Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “How so, Ilya?” Sonya said, gazing into the depths of his somewhat bloodshot blue eyes.

  Ilya shrugged, and in so doing, managed to lean even closer, so that she could smell the aroma of him, compounded of cologne, and talc, and his warm vodka-perfumed breath. “You do not really wish to leave your husband, do you?” he said. “And he does not really wish to leave you, da?”

  “I suppose not,” Sonya said. “But things have been very hard, Ilya, very hard indeed. . . .”

  Ilya reached out and patted her hand. A thrill went through her, unbidden. This man, this beautiful man, who was a veritable human octopus with other women, though certainly a suave and not unwelcome one, had never touched her flesh this way before. “Poor, poor Sonya,” he said. “Perhaps the problem is that things have not been . . . hard enough, n’est-ce pas?” he drawled.

  “Oh, Ilya!” she cried, and pushed him away with a gentle shove to his chest, but not without a girlish little giggle.

  Ilya threw his arms up and back, letting himself loll in languid ease against the couch. “No, seriously,” he said. “I am not exactly a world-class expert on marital discord myself, not having succumbed to the traps and snares of conjugal bliss thus far—and with a little luck and some help from my lady friends, hopefully I never will. However, when it comes to the discontent of other people’s wives, let us say that I am not unacquainted with what the Americans would call the ‘seven-year itch,’ in your case, a decade and more overdue, I should say. . . .”

  “Should you, Ilya?”

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “But on the other hand, I am decently drunk enough to throw such cautions to the wind, as it were, or even as it were not, so to speak. Which is to say . . . Which is to say . . .” He scratched his head. “Which is to say what? I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what I’m talking about.”

  Sonya laughed. “Knowing you, it was probably sex,” she said.

  “Sex? Ah yes, no doubt you are right! Now there is a subject concerning which I indeed have some expertise!”

  “Do tell!”

  “About whom? A gentleman never tells, you know, and that is what I am, good Communist or not!”

  “What a beast you are, Ilya Sergeiovich!” Sonya cried.

  “Moi?” Ilya said superciliously. “Far from it! I have never forced my attentions on any woman!”

  “Only because you haven’t had to!” Sonya told him.

  “Ah, but this is not so, not so at all!” he declared. “Oui, it is true, I am never without the amorous attentions of the multitude, but that does not mean I have never manfully refrained from plucking forbidden fruit!”

  “Oh really? Like whom?”

  “Like you, Sonya Ivanovna,” he said.

  “Me?” Sonya said in a tiny voice. Dust motes seemed to hang and sparkle in the air before her. A delicious fear blossomed in her breast and spread down her stomach and between her thighs, where it became a treacherous dissolving warmth.

  “Surely you have noticed?” Ilya said, prying his upper torso shakily off the couch, leaning forward, and staring deep, deep into her eyes.

  “Noticed what?” Sonya whispered, leaning closer herself.

  Ilya glanced down at his crotch, where a telltale bulge strained against the fabric of his tightly tailored pants.

  “Oh really, Ilya,” Sonya said softly. And she reached out her hand to push him away again. But when her palm touched his chest, something, some trick of gravity, or vodka, or she knew not what, made it linger there, feeling his heartbeat.

  “I have fucked at least three hundred women,” Ilya said, staring into her eyes. “I have been a noble stakhanovite of sex. I have fulfilled my five-year plan a hundred times over like a true hero of socialist labor. Fucking for me, it is nothing. I flit from flower to flower, as it were, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, as the gringos would have it. But truth be told, never have I bedded a woman whom I truly respected as I respect you, my good and true friend.”

  “Oh, Ilya, as the gringos would also say, you are so full of shit that it is coming out of your ears!” Sonya said. But she found herself putting her other hand on his shoulder.

  “No, no, no, it is true!” he declared. “We have worked together, we have shared meals together, we have drunk together, we have smelled the sour sweat of each other’s fatigue. We have shared every intimacy save one. . . . So what does it matter? Who is to know?”

  “You are quite drunk, Ilya Sergeiovich!”

  “And you are quite shit-faced yourself, Sonya Ivanovna.”

