Separate Kingdoms (P.S.)

by Valerie Laken

  “Oh, come on,” he says outside afterward. “You have Edik.”

  “Right,” I say, but of course I don’t. Edik’s not an idiot, and I couldn’t lie to him. I haven’t seen him in months. I haven’t fed anyone, haven’t thrown any parties. I take the metro home alone in the sweater, and sit on my balcony through half the night, trying to remember who I used to be.

  I’ve missed the deadline to start school in the fall so I stay another two months, socking away money for tuition. By Christmas I’ll be home, or where home used to be. Sometimes I go for walks with Anna Petrovna but mostly I leave my apartment just for work and food. When I get especially lonely I go down to a little pizza place that’s opened up not too far from work and I sit at the bar and order two beers and one pizza margherita. They have CNN on satellite, and all the lonesome new expats with no friends and no Russian skills sit around staring at it.

  One night they show a clip of Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on Arsenio, and it makes me blush. Then somebody plops down next to me, saying, “Nu, privet,” in a deep, familiar voice.

  It’s Andrei. He has a big bruise across a third of his face and a scab through the middle of his left brow.

  “What happened to you?”

  He shrugs it off. “Car accident,” he says, but that feels like a lie.

  “How’s business?” I say.

  “Outstanding. Bez problem. Better all the time.” He owns four kiosks now, and is looking into buying a bar.

  “Good for you. And you don’t have…opponents?” I say, wondering about his face.

  He shrugs. “Everybody has enemies. That’s just business.”

  A soccer game comes on and we talk about that for a while. We share a pizza and a couple of beers, no shots, no toasts.

  “Oh, I’m going to be a dad,” he says. “In March.”

  “Wow,” I say, in English, because he always liked the way that sounded.

  “Owow,” he says, in a slow and careful effort.

  “You should really call Edik, before you go,” he says at the end of the night, and I nod. I know I should, but where would it land me? I give Andrei my parents’ address and phone number, just in case, for the future. A few weeks later, I’ll translate an article about a Russian businessman killed in a drive-by shooting on the steps out in front of this restaurant. It won’t be Andrei or Edik, but for a minute my brain’ll go white with the possibility. There’ll be more of these kinds of shootings to come, many more.

  The last night I remember of the city is election night, 1992. Some American companies sponsor a party at the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel, by Kiev Station. They put out an open invitation to Americans to come watch the returns all through the night into morning. Some people from work talk me into going, and I’m both drawn and repelled by the prospect of seeing Jacob there. It’s been weeks. Over a thousand people show up, more Americans than I ever imagined were here. It feels like a huge high school dance, except we’re of all ages in our motley jeans and wet boots, with our limp hair and tired eyes as the night goes on.

  There are free Nestle Toll House cookies and Pop Secret popcorn and Coke, free Pizza Hut pizza and Miller Lite and KFC. They’ve got big screens set up all over the room, projecting the returns on CNN, and when the chairs fill up we lounge across the floor—unthinkable behavior in the city around us.

  I spot a cluster of Jacob’s friends by the Miller Lite stand, and they wave me over so I walk the plank. It turns out he’s moved on to Prague for a new job, and I won’t run into him here or anywhere again. “Prague,” they say, capturing a whole room of jealousy in one word.

  Ross Perot splits the conservative vote and this chubby sax player closes the gap. Carol Moseley-Braun becomes the first black woman senator, and a cheer goes up in the room like I’ve never heard. I realize, shouting and clapping, that I’m being louder right now than I’ve been in all eighteen months here. I’ve been sneaking around, keeping my head low, for so long. And no matter what anyone says tomorrow, tonight we’re bound by something tinged with pride. Never mind that Moseley-Braun will get mired in corruption and Clinton will become a national embarrassment—like drunk, dancing Yeltsin, who’s been selling all the nation’s resources to five or six men. We don’t know that yet. We drink and dance and try to believe, for now. Around dawn I drag my bones downstairs and out the front door, where I watch two women getting into an official black taxi outside, right in front of the lobby where they cost triple. They’re laughing and stumbling like college girls, so young. I zip up and walk down the street a few blocks to hail a normal car for a dollar, and the driver asks me what the heck I’ve been doing all night. The sun is starting to come up. I tell him about the election, about the whole ridiculous party, free food and everything. He says, “Yeah, but how do you know Bush will really step down? Why should he yield to this new guy?”

  Despite everything I’ve learned here, the question still strikes me as ludicrous. “He just will,” I say. “That’s how it works.”

  “But what if he doesn’t,” the driver says. “He probably likes being president, after all.”

  “He just will,” I say, looking out the window at the cold river curving beside us, cutting its crazy route through the vast city. All these months I intended to memorize its path, but I never quite got around to it, and in the end I never will.

  REMEDIES

  IT WAS THE screaming that woke Nick up—actually, the realization that the screaming was coming from him. His hands, he noticed next, were bleeding, were banged up. The hood of his car was a rupture of metal. He had to lean to one side to get a full view of the minivan in front of him. An accident, an accident. Before he could get a grip on any of this, a chain of boy scouts came filtering out of the van, pointing their thrilled little fingers at him. His fault.

