At the End of the World, Turn Left

by Zhanna Slor

A laptop. Yes. That means I don’t have to wait until tomorrow to send that email. Emily is right that emailing the ad is the best way to check if it’s Anna behind the scheme. Maybe it will be that easy; I’ll request a visit, and she will come here, and this can all be over. The crime, and the search for her. Maybe she is just waiting for someone to catch her. If it’s Anastasia at all. What if we had both been projecting? Wouldn’t that be the ideal outcome?

  I open the computer, which isn’t password-protected because it’s only a step away from being in a recycling bin, and I search Craigslist for “Chinese.” An ad for lessons in exchange for house cleaning comes up almost immediately, like Wang said. I try several other languages too, out of curiosity, but nothing else comes up. They are particularly targeting the Chinese community, for some reason.

  In the bar where it lists an automated email address, I copy paste and open another browser window for Gmail, where I create a new address under the name WÉI_WÚ_WÉI, a Chinese term that has several meanings. Roughly translated it means movement without action; less like passiveness and more like Pascal’s theory that “rivers are roads that take us where we want to go.” To me, it has always meant having a little faith.

  “Hi,” I start writing in a new email window. “I’m a grad student at UWM. I know fluent Mandarin, and your ad sounds perfect for what I need. I’m about to leave town for the rest of the week, and was hoping you could meet me tomorrow before I leave? Thanks.” I Google translate ‘thank you’ in Mandarin and paste it on the bottom. Then I click send and crash back down on the bed, falling asleep the moment I close my eyes.

  MASHA

  ________________

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I wake up to my phone buzzing repeatedly from my pocket. It’s unclear how much time has passed, but it feels like possibly the middle of the night. Until, that is, I look towards the quilt-covered window and see a strip of sunlight attempting to break in. So maybe not the middle of the night. Early morning? If it is, I don’t know how I’m still so tired. I could sleep another ten hours. My eyes feel glued shut with rubber bands.

  “Masha?” asks my dad’s voice. “I tried calling you more than few times. Vco horosho?”

  I sit up, wiping the sleep from my eyes. “Sorry. I fell asleep.”

  “Where?”

  “I ran into Rose, and she gave me her keys. To my old place. I ran into a lot of people actually. I forgot Milwaukee is basically a small town of drunks.” I look around the room, which is empty, then go into the living room to see if anyone is there. No one is. The clock on the oven says eight a.m.

  “Did you find something? About Anastasia?” my dad asks. I remember the email and head back to Rose’s room to use her laptop.

  “I’m working on a lead,” I say, while Gmail finishes loading. One new email. I clear my throat. “I’d rather not get into it until I know more.” With my heart in my throat, I click to open it. “Okay?”

  In the email response, it says “How’s ten?”

  I write back that ten works fine, then give Rose’s address. She won’t mind—I hope. Rose has never owned anything of value besides that bass, and she didn’t come home, so most likely she took it with her to whatever house she’d ended up sleeping at. Even her computer is a hand-me-down off-brand laptop that couldn’t have cost more than a couple of hundred dollars new. She still has enough handmade scarves to clothe a small school of children, and judging from the piles of cash and coins littered about, probably has never opened a bank account. There’s a word in Yiddish that perfectly describes her: Luftmensch. It refers to someone who is a bit of a dreamer; accurately translated, it means an “air person.” The problem with Rose is that she has a different dream every other day. She devours things—jobs, plans, identities—and spits them back out so quickly it’s like they never happened. I lost track of how many college programs she’d enrolled in and then dropped out of, how many restaurant aprons and name tags she’s acquired, now haphazardly strewn about the floor. She also never learned how to clean. I have to fight the urge to rearrange and organize her room. But, holding the phone to my ear, I only allow myself to gather all her cash and hide it in a drawer.

  “Hello? Maria?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “I said, do you need me to come pick you up?”

  “No. I mean, not yet.”

  My dad pauses, then asks, in Russian, “What aren’t you telling me?”

