Quarter Pipe And Grind Rail

Ah-nala-thura, mech-tidi and Other Stories

Ah-nala-thura, mech-tidi

I FELT A SURGE OF FEAR as we got off the tramway. Danger lurked in the forest. There, among the white aspens and the daytime mist, lurked a killer. Vasya and I looked into each other's eyes with dread. We entered the forest on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Russia. I limped behind him in the mist until we reached a deep canyon. The cross section of brown earth vanished into blackness. Vasya ran and leaped over the canyon. I felt nervous about running with my lacerated ankle, but I stepped back ten yards and ran for the canyon edge. I made it to the far side but my ankle felt like it was on fire. I knew I had ripped out my stitches. We moved deeper into the forest. We passed barkless trees that were bent, cracked and dead. Then we saw it: a stone house made from slabs of granite with a tin roof that rose to a point.

I resisted going closer.

"I know Sadura will help you, " Vasya said. I held back but Vasya kept on going. I followed him.

At the front door, I caught up with him. I noticed he had begun to quietly hyperventilate. Without us knocking, the birch-wood door swung open to the silhouette of a tall woman. Her long hair was all black except for a single white lock that hung down the middle.

"Child, " she said to Vasya. He seemed to float without moving his feet into the house ahead of her wrinkled hand. I followed them. In the main room, I saw a wooden wall cabinet covered with hundreds of small wooden drawers. A tree grew through a hole in the floor under a skylight. I looked through a door to the kitchen. The table was topped with blue stone. It reminded me of a lab. On the bluestone table stood hundreds of glass jars. The bluestone reflected the contents of the jars. Some contained brown fibers and plant stalks. Others held green foamy liquids. On the far wall was a fireplace with black scorch marks above it. I kept near the front door. Sadura took Vasya to the kitchen. The light came on and I limped in. When I entered, Sadura had just finished talking to Vasya. She turned to face me. Her coarse black hair swung in front of her shoulders. When her eyes landed on me, I felt terrified. She had spoken to Vasya in Russian. Then, to me, she spoke in perfect English-English without the tiniest bit of accent. I had lived in Russia for two years and her speech was something I had not heard: a perfect Central-Plains English dialect, without the slightest Eastern or Southern twang, or even the Minnesota vowels.

"What did that to your leg-hounds?" she asked.

"Dogs-yes, it was dogs-in Moscow, " I said. "Long story. It's infected."

"Most definitely, " she said. "Don't know where they've been feeding." Sadura sat me in a chair and put my leg on a stool. She unwrapped the bandage on my ankle. The wound gave off a foul odor. She stood and went to the lab. She returned with a crusty jar that contained a sloshing cloudy-white liquid. She uncorked it and poured the sauce liberally in my wound. At the tsunami of pain, I yelled and my voice echoed in her stone house. She pulled out the laces that held the wound edges together. She grabbed a rag from inside her sleeve and wiped out my wound. The smell of vinegar was strong and she rubbed and cleaned. I lost track of time and lay still in the chair. Then, Sadura and Vasya lifted me out of the chair. They walked me over to the head-high brick oven in the middle of the room. They helped me to hoist myself on top where it was warm.

I lay on the warm top and stared at the ceiling. I woke to feel her fingers touch my ankle. As she moved them, I felt a cold ointment slide between her fingers and my swollen wound. Then she wiped her hands on the rag. She unscrewed a jar and added a finger dollop of runny ooze to the ointment in my wound. The ooze felt cold. She mixed the two ointments in my wound, and moved her finger back and forth along its torn, puffy edges. I expected pain as her finger moved over the torn tissue of my body but it didn't hurt and actually felt better.

"Now-sleep, " she said. She took my left hand in hers and spoke a rapid series of foreign words. They were not Russian. I didn't know these words.

"You agree?" she asked me.

"What?" I asked. "Sure." I was not paying attention.

"Time to rest, " she said. I slept. I woke to a bump. I turned my head to the side and cracked open my eyes. Across the room, Sadura sat in a high-backed green chair. She sat face to face with Vasya. His legs did not even reach the floor in the chair where he sat, staring gape-mouthed into Sadura's eyes as she spoke.

"Ah-nala-thura, mech-tidi, " she said. She said it while Vasya tried to repeat the words. The sounds they spoke were not words to me, nor did they have the syllabic taste of Russian words. Looking on, from the top of the oven, I kept still and observed the ritual. Then slowly Sadura raised her left hand and moved it up and down, with her open palm tracing the path of a slow-motion wave through the air. With halts and jerks, Vasya flattened and bent his hand in imitation. Sadura crouched nearer to Vasya. Her tongue extended between her lips as she spoke the words: "Ah-nalah Thoo-rah mekk-tea-dee, " she said and was left with a puddle of spittle on her lips as the last syllable left her mouth.

Vasya cleared his throat. He lifted his chin, wet his lips and closed his eyes: "Anal La Threw Rah men tiddy, " he said and opened his eyes. He lifted his eyebrows in exhaustion because of the difficult th sound. Sadura sighed and set her jaw. She glanced at me on the oven. I quickly shut my eyes and lay still. When I opened them a moment later, I saw Sadura collapsed on the floor, her light-colored lock of white hairs scattered in a tangle as she sprawled on the slab floor.

