The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “I still am.”

  “Me, too. But we don’t have many places to put it to use.”

  Avo said, “It’s embarrassing, wanting to be recognized by strangers on the street.”

  “No,” Mina said. “It’s only embarrassing to admit it.”

  He did that thing he did, palming her head. “You’re my great love,” he said, and he kissed her hair. “But embarrassing or not, I want both. I want your love and I want the love of the public. You laugh, but I’m not ashamed to say it. I want both. I don’t want to choose.”

  Mina was laughing not because she thought it was funny but because she wanted to make sure he would listen. She said, “It seems greedy to get both, doesn’t it?”

  Avo laughed. “Are you threatening to leave me?”

  “Kirovakan is my town,” Mina said, teasing. “If I want you gone, you’re the one who has to leave.” As he wrapped himself around her, she laughed and sputtered through it, “You can stay, you can stay!”

  Maybe it helped that the diamond wasn’t real. It made leaving her—at the party, in the country—feel less like a breach of his word. Or maybe his word was the real fake, his commitment to her a semi-synthetic material made for ulterior uses. Or maybe he was lured by the idea of America, or the official typesetting on the visa to Los Angeles—curled from the tube-rolled envelope in which it came, along with a receipt for airfare—which was so declarative that it made every other fact in Avo’s life appear sentimental by comparison. Or maybe he just missed his brother—his cousin’s cousin, really—who didn’t prioritize being well liked, who was fighting a heroic cause, who believed that getting history right was just as much an act of making as any invention to come in the future.

  Or maybe Avo felt that it was his job as a man—an Armenian man—to shunt aside his heart for what he’d been taught to believe was the greater good. Maybe he was ashamed to know the truth about Tigran, ashamed he couldn’t share it with Mina. Or maybe—he insisted on considering—he’d been pretending to love her all that time, or maybe it was puppy love—hadn’t they only been serious together since October?—and leaving could be as easy and thoughtless as catching a bus.

  With this story in mind, he chose to leave first thing in the morning. The one running bus left for the capital just after dawn, and he knew if he missed it, he would never leave.

  When he returned to the party, Mina was barely awake, lying on the sofa in front of the blue light of the muted TV. Her nose cast a teal shadow down her face.

  “You missed it,” she said, and he knelt beside the couch and kissed her forehead. She complained that his nose was cold. He kissed her again anyway.

  “It feels like a big year,” she said, “1975.”

  He could hear her falling asleep, her voice drifting. “If it’s not our year this year,” he said, “know that we’ll have our year.”

  “Mhm,” she said, hardly at all. “We’ll have it, our year.”

  All night it snowed. In the hills, vacationers slept in cabins, waiting for the ski lift to resume at daybreak. From the city, though, the vacationers were invisible. Avo left Mina and waited, half-frozen at the stop, for the bus to come. He remembered seeing the ski lift for the first time from Ruben’s bedroom window. The chairs rising on their cables seemed to welcome him to this next part of his life, after his parents, appearing right there in the window on the other side of the hill, lifting and returning, waiting for him to step aboard and rise.

  There would be no snow in Los Angeles. Half a meter here tonight, it looked like. His bus at dawn might have some trouble getting through, he thought, and the idea of getting stuck on his impulsive escape from home sent all the dinner and walnuts he’d eaten churning in his stomach.

  He’d left a note for Mina to find when she woke up, but he’d had to be vague. He didn’t want a Party official, having seen them on long walks late into the night, going to her with questions again. First the little stern boy defects, and now the tall one—and what do they have in common but you, Mina Bagossian? Surely that can’t be a coincidence, can it? All he’d written was: I love you. When it’s our year, I’ll explain.

  Now he had to shovel. It was still dark when he laced his boots. He found a shovel near the census bureau and returned to the bus stop. The light scattered underneath the streetlamp, speckled with miniature shadows of snowfall. If the bus got stuck, he’d never leave. So he shoveled. In that light, he spent an hour plowing the road, all the way from the bus stop to the first bend some fifty yards out—enough for the bus to gain momentum and keep it.

