I like Vitali Ignatiy on sight. He has a beard shot through with grey, a hairline that is halfway across his crown, thick-framed glasses, eyes that are an afterthought—beads pushed into his skull. He has a white T-shirt and a denim jacket on. His belly pushes out pleasantly, like a plush toy. I find him unthreatening.
I hear noises from beneath the floor and I look down.
“Basement. I have a printing press,” he says. “You are so much like your mother.”
I first think he means my original, then I relax. I don’t speak. I run my eyes over his space. Disorganized, but clean. Books and papers all over, pens, glasses of water, mismatched slippers, two lamps, a desk where his hairy forearms rest. There is a photo of him, younger, slimmer, smiling at some woman with surf in the background. The study has a lingering smell of synthetic pine, like he’s cleaned up in a hurry for impending company, unexpected but welcome. I think there are cat hairs, but I cannot be sure. There is a radio of some kind, no labeled stations, no real dial I can see, but on, and giving off the hiss of absent stations.
He seems to suddenly become aware of the tamaras. “Thank you, Tamara. I’ll take things from here.”
When we are alone he gets up and roots about for some handwritten notes, different papers with different levels of oxidation, gathered over time. “Would you like a drink?”
I shake my head. “I try not to indulge. I got lost in drugs one time.”
He nods like this is natural. He hands me a photograph. Black and white, a woman, very young, dark hair, looks out from between two men in khakis who are taller than her and whose heads are cut out of the frame. She is in fatigues, but has a smile and bright, intelligent eyes. It’s outside on grass and a cloudy day. I see my face in hers.
“Mykhaila,” I say. My mouth is dry and I want to take him up on that drink.
“She was sixteen in that photo, and she was not Mykhaila. Not yet.”
I touch her face across the years.
“You can call her ‘Mother,’ you know. She is still in you.”
“I know.”
“Her name was Michelle White, and she was the bravest person I’ve ever known.”
“You knew her?” I did not know that she had another name.
He looks uncomfortable.
“Thank you for showing me this, Vitali Ignatiy.”
He waves this off. “A week after this photo was taken she was in West Germany and behind the Iron Curtain. She had commando training, and the best of the West poured the knowledge from both sides of the Atlantic into her head. She was fantastic. All her instructors found her charming and incisive, absorbing craft faster than any they had taught before.”
I stalk his bookshelves because to be still is to soak up too much of the emotion lacing his words. The titles are in Russian, French, something that might be Turkish.
This story, my mother, the whole thing is important to Vitali Ignatiy. Who is he?
“Your mother was the best spy in the history of modern times, and she trained you from childhood, even earlier than her own start. Do you know why Mozart was Mozart? Because he started to learn music from early childhood, soaking it in while his father, an expert himself, taught Nannerl, his older sister. Your early exposure from someone who had early exposure makes you unique.”
“Are you forgetting what Tamara said to you? I’m not Molly, Vitali Ignatiy.”
“All right, enough of that. You are the only one there is. You are Molly. Try not to agonize over it.”
“What am I supposed to agonize over?”
He points to the radio. “The sound you hear is not random or static. It’s an amplified signal coming from you.”
“What?”
“It only comes from originals, not duplicates.”
Swallow. Breathe. Do not panic. “What are you saying?”
“How do you think the duplicates home in on the original? Originals broadcast a signal, and the duplicate receives it. The duplicate follows the signal, or tries to, but does not generate any of its own.”
“This is impossible. I’m not Molly, I don’t have her scars, and I don’t make duplicates when I bleed. Molly is dead.”
“Do you mind if one of the tamaras inspects your body?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Might you have got mixed up?”
“No.”
“Tell me what you remember about the last time you saw her.”
I do. I also take off my top and show him my back. “Molly got bitten by a duplicate once, and the scar on her back was permanent. What do you see?”
“No bite mark.”
“I’m not Molly, Vitali Ignatiy, I’m a molly.”