"Sadura!" Vasya yelled. He gave her his hand. She took it and he cupped both his hands around hers. Leaning backwards, he hoisted her from the floor. In the process of lifting her, a weird shiver ran up Vasya's arm. Back on her feet, Sadura held on to Vasya's left hand. She turned it palm up and stroked it. Vasya shut his eyes-as if he was suddenly intoxicated. She held his left hand tightly and gripped the pad of his pinky finger. Then she snatched a long needle from her hair and drove it deep into his finger. The red blood welled and dripped off Vasya's finger. He was still and silent. Sadura moved a shallow metal cup under his finger and milked the blood. I realized that Vasya made no sound as she stabbed his finger.

"Close your mouth, child, " she said to Vasya. Sadura handed him the metal cup of his own blood. She went to a bookshelf and brought back a large book with a wrinkled yellow leather binding. She spread the book on his knees and opened it to a blank page. The pages were wrinkled and tattered at the edge. She pressed Vasya's bloody pinky print on the page. Then, she gave him a quill pen and he wrote his name in the book in blood. After the quill fell from his hand, she held his hands between her own. They began to convulse like they were having seizures. A black rat ran across the floor. Sadura then shook off Vasya's hand. She stood and used the moment to find her balance as Vasya fell over and his skull smacked the floor. Sadura stumbled out of the room, lurching, sweaty and exhausted, leaning on the wall as she made it up the stairs.

After the door shut, I sprung up and lowered myself from the brick oven. Vasya lay on the floor, collapsed on his side, panting. His eyes were open and saliva pooled under his mouth. I patted and rubbed his back a few times and the kitchen door popped open. Sadura came in and altered her pace after she saw me.

"Enjoy the show?" she said. I looked at her humorless expression, her cheek muscles that alternately tensed and slacked.

I raised my brow briefly in a show of innocence, but I looked down and thereby admitted my guilt.

"You will go with us tonight. I've got the itch, " she said and waved her open palm across my face. I felt queasy. The room grew cloudy. A brown blur flashed by my face. I was awake but couldn't escape the brown cloud that blocked my vision. Sadura seemed to move in slow motion. She carved her hands through the air with precision. I felt dizzy and scared. I fell back in a chair and sat limp, unable to lift my arms. Sadura stroked her hands delicately through the mist, followed by grey puffs of smoke. She tugged at my arm and I walked in a state of confusion and mental dizziness. She pushed us into the forest with Vasya walking ahead. She led us down a path into a ravine. As I stumbled down the hill, aspen branches snagged my pants and scratched my arms.

At the bottom I saw a large aspen tree. Its branches formed an umbrella over the wide trunk. At the base of the tree I saw a rock fire circle. As we got closer, I saw that fires in the stone circle had blackened the tree. The circle had a hole in the center that led down into blackness. Sadura stopped and I fell on the dirt facing the tree. I looked over at Vasya. He had flopped on the ground and was staring at the fire circle. I lay in a daze. I raised my head and saw other ladies like Sadura, standing at the edge of the clearing around the large aspen trunk with the hole that led underground. The night passed and we waited and smoky wisps of clouds moved between us and the bright overhead moon that seemed to spin and slow down above us. I stared at the bright white disc with its shining lines that evoked cities and maps. Then, as I watched, the moon ground to a stop above us. Looking up, I shivered. All sound and motion ceased. I saw a glimpse of a black goat that appeared from the forest. The goat was completely black, with its beard shiny and its hooves black. At the sight of the goat, the ladies gasped, bowed their heads and pressed their palms together. The goat turned and trotted around the aspen tree, its goat lips spread wide showing its worn yellow teeth. Time froze and no one moved but the goat. The goat planted its hooves and stared at me. I looked into its eyes, glassy brown wells like marbles. The goat glanced with a sort of smile at Vasya, who scrambled backwards and then dashed from the tree into the dark forest. The glow of the fire cast the goat in silhouette. A moment later, one of the ladies darted after Vasya into the night.

"Vasya!" Sadura said but she did not break eye contact with the goat, which trotted up to her and put its face close to hers. The goat turned. Sadura bent down and kissed the rump of the goat. She whispered a long series of words into the pointed ear of the goat. At that instant, I felt a terrible pain in my stomach. I wanted to get up from the dirt and run but I couldn't move. I didn't understand what I was seeing. The group began to dance around the tree. They leaped high into the air, the goat leaping with them. It seemed they hung in the air for an impossibly long time. I had been looking at the dancers but slowly I turned to the black goat and the long black hairs growing from its chin. The expressiveness, the mobility of its goat face was astonishing. Amid the dancing, Sadura fell to her knees in front of the goat. She spoke to the goat in a language I didn't recognize. I could only hear when the wind carried her weak voice. She spoke quickly and the quaver in her voice scared me. Her power was gone. She wailed and fell limp. She rolled onto her stomach and clawed her way to her feet. Her face was swollen and her eyes bloodshot as she stood above me. From the flush of her face, I thought she might have a heart attack. I didn't understand what I was seeing. I heard drums now going and every dancer leaping and a flash of metal and a sound I will never forget, a high-pitched cry, the short and explosive cry of a baby. It screamed and I could only hear it because I shut my eyes. I felt so tired and for a sudden few seconds I heard the rumble of a deep drum. The sound ached in my stomach and I felt near the end, holding on tightly to my life, feeling the pulse of the blood under my skin. I lay still and could not move even to breathe. My lungs felt heavy. I heard a baby being stabbed. I didn't see it but heard the sound of a baby screaming. The shriek flushed horror through my body. I opened my eyes. Blood was everywhere. I searched for a source of so much bright red blood. I saw nothing but a bloody knife blade, leaning against the tree trunk. After that, the dancing waned. The goat was gone. The ladies kneeled around the tree. The sky lightened near the horizon. In the distance I heard the crow of a cock and instantly all the ladies scattered. Sadura walked away and then she stopped and turned around. She took my arm and lifted me up. I was still groggy and confused. We walked back to her stone house. I noticed that my ankle already felt better. I followed her inside. Just in the doorway, she released my arm. I slid to my knees and slumped on the floor. My leg felt healed on the surface. Sadura moved to the granite steps and went up.

