Learning to Swear in America (8 page)

A city, and yet nothing like Moscow, with an aorta of river flowing out of its curled, ancient heart. His home was a huge place now, gone to flab, larger than its ancestral heart could support. The onion domes of the old churches were dwarfed by the stone monstrosities Stalin had built. Moscow was bigger than New York and could be very dangerous, yet he was comfortable in its metro lines, on its diesel-clouded streets.

This hot, dry city felt wrong. The weight of speaking only English for days now, of signs written in the Latin alphabet, was oppressive. It occurred to him that if they didn’t stop the asteroid, he would die here. In a city, but alone. The hairs on his neck rose. He looked over his shoulder at the sky, half expecting to see the 1019. He imagined he could hear its soundless scream as it hurtled through the night.

He walked for an hour, looking for the right place. Figured he’d know it when he found it. He finally caught the outline of a bandstand ahead as the residential neighborhood gave way to a park. He cut in toward the building and came to the edge of a deep ravine flanked by a tubular railing. A foot of runoff water gurgled
at its bottom, the first open water he’d seen in Pasadena. They probably put the park in because the cut in the land made it unusable for anything else.

He sat by the railing, pulled the mouse from his pocket, and ran a finger down its soft brown back. He touched the end of its whiskers and watched the mouse wrinkle its nose.

“You’re American mouse. You should have freedom.”

The mouse looked up at him.

“You don’t have to worry about June ninth,” he promised.

Then he lowered it gently to the ground. The mouse sniffed around at his pocket, then scampered off toward the band shell.

“Good-bye, Myshka.”

He raised a hand in farewell.

The air stirred as an owl swooped past, seized the mouse in its talons, and regained altitude, never touching down. Yuri stared.

“
Bozhe moi
.
Bozhe moi
, I killed Myshka!”

He stood, arms out slightly, as though to retrieve the mouse, to pull it back out of the sky.

The owl swept out of sight. Yuri watched the empty space where it had been for several minutes after it disappeared, and thought of his promise that the mouse didn’t need to worry about the asteroid. He snorted softly. True enough.

“I’m horrible person,” he said out loud.

He felt empty. He couldn’t save a mouse from danger in the sky. Could he save a continent?

He walked to the bridge over the ravine, an arching affair wide enough for strollers to pass and lovers to walk arm in arm,
illuminated now with floodlights set in the ground. Posts along the walkway held orange fabric banners advertising an exhibition at a local art museum. He walked to the apex. The evening was still warm, but the railing was cool against his palms. He stared for a moment at the stars reflecting in the dark gorge water, then disappearing as the water rushed on.

Yuri looked up at these misaligned, Western stars. He wondered if the asteroid knew it wasn’t in its own corner of the universe, that it was lost. Maybe it was just trying to get home.

He thought about being eternally a foreigner, and about Simons and Pirkola and the approach they were taking to the calculations. They wouldn’t listen to him, and they were going to die. So many people were going to die, and it would be his fault.

The mouse had died, and that was his fault, too. He was a mouse killer.

He laughed softly, climbed over the railing, and stood on the concrete lip of the bridge. He stared down at the ravine, tumbled rocks and maybe a half meter of water thirty feet below. Gripping the railing behind him with one hand he leaned out, trying to see his reflection in the water.

He was going to die. If the NEO team stopped the asteroid, if Earth survived for a billion more years, a billion billion, he would die. He’d always plastered his youth over this fact, like a Band-Aid hiding the wound beneath. Living for seventy more years was essentially the same thing as living forever—death was so far in the future that it didn’t matter. But every evening, another strip
of duct tape pulled away—like the Band-Aid ripping off. Staring at his wavering silhouette in the water below, he couldn’t avoid the point. Within a few days, in a catastrophic astronomic collision, or later—but not much later, really—fire or disease, or a common collision on a roadway … he would die.

It occurred to him that if he did it now, if he just let go and let the ravine break him, the asteroid would become irrelevant. Fletcher would be nothing, along with his plan to detain him in America. Yuri would slip through his fingers, off the axes of space and time.