“Did Mykhaila teach you chess?”
“Yes. I don’t like it.”
He laughs. “But you know the rudiments. You can play?”
I nod.
“Okay, from what I know, in all my research, an original has never died before the duplicates. Perhaps there is something in the cell profile that allows promotion.”
“A pawn that reaches the other end of the board.”
“Becomes a queen. You, Molly, have been promoted to queen.”
“But I don’t make duplicates.”
“No, you don’t. Shame.” Yet his voice does not sound sorry.
“How do you know so much?”
“I stumbled on the Soviet program while researching infertility. Most of this information was handed to me in Belarus and St. Petersburg. I did not even have to bribe or coerce anyone. They were almost giving me papers like garbage disposal. Nobody cares about classified documents because people are getting out of the crumbling USSR, destroying what is incriminating and discarding everything else casually. I built it up from there.”
“You dodged the question before. You knew my mother.”
“I met her once, but I knew her on paper better than anyone, yes. She was pregnant with you . . . with Molly. I tracked her down like I did the other participants in the program. Like Tamara.”
“My mother, Molly’s mother wasn’t a participant. She stole it.”
“Not exactly. She was an unwitting participant, but a participant all the same, Molly. The people who sent her knew it would come down to injecting herself. Her handlers had orders to inject her if she did not do it herself.”
“So, she was a pawn too.”
“All spies are pawns, my dear.”
“Did she become a queen?”
He pauses, glances at the floor, then back up. “She became a knight.”
“Knight. Right. Vitali Ignatiy, what do you want of me?”
“Me? I’m an old conspiracy theorist who hand-prints a newsletter. I want to be heard. I . . . know things. I’ve seen things, but most of them too fantastical for the general public to believe—”
“Stop. Cut that shit out. I don’t buy altruism. Try again, or I’m walking out.”
He smiles. “You are just like her. I don’t want anything from you, Molly. I did want to see you, and I’m grateful that you visited. It is, in some ways, like seeing a ghost, but a welcome one. Tamara!”
The tamaras come in.
“It’s time to go.”
* * *
On the way back one tamara asks, “Why call him ‘Vitali Ignatiy’ all the time? Why not just ‘Vitali’?”
“Russian naming conventions. It’s polite to use what you call the first and middle name.”
She nods and keeps driving.
I flip through the sheaf of papers I filched from Nikitovich’s office, but it’s too dark in the vehicle, so I slip them under my blouse and into the waistband of my trousers for later. I wish I had James to look at them. I picture him as I had last seen him, gobbling up food, and I pinch myself hard in the inner thighs to get my mind off him.
Transcript
It’s getting difficult to breathe. The mass is pushing against my lungs, but also my stomach. I can’t eat or drink more than a few sips.
[PD breathes heavily and struggles to speak.]
&n
bsp; [cut]
Eight
I read the research material surrounded by phantom mollys, six of them, with accusing eyes and no words. Talking to Nikitovich has tripped up my mindfulness and bruised my ability to ignore them.
Some of the stuff I’m reading is in Russian, but most has been translated. I speak a little Russian and I remember how my mother called me dorogoy because she did not want me to consider myself weaker than a male.
What the research shows is that the difference between the primes and the duplicates lies in the spleen, which produces specialized, artificial cells. All those years ago when Mykhaila worked in Russia, she stole and injected herself with a primary suspension of those cells. They nested in her spleen and lay dormant. When she became pregnant with Molly they activated and the child was born with the ability to make blood copies, hemoclones.
I’m surprised to find out Mykhaila had a splenectomy, though there is no information about whether she ever made duplicates. Why else would she have had her spleen taken out? I remember seeing her scar. I imagine the scenario, the army of mykhailas. This may have been why both Connor and Mykhaila Southbourne were so proficient with the rules before Molly was born, and knew exactly what skills their child would need. I break out in a sweat thinking of duplicate mykhailas wandering around the British countryside. She was deadlier than Molly, and if they attack me . . .
