The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  Sometimes, on the days he walks out to the Oranzheria, he feels like he is being followed. Sometimes he hears footsteps in the dirt, a voice—Mister Boss-man!—barking from the breezeway between buildings. Gave you our trust! from the darkness beneath the access line trees. But when he shouts in return for it to leave him be, there is just the quiet of the hemlocks, a cat mewling, a child mocking him back. When he looks behind him, there is never anyone else walking on the road. Just the roar of a bus, the rumble of a truck blowing by, dust clouds in their wake, him making his way through.

  There’s nothing wrong with you, she’d told him, and keeping to himself, steering clear of everyone else, he can feel it’s true. Except for when he lets his thoughts stray into memories of her. Then he feels the threads inside him start to unspool, holds tight to the ends—You made them feel it—gathers them to his chest—then disappeared—tries to keep them from spilling any more. Sometimes, walking in the buffer trees between the city and the sea of glass, he thinks he hears a rail-board’s whoosing along the hidden tracks. He pauses, closes his eyes, listens to the rustling of the fallen leaves, the calls of crows drawing autumn towards the coming winter.

  And then he passes through one of the worker’s doors, and the sky is sheathed. The crows are blown away, as if on some mad gust, gone. There is the rolling song of a bunting. The chif! chif! of a warbler. Above the vast yellow plain of rapeseed flowers blue-winged thrushes dart. He strips off his coat, hangs it on his shoulder. By the time he has reached the cornfields, the vast stretches of soybeans, he is sweating. He dissolves into the high green stalks, nothing left but a faint rattling. He flattens onto his belly, becomes a wispy trail of dust moving down brown soybean rows. Emerging with his rucksack full of stubbled pods, heavy with a dozen ears, he waits in the crop cover for a truck he can jump, lies pressed against the pile of topsoil beneath a tarp or hunches inside some section of a giant water main, and when he reaches his brother’s sector, jumps off. He hides where he can see the buses stop, watches the workers gather, so many their hard hats bulge like fish eggs floating in a sea of their blue coveralls. Sometimes he thinks he can feel his brother. Sometimes he sees him a moment later: his own face fuller, his own black hair shorn short. It is all he can do not to call out.

  Sometimes he thinks he hears Yarik calling to him, distorted by all the distance, muffled by so many days since they last spoke, time like water in his ears. A shout small and wavery as it was from inside their father’s fishing shack, from on top of the ice around the hole, as he had heard it that night, long ago, sinking into the cold water below. Down beneath his feet it was churning, and beneath the churning it was black, and his eyes refused to look anywhere but there, down where the thing must be that had grabbed him, that would come up out of the blackness and grab him again. If he had air in his throat, it would not out. If he had strength in his lips, it would not move them. How far down did that darkness go? How deep would he sink before he could not even tell what was down at all?

  Sometimes he wishes his mother would die. Sometimes he feels she is the only thing still holding him to this world. Once, he walked all the way to the Oranzheria’s edge and beyond the glass and into the woods and stood there, listening to the fury of the chain saws behind him, feeling the air shake with the crash of the trees, looking out into the dark still green, and almost stepped forward, and forward, and another step, another. He has swum out into the lake, swum until his arms couldn’t move him anymore, and lain on his back, and looked up at the clouds, and let the waves return him to shore. There are nights he cannot sleep, when his mind is tumid with ghosts of the living, when nothing he does will ease the ache, when he goes out onto the balcony and crams the hooded bird against his chest, his cheek to the twitching felt, and whispers to it, One day, whispers stories that cut them loose from everything, in which everything has cut loose from them—One day—stories that hold within them no humans but him. Sometimes, then, he thinks how easy it would be to just keep sinking.

