Red Russia

by Tanya Thompson

  When the car finally lurches straight again, Alyona sighs and mutters, “Ux.” Oof.

  Resting back against the upholstery, she shakes her head in dismay and allows the weight of 1950’s steel to slow the car to a roll.

  Flexing her shoulders, she straightens her back before asking me, “Is contagious, yes?”

  The woods still pulse yellow, green, blue, purple, red, and orange.

  Peter mewls a sound of fear, and I ask with dread, “Is it?”

  “It is,” she confirms.

  “Oh god, is it lethal? Can it kill us? Is there a cure? Jesus Christ, what is it?”

  “Yes, yes, and no. Is American overreaction.”

  * * *

  Engine idling, we stand in the road in the Bereznik forest, surrounded by unnatural lights, staring at the horror that is the Studebaker.

  Not only does the 50’s classic have smoky glass T-tops and rear spoiler, it also sports a pulsing undercarriage lit in all the vibrant colors of a carnival ride.

  Yellow, green, blue, purple, red, and orange, it pulses.

  Yellow, green, blue, purple, red, and orange, it lights up the woods.

  Yellow, green, blue, purple, red, and orange, it is as far from discreet as the Sun from Neptune.

  Three hours above the horizon, the nearest star struggles to compete. It casts a fire-like glow over the western forest, and spread out before it is what looks like fog but smells like smoke.

  Alyona says, “Is direction of sawmill.”

  Peter—with no memory older than twenty seconds—is bent at the waist, hands swirling through the lights at the side of the car, whispering to himself, “Nothing can prepare you for the Aurora Borealis. I wonder what it tastes like,” and he drops to his knees.

  For the sake of decency, Alyona and I look away.

  Alyona asks, “What was in vodka?”

  “Probably best not to say.”

  “You think that”—she throws a hand in the direction of Peter—“is bigger secret than that.” She points at the Polar Bear.

  I look to the smoke spreading in the west and say, “We won’t know until it’s over, but it certainly has the potential.”

  “You start fire?”

  “Depends on how you attribute blame. Indirectly, perhaps, but more directly it was one of the brothers teeing hot coals off the barbecue pit.”

  She nods, mostly to acknowledge the oddness of it, and then says, “Drunk or sober, brothers are always trouble.”

  “And the trouble in the back seat? What are we doing with it?”

  “Let us drive one trouble to another and see what it offers.”

  * * *

  My plans, Peter’s future, Morris & Hugo’s investment, Demyan and Volikov’s schemes, Konstantin’s fortune, and the Bereznik forest are all on fire.

  This is exactly the kind of shit you can expect from the Tower.

  Same goes for the dead man in the back seat.

  The sooner we’re rid of him the sooner some measure of luck might return.

  Alyona is driving toward the fire. Undercarriage throwing out lurid colors, we’re a beacon in the woods, a carnival ride gone AWOL, an honest-to-god spectacle of Gravitron proportions, and none of the after-factory buttons on the dash will stop it.

  The shiny silver switch beside the radio looks promising, but flicking it only results in a thudding bass, sans music.

  Peter says, “My heart is pounding.”

  The big dial near defrost has a certain appeal, but twisting it does nothing.

  Peter says, “Bummer.”

  On the column is a chrome wand, but on shifting it the instrument panel flips to digital.

  Peter says, “My ass is hot.”

  Mine is too.

  I’m starting to suspect the bummer dial was seat heating.

  Twisting a knob beside the switch sends Russian rockabilly blaring through the tree tops.

  Peter says, “No to that shit.”

  Still untried are the buttons in the roof, the mixer slides on the armrest, and the lever on the floor.

  I stare at the buttons with skepticism.

  “Why not push it?” Alyona asks. “Afraid it will give us away?”

  The Russian accent is so naturally sardonic, I don’t know if she’s serious when she says, “I think you should push it.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Something has to turn the lights off. Peter likes to say that, statistically speaking, every failure brings a person closer to success.”

  “You know what I hear Peter say? Bridges exist to cross or burn.”

