Corruption

by Adam Vine

  She opened her eyes to an enormous pile of bricks swallowing her legs, hips, and stomach. The Ratkeeper had jumped into the room somehow, pulled one of the walls down on top of her. It didn’t hurt, but the pressure – oh, Wanderer, the pressure – it felt like half her body was trapped in a vise.

  She couldn’t move.

  Her enemy stepped over her casually, raising his lamp so it shined in her face. Katherine tried to look away, but he was everywhere, even when she closed her eyes.

  That mask. There it was. That hideous mask. A pale circle of glazed and fired clay bearing the image of an endless spiral. There were no eyeholes, because he had no eyes.

  It couldn’t end like this. Not for her. She was the fire. She couldn’t be beaten so easily, by some mask, or some lamp, or…

  The cloaked figure standing over her faded into the shadows of the background as Katherine’s ears filled with sound and with it, a pleasant warmth that brought tingles to her skin. The cold and darkness evaporated with every word they spoke, thousands of voices, then hundreds, then one.

  Oh, my sweet baby girl. I love you so much. Open your eyes, honey. It’s all right.

  She hadn’t heard that voice in years. But she knew it, didn’t she? It was still there like a splinter buried deep in her heart.

  My strong baby girl. You’re the bravest of the brave. Braver than I ever was, her mother said.

  Suddenly all she wanted was to listen, and greedily suck up every last drop of that warmth. It was as sweet as fabled sunlight.

  C’mon, Kitty-Kat. Time to come home. Say yes, baby, and come home.

  Katherine opened her eyes.

  I

  I am the tremble of the string,

  Whom glory’s greatness once did sing.

  I am glory faded, ill with age,

  Withered by each turning page.

  Arkadius was a good knight

  Known to never steal or lie.

  A minor lord with great ambition,

  He brought his lands untold fruition.

  But the king was a tyrant, cruel

  He murdered those he swore to rule,

  Raped women he wanted to at will,

  Taxed bare pockets so his stayed full.

  In wine's grasp, Arkadius dream't

  Of an angel, who for Country wept,

  Who pled the knight: "Kill the tyrant!

  And rule Country, benevolent!"

  Arkadius defied the king,

  To end his people’s suffering,

  To fell a tall and fading thing,

  To tremble glory’s sweetest string.

  For everything must fade and stall,

  'Tis God and Nature's only law,

  He who hears power's siren call

  In rising dooms himself to fall.

  -from Arkadius: The Definitive Edition

  Translated by Daniel D. Harper

  Publication forthcoming

  THE AIRPORT

  WHEN I MOVED to Eastern Europe I was a leaf without wind. I had nothing but a suitcase full of collared shirts, cheap blazers, and a little of my parents’ money. There was easy work for native English speakers in the poorer countries of the Former Soviet Union. I was fortunate enough to receive a job offer while I was still living at home, back in the United States.

  The job wasn’t teaching English at a language school or anything like that, which is what most directionless young Americans my age who went abroad were doing, but translating manuscripts at a book publisher that offered to pay me an “American Salary” in a country where my money was worth four times what it was back home.

  I packed my bags, my parents drove me to the airport, and off I went. My old man had tears in his eyes when we said goodbye. I never thought I’d live to see that. My dad was the kind of good man I knew I could never be.

  “Got your kendo stuff?” he said, even though he’d watched me pack.

  I kicked the long side of my suitcase and said, “Yup. Maybe once I get settled down over there, I’ll try to find a good school.”

  “I hope so,” my dad said, and hugged me goodbye.

  “Bye, Danny,” my mom said with a hug and a big, wet kiss.

  A fleeting thought passed through my mind as the requiem of the landing gears folding under the airplane pulled my concentration from the page of the book I was reading, and the Boeing 757 slid from the ground into the dawn-slashed San Francisco morning. I was leaving behind everything I had ever known and everyone I had ever loved. Mom, Dad, Delia and Nick, their little girl, all the guy friends I would take a bullet for, all the girls I had ever imagined lying naked in the sunshine.

