The road was flat and non-descript when I woke up. Brown, brown, flash of green. Brown, off-white building. Brown, brown, brown again. I rubbed my eyes. Wakefulness returned fitfully, like a thief not sure he’s finished casing a joint.

Amritsar was driving. She looked beautiful in the morning light, concentrated and serious. I stretched surreptitiously and looked behind me. Hamed and Suzanna were still asleep back there. I wanted to stay asleep. I wanted to not have to wake up, to not face the day.

The mountains were behind us. Back there, too, the small village I couldn’t even remember. The drive had been silent from the start. The end of a mission, but not good.

Humanity had the chance to completely eradicate the disease. No more children would ever suffer the crippling, the pain. Lives healed and limbs strong. And it was so easy. A few drops. A few drops each, and the kids would only be at risk of getting shot in some blood feud, blown up by a bomb, burned in one of the innumerable fires that live behind the smoky burning lamps that extract a small hacking cough as payment. Not to mention malnutrition, violence of all kinds, corruption so staggering one wondered how any human could survive with their sanity intact, and a lack of economic possibility so profound that smuggling was considered the gold standard of careers. Risk of dying in a shootout with officials and/or rivals notwithstanding.

The car droned on. Two weeks of this. Of practically living in this non-descript box on wheels. A white Toyota Corolla of indeterminate age. A few kanji characters on the rear trunk lid. Faded now from the high, dry, Eurasian sun.

Amritsar. I still couldn’t remember her real name.

I drowsed a bit. Sleep beckoned again, but stayed without reach. Amritsar, she of the golden smile and sullen stare. Last minute addition to the team, documents closely held tight in her plastic bag inside the jacket-robe. Did her job conscientiously.

Her presence ate away at Hamed, who didn’t know much about women from what I could tell. He kept making the same lame jokes and trying to jolly her in small ways. I didn’t know her background. Didn’t know her family. Didn’t know her romantic history. Didn’t know her religion. But I could tell, in fact knew, from the very first second that we’d met and she’d introduced herself to us, paper vouchsafing held forward like a cross to hold off vampires… this was not a woman who would ever enjoy being jollied.

The last village had been so bad we’d called it off completely. We still had almost two hundred doses to distribute, but the gathering of the men around the small, angry one had signaled time on the enterprise. I wasn’t going to risk the team for these people. Satellite phone of not, by the time any help arrived it would have been far too late. Many quick salaams, much rushed bowing, and back in the car and rolling out without even the clipboards.

Would we go back to get them? No. No, we would not.

Amritsar had hopped behind the wheel the second the situation started going South. I was smiling and saying in pidgin how regrettable it was that the day was late and we had to leave. Hamed and Suzanne collecting the small fold-up table, the doses. Throwing them in the trunk. Me still talking. Keep talking. The men turning towards us in a group; a bad, bad, sign. The elder listening politely to me with a vacant, gap-toothed smile. And then a flurry of checking that the others were in the car, me jumping in as the men, twenty or thirty strong, with a slow fire of hatred behind their eyes, walking up the short stretch of rock-strewn dust towards us. In the car and Amritsar driving out quickly and without too much drama. Me surprised. I hadn’t even known that she could drive at all.

I waited ten minutes. Ten minutes of silence, of each of us throwing thoughts against the wall and having them bounce back, over and over. Why bother? Why were we here anyway?

“We’re going back, we’re done” I finally said. The silence continued all through the long path down the hills, the night flashed with truck lights and hairpins.

Amritsar drove the whole way, through the night. Suzanne was quiet. Hamed tried to chat with Amritsar, who didn’t listen. I spent the night in the front seat thinking about whether or not the time was right to pop the cassette back in. Goo Goo Dolls, a tape that had washed up from 1990s America into this beige corduroy world that rocked on shot shocks. “Name”, a song that Suzanne and I had sung along to at high volume, Hamed and Amritsar grinning despite themselves two weeks or eons ago. I fell asleep in that rocking passenger chair still not having made up my mind if group morale would be helped or hurt by hearing some decades-old top 40 hitmaking. The people… The anger was oppressive. Feeling the hate directed at you simply by being who you were – an outsider, a not-from-here. It was not frightening so much as exhausting.

And now it was morning and we were in the flats. Brown, then green, then brown again. Dusty fields and cheap cinderblock houses.

I must have dozed off again.

I play this part in my mind. A couple times a day, an hour, a minute.

I must have dozed off, because I don’t recall how we got there. Only that Amritsar was looking at the policeman steadily. He rapped on her window with the butt of his assault rifle, said something I couldn’t hear. I wiped my eyes blearily and the rear door had opened and Hamed was standing in front of the cop, pushing into him somehow, although I couldn’t see his face from the angle of where I was sitting I could see the way the policeman pulled back before pushing forward and swinging the rifle it a short, sharp arc, but Hamed put his hand on it, and I remember distinctly, at that very moment, the very second I saw that… His hand going onto the rifle stock and grabbing it, I remember thinking, “No.”

That’s all, just, “No.” I didn’t think of calling out, and I didn’t think of leaping out of the car and yelling, distracting, changing the dynamic. I didn’t, in short, think of the things a team leader, a real team leader, should think of. I just thought, “No.”

And the sharp crack of the gun punctuated the thought.

And I could see Hamed crumple down.

And then I was outside, of a sudden. And I was staring at the kid in the policeman’s uniform. The kid, scared and defiant. Angry and sad. And I was saying “Salaam, salaam,” over and over. Like we were going to have a cup of tea together. Us, the weary travelers and him, the friendly officer of the law. And there would be smiles and nods at the small misunderstandings, and we would go on our way, playing our part in one of the unsung heroics of our time, the eradication of disease, and the sun would shine on a green and verdant world.

Twenty steps.

I took a deep breath. Should be easy. One foot in front of the other. C’mon. It’s easy, just one foot in front of the other.

My leg trembled. I was glad I was wearing long pants, so she couldn’t see. She might suspect, but she couldn’t see for sure. Shorts were more practical to get on and off, but I couldn’t imagine coming home looking like… well, like I looked. So, long pants.

I tried to give her a quick confident grin, but a twinge that became a stab as it shot quickly up the back of the leg and seemed to explode in a small, bright ball at the base of my skull, turned that into a grimace. She put out a hand on my arm without thinking, then withdrew it just as rapidly.

One step. My foot was resting on the first step. Behind us, the door to the building opened, interrupting this moment of triumph. An irritated clearing of the throat. I didn’t turn around, but she went down into the landing to clear some space for whoever it was to squeeze by me. I suddenly felt so very, incredibly tired. I leaned my head on the arm that was laid against the railing as the person went by. A scent of stale sweat and strangely metallic dirt. That neighbor who worked landscaping. Getting caught in the explosion had been a downer, but it’d given the strange superpower of having an extraordinary sense of smell. Spiderman had nothing on me, I’d joke while recovering in the hospital bed. Ha. Ha.

Ha.

The doctors suspected some kind of brain damage.

I tried to think of it in positive terms instead.

Like the first time she’d come to visit when I was conscious. I’d been resting my eyes and I noticed that I was thinking of summer fields and roses. She’d tiptoed in. So quiet I’d heard nothing over the hum of the air conditioning and electrical gizmos pushing my knocked about body back to life or something like it. But it was her. I held out my hand without opening my eyes and felt her take it, and I had to rest an extra, long, difficult moment not crying before I could open my eyes.

Summer fields and roses.

We were a long way from there now. I raised my head back off my arm as the neighbor disappeared up the landing and around the corner to the hallway. I could feel her presence behind me, silent. I pulled my other leg up after the first one, so now I had both on one step. Then, gently, slowly, pulled that leg higher, and… success. On the second step. Pulled the other up after it, a twinge, but no stab. Repeat.

Halfway up I rested. Leaned back against the wall, away from the railing.

I could stand still okay. I could sit in a chair too, and lying in bed was nooo problem. Too bad about having to move around. Maybe if there were do-overs I’d be born again in the next life as a tree.

She was looking down the stairs, thoughtful.

“We’ll move,” she said. “Another apartment, on the ground floor. Or rent a small ranch house, one level.”

I looked at her, staring, until she turned to face me. She wasn’t the crying type, and she wasn’t overly given to emotions. She returned my stare. Eyes level.

“With what money?” I said, “The insurance isn’t covering everything, and you heard the docs. It’ll be months. At least.”

I held out my hand to her. She took it, stared down as if examining a strange artifact. I gave her hand a squeeze, then let go and pushed myself off the wall, grabbed the railing again and wrestled my uncooperative limbs upward. She gracefully moved aside.

A few centuries later I was standing on the landing and taking my now-normal halting little baby steps down the hall. I didn’t need to steady myself against the wall with every step, so that’s progress, I told myself. She kept pace next to me slowly. She was thoughtful, pensive. I put everything out of my mind. Just steps. One foot in front of the other. Almost there.

She glided in front of me and unlocked the door, opened it and stepped aside. I made my way into the strangeness of familiarity. The apartment was the same, but life was different.

She’d put flowers on the table.

