“He looked at Vera’s face. Her skin was so pale, he could see through it. It was full of veins and he could see the bruised color of bones and cartilage holding up her facial features. The holes in her face — her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth — suddenly looked wrong to him. Too big or too deep or too pleading. The fact of what he was looking at — her body — suddenly overcame him. He tried to focus on some small thing that might bring him back to human: A cigarette butt a few inches from Vera’s head. An Anheuser-Busch bottle cap near a graying dandelion poking through the concrete. Water dripping off the corner of the gutter. He looked up to the top of the five-story brick building, past the dung-splattered wall toward a fragment of cloud. Then a sound he knew, Vera’s voice, a voice he felt in his gut. He looked back down, right into her mouth. Her teeth were so small.
“Listen to me, Mikael. She pulled at him with a whisper. You have to take her.
“He shook his head back and forth in a panic, so hard that his glasses flew from his face and landed near Vera. With her free hand, the one not holding the infant, she handed them back. Vera pulled her stained slip back down over her hips.
“I know, Vera said. Too much. You are just a boy. She petted her own chest as if she were reaching to comfort him.
Not wanting to look directly at it, he closed his eyes. He heard differently this way, with his eyes closed. He could hear a fractured rasp nearby, like an animal clawing at garbage. No — not that. Something was wrong with Vera’s breathing.
“Shhhh, Vera said, soothing him.
“His body slackened a little. His aching knees and thighs finally gave in and he shifted his weight to one hip, propping himself on one elbow, stretching his numb legs out sideways, so that he was almost reclining on his side next to Vera. The thing between them stilled and quieted. He almost forgot it was there, except that he couldn’t look away from its mouth as it closed on Vera’s nipple.
“Then Vera started to sing.
“When her voice trailed off, he realized he was smiling — a half smile, his eyes closed, his mind off where boys’ heads go when women sing to them. As if now were like always. But when he opened his eyes, Vera was staring at the sky, her mouth too open, her skin wrong-colored. And the thing, the squirming pinkness of it…
“He stood up. Which took longer than it should have. He stared at it. For a moment, he considered simply turning around and walking away. Instead, he squatted back down and took his glasses off, holding them in the air between himself and Vera.
“Vera?
“He brought a temple close to Vera’s face. Gently, gently, he poked her cheek. Her eyes did not blink the way eyes should blink. Her mouth retained its shape. He put his glasses back on.
“Wherever it was that he’d been born, in that other country with the other language that his mouth was fast forgetting, there were stories. Vera used to tell him the stories. The place he was from was cold, he knew, and they said it was war-torn, like some kind of ripped-up blanket. And he had the impression that death moved easily there, between people and things. It was a place cold enough that dogs were left to freeze in the street. Daughters were dragged off to sheds by soldiers in the night, laughing, vodka-drenched soldiers, the air full of sweat. Sometimes the daughters returned later, with their sight taken from their eyes; sometimes they were sold away forever.
“The sons were turned into dogs — or daughters — too, treated as whatever the soldiers needed the meat of them to be. Some of them were turned into guns, killers of anything for anyone, if they wanted to stay alive.
“He always wondered, the boys they used to be — where did they go? Did they recede into the folds of their brains like a well-tucked secret, something to be retrieved later in life? Was that kind of brutality a universal initiation into the world of men? Or did those inner boys just shrivel and disappear? What happened to them? Not the ones who died; they went to dirt. But the others? Did they go to facilities to be corrected?
“He used to hear his foster father’s voice:
“You should always remember how lucky you are to be here.
“And he remembered Vera’s voice, back in her kitchen:
“Never whine for your fortune. No one likes a boy who cries.
“Now he knelt by her body, his knees grinding on concrete.
“He stared down at the little pig of a thing. It grunted.
“He could see Vera was dead, but he couldn’t think it. He placed his hands over each of her eyelids and shut them, the way people do on TV.
“Then the thing began to wail.
“Shut up, he whispered, looking around, adjusting his glasses. But it continued.
“Shut up, he said louder, and grabbed at the blanket around it, which came loose, and that’s when he finally learned that the difference between a boy and a girl lived between the legs: a soft and tiny patch of skin slit where a penis should be. He stared at it. He looked around again — where were the humans? Nothing. No one. A dog barking far away. He leaned in closer. Closer still, until his face was nearly touching the wriggling infant. He smelled the place where its skin and slit were. Its legs jerking. He winced, shivered, pulled away.
“Piss, he said.
“But then it looked right at him. Silently. Half cradled but half falling from Vera’s limp arm. It looked directly into his eyes, not crying but gasping for air or something. Then, wriggling its little fingers, it reached up to him.
“It could only have been him. Nothing else around them left alive.
“His chest felt inside out. He held his breath. His palms were wet. He felt dizzy, blurry. He closed his eyes and opened them and closed and opened them again.
“Hey!”
A voice he did not know swiveled his head around.
“You there!”
Ethnography 3
The moose here are hairless. The children blush and bloom with rashes when they eat fruit or jam. Calves are born with two heads, and there is a two-headed eagle. In the city, the permafrost is melting; in the forests, the ice is taking strange shapes. The fish in the lake are dead or mutated. Underground nuclear tests. Industrial waste from mining. Heavy metals dumped in the river. For years.
I was a factory cleaning woman for two decades. I did my work standing at the lip of the Lena River, washing out clothes. Where else would I go? I was born here. My mother and her mother and her mother. We were a house of women whose men left the moment they could. Women labor into a void — our work to raise children and husbands and animals, our work keeping home and hearth are not considered employment. My whole life’s labor lives in my hands. I stopped going to work when my hands turned red, my wrists developed lumps, and they never got better.
One day, I was washing the clothes — I remember what was in my hands at that moment, a blue flowered dress — and I looked up, and on the other side of the river, half of the shore just fell away to water. I stopped moving. I held as still as a statue, my washing suspended. Then I saw an entire house get swallowed up by the swollen river, as if the land had just given up or lost its meaning. A dog had been barking in the yard of that house. A babe had been sitting on the ground near the porch. A woman at the door was wiping her hands on her apron when the great rush came and then everything was going to water. I wept so hard.
I stepped back from the washing, from the river, and I walked back to our house. The chickens were squawking. I kept thinking about the dog. The babe. The woman. I wondered how long I would have before the river came for me too. The water comes for all of us, I think, like an answer.