by Josh Weil
“Look at me.” Her eyes pulled at him as strongly as if she had bent his face down with her hands. “I am focused,” she said. “I’m focused on you. Now. Half an hour ago, I was focused on getting into the headquarters. Tomorrow, I’ll be focused on something else. I can want to get fucked-up with my friends, and I can want to shake up this fucking world, and I can want to take off my clothes and dance under the stars, and I can want to fuck you here, tonight. And,” she said, “I can want to fuck someone else tomorrow.”
Yes, he thought, and that was why the dream she had—she and Volodya and Fedya and those before them, all the way back to Bakunin and before that—that was why it had never happened. Why it never would. Her eyes looked so large in the moonlight. He thought, looking into them, that they seemed the eyes of a child. That she wanted the way a child wanted. The way he might have when he was very small, before his father fell through the ice, and his mother was sent away, and his uncle lost his world, and he had begun to lose his brother. Because she was wrong: there wasn’t room for more than one thing. Life knew when you were losing focus, or looking away, or simply for a moment shutting your eyes, and that was when it crept in and with its dark knife cut out your heart.
She was talking again about Korochun. How when she was a girl they had done things they never would have on any other night, and he stopped her.
“My papa,” he said.
She waited.
“My papa was the one in the grave. We were ten.”
She went so still she might not have been there, might have somehow slipped out from his coat—and then she moved and he was sure she was going to. But when she stood she pulled him up with her. Her hands were on his lapels, then working at the knot in his tie, got it lose, slid it off of his neck, and she undid the top button of his shirt and then the next and all the way down until she had untucked it and the warmth off the front of her was filling the space in front of him. Then she reached up. He felt it in the rising of her breasts against his skin. He waited for her hands to touch his face. They didn’t. Instead, they went to her own, slid under her wig.
When she had slipped it from her head, she reached over and did the same with his hat. With one hand, she settled his hat on her. With the other, she placed the wig over his head. The machines had started up in the Oranzheria again. He listened to the glass-muffled din. He watched her watching him. She had begun to shake her head.
“Nope,” she said. “No, it’s no use. You still don’t look like me.” Then she leaned in and kissed him. When she was done, she backed away, broke his arms apart, was out. “Maybe you’re right,” she told him. “Maybe, for you, you’re right.”
There was the pale barely visible shape of her while she searched for her clothes, and then her dress was over her head and there was just the paleness of her legs and arms and neck, and then she must have slipped into her coat: there remained only a suggestion of her face. And then she turned and that vanished, too.
Up there, slipping between the last faint suspiration of the world and the breathless infinitude of space, the mirrors had all, one after the other, ten, then twenty, then half a hundred, then the rest, simply shifted their wings. A tiny movement. The glassy fields of quilted Kevlar twitched. And were still again, the zerkala again tracing their paths through the exosphere, their captured light cast down in the same beams that for years now had been strung like lambent threads from the mirrors to the earth.
But not to Petroplavilsk. The circle of luminescence swelled outward, yawned a hole, a ring around the empty center it used to light. Now it lit new land. Fir trees stiffened their branches. Spruce needles reached out, antennae feeling the effulgence. Whole forests of white birch trunks glowed. All around them, the circle’s edge coruscated above new borderland fens. Night animals—raccoons and polecats and Ural owls—that had retreated from the ever-spreading light now fled the new refracted ring, back towards the darkness that had fallen inside it. Over the Oranzheria they flew, and across the lake, clouds of nightjars and bewildered bats, came loping down the access line, stumbling along Otseva’s boggy shores, returning in a horde. With them came humans, too. Villagers unable to sleep, farmers distraught at livestock gone half-mad, loggers and fishermen and old hermits who had lived all their lives far back in the woods and now came doddering out, confounded by what the world had done.