I fell unconscious and slept for hours. When I awoke, night was falling. I remembered what had happened. I could not believe how good my ankle felt. The pain had gone and it no longer itched. I got up and walked out of her house into the forest, leaping over the small canyons. I replayed in my head the sound of that baby crying.

I could not stop thinking of the baby. I kept hearing the shriek and, because I didn't see it happen, my mind continued to imagine the horrible scene of the swift motion of the knife blade plunging into the baby's chest. The depravity of the act bewildered me. I was a witness to the sound but not the horror of the sight. I did not see the white sharp knife plunge into the soft curve of the baby's chest, pressing in and then piercing the skin as the knife disappeared in the baby's chest and the geysers of blood that erupted and the sudden gurgling hysteria in the baby's scream as it coughed up blood.

I ran until I stood at the edge of the aspen forest, gasping for air. I looked up. There, in front of me, stood the house of Sadura, the place I had just run from. I could not escape her. I started to cry and thought of the open-return plane ticket clipped to the wall of my St. Petersburg apartment, and how much I wanted to use that ticket to get on a plane, any plane, out of Russia, back home. I ran again, each step taking me deeper into the aspen forest, far away from Sadura. The air was thick with mist. I pressed on until I reached a thicket. I forced my way through it and on the other side I stopped. I was in front of Sadura's. I could not breathe. Fog covered her house, like a cloud had descended to the ground. I walked next to a large shoulder-high rock. A shadow moved behind the rock. My heart thumped and I wanted to run. I saw a flash of the image. A sheet of blood splashed up. I heard that shriek. I felt a tingle of dread. The top of my head burned. A chill raced through my blood. I took a panicked step forward. I didn't know where I was. I stopped. I looked for her house but was lost.

Sadura's house was completely dark. I noticed a square pane of glass next to the ground. A rectangle of light glowed from around the edges of a cover. I stepped back from the clearing and watched the lit window for an hour. At around three, after I had waited half the night, I woke from my daze to a flickering shadow behind the cellar window. The light got brighter and then it went out. The cellar was dark. I kept my eye on the ground floor window. The house was totally dark. Then lights came on behind glass on the second floor.

I waited on the edge of the clearing. I felt compelled to go to her house. I didn't want to see her. I waited and thought of all the things she could do to me. I thought of her holding the knife over me and seeing her stab my chest like she stabbed the baby. My heart raced in my ears.

I got on my hands and knees and moved knee-to-knee toward her house. I was within view of the window. I crossed the open space to her house. I had no idea if she was asleep. All the lights were dimmed. It was four in the morning. Her house gave no sign of light. I waited until I did nothing but fight sleep. I moved to the front door. I crossed in the light to the open area next to her house. I felt the eyes of an owl on me. I touched the front doorknob and closed my palm around it. Locked.

I felt drawn to Sadura. I went to my hands and knees and crawled to the side of the house. I tried the side door. It was open. I almost fell in. I turned the knob quietly. The side door opened into the hall which was dark. I lifted my feet softly and laid them down in silence. I moved down the hall. I saw nothing in the cold darkness. I followed the hall. The floor squeaked once hard. I stopped and kept still. My heart thumped loudly. I was afraid the squeak woke her.

I looked ahead through the doorway to the kitchen. I moved and the floor jounced under my steps. I stepped toward the oven where something in me changed. The oven felt warm. The top of the stove was black. I felt something wiggle up my spine. I through a punch at the darkness. Moonlight streamed in the window. I headed for the hall and it became apparent that a silhouette stood in the middle of the room. It was Sadura. She turned at an angle to the moonlight. Metal flashed. I froze and held my breath.

"You're late, " Sadura said. She breathed through her nose. "We have work to do." She turned and moved down the hall, the way I had entered. She did not seem angry. I decided to go along. I would run for it when I passed the side door.

"Our Vasya, " she asked. "Where is he."

"I don't know, " I said. She moved down the hallway. I saw the outside door. I hoped to run past her but she stopped in the hall and directed me down the stairs. I saw a knife in her hand. The top of the knife was wet.

"Down, " she said, her mouth tightly closed, her forehead slack and yet a gravity and weight as she stood in black in the hallway, her left arm outstretched, sending me down the stone steps. I didn't want to die. I descended.

The walls were cold as I went down. At the bottom, a fire crackled. Carved in the floor were the lines of a star. In the fireplace, an iron pot hung from three wires tied to a spike in the stonework. In the pot simmered chunks of flesh, flapping in the boiling water. The air held the acrid smell of bad meat. Sadura moved near the fire. I thought the licking of the flames aroused her. She started to rock back and forth. Then she grabbed a wooden-handled poker off a peg and stabbed a chunk of meat. She moved a raggedy steaming chunk with torn edges from the pot to her mouth. After a few resting breaths, she returned to the pentacle as if I were not there. She bent down and picked up a silver colored urn covered with sweat and dark brown drip stains around the lip. She raised it to her mouth and took a long drink from it.

