A Partial History of Lost Causes (33 page)

“I got the sense that there were, you know, factions within the camp.”

“Factions? Dear heavens. Tell me more about that.”

“He seems aggrieved.”

“He was run over by a bus. That’ll make anyone bitter, I’d imagine.”

“I didn’t know that. But I mean, that wasn’t Bezetov’s fault, right?”

“Fault is such a fuzzy concept, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” I said. Viktor Davidenko shrugged and went back to staring at the menu. I forced my voice into a lower register than it normally wanted to go. “What’s the relationship between Right Russia and Alternative Russia, exactly?”

He made a face. “Muted indifference. No, that’s not right. Grudging tolerance.”

“On the part of Alternative Russia, you mean?”

“Obviously.”

“Right Russia is a public relations liability?”

“In some quarters, yes, in other quarters, no.”

“Like anything, I suppose. So why does Aleksandr tolerate Misha’s faction? Does Misha have something on Aleksandr?”

“Some kind of blackmail, you mean?”

“Does Aleksandr owe him a favor or something? Or does Misha know something about him?”

Viktor eyed me wryly. “Like a mistress, you’re saying?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t suggest that—”

“The thought never crossed my mind,” he said. “But no. I do not think Bezetov’s secrets are of the sexual variety. He’d probably be a much better boss if they were.”

“So why associate with Right Russia at all?”

“I can’t talk to you about that,” said Viktor cheerfully. “But this is what I’d suggest. He has a rally next week. On Saturday. At Gostiny Dvor.”

“Right.” I’d seen the posters around the city on those aimless and glassy-eyed afternoons of wandering, in between reading and sleeping. The Assembly of the Dissatisfied, it was called. There were tiny flags and icons symbolizing various causes, some of which I was
familiar with—there were environmentalists, human rights people, free-market people, controlled-economy people, and many more that I didn’t recognize—and I thought it was interesting that one march could incorporate such a wide variety of wingnuts. In the center of the poster was a picture of Aleksandr Bezetov: he peered out at me distastefully, as though he already knew that I was going to try to bother him. Above him, in surreal colors, was a distorted and x-ed out picture of Putin. His puckered, vaguely serpentine face registered a look of continual disapproval over the proceedings.

“You should come,” said Viktor. “Wear that shirt again.”

It occurred to me dimly that I was being flirted with. I am genuinely bad at discerning this. “Do I talk to you again?”

“Me? No, certainly not. You never talk to me again. You’d never outsmart me, but Aleksandr is, shall we say, cautious. This conversation didn’t happen. I’m not supposed to meet with people like you.”

“Women?”

“Funny.”

“Americans?”

“Getting warmer.”

“Who do I talk to at the rally?” It occurred to me that Viktor might not have believed a single thing I’d said to him, and then I thought to wonder for the first time whether I should believe anything he’d said, in a definitive way.

Viktor leaned toward me. “You’ll see Nina. The wife. She has red hair. You can’t miss her.”

“Okay.”

“Ask her for a meeting.”

“You’re the media relations guy and you’re telling me to accost his wife at a rally?” I had wanted to avoid doing exactly that.

“It makes her feel important to arrange things,” said Viktor. “She’ll give you a meeting.”

“What’s she like?”

He looked up. “Why? You after her job?”

My mouth fell open. I closed it. “No. No. Of course not, no.”

“It wouldn’t be professional for me to comment on my boss’s wife.”

“No. Of course not. I’m sorry I asked.”

“But I’ve staked my career on pushing professional boundaries. So I’ll say she’s—she’s not making him happy.”

I rolled my eyes. I was bored of talking about this already. Might she be castrating? Might be she be emasculating? Might she be shrill? I was sick of hearing about the failings of wives, ever, and was suddenly filled with gladness that I would never be one.

“What?” said Viktor.

“Oh, I don’t know. Making someone happy is such a tall order these days.”

