And then the Hyatt decided to cut loose. She—for there was a slender femininity about her—lowered her hazel eyes, ignored the spaghetti strap that had fallen promiscuously off her pretty shoulder, and then, in a move of such dazzling brilliance that the enraptured sun turned rainbow every glittering piece of her broken heart, she jumped across the sea.
38
My Mother Will Be Your Mother
Someone was fondling me, and I didn’t like it at all. I turned over on one side and felt a moist clam crunch beneath me. A disgusting male mouth, all turmeric and bad teeth, was breathing down my nose. “My hand!” the mouth said. I opened my eyes to face a man I can only describe as polluted. And in pain.
“Sorry, fellow,” I said. I rolled off his hand and he clutched it, crying and trying to unbend the fingers, which, in my dazed state, seemed as green and squirmy as the legs of a grasshopper. “Ooofah,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my intact pale squishies. Was I still on the Sevo Terrace? What the hell had happened? The lanza, for one thing. And then…Some strange memories swished about, filling my head with vapor trails. But the trails all led to one place: to the tentacles of the Sevo Vatican unfurling outward, as if to embrace me, one orange clump of stucco in particular somersaulting toward my happy, stoned, unflinching face. I raised my hand toward the bridge of my nose and felt a dark, deep, caved-in nasal pain. A hump had swollen on one part of it, but there was also a new emptiness underneath, a concavity, making me feel, in some ways, like a gentile. I stopped playing with my nose and looked upward at the city around me.
The city was finished.
The skyscrapers of the International Terrace were still standing, but their facades had been entirely stripped of glass, leaving only the joist-and-girder skeletons underneath. In their new incarnations, the buildings looked like charred model showrooms for disposable Western furniture. The Hyatt was no longer a magical destination for the city’s priciest hookers, but rather, an open-faced checkerboard of five hundred squares, each marked by an identical queen-size bed, cherry-wood dresser, and marble-topped desk. The office towers, on the other hand, were a complex geometry of scrambled workstations and blasted modular units, a dizzying white-collar crush akin to the world’s most difficult flowchart. But beneath this sophistication lay a simple, exposed fact: the West, when stripped bare, was essentially a series of cheap plastic components, pneumatic work chairs, and poorly framed motivational posters. The towers that had risen over the city as a watermark of Euro-American civilization were work hives and nothing more. As quickly as they had been put together, they could be taken apart. Already, teams of adventurous local alpinists were mounting the shorn facades of the towers and hauling down flat-screen televisions and gleaming Hyatt toilet fixtures by means of an ingenious pulley system they had rigged up in a matter of hours.
Beneath the International Terrace, the Svanï Terrace had taken the brunt of the falling debris, the Moorish-style opera house covered in glistening shards of green glass and splattered dark blue by an infinity of exploding toner cartridges. Six Svanï churches had been set on fire and were smoldering evenly across the terrace like the smokestacks of some previously undiscovered industry. On the Sevo Terrace, the dome of the Sevo Vatican resembled an egg cracked down the middle by means of the world’s heaviest spoon. The tentacled columns had crumbled entirely; from this day forward, the church’s storied octopus shape would exist only on the pages of Soviet-era guidebooks and the reverse side of the hundred-absurdi (US$.001) note.
I got up and walked toward the waterfront, thinking, improbably, of washing the blood from my face amid the oily swirls of the Caspian. I moved along carefully, for there were people everywhere in various stages of injury and distress. I didn’t know it yet, but the Hyatt and the office buildings had been evacuated completely before being hit by an afternoon’s worth of rocket-propelled grenades and artillery shells. Most of the casualties were Gorbigrad and countryside refugees trying to take shelter in the terraces below. I avoided the eyes of the gently rocking citizens still crouching instinctively on the ground. The scene around me had reached a perfectly abject equilibrium among those quietly bleeding to death and those stumbling ahead looking for water and some trace of authority.
I walked toward the docks, the sun either setting or rising over the oil fields, it was impossible to grasp which. A woman in her forties approached me. She had gold teeth and a clean Russian accent. “How do we get out of this circle?” the woman asked, her tone as soft and ponderous as the big bosom that she proudly held aloft. “This karma that’s been dealt to us?”
“Good question,” I said, looking up at the high-rise remains of the International Terrace. I didn’t want to mention the fact that I never really believed in karma, that I thought most events were simply the outcomes of discrete actions taken by individuals, corporate entities, and nation-states. But how do you say that to a common person without sounding like a wisenheimer?
The woman followed my gaze up to the rump of the defunct Daewoo Building. “Oh, those,” she said. “I don’t really care what happens to the foreigners. Our lives will be hell with or without them. Do you want to hear my story?”
“Um,” I said. I was coming off my lanza high, and I wanted to get right back on.
“Don’t worry, it’s a short story. I can tell that you are an important man and that you are expected all over town. Generally speaking, I earned thirty dollars a month working for the railways ministry. Until the trains stopped running. Then my son got drafted into the Sevo forces before he could take his magister exams. And we’re ethnic Russians. What do we care who wins, the Sevo or the Svanï? And then my husband left me. I want to marry again, but there are no more normal men left. If you know of a good man, please tell me.” She looked up and down my well-fed profile and brushed her sparse reddish hair back seductively. Did she consider me a good man? Given her circumstances, maybe I was. I tried, as a common courtesy, to picture her with her skirt hiked up to her waist while I took her from behind, but nothing was registering. Where was my Nana, anyway? Safe at home, I assumed. Surrounded by armed men.
A little girl ran up to us and clutched at the woman’s leg. She was of that age when all children get to look sleek and confident, a tanned summertime face and a bun of straw hair held back by a bonnet, and yet there was something mousy and unkind in her smile. I noticed that her feet were dirty and unshod. “Where are your sandals, dear?” I murmured. “There’s broken glass everywhere.”
The woman started whispering violently into the girl’s ear. “Talk nicely,” she said. “Talk intelligently to the good man. Don’t be a stupid little one. Don’t make things up.”
The girl turned away from me and shook her head. She buried her face in her elbow and made some indecent noises. “What a cute one,” I said. “What’s the matter? You don’t want to talk to your Fat Uncle? Well, don’t be scared. The war will be over soon, and then we’ll all go home and play with our kittens.”
The woman gave the child a nasty bump forward with her knee. “Yulia, talk to the nice man!” she commanded. “Children are difficult,” she said to me, “but at least you can teach them things. She’s my youngest. Five years old. She’s a bit slow. My two sons, now, they’re a real treasure. One has a bronze medal in school, and the other is clever like an oligarch.”