  But nothing had grabbed him from below to drag him under. His limbs had moved, and the air had bubbled from his mouth, and his eyes had followed the bubbles as they floated up, and one day his mother would die, without his wishing, despite his desperation that she not, and the thought shook through him and cramped his lungs and seized his muscles and sent him kicking. Back up, up there where he could see a small spot shaking, blinking out, back on, yellow, burning. One day, he would sit again on the couch between his niece and nephew, tell his stories into their soft hair instead of the bird’s feather-pricked hood. Like a small spot of oil lit atop the water, flickering, burning bright, and all around it the vast field of faint blue ice that was the moonlight coming through. One day, he would take off his shoes and walk barefoot in the hot dirt of the fields his uncle had walked before. He could feel his boots come loose, slip off, sink away beneath him, and he kicked at them, kicked, and one day, his brother would come back to him, his brother whose hand had been the thing to finally grab him, from above, by the hair, then by his hood, at last hauling him up.

  Once each month, every month since he had last seen Yarik, an envelope appeared in the mailbox downstairs. On it: Galina Yegorovna Zhuvova and the apartment’s address put down in ink. It looked like the stamp that years ago Zinaida had bought for the tags on his mother’s clothes, back when they had all begun to worry she might wander off. Inside the envelope there was never anything but the cash. Six thousand roubles in thousand-rouble notes. They were stacked the same side forward, the same edge up, the way Yarik always stacked bills in his wallet, and Dima would turn the envelope over, looking for another sign—even just the smudge marks of dirt-ingrained fingers, even a scent. But there was nothing.

  The only other mail that ever came was his mother’s meager pension check, or bills, the one not nearly enough to cover the others. The bills he saved for kindling. The envelopes he carried to the bank. He dreaded going there, where customers gave him glares, glanced at each other, sometimes derided him aloud: Your comrade calls you! one might say, or turn in line and whisper from the video—It doesn’t have to be this way—or even recite a line of poetry—Lyudmila? Where is Lyudmila?—and ask him, mocking, why he’d stopped. At first, the tellers tried not to serve him, timed their breaks with his turn at the window or called the person behind him to step up. Once a guard wouldn’t let him in—I thought you didn’t believe in money—and Dima had to bribe him with a thousand-rouble note. The man must have shared it with the tellers: after, they served him without complaint. His mother’s pension he placed in her account. His brother’s remaining five thousand roubles he deposited into his own. Once there, it was untouchable; he never took a rouble out.

  It was a rule he’d formed the first time he brought the envelope to the bank, sworn it shuffling along the street beneath his brother’s disapproving stare, his eyes turned from the gritty wind of passing buses plastered with his brother’s face; he had crossed Ilyinsky Square that day with his gaze a broom brushing the pavement before his feet, never lifting, not even at the coaxing of Yarik’s voice: Look up! Look ahead!

  His brother was everywhere: on the loudspeakers topping defunct streetlamp poles, smiling down from billboards above the shuttered theater, blocked the train station’s red-starred spire, wondered aloud Who’s next? in bright blue letters beneath the tip of his bright blue tie. His teeth were straight and white, set in a smile, asking, Why not you?

  Each afternoon Dima went to the Universitetski Rynok, to the metastasizing kiosks that swamped the fountain, into the swarm of mongers and shoppers gathered around the tsar’s bronze ship. Through the throngs, Dima could just make out the ground-level billboard that stretched the length of an entire wall. Five lifesize likenesses of his brother, progressing left to right: Yarik on his knees, draped in peasant’s rags, bent double to pull a weed; Yarik crouched in coveralls and hard hat, reaching with a wrench, as if another’s hand might pull him up; then he was standing, hunched over a clipboard, his foreman’s windbr
eaker embroidered with SLAVA above his chest; and at last he stood unbent, straight shouldered in suit and tie, briefcase in hand, shiny black shoe lifted, as if to stride right past the building’s edge. But he was blocked by one more image: his own silhouette, or any silhouette of any man, outlined in gold and filled with a mirror that reflected back whoever passed. Most who did stopped. They turned, walked close, fit themselves into the shape, who they were staring back from within the golden shimmer of who they might become.

