The Great Glass Sea (29 page)

A Russia,
Dima thought,
before the end of Russia
.

They had come to the rusted fence where the rail yard stopped. One after another, sets of tracks hit their concrete buffers and ended, too, sudden as time ceased. Except for one. It ran on, out, past the fence, dwindled into the distance. To either side of it a barrier of hemlocks grew, planted by the Consortium in preperatory years, a darkness-indifferent woods, branches swaying as if from a breeze blown down the access line. Dima could have stood all night watching the forest undulate if it hadn’t been for the faint buzz growing in his ears. He followed the sound upward: the power line, the towers, the wires swooping and rising into the distance, cresting and falling like waves. Which would make him underwater. Which would make the tracks beneath the wires, their shadows cast upon the lakefloor. Which would mean they weren’t solid at all, just strips he could stir with the brush of his hand. When he stooped down to touch them, Vika let go of his pants. The rail was solid.

He looked for Vika to let her know the news, but she was already disappearing into the shadows of the trees. Straightening up, he looked for the others. They were gone. No: he could hear them rustling in there. One by one, they came back out, the branches shifting, a shape separating from the trees, hurrying up the slope back to the tracks. Each of them carried some sort of board, wide as a spread hand, long as an arm, and, coming closer, he made out, beneath each plank, some piece of metal catching a curve of gleam. Wheels. Dima stopped, stared. Fedya was the first to set his on the rail—a heavy thunk—the others following with a clattering of metal on metal, and then a whooshing, a hiss, the sound rolling louder and louder towards Dima.

“That one,” Vika called to him, “is yours.”

They rode the outside rail in single file, Fedya then Vika then Dima, Volodya behind him so he wouldn’t get left. Dima watched the woman in front, the way she set one foot a little back on the board, used the other to push at the ties as they flicked by—it wasn’t hard; he just had to keep his balance, his distance—and when she stopped shoving and planted both feet and sank bent-kneed and low and let it glide, he did the same: the four of them flying down the rail, the trees whipping by in silent speed, a picture of the wind that rushed at Dima’s face, shook his beard, went wild through his hair. Squinting into it, all he could make out was a blur: her hurtling, the rails streaking, the ties flickering by, the streams of power lines like flight paths of birds somehow made visible to him, visible as the mirrors above, and then, suddenly, he could see beyond them, through the nighttime haze, make out the Milky Way, the distant planets, the pristine blackness of space.

Somewhere his father was smoking his pipe. Somewhere he was whittling a story out of wood. Somewhere his uncle was standing barefoot in the sun in the middle of a field, his toes burrowed into the dirt, down to the coolness, down to the coolness, and what was left of his mother but love for him? What did his niece know but the softness of his beard? To whose leg did his nephew cling? Who was as forgiving as his brother’s wife? What more could he want than to feel, even now, below his feet, the shaking of Yarik’s shoulders before the launch into the lake, even here, the wind rushing by as they slid beside each other on their skates, to know that no matter what the world did to itself, what it might try to do to them, there were places in it, in him, in his brother, where it could never reach.

They went on. The rails went on. The trees blurred by. Nothing but the walls of the woods and the causeway between them and the woman in front of him hurtling down it and the man behind him coming on.

It was a shock to hit the Oranzheria. Its high glass plain came into view like the shore of a continent glimpsed from far out at sea. Bright as ice beneath the mirror-light, hovering above the tops of the trees, its edges stretched as far as Dima could see. Only straight ahead, where the access line cut through, was there a gap. They shot into it. From beyond the buffer of hemlocks came the distant clangor of heavy machines, the roar of threshers, the din of a thousand voices, as the endless line of glass, broken only by the tops of the tallest trees, streamed by. In front, Fedya flung his arms out to either side, flipped it all the finger. Ahead, Vika did the same. Behind him, Dima knew, Volodya must be, too. He stretched his own arms out, stuck up his middle fingers, and, grinning into the wind, rocketed through.

Over an hour later, they came out the other side, blew by the outer reaches of the Oranzheria and into the sudden quiet of the still-standing woods. Not long after that, they stopped. His left heel bruised from using it as a break against the thwacking ties, Dima followed the others down the embankment into the trees. Here, the mirrors’ reach was new enough that there were still birches, aspens unfurling freshly budded leaves, pines strong and healthy as if grown from Consortium seeds. Beneath the boughs they hid their rail-boards. Nobody spoke. It was darker below the canopy and he hustled to keep from losing the others behind the scrim of pines, until the scrub cleared and they were scrambling down the dirt of a dry creek bank. Walking along the sandy bottom, the sound of the woods began to change. Between the rustling of their footsteps he heard music, the distant murmur of a radio or TV.

Vika turned to him. “You want an answer?” she whispered. “Why the old way failed? Why our way never gets a chance?” Taking his hand she pulled him up, over the lip of the bank, onto the forest floor.

Through the trees, he could see colors flashing, giant TV screens. Out of the creek, he heard it: the bombardment of loudspeaker ads.

“Why do you think,” Vika whispered, “the Party wouldn’t let us out to see the West? Why do you think they were so scared of even letting pictures in?”

Beside them, Volodya whispered, “To make us want what we don’t know we want until we want it: the genius of capitalism.”

“Spit on it,” Fedya said.

“Indeed.” Volodya nodded in the dimness. “But admire it, too. Because that, my expectatory friend, is the piece upon which the entire enterprise rests.”

They moved off through the trees, whispering as they went.

“Always increasing,” Vika said.

Volodya added, “Ever expanding.”

“Fucking America,” Fedya spat. “Hardest working fuckers in the world. Make three times more shit every hour than they did just fifty fucking years ago.”