  Most people reach a tipping point at some time in their lives, a moment when the song changes, and the next one begins. But usually, they can go home. They can push repeat. They can disappear, but they don’t have to leave. I did.

  I spent most of the thirty-hour flight to Country getting drunk and sleeping. Lufthansa provided unlimited free booze to its passengers on all their international flights, so I drank as many finger bottles of Jack Daniels as I could before dozing off to the Cthulu-esque howl of the engines. The few times I woke up, I tried to get a head start on the epic poem I was supposed to be translating for work under the dim glow of my seat’s overhead reading light.

  The poem was titled Arkadius. It was written in the 13th century by an unknown author, and remains the single greatest piece of epic literature ever produced by the Country I was moving to. It was about a good knight who becomes evil after he overthrows a tyrannical king and then fails to use his newfound power for good.

  (Yes, the Country has a name, but I think it's better if I don't mention it here, since it could get the friends I have still living there in trouble, not to mention Kashka… sweet, crazy, beautiful, horrible Kashka. But I’ll get to her later.)

  The translation of the poem was in Russian, since there wasn’t one available in English yet. I’d printed out a rough one from Google Translate that served me well enough to glean a basic understanding of the story. My edition was an antique, probably close to eighty years old, and was a gift from my new boss to celebrate the signing of my contract a few months ago at BookCon in L.A. It was bound in cracked, red leather and had full-color illustrations pressed in gold leaf.

  I’d only seen pictures of the City I was moving to, but I’d read about it until my eyes had bled on websites like Wikipedia and Reddit. The City was located on the border of two countries that used to be one. Twenty years ago, it was deep behind the Iron Curtain, but today it was a pleasant enough place, with a booming economy and world-famous nightlife, a playground for British stag parties, American pick-up artists, tour groups full of old people wearing their passports on lanyards around their necks, and Erasmus exchange students from every sex-starved corner of Europe.

  The City lay in the heart of a smoggy valley split through the middle by a rust-brown river thick with industrial pollution. There were mountains to the south, coalmines to the west, small towns and villages to the north and east. The City’s nickname was “The City of Churches,” because it had over three hundred of them, most from the gothic and baroque periods, with a few dating back to the City’s founding in the year 1000 AD. There was a touristy Old Town with a medieval brick castle and a curtain wall full of watchtowers and murder holes. And of course, one couldn’t mention City without thinking of the crown jewel of its skyline, the gargantuan gingerbread church with its iconic gumdrop towers, the Basilica of Saint Mary.

  As dawn’s pale blaze reared over the curve of the world and I awoke to see the City for the first time outside of a computer screen, all painted and miniature through the Dreamliner’s tiny portside window, I expected to be overwhelmed, like I was a dribble of ink balanced on the edge of a page that was turning, ready to fall and leave all that I could not change behind me to spill down into a realm of infinite possibility. Instead, I felt the same emptiness, exhaustion, and loneliness I’d felt for the past two years since the accident.

  Two yea
rs, I thought. Christ, what a dry spell. I’ve finally got the chance to do it over and start with a clean slate. Who ever actually gets a clean slate? If this is what it takes, then it’s what I have to do.

  When I made the decision to leave America I was determined to make a new life in City, and to make myself a new man. But people cannot change completely. We can only become better or worse versions of ourselves, and we always carry our memories with us, no matter how fast, or far, we try to run.

  THE CITY

  FROM THE LOOK of things on the taxi ride from City’s tiny, bucolic airport, communism hadn’t done the people of Country any favors, despite having ended over twenty years ago. The outskirts were downright depressing, with so many abandoned buildings that I was surprised anyone would want to live in the ones that were still habitable. Then I realized they probably didn’t have a choice.

  There was a techno version of the Russian national anthem thump-thumping through the old Mercedes Benz’s AM/FM radio. The taxi driver muttered something and flicked it off. Noticing I didn’t speak the language, he said again in broken English, “Russian trash.”