"You must never turn away, " she said. "You must abjure." She chanted an incantation and uncorked a paper tube. She added a pinch of powder to the fire. The tongues of flame flared. I felt sick from the bubbling pot and the smell of flesh. She kept on uttering words I didn't understand in a language whose syllables I didn't recognize. I noticed she seemed to be floating above the floor, light and carried away, as in an orgasm. She threw a final pinch of green mineral into the fire and it exploded in a brilliant white light. I noticed a line of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. Her chest heaved rapidly. After she was done, she turned and looked at me.

"Soon, you will speak his words." She wheeled her eyes back to the fire. It seemed she listened to the flames. This went on for hours until at last Sadura fell away from the fire, exhausted.

"My time is near, " she said. "You are mine, malchik."

A river of chill slid down my neck. I stepped back.

"Now, this is what you are, " she said, and advanced the step I had retreated.

"I just want to get out of here, " I said. "I want to go home." I felt the weight of her hand land on my head.

"Tonight, you too will itch."

"No-I can't."

"You must, " she said, and took away her hand. "You will." I landed on the stone floor. Above me I saw the shiny blade. The firelight danced on the steel. I stared into the knife and as it fell into motion, I fell back, back from my body, as if I were a billion miles from my eyes, back into an emptiness of mist, silence and cold.

Belamor Kanal

ANDREI NEEDED A SMOKE. He took his brown leather coat off the peg and addressed the young devushka Larisa who was his office assistant.

"I'm going to the library, " Andrei said. "I need a book on the creep rate for the Ninnis Glacier in Antarctica."

"Wait, " Larisa said, grabbing her coat and purse. "I want a smoke too."

Andrei Brezhukov thought of his wife Ekaterina and the chance that one of her friends might see him standing out in the snow next to this young dev with the pretty blond hair spilling over her collar. Larisa, the office assistant with the urgent need to kooreet, popped a stick of gum in her mouth and chewed it a few times as she waited. Then wrinkles formed at the sides of Andrei's eyes and he smiled.

"Dah-vye." He led her down the echoing, wood-floored hall of the Russian State Hydro-meteorological Institute, where he was a Pro-Rector of Experimental Meteorology. That he was still a Pro-Rector, not a full Rector-after 16 years at the Institute, after dozens of trips to weather conferences around the world, after publishing scores of papers in peer-reviewed meterology journals-angered him. It enraged him every day. In Japan, Andrei was famous for his research papers. Home in St. Petersburg, at the State Hydrometeorological Institute, he was snubbed. He had no Scientific secretary and had to answer his own phone. He had a student office assistant, Larisa, who did nothing. He even had to dump his own trash. The Institute was poor and no research was being done. There wasn't money enough to pay for electricity to run the radar on the roof. The labs were cold, empty and unused.

Andrei held the glass door open for her and they stepped out in the cold. Larisa, a 23-year-old sophomore in Meteorology, took out her pack of cigarettes, which were Marlboros. Andrei stared at the red pack of American tobacco and then at his own cigarettes, Russian Belamor Kanals. Four packs of Belamor Kanal cigarettes cost the same as one pack of Marlboros. Seeing her professor light up a Belamor Kanal, Larisa snickered until she met eyes with Andrei. His face was tense and held no trace of amusement, and Larisa hid her smile. That irritated Andrei. He glared at her with an expression that seemed to ask if she was padding her income as a prostitute in Nevski Melody or Candy Man. She took a long pull on her Marlboro and blew out a gray blast of smoke into the cold St. Petersburg air.

"I suppose you have some plans for tonight, " Andrei said, trying to change the mood. "Party or something?"

"N'yet, " Larisa said, smiling. "Just going dancing with my girlfriends." Andrei's only reply was his smile. Larisa pinched her brow in reaction to his smile and took a last drag on her Marlboro before she rubbed it out on the brick wall and flicked it into the snow.

"S'Novum Godum, " Larisa said.

"Happy New Year, " Andrei replied and she went inside.

Later in the evening, Andrei stepped off the Metro at Primorskaya. Holding his leather briefcase, he rode the long escalator up to the street and began the cold walk home. He thought about Larisa's Marlboros as he emerged from the Metro. It was dark out and the snow crunched under his feet and cold rubbed his cheeks as he walked and lit up another Belamor Kanal. To a man like Andrei who loved his tobacco, applying the name cigarette to a Belamor Kanal was an abomination, an affront to the art, as a Belamor Kanal cigarette' was nothing more than a rolled tube of cardboard ten centimeters long with another tube of cigarette paper attached to the end of that and finally a lump of coarse tobacco from the South held in the paper. It was harsh and the smoker had to pinch the cardboard tube to mute the strong, bitter taste of the burning tobacco. Andrei took two drags and then tossed it aside to singe and sputter in the snow.

A young boy saw the trail of smoke and scooped up the butt. Andrei walked home to his Katya and his two sons, Mikhail and Yuri. Walking in the dark on the dirty white snow he threaded his way between citizens standing on the sidelines of the foot traffic exiting the Primorskaya Metro. Citizens stood in their winter coats, shopkas and scarves holding things like a pair of used men's shoes for sale, a scarf, a balilyka, a small table with two potatoes and three dirty onions, a pair of slacks with different-colored patches on the knees.

