The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  And so he was—asleep—when it happened. When God seized him by the shoulders and shook him awake. Twenty seconds on the morning of December 7, 1988. That’s all it took. Twenty of the thickest seconds in history, when the devil rattled Armenia like dice in his hand, when every Brezhnev-era building from Leninakan to Kirovakan crumbled as swiftly as old men in the sea, when fifty thousand people were killed or buried and lost, when the animals clambered over the ruins of villages and cities alike, when the graveyards split open like wounds, when the body parts of corpses new and old were scattered on sheets of slate and steel, when hell arrived again in Armenia—Ruben was asleep. He thought he was dreaming. Mother with the gash in her head.

  Father bent over her, mud on his face and crying. Dreaming. Ruben wound down the path to join the digging. Mudslides trapping children, burying the old. He went on digging in that mud. All that sludge and muck, hoping and worrying that a hand might pull him under.

  Broken. It was his father’s word. All that coddling and now he’s broken. Now the city was, too. There wasn’t a building left standing unscathed. Not even the tallest.

  The dice had rolled her way more often than not, and mosquitoes never bit her, and her arranged marriage had led to real love, but her building, the tallest in the city, had come down just like the rest.

  He couldn’t say if she’d survived or not, but he dreamed of pulling her out of the rubble, the lucky one. The farthest he could get, though, was the city square, and as his father fell deeper into his drunkenness, Ruben began to stay there, outdoors, near where the statue of Kirov in his defiance kept standing. Kirov’s bronze head had split in half like an apple, but he had not fallen. Ruben began to sleep there even in the rain, and if his father died, he wouldn’t know it, because Ruben hardly remembered him.

  And who remembered him, Ruben Petrosian? Hero with a pen. Cultural watchman. No one. He was just another bum in the broken streets, another thing displaced and unrecognizable. Still, he hoped she might remember him, that if anyone could remember who he really was, it would be her, the lucky one.

  One morning before sunrise, he gathered himself and combed down his rain-soaked beard, slicked back his grown-out hair, adjusted on his nose the frames without lenses, and he went there, to the rubble that used to be the tallest building in Kirovakan. A year had passed, and the mess was just as bad. He climbed up the stones like a pristine stairwell and imagined he was standing on the roof. Eventually, he thought, she would join him there. In the meantime, he leaned against a jutting wall and watched the sun rise through the slashing rain. All that devastation at once. The whole world as broken as he was. The sun rose and rose, nothing so glorious as the April dawn he’d witnessed in Palaio Faliro, in those narrow hours between prison and home. Who had taken the credit? The PLO, certainly, and Turkish agents, no doubt. The Israelis, in retaliation for Hagopian’s early role in Munich. Even ASALA itself had been suspected, the final push for new leadership under Monte Melkonian. But Ruben knew the truth. It had been half past four in the morning. Early dawn. Hagopian was out on the street, a piece of luggage at his feet, waiting for a taxi. Ruben had broken into the khash restaurant and stolen old Hayk’s gun from the kitchen. What had Ruben said to Hagopian before shooting? Something about his friend. The tall one. The giant. He had said his name and then shot and then run. The sunrise kissing the Mediterranean. Everybody took credit for killing Hagopian, so no one would know the truth. Ruben, standing over the ruins of Kirovakan, laughed. Nothing maniacal, just a brief, incredulous snort. He couldn’t help it. It was funny. To know a fact of history that nobody else would ever know. It was funny.

  As for what he’d say to the lucky one when she joined him on the tumbled roof, he had time. Maybe she had left the city, the country, before the earthquake. She had a child, maybe, and he envied her that—not because of her luck but because, although he’d seen the world, she’d made one of her own. He wanted to explain to her, wanted to tell her all of his memories so he could sort out which were true and which were fiction. Finally, he decided to leave the rubble and return again tomorrow, when he’d come up with someplace to start explaining, but tomorrow came and he didn’t know how to explain himself then, either, and he slept under the statue of Kirov in the square.

