The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  His brother hardly seemed to notice, though Dima must have seen how it hit Yarik: the way the older twin spat back onto his plate the chicken bones he’d cracked for marrow; the evenings he stood outside the theater’s exit door, ear pressed to metal, eyes shut tight, trying to imagine the sight; the hours at home, back from the boat, that he spent slumped before the television, flipping through channel after channel of news.

  All the stories of all those men in Moscow: one who made a killing on fish flown overnight from Asia, another who ran a mountain range of pastures efficiently as factories, shepherds to meatpackers, management rocketing overhead on shuttles launched into the exosphere by yet another who, in The Past Life, had been a low-level apparatchik, a failed actor, a farmboy, heir not to fortune but to a state of mind, the same that once drove the Soviets to try reversing their rivers’ flow, to drill in search of the center of the earth, the sort of wonders that the USSR had failed to realize, that only the Russia which replaced it—oligarchs bred beneath the clamp of communism let loose upon loot-fueled dreams—could make come true.

  Even in those early days there had been an entire TV channel devoted to Petroplavilsk: the Consortium, the space mirrors, the great glass sea. News stories about another satellite sent up. Progress reports on the Oranzheria’s increasing reach. Documentaries on the ecosystem chain that led from Lake Otseva’s blooming algae to its bigger yields of fish, the scientific feats that reached into plants’ cells and found the genes that felt sunlight, knew to blossom, bear fruit beneath a longer or a shorter night. Sometimes, after watching a story on some new flower the Consortium was planting in the parks, Yarik would shut the TV off, wander outside, crouch down, touch a petal. Sometimes, on the boat, laying out nets in what once would have been dark, he would gaze up at the zerkala, eyes watering at their light, and hear again the television’s voice: spectrums and non-special-case geosynchronous orbit and a thousand kilometers up in the sky.

  And lying in his bed in the room he had still shared with his brother, listening to the night sounds on the street that in his childhood had been the sounds of day, he would wonder how the billionaire had done it, what The Baron had been in the life before—A brigade manager on some factory floor? A beetle-browed student? An aspiring engineer?—who Boris Bazarov had been as a boy. Behind the wall, his mother coughed in her sleep. His twin tossed in the cot they used to share. Dima’s unsettled breath, the creaking of the springs. Yarik had known that if he got up and lay beside his brother the tossing would stop, the breathing would calm. From the apartment upstairs: a tinkling of water; the rush of it flowing down through the pipes. Sometimes he could feel time trickling between him and his brother. Eroding, gullying. Until the gulf between them seemed wide as the space between their beds. His own breathing would ruffle. He would sit up. And, rising, pad to his brother’s cot, climb in.

  There were nights, too, when he didn’t, when he never even climbed into his own, nights when he left Dima at the docks and, claiming some chore that needed doing, went behind the clanging yards to an old shipping container where a woman or two sat on the ledge, inside the open loading door, swinging legs in zerkala light. There were nights when he went out to clubs, stood against the wall until some dance-slicked girl came up to him; others when he went to the dom kultura without his brother, danced with girls out there, instead.

  Sitting in the back of the billionaire’s car, watching the tree-splintered light flicker over his shut eyelids, listening to the tires’ ceaseless hush, he knew Dima would have said it had been his need for a wife that had carved the gulley between them, his son that eroded one shore, his daughter the other, their work on the Oranzheria, day after day, rising like a flood.

  When he’d first told his brother about the jobs—how much the Consortium would pay, how fast they’d be snatched up, the fact that he was going to apply—Dima had listened silently, gathering the mooring rope hand over hand, watching it coil at his feet. Until Yarik reached over and stopped him.

  “Bratets,” he said, “I have to. We have to move out.”

  “Where?” Dima asked.

  “To our own apartment.”

  “Why would we need our own apartment?”

