The Great Glass Sea (30 page)

He leaned in, his beard brushing her cheek. “It can’t already be that close.”

“And coming closer,” she shouted, “every day. Won’t be too long till it’s here. Then they’ll either knock this down and send us somewhere else, or just flatten it to one story, build right over, keep going.”

“It can’t,” Dima shouted, “not forever.”

“It has to.”

“Not past the mirrors’ reach.”

“They’ll send up more.”

“It’ll hit Lake Segozero.”

“They’ll build around it.”

“It’ll hit the White Sea.”

“They’ll go up the Karelian Isthmus.”

“What about Finland?”

“They’ll go north. Into the Kola Peninsula.”

“And when they hit the Barents?”

“By then,” she shouted, and he could feel her lips brushing his ear, “it will be outdated. They’ll have invented the next model of Oranzheria.” He could feel her warm gust of a laugh. “The great glass sea version two.”

“And then what?” Dima shouted.

“Then version two point one.” With a smile, she stood. Then stepped over Volodya and, stretching out on the roof, lay down on her back. He watched her, but she was already turned to the sky, her eyes hidden behind goggles agleam with zerkala-light, zipper teeth a twinkling track running down her chest through the darkness of her sweatshirt, the safety pins like tiny ties. Where they stopped, the fabric peeled apart: a wedge of bare belly, wavery with the flickering from the giant TV screens, and in its middle, over her navel, something round tattooed in red. He saw it now: the head of a mushroom inked into bloom over her center.

Below his hands, the tin shook. Dima turned to look: Fedya stepping onto the roof, standing up into his sphere of sight. He held something the size of a brick, passed whatever it was out of Dima’s sight to someone else, while with his free hand he reached into his pants’ waist, drew the pistol out. Then he was there, filling the frames of Dima’s goggles, patting the air with his palm—
get down?
—until, with a shove of the man’s hand on his shoulder, Dima lay back. Stradling him, Fedya raised the gun, pointed to it, to Dima. Dima lay still. The man above him tapped his own goggles a couple times, then swung his leg over Dima and lay down beside him on the roof. Cheek laid flat against the metal, Dima could see Fedya’s face less than a meter away. Fedya didn’t look back at him. Instead, the man slowly raised his hand until his arm was a straight line from his shoulder to the sky.

Dima felt the shot—the jerk of Fedya’s shoulder shuddering the tin—as much as heard the sound: someone hammering a nail in one hard bang. Without dropping his arm, Fedya turned to Dima, grinned. “Fucking zerkala!” he shouted.

Dima nodded. “Fucking zerkala!”

The second shot didn’t come as a surprise. But Volodya’s voice booming in his ear did. He jerked his head around, knocked his nose into the fat man’s cheek. Volodya laughed—Dima could feel the beard shaking against his face—but when the man leaned to his ear to shout again, his voice was serious.

“You ever hear,” he shouted, “of ‘propaganda by the deed’?”

Dima shook his head.

“One day,” Volodya shouted, “we’re going to
do
something. Something more powerful than any ad on any TV. We’re going to show the people that it doesn’t have to be this way. That we can change it. You want to know how?” Volodya pointed up, his huge arm like a missile launcher, his fist the missile, his pointer finger its tip. He aimed from mirror to mirror to mirror. Into Dima’s ear, he shouted, “We’re going to turn them off. All of them. All at once.”

On Dima’s other side, a third bang cracked the quiet of the wax plug. Dima turned away from it, towards Volodya to shout his question, but Volodya was already at his ear, answering it.

“Break into the control room,” the fat man shouted. “Redirect the bastards so they can’t shine their light down.”

Another shot shook Fedya’s shoulder, shook Dima’s head.

“But,” Dima shouted in Volodya’s ear, “won’t they just direct them back?”

“That’s the point. One night, maybe just one hour, even just one minute. Like one giant wink. Aimed at the whole city, at the whole country, telling them,
us
, we can change this. We can do what we want to do. What we
need
to do.” Another pistol crack. “We just have to do it.” Dima could feel the man’s grin coming through the beard hairs against his cheek. “And that,
that
is going to be some serious propaganda by the deed.”

But when Dima turned to look at him, the man lowered his arm and pointed for Dima to look the other way. There, Fedya was knocking the spent shells out of the revolver’s chamber. They hit the roof, bounced: six shiny gleams silently rolling towards the edge of the tin. When Dima looked back at Fedya, the man was loading fresh bullets into the chamber. He held the gun out to Dima. He put it in Dima’s hand. He rolled close enough to shout.

“Try it. It feels fucking good.” And when Dima closed his fingers around the grip, Fedya told him, “Aim for a different one each time. You can almost convince yourself you’re hitting them.”

It was true. He held the gun in both hands and extended his arms straight above him and the tip of the barrel seemed to aim at a mirror all by itself. He pulled the trigger. The gun nearly shot out of his hands, jerked back, yanked his arms up, slammed against the roof above his head. He looked at Fedya. Fedya was grinning like he’d just watched one of the zerkala come crashing down. The others were looking at him the same way. And when he turned back to the sky and looked up at the mirrors, it did seem like one of them might be missing, like there was a little more black. He aimed the gun again. The false stars shimmered, their reflected light shaking, as if they knew what was coming. He covered one with the revolver’s barrel and let loose.

