by Idra Novey
But what would come of saying such a thing to a pair of elderly sisters in a shared cab?
And so Lena gave the sisters what they were expecting: the docile smile of a teacher who taught first-year pedagogy students in a marginal college, a woman given a name almost as common on the island as Maria. When Lena had confessed to Victor the implicit expectation she felt to be as ordinary and predictable as her name, he’d said what about Helen of Troy—nothing predictable about starting the Trojan War, right? He’d suggested she think of herself as Helen’s descendant, instigating the end of her island’s regime one flaming police car at a time. All it would take, he told her, was a little gasoline in a bottle.
They’d been sitting on the plaid couch in Victor’s basement at the time. She’d been in her second term at the university, Victor in his third in political science and revered by everyone in the movement. She’d known that his interest in her had been the only reason she’d been included among the students secretly organizing the marches. At the meetings, everyone deferred to him. He’d deliver his ideas with such precision and hypnotic confidence that he left them all mesmerized. When any of them presented an idea, they’d turn to Victor for validation. If he nodded in agreement, others began to nod, too.
Riding now in the cab, Lena couldn’t remember if Victor had first kissed her on the sofa then, or if it had been later, after she’d made her first Molotov cocktail in the shed behind his house. For hours afterward she’d felt dizzy from the gas fumes but also from the audacity of what they were doing. If they didn’t die, it was entirely possible they might usher in the country’s first legitimate election in over a decade.
Soak the rag a little more, Victor had urged her. Get it good and drenched.
* * *
Victor woke and for a moment didn’t recognize the woman playing with his inner leg hair and arguing in such a strained voice on her phone. Father, it just feels right, the woman was saying. I’m engaged to him now and that’s it.
Victor twitched as the details reassembled. When he drew his leg away, Cristina made a motion with her tongue as if she were a python. There was nothing like a little sleep to reveal to a man how much panic was shaping his perceptions. But whether this naked woman intended to constrict him to death or not, she had just said “engaged” while on the phone with the head of the Senate Transparency Committee, and there was no backing out now.
As Victor had done at every moment of remorse or shame in the past decade, he blamed Lena. If she hadn’t made such an idiotic mistake, he never would have ended up with his hands around her neck. When she lost consciousness and slumped to the ground like a sack of apples, he hadn’t been able to breathe himself.
Oh, it was astounding how low, low, low a single lapse of self-control could sink a man, convincing him of something sick in his nature. But he’d never lost control again, not the way he had with Lena.
Or not, that is, until Maria.
Beside him, Cristina hung up the phone and cupped his face with her fragrant, just-moisturized hands. Was I too loud? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yank you out of your sleep.
Transaction Log for Olga’s
SEEK THE SUBLIME OR DIE
September 6th
10:05, Kundera Report
Dear S, just sold another Unbearable Lightness to a student with curls as thick and self-determined as yours. If you’d lived till Kundera came out in translation here, I’m sure you would have known why his books are like cocaine for the undergrad mind.
10:52, New Customer
A reporter named Simon shuffled in, but only for cannabis. He writes about corruption and has a severe stutter you would find endearing. He’s just moved back in with his mother up the street and he talked at me as if I were his mother, too, but I enjoyed him anyhow. He told me a stutter is like grief and can never be overcome entirely, no matter how many tactics a person might learn to suppress it.
I said your name aloud, S, after Simon left. I can’t remember the last time I said your name anywhere but in my head. You have become my unutterable divine. My mother had her never-spoken-of God she mumbled to when she thought no one was listening, and you are mine.
11:05, Dread
I may be about to fail another friend, S, as I failed you.
* * *
Right here, thank you, Lena spoke up from the backseat as they reached the narrow street below Olga’s Sublime. The morning clouds were still low and thick over the port, the rundown homes stacked into the hillside still drained of color. The dense fog off the ocean usually retreated by noon, but it had hung on today, muting even the brightest pinks and yellows of the paint chipping off the doors and window frames of the street below Olga’s. Once the sun emerged, the port city looked less like a soiled and forgotten heap of laundry. The graffiti on the stairwells, the brightly painted doors, even the rusted tin of the roofs came defiantly alive in the sunlight.
Lena had felt more defiantly alive herself once she’d moved here and definitively left her parents’ sealed-off existence. She loved living above the streets she’d marched down as a student, shouting until her throat felt blowtorched. She knew everyone assumed her family, as owners of one of the largest juice factories on the island, had supported the regime—and they weren’t wrong. Her grandfather had hired only workers who professed to support Cato. Throughout her childhood, her grandfather had repeated the same justifications for the roundups that everyone in their world of gated homes had, insisting the numbers of people detained and killed were wildly exaggerated.
Although at night, as a teenager, through the wall her room shared with her father’s study, she’d heard him listening to what the foreign stations were reporting about the island. Her father never brought up what he heard, and Lena never told him how many nights she’d stayed awake, straining to make out what the voices on the radio were saying about all the police shootings that went unmentioned in the island’s newspapers.
