The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  4

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1973

  By now they were spending every night in the city square. On Ruben’s seventeenth birthday, Avo stole a bottle of vodka from the house and uncorked it at the foot of Kirov’s statue. The bulbs in the lamps above them glowed feebly, and the two brothers passed the bottle back and forth in the stuttering dark. From a distance, they must have appeared in fits and starts, one hunched low to hear the smaller other.

  “Look at this,” Ruben said, fumbling something in his hands. “Can you see this book?”

  In the dark, Avo couldn’t, but he traded the vodka for it anyway. The book was soft and leather-bound with extremely thin pages that, when he thumbed their edges, felt sliced with metallic flakes.

  “It’s an old journal,” Ruben said. “A priceless artifact.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  Avo promised he would, and Ruben took another swig of vodka before beginning to explain.

  The journal, Ruben said, was over three hundred years old. An imperial cleric had copied, by hand, rare proofs and algorithms from no longer extant papers belonging to a fifth-century Armenian mathematician and philosopher named Shirakatsi. The journal, dated 1669, went on to become one of the few Armenian artifacts saved from the Ottomans in Diyarbakir in 1915. When Ruben said priceless, he meant it—not only for the journal’s historical significance or monetary value but for the potential application of the mathematics inside: some of the algorithms laid out winning strategies for different board arrangements in backgammon. Seeing as how the game had been invented only a hundred years or so before Shirakatsi’s time, the algorithms must have been among the first backgammon strategies ever recorded. And on top of all that? The proofs had been passed down from grandmaster to chosen pupil, and then on to his chosen pupil, and so on, never translated from the Armenian. And now it belonged to Ruben.

  Avo thumbed the pages again, this time feeling a new delicacy he couldn’t believe he’d missed. “Tigran chose you.”

  Ruben drank from the bottle. “Tigran didn’t give me the book,” he finally said. “I stole it. Three days ago.”

  It was easy to lose track of time in the dark, but Avo knew it wouldn’t be long until someone noticed that a three-hundred-year-old record of a lost manuscript by a legendary fifth-century figure had gone missing. He said, “Tigran’s probably dying right now.”

  “He doesn’t know it’s missing,” Ruben said. “I didn’t steal it from him. I stole it from the student Tigran actually chose to give it to.”

  “Which student? What’s his name?”

  Ruben drank again. “Her name. He gave it to Mina.”

  The girl who covered her chin when she spoke, the girl Ruben seemed to dislike less than he disliked other people.

  “Your girlfriend.” Avo laughed.

  “This isn’t funny,” Ruben said.

  “She might drown herself in a lake, thinking she lost this thing.”

  But Ruben said she’d get the journal back soon. He’d spent the last three nights copying the proofs into his own papers, and he’d be finished tonight.

  “The trick is we’ll have to give the book back to her without her noticing we had it,” he said. “We should let her think she’s misplaced it and found it again, all on her own.”

  “We?” Avo said.

  Early the next morning, before class, Avo joined Ruben in the small room where the backgammon club met daily before school. Of the seven students there, the one named Mina was easy to spot.

  Even if she hadn’t been the only girl in attendance, she was also the only one sitting restlessly in her chair, her knee bobbing violently, her bottom lip in her teeth. When Tigran—a round, white-haired ornament of a man dressed in a heavy overcoat and a floppy blue hat—entered the room, Mina cleared her throat. She was on the verge, Avo could tell, of announcing that she’d misplaced the irreplaceable, and then she would probably climb to the roof of the tallest building in Kirovakan and jump.

  But before she could do that, Tigran grabbed his chest in mock heart attack, bulged his eyes, and gasped at the newcomer in the back, “Good God, man! How tall are you?”

  Two weeks earlier, Ruben had stood on a chair to mark the wall above Avo’s head with a pencil. This week, he was just shy of two meters tall.

  “Two meters! And how old are you?”

  “Seventeen, sir.”

  “Good God, you look thirty! Maybe you’ll be the first man to hit three meters.”

