Learning to Swear in America (11 page)

Yuri, not sure if I should mention this while you’re trying to save Los Angeles, but weird things are going on here, and I think you have a right to know. Somebody went in your office this morning—Fyodor Laskov. No, I’m not kidding. He claimed you’d done some work together, and he needed to look at his notes.
His
notes. The chair refused to give him the key—but then his father called and how do you say no to the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences? Sedatov went down and watched him—guilty about giving him the key, I think. Laskov spent an hour in your office, trying to boot up your computer. (Nice job on the password by the way, or maybe it’s just that he’s an idiot. God knows he’s never done any decent research of his own.) So he took off with some notes of yours, and a couple of flash drives. I hope to hell you just have porn on those drives, because honestly, I think he’s trying to steal your research while you’re gone.

This could be serious. You don’t have anything in print yet—if there’s a dispute over whose research this is, and with his father’s backing—they might split the Nobel.
Worse than that, what if they hyphenate your research, and your name is linked with that asshole’s? The Strelnikov-Laskov Theory of Antimatter?

Get back here fast.

P.S. I think my fingers are going to fall off from typing that hyphen.

P.P.S. Kryukov wasn’t in when Laskov came by. I think he planned it that way—everybody knows Kryukov’s your protector. But when the old man found out, he pitched a holy fit.

Yuri stared at the screen for a full minute, visualizing a life dragging Fyodor Laskov around with a hyphen. There would be public appearances where they would both speak—Yuri would have to write the lecture and watch Laskov give it, then step to the podium for questions. It would make Laskov look like the dominant partner. But it couldn’t be done the other way, because Laskov wouldn’t be able to answer the questions. It made Yuri’s skin crawl.

And it would never end. Because people didn’t make huge scientific breakthroughs every year. If you made one, it was once, usually when you were young. Then you spent your career refining your theories, hammering out the edges. Which meant that for the rest of his life, Fyodor Laskov’s big, ugly face would be hovering near him.

When he was six, Yuri had memorized the list of Nobel physics winners. He’d rattled them off for his mother: Röntgen in 1901, Lorentz-Zeeman in 1902. Amused, his mother explained that
Lorentz and Zeeman were separate researchers. There would be people who saw “Strelnikov-Laskov” and
thought they were the same person.

Yuri stood up and kicked his garbage can across the room. It crumpled against the wall and rocked back and forth on its undented side until it slowly rolled to a stop. He walked over and gave it another savage kick, and another. His foot hurt, and a sharp tingle sliced up to his knee. And again. And again. The wastebasket was mangled.

The door opened with a soft click. “You okay?” Yuri looked over his shoulder. He didn’t know who it was—some American whose work wasn’t in jeopardy.

“I might need new garbage can.” He gave it another kick, but it was so misshapen that it no longer gave a satisfying crunch.

The man stepped into his office and picked up the phone. Yuri kicked again and sent the crumpled metal rolling. It hit the edge of the bookcase and rattled to a stop, propped against the wall.

“Yeah, somebody get Dr. Strelnikov a new wastebasket, please.” The man paused and looked at Yuri, panting slightly and eyeing the remains of his garbage can. “Maybe a couple.”

When Simons and Pirkola brought their dinners to his office that evening, Yuri was polite and vague, and listened to their progress without saying much.

“Other groups are doing okay? Solving their problems?” he asked during a lull in the conversation.

“Yeah,” Simons said. “Seem to be. Some sections are harder to work out than others. But everybody’s going forward.”

Yuri nodded absently.

“We’ll get done,” Pirkola said. “No problem. It’s just whether or not it works.”

“You don’t think it will?” Yuri asked, his mind snapping back to the office. To this office.

“I do. I just wish there was a backup plan.”

When the work day was over, and another sunset had sunk beyond the glass wall and into the past, Yuri caught his ride back to the hotel. In his room he cleaned up after the mouse, and scrubbed the ice bucket.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the empty container.

He sat on his bed in the dark for half an hour, hating Fyodor Laskov. Then he sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. Because for all that he could visualize Laskov’s thick lips and stupid ugly mug, and the disappointed way his illustrious father looked at his stupid ugly mug, Yuri kept remembering sparkly green eye shadow. It was interfering with his hatefest.

He found a phone book in a nightstand drawer and flipped through it while he brushed his teeth. There were enough Collums that he didn’t think he could cold call, and he couldn’t remember Dovie’s phone number or her father’s first name. Didn’t know what he’d say if he found her anyway.

He stood at the window, absently fingering the plastic curtain pull, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. His room looked out over the back of the hotel. If he craned his neck, he could see
most of the restaurant parking lot. And there, partially screened by the trees, was a green car with one yellow door.

He jammed his toes into his shoes and let the heels ease in as he walked, shoving his plastic key card in his pants and finger-combing his hair as he stepped out of his room. He trotted toward the stairwell, embarrassed at how happy he was to have someone swing by for him.

There had been a time in high school when three older guys from his advanced calc class came by. They were heading to a café and wondered if he’d like to study with them. He’d been thrilled. One guy offered him a drink of his dark brown beer, even though Yuri was eleven. Yuri took a swig, thought he might vomit, and held it in his mouth until it became impossible not to swallow. A waitress set a platter mounded with boiled shrimp on the table, and the older boys snapped the heads off and ate the bodies, creating little pyramids of pink heads in front of them. Yuri snapped the legs off, too, and hid them under the edge of the tray. He didn’t realize until he went home after the third study session that he’d done all their homework for them. He hadn’t been angry with his classmates for using him; he just felt stinging shame at not having seen it.

After that, he vowed to be aloof and make people earn his friendship. That hadn’t worked, either. It was like he’d raised the price on something nobody wanted.

