The Best of Electric Velocipede (48 page)
Read The Best of Electric Velocipede Online
Authors: John Klima
“Even wolves mourn their dead,” she said.
“He’s not dead,” I said.
“People die.”
“But not him.”
“Why not him?”
“Why are you here?” I said, spitting out the words. “You hate us. You won’t get your painting back. Your stupid husband will still be dead. When we’re finished here, you’re going back to that camp. So why are you here with me?”
“Because you dragged me along.”
“Yeah, well. Go. Leave if you want to.”
“I’d be dead in a day,” she said, and then touched her hand to the buzz-cut on top of my head. “You are so young.”
“Don’t touch me,” I said. Unconvincingly.
“You never felt manipulated?” she asked, standing up, stretching long lovely arms. “By the men who put you in that Box? By the government? By him?”
I lowered my head. All the sentences in my head involved swearing, and angry as I was I knew that swearing was wrong. It was one of Apolek’s simplest rules.
She put a hand on top of my head, then tilted it back until she could see my eyes. “I was a dancer,” she said.
I looked away. “So what.”
“I’d like to dance for you.”
I said, “Do what you want. But if you think you can mess with my mind so much you can steal your stupid painting when we find it, you’re wrong.”
What did I know or care about dance? Who cared what the body did? But I watched her. She moved like a phantom, dancing. Her body was smoke, the flimsy ugly dress an extension of the wind. Her body made its own music. My head filled with sad stories and long-buried lullabies.
“That was wonderful,” I said, an unaccustomed lump in my throat. Dimly, dumbly, it occurred to me to wonder, really wonder, why she was doing any of this. I felt like I had a lot of weeping to do, and I did not know how to start.
Then she ruined it all by letting the dress slip from her body, and stepping toward me in the last fading darkness of that night.
*
An eight-hour walk, from the station to the dacha. Scorched skeletal trees on both sides of us. The cold here was crueler, cutting through even the thick clothes I commandeered from the town’s tiny army depot. We found Volkov’s dacha and crept up close. He lay asleep on a couch, camouflaged by empty bottles. All of the tracks in the snow seemed to come from one pair of boots.
He was alone, except for the Broken soldiers who slept obediently in his truck.
“The other dacha, then,” she said, and started in that direction. I followed, frightened by her zeal. If Apolek was out here, so close to Volkov, were they working together? My old hate for the commander flared up again, brighter now, from jealousy. Ice cracked under our feet. We were not stealthy.
Night came on us fast, while we walked. Many times we were sure we heard someone following us, but sound moved strangely through the trees. We could see the dacha, a dark spot at the end of the road, but the closer we got, the more it faded into the spreading night. No lights were on inside.
“You asked why I came,” Zinaida said, stopping as we climbed the walkway to the front door. “Do you still want to know the answer?”
“No,” I said, pulling her inside by the hand, and kissing her hard, even as I nudged the front door with my foot and found it unlocked, too excited about what we would find inside to care about anything else.
Zinaida lit a candle. We watched our breath cloud out into the frigid darkness of the dacha. I looked for a lamp, and found three. I laughed out loud, when they were all lit, at the sheer size and splendor of the place.
His rucksack lay abandoned beside the door, spilling out books like entrails.
“You look upstairs,” she said.
He wasn’t in the first of the three bedrooms. A window was open. A curtain flapped. As if the whole place was waiting. As if the murdered count who lived there would come through the door in the morning and bring summer with him.
The light from my lamp found Apolek in the second bedroom, in a wine-colored velvet chair, with the painting in his lap.
“Apolek!” I said, and rushed forward, but he did not move.
“What is a painting in the dark?” he said. On a table beside him stood a glass of ice.
“What happened?” I asked. “Why did you leave?”
His coldness kept me from coming closer. And asking: why are you sitting here in the freezing dark? I wondered if Apolek was a ghost.
“I spent so long in darkness,” he said. “I looked at the paintings, but I didn’t see them.”
“What did Volkov say to you?” I asked.
Apolek made a perplexed face, but it passed quickly. He was still transfixed by the painting. I imagined him frozen there for days, wasting away and shivering himself to nothing while he stared at it.
He said, “Volkov didn’t say anything to me. I left that night, straight from the Spasskaya mansion, without speaking with him.”
“He doesn’t know about the painting?”
“Not from me,” Apolek said.
“You haven’t spoken with him since?” I asked.
“How would I do that?”
“Christ, Apolek, he’s followed you. You didn’t know?”
Apolek looked up at me for the first time. “He’s here?”
“He’s at the dacha at the end of the lane,” I said, still wanting to rush over to him, still not daring to.
“He’s keeping an eye on me,” Apolek said, standing up, resigned. He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Come back,” I said. “We can work this out.”
“Not after this,” he said. I thought he meant his own foolish flight from Moscow, but he was staring at the painting.