  This was September. Zinaida had been living with them since July. Yarik waited for Dima to understand, listened to the waves slap at the hull, the sharp cries of the gulls, said at last, “She’s pregnant.” His brother turned away. The faint thuds felt through the boat. The deck swept by the shadows of the birds. When Dima finally spoke it was only about fishing: how he couldn’t continue by himself. Yarik had reached up, then, buried his hand in Dima’s hair. Half of Yarik had wanted to grip hard with his fist—nothing about a nephew, an Uncle Dima, the fact that Yarik would soon be a dad?—and half of him had needed more than ever then to hold his brother in a hug. But Yarik had only given Dima’s head a little shake. “Why would you need to fish,” he’d said, “when you’ll be working on the Oranzheria with me.”

  He could feel right through Dima the same rocking that he could feel below his own feet—the wake of the steel ships that plowed by in endless embarkation and return, to and from the new built dock, The Baron’s fisheries—and suddenly he hadn’t wanted to let go. He let his fingers knead his brother’s head.

  Dima shut his eyes. “What will we do with Papa’s boat?”

  “Sell it,” Yarik said.

  And then Dima’s hair was gone from his hand and his brother was lowering himself unsteadily to the deck. At Yarik’s feet, Dima lay down, his back on the boards. Yarik stood above, watching him. Then he crossed to the engine house. “I need to get an apartment,” he said, before ducking his head inside. From in there he shouted, “And you need to buy a baby gift.” He cut the motor, ducked back out. “A really big one.” He came back, crouched down in front of Dima, held his gaze. “A hundred hectares big.” Lying down beside his brother, he had lain it out: how much more quickly they could buy the land, live on it there together, with wives, children . . .

  “A dog,” Dima had said.

  “Named Ivan.”

  “The Second.”

  “The Terrible.”

  “No,” Dima had told him, smiling at last, “that will be your baby.”

  Out there, in the becalmed boat in the middle of the lake, beneath the sky that would have long ago been night, they had lain quietly side by side, the boat rocking their bodies together and away, together and away.

  “Yarik,” Dima had said, “do you remember?”

  Yes, he thought in the stillness of the car’s smooth speed, he did. All these years later. That night, all those years ago. But this—this leather seat, this road unfurling beneath him—was now. And his brother was wrong. What had risen between them wasn’t anything more than simply time, the steady drip of years, the way life was. Lifting the gloves off his face, he went to shove them in his jacket pocket, felt the cellophane-wrapped cigarette pack, and drew the Troikas out. He could still see the steadiness of Bazarov’s hand, the pistol motionless, as if soldered to the side of the man’s head. Where, he wondered, had Dyadya Avya’s old gun gone? Had Dima taken it from the izba after the farmhouse was sold, buried it with all the other remnants in their uncle’s trunk? Yarik shook free a cigarette. Soon, he would go look. In their mother’s apartment, in the chest she kept in her room. And if he found the pistol he would bring it home, hide it somewhere safe. No one would know. He stuck the smoke between his lips. Until—he lit a match—the day he’d mount it on his desk.

  That evening, in the strange light of the switch, they met each other as they had met each other every evening for years, Dima in the shuffle getting off the bus (“Good morning, bratan”), Yarik in the line to get on (“Good evening, bratishka”). Except this time Yarik’s neck looked a little less bent, his face less caked with dust, his eyes more alive. Instead of a quick cupping of his hand on Dima’s neck, he held it there till Dima stopped.

  “I’m going to be a foreman,” Yarik said, and, right in front of all the o
ther hard hats, pulled Dima into a hug.

  The line of men getting on and off flowed around them, jostling as if to break them apart, sweep them away to bus and work, but when they loosed their grip it was only to lean back far enough to see each other’s face.

  Yarik gave him a shake. “Bratishka, it’s good news.”

  He did look happier than Dima had seen him all year, his smile so wide Dima could smell the cigarette smoke. Dima felt a sudden thickness in his lungs, told himself it was the smoke and, smiling back, began to ask how the job had come about, but his brother was already on to what it could mean—for them, their future. . . .

  “Maybe now,” Dima cut in, “you can get me on your crew?”

  Someone’s shoulder shoved past, seemed to knock Yarik back a little, his neck stiffening, his eyes suddenly a little more serious. Though no less bright. “Maybe now,” Yarik said, “I can really start to save.” On Dima’s nape, his brother’s hand gave one more squeeze. Behind Yarik the last of the stragglers climbed through the bus’s doors. He broke away—the air on Dima’s neck somehow more heavy than the hand had been—and started after them. “Maybe now,” he called back, “by the time we’re ready I’ll be ready, too.” Then the doors were closing and Yarik was jamming himself between them: his shoulder, his elbow, gone.

