A Partial History of Lost Causes (56 page)

And then there was the unendurable pressure of having to die gracefully in front of people I knew. There was the childlike suspicion that this thing chasing me was something that could be outrun; there was the sneaking sense, only three quarters ironic, that Huntington’s might not qualify for a visa. Even more primal and even more shameful was the fleeting question of whether my father had ever died at all. I’d watched him die from superego down to cells, but even as a child, I’d had the good sense to darkly scrutinize what I was supposed to be taking at face value. How was the man in front of me—the man who flailed and shouted, threw things across the room, shat on the piano—how was this man the same one who had composed choral arrangements for Bach, and had the capacity to carry on simple conversations in a truly unfathomable number of languages, and followed geopolitics like other men follow sports? Even as a teenager, I suspected that the whole thing might be a sham. This man’s leprous face was not my father’s face; his syncopated animation was not my father’s gestures. If this man was not my father, then my father wasn’t here. And if he wasn’t here, he was somewhere else—perhaps he’d outmaneuvered everybody, as he always outmaneuvered me at the chessboard in the days before he couldn’t anymore.

I told Viktor all this. And then I told him something simpler and just as true: sometimes there are things we don’t understand even about
ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we’d never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that—even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them—we still wouldn’t know.

It was only four hours to Perm, and I slept most of the way. We touched down and shuffled out and rented our car glumly, with the air of hungover teenagers who know that, in a burst of inebriated inspiration, they’ve done grim damage to their future lives. I let Viktor drive.

We didn’t speak as we skimmed along the Kama River. I rolled down the window and looked at the water—blue as a femoral artery, running off to five different seas. Somewhere beyond the thicket of trees lay the ruins of Perm 36, but we didn’t have time to go looking for it. Even if we did, there probably wouldn’t have been much to see: a ghostly archipelago of stones, a husk of barbed wire, and withered trees. Through the window, the air came at us mossy and dense and rich with the complicated, metallic scent of industry. The city skyline was strangely ridged, which made the horizon feel askew: buildings jumped at us in weird ways as we approached, and off in the distance we could sense the hulking presence of the Urals, their humped backs like fossilized ogres guarding the entrance to Asia. And between them, perhaps: snatches of weak intercontinental light, backlighting the contours and making paper lanterns of the foothills. And beyond that, seven more time zones. You could squint and almost see it: tens of thousands of fields of wheat, overgrown collectives where nature had clotted over agriculture. Unrelenting taiga pocked by the occasional relic of the odd, enormous universe: a putrefying missile silo, the void left by a comet. And beyond that: a smattering of volcanic islands and then America. I could close my eyes and give myself vertigo just thinking about it. I am not ready to die. I’m not. I am not even bored of the fact that the world is round.

Outside the window, the sun was brutal, bright and horrible as an exposed organ.

We checked in to a hostel that was similar to my old hostel. I thought of my things back there in the building that had been something like a home—my pile of myriad clothes and books, all the lingering things that I would soon have to grimly assess and stow, like a pathologist at an autopsy. Better to leave nothing behind than to leave behind so little—just enough evidence for people to know that you only made it two thirds through
War and Peace
, and you were overly fond of shirts with collars.

We found our room wordlessly and thunked our bags onto our hospital-cornered beds. Across the room, Viktor turned to face the wall and change. I eyed him with what I realized was a version of lust, even if was a bit bleached out, a bit bloodless. It wasn’t particular to him, I didn’t think—although he had nice eyes, I suppose. It was just that he was a man, and we were at a sort of hotel, and I was dying. And sex is supposed to put you in contact with the enduring, or the infinite, or whatever, although I wondered if, in this context, it might have the opposite effect. Maybe the smack of skin on skin would remind me only of our stubborn corporeality. Maybe it would make me start thinking about evolution, and genetics, and continuity, and the future, and maybe I would think about how sex was an inherently hopeful act, and maybe the whole thing would leave me in worse shape than I was when we started. And anyway, Jonathan was somewhere else—a life with him irretrievable now, even if I turned around the very next morning and flew home, even if I spent the night clutching at another man’s bones.

I had just about talked myself out of it when Viktor grabbed my hip and stared at me hard. He leaned in. And then we were tearing at seams and hair and skin, and I was on top of him, and we wrestled each other as though we were fighting with our own mortalities: it was high-stakes sex, it was execution-day sex. We clung to each other’s bodies: unfamiliar because we were strangers in this way, familiar because we were both human and both still blessedly alive. He smelled like basil. We yelled into each other’s shoulders, and it was terror, I’m sure, as much as it was joy. It was like shouting into the apocalypse.

Afterward, he tapped me on the shoulder. “Another question,” he said.

“Yes.”

“All this stuff about wanting to know how to face defeat,” he said. “You think you learned something from Aleksandr about that?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? We both are.”

