The Great Glass Sea (27 page)

He asked them all, “Why would anyone come after
you
?”

“You mean to tell me,” the gun wielder said, “you’ve never been jumped?”

Dima shook his head. The hood shook with it. “Not till tonight.” The fat man laughed. “I thought you were nationalists,” Dima said, and the laugh stopped.

“Us?” the gun wielder said.

“I thought—”

“If they were us, you wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it. You wouldn’t have the fucking teeth to talk through. You wouldn’t . . .” And a hand was at his throat, on the edge of the hood, lifting a corner, the harelipped face close in the opening, the scabbed nose, the barrel of the gun. “Now you know,” the mouth said, “what this is fucking for.” Then the gun was gone, in its place a clear plastic bag filled with pieces of something that looked like scraps of shriveled skin. “
This
,” the man said, “is for the cops.” Then the hood was yanked down again, the blackness back.

The woman gave his hands a pat. “But those,” she said, “are just our short-term problems. They aren’t what worries us. What worries us long term, where the real danger lies, the threat to who we
are
. . .”

“. . . is your friends,” the fat man cut in, “the Communists.”

“I didn’t know they would take the picture,” Dima said. “I didn’t know about the poster. They were just . . .”

“They fooled you.” The woman nodded.

“Yes,” he told her.

“They tried to use you.”

“Yes.”

“The same old story,” she said.

And the gun wielder’s bark—“Spit on it!”—came at Dima with such fury he flinched. “Every fucking time, I mean since the fucking Hague, fucking Bakunin, those red motherfuckers have been fucking us over. We came for
their
revolution. We showed the fuck up. And after? They fucked us. Ours? Against the same people? Right next door? Did
they
come? Does a cat fuck a fish?” He paused, said it again: “Does a cat fuck a fish?”

Inside his hood, Dima shook his head.

“You’re fucking right,” the man said. “Not unless that cat
knows
it’s the only way it’s going to
catch
that fish, to hold that fishy still, that little fishy flopping there thinking, thinking, That cat’s not so bad. It doesn’t want to eat me. It only wants to
fuck
me.”

“All right,” the fat man said.

“
All right
? Do you
like
being treated like that? Like this guy. Like this motherfucker. Like
you
.” He jabbed a finger through the hood, against Dima’s forehead. “Get him on board. Fuck that fish. Fuck
us
. Until they turn around and fucking eat us. Right?” The man jabbed his finger again at Dima’s forehead. “
Right
?”

“I don’t know,” Dima said, “who you mean by
us
.” For a moment, there was just the sound of the man’s worked-up breathing, Dima’s own quieter breathing inside the hood. Then the man’s finger was gone and the fabric was rushing up Dima’s face and the hood was gone.

“
Us
,” the gun wielder said, the fabric hanging from his fist. “Me, him, her.”

But Dima was no longer listening. He sat, blinking, taking in the whole scene so fast he could feel it filling his eyes, as if the rush of information was what was squeezing down his pupils instead of the light—hard slants of light slicing past the crimson window drapes, painting the wall-bolted tables, the curved vinyl booths, the chrome of the bar, empty bottles glinting on dark shelves above the stools. On one table: a plastic basket that must have once held sugar or stacks of napkins but now overflowed with cigarette butts. It breathed a gray mist. The air was curdled with smoke. In the booth, to either side of him, the two men sat with cigarettes in their mouths, adding to it. Across the table the woman’s mouth was empty, her empty hands still on his tied ones.

“Us,” Dima heard the gun wielder say again.

She smiled a bad-toothed smile. “You,” she said.

Her name was Viktoriya Kirillovna Ovinka, though she told him, “Call me Vika” as she untied his wrists. “This”—she nodded across at the gun wielder—“is Fyodor Georgievich.”

“Fedya,” he said, picking at the scab on his nose.

“And Vladimir Vyacheslavovich.”

The fat man bowed as best he could, a small jerk of his gut against the table edge. “Volodya.” He extended one huge hand to Dima. “I believe you’ve already met my armpit.” He lifted an enormous limb, said, “Yuri Yurevich.”

Reaching beneath the fat man’s pit, Fedya flapped his hand like a mouth, let out a smoker’s croak: “Yura!”

That cracked the others up.

The hood-sweat slowly drying on his face, Dima, quietly, cautiously, asked them again, “But who are you?”

“Ah,” Vika said, bunching up the rope that had been around his wrists, “you mean
what
are we.”

“We could be anarchists,” Volodya said, “but Fedya would debate it.”

“
I’m
an anarchist.” Fedya rasied his hand—with the gun in it—like he was a student in some schoolroom for revolutionaries. “I’m a fucking insurrectionary anarchist. But there are definitely some mutualists in the room, collectivists, maybe—I’m not naming names—even an anarcho-capitalist.”

“Who?” Vika demanded.

Fedya lifted his shoulders, held up his hands.

“I’m not an anarcho-capitalist,” she said. “I’m a post-anarchist.”

“Yesterday,” Fedya said, “you were an anarcho-feminist.”

“So today I’m a post-anarcho-feminist.”

“But always”—Volodya motioned towards her with one huge hand—“and with great consistency”—held it out as if to settle everyone down—“Vika is a hedonist.”

She shrugged, her small shoulders lifting her sweatshirt, the row of safety pins winking up the center of her chest. Dima looked away, tried to ignore the glint still ghosting in his eyes.

Volodya placed his wide palm across his own wide chest, as if to draw the abductee’s attention back to him. “I,” he said, “consider myself a gastronist. Not a gastronome. I don’t love food; I
believe
in it. That society can, and should, be organized around it. But, that is, I admit, a minority view. So, if you must call us all by one moniker, then I suppose you might try Leisurists.”

“It sounds so stupid,” Fedya said.