I went to the sofa and hauled myself slowly down. She went into the kitchen, reappeared with a glass of water, put it on the coffee table in front of me.

“So…” she said and sat down next to me.

I nodded. “So…” I repeated back. I put a hand on her leg, her beautiful, healthy and not-at-all-looking-as-if-a-giant-mutant-rat-had-chewed-through-half-of-it leg. I bit my lip. There was not a single thing I could think of to say.

She sat still next to me and time stretched and collapsed, and I was so very, very tired again. I fought the feeling off, I didn’t want anything right then, not even blissful, painless sleep. I just wanted to sit here with my hand on my girl and her summer fields and roses filling my senses and the random small quiet sounds of an apartment building in the afternoon and the sun through the window and the nothing of thinking of nothing. Especially the nothing of not thinking about never being able to run. And if we actually had a kid, like we’d talked about before, of never tossing a ball to him, at least not easily. There were a lot of things to not think about. Of what would happen if I didn’t really, actually, get much better than this. Months, they’d said, but they hadn’t looked too confident as they’d said it. What would she do? After a decent amount of time had passed? I loved her enough to know her, and saints aren’t real. How long did I have?

I sat there and the tiredness washed over me and her breathing slowed too, and then she nodded to herself in that way she had and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and got up, went to the kitchen. I heard her putting water in a kettle. I couldn’t fight it anymore and my eyes closed and I drifted off.

The future stretched out. One long path with no end that I could see.

But still, a path. Just take it one step at a time.

I yawned. The clock said 5:30, its incessant beeping taking me from the warm arms of the woman with just that smile. I tried to hold on to the image, that sense, but it drifted away like mist off a high peak.

As reality set itself into frame and sleep drowsed away, I stretched, shook my head and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. An early flight. I had an early flight, that’s why I’d had to set the alarm. Outside the window, the night was dark as only the savannah can be. I got up, fumbled around my hut for my shorts, wandered into the bathroom.

Brush teeth. Shave. Take shower. Get dressed.

Each step took me closer to humanity, to personality, to vitality. I opened my door. On the step sat a tray with some eggs, bacon, and most important: a pot of coffee. Checked my watch. I had ten minutes before the land rover came to take me to the airstrip. Dug into the food, scalded myself on the coffee. Finished and stepped outside, glancing to the East. Dark.

The headlights bounced slowly towards me. Johnathan the driver sat stoically behind the wheel. Guess he didn’t like getting up this early either. We didn’t say much to each other. “Morning, Bwana. Pole, pole… Slow on the way, hey? Too early to go fast.” He looks at me, nods. Economical with words. Good driver, though.

We bounce along the dirt track and I stifle a last yawn. I don’t mind this early start. One pick up at Serena Lodge, then off to the lake, then back in time for a late lunch. An easy day, all things considered.

The plane gleams in the headlights as we pull onto the ramp. A glorified term for a large flat piece of pounded-flat dirt next to the runway. I look on my mount with joy and some degree of pride. Okay, she’s not actually mine, but still, I am her pilot. I hop out, ask Johnathan to roll down the runway looking for lions or such who might find the strip more comfortable for a snooze than the long grass. He looks at me. Some hyenas have been seen nearby recently, and they’re as bad as the big cats. Worse, maybe. The lions do most of their hunting either in daylight or earlier in the evening, so I’m not worried about them, but hyenas… Who knows? They’re the weirdos of the animal kingdom. I hop up on the wing, open the door, get in the cabin of the plane quickish. Wave to him from inside. “See, I’ll wait here if any show up. Now go check the runway.” He’s satisfied, waves and trundles off.

I go through the preflight quickly but carefully, flashlight bobbing as I check the oil, sample the gas, after carefully sweeping the area for any bright yellow eyes in the brush, the gear, the ailerons, the empennage. She’s just like she was yesterday, but I’m determined to become an old pilot, not a bold pilot, and I look carefully. I give her a tap for luck on the fuselage before climbing aboard and setting up the office. Headsets here, kneeboard strapped on, flashlight stowed, everything ready. Wait for the headlights of the Land Rover. There he is. He trundles past, I give a quick wave as he disappears to park on the road until I take off. I start the engines, the big sixes catch and settle into a deep throaty rumble. Avionics on. Try the radio. No real chance of reaching anyone, but… procedures. Make a call in the dark to my destination. No answer, of course.

I’ve timed it well, though. The first thin sliver of sun is poking over the horizon to the East. I give the engines five minutes to warm up. By then the sun has already begun to spread light like a thin blanket across the surroundings. I can see the grass, dark outlines against darker ground. I look around. No crazy Ivans coming in early and unannounced from Nairobi, no lights in the sky except the stars growing dimmer by the second. Taxi to the departure end of the runway, making a call into the blind on the radio to any other traffic that might pass through the same airspace. I learned to fly in Southern California. Old habits die hard. No reply, of course.

Check the gauges one last time. All in the green. Savor the moment. The second before freedom. Throttle up and she starts rolling, bouncing gently on the dirt as we gather speed. 60, 70… there… rotate. The wheels leave the ground and there’s that ineluctable joy of clawing into the air.

Wheels up, and climb out at 90. No need to rush, Serena’s only fifteen minutes away. I level off low, a thousand feet over the ground or so, waggling my wings in the turn at the Land Rover below as I skim off to the South-East. The sun’s almost completely off the horizon, climbing like me, as I speed up. I try the radio again. By now I’m high enough they should get the signal. Nothing.

I pass over the land waking to the light. The acacias passing by beneath, one remote sentinel after another on the endless grasslands. The Mara river gently meanders off to my right, barely discernable from this angle and height. I pass the short flight in a sort of reverie. The world is simply beautiful.

Ahead of me the land disappears. I frown slightly. Strange, I’ve never seen this before. I pass over a gentle ridge and where the Serena Lodge should be, ensconced in a snug thicket of trees around the waterhole is… nothing. Just a low white barrier. I’ve never seen mist right here, but then I’ve never flown here this early before. I maintain my altitude instead of setting up for a descent. Pass over the mist, white like a snowbank, flat and undisturbed as a zen garden. I circle overhead. Down there, in the slight depression of ground, is the camp and the airstrip beside. For now, they’re both hidden to me. I circle and try to raise the lodge once again on the radio. Nothing. Of course.

I circle slowly down, throttling back to keep from speeding up. The sun will burn this off, I know, but how long will it take? I keep descending until I’m skimming the surface of the mist. Here and there I can just barely see the very tips of trees poking through the top. I dip my wing to turn again and stay overhead, and see an inch or two of the wingtip descend into the white. It leaves a trail like calligraphy. I turn the other way, to the right, dipping the very last few inches of the right wingtip into the mist and carving a dark swirl in its surface. I forget the radio. They can call if they like, I’m through trying over and over. As I begin to reach the end of the cotton wool lake beneath me, I turn sharply, banking one wing in a smooth, drawn-out curve on its surface. Then the other way. The sun is rising. The very top of the mist is dissipating, and the treetops become not shrouded, but visible. I slalom above them, lost in the magic of this interaction between atmosphere and land, flight and wisps. I don’t know how long I carouse there, but after some … Seconds? Minutes? Lifetimes? … The mist is gone, except for a stubborn layer right over the airstrip itself. I check my watch. Thirty minutes since I took off.

Still nothing on the radio. I make one last pass over where the camp is, tent tops visible only as I pass directly above them, and wing my way back to base. After a few minutes, halfway home, the radio crackles. Serena calling. I explain the mist. They laugh. Yes, they thought that might be me, they couldn’t get the generator going to power the radio. The clients have cancelled the trip. Decided to take a safari instead of going to the lake. So sorry.

I look back over my shoulder, the trees now bright against the golden grassland, and disappearing rapidly behind. Think for a moment. “It’s okay,” I reply, “Maybe next time.”

I poured scotch into my glass. No ice. Held the glass in my hand, went over to the window that looked out over the parking lot. Next year maybe I’d have a view of the mall. For now I had a nice look at a fleet of black Lincolns, with the occasional cop car thrown in for relief.

Belinda came into the room without knocking. She was a good chief of staff, but had adopted DC ways. Which meant everything was a crises RIGHT NOW, and niceties had to be ignored. Because the work of the people was IMPORTANT, even when, maybe especially when, that work just meant hitting up the people for money. Because democracy runs on cash, and governance go hang. I laughed to myself at the thought. Governance. Three years in, and I still thought that mattered, like some rube from the hills.

“You heard about this?” she said, waving her phone. “It’s not funny,” she continued, mistaking my chuckle for something meaningful. “Morris could make this hit the next cycle.”

I sipped my scotch. Turned to her. “Nothing Morris ever does is funny. No, I haven’t heard, what is it?”

She came to stand next to me, thrust the phone under my nose. Holy… It was a picture of me, my teenage self, looking smug and confident. Obviously scanned off some old snapshot. I was standing next to my first motorbike, the old Honda, wearing my punk jean jacket, scrawls up and down the sleeves, two-tone pins across the lapels. And, was that… Yeah, Muffet, the girl I’d sort-of, kind-of, really-but-not-really been seeing then, looking up from underneath her bangs next to me. Huh, must’ve been 1984, no, wait, ’83. That Summer, riding all over town, everything bright, new and meaningful. Nothing in the world like being 16, not ever again.

