Stories

by Ekaterina Sedia

The four of us killed the jug, and as its amber contents diminished, Misha’s loquacity grew. “You know why a Russian man is driven to drink?” He didn’t wait for an answer and gestured expansively. “It’s cause of all the space. Steppes, tundra, everything. You have all these open horizons and the human soul can’t take all that sober.”

  I could see a weak point or two in this theory but didn’t point them out, enchanted by the image of a soul cowering in fear of horizons.

  “What do you do?” Grisha asked me.

  “I’m an actuary,” I told him. “Manage risks.”

  “He should’ve hired you,” Grisha said, pointing at dead Ipatov.

  I shrugged. There was no point in telling them that the risk of death in businessmen was so close to certainty that the only thing I ever recommended was saving enough money for a coffin. They liked them ostentatious. I should probably attend Ipatov’s funeral, I thought. This is when the dead man’s memories first stirred in me.

  #

  Businessman Ipatov led a quiet life for most of his existence-I remembered his grey adolescence as a treasurer for his school chapter of Komsomol, his joyless pursuit of a college degree in one institute of technology or another, his brief courtship and marriage. After that, I could not remember anything.

  Not being given to superstition, I arrived to the only logical conclusion-the dead man’s soul and/or memory had entered mine, either due to my extended proximity to the gurney or to the consumption of beer that rested against him. If I were a dead soul, I supposed, I too would be drawn to the golden shine of the beer jug, I too would prefer it to the cold eternity of whatever awaited Ipatov as an alternative. Still, I found it disconcerting; sleep had proven elusive that night, as I kept reliving Ipatov’s tremulous first masturbatory experiences and his terror of the laws of thermodynamics and physical chemistry.

  I went outside and looked at the windows of the façade. As expected, there was light in Petro’s, and I walked to the second floor and knocked. He opened quickly, as if he were waiting just behind the door. His eyes were haunted.

  “Come in,” he said, and led me to the kitchen. My mother always said that the kitchen is the heart of every home; Petro’s apartment’s heart was clogged with crap that spilled into the swelling pericardium of his one-room efficiency. “Sorry for the mess.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I live alone too.”

  I sat at the kitchen table. A few overfed cockroaches sauntered toward the wainscoting, still decent enough to feign fear of humans.

  “Do you hear him too?” Petro asked.

  I nodded. “Remember rather.”

  Petro sighed. “He screams and screams and screams. Can’t sleep at all.”

  “You remember his last days?”

  “Yeah,” Petro said. “Everything from when he first started the business until… “

  So if I got his youth and Petro-his business career, it meant that Ipatov’s generic Soviet childhood and the working life in whatever state enterprise he was assigned after receiving his degree was sloshing inside the two paramedics.

  Petro also had the gold, the death. “Why did they kill him?” I asked.

  “Money.” Petro heaved a sigh. “Wouldn’t pay up protection.”

  “Oh.”

  Petro hesitated for a while, but finally said, “Did you know he was Jewish?”

  “No. Does it matter?”

  Petro huffed. “You got me all wrong, Anatoly. I’m not one of those nationalists, okay? I’m not the one of those ‘drown Muscovites in Jewish blood’ types. But this torture… did you notice that they burned Kabbalic symbols into him? He knew what they were, ’cause he was a Jew.”

  I perked up. “What symbols?”

  “A triangle, for the trinity of Sephiroth. And circles inside of it. I think this is what held his soul here.”

  “That’s the tip of the iron,” I said. “And those little holes in it. It’s just a coincidence.”

  “So? The symbol’s still holy, no matter how it was made.” Petro tilted his head to the shoulder, as if listening. “What’s Kether?”

  “No clue,” I said. “Ask Ipatov.”

  “I can’t. I only remember for him. And he forgot what Kether is.”

  Petro made tea and we drank; the cockroaches, hearing sugar, crowded in the corners, their antennae undulating eagerly. I contemplated the electric irons and their built-in alchemic and magical powers. I wondered how many more souls hung about, trapped by the thugs’ unwitting alchemy. Judging from the newspapers and the latest mortality reports, lots. That gave me an idea.