“And that’s it?”

“I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.”

Outside, bats made shadowy filaments against the sky. I burrowed into Viktor’s shoulder and tangled in the scratchy sheets. It was still early, for a certain demographic. Down on the street, the city geared up like a rusty engine, and I heard mirthful hilarity in the streets all night long.

For the conversations with Simonov, we’d booked a hotel room in downtown Perm. The day after our arrival, Viktor and I drove there in silence. Outside the window, the town petered into white fields and enormous white sky. The sun emerged and began sweating tenuous light. I rolled down the window and smelled cold mud and the bloody smell of rusted automotives.

At the hotel, we promptly ordered decadent room service on Aleksandr’s credit card. After half an hour, Simonov arrived. He knocked on the door. “You’re the film students?” he said.

We let him in. He had a weathered, tumorous face, spackled with a stingy assortment of zinc-colored teeth. A Kalashnikov rifle was hanging from his hand, limp as a dislocated elbow. It was an odd way to hold a gun.

“Thank you for meeting with us,” we said, and then we watched Simonov eat and drink and smoke for a while. He poked at his pork and sucked on his shots. We set up the camera, and it stood splay-legged in the corner. Simonov eyed it and began tapping his knee with the wretched repetition of an autistic child. It was possible, I realized, that he had stage fright.

After we’d all done a couple more shots, we started to ask Simonov our questions. We asked him about his childhood, his rise to power, his thoughts on the greatness of the Russian armed forces. He drank. We drank. We turned off the camera, and Viktor made off-color jokes. Simonov laughed. We turned the camera back on and asked him his
thoughts on tensions with Georgia. At one point he banged on the table and started yelling about how Russia was the number one exporter of weaponry in the world. We turned the camera off. He got misty about his children, about his wife. “She looks like a potato,” he said. “But God help me, I love her.” I glanced at Viktor. We turned the camera back on.

“You’ve been working here at Perm for a long time,” said Viktor carefully.

“Yes,” said Simonov. He leaned back. “Ten years.”

“So you were here in 1999, then,” I said.

“That’s what ten years means.”

“So you were here on September 3, 1999, then,” I said.

He stiffened. “Yes,” he said slowly. In the silence, it felt as though the camera were emitting its own tiny sound—the barely audible breathing of febrile ground, or of something waiting to capture something else. “I suppose.”

“Were you aware of the disappearance of a significant amount of RDX in the middle of the night on that date?” said Viktor.

Simonov laughed, but it sounded like a warning. “That was a very long time ago,” he said.

“You might remember it,” said Viktor, “as the night before the bombings started.”

Simonov’s voice went quiet. “Turn off the camera,” he said, and Viktor did as he said. Simonov looked at us differently—his mouth hung open, but his eyes were narrowing into an expression that was cold and, implausibly, quite sober. Then he smiled. “Kind of an odd question for students.”

I looked at Viktor. He turned his head slightly to the side.

“I know who you are,” said Simonov. “I know who you work for.”

I started to speak, but Simonov waved his hand at me. “He will not win,” he said.

“No,” said Viktor.

“Then there’s something we can agree on,” said Simonov. “And he’s making this film. You really thought I hadn’t heard of this? You really thought I didn’t know?”

He leaned back and looked at us. His gaze was stricken and faltering,
as though he’d been waiting his whole life for this moment, and now that it was upon him, there was nothing he could do with it. For a long time he looked at us, his mouth puckering. “Lucky for you,” he said at last. “My daughter was killed in Buynaksk.”

I leaned back. “She was?”

“She was.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He looked down. I looked at Viktor. I could tell that he wanted to turn the camera back on, but he didn’t. “They announced it two days early,” said Simonov. “Gennadiy Seleznyov announced it to the Parliament, that there’d been an explosion in Buynaksk, and I was so afraid for her. But then she called me and said, ‘Papa, I’m fine. It was Moscow. It was a mistake.’ Two days later she was gone. They must have gotten their dates mixed up.” He chewed on his knuckle. I tried to imagine it. It was hard to imagine what that might take from a person.

I leaned forward. “Can you talk to us?” I said.

Simonov stared. “I loved my daughter.”

“Of course,” said Viktor.

He shook his head. “I loved my daughter,” he said again. “But I have other daughters. I have a wife. I enjoy my own life, if that’s not too tawdry to say. I cannot talk to you. I’m sorry.”

Viktor looked at me a little hopelessly. “Talk to us,” he said. “Talk to us now, for your daughter.”

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” said Simonov miserably. “I thought it was for the Dagestan incursion. I thought it was for some business abroad. I swear to you, I did not know.”

“We believe you,” said Viktor. “We believe you.” He leaned forward. “What was her name, your daughter?” This was a little callous, I thought—but then it was also pretty smart.