I stared at the photo. Snippets of music floated through my head… The Clash, The Selector, Madness, Black Flag. I chuckled again, looked at Belinda. “So what, everyone has embarrassing shots from being a kid. What’s the big deal?”

“There!” She said, a mixture of triumph and despair in her voice as she zoomed in on the shot, on the jacket, on the sleeve. A big red A in a circle. Oh, yeah, anarchy. Screw the man. Power to the people. Don’t trust anyone. Three chords and the truth.

I looked at Belinda again. “Seriously?” I said. Took another sip of scotch and turned towards the window. Staffers were beginning to straggle out. I saw them pick their way past the cars to the gate, towards the metro down the hill.

She seemed frustrated. “Yeah, seriously. Sir, it’s not like you’ve got any slack to spare. Latest numbers show you losing among olds and rurals.”

I went over to my desk, sat down, mulled things over. “Yeah, I didn’t exactly have a pick-up truck, sitting under the bleachers with the head cheerleader, kind of experience in High School. You really think the optics of something forty years ago is going to push things over to him, though? Seriously?”

She sat down opposite me. “It’s imperative you get a statement out.”

“Oh yeah? Saying what? I was a dumb kid? I do not now, nor have I ever truly believed anarchy is a viable alternative form of government for these here United States?”

She didn’t laugh. A bad sign. Everything always a problem… no sense of humor. I tried again. “Look Belinda, Morris is a genuine drunk, and didn’t you say we’ve got indications things weren’t all above board on that trip he took to Central America. Wasn’t it hookers or something?”

She nodded, “Yeah, but only a whisper here and there. Nothing any journo would touch. They locked that story down soon as it happened. No sources. Ever since that trip he’s been going to church every Sunday, too. Him, the wife, the kids.”

I knew. He’d even made his announcement of his challenge for my seat on the steps of the church. Nice small-town white shingles behind, American flags draped all over the place. Had to admit, whoever was running him had a good eye. The man himself was an idiot, couldn’t tie his own shoelaces without three assistants telling him he was the best shoelace-tier in history while a fourth actually did it for him.

“So we take the high road. He drops the photo, we tell the press we can’t believe they’d stoop so low as to bring up something like this… I mean, Christ, High School! Really?”

She was shaking her head. “The rurals already can’t identify with you. Urbans are mad you didn’t go along with the gay flag thing. And they’re still hammering away at the gun bill. You’re soft, is the line. Already they were trying to paint you commie red. This… this is just not good.”

She had a point. To get medicare funded through the next fiscal and extended to ineligible vets I’d thrown a sop to the other side, voting against that optics bill about flying a gay pride flag on some damn day, and to get the roads funded for the transportation bill I’d voted for background checks on handguns. Soft. Huh. Let’s see any of those asses go against their side on a single issue. Just once.

“Sir?” She was leaning forward, not worried exactly, but ill at ease. “Sir, we can’t just dismiss it. Things don’t work like that. You know how it is.” I looked at her. Thought some.

“You ever see that old show ‘Happy Days’?” I asked. She looked confused. “I’ll tell you about the first political thought I ever had,” I continued. “I was still a kid, we’d just come back from being stationed overseas. Europe. I hadn’t set foot in the states in years. Anyway, one day we all sit down to watch that show. It was the episode where Richie’s campaigning for Adlai Stevenson. Anyway, he’s all idealistic and everything, but then at the end, he asks The Fonz, you know, the ‘Aaaayyy…’ guy, how he’s going to vote. And the Fonz says, ‘I like Ike.’”

Belinda stared at me. Maybe she thought I was losing it. “The point is,” I said, “it didn’t really matter. Politics didn’t matter like it does now. You could have two characters on a TV show who vote completely different, but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.” I suddenly stopped. Hadn’t thought of that in years, didn’t even know where it came from. She was avoiding my eyes, fidgeting with her phone. Probably thinking of sending out resumes. Maybe to the Morris campaign.

I looked at the portrait of Washington hanging next to the door. Cherry trees and the battle of Yorktown. Now look at us. I took a long swig of the scotch, drained the glass.

“Yeah, you know what? Forget it. Draft a release… ‘I do not now, nor have I ever, believed anarchy to be a viable form of government for these United States. Then see if you can get someone from that Central American trip to spill some beans.”

Belinda left. I stared at Washington. He stared back.

He seemed disappointed.

Vladimir Ilyich was dying.

Around his bed stood Trotsky, The Georgian, and a few others. Five to be exact, although as he faded in and out of consciousness, they flickered and wavered. As if slowly being rubbed out of existence.

The women had gone. In a corner they’d left a samovar, percolating and hissing softly.

Vladimir Ilyich felt his heart rattling, the breath forced by his lungs seemed heavy, oozing, and spots and motes danced in his vision. He was thinking of a blacked-out train, of glimpses of Teutonic place-names seen with a mere glance through heavy curtains when they’d stopped. It was centuries ago. Millenia. So much time past.

“The masses will need to see,” this said quietly by The Georgian.

“It is idolatry. We must not create a new opium for them,” Trotsky replied. One of the five shadows cleared his throat, as if to say something, but thought better of it.

“Nevertheless. They will need to see.” The Georgian’s eyes held no expression. It was as if he were remarking upon the plainest fact, as if mentioning the sky were blue, or grass was green. He walked casually to the samovar, poured himself a cup.

Trotsky looked down on the bed, a strange selection of expressions playing over his face. He seemed distraught. This open display of emotions disgusted Vladimir Ilyich. You fool, Vladimir Ilyich thought to himself with a burst of loathing. You stupid, muddle-headed fool. He will eat you alive. You and the other fools. He will tear off your heads and drink your blood and stand bathed in red while the masses bay for more and ask, no, beg him to do the same to them.

From the samovar came The Georgian’s voice, quiet as ever. “It can be done. Properly. The application of rational science does not end with life. I have seen the most astonishing man, a former doctor. He can preserve any body, human or animal, in exactly the state desired.”

It didn’t bother Vladimir Ilyich that they spoke of him thus in his presence. That they were discussing even now, as his life weakened and his organs failed, his future use to the revolution. History was ordained. Everyone had to fulfill their role. It did not bother him that they spoke of him thus, but it tore at his very being to have them consider using him as a totem, an idol, a waxen image for superstitious peasants to genuflect before and pray to for forgiveness of their trivial sins. The revolution was not trivial. The revolution was fact. It was science, a new science, cold and pure and untethered to bourgeois notions of truth or sin.

He summoned a last burst of energy.

“No,” he croaked. He was to say more, but the effort rattled his lungs, the pain of the effort forcing him into silence again.

One of the shadows started, looked in perplexion at the others.

“What did he mean,” he asked of no-one in particular.

The Georgian came slowly back over to the bedside, holding his cup by the handle and blowing casually across it as he gazed down at the dying man. The Georgian ignored the fact that anyone had spoken.

“He has been my brother, as he has to all of you,” The Georgian said, addressing the others quietly. “He has been a man of iron will, of brilliant leadership and of the noblest purpose…”

Vladimir Ilyich suddenly lost track of the other’s speech. The words were jumbling, his mind couldn’t keep track of the sounds. A roaring in his ears. He was dreaming. The vast fields. They spread out before him, waves of wheat, already harvested, the stubble covering the ground. A cloudless day. A body by the side of the road, a little figure beside it crying softly. The revolution was inevitable. It was scientific. Further along the road, thin stick figures mewling as they tried to gnaw at the very roots of wheat. The sun beating down. The road continuing. Leading into forest. A group of sullen men in overcoats, a few with gleaming insignia on their fur caps, standing and looking at the rifles facing them, resigned. The order to fire, and the men falling as if slumping from exhaustion. Red seeping into the ground. The revolution was unstoppable. It was scientific. The visions flickered, changed. The Volga passing outside his office window, turgid. Smoke rising from the other bank as the last few pockets of resistance were crushed. A body floating by, the river holding it in a cold, furtive embrace. Then another body. And another… The revolution was inevitable. It was scientific.

He heard the last words of the Georgian, “… a symbol forever, of all that the revolution stands for.”

There was silence. Trotsky cleared his throat, looked to the others, the five shadows. Not one met his gaze. He looked down, as if ashamed. The Georgian sipped his tea, looking down at Vladimir Ilyich, expressionless. Only a deep gleam in his eyes betrayed the fact of his humanity.

Vladimir Ilyich sank into the bed. His breath stopped. He was looking out a window, past a heavy black curtain at a sign of some Teutonic name. It had been so long ago. But what did that matter? The revolution was inevitable.