  He was sweating so much that when he took off his jacket, his skin steamed in the cold. In the distance loomed the tallest building in Kirovakan. Through the snow and the steam of himself, he peered from under his eyebrow. Then he got back to work. All night he shoveled snow, fearing and also hoping a light would flare up in her window. But the building kept dark. It was the tallest in the city, everyone knew, but not in the world.

  11

  Los Angeles, California, 1975–1978

  Before he became The Brow Beater, Avo spent his California days conspiring in a warehouse at the edge of Glendale. You could find it across the Los Angeles River from the Wilson and Harding municipal golf courses at Griffith Park, at the end of a warehouse-laden cul-de-sac called Sperry Street: a misshapen cement cube of a building stooped beneath a rusty billboard that read, “You Can’t Spell BIG PLANS Without L.A.”

  Before new zoning laws restricted flammable storage there, the warehouse at the end of Sperry Street had been used as a shared overstock warehouse for companies dealing in fertilizer. A group of Armenians had signed the lease in the Nixon years, when the last of the pallets and bags of shit had been hauled out. Now, six years removed, the smell had been complicated by the paunchy, vodka-pored perfume of professional saboteurs—a French word Ruben had used in a recent letter from Paris to describe Avo’s new Los Angeles compatriots: Saboteurs aligned with the ahistorical agenda of the Turkish regime. Still, despite the enormous warehouse fans whirring all day, despite the patio grill used to barbecue kebob and lamb, and despite the godlessly beefed-up lemons they siphoned over their food during meetings, the faint stench of haystacks and dung refused to stop haunting the place. Every morning upon entering the warehouse, Avo smelled it and took a seat on an old leather armchair, one of a series arranged in a circle, and said good morning to the rest of the men smelling it, too.

  Meds Mart, they called him. Big Man.

  Like many people who chose to identify in groups, these six men always seemed to speak in unison, even when they were speaking individually. There were no leaders among them, and yet whenever an individual among them spoke, he spoke with the arrogance of a man in charge. It was disorienting, belonging to such a collective. The six other men never shared details of their personal lives—it was unwritten but understood that origin stories and family lives were strictly off-limits—and so they remained, to Avo, basically indistinguishable. This worried Avo, since he felt so distinguishable himself, what with his size, which set him apart, not to mention his access to his inner life, which reminded him every now and then that he was inconveniently different from this group he’d chosen to join. Because the group had only one purpose, they had really only one conversation, repeating it in various forms again and again, avoiding anything at all on which they might disagree, and it was the constant sense of agreement that Avo found so disorienting, as if their purpose itself were the only leader they acknowledged. Avo knew that to be untrue, however. Any question of leadership led directly to Europe or to the Middle East or to Asia—wherever it was that Hagop Hagopian had happened to station himself that year, that month, or that day.

  As for the one conversation they had again and again—the ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turks, and their strategy for global acknowledgment, apologies, and reparations—the tone was not as passionate as he’d expected. More accurately, it felt academic, like a school project Avo might have preferred to do alo
ne. Only three months into his membership in the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, Avo began zoning out during meetings, sketching invisible memories of home in his mind, of Mina. He began pretending to listen.

  Except every now and then, there came the brief inclusion of a non-Armenian name, at which point Avo remembered to pay attention. A sketchy plot to kidnap a Turkish movie star, for instance, or a more straightforward plan to assassinate an ambassador. In the background, they put on records of folk singers from the old country, the same trilling clarinets Avo had heard all his life, the same hazy breaths of a duduk over the scratch of vinyl.

  One day, just to change the tone of the room, Avo decided to tell a joke. He’d heard it in Leninakan, as a kid, from an old drunk who paid for his vodka by making the bartender laugh. The joke went like this: An old commander is telling war stories to his troops. The commander was once captured on the front lines, he says. His captors were notoriously ruthless, and to their prisoners, they did one of two things: they killed them or they raped them. “What did they do to you?” a young soldier asks the commander. And the old commander pauses and says, “They killed me.”

