Into the thickening fog, p.1
Into the Thickening Fog,
p.1
ALSO BY ANDREI GELASIMOV
Thirst
The Lying Year
Gods of the Steppe
Rachel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Andrei Gelasimov
Translation copyright © 2017 Marian Schwartz
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
“Fannin Street.” Written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. © 2006 Jalma Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Lucinda.” Written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. © 2009 Jalma Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Previously published as Холод by Eksmo in Russia in 2015. Translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503940819
ISBN-10: 1503940810
Cover design by David Drummond
CONTENTS
Start Reading
ACT ONE DEEP FREEZES
ENTR'ACTE THE DEMON OF THE VOID
ACT TWO FREEZING POINT
INTERMISSION THE DEATH OF NINA
ACT THREE ABSOLUTE ZERO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Whoever thought that hell’d be so cold?
—Tom Waits, “Lucinda”
ACT ONE
DEEP FREEZES
The best place to pass out is in the tail-end lavatory of a Boeing 757.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with collapsing on some beach like a sad sack, or on a pile of soft couch cushions, but if there’s no sand or couch handy at the time, then you’re not going to do better than the tail end of a Boeing.
The compartment’s so cramped no one’s risking anything. At moments like this, we listen to the usual bells that go off in our head and marvel at them the way we always do, whereupon we gently fold up and slide down the narrow wall. If we’re standing facing the toilet, our knees rest up against it, so it’s more hygienic to turn sideways to the crapper. Then our feet brace us, pressed into the lavatory panel, and we curl to the floor like an embryo.
The airliner speeds us over the clouds, a line forms in the aisle for the lavatory, it’s time for the flight attendants to wheel out the meal carts, and we’re blissfully absent. We’re not in the cabin, or our own body, or dreamland. We’re nowhere, and our suddenly orphaned sheath is flying backward at nearly nine hundred kilometers an hour toward that strange frozen city where half of our, or its, life was spent.
The boarding pass in the pocket of our badly crumpled jacket has a name written on it—Eduard Filimonov—though even that barely connects us to this emptied, scrunched-up body. The haggard spinster at the check-in counter got the last name wrong, and the person who knew how to get it right didn’t tell her. He hadn’t been sure he was going to fly at all. And it hurt to talk. His lips barely functioned.
“Hey! Are you okay in there? Director! Wake up, please.”
Someone was shaking Filippov’s shoulder hard.
“Can you hear me? It’s eight o’clock! Wake up! You’re late for your plane.”
Filippov pushed away the vile alien hand and tried to hide under the blanket. But he didn’t have a blanket. The next second he realized he’d surfaced out of oblivion into the nastiest, most inhuman hangover. Filippov moaned at the insult.
“Don’t put on an act,” said the vile voice attached to the vile hand. “Nothing on you hurts. This morning you were galloping all over the apartment. And don’t go kicking at me, please. You were the one who asked me to wake you. I’ve already called a taxi. Domodedovo, right?”
Filippov wanted to lift his head, but he didn’t have a head. Or rather, he did, but it was someone else’s. Someone had left their head on him—disgusting, sticky, and recalcitrant. The alien head wouldn’t lift. All his other organs and body parts immediately joined this parade of sovereignties. His stomach demanded to be taken where it could be sick; his forehead begged him to stop pouring molten lead into it; his tongue and throat dreamed of icebergs; and his hands’ modest wish was to shake and be covered in perspiration. Filippov felt like the Soviet Union in 1991. He was falling apart. It was as if he’d died, only a lot worse.
As for death, Filippov was approaching middle age, and he’d realized that leaving life would make him just equal to himself when he’d arrived, so he stopped overthinking it. He pushed hard until forty and then let go. After all, up until a certain point in time, there’d been no remarkable, talented, and unique Filippov, up until a couple of squiggles on the calendar. Exactly as there wouldn’t be after some other number. He’d just factor himself out and the equation would be solved.
Solving an equation means finding its roots. In that sense he compared himself to the clever old Chinese man who gallops through the mountains in search of magical roots. When he finds the root, the equation is solved. And with it, immortality. Because after death, Filippov planned merely to be equal to the being who wasn’t here forty-two years ago, who was hanging out some inexplicable somewhere before the moment of birth, a somewhere where he probably didn’t give a fuck about death. He planned just to put an equal sign between himself and that awesome being who didn’t give a fuck.
The whole difference between what had gone before and what there’d be afterward consisted now of about a dozen photographs he’d leave behind, which were undoubtedly a mischief, because, after all, it would never occur to anyone to weep over you or put them in funereal frames before your birth—on the basis of there being no you yet in this wide world and everyone around you waiting and waiting but you just not having shown up yet. It was later that they took to doing that. They got used to you being in the access zone and the equal sign never crossed their mind. So Filippov almost wasn’t afraid of death as such. A hangover was much worse.