“I need you,” I said, at last. “I’m not finished . . . becoming. I’m stuck halfway between man and beast.”
“So shall you always be,” he said. Apolek reached out his arm and touched a candle to mine, lighting up a gaunt face shadowed by a surprisingly thick growth of beard. “So are we all.”
From outside, I heard the rumble of a truck approaching.
“Why did you do it?” I asked. “You know what they’ll do to you. To throw it all away—”
He handed me the painting.
I looked at it.
This time, I could see. For four, maybe five full seconds, I understood.
Two bodies, male and female, mostly naked, grappling. Was it love? Was it violence? Where did they fit into the larger composition, now lost, severed by the bayonet of a brutal long-ago soldier?
But the story did not matter. What mattered were the bodies. The twist and reach of the limbs. The glow of the flesh. The flush of the cheeks; the wideness of the mouth. Nothing mattered more than what the body wanted. And the body did not just want sex. It wanted friendship. It wanted beauty.
Looking at the painting, I understood everything. It was like what I felt when Zinaida danced, but turned up ten-thousandfold. I would have risked what Apolek risked. Life on earth as a human made sense. We are beasts, and we will never understand what we need, what we want, and why, but we will always obey.
And then it was gone. My head spun so fast I almost fell over. Zinaida had come up the stairs, and stood beside me, one hand on my shoulder, similarly mesmerized by the painting.
“You brought her here?” Apolek asked, pulling away the painting. I felt her stiffen, when it was gone.
“Yeah,” I said. “I took her. From the camp. She would have died in there. And I needed—”
“Why did you bring her here?”
I had never heard fear in Apolek’s voice before. My head spun worse.
“Because I—”
Zinaida stepped forward. Her sadness fell away, a wedding veil no longer needed. In that moment, for the first time, grief was not stronger than rage. And I smelled what I should have smelled the whole time, except that it was hidden behind her sadness and my own blind failure to understand who she was and what she wanted. I smelled an all-consuming violence, a bloodlust strong enough to make all other concerns insignificant.
“You,” I said to Apolek. “You’re the one who—?”
But he didn’t move. And I couldn’t move. Only Zinaida moved, and she moved like a phantom dancing. She darted in, ducked low to snag the dagger from my belt, spun fast around him. One lightning-swift slice of the arm was enough. Blood gurgled out of Apolek’s open throat.
I crumpled to the floor with him. I held his hand. I stared into his eyes. I waited for something, some wise final words or a sudden rush of complete understanding as his spirit left his body and entered mine. I got nothing. I don’t know how long I knelt there. Until Volkov came through the door, with four Broken soldiers close behind him.
“No,” he said, and then said it again and again, faster and faster.
Volkov pointed at Zinaida, and the Broken stepped forward. The stink of his rage made me gag. “Rip her to shreds,” he said, and although I screamed for them to stop, that’s exactly what they did. At least they did not smell of rage. The Broken kill dispassionately.
It took a long time.
I wondered if my offshoot would survive. If—after Volkov took me back to Moscow and locked me in a Box until my spirit shattered, and I emerged as one of the Broken—my sense of smell would still be with me. I hoped it wouldn’t. I hoped nothing would.
My head stopped hurting. I looked at my hands, and knew—my reconditioning was gone. The painting had wiped it away, cleanly and swiftly, and leaving no fatal time bomb inside me.
I wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t break down like a faulty machine, like every other soldier spat out of a Pavlov Box.
Volkov crossed the carnage, to kneel beside Apolek. His rage was gone. He held the boy’s head in both hands. I still had my superhuman sense of smell, somehow stronger than ever. I had never been able to smell grief before.
“I thought you hated him,” I said.
“He hated me,” the commander said, his hair and eyes as black as mine. “He’s always hated me. I tried to make him into something he’s not.”
I swallowed, several times. “You’re his father.”
“Yes.”
“He knew?” I asked.
“He did not.”
Dagger and painting were filthy with blood. I picked them both up. I handled the painting like Medusa’s head, turning it away from my line of sight, and Volkov’s too. I wondered what the Broken would see if they saw it. I felt certain it could bring them back to life. As if it could save us all, the tens and hundreds of thousands of fine young men who would otherwise break down and die under the weight of their botched reconditioning.
“Is there a special Box?” I asked. “A special process, to turn a man into one of the Broken?”
Volkov looked at me, his red face comprehending nothing.
I did not dare to look at the painting again. If I did, I’d lose my nerve. With the dagger, I cut a long slit from top to bottom of the painting, then squatted to remove the glass flute from the lamp and hold the canvas square face down atop the flame.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“Ready for what?”
“To be broken.”
Promise me you’ll make it quick, I wanted to say, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t deserve quick. I had destroyed my best friend, and I deserved to suffer. But I hoped he’d do it soon. I wanted to stop feeling what I felt.