“Or,” Volodya continued, “my personal preference: mushroomists.”

“Mushroomists?” Dima asked. Across from him Vika had balled his old wrist-rope into a tangle, its fibers a fuzzy softness between her fingers. The fat man must have gestured—Dima heard him clear his throat—because she uncupped her hands, spilled out the rope, reached beneath the table.

“Allow us,” Volodya said above her rustling, “to present to you a proposition. All this blather about freedom, all this rattling on since glasnost, freedom this, a free society that . . .” Vika lifted a small plastic bag into sight. “A free society,” the fat man continued as she plunked the bag down, “doesn’t force its people to do what they don’t want to do.” She picked at a knot in its neck. “Doesn’t coerce them even into doing it more frequently than they want.” Her fingernails were unpainted, chewed. “Doesn’t oblige some to work at jobs others wouldn’t do.” Dima watched her wiggle an index finger into the tied end. “Doesn’t bludgeon its citizens into lives they never wanted.” He could see the nicks around the quick, the red of bitten skin. “Doesn’t make us work at jobs we hate.” The knot came loose. Volodya reached across the table, retrieved the bag from Vika’s hands. “A free society,” he said, “doesn’t
make
us work at all. It
lets
us. Because we
want
to. At good work. Enjoyable work. Work we like.”

“In other words”—Vika spoke around a ruined thumbnail stuck between her lips—“it lets us play.”

“No!” Volodya’s voice was so vehement it drew Dima’s look back to him. “No, my dear distracting friend,” the fat man corrected her, shaking his head, his smiling cheeks joggling back and forth. “In no such words at all. Play,” he addressed Dima again, “doesn’t
make
anything. Nothing is
produced
. No, I’m talking about work, work that produces
and
satisfies. That
feels
like play. Shouldn’t that be the point? Not just to produce as much as possible, but to do it in a way that brings pleasure in the doing? Isn’t that the best work, the way we were meant to work? Play—with purpose.”

Opening the bag, he stuck his face in, inhaled until the plastic crinkled around his cheeks, then peeled it away and looked at Dima again. “Behold,” he said, “the heron. What gives a heron its greatest pleasure?”

Dima glanced at Vika; she was watching the fat man; the fat man was watching Dima, waiting, his chin above the bag. “Fishing?” Dima guessed.

Volodya gave Dima a look—half-amused, half-impressed—like a debater whose opponent has just proved his own point. “And a bear?” he said.

“To hunt,” Vika answered.

And Fedya said, “What about a squirrel?”

“I think”—Volodya winked at Dima—“our esteemed poet has seen the point.” He smiled across the table at Vika. “Cups? Thermos? Spoon?”

While she was digging in a rucksack for them, Volodya said to Dima, “Tell me, oh bard, oh scholarly scholar, why should animals have it better than us?” He waited with brows raised. Then, without looking, took the spoon from Vika.

Dima watched her put three tin cups out on the table, watched Volodya dip into the plastic bag, lift the spoon out mounded with powder, the same mealy brown as the shrivels he’d seen in Fedya’s bag before. “Is that mushroom?” Dima said.

“Ah yes.” Volodya, nodding vigorously, dumped the spoonful in one of the cups. “Mushroomists! You bring me back to the question at hand.” He dumped a second spoonful in a different cup. “Naturally,” he said, “all three of us, all
four
of us”— he gave Dima his half-surprised-half-impressed look again—“would be drawn to different kinds of work. Fedya, for example, is a magician with computers. Vika is mildly obsessed with sex.” Across the table, her punch hit his shoulder hard enough he nearly spilled the thermos he had just opened up. “And violence,” he added, pouring into the cups. “I—if I may for a moment unhook myself from the corset of modesty—am not merely an exuberant chef but a talented one.” He finished filling all three cups. “But one thing that we all enjoy in common”—setting the thermos down, he reached beneath the table, drew out a second, larger bag—“and, it might be mentioned, also how we endeavor to support ourselves in this inexorably capitalist society”—pushed it across to Dima—“is hunting for mushrooms.” He opened the bag for Dima to see. It was full of them, pounds of fungi, their brown crowns like a year’s worth of moons crammed into a black dirt sky. “You might call it,” Volodya added, “our co-play. Or joint work.”

Fedya reached over, grabbed a cup. Volodya slid another across the table to Vika, took the third for himself. The thermos he put in front of Dima. Dima tried to peer into it. He couldn’t see anything. When he looked back, the three of them had their cups in their hands, their hands raised.

Volodya nodded, made a little up-up motion with his cup.

Over the rim of hers, Vika’s black eyes peered at him. “What would you do with your time,” she said, “if your time was yours?”

He made himself look away. The others were all watching him, too. But, even looking back at them, he felt her stare.

“Not your
free
time,” she said, “but your
work
time.” And there were her eyes again. “If you could spend it at anything.”

Maybe it was just the way she was with everyone, maybe it was only that these days he spent so much time alone, maybe something simple as her hair, so black, black as his mother’s had been, as his brother’s still was, but for whatever reason he found himself repeating her word: “Anything.” He found that here, to her, he could say it: “Anything, if it was with my brother.”

Vika nodded, so slightly her shock of bangs barely shook. “Then,” she said, her voice low, her eyes serious, “we’ll drink to your brother.”

The fat man’s head bobbed up and down on his fat neck. He asked Dima his brother’s name, then raised the small cup in his huge hand. “To time,” Volodya said, “with Yaroslav.”

“To time with Yaroslav,” they all said.

“And,” Vika added, a small smile slipping back, “with us.”

“With us,” the others repeated, tipped their heads, and slugged the drink down.

It tasted so bad Dima could barely swallow. When he took the thermos from his mouth, the others were still draining their cups. As they finished they looked at him.