  Out at the far eastern edge of the Oranzheria, the support crew had built the scaffolding across the Kosha River, and that night Dima worked a half-dozen meters above the water. Above him, small broken clouds mottled the sky. Behind the clouds the zerkala were albescent creatures in a murky sea, and, on the glass, the workmen wore headlamps strapped around their hard hats, their small yellow cones of light sliding from job to job, a thousand of them drifting like some current-borne school spawned by the mirrors above. Now and again, the zerkala would find a clearing in the clouds; their beams would pour down; the men would all shut off their lamps: a thousand candles blown out in one roving breath. Then, for a while, Dima could see the river below—its gleaming ripples rolling slowly towards the distant lake, the splash of fish, of night birds after them—before the clouds would close together again: a hundred sky-hung lanterns snuffed out.

  He flicked on his headlamp. The glass showed him his own face back. He was preparing the brackets for the panes and he tried to focus on the adhesive strip that he was laying down, but in the reflection he kept seeing his brother’s face, the way Yarik’s eyes looked when concentrating on a task, the way his jaw jerked with frustration at himself. When the silicone ran out, Dima held the gun in the air, the old cylinder still in it, and sat there, leaning over his reflection, pressing his lips tighter, turning down the edges of his mouth, leaking a little more weariness into his eyes, until he had it right.

  “Ey!” the foreman called to him. The panes shook under approaching boots. Dima reached out, put his palm over the reflection. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking up.

  But when the zerkala cast down their light again, he could not stop gazing at the world they showed below. On the near bank, he could see what had once been a farm. The inside of an izba poked through its collapsed roof like the skeleton of a sun-shrunk corpse: the white of a woodstove, a mattress with its horsehair springing out, a kitchen cupboard spilling shards of china and glass. He saw a row of stumps where a windbreak must once have stood. The stone foundation was all that was left of what had been a barn. The last intact building, a chicken coop, he watched collapse: a bulldozer smashing through one corner, the wood crashing into its own cloud of dust.

  Dima watched the earthmover shove the wreckage into a mound so high it almost touched the glass. There, just below the faint reflection of his face, were rugs that had once lined a wall, small white feathers clinging to torn patches of screen, fork tines glinting, the bowl of a tobacco pipe. Where its dark stem disappeared among the remains of soil and memory, Dima could make out the white of the teeth still clenching its tip.

  His slow crawl stopped. In his headlamp’s beam: a dead man’s clench-jawed grimace. Dima bent his face down closer—his own eyes forming in the fog of the glass, the outline of his own tight jaw—until he could see the old dog’s teeth again, yellowed and stained with spots of brown, feel the receding gums, smell the breath, warm and gamy as meat left in the sun.

  “What are you doing to that dog?” Dyadya Avya called across the floor from where he lay.

  “Brushing his teeth,” the boys said.

  In the flickering lamplight the brothers’ eyes passed laughter back and forth between them. Earlier that night, when Dima had gone to dump his bones into the dog’s bowl, he had found a chunk of ivory lying there with its rotted root. Yarik had suggested they brush old Ivan’s teeth. Dima had come back from the water basin with the toothbrush Dyadya Avya used.

  “Oh,” their uncle said, his shoulders shrugging against the boards, as if he had been brushing Ivan’s teeth since the dog was a pup. His neck was canted back so that his thick red throat was arched and his felt cap was crushed, and his red face was upside down, staring at them. He said, “I thought you were trying to get him to smoke my pipe.” He belched. “My pipe,” he said again, and his eyes grew watery in the lamplight. Then he lifted his head on his neck and took a swig from the bottle and rested the bottle back on his chest. There was his upside-down red face again. But the eyes were shut.”Don’t let Ivan smoke my pipe,” he said. “It’s all I have left of your father.” The lamplight drew two wet lines from the corners of his eyes down to his temples where they disappeared in the dark felt of his hat.

