by Josh Weil
“You just don’t know it yet.” The woman patted his hands with hers.
“Who knows,” the fat man said, “who you might have brought with you?”
“Who might have followed you.”
“Some fucking cop,” the gun wielder said, “sent by the fuckers from the Oranzheria? Some guard from the fucking Dachas? National Unity thugs, National Socialist, fucking Pamyat.”
“I don’t understand,” Dima said into his hood. “Why would anybody—”
“Because,” the woman answered, “you look like one of us.”
Did he? The only person he’d ever thought he looked like was his brother. But he could feel his beard bushing against the inside of the hood, smell the sourness of his sweat, and in the claustral darkness felt as far from Yarik as he could have been. His hands tried to rise, as if to grab for the fabric’s edge. But hers were on them, pressing down. She kept his still. This woman who’d lured him out here, who he’d followed. “Who are you?” he asked her.
“A collector of bus fares,” she said.
“A derelict,” the fat man said.
The gun wielder told him, “A bum.”
He asked them all, “Why would anyone come after you?”
“You mean to tell me,” the gun wielder said, “you’ve never been jumped?”
Dima shook his head. The hood shook with it. “Not till tonight.” The fat man laughed. “I thought you were nationalists,” Dima said, and the laugh stopped.
“Us?” the gun wielder said.
“I thought—”
“If they were us, you wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it. You wouldn’t have the fucking teeth to talk through. You wouldn’t . . .” And a hand was at his throat, on the edge of the hood, lifting a corner, the harelipped face close in the opening, the scabbed nose, the barrel of the gun. “Now you know,” the mouth said, “what this is fucking for.” Then the gun was gone, in its place a clear plastic bag filled with pieces of something that looked like scraps of shriveled skin. “This,” the man said, “is for the cops.” Then the hood was yanked down again, the blackness back.
The woman gave his hands a pat. “But those,” she said, “are just our short-term problems. They aren’t what worries us. What worries us long term, where the real danger lies, the threat to who we are . . .”
“. . . is your friends,” the fat man cut in, “the Communists.”
“I didn’t know they would take the picture,” Dima said. “I didn’t know about the poster. They were just . . .”
“They fooled you.” The woman nodded.
“Yes,” he told her.
“They tried to use you.”
“Yes.”
“The same old story,” she said.
And the gun wielder’s bark—“Spit on it!”—came at Dima with such fury he flinched. “Every fucking time, I mean since the fucking Hague, fucking Bakunin, those red motherfuckers have been fucking us over. We came for their revolution. We showed the fuck up. And after? They fucked us. Ours? Against the same people? Right next door? Did they come? Does a cat fuck a fish?” He paused, said it again: “Does a cat fuck a fish?”
Inside his hood, Dima shook his head.
“You’re fucking right,” the man said. “Not unless that cat knows it’s the only way it’s going to catch that fish, to hold that fishy still, that little fishy flopping there thinking, thinking, That cat’s not so bad. It doesn’t want to eat me. It only wants to fuck me.”
“All right,” the fat man said.
“All right? Do you like being treated like that? Like this guy. Like this motherfucker. Like you.” He jabbed a finger through the hood, against Dima’s forehead. “Get him on board. Fuck that fish. Fuck us. Until they turn around and fucking eat us. Right?” The man jabbed his finger again at Dima’s forehead. “Right?”
“I don’t know,” Dima said, “who you mean by us.” For a moment, there was just the sound of the man’s worked-up breathing, Dima’s own quieter breathing inside the hood. Then the man’s finger was gone and the fabric was rushing up Dima’s face and the hood was gone.
“Us,” the gun wielder said, the fabric hanging from his fist. “Me, him, her.”
But Dima was no longer listening. He sat, blinking, taking in the whole scene so fast he could feel it filling his eyes, as if the rush of information was what was squeezing down his pupils instead of the light—hard slants of light slicing past the crimson window drapes, painting the wall-bolted tables, the curved vinyl booths, the chrome of the bar, empty bottles glinting on dark shelves above the stools. On one table: a plastic basket that must have once held sugar or stacks of napkins but now overflowed with cigarette butts. It breathed a gray mist. The air was curdled with smoke. In the booth, to either side of him, the two men sat with cigarettes in their mouths, adding to it. Across the table the woman’s mouth was empty, her empty hands still on his tied ones.
