Shudder (9 page)

It was a slow-moving rainy Sunday afternoon and Anton was at his home, lounging on his sofa. There were two small silk cushions under his head, a glass of beer and an ashtray on the floor by the sofa, and a book standing on his belly, balanced by his lazy fingers. He read with deliberate sensual pleasure.

The book was old, with two layers of cello tape crisscrossing its cover. Its name was,
Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog
.

The raindrops splattered softly on the windowpane and turned into tiny, shifting rivers.

The phone rang. An unfamiliar number. After some deliberation, Anton picked it up.

“Hi, I'm looking for Anton.”

“Him speaking.”

“Hey, Anton, it's me, Dave. Dave Cohran.”

Anton gave a yelp of agitation. “David, you're in town.”

“Yeah, have been for quite a while now. I ran into Natalie and she gave me your number. Wanna have a coffee or something?”

“Sure, let's do that. Let's do that now. You come right over. I'll tell you where I live.”

“Okay, let's do that.”

After switching off the phone, Anton lit another cigarette. David. He had missed him more than he cared to admit. He closed his eyes and returned for the first time in ages to School 95.

Twenty-seven years ago, Anton was a young history teacher there. Back then Dave was a restless boy of fifteen, in possession of a very bright mind but decidedly prone to laziness.

Then came that fateful day, November twenty-seventh. There was a boy in the class, Mike, who was always the brunt of bullying and cruel jokes from the rest of the boys, and some of the girls. Only Dave more or less left him alone.

In the late autumn morning of that Monday, Mike had entered the classroom with a shotgun, two pistols, and an ax.

Anton had recurring nightmares about this for a decade afterwards. The screams, the pleading, the shots, the horrible sound of an ax entering a young human body.

In the end, of those present in the classroom, only Anton himself and Dave had survived the massacre. For an eternity, Mike had looked at them, and they had looked back at the trembling muzzle of his pistol, before, with a sudden movement, the boy had put the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

After this, the young teacher and the undisciplined boy turned friends. Anton had quit teaching immediately and became, after a while, a journalist for a liberal newspaper. Dave had become a young death metal legend. Anton still had two or three of his discs somewhere.

Dave's first two albums, in which he had translated guitar riffs into synthesizer riffs, replaced the bass with a programmed cello, and added samples of animals from a slaughterhouse, had made him an instant legend among the couple of thousand enthusiasts around the world that cared about such things.

As he, Anton, had become something of an opinion maker, Dave had become an almost legendary musician and composer. The center of a cult musical project, he fired all the musicians after the recording of each album, and took his pick from the best ones in the field for the next one, and there were quite a many people who thought it an honor to play with the young prodigy.

Then, a few years after graduating high school, Dave abruptly stopped making music and joined the army. That was the first long hiatus in which they stopped keeping in contact, apart from the incidental Christmas e-card.

Years passed.

Anton's lovely stepdaughter had grown from a baby to a stunning young woman, when an older, toned, and sexy Dave had appeared on the horizon again.

Anton's phone played the
Flight of the Valkyrie
. It was Dave. “Hi, I'm at the entrance of your building. What code do I punch in?”

“Ah yes, sorry, Dave. It's seven-eight, eight-seven, seven-eight, oh-nine.”

“Seven-eight, eight-seven, seven-eight, oh-nine...okay, I'm inside.”

“Take the elevator, type in the same code plus a four at the end to activate it, and go to the fourth floor. Apartment four-eighteen.”

“All right, see you soon, man.”

Anton smiled. Dave still used the word ‘man'. With a happy grunt, he got out of his sofa and opened the window wide. The sound of traffic and the smell of city air entered the room. This was a gesture to Dave—perhaps he was still a nonsmoker and an open window fanatic.

After this, Anton briefly examined himself in the mirror, changed his shirt, blew off the ashes scattered on the coffee table, put on the kettle, and lit yet another cigarette.

The doorbell rang. Anton looked at the little screen near the door. It was an older looking David. He unlocked and unlatched the door and opened it.

“Anton.”

“Dave.”

Anton hugged the younger man for a second and bade him inside.

A minute later they sat in the living room on both sides of the coffee table.

Thankfully, both were relaxed enough to grin sheepishly. No one felt the need to project a stern, serious persona. Dave looked older, but there still remained something of the wild boy, who perhaps even now looked through the mature man's eyes.

“So, Dave, you're back from Russia, I see.”

Dave nodded and smiled. “Yeah, now I'm a private dick working for the police.”

“A sleuth, as people used to say,” Anton said with characteristic quiet glee, “a gumshoe. A sniffer. Congratulations. You always had a bent for logical thinking, although you seldom used it.”

“Thanks, I guess. What about you? Still a journalist?”

“No, no, far from it. I work at the Mental Hygiene Office.”

Dave raised his eyebrows. “What's that? Sounds like a brainwashing ministry from some conspiracy.”

“Not exactly,” laughed Anton. It was a deep laughter, which stirred up a smoker's cough. “It's rather my own invention. You know I've always had a tendency to find significance in the way people dressed and how commercial posters looked. I've finally got the state to pay for me and my team to collect all this info and analyze it.”

“What can I say? Congratulations.” Having said that, Dave wondered what to say next. Anton obviously bristled with desire to discuss all topics imaginable—like they used to decades ago. He formulated a possible leading question. “How does it look? What does your research show?”

“Everything's pretty shitty.”

“Hah, you're telling me.”