  Then he must have slipped under again for a second, because next thing he knew people were knocking at his window, and he could see their lips making all the motions of concerned language. He rolled down.

  They were police officers—so quick—asking him if he was all right, if he knew what had happened. He nodded.

  From the looks of the pavement, they said, Nick hadn’t even touched his brakes. It was midmorning, a hot, hazy weekday, and there were no drinking binges or faulty equipment to blame.

  “Well.” He looked from the cops to the minivan mother and back. “I guess I blacked out a little.”

  The minivan mother lost none of her fury, but the cops grew a lot more compassionate. The trouble was, this resulted in an ambulance. And no amount of protesting after that point could get Nick off the hook. He was carted away like a specimen, and through the back windows of the ambulance he could see a tall, hairy man hooking his car up to a tow truck. He was caught.

  At the hospital everyone was waiting for him to black out again so they could watch. They did blood tests and eye tests, an EEG and a head CT. They checked his reflexes and his urine and blood, then after a lot of consulting resorted to alien, sci-fi phrases. Transient ischemia. Petit mal. Tonic-clonic. Simple-partial. He got the sense that every time they left the room they were hustling back to some reference library to locate in big leather books all the phrases they had failed to memorize in medical school. The orderlies shuttled him from room to room, floor to floor, and each new person he met required a fresh explanation of his circumstances.

  “Let’s try this again, for my sake,” the latest doctor said, taking out his penlight. He was much older than all the rest, with veiny cheeks and big ten-year-old glasses that magnified his eyes.

  Nick pulled the icepack away from the bump on his forehead and allowed this doctor, too, to lift his eyelids one at a time and scan his pupils. He blinked away the flashes until he could see the room again. “It’s like a hiccup, a little skip,” he mumbled.

  “How long has it been going on?”

  Nick shifted his weight, ripping the paper under his legs. “Two, three months?” he said, because this was what he had told the other doctors. Who
knew if it was true? It was hard to fix a starting date.

  “Do you notice the spells lasting longer, getting worse?”

  The episodes had been so minor at first, Nick had thought maybe he was imagining them. Maybe they happened to everyone. “You know how when you’re driving along with the stereo going, and you hit a bump in the road and the CD skips ahead just a beat?”

  The doctor stared at him so uncomprehendingly that Nick wondered if maybe he’d switched off again and missed some new development in the conversation. He waited for the doctor to say something or react. But he didn’t.

  “It’s like that, only everything around me skips—traffic, road signs, the clouds—everything jerks ahead just a little. You follow me?” Nick was the regional sales rep for three restaurant franchises, and spent twenty-five or thirty hours a week in his car. It was his central frame of reference, and they had towed it away with all his features inside.

  “I lose time,” Nick said.

  “What you’re describing may be a kind of seizure.” The doctor worked up a serious expression.

  “May be.” Nick pulled his shirt tight across his thumping chest. “May be.”

  “I’d like to keep you here for observation.” Nick pictured himself on an institution bed, a bunch of white coats with clipboards eyeing him all through the night.

  He said no. He buttoned up his shirt and concentrated on his tie—over, around, under—letting the doctor’s words slip through the air around him. Abnormal electrical activity. Absence spells. Possibility of stroke, atherosclerosis. Tumor. Cyst. Mass. He pictured a clump of Silly Putty left under his skull like a prank.

  “Well, which is it, Doc?” Nick said at last. “Just tell me which one it is.”

  The doctor folded his arms and proposed more tests. Nick saw flashes of horror film images: himself on a metal table, head shaved, with red lines on his scalp marking future incisions.

  “You’re being childish,” the doctor said. What did he know?

  “Listen.” Nick made a move for the door. He was sweating. “I appreciate your concern. I assure you, I swear, if it happens even one more time I will definitely go in for a second opinion.”

  The receptionists confronted Nick with a series of papers to sign, then pointed over to the corner, where they said his emergency contact was waiting.

  “Emergency contact?” Nick said. And there she was, Theresa Felangi, stooped over in a long, loose skirt, studying the fish in the waiting room’s aquarium.

  “This is embarrassing,” Nick said.

  “Not at all.” She smiled. Her hair was a different color, more reddish, and the freckles he’d always liked on her cheeks had multiplied. Three years ago they had nearly moved in together. Nick had terminated his lease and given away his old college couch, his posters, his porn, but at the last minute Theresa had a change of heart. She’d had a powerful dream about her future, she told him, but then she stopped talking and only shrugged. Apparently the dream hadn’t featured him.

  And now she was probably married, all settled, and Nick hadn’t even gotten around to replacing her name on his insurance forms.

  He followed her through the revolving doors, apologizing for the mix-up.

  “No, it’s good to see you,” she said as they reached the curb. The afternoon had arrived, muggy and high pressure, leaning toward a summer storm.

  When Nick offered to take a cab she looked offended. “You’re not well. I’m driving you home.”

  He just wanted to get back to his car. He thought of the paperwork, the spare shirts, the phone, the travel mug.

  “Shouldn’t you just leave your things for now and go home and rest?” she said.

  “It’s not that serious.”