  Once, Dima had stood like that, his body encased in the outline of his brother’s—his taped-together boots filling the space for Yarik’s shoes, his ragged pants fluttering in a wind, his shirt so thin dark patches of hair showed through like bruises beneath etiolated skin, his shoulders shrunken too small for the silhouette, his tangle of beard too big, his face, in the hard late sun, a landscape so shadowed with hollows it seemed to him hardly a face at all, no more his than the faces of his brother peering out from the wall to watch him, this Slava’s gleaming smile, his carefully coiffed hair. Only the eyes in their depths were Yarik’s—and feeling them on him Dima had tugged his body loose of the silhouette, turned from his reflection, hurried away.

  The first to go was the cooking gas. One evening he came home and found his mother at the stove holding a match to the burner. He watched the flame reach her fingers. She shook it out, dropped it on a cutting board, lit another. On the board there was a pile burned to blackened ropes.

  By then, she shouldn’t have been cooking, anyway. Her hands shook too much to chop; one day he would open the door to her wailing, the counter slick with blood. Twice this month she had forgotten to add liquid to the soup; he’d found the pot billowing smoke, cabbage sludgy in the bottom, a fire about to start.

  After the gas was turned off, he made them supper. Usually it was cold—the edible leaves from a half-rotted cabbage, cheese with the mold sliced off, stale bread turned to crackers in the toaster—but sometimes he carried kindling out to the balcony. Ivan would flutter with fury at his invasion of the space. He’d wrestle the hood on the bird, tie it to the railing. He had traded away the couch, but he would set a pillow on the ground, lead his mother out by the hand. Her eyes would widen at the fire. “Oh!” she’d say, as if he’d given her a diamond. Sitting crosslegged on the concrete, they would watch it burn, its flame dim in the zerkala’s glow.

  “Is it the white nights?” his mother would ask.

  “Yes,” he’d tell her, though they had come and gone months ago.

  He had been glad to see them wane. Back in summer, out on the balcony, waiting for the sun to set so he could slip the hood over the rooster’s head, he’d watched the last of the natural light, the sanguine sheen lingering on the leaves of all the potted plants on all the balconies, that faint color the closest they had come to flowering. No buds had ever formed, never a single bloom. All the long hour it had taken the redness to drain out of the clouds, he’d tried to imagine what had gone wrong inside them, tried to keep his thoughts away from that night on the other side of the solstice, to steel his mind against it, keep the pins from popping open beneath his fingers, from feeling the flick of her finger against his chest, her hand there, pressing. But as the nights grew longer, day’s end realigning more and more with the mirrors’ rise, the color leaching more quickly from the sky, the plants withering away in their pots, the weight on his chest had become less a feeling than the memory of one, then at last simply something that might have happened to another him, in another life. This one was so much simpler. Out on the balcony, in front of the fire, sitting beside his blanket-wrapped mother, beneath the perched and hooded bird, he was grateful. What could be better, after a week of cold salads and coagulated cheese, than the crackling of fish skin when he put it on the coals, the smell of its flesh cooking? What could sound more gratifying than the hums of pleasure his mother made as she picked clean the bones? “Good,” she would say, looking up, her eyes crinkling. He would lean over and kiss her cheek, beneath his greasy lips the softness crinkling, too.

  And if it rained, or sleeted, or simply was too cold, they would sit inside and listen to the radio. In the bare apartment it had taken on the feeling of furniture, and he would carry it, cord dragging behind, to whereever his mother was—the sewing machine, the bath—and tune it to the Rachmaninoff or Mussorgsky that she liked. Between every piece, advertisements blared. The last notes of Lilacs were trickling away, and Dima had reached out to turn the volume down, the first time Yarik’s voice came on. His fingers stilled.

  You know me, his brother said.

  A salvaged pirozhki slipped off his mother’s fork.

  I’m your neighbor, your friend, your husband, your son.

  His mother stared at the radio: “Yarishka!”

  I used to be you.

  “Your brother,” she said.

  Dima nodded, not wanting to cover any of the radio’s sound.

  Before I joined the team at the Oranzheria . . .