“You think so?” He was looking at me, I noticed, in the way I remember men looking at me, back when men looked at me. There was a brief, comical period in college when I was widely deemed mysterious. All people meant by this was that my listening face was not terribly animated. I could see Viktor Davidenko gearing up to think me some kind of puzzle, and this never works—not because people solve you, particularly, but because they learn there’s nothing much to solve. Seeing yourself through somebody else’s eyes is like taking a guest through your long-unvisited apartment. The bits of your personality that you’ve come to take for granted are like the souvenirs of a life you are already bored of remembering. This old thing?, you want to say, pointing to your personal trivia or your political beliefs or your body. Got it in Barcelona for four euros. It’s not real. This joke? I make it all the time. You’ll get sick of it. I am sick of it. But the new person doesn’t know that yet, and you are not actually about to tell him.

“And you?” I said.

“And me, what?”

I realized I didn’t know what I was asking. “You’re motivated by—what? You believe in Bezetov?” I tossed this off flippantly, though I desperately wanted to hear that the answer was yes.

“Yes.” He leaned forward. “I do.”

“Why?”

“Why? The lady wants to know why. It will matter, is the bottom line. I do believe it will matter. You look at the ’91 coup, the way that the demonstrators then could not be dispersed by force because there were simply so many of them. It is an enormous country. He will not win. Of course he will not win. But I do think it will matter.”

Here, in this statement, I found my vague attraction made specific: he was a person who believed, ultimately, that Aleksandr could be important. I’d been drawn to Viktor already, maybe, but that attraction was narrowed down to that most concrete and self-serving thing: the shared affinity of vision.

“You have someone at home?” he said.

“I did.”

“You left him?”

“I did.”

“For this?”

I slid my tongue along my lower teeth, feeling the unevenness that had resurged in recent years. All that orthodontia, such an investment, for what? Though I knew this was a rabbit hole that did not warrant pursuing. When you thought about it, everything—all of life—could seem a series of wasted preparations. Why did you exercise, and why did you consume the appropriate staggering amount of vegetables per day? And why were you vain about your body or your brain or whatever it was you were vain about? And why did you sob for a week and refuse food and lie the wrong way in the bed and watch the necrotic light creep over the horizon only because a boy who never loved you still did not? Such anguish, such narcissism, such ahistoricism. All the grand projects were, after all, not so grand. Little petty fits, all of them, piecemeal staving off of the inevitable, scraps and dregs of self-distraction, all of it existing only to mitigate the fact, the central fact, the unbelievable irreducible fact, of our transience.

“I suppose so,” I said slowly.

“That must not have made him happy.”

I shrugged in a sudden, flinching fashion. I was mirroring the way he had shrugged a moment ago. “Probably not.”

“Has it made you happy?”

“Not yet. I am cautiously optimistic.”

“That is probably too optimistic.”

There was some slyness happening on his face, like a pentimento, an echo of a previous intention. There’d been a tension in the conversation all along, running some syncopated counterpoint to the surface. We were more adversarial than was merited, that’s what it was.

He raised a finger for the check and paid the bill before I’d even begun fumbling through my wallet. There was the sense of attraction gearing up, swinging in a new, unexpected direction, as it could. I thought briefly of that parade of men in college: insubstantial, finally; it was hard to clearly remember a face or a personality, though it was easy enough to remember the disappointments, misunderstandings, abuses. I wondered what attenuated mini-romances of 2006 were even like—people must wonder whether they’re being dumped for not having a sufficiently robust Internet presence, or whatever. The Internet: a whole new arena in which to fail to significantly exist. As soon as I realized I was thinking about that, I knew I was drunk.

Outside, there was too much clarity to the buildings, as though they’d been freshly etched; the stars were a degree brighter than seemed totally plausible; I felt, generally, like a recent recipient of corrective lenses. This—all of this, I knew—was silly. One thing I did not like about drunkenness was that it unlocked all of one’s self-pity at once—in my case, self-pity was vast and gnawing and insatiable; it required constant combat to subdue. When I was drunk, my defenses were down, and I could easily spend an hour staring in the mirror, thinking that I was too pretty to die.

“Well,” I said, suddenly clunky, suddenly professional. “Thank you for your time.”

I offered my hand and knew immediately that this was the wrong thing to do.