Now he was almost to the stairwell when an American stepped out of a room, heading the other direction. The guy nodded to him and kept going. Yuri nodded back, hesitated, then went to the
window at the end of the hall, stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. Just admiring the view. When he glanced over his shoulder, the man was gone. Yuri ducked into the stairwell, ran down the steps and out through the hotel’s back lot.

He made it past the line of scrubby trees to the adjacent restaurant, and ran bent over to the car. Its windows were down, and a male voice carried out to him.

“You know, that doesn’t make you less conspicuous. It just makes you look like an escaped mental patient with orthopedic problems.”

Lennon.

Yuri looked through the front passenger window, saw Dovie in the driver’s seat, Lennon in the back. He swung into the front.

“I’m glad you came,” Yuri said. “I wasn’t sure how to get your phone number.”

“You ask for it,” Dovie said, smiling. Her hair was braided and wrapped around her head, the tips sticking out the top, pointing away from each other, like coiled snakes looking in opposite directions. He almost said, “You have snakes on your head,” but stopped himself in time. He was a smooth guy.

“So do you want it?” Dovie asked.

“Huh?”

Lennon snorted. Dovie raised an eyebrow at Yuri. Maybe he wasn’t a smooth guy.

“Oh. Miss Collum, may I please have your phone number?”

Dovie handed him a square piece of note paper with her contact information printed in silver ink.

“May I have yours?”

He flushed.

“I don’t know it. But I’m in room 427.”

“Good enough.”

Dovie pulled out of the parking lot in front of a pickup, which hit its brakes and horn simultaneously. She veered into the outside lane, fishtailed, and straightened up.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou …” Lennon mumbled in the backseat.

“Shut up, Lennon. We’re not Catholic.”

“I am when you’re driving. Also Baptist, Jewish, and Hindu. Anybody who’ll listen.” He turned to Yuri. “I think Hindu will do me the most good. They have thousands of gods.”

“Good thinking,” Yuri said. “Mathematical approach to religion. I like it.”

“So we have a plan,” Dovie said. “The general outline. We still have to fill in the details.”

“Plan about what?”

“While you’re saving us from the meteor …”

“Asteroid.”

“… We’re going to save you. You know, get you home.”

“Okay. Thank you.” He hooked his elbow on the back of the seat and looked back and forth between them. “How are you going to do that?”

“Those are the details,” Lennon said.

“Oh.”

“We’re going to start by taking you to the mall. You need
some new clothes,” Dovie said, taking a corner with the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “You have any money?”

“Yeah, but what’s wrong with my clothes?”

“You’re wearing a white dress shirt,” Lennon said. “And gray dress pants. And black dress shoes.”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen.”

“Going on eighty. You need to blend in if we’re going to sneak you out of here.”

“That makes certain amount of sense. So we’re going with sneaking approach?”

Dovie pulled onto an access road to a mall and took the first right into the lot. The car rocked to a stop and Dovie got out, opened the trunk, and wrestled Lennon’s wheelchair out before Yuri realized what she was doing. She set it up, hooked her arms under her brother’s armpits, and heaved him up and into the chair, then clicked the wheel locks off.

“Wouldn’t van be easier?” Yuri asked.

“Duh,” Lennon said. “You know what those things cost?”

“No. No idea.”

“I work part-time at the library. So it’s a little beyond my means.”

As they went into the mall, Lennon’s tires crunched on white stones that had spilled from the landscaping around spiky desert plants. The doors hissed shut behind them, and they were blasted with air-conditioning.

The interior was nicely done, with potted plants and skylights and distinct storefronts that gave the impression of a downtown street in some Mediterranean city. People strolled by with drink cups in their hands or wandered in and out of stores. No one seemed to be in a hurry. They passed a couple of middle-aged women leaning against a wall, looking at something on a cell phone.

“You see that?” Yuri said. “If we ever have to figure out who is American spy, it will be very easy.”

“Um, what?” Lennon said.

“Look,” Yuri said, gesturing expansively. “Everybody standing near wall is
touching
wall. They lean, or put hand on it. It’s like you people have magnetic spines. You get within half meter of some wall and—
sloooop
—you touch it.” Yuri stood on one foot and then tilted toward the front of a candle store, as though caught in its pull. “You tell Russian to stand by wall, hour later he’ll still be standing by wall. Not touching it.” He shook his head. “Your spies have no chance.”

“Okay,” Lennon said. “Somebody’s in a mood today.”

“And another thing. Did you see, when we came in? We had to wait moment while people exiting used our door because it was already open. Because someone had just gone in. So they made us wait instead of just using their own door.”

Dovie shrugged. “No big deal.”

“But do you see how lazy is that? I’m not saving California so people can go out wrong door.”

“Um, we have some ideas,” Dovie said, taking Yuri’s hand and
pulling him on. “We could try to get you over the Mexican border. It’s very porous, and most people don’t get shot crossing.”

“Shot?”

“You could dress like a Mexican drug lord,” Lennon said.

“Why drug lord? Why not just regular Mexican guy? Worker, or student? Mexican physicist?”

“What’s the fun in that?” Lennon asked.

“I don’t like shooting part,” Yuri said. “And I’m blond.”

“That wasn’t our best idea,” Dovie said. “But we thought we’d start with that one, to make the next one look better. What if you dress in drag?”

“Drag?”

“As a girl,” Lennon said.

Yuri flushed and shook his head.

“They’d be looking for a guy,” Dovie said. “You could walk right past them.”

“
No
. Anyway, how would I get on airplane? My passport says I’m male. It’s rather specific on that point.”

“What about impersonating a pilot?” Lennon said. “We could maybe lock the real pilot up, give you his clothes, and you could get on the plane that way.”