“Are you going to get up or not? What should I tell the taxi driver?”
Having pondered his own demise, Filippov reconciled himself to the necessity of living and tried to marshal all his mutinous organs. Even the shakiest consolidation requires the presence of a strong leader.
“Where am I?” he managed to say, overcoming an onset of nausea any other individual would find intolerable.
“The front hall,” the vile voice replied gloatingly.
Filippov unstuck what he had left instead of an eye and ran it over what he had managed to sidestep. Very little fell into his field of vision: a section of wall plastered with old photographs; a blond lock that evidently went with the vile voice; the back of the leather couch where he’d woken up. Or rather, come to. The couch really was in an enormous front hall, as Filippov managed to understand on the second attempt. Directly opposite was a dark, massive front door.
“Think you can quit squinting?” said the vile voice. “Am I supposed to pay the taxi driver or something?”
Filippov called upon the citizens of his internal fatherland to be brave and grabbed on to the back of the couch. After a few rocking movements, which nearly resulted in his stomach declaring its wish to secede from the federation, Filippov was able to find a point of consensus. He froze in a more or less vertical position, swallowed dry saliva, surveyed his hopelessly wrinkled suit, and tried to focus on the vile voice.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Couldn’t you have taken off my jacket? It’s a Burberry, by the way.”
“You wouldn’t let me. You said you’d be cold.”
“You could have . . . brought me an afghan . . . But where is everybody?”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Well, the people. The people who live here.”
He recalled the night’s people like a blurry, faceless blotch. Filippov hadn’t known any of them before. Even how he’d ended up at this party escaped him; it was a faint glimmer in his swollen, inflamed, and desperately swimming memory. Snatches of some incredibly nasty MTV tune flickered in his head, snatches he really wished he could get rid of, but the song wouldn’t let him go. The human blotches had circled amiably to this nauseatingly cheerful music, and his own nausea had imperceptibly fallen in with the general rhythm.
“Where’s the bathroom?” he managed to ask.
“Down the hall, second door on the left.”
Smell was the last to return, after hearing and sight—a little late, but it quickly caught up. Not anticipating any new tricks, Filippov was listlessly splashing water from the tap on his plastic, totally numb face when he was suddenly overcome by the suffocating smell of singed wool—and he rushed back to the toilet. After awful convulsions, coughing, and tears, he was able to eject a pitiful drop of bile into the shiny porcelain.
You should have eaten something this morning, his inner voice told him.
“Go to hell,” Filippov told the voice, and his reply sounded weighty and booming, amplified by the toilet bowl.
At that moment, he felt like little Alice looking down the rabbit hole, listening to the sounds of her own voice and wondering a
“You’re boozing half your life away,” the demon jeered at Filippov. “Who’s going to give you back that time? You think you’re going to get it back at customs like the VAT? Show up at the airport for your flight, present your receipts, show the clothes you bought, and sign a receipt? No, dude, that won’t fly. You’re sleeping through the second half of your life.”
“Oh, go to hell,” Filippov repeated, swiping the unending thread of bitter spit hanging heavily from the corner of his mouth. “I’ve had it with you.”
“I’ve had it with you,” the demon snorted, vanishing with a whistle into depths more mysterious than anything Lewis Carroll ever could have imagined.
Suddenly, Filippov was again overcome by the smell of singed wool. He shuddered, incapable of getting even a little more out, and the pain born of this vain effort lit up his brain like a flare. The remotest, darkest nooks became visible, and the smell flung him into the distant past, when he and his parents would visit his grandmother for the hog-slaughtering holiday.
They always took the piglets in pairs and named them Mishka and Zinka, as a result of which, for his whole life ever after, Filippov shied away from people with those names. They fed the pigs up for a whole year and slaughtered them in the fall, on the seventh of November. No historical metaphor here whatsoever, of course—they just had the idea of linking it to the holiday that celebrated the Great October Socialist Revolution. Also, you could only keep pork in that quantity in the cellar during the cold months. Little Filippov would hide in the bathhouse or run out the gates so he wouldn’t hear the desperate squeals or think about what they were doing to the little pigs, but the smell of scorched bristles after the slaughtered carcasses were burned with a blowtorch permeated everything. Even his mama’s holiday blouse reeked of it when he pressed up to her during the feast and everyone was trading shouts under the mistaken impression that they were singing.
“Hey!” The young woman consumed by the subject of his taxi drummed at the door. “Did you fall asleep in there?”
Filippov frowned, spat in the toilet, and trying not to spill his headache, slowly rose from his knees.
