The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  For a second he didn’t know what grabbed him. Then, somewhere in his skull, came the realization they were hands, hands clasped around his chest, arms beneath his own, his own face in the air, a body against him, its breath, Bazarov.

  “What did you think,” the man said, breathing hard close to Yarik’s ear, “that it was going to eat you?”

  Yarik flapped his arm, coughed. Bazarov’s laugh brought him around as much as anything else. “What the fuck is that?” he said, and kicking—“I’m OK”—tried to pull out of the man’s grip.

  “You sure?”

  “What the fuck is it?”

  “Not missing any toes?”

  “Fuck off.”

  And Bazarov was laughing again, heaving him up onto one of the boats, hauling himself the rest of the way, and Yarik remembered who he was talking to. He lay flopped over the kayak, belly breathing against the hard plastic, arms clutching the side. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  There in front of him the billionaire, The She Bear, his boss, treaded water, looking up into his eyes. “You want to know what the fuck it is?”

  “I’m sorry,” Yarik repeated.

  But Bazarov only beamed. “I call it the Serpent of Otseva. The Americans called it—the one they saw in grainy pictures—the Caspian Sea Monster. But what it is is an ekranoplan. Wait.” Bazarov gripped Yarik’s forearms with his hands. “I know.” He held on, still treading with his legs. “I know, Cossack. What the fuck is that?”

  On the way back, he told him. How, over half a century ago, the bureau for hydrofoil design had built the first: five hundred tons, a hundred meters long, a colossal cross between airplane and ship whose eight head-mounted engines would hurl it forward at such speed its winglike fins would compress the air against the water’s surface and give it lift. How, at seven hundred kilometers per hour, twenty meters above the sea, it would rise out of the realm of hydrofoils into one that existed only for it. How, though eventually they’d be built down on the Caspian, the prototype was tested on Otseva first. Then, to keep it from the spying eyes of satellites, sunk. The first creature of its kind, a genius’s lifework, and all these years buried in the lake. As if, Bazarov said, he was one day to collapse the entire Oranzheria, let it simply disappear in hundreds of hectares of weeds, woods grown up, a forest hiding the great glass sea.

  “You,” Bazarov told him, “are the first person I’ve brought to see it.”

  They were paddling side by side, the wind now coming from behind, the waves helping them along. And maybe it was his relief at that, maybe just the rhythm they were in, blades lifting and falling in synchronicity, but Yarik glanced at the man beside him and asked, “What about Pavel?”

  Bazarov’s paddle-blades dipped, rose, dipped again. From the shore there came the distant boom of trees being felled, the first gleam farther up of the Oranzheria’s glass. And then: “Stop paddling.”

  Yarik watched his blade streak by Bazarov’s stilled one. The man gave the water one more stroke to bring him back beside. They floated, still slipping forward over the waves, the wind still pushing them.

  “Give me your paddle,” Bazarov said. And as he took hold of the near blade, he slid Yarik his own. “Hold both.” Reaching past his lap into the kayak’s hole, he brought out a square of something. Shiny, crinkled plastic. Watching Bazarov unfold it, Yarik realized it was a tarp. And when they’d tied each corner to a pole, and held the poles between them, and opened them up, it became a sail. And their kayaks, sailboats. The wind, a gale. The lake shot by.

  Between them, the tarp billowed. Their arms shook. The wave spray blew over their bows and wet their faces and Yarik could feel its sting all over his cheeks, and he squinted into it, let it rush his teeth.

  Beside him, Bazarov let out a whoop. Through his whipping hair, his eyes glinted at Yarik. “The Yaroslavoplan!” he shouted.

  “The Bazoplan!” Yarik shouted back.

  “The Bazoslavoplan!”

  And they blew across the lake, the surface a blur, the waves machine-gunning against the bottoms of their boats.

  “Pavel,” Bazarov shouted, “was always too afraid to do this. Afraid of everything. That picture of the boar? Me and the boar? On my desk? He was even too afraid to take it! A picture! Of a dead boar! The dog handler had to take it. And I had flown him all the way up, brought him on the hunt, hoped to make a hunter of him.”