Life’s constant wasn’t the speed of light, or Planck’s constant. It was death. He’d learned that from a mouse.

Headlights flared bright beside him, throwing his ghoulish projection across the little park. A motor clunked and roared above the general traffic sounds. He heard the insistent
ping
of a car, door opened with keys still in the ignition. Someone had stopped. Someone had found him.

He twisted, looking over his shoulder, expecting a man in a suit or a soldier. It was a girl, not tall, not thin, running toward him, her car stopped at the base of the bridge. She rushed at him, shouting, her hands waving in front of her, and he noticed there was something wrong with her hair. As her shadow bumped him, he leaned back in surprise.

His grip broke.

Then the wrong-hemisphere stars were upside down and rushing. He reached his arms out, splayed his fingers, grabbing fistfuls of air as the stars slipped through his fingers. He twisted
and one hand caught the lip of the bridge below the railing and he swung around, smacking his face against concrete, tasting the iron of blood in his mouth. He scrabbled with his other hand, all thoughts of death gone. He wanted to live. The water rushed below him. It sounded like a city gargling, getting ready to spit him out.

The girl knelt on the bridge, reached through the railing, and grabbed his wrists. It was the girl he’d shared a doughnut with. Her fingers were flecked with paint but warm and strong, and made little troughs where they dug into his flesh, elevating the adjacent area like foothills. He wondered when the last time was he had been touched, skin to skin, by another person. Shaking hands with new colleagues at JPL, of course. And before that?

“You paying attention here? Because I’m trying to save you.”

“Right. Sorry.”

The girl gave a trial tug on him, but he didn’t release his grip on the bars and didn’t go anywhere.

“Can you climb up?”

Yuri crabbed his hands up the rails, but they slid back down. “There’s nothing to put my foot on.”

“Can you swing out a little? Get a little momentum going, and sort of hurl yourself over the railing?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not monkey.”

“Well, that was poor planning.”

The girl let go of his wrists and took two tries to climb onto the railing, holding one of the uprights. She was not a natural athlete. She hooked one elbow around the post, stood on one foot and wrapped the other leg around. She was shaking, but she reached up and ripped down the museum banner, tucked it in her waistband and climbed down, making sharp little breaths.

“Ohmygod that was scary.”

“I’m hanging off bridge here,” Yuri said.

“Well, don’t be a grouch about it.”

The girl took a deep breath, then climbed up twice more, stripping the poles of their exhibition banners. Then she knotted the ends and knelt before him, tying the jerry-rigged rope around one of his wrists and looping it over the railing.

“Try now. I’ll keep your hand from sliding back.”

He obeyed, ratcheting his hand up. He threw his loose hand onto the top of the railing, swung a toe up onto the concrete lip, and pulled backward to get momentum to swing over the top. The railing groaned under his weight and bent outward, the top of the railing snapping on one side where it met the next section. Yuri’s foot slipped off the bridge. He had both hands on the top of the railing now—progress—but the railing itself was peeled away from the bridge.

The girl scrambled to untie the rope from his wrist.

“Not good idea,” Yuri said, but he was afraid to move.

She slipped the knotted banners over the railing and under his nearest arm. She tried to pass it over his back and thread it under his other armpit, but her arms weren’t long enough. She pressed
her face into the bars, concentrating, and the result was so comical that Yuri smiled, even though his biceps were beginning to shake and his palms were slick with sweat.

Then she got hold of the tail of the fabric and gathered both ends in her hands.

“Ready?” she asked, pressing a foot onto the bottom railing for leverage. Without waiting for an answer she yanked upward.

Yuri lost his grip as her foot pushed the bent section of railing and it snapped off, falling with a clatter onto the rocks below. He swung loose, twisting slowly over the gorge, suspended in an orange harness held by a rounded girl.

He screamed.

“We can discuss your attitude later,” she said, through teeth clenched with strain.

The girl leaned back. Yuri swung in and his face bounced off the concrete. His fingers scrabbled wildly and found purchase on the bridge surface, and he threw a foot up onto the concrete lip. He could scramble up now, but the girl kept pulling, smashing him against the side of the bridge where the railing was missing.