“All’s well. I’m coming out.”
Stopping at the mirror, he finally discovered the source of the foul smell. The right side of his own beard and mustache were noticeably fused, and the tips of his stubble were covered with an unexpectedly handsome scattering of tiny, possibly glass, beads. That place on his face reminded him now of some sea creature with a mass of short translucent tentacles, or the vault of a deep cave covered with fragile and very tiny stalactites. Whitish burn marks shone on his lips like elongated slugs.
Who had set fire to his beard, and why? Filippov couldn’t remember.
“You leaving, too?” he said as he exited the bathroom and raised his sorrow-filled gaze at the young woman.
She was standing in the middle of the front hall, wearing an unbuttoned red jacket and holding Filippov’s coat.
“I’m going with you.”
“Where?”
Filippov stopped and tried to recall his plans. None came to mind.
“The North.”
“What for?”
“To see the aurora borealis. And eat sliced frozen fish. You promised.”
“Yeah?” He sighed mournfully and smelled the area around him, now perfumed with eighteen-year-old Balblair that hadn’t completely dissolved in him. “Is that all I promised?”
“No, to get married, too.”
“I see. And who are you? Remind me, please.”
The young woman smiled, and Filippov understood why their relationship had taken this turn last night.
“I’m Nina.”
“Don’t lie.”
“It’s the truth.”
He ran his damp palm over his face, as if trying to wipe off something.
“Fashion model?”
“Yes. I told you yesterday. I’ve been working for six months already.”
“Good for you. Tell me, I didn’t give you a credit card, did I?”
“No.”
“What did I give you?”
“A phone.”
“Give it here for a minute, please.”
She took a black iPhone out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Filippov. Scrolling through the texts, he frowned, not finding what he was looking for, then took out the SIM card and returned the phone to the young woman.
“You’re beautiful, Nina.”
“Thank you. So you’re not taking me to the North?”
“No. I don’t even want to go there myself.”
“And you’re not giving me a part in your show?”
“Are you an actress?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not.”
“Too bad. I believed you.”
Filippov took his coat from her and again sighed so deeply that images of the distant but marvelous Scottish Highlands became palpable in the front hall.
Nina had become very sad.
“I envy you,” he said.
Filippov had to go to the North for two reasons. First, he was a swine. Second, he was a coward. Actually, that’s why he’d gotten drunk in the company of total strangers, so drunk that some Nina woke him up in someone else’s front hall. How he’d ended up there he recalled only vaguely.
Once in the taxi, he lit up and then immediately threw the cigarette out the window. The whole pack flew out after it.
“You should have given them to me,” the taxi driver said.
“Next time.”
Filippov looked down and saw why the driver had asked him for the cigarettes. In the deep plastic pocket on his door were tight rows of Marlboro hard packs, L&Ms, Java Golds, and some other crap. There had to be thirty packs.
“Laying ’em in for the winter?”
“They’re empty.”
Filippov reached out and opened one of the packs.
“Why then?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?” The driver grinned condescendingly. “A passenger gets in and wants to smoke—but where’s he going to put his ashes? My ashtray broke a long time ago.”
“Logical,” Filippov said approvingly, and he made himself more comfortable.
The world of idiots was dear to him not only professionally. Even before his success, long before he started winking at his own mug looking at him from magazine covers on newsstands, Filippov liked to act as though people were angry at him, or even trying to pick a fight. Sitting without a kopek to his name one winter at the dacha of some people he knew who had let him go there on the pretext of guarding the house, he’d made friends with the in-house rat, named it Petka, taught it to get into a Salamander shoe box when he gave a special whistle, and then he’d taken this box to meetings with film producers and art directors at the most famous Moscow theaters. When asked what was in the box, he was always honest and lifted the lid slightly. To his old friends from the theatrical institute, who were becoming fewer and fewer and who were absolutely unsurprised at his failures, Filippov explained that Petka was dear to him not just as a friend. Petka had been able to explain to him who he in fact was.
“Judge for yourself,” he told one of the last friends who would still pay for him at a restaurant. “In the morning, I get up at the dacha, rummage through all the cupboards, and all I find is a bag of chips. With jack shit in it. I think, ‘You dumbass Pink Floyd. Some joke. It’d be nice to eat something.’ And all I’ve got is two little pieces of bread. Because the rats have practically cleaned me out. I strung up that bread, wrapped in paper, so they couldn’t get to it. Like on a clothesline, you know, all the way across the room. Like for drying sheets. So, I walk behind it, and this eagle is creeping across, across the line, straight for the bag. Upside down, like a mountain climber. I think, ‘Well, they’re totally bonkers.’ I pick up my bat, walk toward it, swing—and suddenly I can’t hit it.”