  Funny. If anyone wanted to know who’d killed Hagop Hagopian, all he had to do was witness the change in attitude of one little bespectacled man in Kirovakan. All his life, he’d been serious and stern and unwelcome to joy. But now he’d completely changed. He lived in the streets, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He was endlessly, genuinely cheerful. He enjoyed tipping the empty frames of his glasses to people in the streets as a way to say hello, and he had loud, funny conversations with the broken statue of Kirov in the square, a habit that became a kind of ritual for the city, and people began to take their children to watch him with the statue, a kind of puppet show, a performance, with stories and jokes that seemed to arrive from the different corners of the world, cheerful anecdotes about what all nations had in common, and people would toss coins into a hat for him, or bring food and sweets to feed him, and even after the Soviets fell, when Armenia gained independence, when Kirovakan scrubbed itself of the name of that old Soviet guard and leveled the statue of him in bronze, even then, that little man with the glasses went on performing, speaking to the birds in the trees or the cats dipping their noses into the fountain for a drink. And when people asked him if he’d always lived out in the rain, or when people asked him for his name, he seemed perfectly unable to remember. The only person who might have reminded him had taken her family to live under the promise of a thousand points of light. And what would he have said to her, anyway? He was too happy to continue his eccentric strolls through the city, pretending to be in control of the lamps and the streetlights that zapped on and off at random, now that the natural gas and oil from Russia had been cut off, now that independence meant a landlocked homestead surrounded by ancient enemies. Long stretches of powerlessness came over the city, and winters were impossible, but oh God were they free. Free as that little man in his glasses, smiling and laughing and waltzing through the city, covering his head in a scarf, saying bits of nonsense to the birds and the lamps: Nothing phony about me, said the real one. Nothing real about me, said the fake.

  Acknowledgments

  For the gift of time, space, and money—or some lucky combination of the three—I’m grateful to the Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan, the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Andreas Faculty Grant provided by Minnesota State University, Mankato. The grant allowed me to visit Armenia, where my beloved aunt, Madlena mokor, joined me as a guide and translator, and I’m forever thankful to her and to my new Armenian friends for their hospitality and generosity. .

  My agent, Julia Kardon, sharpened this novel beyond measure and cannot be outhustled. To be able to count on her belief and her tenacity is a boundless privilege. And to land at Harper is dream enough, but to score the extra luck of working alongside Mary Gaule seems cosmically unfair. Her support means more to me than she knows, and her work—editing this novel from the inside out, with empathy and artistry—shows on every page. To the rest of the team at Harper who helped to make this book real, especially the tireless copy editors and designers: thank you so much.

  For my understanding of the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide and the global legacy of its denial, I’m indebted to a long list of scholars and writers, including Ronald Grigor Suny, Michael J. Arlen, Eugene Rogan, Meline Toumani, Carol Edgarian, Taner Akçam, and Peter Balakian. I’m also forever grateful to my extended family—the Kantzabedians, the Manukyans, the Aprahamians, the Lusparyans, the Sarkissians, the Artsrunis, and the Aminian Baghais—for the stories and the love.

  Thank you to David Shoemaker, Thomas Hackett, and Tim Hornbaker for their lively and informative histories of professional wrestling, and to Kayfabe Commentaries and The Hannibal TV for their productions of shoot interviews with wrestlers from the territory days.
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br />   Endless thanks to all my teachers, colleagues, and students.

  I owe so much to readers of this novel in its earliest stages. Brit Bennett: winning big at a craps table with you was nothing compared to the luck I’ve had in counting you as a friend and sister. Johannes Lichtman: your smarts and your jokes make me forget my distaste for phone calls. Thank you both for your mindful time.

  Thank you to Derrick Austin, Ezra Carlsen, Dan Hornsby, Matt Robison, Jia Tolentino, and Maya West. What luck to call you brilliant writers my people.

  Jenna Meacham, for all the years and all the art: thank you. Tim Longtin, for those long Michigan nights, which I miss dearly: thank you. Adam and Shelby Smith, your friendship sustains me all the way from the ocean. Andrew Daley and Andy Henderson, thank you both for watching wrestling, talking wrestling, and spearing me through a door that one time. Research!

  My parents deserve more space for gratitude than this page will allow. I’ll be thanking them for it all, always and always. Same goes for my sister, Madelein, who set the bar so high all my life. I’m lucky to be in her shadow.

  Finally, thank you to Mairead Small Staid, my found one, and the countless trillion coincidences that led us together. You worked on this book as if it were your own, a fact I’ll publicly emphasize if the reviews are bad. The truth is I couldn’t have invented this story if I weren’t in love with you. In that way it is—yours.

  About the Author

  CHRIS McCORMICK is the author of a collection of stories, Desert Boys, the recipient of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award. Born in 1987 and raised on the California side of the Mojave Desert, he now lives and teaches in Minnesota.

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  Also by Chris McCormick

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE GIMMICKS. Copyright © 2020 by Chris McCormick. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover illustration © CSA-Images/Getty Images

  Digital Edition JANUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-290857-5

  Version 10052019

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-290856-8

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