  Avo put his hands up to signal that his joke was finished. But the men weren’t laughing. One of them began a long lecture about the brutalities inflicted upon Armenians during the forced marches to Deir ez-Zor. “Here we are trying to win justice for the victims of barbarians, of rape, of murder, and this big oaf is auditioning for Johnny Carson.”

  Avo sank as low as a man his size could sink into his chair. The truth was he found the joke mean and unfunny himself, always had, even as a boy. But he’d thought the men would like it and had performed it—worn the joke like a costume—hoping to connect with them. Having failed, he offered an apology, but the group had moved on already. They were back to their ongoing conversation. Avo listened for a while longer, picking up a new detail about the Turkish ambassador’s home in La Crescenta. He rubbed his head, balding already at nineteen, and brushed his one eyebrow back from his eyes. He wondered where his brother was. His cousin’s cousin. Ruben wouldn’t have laughed at the joke, either, but he might have at least understood Avo’s motives for telling it.

  When he wasn’t at the warehouse, Avo ducked underneath the doorways on Chevy Chase Drive, living in a studio apartment Ruben had arranged for him from overseas. To his surprise, Armenians were his neighbors on the other side of every wall. Glendale was a city with Armenian butchers, grocers, and landlords. Almost every tenant in Avo’s building was an Armenian, and he spent long stretches of those early days in America never hearing a word of English. A diaspora city could feel like home the way distant traffic at night could be mistaken for the sound of rain, he thought.

  Almost every night, several of the families in the building would choose an apartment to gather in and drink and eat dinner. Sometimes, when loneliness settled like a scratch in the throat, Avo would join them. He was too young to have much in common with the old folks, and besides, his size made him a hit with their children. They gawked up at him as if he were the Armenian statue of liberty, and he’d tell jokes and let them climb to his shoulders, around his neck, and he lifted them so they could look inside the light fixtures for the bodies of dead flies, and it was as if he’d given them a better view of not only the apartment but also this new sun-beat country they called theirs.

  On Sundays, instead of going to church, Avo went to a jewelry store to meet the only adult with whom he spoke more than a few words outside the warehouse, an older woman with a pet dog she adored.

  Valantin read to some of the children in his apartment complex and had been in attendance at one of the building’s dinners. Immediately she’d taken a liking to the big man entertaining the children, and struck up a conversation. When she realized he hardly spoke English at all, she gave him a trilingual business card and spoke every sentence to him twice: first in their old language and then in English.

  “Gari daragan es? How old are you?”

  “Tasniny.”

  “Tasniny. Nineteen,” she said, and so on.

  She’d practically ordered him to meet with her at a jewelry store in town.

  “Sa Avo Gregoryan,” she told her aunt the first Sunday at Nor Jewelry. “This is Avo Gregoryan. Khosel anglaren e nran. Speak English to him.”

  “Wow!” her aunt said. She was hardly five feet tall and reached into her dress pocket for a pair of purple glasses, which she then held over her nose. “Shat, shat medz,” she said.

  “Very, very big,” Valantin echoed.

  “Sure,” Avo said in English. “I thank you, sure.”

  Sunday after Sunday, they took their coffee the Armenian way at a table in the back, near the safe. The weekly sessions might’ve felt like church if not for the way Avo checked over his shoulder every now and then during the conversation. Ruben had instructed him not to associate with anyone unaffiliated with ASALA, and that fact haunted every Sunday he shared with Valantin. It lingered in the steam over their cups of coffee, over their cheese-filled boreg and their sweets. It snaked its way through their vocabulary words and their conjugations, settling in the margins of the history textbook Valantin brought in one day, after explaining the difficulty of translating poetry. Ruben had gone to great lengths to arrange everything for Avo so that there would be no need to talk to anyone who didn’t speak Armenian. And yet, for almost three years, Avo traveled to the back of a jewelry store, secretly and in violation of his word, to learn an impossible and illogical language. For what? Any time the question came to his mind, he pushed it away as if he were back at the factory, monitoring the textile machinery for bad signals. But at night, falling asleep to the sounds of his neighbors fighting or loving, the question reemerged.

