadn’t seen since the chalkboard at The Gutshot. I wrote a postcard, too, and we dropped our messages into the mailbox. Then we took an elevator up and out of the planet, and lingered near the parking lot until dusk, when, according to the image on the postcards we’d just purchased, something miraculous was scheduled to happen. Sure enough, as the sun began to set, a group of park rangers lined everybody up outside the big mouth of the main cavern. Just as the sun slipped behind the mountains, there came the bats. Countless thousands of them, shooting like streamers from the big mouth into the red and ocher sky. Worth a million miles crammed into a car too small, breathing on your knees. Worth surviving it all to see. “It’s like art,” The Brow Beater said, “but real.”

  Now it’s November, and I’m done driving. Now I know they’re not out there on the road, my brothers. Not on a fishing boat near the Greek or Aleutian islands, not among the marbled dust of an heirloom boutique on the southern coast of Turkey, not in the polylingual boroughs of American cities, not buried in the sea between Hungnam and Wonsan, or in the locker rooms of New York or Atlanta or the shunted scraps of the territories. I know that in order to find them, I’ll have to go in. Into the bat-beaten caverns of the heart, into the endless drips and pools of history, into the pressing rib cage of the earth. Inside, I’ll find them—right there in the center, present, waiting for me.

  In the meantime, I’ll wait for the birds and watch the news. Just now, the wall is coming down. The evil empire is fading. We who have believed all along in the story of our march will be vindicated. The future will be kind to us because we were right. We were free. We were not marks. There will be no fooling us now.

  26

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1988–present

  Just last spring in Kirovakan, during a silver hour of peace from the rain, a crowd of people filled the station. They wore their children on their shoulders, peering down the tracks. Birds bathed in the still pools between the crossties, their chirrups giving way to the thrumming din of a far-off, approaching thing. Stillness in the puddles gave way to quivers. The train was coming. Whistling like a reed. Hollering. The crowd hollered, too—some cheering, some hissing. They lifted what they’d brought—sweets in their hands, or baskets of fruit, or signs saying “SHAME,” or signs saying “THANKS.”

  At the airport in Zvartnots an hour earlier, a delegation including his parents and the first secretary of Soviet Armenia himself, Karen Demirchyan, greeted him with an honorary pen. A gift for writing the truth, he said, in the pages of world history. Ruben gave the pen to his father. On the train, his mother asked after Avo, and Ruben buried himself in her neck, in her arms, like a boy. His father sat beside them, turning the pen in his hands.

  Getting off the train, waving ceremoniously, stepping arm in arm with his parents, Ruben found it impossible to tell apart the faces in the crowd or their attitudes, which particular people were present at all. He fell into the car with the baskets of apples and pomegranates, a paper bag of homemade cards and sugar cookies and honeyed bars and the bottles of wine the driver loaded in the trunk and in their laps. And they went up and back and around the muddy road to the village, all sludge and muck, up and back to his childhood home, where the chickens were gone, and he slept and slept and slept.

  It was impossible to say who’d been at the station and who hadn’t. Ruben remembered it alternately as a crowd full of strangers and as an assembled collection of every person he’d ever known, living or dead. But as the weeks went on, as the gifts and curses sent to his home in the village began to arrive less and less frequently, as his dates in the city to meet with officials, to dine with people who called themselves old friends—Mr. V, one night, and a father of six who�
�d once kicked gravel into his face—came and went, as he ventured into the city square less often, finally only to collect the monthly stipend for his honorary position as Kirovakan cultural watchman, he was convinced that one person in particular had not been in attendance at his return. In fact, she seemed to be totally avoiding him.

  Where was she, Mina? At first it seemed inevitable that they would speak, that she would invite him to dinner as everyone else had, that her husband would conduct some business with him at the census bureau. And yet she’d made no contact, none whatsoever, not even when Ruben thought he spotted her on the steps of the city hall, affixing a golden pin to her husband’s lapel, when their eyes caught just the way they had at the wedding years earlier. But Mina—he wasn’t sure if it was her—didn’t wave hello. She turned and guided her husband into the bureau. He knew then they’d never speak again, that she was in denial that he’d returned at all, that he’d been erased in prison or elsewhere, stabbed to death or hanged, or simply lost to history and gone.

  His monthly visits to the city square went on without ever seeing her again, and every now and then someone from his childhood would ask, “What about that big tall friend of yours,” or, “Whatever happened to that brother of yours with the eyebrow,” and Ruben started avoiding them, too, sending his father to the city square to collect his checks. Even up in the village, the neighbors began to avoid him, and the time he spent at home with his parents grew heavy and thick, and time felt less like an arrow than it had in the past and more like a block with depth and weight, and those in the village who spotted him feeding the goats or helping the dogs unbury bones began to whisper together about how ill he looked, how young and frail, like a little boy, tiny and weak and sometimes even curled in his mother’s arms. Others disagreed. He looked elderly, they thought, infirm and shriveled but for his enormous eyes, which beamed from behind his glasses. No one could quite remember his real age. And when the fights raged on between his parents in the night, they roared through the village, and the father said his son was broken, and he blamed the mother’s coddling, and the mother screamed and pointed to the father’s drinking, and the neighbors shut their windows and cowered their heads into blankets and pillows until at last a child gathered her courage to shout, from a window near the dogs, “You’re both to blame, now go to sleep!”