At the far edge of the driveway, beneath a sign reading DANGER: LOW OVERHEAD CLEARANCE, a group of men had been assembled at gunpoint. They stood there with a terrible resignation, their ties hanging limply around their necks, arm hair glistening beneath their short sleeves, some of their eyes already swollen shut, presumably from rifle blows.
“There has been an attempted Sevo putsch,” the colonel explained to me. “We’ll take care of it in a few minutes. Go back to the hotel, Misha.”
I ran as quickly as my weight allowed and burst headlong into the chilled Hyatt lobby. Alyosha-Bob and Larry Zartarian caught me in an embrace, and we all fell to the marble floor.
“You have to… You have to…” I said, scrambling all over them, my hands flopping up and down as if I were swimming toward a distant lighthouse.
“There’s nothing… There’s nothing…” both of them were saying in answer. “There’s nothing we can do.”
I spotted Josh Weiner among a clutch of oil workers, their hands filled with afternoon beer mugs. “Josh,” I cried. “Josh, help me. They’ve got Sakha.”
The diplomat was looking deep into his palms, which he had stuck out in front of him. He turned his hands over carefully, never shifting his downward gaze.
“Josh!” I said. Timofey leveraged my weight with his and brought me to my feet.
I hobbled over to Weiner, but he silently turned away from me.
“We’ve already filed a protest,” I heard him say.
“The people they’re going to shoot… they’re not rebels. They’re all democrats!”
“Did you hear what I just said, Vainberg?” Weiner grated through his teeth. “We’ve filed a protest.”
I turned around and made for the sunlight. “Misha, no!” Alyosha-Bob shouted, throwing himself upon me, but I knocked him out of my way with one enormous squishy fist.
I emerged onto the driveway to the sound of angry male voices. “On the ground!” the soldiers were yelling to Sakha and his cohorts. I felt them. I felt the soldiers with their warm ethnic blood and clan loyalties, their adolescent swagger and inbred psychoses, their made-up heraldry of lamb pie, plum brandy, and a hairy virgin for the wedding feast.
“On your knees!” the soldiers shouted.
The men, some of them heavy, others bestowed with an academic’s lack of physical grace, found it difficult to arrange themselves in this tenuous position. Several were tipping over and had to be dragged up by their collars. The soldiers had fallen in line behind them, one soldier to a man, a ratio that did not bode well.
Sakha’s eyes fixed on me. There were tears on his face; I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. “Misha,” he shouted to me. “Mishen’ka, please. Tell them to stop. They will listen to a man like you. Please. Say something.”
I felt Alyosha-Bob’s hand tugging on my sleeve, his little body pressing into mine. “Golly Burton!” I yelled. “KBR!”
The soldiers looked to Colonel Svyokla, who nodded. They shot the men through the back of the head, the bodies of their victims jerking up in unison with the discharge, then hitting the driveway with tremendous speed, a cloud of loose gravel swirling around them.
The spent bullet casings rolled down the driveway to my feet. A dozen bodies lay on the ground.
19
My Gray Reptile Heart
Forty stories above the war, civilization à la Hyatt enclosed us.
Generators hummed deeply within the skyscraper, allowing the illusion that we were on an American spaceship floating past the tanks and armored personnel carriers, the fake Irish bars and Royal Dutch Shell oil platforms, toward some remarkable and disingenuous Hollywood conclusion. “Everybody into the pool! It’s party time!”
I dialed, and misdialed, and dialed again Dr. Levine’s number. Finally the good doctor came on the line, coughed, sneezed (seasonal allergies again), hacked, and wished me a good day. “Dr. Levine, emergency,” I said. “I’m in Absurdsvanï Republic. I’m in great danger. Terrible things. Please advise me—”
With great patience and analytic equipoise, Dr. Levine beseeched me to calm the fuck down. “Now, where is this place?” he asked.
“Have you been watching the news?”
“I saw the news last night.”
“So you heard about the civil war.”
“What civil war?”
“In Absurdsvanï. In the capital. They’ve sealed off the airport. And they shot my friend in the back of the head.”
“Okay, let’s start from the beginning.” Dr. Levine sighed. “What is this Absurdsvanï?”
“Absurdsvanï is on the Caspian Sea.”
“Which is where, exactly? My geography’s a little off.”
“The Caspian Sea? It’s, you know, south of Russia, near Turkmenistan—”
“Where?”
“Near Iran.”
“Near Iran? I thought you were still in Moscow last time you called.”
“St. Petersburg.”
“Still, Iran must be a great deal farther off than Moscow. What are you doing there?”
I explained in so many words that I had traveled to Absurdistan to buy European citizenship off a crooked Belgian consular official after nailing my dead father’s young wife. A reproachful silence followed. “Is this a legal way to get citizenship?” Dr. Levine asked.
“Well,” I said. “ ‘Legal’ is a relative word…”
You son of a bitch, I thought. How dare you suggest that I shouldn’t avail myself of every last chance to get out of Russia when your own great-grandparents probably bribed half the czar’s men in the Pale of Settlement and then sneaked out in a mail bag, just to make sure their descendants could lounge on a fine walnut-trimmed Eames chair on the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street, issuing half-baked censorious statements to the insulted and injured and collecting US$350 an hour for the privilege? But instead of saying this, I started to cry.
“Let’s go through the important questions first,” Dr. Levine said. “There seem to be a lot of people being shot to death or blown up by land mines in your recent past. So let me ask you: Are you in a safe place? Is your life in any immediate danger? And, given the possibility that you may now experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress such as feelings of detachment, anger, and helplessness, do you think you can make rational decisions that will keep you safe in the future?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, choking off my sobs to concentrate. “My friend Alyosha-Bob is trying to get us out of here. He’s very smart, you know.”
“Well, that’s positive,” Dr. Levine said. “In the meantime, you should spend your time constructively. Try to occupy yourself as you did in Moscow. If it’s safe to do so, go for a walk or do some exercise. This type of activity, combined with three milligrams of Ativan a day, should lower your anxiety level.”
“Do you think I can really—”
“Look, why don’t you just try to relax?” Dr. Levine said. I could hear him slurping on his beloved citrus shake with vitamin boost, the modern equivalent of the analyst’s cigar. “Just don’t get so worked up,” he said.
“Try to relax? How do I do that? That’s like trying to drink my way to sobriety.”
“You know what helps another patient of mine when he gets all worked up? He goes out and buys a suit. Why don’t you go out and buy a suit, Misha?”
“I’m too sad to buy a suit,” I whispered.
“What else comes to mind about that? About your sadness.”
“No one cares about me, not even you, Doctor,” I said. “I saw a nice democrat killed in front of me, and I try to grieve the best I can for him, but I can’t. And I try to grieve for my papa, but nothing, as you say, ‘comes to mind about that.’ And I try to be good, I try to help people, but there’s no way to be good here, or if there is, I don’t know it. And I’m scared, and I’m lonely, and I’m unhappy, and I’m chastising myself for being scared, and lonely, and unhappy, and for being alive for thirty years and having nobody, not one soul save for Alyosha, who would care for me. I know there are people in New York and Paris and London who have the same problems, and that I shouldn’t feel exceptional by comparison, but everything I do and everywhere I go, it’s all wrong, wrong, wrong. And it can’t just be me. I need to know that it’s not just me. I need to hear that I’m better than this. I wake up in an empty bed and I look at my heart and it’s gray. Literally. I take off my shirt, I pick up my breast, and my heart’s all leathery and gray like a reptile’s.”