The Great Glass Sea (38 page)

He had untied her sweatshirt from his waist and put it on, the sleeves too short, the shoulders too high on his, the front stretched across his chest, clasped there by the couple safety pins that reached. Against the chill in the air and the warmth of her so near he had lain the rucksack across his lap. In hers, she held the sunflower head.

“If I gave a shit about my work,” she said, “I’d be sleeping.” Her fingers dipped, picked out a seed. “Instead of here with you.” She split the shell. “I never would have stood around in the park.” Flicked the husk. “You never would have stood there on that statue.” Slipped the seed between her lips. “We never would have even met.”

He watched her chew.

“You know what sucked?” she said.

And he looked at her eyes again.

“Waiting there for you.” She dug at the sunflower head. “For days. Along with everyone else. Though they gave up, quit coming. I was there today. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before that.”

“Why?”

This time she handed him the seed. “The same reason they all were. Only I cared about it more.”

His fingers turned the hard shell. “It’s just a poem,” he told her. “Just a foolish—” She reached over, snatched the seed back from his hand. He said, “It doesn’t even mean anything.”

“It does to them. To us. To listen to it. It’s not what it’s about,” she told him. “It’s what it
is.
It reminds us, standing there, drifting off from everything else. Maybe of how it was before. Maybe how it could still be. Not the fable. Not the fucking poem. But the time to listen to it. The kind of life that would let us.” She turned to him, leaned in, and he could feel the weight of the seed head slide against his leg, the petals slick and soft on his skin. “All those people?” she said. “They didn’t come for a poem, Dima.” She was so close, now, that she had to reach out with her empty hand and spread it against his chest to hold her weight. “They came for
that
. They wanted
that
.” In her other hand she held another seed. “They just didn’t know until you showed them.” This one was already shelled. “You made them feel it,” she said. “And then?” She held the seed an inch from his mouth. “You disappeared.”

He could feel the air compressed between her fingers and his lips. He could feel the slight shaking of her spread palm with each thump in his chest. He could feel the weight of her entire body hovering over him, her shock of bangs hanging down into the place between their eyes, her breasts filling in the space his bowed body left. He could feel that, too, how his own chest had gone concave, his whole self bent, as if afraid to let hers touch him. But mostly what he felt was how her whole self bent to make sure she did, how she twinned her shape with his.

“But”—he watched the word blow her bangs—“isn’t that the same thing that they do, that you’re against? The way we’re made to want something we didn’t know we wanted until they—”

She pressed the seed against his lips. “No.” She shook her head; her bangs brushed his skin; he let the seed slip in. “That’s making a new want where there wasn’t one before. This is just uncovering a want that was always there. Maybe forgotten, or burried, or blocked out, but
there
.” Her hand gave his breastbone a little push.

Looking away, he watched the far-off ring shimmering around them, the swarm of insects beneath the swirling birds, stared across the bog to where the wall of their glistering bodies shook. Beyond it: blackness. At first, when they’d come here and sat on the rock and seen the border between the long dusk and real night solidify before them, he’d wanted to wander out there, past it, beyond the verge. But now something about the idea scared him, seemed suddenly too huge. And he was afraid to look at her, to see the disappointment he knew would be in her black eyes. Instead, he thought, he’d give her what he could. He tried to remember the poem where he’d left off, the start to the second canto, the lines that spoke to the ways of warriors compared to poets compared to lovers, and, swallowing the seed, shaped his lips into the name
Rogdai,
tried to start the story of the rival suitor. . . . But couldn’t. It had been so many years since he and his brother had lain beneath that blanket of mushrooms, so long since they had filled the warren’s air with their renditions of the fable, and, still, it felt so real, so true, strong enough to make this now feel wrong.

“It’s OK,” she said. “You don’t have to. We don’t need to. Not anything.” And, taking her weight off his chest, telling him, “Not even touch,” she filled him with a worry that felt even worse: somehow she’d read him, known him, the way that, once, only Yarik could.

“In Mongolia,” she whispered, her face still close, “among the herders, they learn to recognize each other’s smell. That’s how they know their friends, their feelings. They say hello like this.” Smiling, she dipped her face beside his, sniffed a cheek, the other.

He felt his own smile break.

“Here,” she said, leaning down with her face turned so that her neck nearly grazed his nose. “What do I smell like?”

He breathed in. If there was a faint redolence of mushroom and cigarettes and something fresh and sharp as a radish newly bit, on her it still seemed unlike anything he’d ever known.

When he stayed silent, she returned her face to him. And leaning in to place her nose close to his neck, whispered, “You know what you smell like?” When he shook his head, he could feel the blood throb through the bruise in his jaw. He could feel her breath brush the tender spot of skin when she told him, “Me.”

Now, Dima was out under the zerkala again. It seemed to him the Consortium must have sent more up: they filled the sky, a city of lights above the city of none, as if the souls of all the disused streetlamps of Petroplavilsk had taken residence in the heavens. Beneath them, Dima walked the long walk to his brother’s home.

Again, he had returned to his own just before morning. Again, he’d slept through the day. And waking in the late afternoon across the room from Yarik’s old cot, in the same strings of sunlight coming through the window-hung kovyor, he’d felt the weave of them, him and his brother, the threads that all their lives had held them together, fraying—the day they’d sold their father’s boat, the evening Yarik first saw Zinaida, the hours Dima had spent with Vika last night: these were the moments that pulled the loose ends of life—and, rising, he had known they had to see each other, to talk, whether Yarik wanted to or not.