  There are lots of untranslatable words that describe my dad. Shlimazl: Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person. Or Won, a Korean word for the reluctance on a person’s part to let go of an illusion. The fact that he still thinks either of my or Anna’s lives could be in his control requires more stubbornness and reluctance than I can imagine.

  “Trust me, Papa. You don’t want to know.”

  “Bozhe moy.” With a sigh, he hangs up the phone. My screen alerts me to four missed calls from him during the night and a text from Rose: I crashed at a friend’s, her message says—code for she went home with a guy she is casually seeing. At work till 5, help yourself to anything in the fridge.

  Relief floods over me; I am starving, and I get very grumpy when I don’t eat. On top of that, I’m still groggy from the long flight. I get up to explore what’s in the kitchen.

  Groggy is another fun word, etymologically. It originated in the eighteenth century with a British sailor nicknamed Old Grog, on account of his weatherproof coat, made from a material called “grogram,” a mixture of silk and wool. In 1740 he declared that his sailors start drinking their rum diluted with water; this drink became known as Grog. The feeling experienced when drinking too much of this, they called “groggy.” So really, it originated as another word for drunk, but now people use it more for waking up under the weather or having jetlag. Despite only consuming one vodka-soda last night, then sleeping for nearly eleven hours, I happen to feel all of these things.

  Coffee, I think then. Where is the coffee? I ask the kitchen. I dig through Rose’s old pine cabinets and find a bag of Fuel Café beans, grind them up, and pour the grounds into a French press sitting on the counter. If I was Orthodox, like some of David’s family is, I’d have to do my morning prayers now. But I’ve found it more than enough to merely take a moment to breathe and appreciate the morning, the fact that I’ve lived to see another day. Many people went to sleep last night and didn’t wake up. We shouldn’t take these things for granted.

  While I wait for water to boil, I check the fridge, my stomach growling in anticipation. But I am disappointed to find that though I am welcome to help myself to anything, all that lives inside the fridge is a jar of Vegenaise and a very old apple. I close the fridge and look through the cupboards again. Not even a box of cereal. Plenty of ketchup packets and Splenda, but no food.

  I sigh and settle for the old apple, cutting the bruised parts off. It almost doesn’t even seem worth mumbling through the prayer for food, but I do it anyway. I’ll have to get breakfast after this whole thing is over.

  It’s strange, being here. My old house, my old dishes; it’s almost like jumping into a time portal. It even smells the same; like American Spirits and sandalwood incense. I’m surprised to feel no angst, or flashback of any kind. In fact, the feeling of dread that has hung over me since my arrival has begun to dissipate. Maybe it’s because I got some sleep. Or that I may have already found exactly what I was looking for, which means I can go home. Sure, I hope to be wrong. The thought of my sister as a conniving thief makes me sick to my stomach. But it’s better than her going missing, isn’t it? In this neighborhood, there are far worse things that could happen to a person than to be caught stealing. As long as Anastasia is safe and unharmed, I could forgive her this mistake.

  Once I drink a cup of coffee and finish the apple, I’m digging through a crate of old shoes, looking for some gym clothes—I’d feel ten times better if I could get a run in later—when the doorbell starts ringing. Already I have my suspicions it won’t be Ana
stasia. She’s never been early for anything, and it’s not ten a.m. yet.

  It’s also possible I was only projecting when I saw that police photo. Similarly possible is that Liam’s friend was wrong about her getting involved with a sketchy thief, or that Rose was wrong about his addictions. Maybe I was too quick to assume how easily Anastasia could turn to drugs for some sort of solace. It’s not like addiction runs in the family, besides maybe smoking. Sure they like to drink at parties. (What can you expect from a language with more than ten words for hungover and even more for drinking, but no present-tense word for “to be?”) But my grandparents have been alive a pretty long time, all things considered. Anna barely even snuck a taste of wine at our house, when it would have been easy to do so. She was a kid then, but still. She couldn’t have changed that much, right?