It was a grey day, rain sighing down through the elms. He stood in the doorway of an apartment building as the cobblestones on the street in front of him grew slick, and hausfraus and burghers fumbled with their keys and collected their groceries from the hatches of their cars. Every once in a while he looked at his watch and made a show of slight impatience, shuffling from one foot to the other. He hadn’t caught a tail so far as he knew. Still, he’d learned what you know doesn’t count for much. So he stood there, and did his reconnaissance, and didn’t see anything suspicious, and so he didn’t leave his coat unbuttoned. That was the signal.

If they showed up. If this sort, kinda, maybe lead to someone who supposedly knew something panned out. It was about natural gas. That was all he knew.

The car turned around the corner exactly on time. It came down the street towards him, slowly, as if looking for something. A parking space perhaps. A nondescript black hatchback. He stared at it a fraction too long. What the Hell? Black? He sighed expressively, took one last look at his watch and made a show of turning up his collar, and venturing out onto the sidewalk, strode past the slowly moving car without a second glance.
This was supposed to be easy. A quick trip over, a quick trip back. Just some possible contact at a gas company. Or as they said nowadays, energy company, he thought inconsequentially.

Anyway.

Nothing in his earpiece. He pulled out his phone as he walked, just another idiot texting along, oblivious to the world. The screen was dark. He pushed the power button again. Nothing. Suddenly the world grew very real. The slight scent of ozone in the air, the soft hiss of tires on pavement. The brush of a sudden small gust of wind on his cheek. His neck prickled with sudden sweat. No comms. The black car meant no team. And, for something that was supposed to be very, very simple, no real prepared cover. Nothing that would stand up to more than the most cursory scrutiny, anyway.

Maybe it was a test?

There was a café on this street, halfway down the block. It would be the most natural thing in the world to step inside, order a Kaffe Schwartz and take his time. Figure out at least a few of the angles. Could this be salvaged?
He neared the café. The rain was starting to gust now, but as he approached the door a girl sitting at a table near the window happened to look up. Maybe she meant, to, maybe she didn’t, but she caught his eye for the briefest of seconds before looking down again at the magazine she was reading. Expressionless, but that didn’t mean anything. He hesitated at the door to the café and looked down the street further, let go of the handle as if he’d noticed someone, or just thought of something, and continued down the street. He didn’t see any other pedestrians just then, a good sign.

A magazine. How old-fashioned. Not a tablet, not a smartphone, but an honest-to-goodness magazine. Pulped trees, he thought to himself inconsequentially. What a waste.

The rain came down harder. Soon, he’d become conspicuous, no longer someone just caught in the sudden downpour, but a man perversely continuing a walk when any reasonable individual would take a pause indoors. Strange behavior is suspicious. Suspicious behavior is anything strange. Words were beginning to rattle in his head, he thought to himself. A bad sign. The nearest safe house was five blocks over. The team was supposed to be in the van, around the corner from where he was to have been picked up, but there’d been nothing. His comms were dead. It was nothing, he told himself. Nothing. Nothing meant anything. The girl was just a girl. The signals had been mixed up. The mission was a bust, that’s all. His team had been here illegally, trying to get a piece of this to sell to somebody, but…

Everybody did it.

Information wanted to be free they said. He’d read that, a quote from some techutopian. Idiot. Information existed to be captured and sold to the highest bidder.

Like a competing gas company.

Energy firm, he corrected himself.

His neck still prickled, despite the sudden chill of rain. Bad signs.

Bad signs.

This was a small thing, not even a mission, really. A sort of, maybe, perhaps kind of a feeler thing, he told himself. Checking out a very vague lead that was probably nothing. Nothing that any other team or crew, whether on contract or government, would even care about. Right? Right. That girl in the café had just been a girl reading a magazine who’d happened to look up he told himself again. The comms were out because of a solar flare that the techs had forgotten to brief them on. The car had been black because the supposed, perhaps, maybe contact had been sick, or their boss had held them up at work. Nothing had gone wrong.

He told himself that again as he turned the last corner before the safe house, actually an apartment.

Nothing had gone wrong.

Blue lights flashing against the façade. A polizei, green uniform glistening in the rain, looked at him interestedly as he approached. He looked at the flashing lights of the green-and-whites with mild interest, crossing over to the other side of the street. The policeman looked after him thoughtfully, then, unobtrusively, spoke something quietly into the mike hanging by his shoulder.

The door to the safe house was on its hinges, wood splintered onto the sidewalk.

From an unmarked car parked at the end of the block a man emerged, dressed nattily in black. The passenger door opened almost simultaneously, and a female figure emerged, also dressed entirely in black. It was something about the weather he’d decided long ago, this compulsion to wear the darkest shades imaginable.

They started walking towards him, unhurriedly. Both falling into step with each other naturally. He was made, no doubt about it. The polizei was right behind him, the light tread of someone on the balls of their feet. Suddenly he was calm. It didn’t matter. He was just suddenly glad everything was over.

Two weeks later a new contract was announced between the Federal Republic of Germany and LukProm, the gas company.

Or, as they preferred to be called, energy company.

*Author’s note – This was written when I was in college and inspired by Chekhov. The Lady with the dog. It has been lightly rewritten in the intervening decades.

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He ordered a cappuccino. Out in the streets the office workers were just beginning to file out of their hutches, stopping by the hot dog stand to get sustenance before boarding the trains and buses which would rattle them home. He sat there and watched. He was early, which made a change for him, and he luxuriated in the feeling of indolence it afforded. The women walking by swung their hips and showed off their legs, for it would soon be too cold to be without an overcoat. The summer was over, but the fall was being unusually kind, and the denizens of Stockholm paraded the remnants of their Aegean tans and smiled at each other.

So he sat, and drank his cappuccino, and didn’t even read the book by Chester Himes he’d bought to assuage the dripping nostalgia for the rotting, pulsating homeland. She came in on a breeze, and he sensed that if he hadn’t pulled her down to Earth, and to him, with a wave of his hand she might have floated off into the clouds, adding her radiance to the warmth of the sun. They kissed each other, and he looked around for the waiter. They didn’t say anything until the man came, each feigning slight boredom. He ordered her tea for her, and she nodded her approval regally, an extra raised to the starring role. They sat still and watched the passing crowds.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it, that happiness comes from the smallest things… the ones with no price.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, “Really? Ironic? I think it’s perfectly natural. After all, what can you do with money other than burn it? Things without a price tag are valuable precisely because they cannot be bought.” She said this in a tone of reproach, but couldn’t prevent a smile from playing around her lips. He grinned at her and raised his coffee cup in mock salute. They laughed, as idle rich can do at unassuming passions.

The Note

I’m seeing Theresa. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way of explaining it other than to say that we’re in love. I feel terrible about deceiving you, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell you we were together. That night. In a strange way, it was hard to say anything simply because I care so much about you. I hope you’ll understand, but I don’t expect it. If you wish to call me, or talk to me, I’ll be back from Italy in two weeks. If it would be at all possible, despite the idiocy of the cliché, I would still like us to be friends.

She crumpled up the piece of paper. She took it to the ashtray which lay on the living room table and carefully set fire to it. She felt quite calm. The paper burned gladly, flames cheerfully licking away the embarrassment, and excusing itself in a thin wisp of smoke. She walked over to the mirror which hung in the hallway. The face of a beauty looked back at her, calm and cold, a face seen in small photos of happenings in certain magazines, a face glossy in the manuals of how to do good that occasionally thumped through the mailbox of those parts of town where things simply are or aren’t done, my dear.

She neared the mirror. Carefully studied her eyes. No. No sign of tears, no hint of redness in those perfectly made-up blue walls. So, she thought to herself. So, it had turned out to be Theresa. Well, he’d written a nice note at least, she thought inconsequentially. She felt a welling inside her, and she went to the window, closed against the greying skies, prepared to surrender to her feelings. But the wave subsided, and she found herself not crying, but thinking quite analytically about whether and why she should feel bad just because he’d left her. Had he really meant that much? Well, yes, she admitted to herself, he had meant a great deal. But they had never cemented their relationship, never fallen into what he’d turned one night the trap of impossible expectations. So why did she now feel so empty? Why did it hurt her to think of him in Theresa’s arms? She sat down on the sofa and stared blankly at the walls. She could still feel the way they’d touched, the way he’d stroked her hair, the way he’d moved inside her. And also the way they had laughed, had shared their disdain of the ordinary, cultivated their own little fringe of two. Laughed at the neighbor who kept saying the Russians were coming, the KGB had microphones in the walls, and it was time for revolution. Why had she thought of that of a sudden, that one memory? Now she thought of him, sitting at the table, urging the neighbor on with one more drink and glinting at her with his serious eyes, and she felt wetness on her cheeks.

He was tired. The flitting trees of Northern Italy were sucked back through the window of the rocking train. Theresa’s head lay against his shoulder, and he sighed. From contentment, he told himself. A fly buzzed miserably against the window. He felt a certain sympathy for its plight. The best laid plans of mice and men, and a’ that. He watched its meaningless struggle, but the sound it made bothered him not at all. Silly fly, he thought, why on Earth would you want to get on board a train in the first place?

