Learning to Swear in America (7 page)

“Yeah, it’s stupid.”

Simons and Pirkola both moved their heads back slightly, as though an axle connected them at the neck.

Yuri leaned forward. “This is desperate situation, right?”

“We have enough time,” Pirkola said. “In theory, we ought to be able …”

“Is big
chertovskii
—” He paused, wishing he knew how to swear in English, and started over. “Is big, bad asteroid coming toward Earth, to smash your country? Then maybe we should do it right, yes?”

“We intend to do it right,” Simons said, his voice clipped.

“No, you intend to do it safe. You have how many years old? A hundred?”

Simons flushed. He was fifty-six.

“And still you have to do things like everyone else. Be all alike. You …”

“This isn’t about peer pressure,” Simons snapped. “It’s about science.”

“Then
look
at science,” Yuri said, tapping the table. “We want to destroy asteroid, but it’s very big. We can make it smaller with antimatter bursts and greatly increase chance of success—of debris burning in atmosphere.”

“You know you’re not the only guy who’s ever looked at this, right? You’re not the only physicist in the world.”

“That’s not point.”

“That
is
point.”

Yuri flushed. Russian didn’t have articles, and while he knew that English was full of them, he was never quite sure when to use which. Easier just to skip “the” and “a.”

“There are a lot of smart people who wonder about
antimatter,” Simons said. “Who have thought about it
for longer than you’ve been alive
. What does that tell you?”

“I’m not saying they’re not smart. I’m saying … they just don’t know how to work with antimatter.”

Simons threw his hands in the air. Yuri turned to Pirkola.

“Here, let me explain.”

“How long will it take?” Pirkola asked. “To really explain it and give the mathematical proofs so I’ll believe it?” He laid his fork down. “You do have mathematical proof?”

“Of course. Would be … really to explain? And you’d want to work it out yourself little bit, to double-check. Four days.”

“Four full days,” Pirkola said. “That’s time we can’t lose. Maybe at the end, if we get this done early. I’d love to hear unpublished work from Yuri Strelnikov, boy sensation. But not now.”

Simons crumpled his napkin and tossed it onto his tray. Yuri ignored him and focused on Pirkola.

“Our point of divergence is early. I wish it wasn’t. But if we work out whole thing, then I show you I’m right, we don’t have time to do it again. We’ll have wrong approach.”

Simons stood. “And if we waste four days on this and don’t agree with you, and don’t get done in time, what then? We’ve killed everybody in California to indulge your ego.”

Pirkola stood, too, holding his tray. “Look, I really would like to hear your thoughts on this. But we can’t handle anything else right now.”

Yuri turned to Simons. “If you’re not going to listen to me,
why am I here? Why not just send me home? You two do equation, and I’ll go back to Moscow and watch sky.”

Simons flushed. “We need your input,” he said. “Is that what you need to hear? You need a compliment every five minutes? We need your input,
based on proven, established theory
.”

No
, Yuri thought.
I don’t need compliments. I don’t need to be kidnapped, either, while everyone is looking at the sky
.

They put their trays on a rack outside the kitchen and headed toward the stairwell with its glass wall, but Simons turned back. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and extracted a photo.

“My daughter,” he said, holding the picture out.

Yuri looked but made no effort to take the picture. It showed a pretty brunette in a purple shirt. Looked like a high school senior picture.

“She’s older now. Expecting our first grandchild. It’s going to be a boy.” He tucked the photo back in his wallet. “She’s due June ninth.”

Impact day.

Simons choked for a moment, looked surprised with himself, then regained control.

“I do a little woodworking—have a shop set up in the garage. I’m making him a wooden rocket ship seat for his bedroom. He won’t need it for a year, but it’ll probably take me that long to finish it.”

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a paper, tattered on the fold lines.

“See? Designed it myself. There’s a little seat in there, and a
window in one side so he can see his mother coming. I’m putting a little bookshelf on the other side. And I got an old harness that’s been in space, cut it down to make a seat belt for his bench, so he’ll get used to wearing them. It’s important that he wear his safety belt.”

Simons passed a hand over his eyes and thrust the diagram back in his pocket. Yuri wanted to say something, knew he should, but all he could think of was
ublyudok—bastard. I wanted to hate you
. He just nodded and let Simons walk away.

Yuri worked restlessly that afternoon. He kicked his chair away and stood before his desk on one foot, then the other. He tried squatting against the wall as though he were sitting, working on a clipboard on his knees. The burn in his thighs felt good, but he couldn’t hold the pose very long, and it interfered with his concentration. So he sighed, retrieved his chair, and sat again.