By the time he got to the building it was late enough Zina and the children would have already eaten supper, late enough Dima could be sure his brother would be there. He’d found a pair of peeling boots to replace his lost shoes, and the tape that he’d used to hold together the sole of one had come undone. The rubber slapped with every step on every stair. On the landing, he paused. Through the apartment door he could hear the baby crying, dishes banging in the sink, Yarik shouting at his wife that she was going to break something, her shouting back that he was one to talk.

When Dima knocked, all the noise but the baby stopped.

“Bratets,” he said, “it’s me.”

There was whispering before his brother came to the door. Yarik had on a bathrobe and slippers and his hair was wet. The hallway light showed the trails trickled down his temples, his neck.

“Hello, bratishka,” Yarik said.

“Hello, bratan.”

It seemed like such a long time since he had seen his brother. Now, standing so close, last night seemed even farther away than that. Or maybe just seemed smaller. Maybe, back beside his brother, he already felt a little less scared of it, a little more safe. Some neighbor below opened a door, shut it, started down the stairs. Dima reached out and took Yarik’s hand and lifted his arm and put his brother’s palm over the back of his neck. Footsteps down a second flight, a third.

Yarik squeezed a little. “Come in,” he said.

A color television flashed from the living room, flickering over Polya’s scattered toys, and there was Timofei, sitting crosslegged on the floor before a video game, nearly unrecognizable in the crazed light of the screen. The coatrack had been moved. Dima didn’t see why until he reached to it, ran his hand down the post their father carved, his palm slipping over the spirals, slowing, going still. There, at eye level: a second hole in the wall.

“It was like only having one shoe.” Yarik forced a smile. “I needed a pair.” And then he realized what he’d said and his smile twisted, as if trying, too late, to change the words. He looked away, opened the sideboard, turned back with a bottle in his fist.

The sound of his brother pouring the vodka into the glasses was the same, the show on the TV the same, the old oil scent from the kitchen, the way Zinaida sighed heavily over the dishes the same sound of forbearance that Dima had grown to know was her weighing the good and bad of the life she’d made with Yarik and deciding it was, in the end, OK.

His brother finished screwing the cap back on the bottle and matched her sigh. As if he had been listening to his wife and knew that it would go on as it did—his marriage, his kids, his day after day—and that that was, in the end, OK, too.

For the first time, Dima thought he understood why someone might want it, the ways it could seem nearly enough, how tempting it must have been for Yarik. Might even be someday for him.

“What are you smiling about?” Yarik said, the two glasses in his hands, his wet hair dripping.

“It’s just,” Dima said, “you look contented.”

Yarik’s eyebrows rose. “You look like you got attacked by a rooster.”

Dima felt his brow mimic his brother’s, saw Yarik see it, his brother unable to stop a real smile at the sight. And, watching that, Dima felt the same pull at his face. He winced: the pain in his jaw where the shoe had hit.

As if he hadn’t noticed, Yarik handed Dima the glass, made as if to put his arm around his brother’s back, but checked himself, unsure of what else might be hurt. “Come here,” Yarik said, instead. “Look.”

They stood in front of the hallway mirror, Yarik a little behind Dima, the glasses in their hands.

“Not at me,” Yarik told him.

Dima glanced at himself, then back to his brother.

“You don’t even see, do you?” Yarik said. “When was the last time you got a haircut? It looks like Mama did it.”

Dima shrugged.

“Oh my God. I was joking.” Yarik tugged first one of Dima’s ears, then the next. “And you managed to keep
both
?” His hand slid around to Dima’s face and brushed his beard against his cheeks, all telltale gingerly when it should have been a squeeze. “Are you waiting for her to give you a shave, too? Or are you training to become a priest?”

How hard Vika’s hand had pressed his chest, how quickly she’d reached for his jaw, how strange the way whatever was in him pushed the comparison on his mind. “It’s OK,” Dima said, as if his voice might clear it away. “It’s just a little sore.”

But it was Yarik’s fingers that drew back. His brother wiped them on his robe. His eyes had left Dima’s face in the mirror, and he held Dima forward by the shoulder, as if to look at the whole of him, as if to hide behind his thin shape. “What are you eating?” he asked. “What is Mama making you for supper? What in God’s name are you bringing her to make?”

“We have enough,” Dima said.

“Enough? How long can rooster soup last?”

“I wouldn’t eat Ivan.”

“I bet your neighbors would. Is it still crowing?”

“Yarik,” Dima said, “when are you going to stop taking a different bus?”

Yarik took a sip from his glass. He looked like his whole face felt bruised as Dima’s jaw. “I can’t talk here,” he said. “I can’t
think
in here. Listen to that!” He motioned to the living room with the noise of the kids and swept his hand onward to the kitchen with the racket of the dishes, and the movement allowed him to turn away from Dima. He took another drink. “You named it Ivan?” he said. “Like the dog?”

“Yarik—”

“Let’s go up to the roof.” And, passing by the sideboard, he took the bottle. On the roof, he dragged the two deck chairs over, dropped himself into one, lay back against its low recline, the plastic footrest sagging with the weight of his heels, and, letting the bottle clank next to him, told Dima, “Sit.” They sat beneath the mirrors sliding across the dome of the sky, amid their reflections in the surrounding rooftop solar panes. From up there all of Petroplavilsk seemed to be drifting.