  Bazarov’s eyes held on him, seemed to take him in, appraise him, and then they left him and the man gazed straight ahead again. “This winter,” Bazarov shouted, “we’ll go together. Along the northern shore. I have a hunting lodge there. Those woods grow boars the size of bulls. You with one Colt .45, me with the other. None of this big-game rifle bullshit. Cowboy,” he shouted, “you haven’t lived till you’ve seen a couple hundred kilos of boar charging at you through the snow and nothing between its tusks and your balls but the barrel of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old pistol.”

  Bazarov laughed, the sound flung away by the wind, the wind Yarik could feel gusting against the tarp, feel in his throbbing hands, in the way all his skin felt whipped to life. And flying across the lake, the glass now shining on the shore, Otseva stretching out on the side all the way to the horizon, he knew who Pavel was. But it didn’t feel to Yarik like Bazarov was trying to turn him into a replacement for a son; it didn’t feel like his boss wanted to become some sort of a father. In that moment, Yarik felt, instead, what it might have been like to have had an older brother.

  Dima landed on the gravel with a quiet crash, crouched, his back against the concrete end of the train station platform, his head hidden just below its upper edge. The world had begun its tilt towards ever shorter nights, but beneath the zerkala the long twilight was stripped of softness, scraped clear. The open rail yard was strewn with shimmers and shadows, a tangle of tracks. Along one, a passenger train came on, its headlight diminished to mere safety signal. Around it, freight rails held long rows of oil tanks and open-topped cars, gravel or coal, whole caravans beneath forestfuls of logs. Among them moved the night-shift workers, crawling the ladders and tracks. Behind Dima, on the platform he’d just jumped off, he could hear the passengers milling. Before him, far in the distance, the thin edge of the Oranzheria was broken, a gap in the glass filled with dark pines: the access line. Between the pines and him, the rail yard’s fringe was a strip of stillness, abandoned cars, parts of trains retained for scrap, engines with wheels rusted stiff. Over there, he’d surely draw the eyes of passengers, workers, anyone waiting for him.

  Why had she chosen this place? Why not just take the shoes from him while on the tram, stuff them in her bag, the way he’d stuffed them in his rucksack now? He took them out, slung their tied-together laces around his neck, and, staring into the stillness for any sign of her, swore again that tomorrow he would not climb the statue’s plinth. He would stay away from the square, stop reciting the poem, go out to the Oranzheria and wait to tell his brother that he didn’t have to worry, that it would be OK; he’d tell Yarik everything, all he’d left out earlier that afternoon: the new kind in the crowd, their black button-down shirts, white ties, shaved heads, faces masked by scarves bearing the double-headed eagle of the tsars, or bare and furious with screaming. My head still rests upon my shoulders! They had brought copies of the text, shouted along with him. I still wield my sword with skill! In their raised fists, he’d seen flashes of metal. Halt! Their bellows had shaken the crowd. Halt! And he would. Tomorrow. Tonight there was still the girl out there in one of those abandoned cars waiting for him.

  Walking across the open, he expected to hear some yard guard’s bark, a worker’s querying halloo, but when he reached the shadows between the two long lines of train cars, and stopped, there was just the sound of his own footsteps crumbling away into the quiet. Unless—he stiffened—he’d heard the ghost of someone else’s disappearing, too. When he began to walk again the shoes clocked at his chest; he held them still, passed boxcars with black cracks between their doors, cattle cars
come alive with the sound of scurrying, flatbeds that left him stripped of cover.

  By the time he got to the passenger cars, he was seeing her in every window: a stirring in an upper corner where the top bunk would be; a shadow walking through the inside aisle, keeping pace with him—his own reflection flitting from window to window. Until, at a café car, he stopped. From somewhere came the sound of water trickling. Stepping closer, he peered in. Red curtains pulled back, the edges of booths, mirror-light slanting through. In there the air was smoky. He could smell it: cigarettes. He could feel one: a small warm spot on the nape of his neck, hot as a point of sun honed through a magnifying glass, growing hotter. He whipped his head around.