  I’d read about how the people in Country hated Russia. Even before the communist years, they had suffered centuries of brutality under Russian imperialism. The Country’s geographical position, smashed smack-dab in the middle of Europe and Russia, had made it the unfortunate historical middle ground for the eternal tug-of-war between those two superpowers, and the cost its people had paid was their blood. Invasion, occupation, genocide, mass rape, racism, economic and cultural erasure, these people had seen it all. It was far from ancient history to them; many of the survivors were still around, walking down the same streets now passing outside my taxi window in a gray-on-gray blur.

  No grayer than Arcata, I told myself.

  I sat in uncomfortable silence and watched my new home slide by under a sky of polished stone. A concrete sprawl of ugly apartment buildings and half-assed skyscrapers ran for miles from the City’s edge toward its center. But as we drove on, I was surprised at how modern the City became. The trams were new and fast. No donkeys pulling carts. Nice cafes lined the main avenues, full of young professionals and well-dressed couples on dates. There were beauty salons, shopping malls, department stores with names I recognized. I even saw a McDonald’s.

  And, my God, the women. The average Countryish girl was thinner and more beautiful than the best-looking girls I knew back home.

  My taxi driver, whose name I learned from looking at his taxi driver’s license was Krzysztof, noticed me craning my neck to look out the window and said, “Yes. We have nice girls.”

  “No kidding,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say on the subject, so I asked, “Say, I’m pretty hungry – can you suggest somewhere good to eat?”

  “Dumplings,” Krzysztof said.

  “Okay, sure. I like dumplings. What kind do you recommend?”

  “Dumplings, yes. Dumplings!” Krzysztof nodded. “Dumplings, very good. But not as nice as girls.”

  I wondered exactly what kind of place I had come to where the first selling point out of my taxi driver’s mouth wasn’t some tourist trap, or the beautiful architecture, or for that matter even the very good dumplings, but the flesh.

  “Maybe I take you to girls?” the cab driver said. “I know nice place.”

  Hungry and sleep-deprived as I was, the offer caught me off guard. “Uh, what?”

  “Sex club,” Krzysztof said without hesitation, like I was some kind of moron for not picking up the hint he was putting down. With extra emphasis on the sex, he added, “Maybe sex club for you?”

  “No thanks,” I said. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be swallowed up whole by the cracked, broken leather of my seat. I tried to play it cool and said with a casual wave, “No, sorry. Not really my thing.”

  Krzysztof shrugged and turned his eyes back to the road.

  Sure, I had fantasized about meeting a nice traditional girl to marry and make dozens of beautiful half-Slavic babies with, but it was only a fantasy. I didn’t think I was ready to talk to another girl yet. Every time I’d tried since the accident, I ejected early and went home alone, because they all reminded me of Carly.

  Besides, if anyone ever saw me stepping foot in a brothel, I was bound to get fired. Then I wouldn’t just be out of a job, I’d be alone in a poor foreign country with no one to lean on. I could always call my parents if I ran out of money, but I was twenty-six years old. It was time to get on my own two feet.

  After all my colossal failures back home, this was my last chance to make myself and become the man I wanted to be, this kingdom of sorrow and gray concrete buildings, of good dumplings and nice girls. This was my lifeline.

  THE CITY

  MY APARTMENT was in the city center, a thirty-minute walk from the Old Town. It was in the only renovated building on a busy avenue of turn-of-the-century tenements whose ashen facades were streaked with smoke and grime, their brick underwear peeking through giant, weeping wounds where the plaster had fallen away. My building was number forty-six.

  I buzzed the number my landlord had emailed me. A small Countryish man and his wife met me at the front door. He introduced himself as Marcin, the son of the building’s owner, and his wife as Julia. Marcin was a young, short man with brown hair stricken by pattern baldness, and sharp eyes that looked like they were evaluating a handful of diamonds. His t-shirt and jeans looked like they were from the Goodwill. His wife was slender and pretty, but I suspected the blonde in her hair came out of a bottle, and when she smiled at me I noticed her teeth were stained the color of used dishwater.

