Brainfire (5 page)

What was he anyhow?

A physician—yes.

He wasn't a hired thug, a technician with a needle. His business wasn't that of reducing old women to a state of wreckage from which there could be no return, no wholeness; it wasn't up to him to take a person and reduce that person to splinters. Damn them, he thought.

Damn them—

He turned his face away from the papers. Flecks of snow, maddened crystals, could be seen falling away from the window, disturbed by the wind and the motion of the train. He saw his own yellowy reflection in the glass. TdT, he thought. Leukemia. Therapy protocols.

They
.

He remembered the face of Professor Yeremenko, his rather elaborate room at Moscow University, the man's contagious nervousness, the palm of one hand forever stroking a marble paperweight, a Bulgarian souvenir; he remembered Yeremenko's stumbling presentation, the stuttered proposition, the hooded reference to Mrs. Blum. There had been sunlight in the room, particles of dust shifting in an orange column of light, the room itself the color of a decaying tangerine.

It will take you out of Moscow for a while, Domareski.

Yes, Domareski thought.

Yes—

Mrs. Blum has, hmmm, special talents
.

Domareski had heard himself refuse; he remembered the weight of his own negative response, how the refusal had somehow lain trapped in that orange room.

I don't think I make myself plain, Domareski
.

How so?

They have indicated that there are no choices. You hare been selected for this, hmmm, special duty
.

Domareski recalled a fragment of ash in Yeremenko's beard; it had hung from a coiled hair like a small white flake. Why recall that now? A detail, banal, nothing. Special duty. He should have known that Yeremenko hadn't clambered to the top of the heap because of his humanitarian abilities; he should have understood that Yeremenko's summit had been reached only by circumnavigating the scientific dissidents and adhering,
clinging
, to the Party line. To that great nipple of the State. There was neither room nor space for rejection, for refusal. You did what you were told.

No choices. Special duty. Don't you understand? It is a simple case of administering morphine. It shouldn't upset you.

Domareski stared into the light bulb until his eyes hurt.
They. Them
. All his life he had been conscious of anonymous forces shaping the patterns of things. The creations of paradigms, matrices, obligations by which you lived. To stand up against them took a special bravery, didn't it? The courage of history, the simple courage of the fool: stand up and be counted—but the count was small, the lure of the labor camp, oblivion in the permafrost, overwhelming.

He saw the needle go into the old woman's arm. What did she think it was? A simple pain-killer? a tranquilizer? Something inoffensive?
An increased dosage
. That's all it would take, he thought. A mistake, he would say; an accident, a terrible accident. You don't have the courage to be a fool, he thought. You don't even have that, do you? You don't have the courage to kill her before … before whatever.

He tried to read Glazkov's paper again. The words streamed together in a sequence of nonsense. A sudden draft caused him to shiver, caused the papers to rise very slightly from the table.

A door had been opened behind him.

Quickly he turned his face to look.

There were shadows beyond the light, uncertainties. Was it Andreyev and his wretched assistant? They moved forward but still the reach of the table lamp did not define them.

“Andreyev?” he said.

It was, even if he did not know it at the time of asking, the last word he would speak in his life. One of the shadows moved in an abrupt, quirky fashion, a hand raised in the air. Domareski saw a simple flash in the darkened dining car, and as he felt a violent pain in his skull, as he experienced a remote awareness of bloodstains flying across Glazkov's papers, he lowered his face to the table linen, down and down and down—a sinking man whose last gesture was to overturn the table lamp, as if what he wanted most was to hurry the onset of his own darkness.

Like a flawed piece of apparatus in an experiment that has gone quite wrong, a cracked retort, a broken pipette, something no longer useful in laboratory terms, his body was thrown into the snowdrifts between Biysk and Slavgorod.

3

1.

Rayner sometimes thought his wife made love with one eye fixed to some imaginary stopwatch, that she handled his flesh as if she were wearing surgical gloves. She seemed both intimidated by the physical act and aloof from it at the same time. He thought of someone performing an operation: open-thigh surgery. Her orgasms were quick, strangulated little things, a brief outcry and then a slide into a silence that suggested embarrassment. An atavism of sorts, he imagined: Isobel, Victorian wife, raised on a diet of conjugal manuals, wifely etiquette, how to behave with a lustful husband during “the bad time” of the month.