  “It sounds kind of serious.”

  For a second Nick had a woozy sensation of falling, but he didn’t fall, didn’t even teeter. “The thing is”—he put on his salesman voice—“there are better specialists over at Rockford Memorial. I’m going to make some appointments over there tomorrow rather than waste time here.”

  He snuck a look at her to gauge her expression.

  “OK,” she said. “OK.” She turned onto East State Street, heading toward the impound lot.

  After that they didn’t talk for a while. As Nick watched the gray cars and buildings roll past, a brief fantasy imposed itself: They were forty years older, gray haired, and round shouldered. She drove everywhere because his sight was failing. They were going to McDonald’s for coffee. Theresa wore thick stockings that sagged at the ankles and he wore a sweatshirt with a stain at the top of the belly. Then the jolt of a pothole snapped him out of his dream, and they were thirty-one years old again and separate, trying not to look at each other. “Are you still making those art projects?” he mustered.

  “Not the action figures,” Theresa said. When he had known her, Theresa had been teaching graphic design classes at the community college and in her spare time making little wax action figures in various female forms and professions—executioner, meter maid, guerilla princess—which she sold in the summers at art fairs, without much success. “I’m doing collages now,” she said. “But they don’t sell as well.”

  He nodded. He never knew what you were supposed to say about art. “Still living over by the water park?” Big raindrops started smacking the windshield with a kind of random violence.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve got a house on the west side, off Auburn. And a dog.”

  “And a husband?”

  “Holy shit,” she said. They had pulled into the impound lot and she’d spotted his car. “Wow, look at it.”

  Nick got out and walked over to his car. He crouched next to the left front quarter panel and ran his hand along the warped and jagged wheel well. “Well, hell,” he muttered.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” he said, turning to Theresa. “I can drive it to the shop.”

  She leaned against the car parked beside his. “Nick, you can’t drive.”

  He wished she would stop looking at him this way.

  “I mean, you’re hurt.” She reached her hand out to his forehead.

  “I’m fine.” Nick shrugged her off, hearing the anger steeping in his voice. “This isn’t some big dramatic thing, Theresa. It’s a bump on the head. A fender bender.”

  “If you’re blacking out, the police will probably revoke your license or something, make you get tested.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “They should.” She’d outgrown the old timidness, he saw, and acquired that confidence of women who didn’t need anyone new in their lives. Nick imagined a snug little house for her, a dog and a husband and some flowerpots out front.

  “You know, Theresa? I guess you don’t really get to decide this one for me.”

  She stared at him for a while. “Right, fine. I’ll tell the women and children to get off the streets then. And give me a head start, would you?”

  Nick smiled back grimly. He could handle it. He watched her hustle into her car and drive off.

  He crouched down again and pressed his palms against the cool metal of the dented hood. It seemed important to check on the basic facts. The episodes had started to make him wonder if the world in front of his eyes was the same one he saw inside his head. But the car was still here, still definitely mangled.

  He thought of rust, of old age, of the impossibility of life without driving. He got in and buckled up.

  “All right,” he said to himself, turning up the stereo. “Now concentrate.”

  Concentrating didn’t matter; it happened again on the drive home. Waiting at State and Alpine for the light to change he watched a can collector pushing his shopping cart slowly along the sidewalk. Nick watched the man’s trench coat flap and billow in the wind at the back of his knees, and he felt sorry, for a second, as the man stooped to shield himself from the rain. And then he was gone. One blink—though Nick wasn’t even sure he had blinked—and the man was out of sight. Not gone, as it turned out, just thirty feet farther a
long, and heading into a gas station, still stepping slowly. It was as though a hundred frames had been cut out of the film Nick was watching, or the cruel bastard above was screening Nick’s life, pressing FAST FORWARD and SKIP just for the fun of it, out of boredom. The light had turned green, the cars had moved ahead around him. A few were backed up behind him, honking. Nick pulled over and put on his hazard lights. It scared him. What if he blinked and never woke up? He regretted sending Theresa away. But he couldn’t sit there all evening. He left his hazards on and crept along in the right lane, giving himself a wide berth.

  At home, his neighbor Bryan was working in the garage when he pulled in. Their building was a strange arrangement: a small warehouse built in the sixties, with the first floor converted now to one massive garage, and the upstairs done up in two big, mirror-image apartments. Although technically they shared the garage, in reality it was mostly Bryan’s domain. He was a welder for a tent and awning company, but what he really loved was vehicles. He had two snowmobiles, a jet ski, a souped-up Corvette, and a giant pickup truck. There were extra sets of tires and tools hanging on all the walls in neat rows, and big glossy red tool cases standing below them. He even put in an old couch and chair, and when the weather was good he would open the garage doors and sit down there with a beer, watching the sun set across the Whitman Street Bridge. All Nick needed was a corner to park his car in, so it was a good setup all in all, low rent because the neighborhood was industrial and deserted, and Bryan was a nice guy, could fix anything. Sometimes Nick would sit upstairs on his couch at night feeling the low rumble of Bryan’s machines in the garage below, or imagine him sitting on his own couch next door, facing Nick like a mirror on the other side of the wall.