  Stopped at a fork in the road, Alyona considers the possibilities. To the left, the trees are young and spindly thin, and to the right, straddling the river, is the Soviet era sawmill that Morris & Hugo plan to refurbish. On all sides of the mill, the ground is worked bare and littered with the unprofitable refuse of the mill: mountains of bark and dust, heaps of side slabs and splintered boards, all the free waste that ensures Morris & Hugo’s future paper mill will be profitable. The bulk of the yard—the drying sheds and round logs—is on the opposite side of the river across a rusted steel bridge.

  Peter leans into the front seat to say, “Cross it or burn it but never ignore it.”

  As smoke rolls from the western forest and seeps into the new growth of unplanned pines nearer the mill, I warn Alyona, “This may not be the moment to literally apply corporate metaphors.”

  “It’s the Art of War, baby, and I’m your general. Drive this tank to the frontline so I can slap them with my saber.”

  “I do not think that is Sun Tzu,” Alyona says, “but we will cross bridge.”

  “I always suggest crossing over burning. Every time you cross a bridge, you create the opportunity for a new relationship. New relationships are the life force of—Jesus Christ!” Peter’s eyes finally see what lies beyond the hood. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I am crossing bridge.”

  “Why?” he shrieks “Why would you drive into that?”

  “Because there is fire.”

  “Then pray for forgiveness and turn-the-fuck-around!”

  “Steel bridge will not burn. We must cross.” She’s neither an idiot nor following Peter’s advice, she’s smirking. She’s playing with language and fate. She’s the Queen of Swords from the court of air, and Peter’s earthly concerns don’t trouble her.

  Another time under different circumstances and without the Ambien, Peter wouldn’t stand for this. At the moment, though, he doesn’t have a lot of sway because he can’t remember there’s anything worth swaying. A steel strut catches his attention, and he follows it along the side windows, past the Polar Bear’s head, and then he’s saying, “Pretty river. Can we go swimming, Mom?”

  He’s not that far off. Alyona reminds me of his mother as well. Both scary as hell, but also, if you remember, his mother is represented by the card Justice. You might know her as Lady Justice. You know, the righteous woman with the sword? Kind of like…

  “We will stop at sawmill. Peter, you will take our friend and put him at top of—” She turns left off the bridge and points to the massive mound of discarded wood. “—pile,” she decides to call it.

  The accent is so strong, Peter repeats, “Pie-el?”

  “Pyre,” I correct.

  “Pie-err?” she asks.

  “Pierre?” Peter taps the Polar Bear’s cheek.

  “If I understand your plan, it’s a pyre.”

  “Ah, yes, funeral pyre.” She smiles with appreciation. “I like this word. It rhymes with fire, no?”

  “As it happens, yes.”

  “Is good plan, no?”

  The pile she stops beside is fifteen feet tall at its peak, thirty feet wide at its base, and it runs the length of the mill, so about eighty feet long. There’s a few more by the drying sheds and another along the river. The rounded edges of the trees that can’t be cut into symmetrical lumber lie jumbled and splintered crossway and diagonal a
cross each other. With air moving freely through the lattice of scrap, it’s a perfect bonfire that will burn for days.

  “It’s a good plan.”

  Alyona points to me and says, “Fire.” Then pointing to herself she says, “Pyre. Fire Pyre.” And she laughs.

  “Don’t”—I shake my head—“name us.”

  “Awww,” she mocks. “You want Bitcoin back?”

  I look at her from the top of my eyes.

  “You don’t get Bitcoin back,” she says. “You buy friend. You have friend. Now come, friend, we put fire to pyre.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know, baby, this doesn’t seem right.”

  Peter isn’t really buying my story that the Polar Bear is a dead king, we his acolytes, and the pyre his royal death right.

  The day trippers at the Renaissance fair would have devoured it, but that’s not really Peter’s scene. I need to think corporate.

  “We’re downsizing, sweetie. No, we’re restructuring. We’re shooting puppies. That’s it: we’re shooting puppies.”

  “Man, I hate to be the one to shoot the puppy.”