In Petroplavilsk, the people watched them come, watched the white hares and stoats and arctic fox streak across the snow, apparitions from an earlier age when it wasn’t strange for animals to change the color of their coats, remembered a time before the zerkala, realized how much the mirrors had changed them. They called it The Revisitation, and they meant the returning animals and the refugees and the reemergence of poverty and the coming of the dark, but mostly they meant the way it stirred inside them a reconsideration of their own lives. These were the days of first true snow. The darkening of skies, the blanketing of roads. The sun hardly showed. Each morning it rose a little later, each evening set a little earlier, lighting the city for less and less of each spin of the earth, and soon there would be hardly any light at all.
Before, at night, the mirrors’ beams would help to melt the snow. Now it piled up, no lamps to guide the snowblowers, no headlights on the plows. Without the Consortium, there was no money for new streetlights, the city spending all it had to keep government buildings from going dark, portable lights along the two most vital boulevards, no other way to get anywhere, except by foot.
People came out with flashlights, would have brought snow shovels, too, but who, for years now, had shoveled their own snow? So worn out from work, who wouldn’t pay a company with armies of snowblowers to roar it clear in minutes? No one could now. Now they turned flashlights off when the moon came out, worried about the cost of replacing batteries, wished they had saved more. They canceled their satellite TV, took away their children’s phones, stopped buying anything but food. On the shelves the delicacies went unpurchased—sundried tomatoes, gourmet coffee, purple-veined radicchios big as hearts and starting to brown—and then went for the same prices as the cans of fish, ordinary cabbage, and then were gone, the rest going. And when even the pickles and potatoes stopped selling, families skipping meals to make it through the month, people started to panic.
But, above, the stars were beautiful.
Small groups of men and women walked beneath them in the streets, flashlights flaring on at sounds in the dark—a snarl, a hiss, something crying out—beams catching eyes bright as bursts from the muzzle of a gun. Sometimes it was. Along what streets the police could drive, they used their flashers for light, and on the others they went by foot, big flashlights burning batteries, said they would continue until their paychecks stopped. Crime came back to Petroplavilsk. Fear with it. People stayed in, hunkered around what few lamps they had, the TV showing clips of their darkened city, news anchors hinting it was their own fault, politicians hedging about when they might step in to help. Everyone knew they wouldn’t. Everyone worried how long it would go on. If they had to be out on the street at night, they gathered in groups, hurried past the crude snow shelters the refugees constructed, igloos trembling with the glow of the fires inside, or gone dark and still, worrying the people passing even more.
It didn’t take long for the worry to turn to anger, for the anger to get organized. Crowds began to gather wherever the Consortium had put pictures of its spokesman up, men and women clustering beneath the billboards on Chernishevskogo Avenue, collecting around the edges of Space Regata Square, shouting at the strikers still gathered in the middle and shouting back. Some had joined the strikers in anger at the shutdown of the Oranzheria, the billionaire’s stone-hearted redirection of the mirrors. But each day more of the strikers left, crossed the cobblestones into the growing mass of those who catcalled and cursed, who wanted their lives to go back to how they were, who wanted work.
But out at the Oranzheria it was quiet. No chain saws roared, no backhoes groaned, no bulldozers knocked anythin
g down, no tractors plowed, no harvesters cut fields, nobody called to anybody on the glass, or beneath it. It was a sea becalmed. The only ones who still had jobs were the guards. Stationed along the Oranzheria’s edges, they faced those out of work, the ones that came each day, bundled in hats and coats, hands in their pockets, simply standing, silent, waiting. Behind the guards, through the glass, they could see the fields inside. Each day the plants were a little more dead.
At home, in the dark, Dima would sit with his mother on their square of cardboard beside the hissing heater, forks scraping at a barely visible pan. A bag heavy with wet potato skins, an onion from which to carve away the rot: in fish tin oil he’d fry whatever he’d found, popping and crackling over the balcony fire. He’d struck lucky with a sack full of sunflower seeds, and each night he put his mother to work splitting their shells—it was the kind of task he’d learned could keep her at peace for hours, the way her sewing had before he’d taken away her machine—and when he fried the seeds up with the rest they could elevate the dish to edible, even, on lunchless days when they were hungry enough, to good.