She’d also never told her parents or brothers about her increasing involvement with either the protests or with Victor. To explain her ever more frequent overnight absences, she’d invented sleepovers to study with girlfriends. One evening as she packed her bag, she’d looked up and found her father in the doorway of her room. She’d thought he was going to confront her, but he’d just remained there with a pained expression, watching her. She’d kissed him and assured him she was meeting up with friends who looked out for her and that she would be fine.
An hour later, at the meeting, Victor had announced to everyone that she’d be in charge of flyers for the next march, and it had felt like a baptism. She drafted each one as if it were destined for a museum. She ran her fingers twice over each fold while Victor paced and strategized in his basement. They began to repeat the ritual several nights a week, Victor thinking out loud, Lena murmuring in agreement as she went on folding and folding, determined to prove she was as committed and relentless as he was. They’d talked endless times about the unfairness of it, how the police wouldn’t dare beat her if they caught her. When Victor told her she needed to be more brazen at the marches, to remember that her family could get her released with no more than a phone call, she had nodded and said of course, had begun throwing more Molotovs than all of the other girls combined.
The day she misplaced the draft of the flyer had been after a night staying up together until four a.m. She’d felt nauseous with exhaustion by the time they got to campus. The draft contained all the information for the next march and she hadn’t intended to take it with her. They all knew agents for the government were crawling like ants through every trash can on campus. She’d checked her books and her bag over and over before she’d gone to Victor’s to see if she’d left the draft of the flyer in his basement.
Moving up the steep stairwell to Olga’s back door, Lena could still recall the splatter of Victor’s spit on her face after she told him she didn’t know where she’d misplaced it. When h
e pushed her against the wall and grabbed her throat, she’d thought he was just panicking for a second. But then he’d smashed his palm over her nostrils. He’d shouted about her father and grandfather, yelled they were the reason she was so careless and couldn’t be trusted with anything. Each time she’d managed to gasp for air, she’d apologized again, but Victor had just clamped his hand down, harder.
More than ten years later, the thought of those seconds before she’d blacked out in his basement still caused her lungs to stiffen, the memory of her nose crushed under his palm still startling enough to suck all the other contents out of her mind. Reaching the back door of the Sublime, she didn’t know if she was out of breath from the steepness of the steps or from what was replaying in her head.
Finally! Olga called from the front of the store. I have a gift for you.
I need some water first. Lena kissed her friend on the cheek and picked up the plastic bottle Olga refilled each morning at home. Lena had offered once to help her pay for the pipes to be fixed, but Olga had given her a vicious stare and said if she was looking for a corporate sponsor, she’d let her know.
That sweater looks good on you. Olga held out the joint to her. You should order clothes from the afterlife more often.
Lena frowned at this, inhaling as Olga let out a stoned, gravelly laugh, her body as imposing as a king’s in the large stained velvet armchair she kept behind the register. Olga was broad shouldered and big boned, her gray hair chopped short as a man’s. Even high, she had an intimidating air, and Lena didn’t mention the computer monitor sitting on the floor until Olga motioned to it.
Internet’s still down, Olga said.
I see that, Lena replied. I should have printed the obituary so you could see it’s practically the same sweater. I know Victor pushed her in front of that bus, and he isn’t going to get away with it. With Olga’s tenacious gaze on her, the words felt less convincing in her mouth than they had when she’d declared them on the phone, alone in her living room. She felt the granules of conviction she’d stirred up at her computer already dissolving inside her.
When Olga asked if she was over her crazy idea yet of concocting a story for the police, Lena pivoted toward the wall.
You know Victor will use your grandfather to discredit anything you claim, Olga said. I bet he’ll go after your whole family. He’ll get his minions calling for a boycott of every juice coming out of that factory.
Olga motioned for the joint and Lena wordlessly returned it to her. Of course Victor would do that. She had confessed her grandfather’s hiring practices to him as if he were the head priest in the church of reprehensible complicity. Just last week there had been a big story in the news about a right-wing family in the interior that no one had exposed before, a family that had stored arms on their horse farm for the regime. People were tired of rehashing the same familiar cast of villains from the Cato years. They were hungry for other wealthy families who had yet to own up to their share of the blame. Victor could easily make hers the next.
With a quiet huff of defeat, Lena looked down at the white pulse line across her chest, how precisely the zigzag fell at the rise of her breasts, how perfectly her body complied with the design.
Victor and I joked about having a baby and naming her Futura, she told Olga. We were going to take Futura with us when we went to vote.
Olga whistled. Can you imagine if you’d had a Futura with that sociopath?
