Learning to Swear in America (31 page)

“This is the scientist, on loan from Russia, who was solely responsible for a crucial part of the attack on the asteroid.”

Yuri stared, stunned.

“Director Karl Fletcher says that without the work of this lone scientist, the asteroid would have hit Los Angeles. No one else at NASA’s Near Earth Object Program agreed with Dr. Strelnikov’s analysis, but he courageously stood by his work. And get this—he’s seventeen years old.”

“Incredible story, Caitlyn,” the male anchor said as the camera pulled back to a side-by-side shot. They began to banter about being flattened by the asteroid.

No mention of the hacking. Probably Fletcher didn’t think that reflected well. Yuri hit the “mute” button, but kept staring at the
television. The anchor had presented it in a positive light. Probably that was going to be NEO’s official version, and maybe it had to be to prevent an investigation of Fletcher’s security procedures. Or maybe it was a threat, that if Yuri fought his detention in America, they would reveal what he’d really done—the hacking, the deceit—the chance he’d taken. Except Fletcher had gone out of his way to highlight it as Yuri’s work, as though he was trying to help him.

Why?

Yuri checked his e-mail on his cell phone. There was a message from Gregor Kryukov that had come in hours before.
Yuri, they’ve retired me. I can’t help you. I am so sorry.

“Damn Laskov,” Yuri said in English. Laskov was tying himself to Yuri’s star—that was one thing. But bringing down Kryukov for defending Yuri’s authorship of his work? Kryukov had a towering intellect and brought wit even to his seminar on quantum phase transitions. He was all brain and eyebrows and kindness—and he had lost his job, a sacrifice to Fyodor Laskov’s ambition and political connections. “Damn Laskov,” he said again.

Yuri rose abruptly, grabbed his key card, and left the room. He was three feet down the hall when Linares charged out of her room, almost colliding with him.

“Where are you going?”

“Movie.”

“Movie? You want to see a movie?”

“There was cinema couple of blocks down. We passed it, yes? I’m going to see movie.”

“Which one?” Decker asked behind him.

“Does it matter?” Yuri stuck his chin out fractionally.

Decker and Linares exchanged a look.

“Guess it doesn’t. Yeah, we can see a movie.”

English first person plural: we.

Yuri stalked to the stairwell, passing the workout room. He thought briefly that he might be better off attacking the treadmill, but the TV above the machines was on, and his picture covered it. Different channel, same photo. Russian boy hero. He wanted to sit in the dark, in the back, among strangers. Because he needed to be with people, and this was as close as he could get.

And then the TV showed a photo of Fyodor Laskov, weasel, and son of the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He couldn’t hear the audio, but he didn’t have to. There was a banner at the bottom that said “Laskov-Strelnikov Theory of Antimatter Containment.”

The Russians knew by now that he wasn’t coming back—everyone had been told except him. Laskov could make his play. But Yuri
was
going back, and when he got there he would claim his work as his own—he could prove it, because
he
could understand it—and restore Kryukov to his position.

Yuri turned and kicked the wall hard three times. His foot sank through the drywall the third time, and he gave Linares a hard stare. She seemed completely unperturbed by his display of rage, and somehow that made him angrier. He pulled his shoulders up and stalked to the cinema.

It was lit up, brass trim, dark carpet with a vine pattern, a guy his age in the ticket booth, wearing a white shirt and black pants.
Yuri recognized himself—the age, the shock of blond hair, the dress clothes—and laughed out loud. What was this guy’s worst dilemma? Which movie to sneak into when his boss wasn’t looking?

“Which movie?” the guy asked.

“That one.” Yuri pointed at a poster. One of his favorite actors, and it looked like there’d be car chases.

The guy nodded, took his money, and printed a tiny receipt. Linares kept stride with him as Decker stepped up to pay for the guards’ tickets.

“I don’t need help to watch movie,” Yuri said without looking over.

“You want popcorn?” Linares said.

He started to say no, then changed his mind. Why shouldn’t he? What if he clogged his arteries and had a heart attack in a week? He’d done his life’s work. There was nothing after this. No matter what he did for the next seventy years, his obituary was already written. It was all downhill from here.