“Us,” Dima heard the gun wielder say again.
She smiled a bad-toothed smile. “You,” she said.
Her name was Viktoriya Kirillovna Ovinka, though she told him, “Call me Vika” as she untied his wrists. “This”—she nodded across at the gun wielder—“is Fyodor Georgievich.”
“Fedya,” he said, picking at the scab on his nose.
“And Vladimir Vyacheslavovich.”
The fat man bowed as best he could, a small jerk of his gut against the table edge. “Volodya.” He extended one huge hand to Dima. “I believe you’ve already met my armpit.” He lifted an enormous limb, said, “Yuri Yurevich.”
Reaching beneath the fat man’s pit, Fedya flapped his hand like a mouth, let out a smoker’s croak: “Yura!”
That cracked the others up.
The hood-sweat slowly drying on his face, Dima, quietly, cautiously, asked them again, “But who are you?”
“Ah,” Vika said, bunching up the rope that had been around his wrists, “you mean what are we.”
“We could be anarchists,” Volodya said, “but Fedya would debate it.”
“I’m an anarchist.” Fedya rasied his hand—with the gun in it—like he was a student in some schoolroom for revolutionaries. “I’m a fucking insurrectionary anarchist. But there are definitely some mutualists in the room, collectivists, maybe—I’m not naming names—even an anarcho-capitalist.”
“Who?” Vika demanded.
Fedya lifted his shoulders, held up his hands.
“I’m not an anarcho-capitalist,” she said. “I’m a post-anarchist.”
“Yesterday,” Fedya said, “you were an anarcho-feminist.”
“So today I’m a post-anarcho-feminist.”
“But always”—Volodya motioned towards her with one huge hand—“and with great consistency”—held it out as if to settle everyone down—“Vika is a hedonist.”
She shrugged, her small shoulders lifting her sweatshirt, the row of safety pins winking up the center of her chest. Dima looked away, tried to ignore the glint still ghosting in his eyes.
Volodya placed his wide palm across his own wide chest, as if to draw the abductee’s attention back to him. “I,” he said, “consider myself a gastronist. Not a gastronome. I don’t love food; I believe in it. That society can, and should, be organized around it. But, that is, I admit, a minority view. So, if you must call us all by one moniker, then I suppose you might try Leisurists.”
“It sounds so stupid,” Fedya said.
“Or,” Volodya continued, “my personal preference: mushroomists.”
“Mushroomists?” Dima asked. Across from him Vika had balled his old wrist-rope into a tangle, its fibers a fuzzy softness between her fingers. The fat man must have gestured—Dima heard him clear his throat—because she uncupped her hands, spilled out the rope, reached beneath the table.
“Allow us,” Volodya said above her rustling, “to present to you a proposition. All this blather about freedom, all this rattling on since glasnost, freedom this, a free society that . . .” Vika lifted a small plastic bag into si
ght. “A free society,” the fat man continued as she plunked the bag down, “doesn’t force its people to do what they don’t want to do.” She picked at a knot in its neck. “Doesn’t coerce them even into doing it more frequently than they want.” Her fingernails were unpainted, chewed. “Doesn’t oblige some to work at jobs others wouldn’t do.” Dima watched her wiggle an index finger into the tied end. “Doesn’t bludgeon its citizens into lives they never wanted.” He could see the nicks around the quick, the red of bitten skin. “Doesn’t make us work at jobs we hate.” The knot came loose. Volodya reached across the table, retrieved the bag from Vika’s hands. “A free society,” he said, “doesn’t make us work at all. It lets us. Because we want to. At good work. Enjoyable work. Work we like.”
“In other words”—Vika spoke around a ruined thumbnail stuck between her lips—“it lets us play.”
“No!” Volodya’s voice was so vehement it drew Dima’s look back to him. “No, my dear distracting friend,” the fat man corrected her, shaking his head, his smiling cheeks joggling back and forth. “In no such words at all. Play,” he addressed Dima again, “doesn’t make anything. Nothing is produced. No, I’m talking about work, work that produces and satisfies. That feels like play. Shouldn’t that be the point? Not just to produce as much as possible, but to do it in a way that brings pleasure in the doing? Isn’t that the best work, the way we were meant to work? Play—with purpose.”