  “Nobody likes it, but we’re doing the needful.”

  “Better gist me on the mission then.”

  “The criticality of it cannot be understated. If we don’t de-integrate that liability from our corporate memory, Morris and Hugo will have to defer success, and you’ll be totally hosed.”

  “Christ, baby, you should have disambiguated this sooner. Have we got strats on the situation?”

  “You need to left lane the liability to the top of the solution.”

  “The doability of that I can fully operationalize.”

  While Peter hefts the liability from the back seat of the Studebaker and drags him to the base of the de-integration solution, Alyona says, “If you keep talking like that, I will start shooting babies.”

  “Ah, but here’s the crux,” I tell her. “It only works with puppies because everyone loves puppies.”

  “You don’t love babies?”

  “You don’t love puppies?”

  “I like cats.”

  “Yes, of the choices, they are most preferable.”

  “Babies just grow up to be people, and people are assholes,” Peter says. He has the Polar Bear’s arms over his shoulders and is slow walking him up the slope of a plank. Where it intersects with another splice of long wood, he throws the body over, then climbs in front and drags him farther up the pile.

  “Cats can be assholes too,” Alyona says, “but in respectable way.”

  “I always wanted a couple of otters,” Peter calls down. He hefts the Polar Bear over another slab and then crawls over his stomach to take him by the hands again. “I wanted to live by the river and feed them fish—fish I’d trapped in the river with baskets—and give them toys I’d carved from wood.” He pulls the Polar Bear higher, saying, “I dreamed of building a log cabin, felling trees, hunting deer, cooking over an open fire, living life like a real mountain man.” Near the top of the pile, he stands up and looks east, past the sawmill and into the field of sawn trunks. “Like this. Look at this rugged beauty. This is raw nature at its finest.” He takes it in with a deep breath. “I’ve never seen anything more stunning.”

  Whatever the Ambien is seeing in the east, it’s not nearly as wondrous as what waits in the west.

  Eyes drifting slowly past the bridge, the full panorama comes into view and Peter’s mouth falls open. He shudders. He sways. He hurtles down the pyre in ten leaps and runs past us for the car, explaining, “Solar annihilation!”

  Scrambling into the back seat, he slams the door, then knocks on the glass as though he doesn’t already have our attention. He shouts, “I know how it ends! We have to find a scientist!”

  Casually, Alyona opens the driver’s door to sit crooked behind the wheel. With her feet outside on the ground, she turns the ignition switch just enough to power the under-carriage lights and the cigarette lighter, and then she lies across the seat to rummage in the glove box for paper.

  Peter looks over his shoulder and says with despair, “We should have teched.”

  Tossing a booklet over the seats, Alyona tells him, “Find exit strategy, Peter.”

  As Peter rips through the pages in a panic, I notice the smoke in the west has been consumed by flames. A cloud of billowing orange travels the treetops, eating up foliage and limbs. With much of the woods now crackling and hissing, and the roar of acceleration growing louder, Peter’s terror is duly warranted.

  I look back to the sawmill in the fire’s path.

  It’s not going to be a great loss.

  Well, I mean, it’s definitely going to burn to the ground, but the building itself is so impoverished and antiquated, no one should shed any tears. Open to the river on each end, it’s a throwback to an era when mills floated logs for transport. It’s an environmentalist’s nightmare. A radical one would happily come and strike the match themselves. But we don’t have a match, so Alyona is putting the red coils of the cigarette lighter to a bundle of official looking paperwork.

  Peter’s twenty second memory is no longer looking for an exit strategy but is instead obsessed with smoothing out the pages of the booklet. Because his hands are working about two inches above the page, he’ll be busy until the Ambien starts to wonder what the words taste like.

  The flames have now reached the edge of new growth. Driven by the wind and drawn by the river, the first waves of heat roll across the mill’s yard, and at this point, setting the pyre alight is just a gratuitous precaution, but one Alyona isn’t going to ignore. She puts the torch of paperwork to the slivers and shavings at the base of the pile, and lets the draft from the forest fan the flames.