  He shut his eyes, tried to strip the words away, to pare the voice down to just vibrations, to feel them on his face.

  Next! The word seemed to break against him. The Consortium’s theme song swelled.

  Electricity was the next to go. The company warned him, but the letter seemed from such a distant entity, so far removed from what life had become, that Dima couldn’t work up much worry. So long as they still had heat—the steam that had all his life run through the pipes of the entire building—they would be fine. Without lights they would simply go to bed when the sun set. They would rise with it. Without power the radio could no longer haunt them. He sold it. The toaster, too. Traded the plug-in clock. In Dyadya Avya’s box he found a wind-up watch. That night, he turned the tiny knob with his thick fingers, listening to the sound of its spring tightening.

  And in the morning, he carried the new electric samovar out to the bus. Back when his brother had brought it over, he’d taken his mother’s old coal-burning one and traded it away at the Universitetski Rynok. Now, he waded through the crowds, searched for the same kiosk, the samovar propped against his chest, his thinned arms straining with the weight, until at last he saw the stall, hurried to set the samovar down.

  “Hey!” The stallkeeper’s voice was harsh as a gull’s. “Take that off my table.”

  Hefting it again, he told her he wanted to trade it.

  “A samovar?” She laughed, said she should have never taken his old one. “Just to get rid of it,” she told him, “I had to throw it in for free with one of these.”

  On the long table of goods for sale sat some sort of white machines, larger than toasters, smaller than microwaves, cords hanging like limp tails.

  “What are they?” he asked. And when she told him “bread machines” he stared. “For baking bread?” he said.

  Modes for low heat and high, the stallkeeper told him, settings for half kilo loaves and full kilo ones. “This can even do two-thirds of a kilo.” Round shapes, rectangular, baguettes, sweet cakes, keep-warm features, variable crust colors . . .

  “You mean,” Dima broke into the stream of her salespitch, “like an oven?”

  She glared at him. “These do the baking for you. While you’re at work. Which you’d understand if you weren’t a bum.”

  He could feel the samovar reflecting the low sunlight onto his neck, his face. The edge of its base dug into his fingers.

  “Get out of here,” she spat, “before I throw a rock at you.”

  Carrying the samovar away, he heard her say beneath her breath, Feed them once, they come back forever, but he was thinking of long ago, when he was a child, of the early morning every week he had accompanied his mother and her baking kooperativ. Of how, before light, thirty or forty neighbors—parents, kids, the whole apartment block—would walk together down the still-dark street, passing among them thermoses of tea, steam rising as they drank. He was remembering the bread factory, its huge ovens, everyone stripping off their coats and rolling their sleeves, and the smell of the bak
ing, and how, when it was done, they would cut the steaming loaves, everyone—his mother, her friends, the neighbors he called aunt and grandmother and grandfather—eating a slice right there, their eyes shutting for a second, faces flushed with the heat.

  At home, each evening, he would take the toothbrush from his mother’s shaking hand and squeeze the paste on for her, stand beside her at the bathroom sink brushing his own. A little longer, he would tell her, and, after, with a washcloth, wipe spittle from her chin. In her bedroom, she would give the mattress a pat. He would climb onto the comforter, lay back beside her, listen as she told him stories of his childhood. Sometimes, she confused Yarik and him. He let her. Sometimes she seemed to think they were still little. “Which one,” she would say, “would you like tonight?” And he would shut his eyes, hear in her age-deepened voice, her “Zhili-Byli . . .” at the beginning of a tale, the sound of his papa from so long ago. In his own, his brother’s boyish whisper, “One more.”

  Afterwards, every night, Dima would sit in the living room on the floor beside the phone and call.

  The first time Zinaida had picked up.

  “It’s Dima,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How are you?”

  “He’s not home,” she told him.

  The next time she heard his voice and hung up.

  When they stopped answering at the time that he would call, he started calling an hour later, or in the morning, or as soon as he knew Yarik would return from work.

  Sometimes he got Timofei. “It’s your Dyadya Dima,” he would say.