  “Tigran,” trembled the voice of the only girl in the room. “I have something very, very important to say.”

  “I’ll probably stop growing after another ten centimeters,” Avo boomed over her. “That’s what the doctors tell me. In order to grow more than that, there has to be a problem with your glands. People who grow to become freaks? They have glands like faucets you can’t turn off. Hormones flowing forever, which causes many problems, as you can imagine. I’m lucky, the doctors say. I’m big, but not broken.”

  “Tigran?” came Mina’s voice again. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to tell you—”

  “And when I heard that,” Avo shouted, “I asked myself where else I could try my luck. Maybe I can roll the dice on a backgammon board and see if my luck works here, too.”

  “Ah,” Tigran said. “If only backgammon were a game of luck. Unlike chess, which is a game strictly of skill, and unlike craps, which is a game purely of chance—”

  “Tigran!” Mina shot to her feet, hammering her hip against the table along the way, which would leave a bruise for six weeks. She held it and covered her chin with her other hand. Even in a yell, her voice sounded on the verge of tears. It had the blurry quality of something seen through heat or rain. “I have something to tell you and I can’t wait another minute and I won’t let this overgrown idiot keep interrupting me.”

  Avo said, “I don’t know if you missed the part about my glands, but I’m not overgrown.”

  “Go on, then,” Tigran said. “Tell me what’s so important, Mina-jan.”

  But just as she was about to confess, she saw it, the ancient book, its pages with their golden edges. Ruben had sneaked it into her bag—with the help, Mina realized, of Avo’s distraction.

  “Yes?” Tigran said.

  Mina looked around the room as if trying to think of something else that might have warranted her growing bruise. She looked to Avo, relieved, and there was his heart, climbing. His overgrown, idiotic heart.

  “What she wants to say,” Avo said to Tigran, “is that she can’t concentrate on backgammon when I’m in the room.” The other students laughed. “And it’s not just my height, sir. It’s my mysterious hazel eyes, and my one strong eyebrow, and these bear claws you mortals call hands. I should leave, sir. Look at her looking at me—she’s obsessed!”

  The students laughed, and even Tigran pulled his hat over his eyes and shook his head, muttering funnily. Mina, embarrassed and relieved all at once, gave Avo a look of hatred mixed with appreciation. As for Ruben, he’d taken his seat at the front of the room, dutifully waiting for class to begin.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ll leave,” Avo said, ducking under the doorway. “I won’t come back! You can concentrate on your game, Mina-jan. Luck and strategy, all at once, remember. Goodbye. Goodbye!”

  Once in a while, the rain held off. On one of those rare bright days in the spring, a white bus with a pale blue roof came to a hiss near the fountain in the square. From the shadow of the statue of Kirov, Avo saw Mina in the bus window, chin in her hands. Then she got off the bus and shuffled down Moskovyan Street, carrying a shellacked backgammon set under her arm. Outside the school, she stopped and spoke with a friend who made her laugh. The laughing sent Mina folded over on herself, and the backgammon board under her arm reflected the sun’s white glare this way and that, rays of light that flew across the square and into Avo’s eyes, so bright they made him sneeze. When he regained his sight, he saw that Mina
had spotted him. He waved. She waved back.

  “I wonder,” Ruben said, reminding Avo he wasn’t alone. “I wonder if there’s something funny going on between her and Tigran. Would explain why he gave her the journal and not me.”

  Avo said, “Or maybe it’s possible she’s the better backgammon player?”

  “That’s not it,” Ruben said. “It’s strange—she’s the luckiest player I’ve ever seen.”

  Ruben returned to his book, a Russian history of the genocide he couldn’t stop talking about, extolling the empire’s humanitarian response to the refugee crisis. He’d read the book so many times, he could hold long conversations while he read it again. “I don’t know how, but the dice seem to do whatever she wants them to do.” He turned the page. “And someone that lucky can only bring bad luck to others.”