He rolled away from her and looked at his wrist-watch on the bedside table. Seven-thirty: a sexual duration of seven minutes. Turning back, he glanced at her. She had the kind of beauty that suggested something rare preserved in formaldehyde; alabaster afloat in crystal liquid. She turns heads, he thought. When she strolls through a room—ah, how the heads do turn. But at the heart of this beauty there were chips of ice. Now, drawing the stiff linen sheet up over her small breasts, she lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke.

“These damned sheets are so cold,” she said. “This entire hotel's such a drag.”

Saying nothing, Rayner got out of bed and went to the window, wondering if the room were bugged, if perhaps somewhere a concealed camera had recorded the recent marital contrivance. He looked out into the sleet, a sky of slate, electrical conductors swaying on the tops of buildings; in the distance, rising like slabs, were apartment blocks. You could think of better cities to be in than Moscow, he thought. You could think of French food, Italian wine, the Aegean Sea; instead what faced you, from the confines of this monstrous hotel, was a city trapped in its own dreariness.

He turned to look at her, conscious of his own nakedness through her eyes: it was not a point of view that entirely pleased him. A little flab—less than some men his age, but that was a cold comfort; the pectoral muscles beginning to sag. Do I end up as one of those men with
boobs
? Bermuda shorts, Palm Springs, an electric golf cart, and tits,
tits
of all things? Isobel blew a perfect oval of smoke and Rayner had the odd desire to shove his middle finger through it.

Isobel sighed and, still clutching the white sheet to her breasts—as if Rayner were not her husband but some stranger who had improperly hauled her ashes—stepped out of bed and went in the direction of the bathroom. He listened to running water, pipes knocking. You fall in love at twenty-two, he thought. You think she is the most angelic thing ever to have been set down to grace the planet, her sweetness is almost
terrifying;
and somewhere down the length of fifteen years you lose it. How? Consider, Rayner. Does it sift through the old hands like your proverbial sand? Does it reach this state of affairs through the relentless accumulation of marital detritus? Or is it something even more simple, more sickening—like waking one day to find the fever forever gone?

Ah. God knows. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked once more at his watch. There was a meeting with Lindholm in half an hour; in the course of the meeting Lindholm would sit with the kind of expression of discomfort that suggests a man is seated on his hands. Let it be. Lindholm, even here in the Soviet Union, was still the Vice President; and somehow you had to overlook the fact that he was a Kansas hick who, Rayner imagined, would have been in his element staring at storage silos or calculating porcine percentages.

“The plumbing is shitty,” Isobel said.

Rayner closed his eyes. Sometimes he sent himself back through time to a point when he had been a young man on the lower rungs of that seemingly endless ladder known as the State Department; this younger Rayner—darkly handsome, trim, desirable—had a gorgeous loving wife, fine prospects, a future that suggested the American Dream could, with the right kind of luck and labor, become a reality. He invented his own time-travel device, his capsule; and it made Isobel tolerable for a time. But it also brought regret, a sense of—ah, shit, things could have been different, Rayner. Things could have been somewhat better.

In a white bathrobe, she stepped back into the bedroom. She said, “It beats me why we worry so much about a country that doesn't even have a decent plumbing system.” And she opened the closet, fingering various dresses that hung in a shimmering array.

A plumbing system, Rayner thought. It's all a question of priorities, my love. They regard the transport of human effluence as being of less strategic merit than the megaton capacity of an ICBM. How do I explain that to you, darling?

She lit another cigarette and stared at her dresses. “What time is the dinner?” she asked.

“Nine,” Rayner said.

“God.” She touched the various garments. Rayner knew that she hated them all, that she was given to a kind of vicious dislike of dresses whose only crimes were that they had been worn once. At times, he perceived his life in terms of Isobel's charge accounts.

“The whole thing's preposterous anyway,” she said. She was holding a black silk dress against her body, turning this way and that in front of the mirror. The black material was magnificent against her pale skin and Rayner, despite himself, felt the kind of desire that goes nowhere except into a painful knot.