  “Who am I to deny it?”

  “Well, shall we get it over, then?”

  “Get what over?”

  “The cosmic inevitable,” Ilya said, and he swept her up into his arms, and he pressed his lips against hers, and thrust his tongue deep into her mouth. And that was the end of thought.

  * * *

  Why the pull-back on Wall Street? The conventional wisdom is that we’re just seeing the inevitable profit-taking after the big Renationalization run-up. But if you look at where all the cash being pulled out of stocks is going, you get a different picture, amigo. Institutional investors, flush with the profits they’ve taken, are gobbling up Baja California real estate like there’s no tomorrow, inflating land values to the point where there are few real bargains left.

  But adventurous investors can still cash in by buying secondary regional bank stocks. The majors are already in up to their eyeballs, leaving the smaller banks to write the loans for the Johnny-come-lately small-fry speculators in a lenders’ market. True, a lot of this action is highly leveraged, and it’s not for the weak-hearted.

  For conservative investors, defense stocks remain the most prudent play, particularly the California-based majors.

  —Words from Wall Street

  * * *

  XIII

  As the ancient pickup truck began climbing up out of Boulder and into the majestic fir-covered foothills of the Rockies, Robert Reed finally began to feel that he was really in the America of his dreams—hitchhiking west across the Continental Divide toward fabled California, just like the beatniks and Oakies and hippies in all the old novels he had devoured in Paris. On the road at last!

  Behind lay Denver, and New Orleans, and Chicago, and Miami, and Washington, and New York, and a ghastly ten days that had disabused him of most of his preconceptions, including his original plan to use his Air America pass to hop from city to city, seeing the country as he zigzagged across it in the general direction of Los Angeles.

  New York was everything the legends said, and worse. Hundreds of soaring towers rising right out of crumbling rat-infested ruins. Elegant restaurants and sidewalk vendors selling what looked suspiciously like rat-kebabs. The Statue of Liberty, where they ran you through metal detectors and bomb-sniffers before they let you climb the long spiral staircase to the crown. The Empire State Building with its magnificent view of the city from on high and its hundred floors of foul crash-cubicles within. Central Park, with its tent cities, patrolled by armored cars. Beggars and prostitutes on Wall Street, right in front of the famous Stock Exchange.

  It was like some dreadful living political cartoon of the injustices of American corporate capitalism, and after a day, and a sleepless night, and another day wandering the savage streets, Bobby had had more than enough, and he caught a shuttle flight to Washington on an ancient 767 that lost an engine on the forty-five-minute flight from La Guardia airport.

  Washington was not nearly as expensive as New York. The center of the city was ringed by relatively cheap and relatively decent tourist hotels, though from what Bobby saw on the bus ride in from the airport, the surrounding sprawl of slums was, if anything, worse, reminding him of nothing so much as the shantytowns surrounding some gleaming African government center, and just as thoroughly black.

  But the nation’s capital had geared itself to tourism, its only major industry besides government, and what festered outside the gleaming alabaster centre ville was kept at bay
by an army of police, who were constantly in evidence checking the identity papers of anyone who was black and did not dress up to their stringent standards of middle-class civilization.

  The center of the city had been turned into a kind of patriotic Disneyland, and Bobby, like most of the rest of the tourists, signed himself up for the two-day guided tour. He was taken to the top of the Washington Monument, and inside the House and Senate chambers. He saw the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial, and the White House. His group was quick-marched through the Smithsonian and the National Aerospace Museum and the Library of Congress—though the Pentagon, and the Vietnam memorial, and the Challenger monument were for some reason not on the tour.

  And all the while he was subject to the most appalling jingoistic blather from the tag team of guides, who sounded as if they were all reading from the same script, and probably were.

  The Washington Monument was an excuse to remind the tourists of George Washington’s warnings against entanglements with effete Europeans. The Iwo Jima statue was the occasion for the glorification of what the Marines were presently about in South America. The National Space Museum was somehow a monument to the vision that had given the country Battlestar America, which was now allowing it to thumb its nose at a hostile world.