Theresa’s perfume was intoxicating, and the combination of perfume and the fly’s buzzing made him drowsy. He day-dreamed of clouds and blue skies, and suddenly he was flying free, lightly drifting on the breezes; far below he could she someone signaling him to come down, but he ignored the shape in a dress. The figure ran underneath him for a time, but eventually he pulled away, and could delight in the coolness of air, the call of the heavens above.

When the train pulled into the small fishing village they disembarked like two children, skipping off the train, he pulling her off the platform, hands around her supple waist, she grabbing his arm and swinging her suitcase in the other. A worn-out conductor watched them leave from underneath hooded eyes and grunted. Probably in displeasure. They ignored him. They walked out of the station and the full strength of the Southern light struck their faces, stunning them into a placid silence. They recovered during their brief walk, getting lost twice in the narrow streets, and laughing with mock relief when they found the pensione. He wiped his brow exaggeratedly, she flung herself on her suitcase in front of the door theatrically.

When the concierge was gone and the door locked, they made love in the slanting sun, to the sound of two hissing cats outside.

He lit a cigarette. Checked his watch. Three in the morning. He carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed and shuffled into his pants. Taking care not to make noise, he pulled on a sweater against the salty chill and walked out. Once on the street he let his feet lead him. The smoke from his cigarette trailed behind like an anxious ghost as he wandered. A short while, and he could distinguish the sound of surf. He followed the sound came to the beach, smoothed stones stretching to the lapping waves, stars reflecting in the wrinkled ocean. The waves poured phosperescence over the stones as if baptizing their inkiness. The sound was hypnotic, and he felt himself drawn to this wordless mantra. He shook his head at himself. Stood quietly. He decided there was a beat to the waves, a rhythm beyond music. Or perhaps a word. After a while, he tried to make that sound himself. If it was a word, it was a word that did not change, that had never changed and could never change, even if the inflection might bend with the power of this or that wave. A soft word… perhaps? A word which connoted something very specific. It was a name, he realized with a shock. A name he recognized.

When he returned to bed, Theresa awoke. She held out her hands against him and pulled him towards her, warmth and heat, scent and sense. He lay down, into her softness, and slept.

The next day he was cheerful, but somehow distant. She noticed how he trailed off when telling a joke about his failed business, how it’d turned to his new success. His eyes had something hollow in the sun. She said nothing, for she believed with the passion and hope of love that he’d tell her if anything needed to be said.

It went away. That night, they had a meal under flickering candles, and afterwards he showed her the beach, and they watched and listened to the waves. They stayed there for two weeks, and she was happy.

When the morning came of the day before their return home, he was gone. She found a note, and read it on the pensione’s hard bed, still damp from their sweat, while a fly buzzed miserably against the window.

So he returned to the beauty. He made the contrite sounds, faked the strength of will he didn’t need to keep back tears which weren’t there, and in the end she took him back. He was happy. They were happy. But happiness and depression both can become overly familiar, boring. Unsatisfying.

He fooled around. And believing his life, believing the little half-truths he told, and the lies he left unspoken, he didn’t notice the glow on her cheeks after seeing some old acquaintances. Acquaintances he never met.

One night he returned abruptly, unexpectedly, from an argument with a woman he thought could be a lover. As he entered the apartment he heard moans. They reminded him of the sounds she had made when they had been infatuated with their ideas of each other. He walked quietly to the doorway of the bedroom. She was on her hand and knees, facing him. Behind her an acquaintance was grunting with each thrust, eyes shut. Her head was raised and she looked into his eyes; not afraid, not brazen, but with a curiosity and distance that made any reaction he might have null and void.

And he felt nothing. Not anger, not betrayal, not sadness. They held each other’s gaze for a moment, then he turned and walked away, out of the apartment, out of that life. The met the next day, agreed to part, and both moved out. He didn’t want to keep the apartment. Instead, he found, after crashing the hospitality of old school friends, a place in Stockholm’s old city, with a view of the square rigger af Chapman across the narrow water. The bright lights of the amusement park on the island further off would liven up the nights in the summer. But not now.

There, for a while he was able to paint. It was, after all, what he did. Critics forgot to mention his family name when critiquing his work, which was worth more to him than what this or that canvas fetched. And of course he fell in love again. Madly, passionately and infatuatedly. With the girl whom with he argued on that night of realization and reckoning. He bought her baubles, and she cooed over images she didn’t understand.

If he’d died there and then he might have said that his life had been full and complete. But every breath we take holds the threat and promise of another corner to turn.

With the inevitability of December’s sleet he grew moody. Love scratched at the new lovers, and she left him after a few months. Even the sex wasn’t fun anymore she declared, before slamming the door with what she felt was deep meaning.

He drowned himself in imagined suffering. He probed his past, uncovering scabs of sharpness to let his animal gnaw on, seeing hints in false memories and truths in injustice. He wondered what creature roamed his subconscious and plucked at the strings that supported his life. In cafes and bars there was only noise, and in the apartment only the sheeting of the winter, storming against the panes.

So he painted. Furiously. Melodramatically forming the scenes, the colors rising and falling against each other, flailing at his tormentor, trying to pin the beast, to throw it upon the canvas, to pin it to the light and with madness in his eye burn it out of existence.

Yet when he believed he had finally won a battle, had transfixed his past with the brilliance of insight and could finally stand triumphant, he would sense the rumbling of laughter, goading him, pricking him with scorn. And so wars continue. These paintings were ugly. As all ego which is not controlled decides, he decided that life was ugly. And if ugliness was truth, then his truth was art.

On the day before New Year’s Eve he was coming back from a brooding walk along the quay. A shape ahead of him lured his eyes, the familiarity calling. He stopped. She walked on towards him, glanced as she neared, and stopped as well. It was Theresa. She looked at him uncertainly, a smile flitting across before disappearing, her eyes smoked with memory. He looked through her as if she were a stranger. Her hand fluttered by her side, then died. She took a step past him, then another. Then she was gone. He inexplicably snarled with pleasure. When he realized that, he felt suddenly ashamed, and the unfamiliarity of the sensation made him uneasy.

That night he woke early, the night dark and cloying. He lay in bed for a moment, trying to grab at the fleeting shards of a dream. He sat on the side of the bed, fumbled for a pack, and lit a cigarette. He felt the urge to paint, so he threw on his old bathrobe and walked to the easel in the next room. He placed a fresh canvas on it, and picked up his brush.

Dawn broke, and he still stood there. The canvas mocked him.

Pure, unblemished.

A POSTSCRIPT

“I used to be famous, you know,” he said, and stroked his unkempt chin. “I sed to make paintings, and everyone thought they were so very beautiful.” He stared down into his glass. Else didn’t say anything, just looked at him from under perfectly arched eyebrows. He snorted into his drink, the amber liquid sloshing sympathetically as he coughed. He leaned back and eyed her. She was young. Nineteen. He felt old next to a girl like this.

The clouds were pregnant in their whiteness as they fitfully scampered across the sky. On the bay fishing boats, not so many this year, less than the year before, and less than the year before that, puttered in, rolling with waves, rust streaking off ancient steel rigging, salt-streaked gunwales glinting with the reflections of thousands of fish scales. A leaden sun poured heat down on the Turkish coast. He could have done something with this on a canvas, he thought. Before.

“Why did you stop painting if you were so good?”

He laughed. “Who said I was good? I was famous, I didn’t say I was any good. There’s a world of difference.” He took a strong gulp and felt the whiskey bite at his throat. It was expensive, an indulgence, but worth it. If he’d taken to drinking the cheap ouzo and raki like the other expatriate drunks, he wouldn’t have had a voice after a couple months. He debated whether or not to have a cigarette. He knew without checking that there were six left in the pack, and they would have to last him until morning. As always, it ended up a rhetorical debate, and he lit up. Else sniffed.

That was how they had met, just two days before. She had sat down at the table next to him in the midafternoon heat, the aura of an unrequited meeting hanging around her sharp and small features. They had simply sat there, while nothing moved; two infidels. He’d lit up, and she had told him with a cool gaze that smoking was bad. So they introduced themselves, and after each had debated internally whether or not to actually converse with the other, they had begun the dance.

She was from Buxtehude in the North of Germany, and had come to Turkey to escape civilization for a while. The unknown, unseen, and changed heart of the unmentioned travel companion sat beside her as she said this, mocking her. Probably on a neon-lit island nearby, downing shots at a bar of shrilling tan bodies who couldn’t imagine a better existence. Anyway, she’d wanted to escape civilization. He told her that was a rather arrogant statement to make, considering civilization had arisen right here, or close enough, only ten millennia before. She gazed at him coolly again. The look made him reconsider speaking at all. Perhaps if he’d been that age he too would have preferred thumping music and a mindless drunk. Perhaps. No, he decided, even back then… no. He smiled at her to show his teasing. She dropped her gaze and looked into her glass of tonic, sweating in the heat. He offered to show her the sights, and found her a willing audience for the Story of His Life which he found himself creating even as they scrabbled in the dry dust over rocks hewn from some epochal hand. He especially enjoyed his description of how he’d lost his art; he made sure to tell her only enough to pique her curiosity.

That night they went to the cliffs to see the waves crash. As they did.