“Dear old Lindholm, I mean—well, he's a nice old fuddy-duddy in his way, but this entire trip is useless. He knows it. We know it. Our friendly Soviet hosts know it. So why bother?”

“The Veep was promised a trip. He got his trip. It keeps him happy. It makes him feel he's a part of the great decision-making process we call democracy. He chats with the Russians and they chat back. Lindholm goes back to D.C., gets his pictures taken at the airport, reports to the Old Man, then he sinks back into his neat little box of obscurity again. Simple?”

“Stupid,” Isobel said. “The black one, do you think?”

Don't ask me, Rayner thought. I only want your body. If there was some hope of response.

“Or the yellow?”

She went through the dresses, holding them against her body, making faces at herself in the mirror, throwing them down on the bed: rainbows of silk and rayon and cotton, a heap of rainbows. Rayner thought of the discarded cocoons of weird exotic moths.

“Shouldn't you get ready for your meeting?” she asked.

He walked back to the window. Sleet whipped the night. Moscow, Moscow—why was he ensnared here, here in the most embalmed capital of Europe?

“I think the black,” Isobel said. “Yes. Definitely. The black.”

Rayner looked at her, remembering her insistence on accompanying him this trip.
I will not put up with the horrors of Washington in January
, she had said.
Stick that in your diplomatic passport and smoke it
. Now she did nothing, it seemed, except bitch: a whole lifestyle constructed out of verbal sniping.

“What do you think of the black?” she asked.

She looked so tantalizingly beautiful that he had to struggle to remember: she has a heart of crushed ice. And love seemed to him just then an appalling conundrum, a joke of God's—as if the human heart were a kind of whoopee cushion capable of creating not only humiliation but, worse, painful confusion.

2.

It was not exactly clear to Rayner why Maksymovich, the First Secretary of the Central Committee, found Kimball Lindholm so apparently fascinating; why Maksymovich, who stooped as if he carried a burden of lead between his shoulder blades, should continually watch Lindholm through half-moon spectacles in a manner that suggested intense interest. Nor was it clear why Maksymovich should make himself so available, so accessible, to the Vice President when it was well known that the First Secretary had little regard for the niceties of diplomatic protocol. When Kimball Lindholm made a joke—usually unfunny in its original English and presumably without any humor in the translation—Maksymovich would laugh, his thick body shaking; he would take off his tiny glasses, rub his eyes, wipe the lenses of the spectacles with a small rag, and blink at Lindholm as if to say: Stop, it's too painful for me to laugh anymore.

Rayner had the sense that a palm was being greased: a snow job taking place. It puzzled him—but then he was accustomed to the seemingly inexplicable changes in policy that frequently took place behind the closed doors of Kremlin rooms. After a time you simply stopped looking for a logic; tomorrow's policy might be the opposite of today's—and there would be no contradiction involved.

He found himself staring at Lindholm. The little man was huddled close to his interpreter, a look of some mild bewilderment on his face. Across the table, the First Secretary scribbled something on a note pad: a doodle created out of interlocking circles. Rayner sat back in his chair and looked quickly around the room. Save for a grainy portrait that depicted a group of rather indistinct figures, and a Soviet flag that hung loose from the ceiling, the walls were bare. Rayner gazed a moment at the pale hammer and sickle on the red background.

Besides Maksymovich and two nondescript men whose functions had not been made plain, besides Lindholm and the interpreter—a fragile man with flesh the color of an eggshell—the only other person present, apart from Rayner, was Haffner, the Assistant Secretary of State. Haffner was a creature of strict protocol; he sat in an oddly stiff manner, as if the national anthem were being played and he alone were capable of hearing it. He had all the slightly strange reality of a wax apple. And somehow Haffner's presence added to the general sense of futility that Rayner had felt from the very beginning. Lindholm had no power, no real power; but somewhere along the way—during the course of the campaign, during the final stages of the Convention, whenever—he had been promised a trip to Russia. And this was it. One could imagine the AP photographs in
The Wichita Eagle
, your very own Kimby Lindholm sitting at the nerve center of true power. It would, Rayner thought, give the farmers something to chew over. But why was Maksymovich putting on such a show?