These nights, he left the bird unhooded. He left the kovyor-curtains up. Sometimes, before he went to bed, he would stand against the edge of his brother’s old cot, hands spread on the empty mattress, staring out at the city. The dark sky and the dark buildings and all the scattered squares of lamplit windows: it looked almost how he remembered Petroplavilsk from when he was a child. Then he would wonder where among those lights his brother was. At home, with Zinaida, in bed? Curled on his son’s cot, having read Timofei to sleep? Pacing the apartment with Polina bawling in his arms? Or was he still at work, still awake, trying to keep the Oranzheria safe, to keep his job, to keep things ready in case someday the zerkala came back? Unless he knew they wouldn’t. Or knew exactly when they would. Unless he wasn’t even nearby at all, was in Moscow, or even farther south, vacationing with his son and daughter and wife. Standing at the window, Dima would think about how any of it could be true and he wouldn’t know, how Yarik could be as close as a five-minute tram ride or as distant as the sea and either way as far from him. Choice, Yarik had once said, the choice he was making. But Dima had only ever wanted to keep the choices at bay. Once, they had just been two boys together in a boat. How still the stars above had seemed! How the skiff had rocked beneath them, as if held in place. But now he knew it wasn’t. Eventually the tide would have taken it, the current would have pushed it to some shore. Even if the search boat hadn’t found them. Even if his brother hadn’t stood up, so desperate to be taken aboard. All that he would think about. And then he would go to sleep and dream of Vika.
He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard from her since the night the mirrors disappeared. At first, he’d worried it was too dangerous for him to venture out, that the anger over the city’s plight would turn towards the myth that had been made of him. For three whole days he stayed inside, the food dwindling, his mother berating him for shirking work, even the rooster leveling at him a look of disgust, while over and over he tried to clear his mind of her, and couldn’t. Then, one dawn, he snuck out onto the snow-deep streets and found the posters with his face were all torn down, the statues in all the squares abandoned, the only finger pointing at his shorn face and close-cut hair the one on the heavy hand of the bronze tsar alone again down by the lake. Above Space Regata Square, the screens that had been hacked were back to watches, perfumes, Slava asking those below, What next? Once, standing at the edge of the roiling crowd, he thought he saw her amid the pandemonium. Once, he thought he heard her shout. One day, at last, he went to look for her in the old Pioneer House.
The cellar hatch had been locked shut. In the front, a sign was nailed to the double doors—a stick figure in the crosshairs of an X beneath the words KEEP OUT—bright as if painted that morning just for him. Someone had nailed wood scraps over the windows; he went from one to the next, pressing an eye to the cracks, peering in. In the ceramics room the sink was empty, the counter bare, her pallet gone from the floor. Even the potter’s wheels had been stolen or sold. Through a pine-knot hole, he looked in at another stark room: model rockets and planes still hanging from the ceiling, dangling motionless, fighter jets and helicopters and something that looked like the giant hull of some sort of flying boat. Yarik would know what it was. He would know which of the rockets had launched Gagarin into space, which capsule had held the dogs. This one, he had said so long ago, showing Dima his sketchbook for the cosmonauts’ club he’d joined, is going to take men to Mars. These are the landing pads. And these are the thrusters. And this was something else he would invent, and that was the Martian station he would design. And this was how one day they would be able to live. And Dima could still remember looking at his brother’s careful scratches, wondering, Why?
Why had he never asked? Why had he never allowed himself to wonder further? Had they always been so different, ever truly wanted the same thing? Had he simply wanted it so much he’d refused to see the signs his brother hadn’t? Maybe that had been his choice. Made so many times, so long ago, by such a small boy squeezing his eyes shut in that floodlit boat, and again in the darkness of that hidden warren, and again in the shaking dom cultura hall, again and again and maybe wrong.