It was lunchtime, some days later. She was still there, sitting with him. He shook himself, looked blinking into the clear sky. A heaviness. He’d run out of fascinations with which to intrigue her. The horizon stretched beyond infinity, the heat lay and coaxed, swam over one’s skin and blanched the world, making only daydreams seem real. “Else,” he said, pleased with this sudden, new, turn of phrase, “don’t you think this heat, well, it blanches the world away, leaving only our dreams real?”

She looked at him seriously. “Perhaps. It depends what you are dreaming of. Sometimes I think I can never dream again, then it is very nice just to sit and let the sun warm me.” She shrugged. “I have to say that for me, only the present is real.”

He took a drag from his cigarette to hide his irritation. It was a new pack, and he’d had four already. It was the heat, he decided, the heat which rasped over one’s skin like an overly friendly snake.

She looked at him. “Tell me again, why did you stop painting? Why stop? Why come here?”

He looked at her and debated whether or not to be honest. But did he know the reason himself? What did honesty mean, if only that he’d run out of stories. He felt there was nothing to hide.

“I came here because there was nothing left for me back home.” A swig from the glass. A look of resignation, untinged, he hoped, by any artifice. “I realized I was not worthy of the art, and decided there was nothing else I was suited for. I also… I hurt people, and wanted to get away, to protect as much as myself.” He finished. Sighed in a suitably tragic yet noble manner.

“Yes. I expected you to say that. Something like that. But you know, it doesn’t sound so much tragic as self-pitying. You know, people can protect themselves. No, I think you ran away because one day looked in the mirror and saw what was there. And you sought to get to a place with no mirrors.”

She stopped. Alex felt a vague sense of unease. She had been accurate, of course. Unnervingly so, and he realized that because she didn’t speak much, and because of her youth, he had badly underestimated her sophistication. His unease was leavened by excitement. There was more to be discovered with this girl than he’d thought.

“I think you don’t give me enough credit.” He said with an aggrieved air.

“On the contrary,” and here, for the first time since he’d met her, her smile broke the sharpness of her features, softened her face. Suddenly she seemed to glow, as from a heat generated from within. “I think I give you all the credit you deserve.”

He stared out at the sea. He tried to empty his mind; there was something he could almost, but not quite, hear. He realized what it was.

“And tell me Else, why did you come here. Really?”

She smiled as if he’d told a sly joke. The sun burned slowly down into the water. She looked into his eyes, as if a decision had been made. “I think you should begin to paint again.”

He looked at her carefully. Her hair glinted in the setting sun. A stray wisp played about her eyes. Her outline clear, silhouetted against a backdrop of blue, pretty as a picture. Something stirred inside him, but he couldn’t name it.

They sat in silence as the dark symphony of light settled in the West, sparking the clouds with the burning umber of a medieval battlefield. Mustafa, the owner, came out and ostentatiously polished a glass slowly. It was late, but the tourists were rare now, and it wouldn’t do to speak. Particularly as the man spent his money freely on the imported drink. Mustafa sighed quietly, thought of his wife waiting for him.

The two antagonists ignored him, as each measured the other.

“You know,” Else finally began, “I think perhaps you do not read enough. You seem to judge the book by its cover. There is maybe something you know you should do, that you will not admit. You will not do this thing because you wish to play a role you believe you are suited for.”

He grinned at her. “No, my dear, I read too much, don’t you see? Things which are simple become complicated, and I become paralyzed by the enormity of any decision. Like, for example, a small town. It can be very quiet, very calm on the outside, but behind the little curtains there are things… things which can be hard to deal with, and then what can you do, eh? What can one do?” He let the question hang. A challenge.

“Well, whatever is the course one chooses, one should never abandon the one’s soul…” Suddenly she started giggling. She tried to stop, but couldn’t help herself. He stared helplessly at her.

“I am sorry,” she continued, “it is just that I remember reading a book and thinking to myself that there were no people who spoke like that, and here I find myself. Speaking of souls. Ach!” She smiled again, and for the first time since they’d met he completely forgot that she was nineteen.

He smiled back. His thoughts uncoiled, and he sensed a promise in the air, of something without, and within himself. “Come,” he said.

He dropped too much money on the table. Mustafa’s smile lite their way as they wandered off. When he put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned against him, he felt like bursting in song.

They came to the beach, walking barefoot at the breach where the waves searched their way up the shore. For a long time they walked like that. He looked out into the distance, lost. She kept her eyes fixed before her, as if feeling for a chasm. The waves curled under their toes, dragging at the sand beneath them.

“There was a boy, very sweet. He wanted to take care of me, he said. To protect me. But not macho, not like that, just sweet. He was very much in love with me, I think. But, I did not love him, although I tried. For a time. He said it didn’t matter, my love or not. All he wanted was for me to let him love me… I grew to hate him. That is why I came here. Also, I did some bad things, things I should not have done. I thought I could convince him not to love me.”

Else fell silent, and he let the words die, swim and form in his mind. He could see the scene. Very clearly.

“And then,” she continued, “when I met you I thought: ‘Oh, he is just a man who wants to sleep with me,’ and all the time you were talking it seemed that way. But then you talked of painting, and there was… something. I thought, well, he is a man who wants to sleep with me, but there is something there. And then…” She looked up at him briefly. “You have wonderful hands. You do not give yourself credit in the right places. You are more clever than you look, but not as clever as you think. But you have hands that can paint. I am sure.”

The waves tapped at their feet, the sand sloughed away and back. The moon shone down. They stopped walking.

And they faced each other.

*Author’s note. This is intended to be a continuing series of stories told in the manner of a children’s tale, but not necessarily for children.

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Tommy the rabbit heard the soft chirp. He pulled out the smartphone from his carrying pouch and swiped it open. A message from Gillian the deer. Typical. “Were u?” It said. He looked around, the rocks towering over his head, the pine trees around. “Home. What up?” he replied back. The sun felt good on his back. It’d been a long Winter. He held the phone in his paws for a couple seconds, but there was no reply. Twitching his nose, he sauntered over to a few fresh green sprouts of grass. A soft crack of a twig a few yards off suddenly sent adrenaline racing through his system. He whirled around and saw Peter the fox eyeing him from a distance, one paw about to set down, his hindquarters beginning to crouch slowly.

Peter smiled, his tongue flicking out quickly. “Hey there, rabbit. Nice that Spring’s finally here, huh?”

Tommy eyed the fox carefully, nose twitching, legs ready to spring. He affected a calm demeanor. “Yeah. Sun’s out. Grass is growing. Nice day, you know.” His burrow was just a few yards away, but the fox was blocking the route diagonally. He might be able to make it in one quick leap, or… he might not.

The fox inched himself down until he was sitting on his hind legs, licking his paw nonchalantly. Stared at Tommy. Tommy could feel the rush, the warm flow of blood through his body. He could make it if… if… what was that chirping sound?

“You gonna answer that?” The fox asked, his ears pricked and eyes focused.

“Oh, yeah. Just, uh…” Tommy back casually a few steps away, making a show of reaching for his pouch as he put a couple precious feet between himself and Peter. He swiped the screen, still tense and ready to dart at any moment.

“Hey, Gil, what’s up?”

Gillian’s excited, high-pitched view came through with the characteristic nasally deer tone. “Oooh! Tommy! You won’t believe the fresh meadows down around the creek! You’ve just got to see!”

“Uh, sure, Gil.” He replied.

Peter sighed, stretched down until he was prone on the ground. “Hey, don’t mind me. You wanna talk with your giiirlfriend, go ahead.”

Tommy inched slowly back some more. He could see the tenseness in the fox’s muscles. “Sure Gil, yeah. Down at the creek. Yeah, I’ll be there, be good to see you.” He tried to talk cool, but it came out rushed and breathy.

“Tommy, are you with somebody?” Gil might not be bright, but she had some kind of intuition. Had to give her that.

“Well, actually, you know the fox, Pete? He’s here, first time seen him this year. We’re uh, we’re catching up.”

Peter sat up, seemingly bored. “Hey you talking to that deer? The one always going on about birch bark and eating right?”

“Yeah. What if I am?” Tommy felt anger, but, well, as much as he’d like to kick the stupid fox’s eyes out, it’d be a one-sided battle. What with those teeth and all.

“Oooh! Let me talk to him!” Gil breathed out. Tommy couldn’t believe his ears.

“What? You want to talk to… to a fox?!” He glanced over at Pete, whose eyes were lazily half-closed, but whose ears were pricked. Right. The. Eff. Up.

Gil cooed, or as much as a deer could coo, “Yeah, you know I always dug him. What’s wrong Tommy? You mad or something?”

Tommy put down the phone stared at it. Pete stretched nonchalantly, got up, rubbed his back against a nearby tree. “Uh, she, uh. She wants to talk to you.” Tommy finally stammered.

Peter came over, while Tommy simultaneously backed away. “Sure she does,” He winked at Tommy. The fox sat by the phone, picked it up with his paws. “Hey you,” he said.

Tommy backed off in a wide circle. Went to the entrance of his burrow. Sat back, washed his face with his paws. Twitched his nose. Peter was laughing softly into the phone. Tommy’s nose twitched again.

