The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  The last of yesterday’s fireworks. The flames from a decades-old factory fire. For years, the boiler had gone unchecked. Weakness under pressure. Forgotten and forgotten until it refused to be forgotten.

  In the shower, Ruben used hardly any soap or water at all, just a slap on his head, slicking back his hair, which was receding badly at the corners of his forehead, and a few quick rinses of his pubic hair, so thick his penis, like a cashew in a salad, barely emerged from its leaves.

  At the mess hall, the Christians at the table no longer welcomed his eccentricity, and Ruben sat alone near the guards. “Some of them aren’t really Christians, I hope you understand,” he told them, and the guards told him to shut up.

  He did. He stopped speaking altogether, never so much as acknowledging a word his fellow prisoners said, even if he happened to be alone with one of them. Silence was an easier habit to adopt than he’d imagined, and he kept silent so well that he tricked himself into believing he enjoyed it, that he was gaining some unnamable force from choosing nothing all day but to remain quietly observant. The question of whether the old eccentric’s conspiracies were true or insane began to seem beyond the point entirely. I’m the only one he would’ve trusted, Ruben thought, and his heart swelled. A sentence like that—it meant something to an abandoned person. No matter who said it or why. Or if.

  The man with the long fingers had been from Moscow. After cleaning up the hotel room, Ruben had taken a cab from the hotel in Paris to the airport in order to return to his search in Los Angeles.

  Hagopian himself had instructed him to do exactly that, but something had changed in the ASALA leader. The new angles in his face weren’t the effect of age but of worry. Worry was not the emotion, Ruben thought, of a man whose true aim was to fix his people’s past. Worry was an emotion for men consumed by their own personal fate. And that change in priorities worried Ruben—shouldn’t he be above worry, too?—in loops.

  And so, in the terminal, Ruben changed his flight to include a brief stop before moving on to Los Angeles. There was, he’d heard, a wedding back home.

  He arrived in Kirovakan by taxi from the capital, and tipped the driver a month’s salary, asking him to wait outside the church as long as it took him to return.

  There she was, Mina, standing at the altar in her gown. Her posture—lurching her forehead to the shorter groom’s, bracing the weight of the priest’s relic, bearing a bouquet like the handle of a broadsword at her sternum—turned her into a classroom skeleton, all shoulder blades and elbows. And then she laughed, apropos of nothing, and he thought maybe he’d brought the smell of rain into the church, and she’d sniffed his arrival. Who was he to say if she was beautiful? She was a friend. A woman he’d always wished to be kind to. She was laughing. He was glad he’d come.

  Hagopian had asked after her outside the jazz club in Paris—hadn’t it occurred to Ruben that Avo might be in contact with the girl from the tournament, might in fact be hiding in her dress skirts? Ruben said it was unlikely, explaining what he’d learned in America and the trap he’d laid over there, which Avo was bound to fall into sooner rather than later. In a way, Hagopian seemed satisfied with that, but Ruben knew someone would be sent to check on Mina, just in case. So he had come to her wedding to check in on her himself.

  After the ceremony, he watched her dance. He knew he needed to warn her against helping Avo, but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t tell her the truth, that he’d agreed to hunt down Avo, who’d gone missing in America. So he decided to tell her the most painful truth he could afford to tell her, the only way he could separate Mina and Avo for good without betraying Hagopian’s trust. He watched her dance. He watched her recognize him. His heart levitated. She was running to him. He said a little prayer, asking for the courage to undo the lie they’d told her about Tigran’s death, but the courage never came. He couldn’t admit his role in that story, and so he couldn’t admit Avo’s role, either. Instead, at the last moment, he came up with a new lie that would stop Mina from ever harboring an ambition to see Avo again. Avo had pitied her, Ruben said. Avo had escaped as soon as he could manage to escape. Avo had never, not even briefly, loved her. He wouldn’t even come back for her wedding.