  He could imagine it so well, he could make it so. A mirage of the ear. Sometimes this new life felt like his. A mirage of the heart. Month after month, he wondered if the illusion would ever be made real, as Ruben had promised him. Mina—if Avo didn’t put her at risk by contacting her—would be sent for in the coming months, and this new place would become a real home. In the meantime, the way he saw it, if he protected Mina and did his job, he could spend his own free time any way he chose.

  From time to time, he wished the old world could come calling, but the only taste of that other life came in the form of the occasional phone call from Ruben. The calls were brief and business-oriented, usually making sure that Avo hadn’t noticed anything or anyone strange near the warehouse. In this way, his brother’s singularly high-pitched voice felt less like a signal from home than a reminder of how far he’d traveled. They avoided talking about Kirovakan, about growing up together, or about Mina. And they certainly never talked about the incident at the Black Sea, for which they, secretly or not, still blamed each other. Whenever Avo tried to turn their conversations toward the personal, Ruben stopped him. All of that, he said, could be discussed later, once their job was complete. Now was the time to focus.

  So he corresponded with Mina instead, if only in his mind. Already he’d written imagined letters and read imagined responses, in which Mina had accepted his apologies, promising to join him when the time was right. It was easy to invent her side of the correspondence because, when they were teenagers, he’d once seen a page of her journal, which she’d left near the ski lift they used to go to in the hills of Kirovakan. She’d forgotten the journal, and the wind had splayed it open, and he’d read a page before picking it up and returning it to her. Even in one page he could see a rambling, endearing writer, and he could hear her voice clearly when he read her words. She wrote the same way she walked—patiently, looking around this way and that—and Avo wondered if that was a coincidence, or if it was possible to tell how people think and write by the way they walk, by the way they move through the world. Remembering how he walked—lumbering and crouched and unsuited to the world—he trashed the theory quickly. Still, that was what that one page of her journal had done to him, gotten him imagining long letters written in he
r hand, gotten him thinking about lovely, useless things. Even in his imagination, none of her would-be letters was particularly romantic—though she did leave a lipstick kiss at the end of each note. Instead, she’d have written about her new role at the school, teaching backgammon in the same room where she’d been taught to play by the great grandmaster she loved so much. More than once, she might’ve called her students adorable, and the word would act like a shield that reflected itself directly back to her, and Avo thought about how much those imaginary children would have adored their teacher.

  In the warehouse, the men had spent several months planning an elaborate attack on the Turkish Airlines kiosk at LAX, studying the intricacies of the international terminal and preparing homemade explosives over the interminable compositions of Komitas on vinyl. They’d organized protests, vandalized several dozen Turkish institutions, written educational pamphlets to be distributed to Armenian day cares and schools, and spent many thousands of dollars investing in weapons training and equipment, but the Turkish Airlines kiosk was to be their first major operation. Almost a full year of planning and development had come to this, details being finalized. And then—just as they were about to do what they’d all come to do—the phone rang. The caller was Hagop Hagopian, telling them a flag had been raised at the LAPD. They were to nix the whole plan.

  “They’re doing it in Rome instead,” said the man who’d spoken to Hagop. “Apparently, our brothers in Italy get everything worth doing, no matter how long we’ve been working on it.”

  “Damn,” said another of the six warehouse men. “I guarantee they don’t have the smell of shit lingering in their place of business, either.”

  “Well, at least now we can focus on the professor.”

  “And there’s only one of him,” said another. “So unless he moves to Rome, the professor is ours.”