Andrei parted with no rubles as he wove his way home. He felt relieved when he reached the outskirts of the trade clusters. He had parted with the remainder of his spending money when he flicked away his Belamor after only two of its five puffs. After five puffs, the smoker was getting more cardboard than tobacco. Andrei walked through the gap between his building and the next. The courtyard gleamed under the light that streamed down from fifteen stories of apartments and their screened-in balconies. He passed two Russian women-one young and the other old-walking arm in arm. They wore puffball shopkas on their heads. Andrei stopped and watched them walking and he felt drawn to the older one with paper-thin skin under her eyes. She reminded Andrei of his mother Alexandra. For the first time, this year, they would not be wishing Babi Sasha a Happy New Year's greeting.

For the new year, Andrei had nothing else to rely on except a hidden bottle of whiskey. It wasn't Jack Daniels but it was American whiskey. The bottle was 28% full. It lay quietly hidden on the top of a tall bookshelf, near the wall. If Katya felt around on top of the bookshelf, she would not detect the bottle. This belief sustained Andrei in the 18 months since he had attended a Hydrology conference in Finland where a Japanese collegue, trying to curry favor, had given Andrei a bottle of Jim Beam knowing neither that Andrei was powerless, nor that Andrei's favorite whiskey was Jack Daniels. Because the entire episode reflected badly on him, Andrei had not told Katya the story of how he got the whiskey. That silence allowed him to sneak the bottle into the house in his suitcase. He kept the whiskey secret. Katya did not like it when Andrei drank. Early in their marriage, they fought about it all the time. So, Andrei knew she would go for the bottle and pour the whiskey down the drain by the capful. The fear of his whiskey going down the drain led him to hide the bottle and monitor its contents. He kept the whiskey secret and it gave him a dry island of victory away from the humiliation of teaching students who didn't want to work, and Katya's complaints about his spending, time-wasting and aimless fathering.

Andrei expected Katya to have a steaming bowl of borsht, black bread and a pasta salad ready for him on the table. Maybe a stakan full of apple juice for passing the actual New Year. Andrei entered his building and went past the elevator: two years since it worked. He started to jog to the second floor. He ran up the steps until the third floor, when he hunched over with his arms braced on his knees. For a moment Andrei felt out of breath and then the feeling passed. He used his sleeve to mop off his forehead and cheeks. At the seventh floor-his floor-he exhaled and coughed and strode up to his own apartment.

Andrei inserted his steel key in the outer steel door and pulled the teeth toward him, engaging the pair of gears to pull the locks out. He slipped his brass key in the inner door and was inside.

"Happy New Year, Folks!"

"Privyet, Andrushka, " said Katya, her blondish-red hair up in a bun as she poked her head out of the kitchen. "Happy New Year to you." In the living room to his left, Yuri was playing a game on the television.

"Good evening, Papichka, " Yuri said without looking away from a crude video game he played on the television. "S'novum godum."

"Happy New-" Andrei said, with a dramatic rumble in his throat, as the smell of baking bread, yams and cabbage filled his nostrils. "-Year!" During the dramatic flourish that accompanied the latter word, he allowed his eye to look over at the tall dresser for an instant, looking for the telltale hump in the shadow cast on the wall, the hump that only Andrei knew to look for, that one and only hump from the bottle of whiskey hidden there that contained 28% of its contents-the last time he had the opportunity to look, which had been three months earlier when Katya had to take both the boys to a school meeting with the teachers. Andrei quickly stopped staring and kept his eyes moving on, to feign innocence and protect his stash.

Yuri returned to his game and continued to play. Andrei walked past his son and mussed with the hair on top of his head. Andrei circled around to the kitchen. He came in the kitchen and stood behind Katya without reaching his hands to touch her and pull himself pressing behind her warmly like he usually did. Katya stirred her borsht, standing at the stove, and took a sip. After a moment, it dawned on her that Andrei had not touched her.

"Drooshka, what's with you?" She stroked his cheek with her left hand.

"It's nothing, " he said.

"No, Droo, please, " she said and placed the palm of her hand against the lapel of his suit coat right over his heart. Andrei felt like his life was wasted and his options gone and he wanted to cry but could not force himself to do so. So instead he took Katya in his arms and kissed her with all the passion he could not give to anyone else. He bent her back and kissed her on the mouth with his head slowly turning on the kiss. It lasted five seconds and after he released her and looked away, he saw her smile and straighten a stray strand of hair that had broken loose under the ravishment by her husband. She smiled outright at him and looked at him with the mischievious smile that alerted him she would be receptive to his caresses in bed that night.

Andrei felt emboldened. He loosened his necktie and reached out to put his hand around her waist. Katya slapped away his hand.

"Tee-kuh, Quiet, " she said and listened to the sound of footsteps coming from the loft built above them. There was the sound of bumping and chairs scraping the floor followed by shouts and a high-pitched scream of "Svolich! Pig!" and the loud shatter of glass followed by the clatter as the shards landed on the wood floor above them. A baby started to wail out from behind the shouting and by the time Katya and Andrei lowered their eyes from the ceiling, he felt that she was again cool to him. Andrei stood by the sink with one of his arms braced against it, holding himself up. He hung his shoulders and dropped his gaze to the floor. Katya stood in front of him a moment, waiting for him to speak.

