“Do you walk there or drive?”
“If it is a school day, I stop on the way home. On weekends, we walk.”
“Do you get old movies or new?”
“Myself, I prefer Westerns,” she said. “For Vadim it is only space movies.”
“This Mr. Wong, he runs the Chinese restaurant as well, doesn’t he? I know how small towns work. Please, tell me your favorite dish, the one you always order.”
She looked at me. “Why do you want to know all this?”
“I’m going to think about you,” I said. “You’re leaving in the morning, and when I wonder how you’re doing, when you visit my imagination, I want to get it right. I need to know what your office looks like. I need to know whether you prefer linguine or fettuccine. What color is your toothbrush?”
She just looked at me.
I said, “I only buy clear toothbrushes, because they seem more sanitary. When I come home, I hang my keys on a peg below a picture of my stepmother. I wash my underwear separately. The presets on my stereo are all tuned to classic rock. Jazz drives me crazy, because I never know what notes they will play next. I don’t recycle. I should, I know, but I don’t.”
I stopped. My breathing was fast, and I paused to search Yulia’s face for signs she’d indulge me. She moved to rock back in her chair, and I let go of the arms.
“Mu shu pork,” she said. “I like the angel hair, but Vadim only eats noodles with shapes, such as elbows and bow ties.”
I smiled. “That was perfect,” I said. “We couldn’t have had a better start.”
Her face was fixed somewhere between flattery and amazement.
“Start?” she asked. “You want more?”
“I want it from the beginning,” I said. “I want to take it from the top.”
* * *
The closing credits of Impossible Journey were playing when we returned, though nobody laughed at the Pomeranian outtakes. The kids had fallen asleep, and the adults were teary, especially Farley and Eggers, who had reddened, stoned eyes and stupid smiles, even as the tears ran. The popcorn bowl was empty, and the room reeked of mushrooms and cheese.
Gerry stood, the venomous expression he’d had earlier replaced now with some brand of sadness and inspiration. Pieces of Keno’s popcorn clung in the folds of his shirt. These he brushed to the floor. “You’ll find yourself on cleanup duty,” he told me, and began rounding up the children.
People roused themselves, stretching and making for the bathroom, mumbling their goodbyes and good nights until we were alone, Yulia and I and her son, who was curled up asleep on the couch.
Yulia stood watching Vadim sleep. She shook her head. “I used to just pick him up when he was like this,” she told me. “When he was little, I would scoop him up, and only later, when we were home and I was putting him to bed, would he wake.”
“What hotel are you staying at?” I asked.
“The Red Dakotan,” she said. She looked deep into my eyes and smiled. “The third floor. The bedspreads are blue. On the wall is a painting of a riverboat. Through the window you can see the dam and the frozen lake behind it. What is the name of this body of water?”
“Lewis and Clark.”
“Yes,” she said. “The explorers.” She nodded at her own recognition, then pulled my arm, to get me to lean over. “I will kiss you now, before we wake him up.”
* * *
Later that night, alone in my cold room, I sat up in bed. A fever had gripped me. My ribs were quivering, and when I tried to stand, I nearly went down. On the sheets, I saw I’d left a sweat angel. When the saliva began pooling in my mouth, I knew I didn’t have much time. Nearly naked, I ran down the hall to the bathroom, wondering if I’d make it. When I burst through the door, Gerry and his kids occupied all the stalls, so I was forced to vomit in the sink I’d cleaned that morning. That’s how we finished out the night, the six of us. You’d think you were done retching, but then you’d hear a child vomit or smell the contents of another man’s stomach, and you’d start anew. No one had even turned on the lights. We voided our stomachs by the red glow of the backup lamps, which hung silently in all public rooms, waiting for the right emergency to turn themselves on.
Chapter Nine
I will now attempt to tell a joke:
A banker must take a business trip. Before he leaves, he asks his neighbor to help watch his home and family while he’s gone. Days pass, and after the banker calls home to find no answer, he rings the neighbor.
“How are things going?” the banker asks.
“Just awful,” the neighbor says. “First of all, your cat died.”
“Oh, God, don’t say that,” the banker says. “Man, that hurts. Did you have to say it like that? Couldn’t you have eased the blow a little? Maybe you could have started by saying the cat wasn’t feeling well. Or, better yet, you could have said the cat was playing in a tree, and the cat was having the best time of its life chasing a squirrel higher and higher through the branches, until it got stuck at the top. Maybe you called the fire department, who brought the ladder truck, and a rescue worker went to the very top, and could almost reach the cat, but at the last second the cat slipped and… You know what I’m saying. You could at least tell me they took him to the vet and there was a struggle.”
“You’re right,” the neighbor said. “Gosh, I’m sorry.”
“God, my wife must be a wreck,” the banker said. “How is she?”
“Well,” the neighbor began. “Your wife was chasing a squirrel in a tree…”
As you can see, I am not so much the jokester. Humor is a poor mode of discourse, and I discourage it now. My point, however, is well illustrated. I have set out to speak the tale of the end of my culture, and I must admit I am more like the banker than the neighbor. There are grim scenes ahead, and perhaps it is true that I have become carried away with the details of this story in a feeble attempt to postpone relating what I now must. Now the dark ink must flow.
It was a normal week at the prison after Yulia left. The fever that gripped us was savage, to say the least, and, concerning my gastrointestinal tract, it took no prisoners. Luckily, the illness left as quickly as it struck, though my lips remained red and swollen and a certain darkness lingered under the eyes. The only other calling card was a cough that would not go away. Misfortunes happen.
I found it best to shift my focus to the tasks at hand, and get to work. There was a terrific amount of cleaning to do. I procured some yellow gloves and a couple squirt bottles, then made a crash cart to hold all my cleaning gear, one I could wheel anywhere. Farley had filed several motions concerning jurisdiction and precedents, and he hoped to have some “results,” whatever those would be, in the coming weeks. I cleaned in the mornings, tackled my correspondence to Yulia midday, and, evenings, I donated my services as a tenor in the Club Fed Follies, as the boys called themselves. The group’s signature number was the doo-wop hit “Cathy’s Clown,” and I was the only one who could nail the falsetto refrain.
After these first days of regaining my strength, I decided it was time to begin my rotation as a reader for the blind. The prison had a model program in which books were read twenty-four hours a day, broadcast on AM radio across the Midwest and southern Canada by way of the old university radio tower. One of the inmates came down with the flu, so I was given his slot — prime time, just after the dinner hour each evening.
In the afternoon I went to the library, looking for a candidate to read that night. Conrad and Melville came to mind, though I knew Trudy would be on my back if I didn’t pick a female author. I couldn’t exactly name a book I’d read by a female writer, so I surfed the stacks, curious to see what these woman novelists had to offer. At one of the reading tables, I saw Gerry, head bent, a host of books about dog sledding spread before him. The only thing I’d ever seen him read was a pornographic periodical named Shaved Sniz, but here were journals of the old Yukon postal teams, racing through fields of snow so deep only the tops of trees could be seen. One of the Iditarod books looked interesting, as did Winter of Darkness, Summer of Light, which contained grand pictures of Russian researchers crossing Antarctica via high-speed, stripped-down dog sleds. I saw that Gerry had traced one of these pictures out of the book, except that, in front of the sled, instead of huskies and malamutes, he’d drawn a chain of little dogs, three dozen deep. In the book, the Russians’ faces were both fine and hale, which made me think of Yulia, and I slipped off before Gerry noticed.