  The dog panted, slow and even. Yarik had stopped brushing. Dima, still holding Ivan’s lips away from his gums, could feel on his fingers the hot air of the dog’s insides.

  “He loved his pipe, didn’t he?” Dyadya Avya said. And, when the boys didn’t answer, he answered himself: “He did.” Another swig from the bottle, another sigh. Then the man’s eyes snapped open. “I know what your mother says. I know she says he did it to himself. No.” His felt hat rubbed back and forth on the floor. “No, my children, don’t think it. It’s not true!” The old dog’s ears swiveled towards the shout. “It was”—Dyadya Avya’s voice guttered—“the Chudo-Yudo.” His upturned eyes looked from brother to brother. “That snake! That beast! That devil!” He tried to turn the bottle’s mouth to his without lifting his head and the vodka spilled around his lips and he shook his face, violently, coughing. “I warned him,” he said. “I told him he was tempting the devil. ‘No’, he said, ‘the Chudo-Yudo stays in the river.’ Ha! Where does he go when he grabs the girl from the bank? When he swallows the horse whole and cannot move? Where does the current take him as he rests? The lake! The lake, I told him. Into the lake! But still, there he was, every winter, sitting out there, cutting a hole in the ice just big enough for the Chudo-Yudo’s head to fit through. Up!” The man’s whole body jerked. “And grabs him!” He jerked again, once, like the last flop of a fish on a dock.

  Dima, nine years old, his fingers on the teeth of the dog, jerked with him.

  “In winter,” Dyadya Avya said. “I told him, ‘In winter what else is there for the devil snake to eat? Lyova,’ I said, ‘what are you doing out there? Every day? Alone? You don’t even bring home enough fish for supper! Why don’t you just work? Why don’t you come join the road crews with me? Where you’re supposed to be. We would clear the streets of Petroplavilsk together. Proscribed hours, state wage. Lyova, your family is hungry! Your wife is angry! Your sons . . .’” His words dribbled away. He quieted. He looked at them. “Oh, that beast!” he said. “Oh, that fucking beast.” He was crying.

  Dima let go of the dog. The dog went straight to the sobbing man. It stood over him, licking at his face. “The teeth,” Dyadya Avya said, from the darkness beneath the thick hanging shag of the dog, “the teeth.”

  “But, Dyadya,” Dima said, “I saw . . .”

  And, because he couldn’t finish, Yarik said for him, “We saw them pull Papa from the ice.”

  And, still, a quarter century later, Dima coul
d see the dark blur of the body beneath the ice, feel his father’s frozen eyes staring up at him. Still, crouched on his hands on knees, looking down through the glass at the half-buried pipe—no, not teeth: just a few dried kernels of old feed corn spilled—he could hear Dyadya Avya’s reply: “Oh, my children, the Chudo-Yudo does not eat the body. It swallows the soul.”

  On his first break that night, he climbed off the Oranzheria and walked down to the river’s edge to drink his tea. Small things fled his footsteps, shaking the reeds. The sounds of their splashes, the rustling of cattails and canary grass, were smothered by the rumbling of the earthmovers, the groan of shovels clawing rock, men bellowing back and forth through it all.

  He shut his eyes, lowered his face till he could feel the tea’s warmth on his lids, the waft of it filling his nostrils, and wished it was the scent of his brother’s hair instead. Foreman! He thought of what Yarik had said, how now he’d be ready with the money by the time the Oranzheria was done. But how long would that be? And what if they were wrong? If the expansion was never meant to stop? Opening his eyes, he watched an egret sail between the glass sky and the surface of the river, skimming low, its plumes pearly in the mirror-light, its reflection slipping through the shaky reflections of the artificial moons. Was it possible that the Oranzheria would simply go on like this forever? A sea of glass that never stopped growing, creeping outward over the land with a hunger that could not be sated? Was it possible that this was what the new way meant? Yesterday, his brother a laborer. Today, his brother a foreman. Someday, his brother a manager. Years from now. When they were old and life was almost gone. And he would get off the bus, gray-haired, and greet his gray-haired brother and his brother would cup his neck and tell him, Bratishka, I have good news.