"I have a surprise, " she said, coyly. Andrei lurched toward her.

"Pregnant?"

"N'yet."

Andrei held her arm and waited while she dallied.

"Well??" he said.

She opened the door to the fridge and produced a bottle of Baltica-4, his favorite beer.

At the same time, Andrei felt pleased that she had thought about getting him a present when money was so tight but then he thought what she got him was so cheap. But he said nothing of the kind and accepted the gift graciously and felt guilty for not having gotten her anything. He opened the bottle and took a sip of the bitter beer.

"Happy New Year, " he said, and then they heard the sound of feet tromping down the stairs. It was their older son, Mikhail.

"Pop, " Mikhail said. "We got email from an Amerikanets."

"Yes, and so what?" Andrei replied, using the Russian idiom that connotated the triviality of the news.

"Said he's flying here, " Mikhail added. That was all the impetus Andrei needed to bound up the stairs to the loft. In the upstairs room sat Andrei's computer, which was old and slow. Andrei sat at the monitor and read the letter in English from the American. He was named Jack Aakey. He was looking for someone to meet him at the airport. Andrei hit reply and wrote "Mr. Aakey. I would be most glad to come meet you at Pulkovo II airport. Reply with the time and date of your flight. Regards, Andrei Bruzhukov." Then he pressed send.

Andrei sat back in his chair and sighed to his son.

"Thank god. It means money, " he said and shut off the computer. He took a drink from his beer, which was nearly gone, and they went downstairs. Katya brought out a tray of soup to Andrei's chair. On the television, four men sat in a Moscow sauna talking about their yearly gathering. One of the men was getting drunk. He explained that he had a ticket for St. Petersburg, later that night.

Andrei loitered around Pulkovo II airport-St. Petersburg's only International one-and waited for the American Aakey. Andrei hadn't the slightest idea what this American looked like. Normally in this situation, Andrei would hold up a placard that read: "Jack Aakey." But when the Amerikanets described himself as nearly two meters tall, Andrei realised he would be able to pick out a tall, beefy American with that peculiar American look in his eyes-a look alien to Russians. That optimistic smile worn unconsciously by all Americans was marker enough for Andrei. Only a fool would need a big sign.

The passengers from the Amsterdam flight began to deplane. Andrei stared at the people filing out of customs. A pudgy-faced woman came out carrying several packages. Then, out lumbered a giant of a man, a happy, slightly hunched-over man with sandy brown hair and a smile, something inexplicable to Russians. Most Russians believed the smile meant stupidity. Andrei, who had been to Kanas for a weather conference, understood the smile was optimism, not cheerfulness.

Andrei stepped out of the crowd and gave his hand to the American.

"Jack?" Andrei asked, but already he knew who stood before him. "Your plane was right on time, " Andrei said, himself smiling. "That's very unusual."

"I had a nice flight out, but I'm tired, " Jack said.

"Let me get your suitcase." Before Jack said another word, Andrei-ten centimeters shorter than Jack and fifteen years his senior-grabbed Jack's 40kg suitcase and led him out of the airport, past the Mafia cabdrivers who would have charged him 250, 000 rubles (or $50) for a ride that should have cost 7, 500 rubles. They got in Andrei's Lada. Jack shook off his feet before he got in the car. Andrei drove fast, weaving in and out of traffic so that Jack couldn't take his eyes off the road. In the physical presence of this big American, Andrei felt small. He drove faster than usual and swerved relentlessly, as if to inform this world-traveling American that he always drove as fast as possible, using 110% of the road. Andrei drove not straight but left and right, dodging the potholes. The American gripped the door handle and stared intently ahead. Then Andrei turned left off Shturmanskaya Street and reached the Pulkovskoi Highway, where he he lay on the speed.

"So, for what reason have you come to St. Petersburg, " Andrei said, shifting through the gears, being careful not to call the city Leningrad.

"I'm going to work for a newspaper, " Jack Aakey said. Andrei drove at the same speed and remained silent as he stared ahead and thought what it meant when an American could come to St. Petersburg and earn an American salary working at, of all places, a newspaper.

"Also, I was planning to look for a girlfriend, " Jack said.

Andrei steered the car without speaking.

"It is none of my concern, " Andrei said, carefully. "But, I think you will find no shortage of girlfriends. The hard part will be picking the right one." Andrei decided this American was not on a sex vacation. Still, whichever girl he ended up picking would soon be smoking Marlboro'. A Russian girlfriend always meant money. Andrei remembered when he dated Katya, he spent all the money he did not have buying her Italian leather shoes, honey colored, and then several pairs of sheer chul-kee, which lasted all of a week, like all pantyhose.

"I'm hoping to find a girl who likes me, " Jack Aakey said and his stark expression convinced Andrei he was serious. Andrei laughed to himself because he knew hundreds of Russian girls would swarm to the scent of his citizenship.

"Trust me, the hard part is choosing, " Andrei said, trying not to lie.

"I know you're right, Andrei, " Jack said. "I just don't believe it yet."

Andrei liked this American. He would help him. For that reason, Andrei drove on in silence since he had already decided to help the American. Andrei followed a roundabout and they were on Moscovskaya Prospekt.