Anton looked at his old friend, noting the small telltale wrinkles around the eyes. “How was Russia? Did you see Saint Petersburg?”

“Nope. I saw Siberia.”

“Wow, where did you go?”

“I was a surgeon in Muhosransk.”

Anton cackled. “That sounds like a contemporary love novel, the new best-seller by Tamara Akhmed,
I Was a Surgeon in Muhosransk
.”

Dave continued the improvisation. “A shattering love story of a lonely werewolf transvestite, who tried to flee from himself, only in order to find...er...”

“Herself.”

“Right, herself.”

Anton patted his knees contentedly. They still had the chemistry. Muhosransk, though? “Muhosransk, that's very up north, isn't it?”

“It's like a hostile planet there, man.”

“Tell me, tell me.”

“What's there to tell? It was terrible. When the winter came, it dropped to minus forty. Centigrade.”

Anton gaped obligingly. “Centigrade?”

“Yup. I mean, it's usually minus thirty, but every once in a while it's minus forty. That year was like that. Everybody there knows that every four-five years temperatures tend to get really low.”

Dave's voice had gotten sharper suddenly. “The funny thing is, they live there. It's their city but they are totally unadapted.”

“What do you mean, unadapted?”

“Well, the buildings suck. Apartment blocks, which are very little good against a winter of this sort.” Dave's nostrils flared. “People's hair freezes to the wall when they sleep.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, ice builds up, I mean literally, ice builds up on the inside of the apartment walls. If they are lucky, they can make the bathroom into a warm room, where the kids are sent to do their homework.”

“They must be supermen,” exclaimed Anton, looking at the agitated detective.

“Well, that's exactly it—they're not. They are constantly ill. In the operating rooms, it was hell. Every day of the winter, people would come in with frozen limbs and I would have to saw them off.”

“Ugh.”

“Ugh indeed,” Dave said, squirming uneasily on his chair. “Then you realize that that's that for them. There was this guy, his car broke down out of town. Hell of a frostbite. We had to amputate his hands and feet and he had no family. From now on, he would just be put into some freezing shit-hole for invalids, to degenerate for probably a year, before dying.”

“No question of getting a transplant or an artificial limb, I suppose.”

“Not for your average Ivan there isn't.”

“I understand why you didn't stay there for long,” said the Albino.

“Oh, when the day came, I ran like hell. That day, the anesthetic ran out.”

“What?” Anton's face showed not only horror, but fear, because Anton was very much afraid of pain.

Dave glanced at Anton and then fixed his gaze on the coffee table. “Yeah, we had to cut living flesh and they had to feel every bit of it.”

“But why?”

“Because they are inefficient, suicidal misanthropes,” the detective said with sudden savagery. “There was this kid who missed his bus from school and he walked six miles back to his village. I was expected to cut off his hands without anesthetic because no one had been efficient enough to stock better; because some damn bus driver, who must know all the kids by face, didn't wait for him and there was no other place for him to go.

“Apparently no one had even planned for this obvious situation in the first place, although I'm certain this wasn't the first fucking time something like that happened.”

Dave shot out of his chair and paced the room without even noticing that he was no longer sitting at the table. He had been dying to have this talk with someone.

Anton lit up another cigarette, ejected the smoke out through his nostrils, and looked benevolently at the roused detective.

Dave was gesticulating and sincerely fuming. “I mean, can you imagine: the nation, which for two decades looked like it would out-compete the whole western world, and then for another two decades looked like it would be lagging behind, but still controlling half of Europe... I mean, to this day, the Russians are a technologically advanced nation, if it weren't for them, none of these Irans, Pakistans and Nigerias, they wouldn't have nuclear or space technology. I bet even the Hindus initially got their space technology from the Russians.”

Anton dared not say anything for fear of breaking the spell. He felt that this outpour helped Dave come to terms with certain things.

The detective continued his angry lecture. “There, in the heart of Russia, in Muhosransk, they can't get their act together to the minimal extent of not living in hell. It's not impossible—they have the resources, the technology, the know-how, but they don't apply it. Canadians do, Norwegians, Icelanders, Alaskans do—but they don't. So they live in this hell, in shitty freezing apartments, working and studying in shitty freezing buildings, and they are always drunk to cope with it, and they live like up to fifty...”

“You're exaggerating.”

“Only slightly. They hate themselves, but they hate other Russians more, and they hate foreigners the most. Especially colored foreigners like Asians or Africans. Fucking young skinheads and aging drunken ultrapatriots everywhere.”

“Well, I still ain't too fond of Afros myself,” interjected Anton with an undertone of defiance.

“What? Still?”

“Yup. Don't like them one bit.”

Dave looked at Anton's stubborn smile and suddenly his Russian flashback receded, the adrenaline it had pumped up releasing itself in an explosion of laughter.

“What's so funny, Dave?” Anton asked with somewhat strained patience.

Dave looked through tears of laughter at his old friend. The educated man, the former teacher, the former liberal opinion maker, who was an albino that hated Africans and thought the world of his black stepdaughter.

“You're...you're...” he gasped smiling, “you're still a man of contradictions, Tony, old boy.”

Anton gave a mock stiff nod and beckoned to Dave's empty chair. Dave returned to it.

“More coffee, dear detective?”

“Oh, yes please, Mister Mentalist.”

Anton went to the kitchen. Dave heard him fill the kettle with water and then switch it on. Then the albino returned.