  Avo returned to his own reading. Tumanyan, the son of a priest, was too religious for his taste, but every once in a while in his poems, a line would emerge from the preaching—“Sweet comrade, when you come someday to gaze upon my tomb”—to stand stark and true as a friend.

  When Ruben left to use the toilet in the nearby census directory building, a voice shot out over the square.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you alone,” Mina said, and Avo looked across the way to find the small figure of Ruben climbing the steps of the directory in the distance, walking away with that little bounce of his, checking his glasses against the sky for smudges as he moved.

  “Won’t last long.” Avo laughed. “I’m surprised our leash stretches this far.”

  “Who’s the dog and who’s the master?” Mina asked, switching her backgammon set under her other arm.

  “We take turns,” Avo said.

  She didn’t sit down beside him, but she seemed to consider doing so. “It’s not that I don’t like Ruben. It’s just I see him all the time at practice. I don’t see you very much at all.”

  “Really? I’m hard to miss.”

  Mina plucked a die from her backgammon set and threw it, plunking Avo right in the forehead. “Hey, you are hard to miss.”

  “Here I’ve been trying to make you laugh, and you’re funnier than I am. Are you sure you’re from Kirovakan?”

  “We’re not all as dour as Ruben,” Mina said.

  “He’s strange, but I like that. He’s my brother, what can I say?”

  “It’s not that he’s strange,” Mina said, a bit annoyed at herself for continuing to talk about the one person whose absence allowed this conversation. “If anything, he reminds me of a few of my uncles and their friends, stern old Armenians who never talk about anything except the Turks. It’s so—”

  “Boring?”

  “I was going to say male, but boring works, too. Don’t laugh—it’s true! It’s boring and male, all that talk about the past. It’s a repetitive, endless waste. Have you seen the lemon trees by the ski lift? Imagine if they never dropped the dead lemons from last year, or the year before that. Just went on carrying all their old shriveled lemons until the branches sagged so low that no new fruit could grow.”

  “You’re a poet,” Avo said, and as soon as Mina covered her chin, he knew she’d misunderstood him, had thought he was making fun of her. The truth was he wished he’d had the imagination to come up with something like that, those dead lemons hanging on, or the courage to say it. Instead, he pressed on with his argument.

  “If you talk to Ruben,” he said, “he says we have to keep remembering what the Turks did to us because they deny it ever happened.”

  “See? See how boring that gets? Of course it’s true, but—I saw your eyes glaze over, and you were the one talking!”

  Avo laughed. “Duties aren’t hobbies, you know.”

  “Well, let’s talk about hobbies once in a while. Or movies, or music—my sister has a record player but listens to the worst Russian music, so I found this guy who sells records underground and bought this British album called Pink Moon, and it’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, and it’s only from last year, it’s something new, and that’s what people are doing in the spinning world, they’re making things, not just remembering them—they’re making beautiful new things. Do you have a portable record player?”

  “I—”

  “No, it’s okay—I’ll just borrow my sister’s. Where can we go where Ruben won’t find us?” She was supposed to be luck-graced, he knew, and now he could feel it whisking around her, this girl with big eyes and a small chin standing over him in all her endless fortune, asking him for a place where, together, they could hide.

  His shoelace had come undone, he noticed, and he bent and reached and then pulled at the strings, hiking them so tight and quick that his boot let out a leathery yelp. He said, “I’d love to listen to that record with you, but I want to invite Ruben, too. We’re a package deal, I’m proud to say.”

  Once again Mina switched the backgammon set to her other arm. “Ah yes,” she said, “the leash,” and then she looked down the street. “I should go before he gets back and sees us talking without his permission. If you change your mind, you can meet me at those lemon trees by the ski lift tonight. I’ll have the record player, and the record.”

  “Tonight?”

  “It’ll rain tomorrow, it’ll rain for weeks.”

  She left briskly down the street, carrying that lacquered board under her arm, casting back the flashing light of the sun every now and then until, behind the traffic, she disappeared.