The sun had been up for hours by the time he got home. Riding the tram back to Avtovskaya Street, he could hardly keep his eyes open, nearly missed his stop. Halfway up the stairs, he had to sit, head pounding, all his muscles aching by the time, at last, he opened the apartment door. The rugs were rolled, clamped, the morning brightness streaming in as the mirror-light must have done all night. His mother was slumped over her sewing machine, the thread pulled out and strung from the needle to her lap like a strand of spiderweb catching the sun. He watched it. It did not move.
Mama
, he tried to say, but his throat wouldn’t, and he was crossing the room, and the string still didn’t move, and he was about to reach out, shake her, when her head lolled a little farther onto her outstretched arm. She sighed, went back to her slow sleep breath. At first, he couldn’t tell what she’d been sewing—a bunched-up ball with a cuff sticking out—and then he saw the pile of unsewn gloves, all the mismatched pairs she’d stored since he and Yarik had been young, saw beside them the pile of ones she’d stitched shut finger by finger into fists.

In the flesh of his palm, he could still feel a faint bruise: the pistol’s kick. Standing in his mother’s apartment it seemed too strange a night to have passed through his life only hours ago. But there were his wrists, raw from the rope. And there was Ivan, his tawny feathers mashed against the balcony doors, his body bunched as the gloves and just as still.

Dima was halfway to the bird before it burst into motion, jerked one way, the other, exploded in a fury of feathers and feet—and was still again. None of which distanced it from the glass. When he was closer yet, it did it all again—the wild flapping, the yanking side to side, the collapse into quiet—and got no further. It wasn’t until he was at the doors, about to throw them open, and it had recommenced convulsions, that he saw it had somehow jammed its beak between the panels, gotten stuck. He watched it thrash, body leaping, wings awhir, head like a peg pinning it to the door. How long had it been like that? He knelt down, stared into its crazed eye.

Like hers in more ways than just how black. She’d taken him back by herself—the only Leisurist who worked and lived outside The Dachas—bribing the guard with psilocybe, leading Dima to the tracks. They’d skated slower, lifting their boards off at the sounds of coming trains, hiding in the scrub, riding again into the Oranzheria just as the glass was beginning to blush, leaving it in full golden glare, getting to the rail yard so late the tracks were already hot to the touch. She had showed him. Crouched before they made their run across the yard, she’d pressed the tips of her fingers to the rails, lifted them to his forehead, dipped them to the metal again, and one eyelid, the other, dipped them, his lips. He had kept his face utterly still.

Now, it felt already half-asleep. But, staring at the hood that hung from a door handle, that he should have put on the bird last night, he refused to let his eyelids shut. Standing, he tugged open the door, cornered the Golden Phoenix, and scooped it up. He held it tight to his chest, ran his fingers over its beak, stroked the quivering neck until its heart, beating against his forearm, began to slow. On all the other balconies, the flower pots had sprouted—new green leaves growing fast—but if there were any buds they were too far away for him to tell what kind of blooms they might become. When the bird was calm, he slipped on its hood. Inside again, he unclamped the rugs, rolled them down. He carried his mother to her bedroom. She woke in his arms.

“Good morning, lyubimy,” she said.

“It’s nighttime, Mama,” he lied.

When he woke, the rug over his bedroom window was speckled with the same bright spots of the same tiny holes, but the thin strings of sunlight were slanted the wrong way. He watched them stir on the blanket over his feet. Then he kicked them off and rose and rolled the rugs up and filled Ivan’s bowl and took it out to the balcony and untied the hood and, listening to the rooster crow at the sinking sun, he felt sick. When the bird at last quit he gave it the bowl and watched it eat. He knew he should do the same; he didn’t think he could. Instead, he put the rooster’s hood back on, went back inside, rolled back down the rugs, left his mother sleeping, went out to catch the bus.

Under the glass, at the far end of the Oranzheria, at his brother’s stop, at the time his brother always got on, Dima waited as the bus emptied of workers heading to their shifts, refilled with ones returning home, his hand spread on the seat beside him, holding a place for Yarik. He told himself the tremor was just the bus, but when it shook away from the stop without his brother—he must have been kept late—Dima felt a stab of relief. And that felt more wrong than everything else. Until, as they circled around, he caught sight of Yarik: his back to the bus, his hard hat on, standing as still as the shut-down backhoe beside him, its shovel arm drawn into itself.

The next morning he wasn’t at the Oktrovskogo Avenue stop, either. Dima waited in the sun while three buses came and went, the heat dampening his shirt between his shoulder blades, and then he turned and walked down the concrete pathway to the concrete building and up the five flights of stairs to the apartment door.

“He’s at work,” Zinaida told him.

“No,” Dima said, “he didn’t get on the bus.”

“He takes a different one now.”

“Which?”

His brother’s home was quiet, the children gone to school.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, “I have to get ready.”

“What number bus?”

“I’m already late.”

“Zina,” he said, and would have asked her,
Why? Why was Yarik taking a different bus?
but the sadness on her face stopped him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

That day Dima stayed away from the statue, from the railroad station, from tram number 119, off all the buses except the one he took that evening out to the Oranzheria only to find this time his brother wasn’t at the stop at all. He took the bus back alone again, went again up the stairs to Yarik’s apartment and knocked and no one came to the door. He could hear the baby crying inside. He knocked another time, waited, put his forehead to the door, said to the wood, “It’s Dima.”

He was on the first step down when he heard the bolt. Through the open crack the baby’s wails came so loud he imagined, for a second, that the noise had blown the door open on its own. Then, he heard “Dyadya?” and saw Timofei, his blond hair feathered up off the back of his head, stirring, as if it, too, could feel the baby’s wails.