Yuri waited that night to see if Pirkola would come by his office for dinner. Was he rude if he went to the cafeteria without him, or foolish to wait, hungry, in his office? He finally decided that if necessary he could plead cultural misunderstanding, and walked down to the cafeteria. The place was busy, filled with the sounds of rattling cutlery, trays sliding down the silver rails, quiet conversations, and, from the kitchen, eruptive
thunk
s and clatters. It smelled of steamed vegetables—broccoli?—but not a bad smell.

By the time Yuri got his food, the tables were full. The cafeteria hadn’t been built for the kind of activity the facility was
experiencing now. A pair of men ahead of Yuri—he didn’t know their specialties—paused, then left the cafeteria with their trays. Probably going to eat upstairs. Yuri needed a break from his office, so he set his tray down at a table for four. Two women sat facing each other, bent in quiet conversation. They looked up as he sat and started to cut his salmon, but he courteously didn’t acknowledge them. They had their conversation, and he was separate.

“Um,” one of the women said.

“Hi,” the other woman said. “You’re Yuri Strelnikov, right?”

Yuri glanced up and nodded, then took the cellophane off a bowl of cooked carrots. One really didn’t talk with the other people who sat at your table in a cafeteria—with people who weren’t of your party. Probably this was an American thing, being overly friendly, the way people made eye contact on the street. It seemed cocky, but probably it wasn’t meant that way.

“Okay, then,” she said. The women were silent for a moment. “Anyway, it didn’t work out. I wound up taking a taxi home.” In his peripheral vision, Yuri saw her shrug and glance at him. “I’ll give you the details later.”

A couple of minutes later the women left, and Yuri finished his dinner in silence. Nobody else sat at the table, even though there were three seats open. Yuri finished his salad and stared balefully at the empty bowl. Americans considered a pile of wet lettuce to be a salad. How had these people won the Cold War?

He left his tray on the rack outside the kitchen and climbed the stairs by the west wall, pausing at the top to look out at the arid
landscape. Voices drifted up to him from a couple of men who must have left the cafeteria, too.

“Did you see what Strelnikov did? Sitting with people he didn’t know?”

“Yeah, and then he ignored them.”

Yuri opened his mouth in protest, then shut it.

“Maybe he thinks everybody wants him around. That he’s irresistible.”

“I don’t think it was that,” the second guy said. “I think he just has no social skills. Some of the guys are like that—no clue what’s appropriate.”

I am
not
one of those guys. I know those guys, and I am
not
one of them. Just this week I gave a girl a doughnut!

Yuri retreated to his office.

So there were extra seats in the cafeteria, and people who needed seats. And it was rude for me to sit down, but it wasn’t rude that no one invited me to sit
. He blew air out sharply.
America should come with a manual. Or is that what the Statue of Liberty is holding?

When the call for sunset came, Yuri intended to stay in his office, but eventually wandered to the back of the herd of scientists watching in silence as another day slipped away. The need to gather, to look at the orange-streaked sky, was something primitive. This must be what it was like to have a migratory route. Like birds, or turtles. He spoke to no one and kept his eyes down as they ripped off another piece of duct tape. There were thirteen strips left. Yuri watched until the last streaks of
color had darkened almost to black, then caught his ride back to the hotel.

The housekeeper had made his bed and put out fresh towels. He opened the middle dresser drawer and lifted the ice bucket. The mouse blinked up at him, sitting by a pile of its own feces.

“I’m sorry, Myshka.”

He lowered his hand down beside it and dropped a half-dried scrap of cheese from his lunch sandwich into his open palm. The mouse walked onto his hand, its tiny claws scratching. He gave it a moment to eat, then gently closed his fingers and lowered the mouse into his pocket.

He took the stairs to the hotel’s back entrance and slipped out into the night, pushing through the line of scrubby trees and brush between the hotel lot and parking for the restaurant next door. He strode quickly over to the next street, away from the highway, and glanced over his shoulder. He was alone in a strange city.

He started walking.

The night enfolded him, took him in as its own. He stepped through shadow, trying to look purposeful. To attract no attention. No one had said he couldn’t leave the hotel, and he knew some of the Americans ate dinner at a restaurant in town. But he was pretty sure that people who watched your computer expected to know where to find you.

He passed a mini mall with a laundromat at the end, saw clothes rotating in dryers, the centrifugal forces keeping them in orbit, fabric moons with no planet. A solar system with no sun. Bored-looking people were reading magazines, and a grizzle-chinned man stood by himself, watching his clothes circling. Yuri wondered if he’d ever become a pathetic old man with nothing to do but watch his clothes dry. Then it occurred to him that he was watching the man watch his clothes spin, and that was surely worse.

He cut through the parking lot of a body shop, closed for the night, and a gray cat concealed behind a garbage can streaked away from him, heading for a stand of some spiky desert plant at the lot edge. He stroked the mouse in his pocket. Cars roared by, lights bouncing, radios blasting sound waves that lengthened in their wakes. In some sector there would be crime. Good to avoid that, but it would be easier if he knew where the bad sections were.