  Our conversation was short, since neither spoke English well. They told me they lived in apartment number thirty-four, and I shouldn’t hesitate to ask if I needed anything. They showed me how to get in, gave me my keys, and then led me upstairs to my new place.

  My apartment, which I guessed I was supposed to call a flat, like the Europeans did, was number forty-two. Marcin offered to help me carry my bags. The unit had hardwood floors, big, old-fashioned windows looking out over a tiny metal balcony and a mess of spindly black autumn trees. There was a Finnish washing machine in the bathroom, a science fiction-looking capsule shower, and a box-top toilet that had two buttons for flushing.

  The secretary from my company had left a note on the kitchen table with basic directions about how to get to the Old Town and various attractions around the Market Square, how to order takeout from the Chinese restaurant down the street, and how to log on to the Wi-Fi. She had signed her name, Sabina, with a heart next to a bolded and underlined, “Welcome!!!” The note was tucked under a Christmas ornament, a red glass ball with the company’s name, Bookworx painted in white glitter, even though it was early October.

  I dropped my bags on the IKEA bed and went downstairs to the liquor store across the street, where I bought a bottle of vodka. When in Rome, right? I convinced myself it wasn’t abnormal to get drunk before I found something to eat or unpacked my luggage. My body was wrecked from the jetlag, but my buzz from the free booze on my flight had long since worn off, and I was starting to get a headache. A half-liter of Countryish vodka cost three dollars. I drank it straight out of the bottle without a chaser, rinsing my mouth out with tap water every couple of swigs. I figured the alcohol would kill any nasty critters if the water wasn’t safe to drink.

  I laid in bed, tossing and turning in the dark, unable to fall asleep, partly due to the alcohol, and partly to the new environment. The slatted, golden glow of city lights filtered through the cheap plastic blinds. A Doppler rush of cars passed outside my window in arrhythmic whooshes. Someone’s feet wrecked Kaiju thunder through the ceiling above.

  The Country was nine hours ahead of California. My parents would just be getting home from work or sitting down to eat dinner. I texted them, The eagle has landed. New place is pretty cool. Also, this city is unreal.

  Great! Can’t wait to see lots of pictures. We miss you so much, my mom replied.
>
  And my dad, Cool, dude.

  I went against my better judgment and wrote a message to my best friend, Evan, too. I’d deleted our old thread after he and his wife had decided they couldn’t make time to grab a beer with me before I left. Sorry we missed you. Crazy last couple of months getting ready for the baby, Ev’s last, and only message read, an hour after I’d left for the airport.

  I drafted a few passive aggressive greetings, finally settling on a simple Got here safe. Miss you, man.

  Evan never responded.

  THE CITY

  “GOOD TO SEE YOU, DANIEL,” my boss said, reaching over his desk to shake my hand. It was eleven A.M. my first day of work. My boss, Filip, had summoned me up to his office to discuss my first project. It was the second time I’d met him. The first had been at BookCon in L.A. a few months earlier, when he’d offered me my job.

  Filip spoke English better than most of the native speakers I knew back home. The guy was a self-confessed anglophile. He’d studied the language at university, and had earned one of his four master’s degrees in it. His current goal at BookWorx was to move the company into the American and British markets by providing new translations of Country’s most famous sci fi and fantasy works, which were still mostly unheard of in the English-speaking world. My project, translating the medieval epic poem, Arkadius, may not have been the sexiest book ever published, but it was certain to be a cash cow sold in every airport and university bookstore on the planet.

  “Good morning, Filip,” I said.

  “Please, have a seat.”

  Filip was a small man with a large presence. He was clean-shaved, and had gray eyes and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. He was about a decade older than me, closer to forty than thirty. He’d started the company, which was the most successful publisher of sci fi and fantasy in Country, from scratch with his brother Jan fifteen years ago, and had all the easy confidence of a self-made man. His gaze made you check your body language. His smile was that of a gentle patriarch whose validation you never hoped to lose.