Learning to Swear in America (30 page)

“You know I’m coming, right? For the big escape attempt?”

He crouched down, his head bent forward, and felt an immense sense of gratitude. “You shouldn’t. How will you get there?”

“I’ll drive. Duh.”

“Is very long distance, Dovie. Would take two or three days.”

“When does the conference start?”

He hesitated a moment. “In four days.”

“Perfect.”

“But I don’t even know how I’m going to get out.”

“You’re going over that bridge—the one to Canada. And I’m taking you.”

“Your parents won’t allow it.”

“Allow? You need remedial hippie lessons.” She kissed the phone and hung up.

He smiled and thought about Dovie sitting in her car, one wrist on top of the steering wheel, driving across the country. And then he thought about Dovie, in that rattletrap, with one wrist on the steering wheel. Driving across the country. He called her back.

“I’m coming, so shut up. By the way, nice job saving the world.” She hung up.

He stared at the phone. No hello, no good-bye. Just “I’m coming.”

He took a long, hot shower to wash the dried champagne off. The water steaming over his bare skin had probably been
delivered to Earth by an asteroid hundreds of millions of years ago. He was awash in irony.

He rubbed the thin hotel towel over his hair and then flipped it around his waist. He clicked the lights off and walked to the window. A shooting star flashed across the sky beyond the restaurant next door—not a piece of the asteroid, just a regular meteorite. The sky was still there, Earth and the moon. He stood in the dark for an hour, looking at the stars.

He’d saved the world. Now it was time to save himself.

Yuri spent three days in the hotel room, waiting to be moved for the Detroit conference. He tried not to think of his flash drives in Fyodor Laskov’s sausage fingers. Yuri needed to get home.

He wanted to call Dovie, but she was driving, and he was afraid she’d answer. Dovie streaking across the continent might do more damage than the BR1019 had. He caught up on his sleep, and googled himself—just the usual academic references, and a mention that he was part of the asteroid team at JPL. Apparently the extent of his role wasn’t public knowledge. Then he watched an American senator on a talk show argue that NASA’s budget should be cut now that the danger was past.

The third day he watched TV reports on the convulsive street parties in cities around the world, interrupted by commercials for knockoff NASA merchandise. The most striking footage was of
three guys about his age in Paris, dancing in a fountain with a topless girl, her breasts made rectangular by the censor’s blurring. The guys were wearing matching shirts with a NASA logo. They got to dance in a fountain with a naked French girl,
and
they got matching shirts? That was incredibly unfair.

He jumped off the hotel mattress, checked his dead bolt, and used a pants hanger to pinch the curtains together so there wasn’t a gap. Then he stripped to his underpants and danced with the crazy Parisians, throwing his pale arms over his head. The TV news switched to a celebration in Iowa City involving a scary chicken—the mascot for some local sports team, no doubt. Yuri flapped his arms and clucked and leaped between his bed and the chair. The big chicken shook its tail feathers at the camera, and Yuri turned and shook his butt back at it.

He wasn’t sure if he was going stir-crazy, or regular crazy.

He flipped off the TV and flopped on the bed. Dovie and Lennon should be stopped for the night by now. Lennon would have insisted on it—there’d be only so much of her driving that he could take.

Dovie answered on the second ring.

“You’re not driving?” he said.

“No. We’re in a cheap little motel with no handicapped showers.”

He’d never even thought about that. “Is Lennon okay?”

“Oh, he’s been screaming a lot.” Yuri laughed. “As for the hotel, I just helped him wash up. He’s shaving now.”

“I got hotel information for Detroit,” he said, and told her
where he’d be staying. “I’ve been imagining you driving there, all your rings refracting sunlight.”

“Hey, Yuri? Do you dream in color?”

He hesitated for a moment. He didn’t usually remember his dreams. “I don’t know.”

“I dream in color and I remember in color and I hope in color.”

“What color is hope?”

“I hope in all the colors,” Dovie said. “That’s what makes it hope.”

“I don’t really understand that.”

“Nobody does.” She was quiet for a moment, but Yuri could hear her breathing. “I feel like I was the whole color wheel as a kid. And growing up means losing some of that.”

“Like your art teacher said?” Yuri thought of her cookie jar,
Dreamland
, and the teacher’s complaint that it was too vivid.

“Yeah. That’s why I wear the rings. I’m trying to hold on to the color, literally and figuratively.” Her sigh was soft in his ear. “If you can only keep some, how do you choose?”

“Maybe by expiration date?” Yuri said.

“We’re not talking about paint!”

Yuri clutched his head. “I hate words. So unpredictable.”

Dovie snorted softly, then said, “I want to keep all of me, and I don’t think you get to do that. I think becoming an adult means leaving part of you behind.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. But he finally understood that they weren’t talking about paint.

“I don’t know how to be me and be an adult,” Dovie said.

Yuri stared at his naked legs. “I don’t know how to be kid.”

“Yeah, we know,” Dovie said. “We picked up on that.”

“Hey, do you have computer with you? There’s painting I want you to see,” Yuri said.

“Seriously?”

“Yes!” He was incredibly proud of himself. “There’s copy in building on my campus.”

“Len! Give me your phone. Yuri says so.” He could hear Lennon’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. “He’s a genius and he wants me to have your stuff. Deal with it.”

“Run image search for Kandinsky’s painting,
Squares with Concentric Circles
.”

“Got it,” Dovie said. “I know this one.”