“You are quite welcome,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it rather more elaborately than was required. “I will see you at the rally, then.”

“Yes,” I said, drawing myself up into dignity, attempting to make a coherent exit. “I will see you at the rally.”

I walked back slowly, in ever widening circles. The Neva looked colder than usual, shivering with leaves and bric-a-brac. I stopped to stare at it, trying to get my head to clear. Looking at the water, for some reason—or no reason—disinterred an image of my father. Perhaps it was a memory of a memory, or perhaps a memory of a photo. At any rate, I gazed into the water and I could nearly see him, facing some
eastern window, his shadow severe in the low-hanging light. I could almost see his stooped back, the slumped angle of the shoulders. I could almost see in it some preemptive defeat. By the point the picture was taken, or the memory was formed, he knew. He knew, he must have known. And yet how impossible to parse the moment when the proper exit is before you. How impossible to know whether you’re getting out at the right time. A game of strategy, that, that no one could win. Maybe he thought about it, and maybe he miscalculated, and maybe then it was too late. Or maybe he thought about it and rejected it, nobly, with clean sagacity, accepted the indignity of insanity and death as part of life, consciously, bravely. Or maybe, maybe, he was just too terrified. At any rate, who am I to judge?

I watched the women hurry home along the river: they were uniformly thin, wearing cheap fabrics in bold patterns. Under their coats, I knew, tiny crosses swung against jutting clavicles.

But it’s easy to judge, we’re born to judge; we live for it, really. It’s the way we decide that we are the self we are instead of all the other selves we might have been. And I judged enthusiastically, mirthfully, even him, the man whose disaster was the perfect template for my own—maybe I judged him especially. I thought when I was young that I would have the certainty to do it, that prevailing ethics and aesthetics would win the day, and that as long as suicide could be chosen rationally, thoughtfully, then the catastrophe was only the universal one, nothing more or less—as long as agency could be maintained, as long as the conscience could have the last word, then there was nothing more for a human being to ask from a lifetime. I judged him for not doing it. I resented him for not doing it once he’d disappeared entirely and no longer had to deal with it, and I saw it as a failure of sympathetic imagination on his part, a failure of honor—not the only failure, most likely, nor possibly the biggest one, but the one we’d had to live with longest and thus the one we would always remember. The failure was the legacy. The failure was the only thing left.

Along the Neva, I watched an older woman push her mentally disabled daughter in a wheelchair. The daughter was wearing eyeliner, and I thought of the care that had gone into making that a reality—the
mother licking the pencil, bending her thumb against her daughter’s eyelashes.

If I’d defined my father’s failure in such stark terms—his unwillingness to part with the last feeble snatches of his existence, his greedy and small clinging to what little was left—if those were the terms by which I defined failure, I knew I had a hazier vision of what I meant by success. In part, I was trying to avoid causing my mother the exact brand of anguish that my father had caused us—the particular pain of wishing rabidly for the death of a person you once desperately loved. Though if I was honest with myself, I knew that I was doing something not dissimilar, not demonstrably better, by running away. Did I really think they’d forgotten me? Was my self-esteem actually so low? It was not. Jonathan would get over it one day—he’d find new love, he’d find new memories, those memories would pile on top of the memories of me, pushing me ever further to the bottom of his consciousness, time would elapse, great swaths of time, such time!, and the time he’d spent with me would become ever briefer, comparably, until one day it might feel incidental, anecdotal. But I knew that day had not yet come, and in the meantime, I’d done nothing less than traumatize him. And my mother. I did not think so little of her that I felt my departure was, fundamentally, any kind of favor. I didn’t believe that she’d be able to relax now, soak up the Arizona heat and the love of an inane man, enjoy life. I hoped there’d be some of that, but I could not pretend that all the great difficulties were truly over. To do so would be to invoke depths of grotesque faux self-martyrdom that not even I possessed. No, there was no way to romanticize it: this trip was essentially a temper tantrum. But then maybe insanity invites insanity; illogic invites illogic. There was simply no good answer. There was no right way to go, only countless wrong ways, each as unique as a snowflake.