Are you afraid of falling to your death?
I’m enjoying your company.
Pasha shoved his arm under Robert’s nose, pointing to a crescent-shaped scar on the inner wrist. That’s Yerevan.
Robert laughed. And I’ve always considered myself a nonviolent man, he said.
Arm flipped — bite marks. Tomsk.
I took you to Tomsk?
Where didn’t you take me?
Arkhangelsk?
You mean Talagi Airport? Twice.
As the city’s leading specialist in clinical neurology, Robert had been ordered by the Ministry of Health to constantly engage his phobia, which, considering Soviet aviation statistics, one would be hard-pressed to call irrational. He gave consultations and seminars in small towns, but he also paid visits to the central hubs, where innovations in the field were taking place. Best of all, he attended to emergency patients in remote villages, flying in dilapidated toy planes equipped with thoughtful holes in the floor — rides were so bumpy the doctors usually vomited. An initial romantic plan to forgo flight and ride the rails proved unreasonable; Robert only had to look at a train in order to be robbed blind. He began pulling Pasha out of class, bringing him along on the flights. Clutching his son’s hand, he could overcome the fear just long enough to enter into the vehicle of fiery torture and death. Stuck in these capsules above the marching clouds, Robert shed poisonous sweat, convulsed, clawed the armrest and the pale forearm of his son. In his university days, Pasha became more reluctant to put his life on pause, and in the fall of 1982, the phobia abandoned Robert, like a neighbor that moved out of the building — the claustrophobic atmosphere dispersed, everyone rejoiced, and a replacement neighbor moved in.
Are you homesick? asked Robert.
Pasha was stripping bark off a wet branch like string cheese. He shrugged. I don’t consider Brighton home.
I didn’t mean Brighton.
Can’t say I’ve thought about it.
Means no.
Probably. I’m a little tired of it all.
Robert hiccupped. It all?
Nothing, I shouldn’t complain.
But you did say you were tired.
Nadia.
Oh.
Having never stooped to the subject of women, they weren’t about to begin now. They had an understanding. Robert didn’t need to know about his son’s emotional or sexual entanglements. He had no advice to give. That part of Pasha’s life could be as fraught as necessary and belonged to Pasha’s future biographer, who’d surely take an avid interest in such matters, probably even amplify, adding her own artistic touches. It was preferable that Pasha maintain a high level of activity and complexity in his personal life. It would be suspicious if a poet didn’t do so. Still, Robert couldn’t help but find it distasteful. Get a wife and stick to her. Robert was starving for news of Pasha’s career, foremost his current literary projects but also about the other poets in Odessa, what they were up to, suspecting that it was delightfully mediocre yet needing the facts in order to condescend responsibly. Pasha was cautious with this information, distributing it in meager doses. At times Robert had to wonder whether withholding didn’t provide his son sadistic pleasure. But occasions when Pasha disclosed generously didn’t go smoothly. When he touched on the Odessa poets and their versified propaganda, Robert was all frothy spittle and dilated pupils. Enthusiastic agreement irritated Pasha. In response to an outpouring of convictions, he demanded thoughtful contradiction or silence. And when he detailed a current project, Robert’s follow-up questions were inevitably concerned with how the undertaking might further Pasha’s standing, because, my dear, one collection of poetry does not an established poet make.
And otherwise, said Robert. How’s the institute?
It looks like I’ll finally be getting that assistant.
You need an assistant? I never had an assistant.
It should’ve happened ages ago, said Pasha, who’d been working at the Filatov Institute of Eye Diseases for a decade, because the rule in Russia, perhaps not exclusively, was the greater the writer, the shittier the day job. The job was just one more thing for which Pasha could thank his father, who for years had treated the epileptic daughter of Amalga Svinovna Allergiskaya, head of the institute (“one of the leading ophthalmology centers of Europe”) and creator of “the first in the country Center of Treatment for Severe Eye Burns.”
Why’s that? It’s busy over there?
I’m busy over there! On top of everything, I’ve been put in charge of a weekly newsletter. Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. I’m the one writing everything — reports of ongoing construction projects, future construction projects, profiles of new equipment, personal accounts—
Personal accounts?
Like success stories, very gruesome, with the same ending tacked on — Thank you, Filatov Eye Institute, for giving me back the ability to see my glorious country in all its fine detail. Something like that anyway, patriotic, good for business. The patients are encouraged to write these. Being illiterate and legally blind doesn’t stop them. Nurses deposit giant stacks on my desk daily. I used to go through them, salvaging anything I could, but now I write them myself, though the guilt of throwing them out makes me read them first.
Let me guess — Amalga Svinovna’s brilliant idea.
She retired. Actually, I believe she moved to Brooklyn. Now the head is Ivan Kopeyk. You may remember him, that small fascistic burn specialist with the cleft lip. He’s singled me out, in a good way. The man has literary pretensions. I’m not complaining, but an hour in his office can be draining. Aside from the assistant, he keeps promising to get me a raise.
Then I take it you’re not even considering…
Considering what? said Pasha.
You know what!
Pasha sighed. Just because I didn’t come the moment you guys beckoned, that doesn’t mean I’m not considering.
I know, said Robert. And it’s not my place. Either way I’ll understand. Whatever you decide.
But they won’t, said Pasha, thumb pointing backward. Even in the middle of a lake, they were over his shoulder.
They will, too, in time, said Robert, pleased. They were the bad guys, he the understanding papa. (Ashamed.)
Pasha leaned over the boat’s edge, wanting a gulp. His mouth was dry, forehead burning. Somewhere along the way, he got distracted — fingers dipped in water, none on his tongue. Am I considering moving here? Either they tiptoe around the subject or they ram right into it, as if their approach could steer my decision, their choice of words or the tone in which they’re said influence the outcome. But this need for techniques only reveals an inherent fallacy, thought Pasha, whose aversion to life-decision discussions arose foremost from his skepticism of the very concept. If decisions existed (he’d never seen one for himself), they certainly weren’t born on the same plane as conversation. Decisions ripened in the moldy darkness of the cellar, whereas articulation needed windows. There’s a lag, thought Pasha, a distinct lag, between the inchoate stirring forces and the perceivable world. But what was he getting at?
Pasha’s lower lip jutted. His eyelids sank. The strength required to keep them lifted was now aiding the mental process. When Pasha thought, bodily functions dimmed significantly. He was the biological antithesis to the concept of multitasking. Robert panicked. He feared that Pasha’s wilting meant that his son had grown desperate for a return to land. Robert began twisting his torso this way and that, hoping to indicate through fruitless motion that he was addressing the issue. Meanwhile the sun spilled like syrup over treetops and it got colder. Wind gathered over the lake, abiding clearly demarcated roadways and traffic regulations as it traveled.