Pete put the phone down. “Hey, man, thanks for letting me use your cell.” He stared at Tommy, not unkindly, but not particularly friendly either. “It’s okay, you can come get it, I’m heading off anyway. Going to the creek, you know?”

Pete gave one last unreadable look, whether disdain or derision, Tommy couldn’t tell, but he seemed amused on some level. “Yup, going down to the creek. See you ‘round, rabbit.” The fox trotted off, tail held just-so.

Tommy slowly hopped over to his phone. He put it in his pouch. Hopped over to the fresh sprigs of grass. Tried to eat some, but didn’t feel like it. He waited for a soft chirp. Sat and felt the sun on his back and waited for a chirp.

He was still sitting there when the sun finally started down and the crickets started up.

When my old dad told me about women, I wasn’t more than about ten or so. He said always pay for your own whiskey – well, that was what he said first, sitting by the fire and looking into the coals like they had the truth of eternity glowing in them. He said always pay for your own whiskey, then he sat looking for a spell. And then he said… and his eyes glowed from the embers… and always pay for your women too.

And that was about all the wisdom I ever got from the man.

Out on the road in some dusty place I’d never think about him, but there must be some kind of vestigial sense of origin in the temporal things with which we decorate our existence. I grew into a different man, as all sons do, if they are to become men themselves and not mere followers of genetic predestination. Still, there were moments I could sense similarity with my old man and force myself away onto the uplands of a more individual destiny.

So how came I to be on a mountain in winter, stealing myself for a march through snow towards an uncertain goal?

Well that’s a story in and of itself.

I had been traveling fitfully through a part of the world which was less concerned with the lure of glittering society’s doings than my national home. This is not to make a claim upon the relative merits of one people’s choice of conversation over that of another. I am sure that if I could determine the inflections of voices and words of the people of that place with the ear of a native, I would find myself as assaulted by unwanted information regarding the relatings, goings, doings and froings of individuals for which I could not care much as in my own home town. But as a stranger in the parts, I was excused from overt familiarity with the inflections and intrigues that grip all groups of people born in the same place. Instead I was free to enjoy the soaring crags, the dusty valleys and ethereal light that shone through the racing clouds over a land stark and yet noble.
There was one other foreigner there. A Russian, or so he claimed, although I could no more say that was his true origin than determine from what river was spawned an individual fish. The man was a constant miasma of shifting tales and repeated half-truths. Entertaining for a spell, but not someone to whom you might willingly and without care tie yourself with rope to cross a yawning chasm of ice miles from any populace or safety.

And yet that was the matter as it occurred. Later.

There was a town beauty there; the daughter of a chief, as near as I could gather. The Russian had been in those parts longer than I, and explained to me in a strange mix of English, Francais and his own deep native words thrown in for spice, that he could procure her favors for me. I replied in no uncertain terms as forcefully as the difficulties in communication allowed, that he would do no such thing, for I, a freeborn and proud man of my own honor, would be beholden to another man for very few things in life, and for the favors of a woman, never.

This put a dampener on our presumptive comraderie as fellow travelers in a strange land.  He retreated to the farmhouse of the headman, and I stayed with a joyous crone and her blind husband, who far as I could tell did nothing but smoke his pipe peacefully by the fire and sigh words of their peculiar religion to himself all day long. The crone proved a fine cook, and I fatted myself for a week in their company, the few gold sovereigns in my possession being more than adequate for an extended stay.

Outside the snow piled up and I waited for a break in the weather to continue my quest towards the mythical lands beyond the hills, where an excitable Italian in a bar in Genoa had told me  there might always be easy work to be had and pleasure enjoyed. I had taken the man’s assertions with a grain of salt, as it is the wont of many men, when falling in the drink in unfamiliar surroundings, to embellish the particulars of this or that far-off region.
I had previously heard from a different fellow on a train about the glories of the Yukon, whose fields had just been opened many years before, and the tales of starvation and dysentry that came out of those parts later and are well-known to most men of inquisitive minds, had served as a salutary prophylactic to any further propensity I might have to take any tale of a putative paradise told on a moment’s whim as gospel truth.

Regardless of the particulars, this mythical land of ease did indeed seem to have considerable reserves of gemstones and hard wood, I had found through the occasional article of reading or snippet of conversation. For all intents and purposes it became my personal Shangri La, although I did not favor the thought in a conscious manner until later. However, as I wandered on a path chosen more by fate than plan, I had contrived to end up on a road which would, in a few months travel in good weather, lead me to that land of possibility, beginning to gleam in my imagination with the deep warmth of a well-cut emerald.

Meantimes, however, I was in this little valley hamlet as the snows filled the passes. I helped a bit around the crone’s small acreage on occasion, as befits a fit man in his prime, in between reading deeply Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the original; a task I had set for myself as a means of procuring the personal satisfaction of as deep a knowledge of our real world as could be reasonably expected.

I was thus ensconced in a world of Latin and universal constants, when an excited banging on the door of the house portended a change in my immediate existence. The blind man by the fire stopped his murmuring with an inquisitive expression, and the crone bustled to unbar the door. In tumbled the Russian, his hair wild, unkempt and unhatted, his face a mixture of comical terror and serious relief at his entry. With quick gestures and guttural imprecations he let it be known that he had fallen distinctly out of favor with the chief, and was leaving anon, nay this very instant. He also led me to believe that it would behoove me in my personal journey to join him, as foreigners would no longer be particularly welcome there.

Well, as I might’ve thought to myself, had I had time enough to reflect and posit, this was a fine pickle. The man, who had apparently ruined the surroundings for us both, now desired me to join him in a trek across lands which still suffered the howling frost and treacherous footings of a wintry hell. And this I must do through absolutely no fault of my own, but because of his actions, actions I myself had done what I could to dissuade.

The man told true, however, because glancing out of the door, I could see a band of three men scurrying across the village center towards a small cluster of huts, no doubt to gather more forces. The chief, for it was he in the lead, cast a glance my way such as left no doubt as to the truth of the Russian’s assertions of his lack of amity towards me as a well.

Nothing for it but to gather my belongings, fortunately few in number, toss one more sovereign on the raw table, grab half of a chicken that was slowly roasting over the fire on a spit and nod my goodbyes to the crone and the blind man. He barely paused in his murmurings as we headed out into the snow.

And that is how I came to be bound by a stout rope of perhaps twenty feet in length to a wild Russian in the far-off snowfields of a mountain range whose name I cannot recall, as it had never been told to me. We struggled through
the dusk, which fell with a relentlessness most untoward for gentlemen caught in our situation. Yet there was a fitful moon above, which through ragged clouds showed a path of sorts that wended its way along a shallow tree line, and thus protected us from the full ferocity of the wind above the ridge and the snows which lay deep in the cols and alpine fields. I do not know if the headman and his villagers followed us at all, but we kept at it for hours in the glinting dark anyway, since it was too cold to stop, and a fire would have been difficult in the open.

I am not a man to exaggerate easily, at least I do not believe that to be my character, yet I do think with all truth at my disposal that I came as near death that night as is possible for mortal man without paying Charon for that final ride across the Styx. The cold ate into the bones, through all the many layers I had procured during the months I had previously clambered into these mountains, setting the teeth to chattering the moment there was the least halt in forward motion, and causing a sort of illusion of the mind that one’s head was being physically clenched in a giant’s hand and squeezed tighter and tighter. Not feeling my extremities was another sign, and I was beginning to see the light on the snows lifting and dancing before me, a type of night snow-blindness with which I had never been familiar before, but which even I in my depleted state recognized as most dangerous. It was all in all a most unpleasant means of spending a night. Although I rate myself reasonably tough, I believe we would have both died, had not a providential crack in one of the innumerable winding granite towers led to a small cave, in which we were doubly fortunate to find evidence of some previous occupant, a shepherd perhaps of the summer months, who had left some small pieces of wood on a sort of natural platform in the cavern’s interior.

What bliss to strike a safety match, light a scrap of tinder and see the wood crackle into life. Life, indeed, it felt as if sweet Aurora herself had come and was enveloping us in her warm embrace. The wind still soured outside, and tendrils of its cold malignancy found their way around our feet, but we stood carefully over that fire, and as we felt warm life flow back into our bodies, it was an exhilaration which I can put to words only with the greatest difficulty and which has few likenesses in any other facet of experience.

The morning found us curled on opposite sides of cold embers. Yet we were alive. I had at the man then for this brush with death; I imprecated and swore, and we came to the briefest of blows. Yet it made no difference to my situation, and he did, in fact, seem to know the best way through the mountains. An angle of my practical nature forced out my hand in a gesture of peace. He accepted gladly, babbling of eternal trust and friendship. This I took at face value but with mindful caution. I did not trust the man, and my instincts would prove correct.

We set out for the further reaches of the long valley as the sun rose to display nature’s baleful magnificence. The clouds of the previous day were nowhere to be seen, and the snow lay in the most curious shapes and carvings, the wind having died down and left naught but these sculptures of white in its wake.