Flames from the burning painting singed the hair from my hand, and still I held on to it. I held on until the burning was too much to bear. Now that it was gone, definitively destroyed, I realized what I had done—that without the painting the Pavlov Boxes would quickly cripple the state, bring it to its knees as its best young men died in droves—but that wasn’t why I did it. I destroyed the painting because it killed Apolek.
“Oh, Nikolai, no,” he said. His face shattered, crumpled. “You’re all that’s left of him.” Volkov fell forward, his arms tightening around me and his hairy face wet against my neck. He heaved with sobs. My body remembered, and I felt unaccustomed water spilling from my eyes. I had forgotten how hot tears were. We stood like that, dumb and broken, two beasts grieving.
The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown
Caroline M. Yoachim
T
he magician’s table was covered by a sheet of plywood, four feet square, completely wrapped in aluminum foil. Sugar magic was messy magic, and the foil made for easier cleanup. Scattered across the aluminum were misshapen chunks of candy, the seeds from which the carnival would grow. And grow it did.
Overnight, as the magician slept, sugar melted into candy sheets that billowed up into brightly colored tents. Caramel stretched itself into tightropes and nets, and green gumdrop bushes popped up to line the paths between the tents.
The carnival glittered with sugar-glass lights. The Ferris wheel was made of chocolate with graham cracker seats and a motor that ran on corn syrup. Out near the edge of the table, a milk chocolate monkey rode bareback on a white chocolate zebra with dark chocolate stripes. The monkey did handstands and backflips while the zebra pranced in a slow circle.
At the center of it all was the clown. She was three inches tall and made entirely of sugar. Her face and hands were coated with white powdered sugar, a sharp contrast to the bright red of her blown-sugar lips and the green and purple of her pulled-sugar dress. She was the seed from which each new carnival was grown, and she was beautiful.
As each of the sugar creations woke, the clown was there to welcome them to the world and tell them of their destiny. “You will be adored by children,” she told the cotton candy sheep, stroking the wisps of their baby blue wool. “You will delight them with your tumbling,” she told the flexible bubblegum acrobats. And, “You will amaze them with your daring stunts,” she told the gingerbread daredevil. She smiled at everyone, but she smiled her prettiest smile for the daredevil, because she was the tiniest bit in love with him.
As she woke the carnival, she told tales of children with bright smiling faces, and always added, “In the end you will be eaten, for that is your destiny.”
When she told them that, her smile sometimes faltered. She had seen a child only once, several cycles ago, the six-year-old niece of the magician who had laughed in delight to see the clown’s dancing routine. That had been a beautiful moment, the defining moment of her existence, the moment that made her the seed. After seeing the joy on the girl’s face, the clown had dissolved blissfully into the warm water in the magician’s cauldron, her sugar becoming the seed crystals from which an entire carnival was grown.
As the seed, she was the only one who woke up knowing the joy of a child’s laughter. The others would have to wait until the magician took them to whatever party was on the schedule. So she told the others what awaited them, how wonderful children are, and what an honor it was to perform for them. And she told them that they would be eaten, whatever that meant, because when she asked the magician why he grew a new carnival for every party, he told her that the carnival always gets eaten in the end.
She was generally a happy clown, but it made her sad that she couldn’t go to the parties. As the seed, she was always plucked away by the magician and thrown into the cauldron to grow the next carnival.
The clown stood at the edge of the carnival, waiting, and when the magician woke up he came to greet her. She asked, as she often did, if she could go to the party with the others. He replied, as he always did, that she was the seed, and could not be spared.
He picked her up gently and dropped her in his cauldron.
*
Over time, the clown changed. She became a sad clown, with streaks of burnt-black sugar running down her face like smeared mascara. Her once vibrant dress of green and purple was still beautiful, but the colors faded, and her sugar lost its glossy shine.
One morning, the clown peered out from a green-and-yellow candy tent and saw the magician running about frantically, searching for his keys. He looked tired and distracted, and he was late in collecting the carnival. The clown made a decision. Instead of standing at the edge of the carnival, as she usually did, she would hide in the tent and go to the party. She would hear the sound of children’s laughter again, and she would finally be eaten like the others.
She stayed inside the green-and-yellow candy tent as the magician loaded the carnival into his van, and unloaded it at the party. No one noticed she was there, and soon she heard children’s excited voices all around her. She would finally be eaten!
One of the children pulled off the roof of the striped-candy tent and broke it into pieces for her guests. The first performer was the gingerbread daredevil. He jumped twelve sugar cookie cars on a motorcycle with licorice wheels and a candy corn seat. The children clapped politely for his act before they ate him. The birthday girl bit off his head, then ripped his arms off to share with one of her guests. Was that what it meant to be eaten? Her beloved daredevil had met his end bravely, without a trace of fear, but being eaten looked far less pleasant than dissolving in warm water, and—a new thought occurred to her—if she didn’t go into the cauldron, would she continue to exist? The others always came back, each time the carnival grew, but they never remembered what had happened at the last carnival, no matter how she begged them to tell her.