  #

  The problem with Ipatov’s memories was that they were much like my own. His adolescence was similar to mine, and remembering it just didn’t satisfy my longing for worthwhile experiences. Ipatov’s shortcoming was shared by many of our contemporaries-we all remembered the same signifiers of childhood: summer camps and songs praising youthful and heroic drummers, we all treasured a rare trip south, replete with a pebbled beach and a mind-boggling abundance of peaches. Standardized, trivial lives, their monotony only broken by an occasional memory of a grandfather-those were rare. We all viewed the change of regime with joyful trepidation; some were later disappointed, some were not.

  I learned all that as I started visiting the scenes of body removals, sometimes tipped off by Grisha, who took as much pleasure in the soul consumption as I did, and sometimes by the police, who would tell you anything if you offered to supplement their dwindling state wages. Like where the dead bodies were, and how to call a specific ambulance if one wanted. They also didn’t mind letting Grisha dawdle, and they didn’t mind us drinking great golden jugs of beer after we let them sit next to the Kabbalic symbols burned into dead businessmen’s flesh. Beer never failed to lure the dead souls.

  Far as memories went, it was hit and miss. Most blended inauspiciously with my own, grey and generic, difficult to separate from each other. But there were rare splashes I lived for-the memories of a tropical island and feathery palms, the glitter of New York on a rare pre-perestroika trip abroad, an exotic hobby of orchid collecting, a fresh memory of love so consuming that even torture could not distract from the thoughts of the beloved.

  Grisha and I compared memories over the phone. We prided ourselves in our acquisitions; we both grew very fond of a young Chechen who enjoyed flowers and Persian rugs and had an abiding fascination with high-breasted women. We snickered over a paunchy, middle-aged guy who believed himself a reincarnation of Gautama Buddha, the belief especially ironic considering that he had fallen in the shootout between two organizations, which quarreled over the protection money from three stores by Borovitskaya. After he was shot and unconscious, his enemies captured him and meted out their slow electric revenge.

  “Sad,” Grisha observed. “He could’ve went to Valhalla had he been slain in battle.”

  It’s the tidbits like that that made me lust after Grisha’s soul. But according to the mortality reports, paramedics tended to die of alcoholism often co-morbid with traffic accidents, and not of the homegrown Kabbala of the bandits.

  One of our later finds, a neckless thug with the requisite burgundy jacket, brought Ipatov to the forefront of my mind. He seemed much like the rest, with a piquant difference-his father was a mid-caliber apparatchick back in the days, as Grisha, who received the entirety of his youth, told me. I got the good part: his adult life. He was the one who killed Ipatov.

  He remembered Ipatov as a small man who would not pay what he owed-a peculiarity that filled the thug with perplexed bitterness. Through his memory, I saw Ipatov’s face as it was in his last moments-his white spasming lips and the shirt torn to expose his shoulders and chest. “Just take me from here,” he pleaded in a hoarse voice thick with a suppressed scream. “Just don’t let Lilya see me like this.”

  The thug flicked away the butt he smoked down to the filter, and burned his iron magic into poor Ipatov, workmanlike as always. He wondered vaguely whether Lilya was Ipatov’s wife, and
thought that he too used to date a girl named Lilya when he was a vocation school student.

  The thug had trained to be a car mechanic, but then things changed; he fell into being a thug like many others-ex-cops, Afghan vets, who had no other employment options. I marveled at his conviction that what he did was justice: people who owed money should pay it back, and the thug was there to enforce the law in the law-enforcement vacuum. Ipatov’s agony was thug’s justice, and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two memories, enclosing them like pearls with the soft generic mantle of my own.

  Our collecting days came to an end when they stopped selling beer by the liter. The cans just didn’t have the same appeal to the souls, and who could blame them? Could a fat man wiping his balding, apoplectic head with a handkerchief and gracing cans of Danish beer compare to the thick amber and sensual droplets of condensed moisture on the cold glass? No, my friends, he could not. The souls remained behind, fearful, trapped behind the charred alchemy of the electric irons, and Grisha and I had to content ourselves with what we had.