  Although early rumors had fellow inmates believing he’d been solely in charge of the Orly attack, the court in Créteil saw it differently. In their ruling on March 3, 1985—almost two years after the attack—his partner, Varoujan, was deemed to be the operation’s chief planner. Ruben, they decided under public pressure, had been mostly a pawn who’d made the lifesaving decision to stop the explosive from detonating in midair. Although his last-minute subversion was only partially successful, an act of conscience like his warranted a lesser punishment. Whereas Varoujan was given a life sentence at a notoriously violent prison in the north, Ruben was given twenty years at Fleury-Mérogis.

  “Negotiable, I think,” the lawyer told him, but all Ruben could hear was the word pawn again and again in his inner ear. Tigran had told him once, and he should’ve listened: sometimes a man thinks he’s the dice when he’s really just a checker.

  Month after month of silence, Ruben continued to shrink. He ate nothing but the bread he deemed safe, and although he craved meat and cigarettes, the canteen couldn’t keep them in stock, thanks to the Algerians, who were hoarding the tobacco.

  Then one day he saw a Christian smoking in the yard. He’d just won the cigarette against an inmate in a makeshift game of backgammon. The dice—a paper wheel spun twice—beckoned him to watch. Ruben didn’t break his oath of silence. He didn’t speak. But—how did it happen?—he started to play.

  Soon he was playing any chance he had. Hundreds of inmates challenged him. They played for canteen goods. Candy bars and cigarettes and the rare jar of Nutella—none of which Ruben would eat. Of course he won every game. He took the rewards of his victories and passed them along to the other Christians.

  By 1987, four years after Orly and two into his sentence, Ruben couldn’t remember the sound of his own voice. The other inmates, tired of losing, had stopped coming to play backgammon.

  “Look at those clouds,” the eccentric had said once, holding a towel over his nose and mouth in the yard. “Look at their edges, that hint of green surrounding them. Those aren’t typical clouds. Those are chemical deposits. Cover your face, brother. They’re trying to strip us of our senses. They’re capable of it. They’re capable of anything.”

  Ruben sat alone in the yard, spinning his paper dice with one hand, filtering his breath through a rag with the other.

  The longer it had taken him to find Avo, the thinner and thinner wore the fabric of Hagopian’s trust. How many extensions had he begged for from pay phones as he searched the piggish gutters of America? How many false leads had he followed from the six men who’d been arrested on Sperry Street? Two years, he spoke with bartenders and merchants, carnies and freaks. He looked into every shadow of that country, but because he was looking for only one thing, he saw absolutely nothing but Avo’s absence.

  “I want him safely returned back home,” Hagopian assured him. “I just need to speak with him before I feel confident he’ll keep our names out of his mouth. That’s all.”

  Did Ruben believe him? He couldn’t now say. When he finally found Avo, he made the same assurance.

  “You’re going home,” he said. “We’re just stopping by Greece first, to clear the air. Then you’re going home.”

  If, at Fleury-Mérogis, he’d begun as a rumor, he later became a ghost. His name was never written on any ledger. His name, his crime, his race—none of it was known beyond the desks of diplomats and wardens. In the ghost stories he read in the prison library, he discovered that haunting wasn’t a returning so much as a remaining. He imagined returning home one day, or else imagined that he’d never really left, that he’d remained in Kirovakan all along, haunting the city square. What disgrace had he brought there? What hope? Had he hurt more people than he’d avenged? Not even Shirakatsi could do that math
. The justice he was after involved too many invisible lives, too many ghosts. Ruben began to understand it as the fundamental obstacle of the Armenian cause. It was just too abstract of an ask for the world to say, “Yes, your ghosts are real. Your pain hasn’t returned, it’s remained.”

  And what about his hate? Not everyone was blessed enough to hate the living. Some people have nobody but ghosts to hate, and it’s difficult to understand how that can make a man different.

  Nobody can know all the places a man puts his ghost-hate. It either stays inside and rots him, or else it spews out directionless and cold. Ruben wanted to shake his younger self for hating the classmates who had bullied him in the square, wanted to tell that child how blessed he’d been to be able to look in the eyes of the ones who’d done him wrong. What a luxury it had been to hate the boys who kicked gravel into his teeth, who sent his glasses from his face. What a luxury it had been to see them cause his pain, to know they were responsible, to choose to curse them or fight them or spit in their eyes or run. To choose a vessel for his hate and move on.