Opening the bag, he stuck his face in, inhaled until the plastic crinkled around his cheeks, then peeled it away and looked at Dima again. “Behold,” he said, “the heron. What gives a heron its greatest pleasure?”
Dima glanced at Vika; she was watching the fat man; the fat man was watching Dima, waiting, his chin above the bag. “Fishing?” Dima guessed.
Volodya gave Dima a look—half-amused, half-impressed—like a debater whose opponent has just proved his own point. “And a bear?” he said.
“To hunt,” Vika answered.
And Fedya said, “What about a squirrel?”
“I think”—Volodya winked at Dima—“our esteemed poet has seen the point.” He smiled across the table at Vika. “Cups? Thermos? Spoon?”
While she was digging in a rucksack for them, Volodya said to Dima, “Tell me, oh bard, oh scholarly scholar, why should animals have it better than us?” He waited with brows raised. Then, without looking, took the spoon from Vika.
Dima watched her put three tin cups out on the table, watched Volodya dip into the plastic bag, lift the spoon out mounded with powder, the same mealy brown as the shrivels he’d seen in Fedya’s bag before. “Is that mushroom?” Dima said.
“Ah yes.” Volodya, nodding vigorously, dumped the spoonful in one of the cups. “Mushroomists! You bring me back to the question at hand.” He dumped a second spoonful in a different cup. “Naturally,” he said, “all three of us, all four of us”— he gave Dima his half-surprised-half-impressed look again—“would be drawn to different kinds of work. Fedya, for example, is a magician with computers. Vika is mildly obsessed with sex.” Across the table, her punch hit his shoulder hard enough he nearly spilled the thermos he had just opened up. “And violence,” he added, pouring into the cups. “I—if I may for a moment unhook myself from the corset of modesty—am not merely an exuberant chef but a talented one.” He finished filling all three cups. “But one thing that we all enjoy in common”—setting the thermos down, he reached beneath the table, drew out a second, larger bag—“and, it might be mentioned, also how we endeavor to support ourselves in this inexorably capitalist society”—pushed it across to Dima—“is hunting for mushrooms.” He opened the bag for Dima to see. It was full of them, pounds of fungi, their brown crowns like a year’s worth of moons crammed into a black dirt sky. “You might call it,” Volodya added, “our co-play. Or joint work.”
Fedya reached over, grabbed a cup. Volodya slid another across the table to Vika, took the third for himself. The thermos he put in front of Dima. Dima tried to peer into it. He couldn’t see anything. When he looked back, the three of them had their cups in their hands, their hands raised.
Volodya nodded, made a little up-up motion with his cup.
Over the rim of hers, Vika’s black eyes peered at him. “What would you do with your time,” she said, “if your time was yours?”
He made himself look away. The others were all watching him, too. But, even looking back at them, he felt her stare.
“Not your free time,” she said, “but your work time.” And there were her eyes again. “If you could spend it at anything.”
Maybe it was just the way she was with everyone, maybe it was only that these days he spent so much time alone, maybe something simple as her hair, so black, black as his mother’s had been, as his brother’s still was, but for whatever reason he found himself repeating her word: “Anything.” He found that here, to her, he could say it: “Anything, if it was with my brother.”
Vika nodded, so slightly her shock of bangs barely shook. “Then,” she said, her voice low, her eyes serious, “we’ll drink to your brother.”
The fat man’s head bobbed up and down on his fat neck. He asked Dima his brother’s name, then raised the small cup in his huge hand. “To time,” Volodya said, “with Yaroslav.”
“To time with Yaroslav,” they all said.
“And,” Vika added, a small smile slipping back, “with us.”
“With us,” the others repeated, tipped their heads, and slugged the drink down.
It tasted so bad Dima could barely swallow. When he took the thermos from his mouth, the others were still draining their cups. As they finished they looked at him.
“You didn’t drink,” Volodya said.
Fedya reached out and shook the thermos, shaking Dima’s hand with it. The liquid left made a small sloshing sound.
“You have to drink,” Vika said, “or it won’t come true.”