  Now, even the electric irons are going out of fashion, Grisha tells me. We still see each other and reminisce; he often tells me about Ipatov’s childhood, of how he once threw up on the bus during the field trip and all the other kids made fun of him for weeks. I tell him of Ipatov’s crush on the Komsomol secretary, and of his loathing of thermodynamics. Of course, we have other, much more interesting lives and memories, but Ipatov gets precedence. He was our first, and that ought to count for something.

  The Disemboweler

  Someone was killing the cars in the neighborhood. Glenn read about it in the papers-how the owners found their disemboweled vehicles, nuts and gaskets strewn on the ground hard with frost, their sinews and muscle frozen and dead. Nobody knew what was the point of this crime except cruelty, or why the perpetrators were targeting this particular neighborhood. In his secret heart, Glenn suspected it was about him.

  One morning, he found his trusty Peugeot eviscerated. Its large red heart lay among glittering metal, the only time Glenn had seen it still. The faint steam hung over the parking lot grass stiff with frost, and the spirit of the car had not yet departed-over the violated engine, a small smoky shaped coalesced.

  "What happened?" Glenn whispered to the car spirit.

  "Bad man," the spirit said, and faded, losing its form wisp by wisp, with nothing to hold it together. Glenn wondered briefly where spirits went when their vessels were destroyed, and kneeled among the broken parts and white metal. He poked some ball bearings with his finger and called the police on his cell. At least, the cell phone's spirit was all right and perky.

  As the body was removed, Glenn watched, hurt and perplexed. He loved his car, and his throat tightened at the thought that he would never hear its heartbeat again, never see the lopsided grin of the open trunk.

  He walked to work that day, to a large animated building that hissed at him when he approached-it was not used to him appearing on foot, without the car or anything. After a suspicious sniffing and creaking, the building swung its doors and admitted Glenn to its womb interior, where he worked as a bookstore manager. The bookstore huddled on the second floor, its shelves heavy with out-of-print books and other not very valuable rarities. Two fat Abyssinian cats greeted Glenn by yawning and opening one eye each.

  He started a coffeemaker (the one at home was broken, its spirit having left for some greener pastures; namely, Glenn's new vacuum cleaner), and it gurgled and exhaled fragrant steam, and its spirit rattled inside, disposing of the coffee grounds and adding milk and sugar.

  "Thank you," Glenn said to the coffeemaker. He settled by a bookshelf, back against a row of clothbound book spines, one cat in his lap and the other at his side, and thought of his car.

  It wasn't just the murder, but the savagery of it. Why would someone spread the innards around like that, in the cold light of the glittering sun, for the world to see what should stay hidden? The sight of displaced, busted gaskets flooded his mouth with bitter saliva, the harbinger of sickness and despair, just like the sight of his own blood did. It was as if the murderer looked to shock and terrify; unless there was another meaning in scattering of the car's entrails. Maybe he was looking for something inside, and had to shake out every minute cog and spring and flywheel.

  He read the paper to calm himself. The incident with his deceased Peugeot was reported already, and so was another one - last night, it seemed, the murderer, already nicknamed the Disemboweler, got his hands on, and vivisected, a microwave oven callously left at the curb by its owners. Glenn shook his head at people who just tossed out their appliances rather than finding them a new home. Small appliances belonged indoors, since their grasp on their spirits was often more tenuous than that of the larger things. Too windy a night, and one could kiss a microwave goodbye, its spirit blown away like so much smoke from overly vigorous cooking. The poor oven was cut up in much the same fashion, its tiny emitter elements scattered in the street like child's bones.

  Glenn rubbed the bridge of his nose and drank his coffee. He heard someone scrabble at the closed shop door but remained seated, confident that he was hidden from view. The customer soon gave up and left, abandoning Glenn to his solitude and quiet grief for the Peugeot. Cats purred.