That afternoon he took apart his brother’s bed. He lay the narrow mattress against the wall, tipped the metal frame, unscrewed the legs. He carried it through the living room he had long ago stripped bare, and into the elevator, and out to the Universitetsky Rynok, where he sold it. And that night, he lay awake in his cot, staring at the space where all his life the other cot had been. The room seemed not just emptier, but quieter.
The valley hereabouts was lonely, secluded . . . Watching the pool of night where Yarik once had slept, Dima could see the river so remote it didn’t have a name, the cottage silent on its bank, the current slipping through the rushes, the rustle of the breeze, the Khazar kahn out on his boat, setting his nets, singing as he rowed towards the shore.
And from the cottage there ran out
a pretty lass: her graceful figure,
her hair, left simple and unbraided,
her smiling lips, her gentle eyes,
her bosom, her bare shoulders.
Nothing like her. Nothing but the bare shoulders. And yet it was as if he sat with Ruslan on that bank and at the same time watched himself step off that boat, and when the khan spoke it was both to him and, inside his head, sounded like his own voice.
And here I am, contented now,
a peaceable, obscure recluse,
in this remote spot here with you, dear,
with you, sweet friend, my life’s bright . . .
That Korochun he lit a trash fire on the balcony. Nearly a month since the mirrors first disappeared, the longest night of all the year; by three it was already nearly dark. He cooked an early supper, ate with his mother by the flickering light, got her to bed and fed the rooster, and by six was standing in the near-black hallway putting on his coat. Lifting his old Oranzheria worker’s headlamp off its hook, he replaced its long-dead batteries with the new ones he’d exchanged for the pillow from his brother’s bed. He picked up the broken broom handle. And, for the first time since The Revisitation had begun, he went out into Petroplavilsk at night.
Avtovskaya Street was still unplowed. Cars, unmoved for a month, hunkered beneath drifts at its sides. In the moonlight, the ground was bright enough to see without his headlamp. Bright enough, too, to show the shapes that loped across the snow, the ghostly figures far ahead floating on what must have been skis. He could hear their susurration, the barking of dogs, sirens howling somewhere police cars could still reach. He kept his headlamp on. Walking in the middle of the street, where others had packed down a trail in the thigh-high snow, he passed the makeshift igloos the homeless had built, didn’t look at them, didn’t want his headlamp beam hitting their translucent walls. Sometimes they were silent, and sometimes there were faint voices, and always they stopped at the sound of his foo
tsteps. What dogs came stalking he scattered with a cocked arm—they had grown to know a throwing motion—and set his beam back on the path, and went on.
The closer he got to the outskirts of the city the worse the path was, and by the time he reached the Kosha Road his legs were too tired to take advantage of the swath the plows had cleared. How weak he was. How much his muscles had atrophied in the last half-year. Pick up your pace, he told himself. I can’t, his body answered. Once in a while, a bus would pass, rolling carefully behind fog lights so faint they barely yellowed the road. He would step aside, stand breathing hard, walk on in its fading red wake.
It was nearly two hours before he saw the moonlit Oranzheria floating out in the dark like an ice shelf at the edge of an arctic sea. And it was a half-hour more before he saw the fire. That was how he knew he’d reached the crossroads with the old highway. And it was how he knew, long before he was close enough to make her out, that he had found her. He was still too far away to see more than the shapes of people in the firelight, too far to shape words out of their singing, when, pausing to let some strength leak into his legs, he seemed suddenly transported close. For a moment, he didn’t understand—the singing abruptly loud, right beside his ear—and then out of the corner of his eye he sensed some bulk, a man; he jerked back, stepped to the side, saw him: massive neck bent forward over massive shoulders hunched atop a massive torso—Volodya in his headlamp beam. The gastronist must have been drunk; he didn’t seem to notice the light. His eyes were closed and he was singing while he peed.
How I love my dear brown cow,
And how I’ll mow her stinging nettles!
He was peeing into the trees at the side of the road, and with each beat, he swung his stream against their trunks, back and forth, keeping in rhythm if not in tune with his distant friends.
Eat what you want, my dear brown cow!