  The ember’s glow, its sting on his cheek, the hairy knuckles inches from his eyes, the fat face, curly beard, pair of glasses jabbed close—and then the man’s hand was on the shoes, the laces yanking Dima’s neck, jerking him down, his face mashed into underarm flesh, chest flab pressing his cheek, the slick of the man’s sweat, the stench, he couldn’t see anything. Clawing for a hold, Dima tried to shove his face free, but the man kept jerking the shoelaces like a choke collar on a dog. Dima coughed, quit trying to grab, rammed a knee upwards instead. The man grunted, loosed his hold long enough for Dima to suck a breath, hear someone else’s footsteps on the gravel behind him, and then the shoelaces yanked again and again his face slammed into the squeezing flesh, and something hard jabbed into the back of his head. He had never felt a gun barrel pressed to his skull, but he knew it. He quit struggling. He shut his eyes.

  “Is this him?” the face-squeezer said.

  Another voice: “I can’t tell.”

  “Where’s Vika?”

  “Vika!”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” came a woman’s voice from far away.

  And nearby again: “Let me see him. I can’t tell till I see his face.” Then: “Ey”—spit sprayed with the voice—“do you know what that is pressed to your head?” Dima tried to speak, but couldn’t get the air out. “Ey!” He couldn’t even nod, the shoestrings were so tight. “Do you know what this is?” And, patting his calves, thighs, crotch, rear, the man repeated his demand: “Let me see him.”

  Easing up on the shoelaces, the fat one squeezed his arm, popped Dima’s face out of his pit.

  He was still bent over, his neck still twisted, one eye still mashed against the fat chest, but he could just make the other out: a bloodshot eye in a black bruise peering down from beside a scabbed-over nose, a harelip, tiny yellow teeth. The man pulled the pressure from the back of Dima’s skull, showed a pistol in front of his face instead, pointed it at his forehead, as if to demonstrate and this is how I’ll use it.

  “Tell me something,” he commanded.

  Dima stared at the finger on the trigger.

  “Tell me something!”

  “I just came,” Dima said, “because she told me to. She gave me a note.”

  The man with the gun looked at the face-squeezer. The fat one seemed to shrug.

  “Fuck,” the gun wielder said. Then, to Dima, “Say something else.”

  “I have her shoes,” Dima blurted. “I—”

  “From the poem,” the fat man told him. “A little from the poem.”

  Dima swiveled his stare. He could see the bottom of the massive chin, greasy beardcurls, crimson neckfolds showing through, and he shut his eyes and tried to remember something, anything—For you, tsaritsas of my soul . . . —and then there was the sound of footsteps and he felt movement in front of his face and when he opened his eyes again the gun was being shoved aside and in its place was her.

  Her eyes were black as Ivan’s. They held on him hard as the bird’s when he first took off its hood.

  “Let him go,” she told them. When the fat man didn’t, she stuck her hand out and with it smothered as much of his huge face as she could.

  Trying to shake free, the fat man spoke through her fingers: “He tried to knee me in the dick.”

  “He could find it?” she said, and shoved.

  One final yank on the shoes around Dima’s neck and—“Boing,” the fat man said—his head popped up, freed too fast, all the blood that had flooded his face draining out. Dima stood, woozy, his hair wild, his frizzed beard clumped. The laces were twisted tight to his chin and he worked at them with his fingers, picked and pulled with the fury of all he didn’t dare say.

  She watched him like she heard it anyway and found it funny. Smiling, she glanced down. Her belt was unbuckled: the weight of the hanging end pulled apart her undone fly. “Sorry about that,” she told him, buttoning it up. “I was taking a piss.” Then she stepped forward and put her hands on his. His froze, fingers still in the laces. She pushed them away. Beneath his chin, she worked at the tangle. “I swear,” she said, “I came as fast as I could.” He could feel her fingers brushing the hairs of his throat. “I didn’t even stop to wash my hands.” She smiled. “Or”—she gave the shoelaces around him one more tug—“to pat my pussy dry.”