  By the time I open the door, I’ve worked myself up into such a state I don’t know what I will say if it’s Anastasia standing there. But it doesn’t matter. Because it’s not her face at the door; it’s a man’s.

  MASHA

  ________________

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tristan—if this is Tristan—is old. He’s older than me, for sure; maybe closer to thirty than twenty. I’m surprised by this; I don’t know why. He is also tall, like everyone mentioned; but what they failed to mention was that his hair is bright blue, and so long it passes his shoulders. He also has blue eyes and is skinny enough to be a model, if not for the acne pockets around the chin and cheeks, along with a pretty effective above-it-all attitude. If he’s supposed to be pretending to be a student, he is doing a pretty poor job of it. His jeans aren’t torn to shreds or Carharrts, like all the crust punks in Riverwest, but they’re still pretty faded. Plus, he’s got tiny wrinkles near his eyes; challenging to detect, typically, but it’s so bright out I can see them. Probably because under all that blue dye he’s a redhead. Freckles pool in dark circles around his nose and forehead.

  Tristan clears his throat. He looks equally as confused to see my face there. “You’re not Chinese,” he says.

  “And you’re not a woman,” I say.

  He narrows his eyes at me. “What made you think I was?”

  I pause, thinking. There’s no great way to answer that question. And if this is Tristan, and not some random person, he might have some information to help me, so I can’t go scaring him off right away. I hadn’t even considered the option of someone else showing up, and I expend a lot of effort trying not to panic. I remind myself this isn’t my house, these aren’t my things, that none of it is of any value anyway. “Are you coming in?” I ask, eventually. I try to relax my body language into a laissez-faire sluggishness instead of standing up straight like I usually do these days.

  He hesitates, looking around the street, then at me; I can tell that in his mind, he is labeling me as a non-threat. I start up the stairs, and not long after, I hear his steps following mine. Once we’re inside, I reach into my pack of cigarettes and offer him one. He looks a little thrown back but takes it anyway. “Oh, thanks.”

  “So. You want me to show you around? For the…uh, cleaning thing?” I ask, then without a response start the tour. I want to get it over with. Quickly, I show him the messy kitchen, its windows framed with large, overflowing plants; the living room’s assorted secondhand couches. Even Rose’s bike, a purple Schwinn with a metal basket, both its wheels flat, isn’t worth anything. It’s almost sad. Rose is a couple years older than me. At twenty-seven, you want to be able to afford a few valuable things, don’t you? Otherwise, what’s the point of working at all?

  It’s clear Tristan is realizing this too, half-checked out before the tour is even over. “Cool, thanks,” he says, heading toward the door. “I’ll email you about dates and stuff later. I have somewhere to be.” Is this really how they play it? Or does Anna usually do this part and Tristan is just really bad at it? It seems easy to figure out something isn’t it right. Although, I suppose a new immigrant would never imagine what kind of nonsense crime people in Milwaukee are capable of. If I still lived here, I would probably not let any strangers into my house ever. I guess that’s what happens as you get older. Not only do you become less trusting, but you also acquire things you’d rather not lose. You procure more locks, both real and metaphorical. More reasons to keep people out than invite them in. But you also, hopefully, gain some confidence? Once you look around and discover that almost no one knows what they’re doing, that they’re all figuring it out as they go, the world becomes a slightly easier place to navigate—especially if you happen to truly be good at something. This knowledge has made me far more brazen than I once was. My high school self would be too scared of looking like a fool to ever try any martial arts. Now, I can’t imagine how helpless I’d feel without it. How powerless. I wonder if this feeling is what changed Anna so much; maybe stealing made her feel powerful, at least for a moment. Knowledge and intelligence could be used as a tool almost as much as a body. But where had her moral compass gone? If I could convince her to join me in Israel, I know for sure she wouldn’t be acting this way. But every time I’d tried, she laughed me off like I was some crazy person in a cult. It wasn’t long before she stopped responding to my messages at all; as if my new religious beliefs could somehow rub off on her, thousands of miles away in Milwaukee.