“Kandinsky painted with many colors, and he was adult. You should keep all your colors, Dovie.”

“You found an inspirational piece for me. Thank you.” He beamed. “Although I want desperately to free the circles.”

“No! It’s very symmetrical painting. That’s why I like it.”

“Wow,” Dovie said. “Are we arguing about art?”

“Yes,” Yuri said. “I am Mr. Versatile.”

Dovie laughed. They talked for a couple more minutes, then she handed the phone off and Yuri listened to Lennon’s tales of highway woe. Then he wrapped up in the sheet and fell asleep.

The next morning a couple of guards picked him up at his hotel.

“Kevin Decker,” the guy said, shaking his hand.

“Azenet Linares,” the woman said. “FBI.”

Yuri introduced himself, even though it seemed pointless. They knew who he was.

“We’re your security detail while you’re in Detroit,” Decker said. “Dr. Fletcher asked us to stop by JPL before we go to the airport.” Yuri shrugged and followed them to their car. They didn’t talk on the way in. Clearly neither Decker nor Linares was going to make the Olympic small-talk team.

Karl Fletcher was standing in the JPL parking lot, leaning against his car, arms folded across his chest. Neither of his guards said anything, so Yuri got out and walked over to the NEO director. Fletcher stuck his hand out, and Yuri hesitated a moment, then shook it.

“You know, if you ever want a job here, you’ve got it.”

“I already did my job here. Now I want to go home.”

The director shrugged and looked away. “Had to try.” He reached in through the open window of his car and picked something up off the seat. “Here, I have a souvenir for you.” He handed it to Yuri. Yuri turned it over in his hand for a moment, not placing it. It was a small board with numbers, and some exposed electronic equipment and clipped wires on the back.

“Is this …”

“Yeah, it’s the keypad from outside my office. Instead of having it reprogrammed, I just took it off and told them to get me a new one.” He grinned. “I wanted to get you something you knew how to use.”

Yuri laughed. “I’ll treasure it. It doubles my souvenir
collection.” He turned the keypad over in his hand and shook his head. “I’m sorry I didn’t get anything for you.”

“Are you kidding me? In addition to the planet, you’ve given me a case of heartburn that’s gonna last for years.”

Decker and Linares drove Yuri to the airport, getting him through security with the flash of a badge. He scored a window seat on the plane and spent the flight looking at America turn below him. An asteroid’s eye view. The guards hustled him through the Detroit airport, into a rental car, and then to a hotel off the highway ramp.

He wanted to save a clothes-shopping trip as a potential opportunity to break away and head for the Ambassador Bridge that led into Canada. But he was wearing his black suit, which he’d sent to the cleaners while in Pasadena. Everything else was filthy. He had stuffed his champagne-soaked gray suit in the trash.

So they drove him to a department store and stood back while he bought another gray suit and three dress shirts, jeans and a blue T-shirt, socks, and underwear. He bought a pair of black sneakers, too, in case he needed to do any sneaking at night. He’d run over a roof in dress shoes, and never wanted to repeat the experience. He still had cash the Russian government had given him when he flew out of Moscow—but not much. He had money of his own, but he wasn’t sure how to access it in America. He’d probably need Decker and Linares’s help, and that could prove awkward.

In the hotel, he changed into jeans and the T-shirt, and sat at the edge of the bed for a moment, trying to decide what color socks to wear with black casual shoes.
This is something a normal teenager would know. Or maybe this is something a normal
teenager wouldn’t care about
. He threw caution to the wind and went with navy.

Decker and Linares were in their own rooms, flanking his. He could hear occasional soft
thunk
s as they moved around, pulling chairs out, shutting dresser drawers. He flipped on the television and caught the last period of a hockey game, then ordered dinner from room service and kept the television on, but muted. Not as good as Gregor Kryukov, but still company. He ate at a little round table by the window, the curtains open, looking out at the city, eyes following people on the sidewalks, feeling a faint sense of abandonment when they would disappear behind doors, or into the labyrinth of a parking garage.

After eating, Yuri flipped open his briefcase and tossed a pad of paper on the table. He bent over it, writing a single neat calculation. A billion people lived in the Western Hemisphere. He had two friends: Dovie and Lennon. He wrote it as a ratio on the pad: one in every 500 million people would talk to him. An equation of loneliness. But not a solution. Were there things that couldn’t be solved mathematically?

He raked a hand through his hair. He felt like he was cracking up. The intense pressure of the work, of dealing with Simons, of navigating through a strange land with a strange language … Hell,
Russian
wasn’t even his language. His mother tongue was math.

He craved the Nobel. He’d
earned
it. The asteroid almost took his opportunity away. But his theories had destroyed his competition, and his antimatter had destroyed the asteroid. He had to be a shoo-in with the Nobel committee now.

And in Moscow, Fyodor Laskov was rooting through his flash drives.

When did life get easy?

He traced the ratio he had written, over and over, repetition making the lines bold. He was lonely. He’d always been lonely. Maybe he’d been too busy to notice much before, or maybe he’d just gotten used to it.

“I’m lonely,” he said out loud. He told himself because there was no one else to tell.

He turned back to the television and saw Fletcher shaking hands with the American president. He grabbed the remote and tapped the volume up as the camera cut back to a blond anchor and his own face in the upper corner of the screen. It was his staff photo from Moscow State, and for the briefest moment he didn’t recognize himself.