No, being eaten was not the same as dissolving, she decided. Being eaten was an ending. Being eaten was death without rebirth. The clown couldn’t stand to watch any more. She went and visited some of the animals. She patted the backs of the cotton candy sheep and scratched the dark chocolate dancing bear behind his ears.
“Don’t be so sad,” said the juggler. “We are meant to be eaten.”
She had told the juggler that very thing this morning, that it was their destiny to be eaten. She had believed it. Because of her, everyone else in the carnival—the daredevil and the zebra, the acrobats and the cotton candy sheep—all of them were content to meet their fate, week in and week out, a never-ending carnival of death.
No, the clown decided, she wouldn’t do this any longer.
While the children were busy stuffing sheep into their mouths and watching the juggler toss flaming balls of sugar, the clown snuck to the edge of the carnival, intending to run away—but instead the magician spotted her. He snatched her up and stuffed her into his pocket, and kept her there until evening.
“I don’t want to do this any more,” she told him.
“I’m sorry, I truly am. But we have a party tomorrow, and I don’t have time to make another seed.” He dropped her into his cauldron and she melted away.
*
The clown woke angry. It was one thing to destroy her when she was willing, but the magician had thrown her in the cauldron even after she protested. Her gown reflected her mood—sugar burnt black with a dusting of granulated sugar sequins. Sour gummy animals replaced the fluffy cotton candy sheep, and dark chocolate elephants balanced on jawbreaker balls. The tents of the carnival were a shiny red, like wet blood, and the gingerbread daredevil wore a biker jacket of black licorice.
This time she would not tell the others of the joys of children’s laughter. She would warn them of the horror of being eaten, and instead of meeting their so-called destiny, they would work together and escape.
The clown was busy formulating her plans, and she did not notice that the magician was still awake until he came up behind her and snatched her away. He dropped her into a glass jar on the counter and sealed the lid. She watched from her prison as he poured out a batch of melted sugar and worked it into shape as it cooled. Before long, he had made a figure, a little over three inches tall.
It was her replacement, a handsome candy clown with pants of candied orange peel and sugar-rainbow suspenders. His face was molded into a dopey grin, and the clown knew that she would have loved him more than the gingerbread daredevil, if they had met when she had first been made. Now, though, all she felt when she looked at him was pity.
Over on the table, the carnival was waking, but she was not there to greet them. Instead, the magician spoke to them, telling them of the wonders that awaited them and reminding them that it was their destiny to be eaten. Then the magician loaded them up—the carnival and the angry clown—and took them to the party. He did not let the clown out of her jar until after the party had started.
She tried to warn the others. The animals were hopeless of course, for they understood so little of what was happening. The juggler and the bearded lady did not believe her—and why should they? The magician had been there when they woke, and she was just a clown who joined them at the party. She came too late to save them.
Her last hope was the gingerbread daredevil, who, she had to admit, looked quite striking in his licorice biker jacket. He listened to her carefully, and even claimed to believe her. But he wasn’t willing to stop the show and run away with her. Her plans of rebellion and escape were crushed. The others didn’t change their minds even as the children ripped the tops off the red-sugar tents. “It is our destiny,” they told her, and “What would we do if we left the carnival, anyway?”
Even without the others, the clown was determined to leave. She gathered up the saltwater-taffy cords from the bungee jumping ride and used them to climb down to the floor. She was sugar, and fragile, so she knew she wouldn’t live long, but at least—for the first time—her life was truly hers.
She wove around the children’s legs. The magician stood in the open doorway demanding to be paid despite delivering a dark and dismal failure of a carnival. His arguments escalated into shouts, and the clown slipped out the door just before it slammed shut in the magician’s face. He stormed off to his van without ever looking down, and finally the clown was free. With sunshine glinting off her shiny-sugar hair, she walked out into the chest-high grass of the birthday girl’s lawn and never looked back.
*
On the side of a dried up drainage ditch, on the edge of an otherwise ordinary suburban neighborhood, there is an odd sort of carnival. Instead of tents there are marshmallow mushrooms in assorted shapes and colors, and instead of performing animals there are caramel deer and birds made up of chocolate-covered pretzels. The animals are not trained, and wander through the carnival as they please. There are no daredevils or jugglers or bearded ladies.
But there is a clown. She is a peaceful clown, with white-sugar hair and a minty green dress. She knows that somewhere in the city the magician still makes carnivals to be eaten, and she wonders if someday that too-happy clown will come to his senses and make his escape. She knows her carnival is temporary, and it will melt next time it rains. But she also knows that she is a seed, and that she will not be eaten, and every time the sun dries out the puddles, her carnival will grow again.