  Several years into his prison sentence, representatives of the nations of France and the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic brokered a deal to extradite Ruben Petrosian, former member of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, under the condition that he be confined to the borders of the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic for the remainder of his life.

  Before returning to Armenia, he asked, could he stop in Greece one last time? When asked by the French authorities why, he told them the truth. After a while, they agreed.

  On the morning of April 28, 1988, Ruben was set, in one way, free. In Palaio Faliro, the dawn raised pink whitecaps to the surface of the sea. He had several hours before he was to be extradited home, once and for all. He knew exactly how to spend his time.

  23

  Los Angeles, California, 1989

  There I was, laid out under a wool blanket on a sofa printed with flowers, wearing several zipped sandwich bags of ice.

  Way back in my wrestling days, in the moments after the botched piledriver that broke my neck, all I could move—I was told—were my eyelids and my lips, which kept smacking. It wasn’t something I’d ever imagined my body capable of, shutting down like that, and for many years afterward, I dreamed of paralysis and woke with pins in my fingers and needles in my toes.

  A long time had passed since those nightmares, but now I remembered them clearly. I stretched my legs and toes and my arms and fingers, relieved to find everything in order. Then I stirred on the furniture, this way and that, dropping one of the bags of ice. A cat—Smokey, I understood—pounced, pawing it across the carpet to the linoleum in the kitchen, where an old man picked it up.

  “Galust,” I said, but my jaw hurt too bad to keep talking. Mina’s husband and I couldn’t communicate that way, anyway, thanks to the language barrier. He set down the ice and then opened a pack of cigarettes, offering me one. For a while, we smoked without talking. Then he went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses and a bottle of brown liquor I recognized by smell to be cognac.

  I was afraid to laugh because it hurt too bad, but I couldn’t help it, and the pain of laughing wasn’t so bad compared to the burning cigarette and liquor against the open cuts on my mouth.

  After a smoke and a drink each, and going on round two, the same could be said of talking. It hurt to speak, and I knew Galust couldn’t understand a word I was saying, but the pain seemed more intense in silence.

  I said, “I’m a little out of practice, fighting. Fifteen years ago, I would’ve beat all three of those jabronis without pausing for a commercial break, you know?”

  Galust spoke his language, and we both shrugged and laughed. I said, “I’m going to keep on talking, if that’s all right.”

  I told him we were old, both in our sixties, and I said, “This country lost its mind in the sixties, so why not us, too?” He spoke next. I shrugged, he laughed. I said, “Your wife is a kid compared to us. Half our age. Mina—she’s young, she’s pretty. You—old and short and hairy, not so much. How did you get so lucky?”

  Only when I’d said his wife’s name did he react. The skin on his forehead tightened. Then he shrugged.

  We laughed. We toasted.

  For a while, Galust took his turn speaking, and I got to experience what he’d been experiencing. I listened for cognates—an old trick I remembered from the Mexican luchadores I worked with in the Southwest—but Galust’s language bore absolutely no relation to mine, so there was nothing for me to grasp. I was left enjoying the swell of his sentences just for the sounds of them. It was like coming out of the symphony, marveling at the noise the band made tuning up.

  By our third cigarettes, I was feeling good enough to try standing. My mouth and throat were dry with tobacco and blood, and I wanted water. After I did some miming, Galust showed me to the bathroom, where I swallowed palmfuls of water from the tap and checked the damage to my face. Half had swelled to pink and gloss, and my eye socket looked broken. Woozy and presumably concussed, I limped back to the living room, where the sound of a key wrestling the lock in the door sent Galust to check the peephole. He motioned for me to stay in the hallway, out of sight, and it occurred to me that he was protecting me. I hadn’t realized how old I was until I’d seen that he and I were the same age. Then he opened the door, and I braced for Mina to see me and finish the job Shen and his friends had started. But when she came in with the kids and found me in her living room, broken and old, she just went to the sink and rinsed our cognac glasses. Then she said, “Is my husband forcing you to drink?”