"Shops for rich people, " Andrei said. "My wife would kill to shop in these stores." Andrei took out a cigarette and rolled down his window. "But a Pro-Rector's salary doesn't pay for a lot of clothing." He lit the Belamor Kanal cigarette and saw how the American's eyes were locked on the strange cigarette, as one would follow a suddenly noticed amputed finger. Since Andrei knew what a typical American cigarette, a Marlboro, looked like, he understood the fascination. Andrei didn't want to offer the American one of his cheap cigarettes but then again he didn't want to seem rude.

"Smoke?" Andrei said.

"No, don't smoke, " Jack said.

"All for the better. This shit, " Andrei said. "To make any money in my job you gotta have a mountain named after you." Andrei drove along Moskovskaya Prospekt until the traffic slowed and he turned on to Sadovaya Street. Off to the left was the outdoor bazaar, with hundreds of kiosks arranged in pedestrian streets. The American stared at it all intently, like he had never before seen anything like the bazaar. Andrei was amused and he found himself looking at it from a foreigner's perspective. They were stopped in traffic and a group of dark-skinned children threaded their way next to Andrei's car. They were all dirtyfaced despite their colorful clothes.

"Tseeganets, Gypsies, " Andrei said. The children all had black hair and colorful, flowing clothing. As they passed, Jack Aakey looked at the feet of these children who were all barefoot. Along every wall stood corrugated metal kiosks. A Georgian man crouched next to a bed of coals. Twisting on a metal pike above the coals was brown meat, dripping and sputtering on the coals. As Andrei and the American both watched through the car window, the Georgian took out a long scimitar-shaped knife and carved off strips from the rolling side of the meat. Staring at the meat, his lips outstretched in anticipation of eating one, the American was transfixed.

"That's a shaverma', " Andrei said. "It's lamb, and very bad for you." We drove forward ten meters. "I love them dearly but I have to sneak them. My wife-" Andrei tapped his nostril with his free hand. "-could smell it if a puh-teech-ka farted."

Jack Aakey smiled and then laughed, as if he understood the word meant bird'. At last Andrei broke free of the traffic jam around Sadovaya, and they drove on the Dvortsov Most (The Palace Bridge). As they passed over the long bridge, Andrei saw the yellow lights of the opposite bank reflected along the rippling waters of the Neva river. Across the bridge, Andrei turned left sharply without warning and Jack allowed himself to press against the passenger door, which was not wise as Andrei could picture the door popping open. Andrei reached over to apply some negative G-forces to keep Jack in the car through the turn. They drove out along the right bank of the Neva river as it broadened into the Gulf of Finland and the Atlantic Ocean. Andrei turned right and they drove down a long street in the middle of an urban area, with the usual concrete and metal buildings shielded with encircling fences of triple-barbed wire. Then down the street farther Andrei noticed another open-air market and another Metro station, for Vasiliostrovskaya. They reached the parking spot and Andrei refused to let the American carry his own suitcase. They approached the building where Andrei lived. It was concrete, 15 storeys tall and four of these apartment buildings were arranged in a square, with a large open space that was concreted over and under the snow. As Andrei huffed along with the American's heavy suitcase, the older people they encountered noticed the absurdity of Andrei carrying this tall young man's suitcase. The older people lowered their long eyebrow fans in scorn at the American without knowing his nationality, only noting that he carried a light backpack while a man 13 years his senior struggled with the heavy suitcase. Carrying the heavy bag, Andrei glanced at the broken elevator.

"Kuz-yole. Son of a bitch, " Andrei said and pounded on the metal plate that held the elevator buttons. "Broken." Andrei took Jack's heavy suitcase to the stairs. They walked up to the seventh floor. Andrei was dripping with sweat as they reached seven. In the hallway, he stopped to take a breath and then they pushed on and he unlocked the door to 736, his apartment.

"Priv-yet Katinka, " he said to his wife, who was pretty not plump and seemed pleasant. Andrei switched to perfect Russian with her and explained who Jack was.

"Very pleased to make your acquaintence, " Katya said smiling and bowed slightly as she shook the American's hand. Andrei saw she was titilated by the sight of this giant American. Andrei felt jealous.

"I'm Mischa, " said Andrei's son.

"Mikhail is a student in Physics at Leningrad State University, " Andrei said. "He is very bright and is attending school on scholarship." From the detailed way he had stretched out the description of his son's accomplishment, Andrei realised he was saying that he had done nothing in his own life.

They four sat down at the kitchen table and the American took off his coat. Andrei smiled at the sheer size of his shoulders.

"You're a pretty big man, " Andrei said. "How tall are you?"

"190cm."

"Do you exercise? You look pretty, wide in the chest, " Andrei said.

"Not really, " the American said, and Katya and Mischa asked for a translation, since they didn't really understand English. "When you're all musclebound, people look at you funny, " the American said. "They decide what you're like based on your appearance. I hate that."

Andrei lost his smile for a moment and tried to backtrack. "He said he's looking for a girlfriend, " Andrei yelled back in Russian to Katya. Drying her hands on her apron, she appeared smiling.

"Well then, " she said and gave the American a smiling look over, which implied We'll see how he does'.

Andrei saw the American was embarrassed and so he leaned forward and tried to make up for it.