“So why”—Volodya lifted a bent birch trunk for them to walk beneath—“are they working
more
hours? Not a few, not even a week’s worth, but
months
. Months more every year. Why?”

Behind Dima, Vika said, “Because more productivity just means more work.”

“Spit on
that
.”

Dropping the branch, Volodya whispered, “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“Unless . . .” Vika started.

And Fedya finished: “. . . for every fucking hour some wage slave works to make more shit, he’s also wanting to buy more shit.”

“More production,” Volodya said, “means more products must be bought, means the worker must have more money to buy them, means he has to work more hours to get it, means . . .”

“He’s making,” Fedya said, “more fucking products.”

“More profit,” Volodya added.

“But,” Vika chimed in, “not for him.”

“Because?” Volodya asked.

“Because,” Fedya said, “he’s
buying
the fucking products.”

They came to the edge of the woods. Scrub pines and thin saplings and the bramble-filled field that had been cleared around the outside of The Dachas. The concrete walls climbed up towards the backs of the mammoth TV screens, loomed high above the guard station set on its concrete blocks below, a green steel shell punched with a single door, the square hole of a window. It glowed, the bulb-light shifting with the shadows of men moving inside.

Outside, in the woods, the four of them drew close together.

“But what if,” Volodya whispered, “the worker stops, stops wanting more, becomes simply satisfied?”

“Then,” Fedya said, “the system is fucked.”

“Or,” Vika said, “it’s got to make him
un
satisfied.”

“What if”—Volodya dug in his rucksack—“his wants are fulfilled?”

“Then it’s got to make him want
new
wants.”

Out of his bag, Volodya brought a handful of what looked like swimming goggles with their sides painted black. One by one he handed them out. “The rotary phone,” he said.

“The push-button phone,” Vika said.

“The cordless phone.”

“The mobile phone.”

“The wireless earpiece,” Fedya chimed in.

“Good one,” Volodya told him.

“The television?” Fedya offered.

“The
color
television,” Volodya said.

“The
flatscreen
television,” Vika said.

“The
recordable
television,” Volodya said.

“Fucking cable,” Fedya said.

All three had put their goggles on. They looked at Dima, the black-painted rims and sides making their eyes, just visible behind the plastic, look lit by penlights. Fedya motioned for Dima to put his on. When he did, he found he could only see straight in front of him; all his peripheral vision was blocked out. He turned his head to face Volodya. The fat man was digging in his bag again. “What about the zerkala?” Dima said.

“Of course,” Volodya answered. “Soon, we’ll all want our very own orbiting imitation of the sun.” He had taken out a small metal box and now he flipped the top. Inside sat a clear cake of wax. “Unless,” he said, taking out a pinch, “we simply stop.”

“You mean,” Dima whispered, “stop wanting?”

“No.” Rolling the wax into a ball, Volodya took a second pinch. “Of course you don’t stop wanting,” and passed the box on to Vika.

“You simply want,” she said, “what you always wanted before they told you what the new thing was you were supposed to want.”

“What’s that?” Dima asked.

“To read a book,” Volodya said.

“To lie in bed with your lover,” Vika said.

“To go for a fucking walk”—Fedya gave the box back to Volodya—“in the fucking woods.”

“Maybe”—Volodya passed it to Dima—“with your brother.”

Dima watched the man roll his pinches of wax into two small spheres in his huge palm. Then Dima dug his fingers into the box and scooped out two of his own.

The four of them stood at the edge of the woods, listening to the small sounds of their breathing, a shirtsleeve rustling against a branch, as they pushed the plugs into their ears. Then the breaths were gone, the rustling gone, the babble of The Dachas’ speakers buried beneath the beating of Dima’s blood.

One by one they broke out of the forest into the open scrub, stepping single file through the grass and brambles towards the window-glowing guardhouse. When there was only Dima and Fedya left, the scab-nosed man reached out and pushed Dima into the field. Stumbling forward, he glimpsed in Fedya’s other hand a pale square of caught light against the dark woods: the small translucent bag of shriveled mushrooms.

That was what got them past the guards. But why they wanted in Dima couldn’t fathom. Inside, he tried to keep Volodya’s broad back and boulder head in the circular sights of his goggles, but something would shove his shoulder, or make a sound loud enough to pierce the wax, and he would whip his head around, frame a black-bordered glimpse of The Dachas: a small girl turning skinned squirrels over a fire, hawking their blackened meat with a mute moving mouth; the tooth-gone grin of a drunken man, his breath hot on Dima’s cheek; two more circling each other with slashing shovel-blades; a third laid out, his head stove in, a still shape that passersby stepped over, moving on.

Once, he lifted off his goggles—a blur of people shoving past, of makeshift shacks, bright billboards below the brighter flash of blasting TVs—unplugged an ear to sound crashing over him in the same way, stuck the wax back in, pressed the goggles again onto his face.

They lived in one of the old vacation homes, the two-story building turned into a kind of crammed comune, and while Fedya took their things inside, Vika and Volodya led him up a ladder to see the view. From the roof, The Dachas looked like a dozen villages dumped on top of one another, bits of buildings half-collapsed against each other, shards of others wedged into whatever space would hold them. Up on the perimeter wall, the TV screens were at eye level. Between their pictures of leather-lined sports cars and steaming plates of meat Dima could see the dark sweep of the trees. And beyond the trees, a thin line gleaming along the entire southward horizon.

He turned to one side: Volodya laid out on his huge stomach, eyes closed, breathing slow as a hibernating bear. And to the other: Vika crouched beside him on the slope.

“What is that?” he asked her, as if with the right words he could stave off knowing what he already knew.

“What?” she mouthed, and when he pointed, she slid close and shouted so near his ear that he could feel her breath, “You have to talk like this.”