As I may have mentioned earlier, we had a stout rope of perhaps twenty feet in length, and this we used to secure ourselves one to the other, for in that wilderness of unvarying white, there might be any number of treacherous crevasses and canyons.

And so it proved to be.

For I was following, my eyes cast down on the ground before my immediate feet, my lungs laboring in the paucity of air at that alpine altitude, when I heard a sudden sharp expression of surprise, the fact of it being in a different language from my own no hindrance to the universality of its expression. I felt a sudden moment of disbelief, and then what slackness there was in the rope was taken up with a vengeance and I was cast forward upon my belly as if a giant had suddenly pushed me from behind. I slid along the snow and with, I am not ashamed to admit, a certain amount of desperation, grasped at the ground to prevent my falling as well into the chasm I could see before me, which had suddenly opened and swallowed up my erstwhile travelling companion.

It was only due to good fortune that I caught on a sort of rocky promontory which had eluded the otherwise all-encompassing embrace of the snow. I caught on this island of grey granite in that desert of unvarying whiteness and clung to it with my might. I could not see over the edge of the crevasse, but I could hear the Russian below, and feel all his weight digging through the rope into my waist. He called to me, but I did not answer. I might have said something, but breath was a valuable commodity to me in that situation, and I doubt he could have heard me, had I expended some small measure of it in calling to him.

In any case, as the initial shock of the event wore off, I was left in a quandary; clinging to my outcropping of rock, I could move one arm in some freedom, but was helpless to do anything else. My breathing was, as mentioned, already becoming somewhat belabored, and I could no more pull on that rope and thus bring the Russian to safety than a new-born chick could fly. I could feel him at the other end of the line, struggling apparently to haul himself up. The rope would dig into me with varying degrees, but for all that, he seemed incapable of pulling himself to the surface on his own, as the sudden drop of his weight when it dug into my waist made obvious time and again.

I do not know how long we were there in that position of impotence and desperation.  It may have been a mere ten minutes, or a full hour. But the realization of what had to be done took time to introduce itself to my consciousness, sidling up like a man of easy manners who makes his way into your home through cajolery and flattery, and before you know it, has his feet up on your divan and is smoking your tobacco.

I had the knife out of my pocket and in my hand. I can recall this moment with distinction, even if all others may fade. I saw, as if it were another man’s hand, how I took that knife and began to saw in the rope. And I heard, since the Russian had fallen momentarily silent, the sudden expression of horror from beyond the ledge, as the soft sibilance of that sawing, loud as thunder in that wilderness of stillness, made its way down the crevasse.

I blocked my ears from the voice, from its imprecations, expressions, demands and cajolery. I blocked my ears, and my arm and hand acted as if I did not myself command them, the rope slowly giving way to the weight at its end with stubborn tenacity. The voice reaching me changed tenor from flattery and promises to begging, and finally a sort of inhuman howl of anguish. I faltered once, nearly dropped the knife… yes, I faltered, but I did not fail. After an eternity, the knife reached the last few cords of the rope and it gave way on its own.

The scream lasted for more than a few seconds before ending with a terrible abruptness.

I recall undoing myself from the remains of rope tied around my waist with a strange, flailing anguish. I then sat panting on the snow for some while, before I could bring myself to crawl slowly on my stomach towards the edge of the crevasse. I did not see to the bottom, and would not have stretched myself far enough into that void for all the diamonds of the Kalahari.

Suffice to say I was sure there was nothing to be done but to continue on my own. The path went onward, yet I saw no gleaming jewels at its end. Rather, I heard a keening, although there was no wind.

I continued on.

And that was the tale of the valley. Now if you’ll excuse, I must be off. Gemstones don’t dig themselves from the earth on their own.

He was pushing. He knew it. Time was of the essence, now. The moment couldn’t slip away. No. He wouldn’t let it slip away. The man across from him took another look at the pages, letting each one fall to the desk after a cursory glance. Twenty pages. Twenty pages of drawings, diagrams, studies, explanations, claims…

Tony tried again.

“You see, don’t you? Speedometers are just so… old-fashioned! Rate-based perceptions of potential accident lethality, and of greater traffic safety issues is outmoded!”

The man cleared his throat. The last page fell to the desk. He looked down at it with expression Tony couldn’t read. Was it that he was impressed? Or bemused?

The man cleared his throat again and looked at Tony for a moment, then down again as he spoke.

“If I understand the concept correctly, you want to do away with miles-per-hour speedometers in cars…”

“Not just cars!” Tony couldn’t help but interject.

“Yes, yes,” The man poked through a few pages until he found one in particular, probably the brief study Tony had written on the possibility of using energy potentiometers in heavier road vehicles, and even, why not, sea-borne cargo vessels. The man looked at it again, glanced, really, before continuing.

“Yes, I see it here. The point is, you want to do away with speedometers in… vehicles… and instead have this… potentiometer.”

Tony suddenly saw the light. He saw the problem. “Well, I know, I know, it’s a terrible name, and in engineering terms not unique, so there’s lots of opportunity for confusion. Really, it should be called something else, the point is, though, that instead of measuring rate-based speed it measures the potential energy of that particular vehicle at that particular weight and velocity, which means it’s much more accurate at predicting potential accident damage. Think of a three-ton SUV going 80, versus a small hatchback going the same speed. ” He leaned back in triumph. He’d used his winning card, the SUV versus hatchback example that had finally gotten Mary to understand. And if he could get Mary to understand his brilliant idea, then surely he could get this man, this fellow engineer, of sorts, kind of, then surely he could get him to understand. Tony tried to smile a winsome, eager and friendly smile. His face cracked into a gargoyle’s grimace at the unfamiliar effort. “It’s just that, well, since it’s the potential for an accident that it measures, so I call it a potentiometer, but that’s not what it has to be called, I mean, if…”

The man was holding the page in his hand, staring at it as Tony trailed off. With growing horror, Tony realized that it wasn’t interest on the man’s face. It wasn’t even bemusement. It was… scorn. He felt sick inside. The man finally looked up.

“So I understand that, for the sake of someone sitting in a vehicle, who’s worried about what damage would be caused by him having an accident…”

“Or her!” Tony interjected. Maybe the man, being a bureaucrat, was particularly sensitive to gender issues. They were always going on about government leading the cause for equality. He’d read about it once in a magazine article. Tony had never had a problem with the opposite gender, of course, if you don’t count being understood.

The man lifted his eyebrows and continued, “Or… her! Yes. In any case, you want to… what, exactly?”

The walls of the office dissolved, and Tony was suddenly in school. Sixth grade. That small desk, tucked into the corner. And the teacher pointing to him, then pointing to the blackboard. And Tony had no idea. No. Idea. What the teacher had just asked.

He shook his head. He was back in the office. The man behind the desk looked quizzically at him. “Are you okay? Do you feel alright or…”

Tony nodded vigorously, immediately. “Oh yeah. Yes, I mean. Fine. Never better. Just, um, could you just, uh, could you repeat that?” He looked up in what he hoped was an eager, helpful manner. The man almost recoiled instinctively, but gathered himself and said, with a pure, studied casualness, “What, exactly, do you want me to do?”

Tony felt words fill up in his brain, in his lungs, dancing behind his eyes, whispering in his ears. What did he want the man sitting there to do? What. Did. He. Want. The. Man. To. Do?

Why, he wanted… that is… this idea was just so wonderful, he couldn’t believe no-one had thought of it before but him. Him. Tony Bunkern. But he had come up with it, this idea that would save lives on the roads, people slowing down when they saw the accident potential of their speed, thought of the consequences. All because of his brilliant idea. He was a hero!

The man continued looking at him from across the desk. The man looked tired. Some kind of greyness behind the eyes, fatigue.

The man spoke again, “I appreciate you coming in here with this idea of yours Mr. … Bunkern, but I don’t see how myself or anyone else at the Department can just suddenly make all the cars that exist today, how we can re-equip them with a … well… this potentiometer. And then we’d have to retrain every single driver on the roads to understand your device as well. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Bunkern, it’d be a heck of an undertaking. In fact, I’m sorry to say, it seems unrealistic.”

The roar filling Tony’s ears was a thunder. It was a timpani. A symphony of rage. But he said nothing. He sat, and, after a moment, reached across the desk. The man stuck out his hand, thinking that’s what Tony was offering, but Tony ignored him and scooped up the pages from the desk. He stood, and the man stood too. Somewhat nervously, Tony thought obliquely to himself. The roar wasn’t abating, but he pushed the papers into some semblance of order, stuck them back in his old briefcase, the duct tape on the side slowly unraveling, and managed to bend his head towards the man and croak out, “I appreciate your time.”

He strode out the door. The sun was blinding the sidewalks bright, the sky a burnished blue. He fumbled for the car key as he stepped off the sidewalk towards the parking structure on the other side. His ears roared still, but for a split-second, he thought he heard another, different kind of roar.

The bus was going 35 miles per hour. With a weight of nearly 8,000 pounds its potential energy was quite high, and transferred to kinetic energy quite fast.

In any case, Tony died quite quickly.