The artificial cells act as matter converters. Their design has not been penetrated by any scientists outside the Iron Curtain, but from a drop of blood they can make a full human duplicate based on the genetic material of the Prime from almost any base material: wood, soil, organic waste, even metals.
I have to stop; the more I read, the more intense the ghost mollys become. I wonder what I will find if I take a sample of my spleen and examine it under the microscope. Would the special cells line the splenic channels? Or would they have their own gland budding off like a science-fiction alien? If I return to work I will find a way to biopsy myself.
I can’t say when I fall asleep, or at what point the dream begins, but it’s always best to just ride it out. I should not have to pay for sins I did not commit. I didn’t kill the mollys, so I should not have the nightmares, the shakes, the deep regrets, the ghosts.
I see me. My face, crumpling under my own fist. The mollys don’t register pain, even when they are deep in it. They cry out involuntarily, but no rictus or grimace, even while I break their arms or push their shoulders out of joint.
I see myself in dirt, in the mud behind Southbourne Farm, struggling to get my head up, but my arm holding me under, caught on a root system.
They fight, the mollys do. Ferocious, not as polished as me, not yet, but effective. Only, not effective enough. In rubble, in a place I do not recognize, I am on the verge of losing, but I push both thumbs into the molly’s eye sockets. It’s short work from there.
So many, each one a millstone on my heart.
Then everything stops and there’s Molly, my original, my Prime, sitting on a deck chair, legs spread, hands on her knees, serene. The skin over her knuckles is cut up, hanging off in disorganized flaps. She is dirty, like she has been fighting, which of course she has. There is soot on her face and her hair is bedraggled. I’m on the floor, maybe chained, maybe lying on a beach towel, both possibilities equal like they can be in dreams.
“You know, when I first moved to London I used to stare out of the window a lot, at night, at the lights of other people’s lives. A part of me expected to see a crime being committed, like in that Hitchcock movie. Nothing ever did happen, but I still expected it.” She exhales, shrinks a little.
“You fucked me,” I say.
“I gave you a choice.”
“Not an informed one. I wasn’t twenty-four hours old.”
“Boo-hoo. Manage your expectations, girl. This isn’t Hitchcock. I didn’t get to choose, and neither did my mother. Besides, you still have a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
She stands, now holding lighter fluid like she was on the first and last day I met her. “You can choose each day whether or not to be Molly Southbourne.”
She douses herself and catches fire, smiling. Flaming, skin blackening and falling off in irregular patches, she leaps to embrace me. From behind her other burning mollys join.
I wake crying, and I cannot stop for thirty minutes, so I punch myself in the temple, twice, hard, so hard that I see stars. A molly watches me from the foot of the bed, head cocked.
I hate this shit.
I should go back on my medication. Again.
I opt for coffee instead. I’m in the kitchen, hand-grinding beans with a rolling pin, and my hopeful eye on a drizzle cake that someone left unattended, when one of the tamaras comes in. She seems overdressed for the hour.
She says, “Some of us are going to the pub. You want to come?”
* * *
I am at the bar on a stool, facing a mirror, looking at my own reflection and that of an oil painting on the wall behind me. The painting is of two young boys carrying a blindfolded angel on a litter of some sort. There is also the reflection of a television on which Margaret Thatcher is speaking words with great passion. The image switches to that of an ambulance, probably because the army and navy are manning the ambulance service in order to break the strikes. It’s amazing that they’ve decided to televise the House of Commons live. TV is becoming weird.
The others are dancing and intermittently inviting me despite my resolute refusal. For obvious reasons only two of the duplicates are allowed to go out to avoid undue attention, but I notice some have disguised themselves effectively. Tamara doesn’t have rules like Molly’s, but she has what she calls “advisory tactics.” We’re not supposed to dance, either, but you try getting any group of young people to obey any rules.