  Bobby was mighty glad he was wearing his Dodgers jacket as the citizens on his tour sucked all this up with avid agreement and choruses of diatribes against the evil Russians and the perfidious Peens, for it was quite clear that the general opinion was that Common Europe had sold out civilization to Godless Atheistic Communism, that Europe richly deserved the economic hosing it had just received in return, that American military might was the Last Best Hope of Man, and that he had better keep his mouth shut and his European birth to himself.

  Washington was absolutely dead at night, and the guides had made it clear that so were you if you strayed out of the safe areas in search of fun and games, so Bobby spent his two evenings there watching American TV in his hotel room, or at least as much of it as he could stomach.

  There were game shows, and soft-core porn, and endless episodic series in midstream, mostly tending toward glorification of past American military ventures in World War II and Korea and Cuba, a completely insane musical about Teddy Roosevelt, a science-fiction series featuring cannibalistic aliens who spoke with stage-Russian accents, and a Ronald Reagan film festival.

  The news shows were even more puke-awful and frightening. To hear the commentators and the edited footage tell it, Europe was committing fearful atrocities against American citizens, the Soviet Union was seizing control of the Common European government, American troops were beating the bejesus out of the guerrillas in Venezuela and Argentina, and the Mexicans were brutally attacking American settlers in Baja California, and cruising for a bruising. Since the Mexican government was in the hands of European dupes anyway, the general consensus was that the Monroe Doctrine was about to be applied, and none too soon, for the purpose of which a naval task force was in the process of being assembled off Miami, and another off San Diego.

  From Washington, Bobby caught a flight to Orlando. When he got there, he found that the Kennedy Space Center had been placed off limits to civilians and was surrounded by endless tacky suburbs servicing military and space personnel that sprawled all the way to the frontier of the Magic Kingdom.

  This seemed somehow appropriate, for Disney World had decayed into a hideous parody of the ruins of an out-of-date future, where the amusement rides were clogged with drunken and swaggering military personnel, and the Epcot Center displayed the last century’s scientific wonders, and creaky audioanimatronic robots sparked and jerked spastically. Mickey Mouse, Roger Rabbit, and Donald Duck waddled down Main Street in military uniforms, terrorizing Frenchie the Frog, Limey Dick, the Frito Bandito, and Ivan the bright Red Bear.

  Miami was the most prosperous American city Bobby had seen, terrifying where New York and Washington had been merely depressing, filled as it was with soldiers, sailors, airmen, mercenaries, arms merchants, speculators, whores, drug dealers, political refugees—the major staging base for the U.S.’s military and paramilitary operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

  The drinking age seemed to be about twelve, and so Bobby was able to spend a night there bar-hopping, sipping truly dreadful tropical concoctions and listening to the local bar-talk with growing horror.

  It was no secret here that a large naval task force would soon be on its way to blockade the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The bars were full of sailors from the ships taking their final liberty, paratroopers who expected to be dropped on Vera Cruz and Mexico City any day now, Marines and soldiers on R&R from Venezuela and Argentina full of gleeful war stories, all of them drunk out of their minds on booze and adrenaline, and eager to go out and kill some more spicks for God, country, and kicks.

  What the denizens of the Miami bars were fantasizing about was a President with the balls to really enforce the Monroe Doctrine as God had intended, to kick the fucking faggot Europeans out of Bermuda, Curaçao, Cayenne, Martinique, and the rest of their Western Hemisphere territories and throw them all open for a big land grab like what was shortly going to come down in Baja, what a cakewalk that would be, real profitable too, and surely there must be some way to apply the Doctrine to Canada, the Canucks still were part of the British Commonwealth after all, now weren’t they . . . ?

  One night of this was more than enough, and so the next afternoon, once his hangover and upset stomach had subsided to the point where he could face another move, Bobby escaped the feral lunacy of Miami, shaking and sweating, on the first flight he could get, which turned out to be to Chicago.

  Chicago was another New York, with a little less dirt and a lot more wind, and then on to New Orleans, which was decay dripping with verdigris in sweatbox heat, and another wide-open military pigpen, and from there to Denver, which at least was farther north and farther west.