  She was so close that when she laughed he could smell her breath: fried mushrooms and cigarettes.

  Then the weight was gone from his neck. She held the laces in a fist, shoes dangling between them like a fish she’d caught for supper.

  Behind her, the pistol wielder asked, “It’s him?”

  Where the laces had been, a line felt sliced into Dima’s neck. He reached back, pressed a palm to it.

  “Thanks for the shoes.” The fare collector gave them a little swing. Then reached out and with her free hand took his. She held his palm. Dropping the shoes, she reached out and held his other. “I will wear them always,” she told him, and, turning to the pistol wielder, said, “Yup.”

  Dima felt her grip his hands harder just as he saw the flash of movement—a lunge, cloth flapping—and he tried to jerk away, jerked right into the fat man’s face, teeth revealed amid the beard, before everything went dark.

  There was his struggling, the rustling of whatever was on his face, the gun thrust again against his head—“I don’t think he knows what this is!”—the fat man squeezing him around the chest so he couldn’t breathe, someone tying his wrists.

  They half-hoisted, half-helped him up small metal steps and inside what must have been a railcar and walked him down an aisle and shoved him into what might have been a booth. In front of him: the edge of a table? Beside him: the fat man? Someone else slid in against his other side. Each breath he took sucked the hood to his face. What muggy air he could get smelled like a trash can full of cigarette butts mixed with the fat man’s sweat and he listened to cigarette lighters clicking and the crackle of papers and, from far off, the sounds of the workers in the rail yard, and all around the sounds of his attackers settling in.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked them.

  “What?” one said, and another, “I can’t hear him through the hood,” and a third, “Whose idea was the fucking hood, anyway?”

  Dima thought that was the woman’s voice and he said again, louder, “Why are you doing this?”

  The rasp of someone scratching at their beard.

  “Why,” the woman said, “do you stand on that statue? Why do you recite that poem?”

  “What do you want?” Dima asked her.

  “Why do we have to want anything?”

  “This”—it sounded like the harelipped gunman—“is what your fucking friends got wrong. Purpose, purpose, purpose, purpose.”

  “What if what we want,” the fat man, next to him, said, “is to grab you and place your head in my armpit and put a hood on you?”

  “Productive, productive, productive.”

  “Except,” the woman said, “what we want is to be able to take that hood off.”

  Dima sat there, quiet, breathing. They sat there smoking. “OK,” he said. And when there was no rustling of movement towards him, no touch to the fabric over his face, he said it again: “OK.”

  “What we want,” the woman told him, “is for you to take the hood off.”

>   Slowly, he lifted his wrist-tied hands off his lap, above the table, his elbows bending awkwardly, his hands twisting to let his fingers touch the fabric at his neck. Then her hands were on his again, pulling them away.

  “But first,” she said, “we have to trust you.” Her hands cupped his. “You have to trust us.”

  “You see,” someone said, “unlike your fucking friends,” and Dima realized it was the gun wielder again, “we don’t believe in coercion, in fucking control. We believe in letting the fuck go. Doing what you fucking need to do. Me doing it. You doing it. Because—and this is the fucking point—you, us, we, humans, what we want isn’t fucking conflict. I mean is it? Fuck no. It isn’t competition. It’s cooperation. It’s mutual fucking benefit. So why the fuck shouldn’t we trust you? Why the fuck shouldn’t you trust us?”

  Because, Dima thought, you put a gun in my face and a hood over my head. But he only said, “What friends are you talking about?”

  “Your comrades,” the woman told. “The ones you posed with in your poster.”

  “The Communists? They’re not my friends. They’re—”

  “That’s right,” the fat man said. “Because we’re your friends.”

  “We’re your fucking people,” the gun wielder said.