But Volkhov’s eyes met his and they both looked down into each other’s souls and they confirmed in that look that they each were still alive.
The body of Officer Todd Karagin was writhing on the ground. He had been shot in the head.
It looked like the old man was going to collapse, and Clay motioned to him and Volkhov stood up and they both backed away from the body as it kicked and twitched there on the ground. A young boy came up—he could not have been more than fifteen—and he pulled the trigger on his machine pistol hitting Todd’s body three or four more times and eventually, after an agonizing few seconds, the writhing stopped and Todd’s blood ran into the hardwood of the gymnasium in Warwick.
The crowd watched the frenzy at the podium in silence and no one even noticed the weary, haggard traveler helping the old bearded saint off the podium and into a chair at the edge of the crowd.
CHAPTER 9
An hour later Clay and Volkhov were locked in a cell together. Not the cell Clay had been in earlier, not the Tank, but one of the cluster cells where the young boys had been held prior to Clay’s arrival at Warwick Prison.
Clay and Volkhov talked, but only after a moment or two of silence. Upon entering the cell, they’d sat quietly, collecting their thoughts and breathing. Then they had talked. Clay heard more of the old man’s story and he told a bit of his own. They clung to one another in the exhaustion and euphoria that grips two people who have temporarily escaped death together.
Clay did not know Lev Volkhov, but in a strange way, he felt a kinship with the old man. Somehow he even had affection for him, this man he did not know. Like everyone else in America, Clay had been trained to call every idea that flew in the face of the collective talking points a conspiracy theory. But he’d identified with Volkhov’s speech to such an extent that, except for the details about spying and such, the old man could have been reading the text directly from Clay’s heart. This is not merely to point out that Clay felt at peace with the man; it is to notice the more important fact that Clay felt at peace within himself in the man’s presence.
He knew that both he and Volkhov had been on a long journey that had led them here. His own journey had not started on the steps of that Brooklyn brownstone the day after Sandy. He’d been traveling all of his life. Clay thought of friends and loved ones—the ones still alive, and the ones he’d lost—and he imagined telling them the story of this journey. Would they believe it? Who knows. Everyone carries their own baggage into a story.
Some people would hate the things that they’d heard and would reject this old man and his ramblings, and would curse the things that Clay now thought about the world and his countrymen and this life and the way of it. Some might want to lock Volkhov up and others would want to embrace him or stone him or ignore him with the hope that he would just go away. After all, the dialecticians had done their work. Journeys, in the end, are individual things no matter how many people come along on them. His journey had led him to this place and time, and he accepted where he was despite the danger, and he saw in Volkhov a fellow pilgrim on the pilgrimage of truth. Perhaps they had just started too late. Procrastination tends to be the genesis of almost every journey.
This old man with him in his cell had carried burdens and had walked a path that, prior to meeting him, Clay had only read about in books. He’d lived a life of adventure and danger. More importantly, perhaps, the man had lived a life of the mind. He had lived within himself and within his worlds, whichever one he found himself in, in a search for knowledge and truth. His face was lined with intrigue and despair and excitement and frightful loss. He wore a beard that most, even those who lived in a Russian village today, would consider “unkempt” or wild. Despite his higher learning and his brilliant mind he could easily be mistaken for a homeless drunk or an insane philosopher-poet.
Clay could imagine Volkhov as Diogenes lying in the sun when Alexander the Great rode up and said something akin to “I am the great King Alexander!” to which Diogenes had replied, “I am the great dog Diogenes.” Alexander had promised Diogenes anything he wished in the whole world, to which Diogenes had only replied, “I wish you’d get out of my sun.”
He had the look of that. The face of Lev Volkhov aged in wisdom and worry and want, had had enough of king’s shadows.
In the fullness of time, Volkhov wanted to talk, so Clay let him.
“Clay, what I said in that gymnasium was the truth, but it didn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things it was just an old man railing against the darkness of a life lived by lies. Solzhenitsyn, my honored countryman, said ‘Live Not By Lies’ and it took me way too long to heed him. I should have read more Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy and less Marx and Lenin.
Had Clay been in the other world he would have thought about the books in his backpack, of his own influences, of the writers who gave him hope, but he was not, and he didn’t.
“America is more divided than it was before the Civil War… why? Because the third side has presided over a century’s long plan to dumb down the people and to colonize them into thinking that the only answer to every problem must come from government. In my last ditch effort to save a system that really doesn’t want… no more… it doesn’t need saving, I tried to tell the Americans the truth of what is coming. But, like Golitsyn before me—”
“Stop.” Clay interrupted. “There’s that name. I don’t know who he is…”
The old man waved him off and kept talking.
“The Americans believed everything—bought the whole story—except the most important part! They claimed not to believe what is called The Long-Term Deception Strategy. I told my new masters that the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960’s had been faked. I told them that the Perestroika and Glasnost were faked. I told them that the plan was—” he stopped, as if searching for a word, “—that the plan had always been, to break up the Soviet Union and feign a collapse in order to rake in Western aid, weaken the capitalist west, and to eventually destroy America.
“Golitsyn told them this in his book New Lies for Old, written before the collapse in ‘92, and they believed everything but that. So many other defectors told them this, but they would not believe it.”
The old man looked at him, sadly and spread his hands, holding them palms upward as if in prayer.
“Volkhov told them this too, and they could not accept it.”
Clay looked at him and continued to listen.
“But I’ve learned that there are some in the halls of power who are one with those who are in the halls of power everywhere. They are the ones who forced America’s leaders to disbelieve the truth. Because the third side wants the war.
“They want the planet to lose six and a half billion of its inhabitants. They want to save the environment by destroying it, or they want all of the gold, or they want to continue to be the masters of history… I don’t pretend to understand the why completely. I don’t understand why, but in just a couple of decades from now what once was America will be a collection of independent fiefdoms, a balkanized mess of warring kingdoms like medieval Europe. That is what comes next.”
As Volkhov paused, the door opened and Vasily came in slowly with another case of bottled water. Though this cell had a sink, the water system was not currently operating due to the power outages. Clay smiled at him, and Vasily smiled back weakly.