“Give me biggest popcorn you have, extra butter, please, and large drink.”

The girl at the snacks counter smiled at him and grabbed a red-and-white paper tub big enough to wash a sweater in. He paid and stalked into the theater.

He sat in the back, in a short row tucked behind the door, in the aisle seat so he blocked the other chairs. Decker and Linares hesitated. Yuri swept his arm sarcastically around the room. Half the seats were filled, and more people were filing in. Linares sat on the end of the long back row, the one in the middle, and angled her
legs toward the aisle so that she could see him over her left shoulder. Decker sat at the other end of her row. He couldn’t see Yuri, but he was next to the far door.

Yuri savagely shoved popcorn in his mouth and wondered how he could need privacy and company at the same time, and so badly.

The theater was three-quarters full when the lights went out and the screen lit up with reminders to turn off cell phones, then commercials featuring attractive young people playing volleyball by open coolers of beer and girls in bikinis washing pickups. By the time trailers for other movies blared, Yuri was tapping his foot on the rope lights along the aisle, thoughts swirling like a star circling a black hole—circling the question he’d been trying to avoid.

Not what he was going to do to Fyodor Laskov. He knew the answer to that.

But what if he had been wrong?

The world would have been destroyed. Dovie and her paint-stained fingers and crazy hair and hippie holidays, but also Moscow, the city where he had been born. The towering banks of lilacs at Gorky Park, the ice cream vendors on the street, wonderful, cantankerous Gregor Kryukov, who had taught him so much, who had started taking him to dinner when he was fourteen, and had treated him as a colleague. Who had taken him to the hockey game where he’d gotten his puck. His mother would be gone. They hadn’t been close in years, but still—she was his
mother
. Then again, Fyodor Laskov would have been gone, too. Yuri snorted softly.

He shouldn’t have hacked in, even if he was correct. He knew that now. It was too much for one person. Too much responsibility. If the other physicists had agreed, that would be one thing. But the way he did it—it was indefensible. He had blundered. Kant said
Do what is right though the world should perish
. Yuri had done what was wrong, so the world wouldn’t perish. Kant had sucker punched him.

In front of him, three teenage girls were leaning in to each other, arguing. One had her cell phone on and was running a search. The glare was distracting. On-screen, Matt Damon was weaving between buildings, avoiding gunshots.

“Shut up! It was Liam Neeson, not Mel Gibson.”

“Mel Gibson is
dead
. Isn’t he?”

Yuri shifted in his seat.

“Ohmygod, you are so stupid.
Stupid
. It was Indiana Jones.”

“Indiana Jones is a character, not a actor. Duh.”

“Well you’re a whore, Britney. Anyway, it wasn’t Indiana Jones, it was Samuel L. Jackson.”

“Samuel L. Jackson is black!”

“What, you’re a racist?”

Yuri coughed quietly.

“
No
. I’m saying he’s black and Indiana Jones is white, and that movie had a
white
guy. Didn’t it?”

“If you weren’t so
stupid
…”

Yuri stuffed his popcorn bucket over the head of the middle girl, the one with the cell phone. She lifted her hands in the air, fingers splayed, elbows tight to her body. He stood up.

“Matt Damon is running in suit. Nobody runs in suit like Matt Damon. I wanted to see this.” The whole audience had twisted to look at him. “And you are arguing about some stupid thing, and calling each other names, and
you could have been dead right now
.” The girl pulled the bucket off her head and popcorn cascaded over her shoulders.

As he leaned toward them, the girls grabbed each other’s forearms and shrank back. “Do you understand that? Giant M-type asteroid was coming at Earth at
seventy-one kilometers per second
. It was going to impact Earth with unimaginable force. You would be dead or dying, choking on dust, freezing.” He started down the aisle toward the screen. Linares rose to block his path. He turned back to the girls, their staring eyes white in the dark theater. “And Indiana Jones isn’t actor; he’s character.”

“See,” one girl said. “I told you so.”

Yuri turned back, saw Linares, and stepped onto an armrest, then ran over seat backs toward the front of the theater.