Lena let her head fall back. Even if she had more evidence than a sweater sent from the afterlife, her accusations would lead to nothing. No one would take her claims seriously. She’d be dismissed on the radio as some bitter ex-girlfriend who’d grown up with maids tying her shoes, a woman raised in one of those sickening families that still wouldn’t use the word regime.
When she’d ranted on the phone with Olga, it had felt possible to postpone the consideration of how easily Victor would make her a pariah. With his cult status on campus, he’d have no problem getting her fired. Her family could lose the factory. They might have to leave the island. Victor wouldn’t just burn up her life, he’d incinerate that of her brothers and their wives, her nephews and little niece who’d just started school.
Until Olga said it, it hadn’t occurred to her that the cashier could have been the one who returned the sweater to her bag. It seemed unlikely—but no less so than being haunted.
She squinted up at the water spots extending across the ceiling. She followed the edge of the largest one, its faint yet relentless advance above her head.
* * *
Victor told his fiancée he was headed to his office, which would be true eventually. He needed some air off the sea first. Since college, he’d liked to walk the docks along the port, to process things while moving between the cargo ships. It cleared his mind to drift between the giant stacks of containers, the men shouting at each other as they operated the cranes.
Today, however, something wasn’t right. The first dock was full of people who didn’t belong there. Women and teenagers. Doddering old men with binoculars.
What the hell’s going on? he asked a man who was crouching, about to secure a rope to the dock.
Whales, the man answered. A pair of them, mating.
Where? Victor looked out at the ocean, which was a dull color today, the clouds round and gray and piled like potatoes.
Hard to guess, the man said. They might be going at it down there right now. All anyone’s seen is their backs but people keep showing up. The kiosk’s been out of cigarettes for days.
He turned his face toward Victor with this last piece of information and Victor noticed the man’s right eye wasn’t tracking in sync with the left one. Victor backed away. He wasn’t up to dealing with any peculiar faces right now, and no fucking whales.
He gave the man the briefest of nods and continued down the dock, moving past a cluster of teenage boys eating chocolate bars and laughing. But seriously, one of them said, how big do you think a whale’s boner is?
And then the boys laughed harder and Victor felt a rush of revulsion at their predictable humor and pimpled faces. And revulsion, too, at the thought of his own face, so distant now from a boy’s face. He’d felt painfully old and lonely when his younger brother began questioning him over lunch on Sunday. It had been excruciating to stiffen and deny Freddy an answer, to will a growing distance from his only brother. But Freddy had been relentless. You must know something, Freddy had insisted, you slept with her. Was she a drunk? Was she reckless? How did she end up in front of that bus?
* * *
Olga aimed to save her secret stash of whiskey for special occasions. But if a friend convinced of having received a garment from the afterlife wasn’t such an occasion, then what was? Marijuana alone hadn’t been enough to get Lena to take the zigzag sweater off. With the faucet out of commission, there’d been no way to rinse her shot glasses. Instead, they finished the whiskey sailor-style, straight from the bottle. Lena still had the sweater on, but at least she was horizontal in it now, sprawled and tipsy on the busted couch in Conspiracy.
By the time the whiskey was gone, the morning had taken on the improvisational feel of evening and Olga suggested they pull out the fake beards Lena had brought for her last birthday. Lena had shown up for the party with ten cotton-ball Santa beards trimmed and painted gray in honor of Olga’s legendary impersonations of a certain bearded revolutionary mythologized in movies produced by the same northerners who’d had him killed. When she’d opened the box, Olga had nearly cried from delight at the sight of those beards.
By the end of the party, most of the elastic bands had snapped and broken. But a few of the beards still had their bands intact, and on evenings when she was tipsy enough, she’d cajole friends who came by the store to put them on and play Bearded Revolutionaries with her.
You ready, comrade? Olga waved one at Lena now.
Oh, I can’t, it’s no
t even noon. One of my students might walk in.
But Olga had already snapped on a beard and was adjusting the elastic. Come on, she said. The time for revolution is now!
Olga launched her large body out of her velvet chair. People, she declared, have to know they will not face mere boys this time. People have to know this time they will face bearded women!
She stumbled over to her friend. Get up, comrade. It may not seem yet like we’ve entered the millennium of bearded women, but this one’s ours, I’m telling you. The millennium of bearded book vendors has arrived!
You’re crazy, Lena said, her words slurred from the whiskey. But she didn’t resist when Olga leaned over and slipped a beard’s elastic band over her head. Soon, they were both up and shouting over each other about justice and a beard-for-everyone movement that would spread from bookstores to revolutionary all-night libraries. To cover the electricity, they’d sell the city’s best marijuana and coffee. They’d sell beards in every size—little ones for kids and discount beards for retirees who binged on murder mysteries.
Olga grabbed one of the 1970 leather-bound copies of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto on display in the Conspiracy section and held it up to her ear like a phone. Karl, we’ve got some news for you boys. There will be no true revolution until there are beards covering every chin in every nation!