  Which was about the best that could be said for it. To a born-and-bred Parisian, Denver was hardly a city at all, more an endless collection of dull bedroom arrondissements with no street life.

  Between Denver and Los Angeles, there was nothing, or, as the old American saying had it, “miles and miles of miles and miles.” He could hop a plane to LA and fly over it, or . . .

  Or he could hang out his thumb and try to find that other America that his heart told him must still be out there somewhere. The Rockies and the Great Desert. The Sierras and the Mojave. A thousand miles and more of empty spaces as cities were counted on the map, but the land of legend from another perspective, cowboys, and Indians, and cattle drives, and wandering hippie tribes, outlaws, and ghost towns, and timeless mystic landscapes.

  So Bobby lettered the word “West” on a piece of cardboard, screwed up his courage, shouldered his backpack, walked to the nearest freeway entrance, stuck out his thumb, and waited.

  He had waited in the hot smoggy sun for nearly an hour, while electric city cruisers, big long-distance fuel-cell haulers, and petrol-guzzling monsters buzzed by, quite ignoring him, before this old pickup truck, with its load of toilet bowls and plumbing fixtures, finally pulled up.

  Bobby dashed to the passenger-side door and opened it. The driver was a burly gray-haired man in his sixties wearing a battered straw cowboy hat, mirror shades, and a set of filthy blue coveralls.

  “How far west ya goin’, bucko?” he said in what Bobby imagined was a perfect cowboy drawl.

  “LA.”

  “Figures for a Dodger fan,” the driver said, with a little laugh. “Bring your butt aboard, you like, get ya as far as Vail, anyway.”

  The driver’s name was Carl. He thought it was real hilarious when Bobby asked him if he was a cowboy. “Figures the last of the hitchhikers make me for fuckass cowboy! Though them’d call me outlaw, thinkin’ at it!”

  “Outlaw?”

  “Shithouse bandito, bucko, make it! Haw! Haw! Haw!”

  “Huh?”

  “Hey, Bob, I’m a plu
mber, make it, and when they get the bill, they’re gonna shit in their pants anyway, haw, haw, haw, serve ’em right for buyin’ them Jappo johns in the first place!”

  Carl did a lot of talking on the way from Denver to Boulder, and Bobby kept his mouth shut for the most part, for most of it was about how the ol’ US of A had been corned by the Jappos and the Peens for far too long now, and it had been about time we got down to doin’ the screwin’, and he should know ’cause he had done his time in fuckin’ Nicaragua and Panama, was only luck they had made him a shithouse commando in the Army and taught him a trade still worth a fuck of a buck after all these years, or the spicks woulda iced him in the jungle, and if not, he’d probably be screwin’ bolts in a factory fer nigger wages ’stead of screwin’ the homesteaders, make it, that was the scoop they said about plumbers, really was a license to steal, haw, haw, haw . . .

  It was a tense ride until they drove through Boulder and began climbing up into the mountains, and Bobby had started to hate this ignorant, hate-spewing, chauvinistic gringo.

  But now that they were climbing up into the verdant green mountain fastness, a change had come over Carl the plumber. He ceased his jingoistic jabber, popped an actual Beethoven chip into the truck’s player, and sat there, leaning back in his seat, holding the roof with one hand out the open window, steering with the other, taking an occasional deep breath of resinous pine-tinged air, with a dreamy smile on his face.

  “Nothin’ like this in Akron, bucko,” he’d mutter from time to time. “Fuckin’ God’s country, yes . . . Love this drive . . . ’Magine what it was like when there was nothin’ here but mountain men and grizzlies, hey . . .”

  Higher and higher they climbed, into vaster and vaster mountains, where there was nothing to be seen but green trees and brown loam and outcroppings of gray granite, and it seemed to Bobby that the America of the past ten days was slipping away, in space and time, and some elusive understanding seemed to tease at the edge of his consciousness, and strangely enough, he began to feel a kinship with this plumber, this old veteran of the Central American wars, this former shithouse commando, for all of that seemed long ago and far away as they retraced the epic journeys of the long-ago pioneers through a landscape that the hand of man had scarcely touched since Columbus first set foot on the American shore.