Dancing is good for you, dorogoy. The great fighter Bruce Lee was also a champion dancer. Did you know that?
“You like the print?”
I turn. The bartender is staring at me. He’s young, sounds like he might be German or Austrian or something. Some darkness about the upper lip, but otherwise clean-shaven.
“It’s interesting,” I say.
I thought I was off both booze and sex, but by the end of the evening I’m in his bed where he lives above the pub, and I’m slightly buzzed. A naked molly had done somersaults in the air while I fucked the bartender, but now she is gone. I watch him sleep. There is brown fuzz growing up from his arse crack, up his back. He sleeps like a child, with no cares, no thrashing. His name is Wolf and he is a backpacker. He tells me the painting is Finnish, The Wounded Angel by Hugo Simberg, 1903.
He gives it to me even though it is not his to give, and in the early hours I walk through the streets like an art thief with the rolled-up painting under my arm and my shoes dangling from my hand.
* * *
In the intoxicated state, a memory swirls to the top, reminding me of why I should abstain.
Molly is fifteen. She and her parents are in a clearing to the east of the house at Southbourne Farm, and it is one of those balmy August mornings, sunny, warm, but not unpleasant. There is a cow lowing with maternal heartbreak for a dead calf, but Connor is investigating that. A breeze cools their sweaty skin after the morning run, and their breathing calms. Molly senses the tension in her mother, even before Mykhaila speaks.
“I’m sorry, baby.”
“For what?” Molly is nervous, because hard as her mother is, she does not usually apologize.
She walks behind a tree and comes back with a blue head guard. “Put this on, Molly.”
“Why? I’ve never worn one when we spar.” She straps the Velcro chin strap on. Neither she nor her mother has gloves on, but Molly clenches her fists, raises her guard, places her left foot forward, and waits for her mother’s command.
“At ease, Molly. Today, we do something different.” Her eyebrows come together and lines appear between them. “I should have completed this part of your training earlier
, but I was weak. I . . . don’t want to.” She takes a deep breath.
“Mum, get on with it. The suspense is killing me more than whatever you’ll do.”
“You can fight. You’re fast and tough and creative with your combinations. You aren’t showy, you do what has to be done efficiently. One aspect of your training, though, is improving your ability to take hits. We haven’t done that.”
“How do I train for taking hits?”
“By taking hits. Keep your guards down, stand there, and take what I give you.”
“Okay. Any advice?”
“Keep loose. Your natural response would be to tense up. Don’t. Control your breathing.”
“Okay, Mum. I’m read—”
Molly does not see her mother move. Her vision explodes into fireworks, multiple pins of light, and even when she crashes to the ground, there is no pain. Curious. Her vision clears, and Molly sees tears trickling down Mykhaila’s face.
It continues, progressing from punches to kicks, and the pain comes soon enough. But you can get used to anything, even a beating, even when each impact forces air out of your lungs and you fear damage is being done to your internal organs, even the possibility of death.
“Now, dorogoy, fight, with everything, like you mean to survive. Go!”
Molly pours all her combat training into the fight, throwing sand into her mother’s eyes, pulling hair when she can, tripping, shoving, biting, and spitting. Mykhaila parries all the attacks, but nods with approval.
When it is over Molly collapses in a heap, notices Connor at the edge of the clearing. Something passes between her parents, a subtle disagreement, perhaps.
When Molly is soaking in a bath and her mother is washing the grime off her back, they both hear the door slam and the car engine start.
Mykhaila starts to sing as the sound becomes fainter.
* * *
Since the night out the security around me is lax. I suspect the tamaras followed me and waited when I stayed the night at Wolf’s. I may have been too drunk to spot them.
The number of mollys around me has increased, and I cannot help reacting to them, which earns me odd looks from the tamaras. I try to escape into sleep, but my dreams are anything but restful. I relive the murders of Molly Southbourne, and I am punished for them.
The Survival of Molly Southbourne Page 4