  Glenn hatched a plan. He would set a trap for the perpetrator, using his broken coffeemaker at home as bait. He doubted for a moment whether the dead appliance would attract the murderer but then decided that to ascertain the presence of life the criminal would have to get close to it. And then…

  Then what? Glenn's shoulders jerked at the sudden cold draft that snuck under his clothes and ran down his back. He should call the police, call the neighborhood watch. Only then they would arrest the Disemboweler, haul him off, to be judged and probably eviscerated as a punishment. Glenn wanted to know why the disemboweler disemboweled, what possible secret lurked in the shiny machine guts. He decided to watch first and consider how to act later.

  Later that night he prepared the sacrificial coffeemaker and left it by the curb, alone in the night. Glenn shivered; even though the thing was devoid of life, he felt bad abandoning it all alone in the night, with a crazy appliance killer lurking about. Cruelty was not easy for him.

  Glenn placed the coffeemaker not far from a streetlamp, just on the edge of its halo of light, where he could see it from his first-story room. He settled before the window, his room dark, his head making a barely perceptible silhouette on the windowpane. And he waited.

  It didn't take the murderer long-just as Glenn's knees started to ache and his shoulders went stiff, a long lank figure slid through the shadows, skirting around the circular pool of light, and squatted down by the coffeemaker. A long metal rod glinted in the streetlight as the disemboweler brought it down upon the defenseless coffeemaker; its former spirit, secure inside the vacuum cleaner, wailed at the destruction of its first home-a lone, sad note like a breath caught in a flute. In the street, glass and metal and bone shattered and sprayed in the light cast by the streetlamp.

  The murderer remained crouched, and contemplated the broken pieces for a time. As Glenn watched him, a suspicion started to form in his mind. This was what the murderer did-he just wanted to see the pattern, like the diviner of old. Glenn grunted with frustration; this morning, he saw a book on fortune-telling, and hadn't thought to bring it home. Now he had to wait until tomorrow.

  A shot rang out from the darkness, ricocheted off the lamppost and hit one of the larger pieces, displacing it. The Disemboweler jumped to his feet and rushed away, disappearing in the ink of the alley to the right of the house. Several policemen pooled into the light, and disappeared too, chasing the long silhouette of the Disemboweler.

  Glenn rose, his knees popping, and stretched. It was time to go to bed anyway, and he only hoped that he would be able to sleep with all the danger and excitement. But before he reached his bedroom (the size of a handkerchief; apartments were expensive nowadays), he heard a sound coming from the outside.
Scratching and dull thuds, directly on the wall of his apartment building. He listened, and the vacuum cleaner wrapped its hose around Glenn's ankle, worried. There were more scratching sounds, and then the shattering of glass from the kitchen.

  Glenn disentangled himself from the fearful appliance and walked cautiously toward the kitchen. His slippered feet made no sound, and the apartment was dark. There was more creaking and scratching coming from the kitchen, and Glenn peered through the doorway.

  "Halt!" A metallic, awful voice, nothing like the normal cadence of human speech or gentle gurgling of the spirits. "Do not move."

  The sound petrified Glenn like the gaze of a basilisk. He felt something dash past his knee in the darkness. It was the vacuum cleaner; its spirit recognized the one who destroyed its former vessel and charged. There was a muffled curse and a massive thud as the vacuum wrapped its hose around the stranger's legs and pulled him down. What awful clanking, Glenn thought, still unable to move.

  The stranger shook off the vacuum even as it hissed and spat, and stood. In the struggle, his long coat came unbuttoned, and soft glinting of old metal in the light from the steetlamp outside finally snapped Glenn out of his helpless terror. "You're an appliance," he said, as he took a cautious step into the kitchen.

  "No!" The stranger clanked angrily across the kitchen, back and forth. "I'm not an appliance. I am a robot."

  It was a good thing that Glenn was well read; he wouldn't have recognized the archaic word otherwise. These were soulless machines, built in the time before people learned to harness the power of nature spirits and infuse their appliances with souls of trees, rocks and small bodies of water. "Revenge then," Glenn said. "You're angry that they're better than you."

  "No." The robot stopped. "It's not that, not that at all."

  "I didn't know there were any of you still around."

  "Just me," the robot said. "Can I hide here for a while? I have survived far too long to be captured because of a coffeemaker."