“I’m sorry,” Dima said, but Fedya was already lifting the thermos to Dima’s mouth and Volodya was saying, “Not just for you, for us, too” and Vika was reaching over the table, her smile widening, her hand hunting for Dima’s face while she asked, laughing, “Do you want me to hold your nose? Should I pinch your nose for you?” until he shook his head free of her fingers and the thermos free of Fedya’s pushing and drank it all down himself. It wasn’t until after he had swallowed, after the feeling of Vika’s fingers on his nose had evaporated with the steam against his face, in the fluttery rustle of the others all clapping quietly with their fingers on their palms, that he realized what the inside of the thermos smelled like. That was when the first cramp hit.
“I think,” Fedya said, “he’s starting to feel sick.”
“It’s OK,” Vika said.
“Why”—Dima’s stomach clenched—“would I be feeling sick?”
“We’re all feeling a little sick,” she said. Dima was surprised to find her hands on top of his again, and when he looked at their faces, she was right; they did look sick: Fedya was bent over the table, breathing slowly in and out; Volodya had shut his eyes.
Gently, Vika’s fingers stroked the back of his. “It’s just the mushrooms,” she told him. “You’ll feel better in a few minutes.”
But a few minutes later he was lying on his back in the aisle between the booths, staring up at the three faces peering down. In their mouths the butts of cigarettes glowed. Smoke curled around, drifted above. He watched it crawl the curve of the ceiling, felt it cling to the inside of his throat, thought he was going to throw up. As if they thought so, too, their bodies unbent, their faces retreated. Except for Vika’s. She crouched down, held her cigarette out.
He shook his head. As he should have done, he knew, that first time she’d held the damp end of her stub up for him. Knew it and yet still wanted to take the paper between his lips, let the smoke soothe his churning stomach. She was right: it must just be the mushrooms. Making him feel strange, his insides unfamiliar, his thoughts cast loose. All his life he’d guarded aga
inst just this thing—her, them, the allure of friends, the female touch—all he’d known would only separate him from his brother.
Around him, Dima could hear the others rustling, the clanks of the cups, squeak of the thermos top being screwed on. Just that, he told himself again, just the drink. Except—one of those loosed thoughts floating in—hadn’t he felt it before he’d ever touched a drop?
Vika stood, blew out a cloud of smoke, squinted through it at the others. “I don’t think he’s gonna be able to walk.”
From over by the booth, he heard Volodya’s chuckle, Fedya’s fuck, tried to sit up. His head went woozy.
“Nope,” Vika said, “I don’t think he’s walking.”
“Where?” he managed to ask. “Where are you going?”
And Volodya’s hairy face was suddenly in his. “Why?” The blond beard bunched with the big man’s smile. “You want to go?”
“No.”
“You want to stay here?” Her face was blocked behind Volodya, but when Vika said, “I didn’t think so,” Dima could hear the smile. Then, the smile gone: “It’s time.”
“Time for what?” Dima asked her legs as they stepped by.
“Sorry, Mr. Boss-man,” she said, “I don’t wear a watch.”
“Time for what?” he asked the fat man.
“Time for you to hold on, you vagabond.” Volodya lifted Dima farther up, folded him over his shoulder, said, “And don’t barf down my butt.” And then Dima was in the air, legs dangling, head hanging behind the big man’s back. He tried to struggle, shoving weakly at the shoulders, using his knees, until Volodya simply turned a little and, swinging him against a booth, whacked his head. It was a soft booth, but not as soft as his head; Dima could feel the dent it made in his skull, could feel it filling back in like foam finding its shape. That seemed strange enough he just lay still, let Volodya adjust him on his wide shoulder, watched the aisle unwind as they went out.
Out into the cool air cleared of smoke. Dima could taste its cleanness. It went through him like a gulp of ice water—he could feel it cool his stomach, his innards—and he drank it in while Volodya, holding to the railings, stepped backwards down the small metal stairs. Facing the gravel below, Dima could see each sharp shape of each rock. He could feel their gravity pulling at him, pulling as the big man dropped. He shut his eyes, clenched his teeth against the jolt to his gut. But when it came, it felt good: the huge soft shoulder shoving into him, all the bad air gushing out. It occurred to him he should have thrown up. Then it occurred to him he no longer had to.