  “I looked through that history book of yours,” Avo said when Ruben got back.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, and it got me thinking. We Armenians, you know, we’re so obsessed with the past. It’s like, if a lemon tree just kept growing new lemons, but the new lemons were old, then you couldn’t get any fresh new lemons off the tree, you know?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, well, let me start over. You know those lemon trees over by the ski lift?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No, no. I’m just thinking, we should do something different today, since it’s not raining for once, since it’s, you know, beautiful outside.”

  “You think today is beautiful? You know what day will be really beautiful? The day we do something about the fact that the Turks still deny the massacre of our people.” Ruben returned to reading. “Or maybe the day we do something about the fact that no one but us seems to care about the international cover-up of two million dead Armenians? That day will be beautiful.”

  Avo said, “Mina invited us out tonight.”

  Ruben looked up from the page. “Us?”

  “Yes. Both of us. She happened to walk by when you were gone. Said she had a new album she wanted us to listen to.”

  “Armenian?”

  “British.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Maybe some Armenian stuff, too, I don’t know.”

  Ruben seemed to consider it. “The only non-Armenians who can help us now are Lenin and Jesus.”

  “How am I supposed to keep a straight face when you say something like that?”

  “Lenin and Jesus kept a straight face, didn’t they? Were they funny? Did they find a joke to make in the absence of justice? Did they convince themselves that life was nothing but a joke, that they were the butts of it, and that there was nothing to be done but join in on the laughs? Did Jesus laugh, huh, or did he weep? In the Psalms, God says to the kings who have taken counsel against Him, ‘He who sits in Heaven shall laugh.’ So laughter, you understand, is the prize of living a significant life, not the means.”

  “The album is supposed to be very good, I hear.”

  “Admit it,” Ruben said. “You didn’t joke to distract Tigran. You did it because you want her to like you.”

  “And you don’t?”

  Ruben closed his book. “You don’t need my permission to spend time with Mina,” he said. “You’re a man, aren’t you? Make your own choices.”

  “I choose both,”
Avo said, palming Ruben’s head, but Ruben said, “Both’s not a choice.”

  Meanwhile, the doubly smuggled album—first from England, then from the underground seller in Kirovakan—spun along with the spinning world. Mina didn’t understand a single lyric, but she hummed along with every sad and hopeful song. The new lemons in the tree above her, small as candle flames, glowed green in the dusk. The music, the perfectly clear evening—she convinced herself she was grateful to have them both to herself. She played the record four times, start to finish, before returning home.

  5

  Los Angeles, California, 1989

  The drive from King County to Johnny Trumpet’s bungalow in the Mojave Desert can be done in one of two ways: southeast across Idaho and Nevada, or south through Oregon and California. To save myself the mountainous rifts, I chose the latter, and Fuji and I funneled our way between the valley walls of the western states as if sucked through a pneumatic tube. Aside from a few stops to refuel, we sped through the skunky redwoods of Humboldt County and the roiling vineyards of the Central Valley without rest. At that pace, we should’ve been able to shake ourselves off in the dusty gold pan of the California desert with an extra day to spare. Instead, sixteen hours into the drive, sleepless and dazed, I missed the junction east toward the desert and found myself in the wrong place. I found myself in Los Angeles.

  By the time I got off the freeway and realized my mistake, it was past ten o’clock at night and the streetlights were beginning to confuse themselves with the taillights ahead of me, and I could hardly keep my eyes open long enough to find parking, let alone merge back onto the freeway and continue east. On a side street off the main drag, my luck changed: I found a meter abandoned with almost a full hour remaining on the clock. There, I followed Fuji into the camper shell of my truck and set up my sleeping bag.

  The hour of sleep whipped by as quick as the windburn I used to get on my face as a lookout in the navy, high up in the crow’s nest, but I woke up clear-eyed enough to hit the road again. By then it was almost midnight, and I figured I could make it to the mustard-colored bungalow by two or three in the morning, crash there for free, and get on to the business of repaying my favor. But just as I was leaning out of my window to check for oncoming traffic and pull away from the curb, I realized where, exactly, I’d been parked.