“Don’t pull so tight,” he shouted, even though she was two feet away.

She kept her death grip on the fabric, hands shaking with strain, mouth pulled to the side in concentration. Yuri shifted his weight, trying to scrabble up, and the girl gave another sharp tug. His body scraped over the concrete lip, banging his kneecaps. The girl jumped back, letting go of the fabric, but she wasn’t fast enough and he fell into her legs, knocking her
down. He rolled onto his back, groaning, as she scrambled to her feet.

“It’s common to fall for someone who’s saved your life,” she said, “but that was still a little forward.”

He looked up at her, not sure if she was joking, then looked back at the hole made by the missing section of railing and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Are you okay? You
jumped
. You were trying to
kill
yourself.”

He sat up, and the breeze hit his scraped skin and he shivered.

“I fell.”

“You need to go home. Is there somebody at home? Somebody I can call?”

He sat, knees pulled to his chest, arms around his legs, trembling. He shook his head.

“I’m alone.” He thought he’d never made a truer statement.

She let that sink in a moment.

“I saw you walking. Did you come all the way from JPL?”

“From my hotel.” He looked up at her. “You saw me walking?”

“I thought it was you. I might have followed you a couple of blocks, trying to see if it was or not.” She shrugged. “There’s a difference between curiosity and stalking, you know.” She looked around for a moment, then came to a decision. “Okay, I’m going to take you home. Get in.”

She headed back to her car, an old green sedan with one yellow door. Cheapest replacement part, he guessed. He stood, unsteady for a moment. Unsure. He didn’t want to walk all the way back to
the hotel, and wasn’t even sure he could find his way. But having the Americans see him getting out of this girl’s car might not be better. Maybe she could drop him off a couple of blocks away, and he could slink in unobserved.

She was already sitting in the driver’s seat, her window down, waving him over with an arm out the window. A dozen thin bracelets jangled on her wrist. He tucked his head down and walked over, opening the door behind her. He could see a bag of new paint tubes on the seat, in an art store bag.

“Hey, this isn’t a limo service,” she said, patting the front seat beside her.

He flushed and walked around the front of the car, the headlights flashing over the white dress shirt sweat-plastered to his chest. He was used to car services and taxis. Used to sitting in the back. He opened the front door and sank into the seat, a combination of relief and worn-out springs.

She ran her finger over the side of his mouth, and came away with a smear of blood. It was a gentle gesture. That was when he realized that girls probably liked injured guys. It would be some kind of hormonal thing. He should file this away—it might have useful applications. She rubbed her hand under her seat, then looked at him from beneath lowered lids.

“Your DNA is all over my car now. There’d be no way to remove it all. So if you try anything, you would
so
get caught.”

Oh.

She glanced in the rearview mirror and threw the car into reverse, then stomped on the gas and the engine roared and the body
clacked and clattered. He glanced behind them, expecting to see a dozen auto parts tracing their path through the park to the roadway.

She rested her left wrist on the wheel and extended her right hand.

“I’m Dovie Collum.”

“Yuri Strelnikov. Is very nice to meet you. Um, again.” Her hand was soft and warm.

“Nice to meet you again, too, Yuri Strelnikov. You’re Russian?”

He nodded and wished she’d look back at the road.

“What are you doing in Pasadena? Besides pouring coffee and jumping off bridges.”

She had bright green glitter around her eyes. It was hard not to stare at it.

“Um, I’m here with NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, at JPL.”

“Oh, the meteor!”

“Asteroid.”

“You’re a scientist, huh?” She thought about that for a moment and looked up through the windshield, as though she could see the rock coming. “You’re here to save the world.”

He didn’t say anything, just watched the pink feathers hanging from her mirror sway wildly as she cut the angle off a turn and clunked over the curb.

“How old are you, anyway?” she asked, peering at him.

“Seventeen.”

“Huh. And you’re a science guy? Really?”

“Um, yes.”

He was silent for a moment, tensing as he saw her flip her turn signal on, waiting for the next challenge to the axle, then realized he should show an interest in her.