  The kids crowded me, wanting to know what had happened. I said, “I fell off the roof, thinking I could fly.”

  Mina must’ve told Galust to take the kids away, because soon he was ushering them outside. “You never showed up at the gas station,” I said.

  “Shen was telling me he’ll follow if I go. Cause trouble.”

  “He did, anyway. With, I don’t know, eight or nine of his friends.”

  Mina brought me a glass of water. She said, “Only two friends.”

  “Felt like more,” I said.

  But Mina knew the truth. Apparently, she spent her Sundays teaching backgammon to a group of old Armenians who played at the laundromat across from the gas station. They saw the fight, and stopped it, and called Mina for her English. When Mina got there, I was covered in blood and concussed. “I’m telling you I’m calling an ambulance,” she said, “but you’re saying, ‘No insurance. No insurance.’ So I’m taking you here instead.”

  “To Shen’s building.”

  “He’s meaning well. He’s a good man.”

  “The best.”

  For the first time since I’d come to Los Angeles, Mina smiled. “I can see why you got along with Avo,” she said.

  I raised my glass of water, a salute, and then drank carefully around my wounds. “Shen’s not going to come down here,” I said, “and finish the job, is he?”

  Mina assured me he wouldn’t. “Almost all of us in this building are coming after the earthquake in Armenia. We lost everything. Shen is helping everyone make a new home. We’re being careful not to lose anything else in the moving, you understand?”

  I said I did, but I wasn’t sure. “Well,” I said, “I’ll get out of your way, then.” If I’d had a hat, I’d have tipped it. Instead, I left with a tiny, painful bow.

  Outside, I was surprised to see how much time had passed. The sun was setting.

  Slow-moving as I was, I hadn’t reached the building’s stairwell before Mina caught up with me out in the open-air hallway. She was holding that red fanny pack. She called up to the roof, where her husband had taken the children, and he called back down to us.

  “I’m telling him we’re going to the hospital,” she said, strapping the bag around her waist just as I’d imagined. “But really, you’re taking me somewhere else. Okay?”

  It was dusk, and all the waking crickets of Glendale were chirpin
g.

  “All right,” I said. “If you’ll fill up my tank, let’s go.”

  “Bro,” The Brow Beater had told me in Wyoming, refusing to drive. “I am not your brother.”

  From there, everything broke down. On the outskirts of Omaha, the Catalina went first. We had to take a tow back to the city, where we split the price on my Ranger. I hadn’t even signed the paperwork before The Brow Beater threw his things—a piece of luggage he’d finally bought for his ring gear, his red fanny pack—into the truck. We’d been splitting gas fees for years, but it was my car that needed replacing, so I was ready to buy the truck on my own. The Brow Beater insisted, though. Maybe he felt guilty for what he’d said back near Laramie.

  I drove us east, and we went long stretches of the country without speaking at all. Here and there, The Brow Beater asked about Gil, trying to get me to open up again, but I was done talking about my brother. I said, “You know, I just don’t remember that much about him anymore.”

  A few months before then, I’d started receiving letters in my P.O. box telling me to call Johnny Trumpet. He wanted to know why I kept skipping Kentucky. I told him it was just the way business had worked out, that I was sure we’d cross paths again soon.

  “You still working with that big unibrowed kid? Avo, right?”

  It wasn’t like Johnny Trumpet to use a wrestler’s real name, so I understood that his interest in The Brow Beater wasn’t general. At the risk of being paranoid, I lied and said, “You know, he bounces around a lot nowadays, takes long stretches away from the road. He calls me last-minute if he wants to work a gig.”

  “Do me a favor, then,” Johnny Trumpet said. “Let me know the next time you’ve got him booked a few days in advance. I’d like to come check him out, see his progress.”

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  That night in the motel room, while The Brow Beater slept, I opened his red bag to see if he was hiding something from me. But all I found were his money and his stupid collectibles.