  Above, the Polar Bear lies crooked and hapless like all the other debris in the heap. One leg crosses a slab of heart wood, the other a shattered half round, then an arm is thrown over his head against a shattered beam. In the backseat against Peter’s chest, it was easy to believe the lie told to Peter—that he was just a careless drunk, a hapless souse, a simple lush who’d bonked his noggin—but on top the scrap pile, he is unmistakably dead.

  With little sympathy, Alyona offers as a memorial, “Not best fighter, but loyal. Dust to dust, ash to ash”—she shrugs—“return, yes?”

  “Yeah, definitely. We should get back.”

  The Tower

  I’ve not even consumed any Ambien but reality still seems off. Off because odd is normalizing. Konstantin’s dacha doesn’t look nearly as garish as before, and the Studebaker is even less obscene beside it. Then James Dean, clipping across the front yard in a bikini bottom and leather jacket, doesn’t illicit even a sideways glance from Alyona.

  As she leads the way to the front door, he trots past us for the front gate, repeating, “Nyem, nyem, nyem, nyem, nyem.”

  Nyem is to nyet what nope is to no.

  And whatever is going on in the backyard, Dean is nyeming right the hell out of it.

  What should concern us, but doesn’t, not appreciably, is the sound of fireworks, or maybe gunfire, or possibly just backfire. I’d like to think backfire for no other reason than the Unimog is gone.

  The only keys I couldn’t find to hide, someone must have had on them. Who they are, where they’ve gone, and what they’ve done getting there, these are details I could easily live the rest of my life without knowing.

  Just like I don’t really want to know why the Blond with Cornrows is dropping from a second-floor window, or what the Mongolian with a Mohawk is doing under the Land Rover with a lighter.

  Opening the door, Alyona doesn’t slow to ask, “Want to tell me what was in vodka?”

  “Not really.” After accessory to murder, I don’t really want to anything.

  In the foyer, we step over a tattooed man wrapped up tight and sleeping in the tapestry—ripped straight from the wall—of Saint John’s Ascension.

  Alyona points to Peter and tells me, “Change shirt,” and then pointing to her own blood cove
red attire, says, “I change too.”

  But any thought of ascending the stairs to the bedrooms is abandoned when we hear the angry shout, “I will punch you with my dick!” and watch a military-grade smoke canister bounce end-over-end down the hall.

  Nyem.

  “While that resolves itself,” I tell Alyona, “perhaps we should go mop up the fountain.”

  “Ups,” Oops, “I forget.” Alyona rolls her eyes at the carelessness.

  But when we return to the greenhouse, the fountain is clean. The sponge and bucket that cleaned it are on their side outside the gallery leading to the kitchen. Through the spill, the perfect pink prints of a cat emerge and then vanish behind the gallery door. It would be Hello-Kitty-cute if the paws weren’t the size of dinner plates.

  Taking one step back and then two more, I push Peter with me into a slow retreat.

  Alyona remains rigidly still and looks over the conservatory. When her attention passes through the nearest fronds to the glass facing the pool, she asks, “What is this?”

  Leisurely watching the yard, Volikov holds the bulky satellite phone to his ear.

  Alyona uses her own cell to place a call. She asks, “Where is everyone?” And then answers, “Stay there until—” but the connection drops. “My friends are in tower,” she tells me while raising the phone to the glass ceiling. “Reception is running red and green.”

  Above, on the second landing, the warfare escalates with two quick gunshots: Bax-babáx! Boom-kaboom!

  Unlike Alyona and I, Volikov doesn’t flinch. He simply continues giving instructions into the phone. “Too late for smokejumpers. Send MI-eights and air tankers.”

  His demeanor is so cool, so relaxed and unconcerned, I’m encouraged to creep forward and join him.

  He certainly has an arresting view.

  From where we stand, Konstantin’s property is divided in two. To the south, the forest unfolds lush and green; to the north, it’s charred devastation.

  In the pool, Johnny Rotten and a tattooed man sit on opposite sides of the floating picnic table, passing an empty vodka bottle across Elvis’s naked body.