  Tristan walks slowly back to the door. For the first time I notice he’s walking with a slight limp. “What happened to your leg?” I ask.

  He turns around. His eyes dart away from mine, narrowing sheepishly at the floor. “Oh. Dog bite,” he shrugs. “Had to get a lot of stitches, and it got infected… it’s whatever.” He takes a long drag of the cigarette, then takes another look around the apartment and asks, “Isn’t this where that girl—”

  “No, it’s not,” I interrupt.

  He looks back down the hall, towards the bedrooms. The first one once belonged to me; there’s a window that opens out to the roof, and I used to go out there to drink and watch people walk from bar to bar. Sometimes Emily and I would take these giant hula hoops up there to spin two or three at a time, and we’d throw them to each other like circus people. And June. June was also there, of course. It was always the three of us, even though I’d erased her out of my memory of those years.

  “No, it is,” Tristan is saying. “I’m just putting it together. Yeah. I was around that summer, I remember the news. I remember that odd-shaped balcony. It’s the place where that girl hung herself from her bedroom doorknob.”

  My stomach falls, like I’ve been dropped from the highest point of a rollercoaster without warning. I swallow, hard. “It isn’t.”

  “I wonder if she haunts the place,” Tristan says, rubbing his chin.

  I clench my fists until my nails are digging into my skin.

  “That was so fucked up,” Tristan is saying. Backpfeifengesicht is also a good word I wish we had in English. It’s German for a face badly in need of a fist. Looks like gibberish but somehow isn’t. “Didn’t it take her roommates three days to find her body?”

  “Shut up,” I say, furious now and unable to control myself. “Where did you even hear that?”

  Tristan looks taken aback, as if confused why his questions would cause such an emotional reaction. “I told you. The news. I have a lot of free time during the day.”

  I unclench my fists, inhale another deep breath.

  It had taken three days to find June because the door was shut. And every time we tried to knock or check inside, we couldn’t get the door open.

  Because it was so heavy and didn’t move.

  Because, we would find out, her body was against it.

  “What exactly are you learning Chinese for?” I ask. This interaction is not going the way I intended, and I need to change course. Immediately.

  Tristan leans against the wall near the stove and takes another drag of his cigarette. “Just for fun.”

  “No one learns Chinese for fun,” I say, watching him. I move to
stand in front of the door, blocking his exit. In Portuguese, there’s a term, Saudade, for the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love which is lost. It carries with it the repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return; a bittersweet, empty feeling of something or someone that is missing. It’s this feeling that comes over me now, like a wave. I have to close my eyes to push it away.

  When I open my eyes again, the expression of a trapped bird has overcome Tristan’s face, before being obscured by an aggressive impassiveness. “Sure they do. Not everyone can afford to go to college.” He surprises me by saying something in Cantonese. Something I don’t understand because I don’t actually know Cantonese.

  I feel suddenly exhausted. What am I doing? This is a job for someone competent, not a Russian tutor who only made it halfway through a linguistics degree. There’s a term in Estonian, Ei Viitsi, which means a feeling of such intense laziness you don’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I’ve gone from energized to Ei Viitsi in less than thirty seconds. I’m not a cop. I’m someone who has seen too many detective movies. I should tell my dad to talk to the cops once more and leave me out of it. I should go home. “Can you please drop the act?” I ask, rubbing my eyes with two fingers.

  “What act?”

  I lean against the door, giving him space.

  “You’re Tristan, right?” I ask. But his face is unchanged. If he is Tristan, he’s not admitting it. “I’m not going to tell on you,” I add. “I just want to see Anna.”

  Tristan’s head snaps to mine. “What?”

  “Yeah. Anna,” I say. “She’s the mastermind behind this little scheme, right?”

  Tristan looks past me again, blinking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Everyone looks to the left when they’re lying. Easy tell,” I say.