“You would all be dying! You would be freezing, and crops would shrink. Wither. You,” he said, pointing to an overweight man with his hand poised over a popcorn tub, “you would be dead if it weren’t for me. I saved your life. I saved your greasy fingers.”

Linares exchanged an alarmed look with Decker as the agent trotted down the far aisle.

“I saved your husband! I saved your life! And yours! And yours! I saved
life.
” He balanced on the balls of his feet on the front-row seat backs, threw his arms out and laughed, his shadow wide across the screen. “I saved Matt Damon! I saved his suit!”
He laughed again and jumped to the sticky floor, stumbled, then ran out the front exit below the screen.

Behind him, Linares said, “Shit.”

“Damn, hell,” Yuri shouted, as the door closed behind him.

He ran behind the theater to the block beyond, shouting at startled passersby.

“I saved your life!”
There is no one I will ever meet that I can’t say that to: I saved your life, and I shouldn’t have.

People stopped and moved together, grabbing each other’s arms, gripping hands. Yuri smiled grimly. He was bringing people together. Maybe he was a people person after all.

He ran into a convenience store. The middle-aged man at the cash register reached under the counter. Yuri banged on the Formica. “I saved your life!” He leaned in toward the man’s face and said it again. “I saved your life!” He turned and shouted “I saved your baby!” at a woman holding a stroller handle with one hand and clutching a pack of batteries to her chest. He ran out the door by the restrooms as the front door chimed for Decker and Linares.

A dog was in the alley.

“I saved your paws!”

The dog wagged its tail.

“You’re welcome.”

Yuri pushed open the door of a bar on the corner and ran in. It was dark and had seating in the front, pool tables in the back, and a television hanging over the bar, which ran down the side of the room. The patrons were men in black leather vests, and a few
women with heavy eyeliner and high-heeled boots. Yuri strode to the back.

“I saved your life!” he shouted at a giant man in a Harley T-shirt. The man stroked a forked beard and kept a level gaze on him. Yuri turned to a man with a face pocked with old acne scars. “I saved your life!” He looked at the other players. “I saved your fat ass! I saved your snake tattoo! I saved your ugly girlfriend!”

“It’s that Russian guy,” the forked beard said, throwing a meaty hand toward the television. “The physicist.”

“That right?” the man with the ugly girlfriend said with interest, leaning on his pool cue. “Here?”

“Is right. I’m Russian physicist who saved whole world!” Yuri shouted, throwing his arms wide. It left him completely unprotected as the man handed the pool cue to his girlfriend and launched a fist into Yuri’s solar plexus.

The universe exploded with pain, a big bang that began in Yuri’s ganglia and expanded forever, launching galaxies of light behind his eyes. He crumpled to the floor, smelled beer and the rich iron of blood as he bit his tongue. He struggled to breathe and asteroids hit his face, over and over, and he thought, that’s right—the period after the creation of the universe had a very high level of cosmic collisions. And then a woman was yelling, and he could see high-heeled boots through the stars, and they shuffled backward, and his diaphragm spasmed and he drew a little air into his lungs.

Decker’s face hung over him.

“You all right?”

Yuri sucked in a breath and looked up. The ugly girlfriend was standing behind Decker, fists up like an old pugilist, a smug look below the eyeliner. Pool Cue Guy had floored him, but after that he’d gotten beaten up by a girl.

He nodded, touched his left eye, and winced. Decker grabbed his arm and pulled, and Yuri stood and raised one hand toward the pool players.

“Did I mention that I saved your lives?”

“TV was talking about that,” Pool Cue said. “Boy hero. But you don’t have a cape.”

“Nope,” Forked Beard said. “He doesn’t have reflexes, either.” He chuckled.

Linares was to the side of the door, covering the room with a pistol. No one paid it the slightest attention. By the time Decker pushed him out the door, the crack of pool balls ricocheted through the bar again, and someone was shouting an order to the barkeep.

“That was incredibly stupid,” Linares hissed, shoving the pistol into her waistband. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” Yuri said, licking blood from the corner of his mouth, “that since I bothered to save world, people might shut up during movies.”

“Yeah,” Decker said. “Let’s get you home.”

“Oh!” Yuri said with exaggerated interest. “Moscow?”

“I meant your room.”