"You should not worry, " he said. "In this country, our men don't want to work." Andrei looked uneasily at Katya, who frowned. Mischa put his hands in his front pockets, as if he had heard this opinion before. "Usually, in this country, it is women who carry the burden, " Andrei explained in English, and after the words had escaped his mouth, he lowered his eyes and some of the sparkle went out of them as he no doubt pictured some personal example of a couple where the man, unlike himself, had given up. "You have to understand, " he said in a whispering voice. "Even I have a few friends who-" he broke off and saw Katya listening with her arms folded, because he wasn't translating. Andrei had a brief wordless stretch of conversation with her, where his only communication consisted of raising and widening his eyebrows and mouthing words in Russian to her. Finally, she threw her arms down and clicked her heels walking into the kitchen. Andrei bent in close and finished his story privately to Jack Aakey. Half way across the room, Mischa leaned in to hear.

"I have friends-or former friends, I should say-who crack the bottle at nine in the morning, and drink vodka until noon, when you see them at the bus stop, falling-down drunk. It's a huge scandal for the region. The men's children and family can go to hell. It's the mothers in our society who take care of things."

Andrei looked around for Katya, then added "What you've got to do is find yourself a woman who is different, who will not run your life. Not like m-" and he broke off as Katya returned briefly. "The soup is ready, " she said.

Andrei followed his sons to the kitchen.

Sitting down, Andrei brought out his shy younger son Yuri, who didn't say anything except with his eyebrows and facial expressions. Katya brought out the borsht, deeply red and hot with the scent of beets rising with the steam. Andrei ate with a square of bread in his left hand and a soup spoon in his right. He watched the American for a moment and saw that the soup was to his liking, from the distracted look on his face. The soup reminded Andrei of eating Katya's borsht for the first time when they were in high school. She had invited him to meet her parents. When he got there, Katya's parents were not home. Alone together in her parent's kitchen, Katya sat him down at the table, put a cloth knapkin over his tie and shirt collar, and spoonfed him borsht she herself had made. Andrei looked over at his Katya now, just as beautiful as before.

"Yooshka, " Andrei said with his verbal inflection modulated to the sing-songy rhythmn of a young boy. "He's looking for a girl." The little boy Yuri smiled and remained silent a moment with his little slice of dark rye bread held in two hands, with bitemarks on the crust between his fingers.

"Me too!" Yuri said and everybody laughed at his little joke.

"Well, Jack, " Andrei said, in answer to a nudge from Katya, since we don't actually have any extra room here, we have a couple of friends, Irina and Valeri, who live two floors down. They have a room for you."

Jack's smile dropped. Andrei noticed how crestfallen he was.

"Don't worry, " Andrei said. "You'll still see a lot of me."

Jack regained a bit of his smile but he glanced at Katya, as if sensing that she did not approve of him. Andrei felt irritated that Katya was making him send Jack away.

"Katya, " Andrei said, suddenly, "What is wrong with us?"

She blinked her eyes at him and pinched her brow, uncomprehending.

"We have failed to offer our guest a drink, " Andrei said. Katya looked uncomfortable and confused.

"There's nothing to offer, " she said.

"Look in the kitchen." Katya shook her head in confusion but still got up and left the room.

"Where?" she shouted from the kitchen, after she slammed shut a few cupboards.

"In the cupboard, on top, " he said. While Andrei heard her rummaging around in the top cupboards, he himself got up quietly and moved a chair next to the bookshelf. He stood in his tapoch-kee on the chair. He reached on top of the bookshelf and retrieved the one-third-full bottle of Jim Beam whiskey, which he set quietly on the card table before he sat back down.

"Kat, " Andrei said, suddenly, while Mischa smiled. "I found it need some short glasses Three."

"Chee-voh? What the?" Katya said in a high voice of of disbelief. She came back with a scraping halt. She stared at the whiskey bottle. It was coated with dust on one side. Katya stood for several seconds, her lips spread apart in the shape of a hole. Then she turned wordlessly and went into the kitchen. Andrei pretended to smile, as if the American couldn't see his wife was angry. Katya returned with two short drinking glasses. She set the two glasses on the table hard. From the hidden anger implicit in the gesture, Andrei understood he was in serious trouble. As if pulled by a steel dragline, Andrei felt drawn to the kitchen. He gave Jack a look of remorse and rose from his chair. Andrei walked casually into the kitchen. When he got there, Katya launched into a silent tirade. She sliced the air with her hands and yelled her silent rage at him with only the crisp edges of "s" sounds making themselves heard with any fraction of the vehemence evident in her face.

"Steed-nah!" she hissed at him. "You shame me!"

"I did nothing, " Andrei said.

"Where did that bottle come from?" Katya whispered in anger.

"From a Japanese man, in Finland."

"Why didn't you tell me, " Katya asked, and the original crime was eclipsed by the reaction to the cover up. Katya stared at Andrei like he was foreign.

"Kat, " he said, having no defenses remaining beyond begging for mercy. "I've had it for a year, " Andrei said, thinking he could argue how this showed his self control-making that alcohol last an entire year-when Katya broke out of her whisper of decorum.

"You've been lying to me for an entire year?" She said, loud enough for the American to hear.

"You're taking it all wrong. For a year I've been resisting, " Andrei said, loud enough for the American to hear his side of the argument. He took out his crumpled pack of Belamor Kanals. "Just like I've had to suffer with these gavney shit cigarettes."

"Andrei, don't swear around Mischa, " she said. She had made her point and wanted to change the subject. "Also, you shouldn't smoke, it's bad for you to smoke."

After she migrated to the lecture about smoking, Andrei left the kitchen and sat on the couch. The American said nothing but he smiled big enough to show his teeth.

"I can't wait to get married, " Jack Aakey said, in Russian. After the American said it, Andrei could not hide his surprise. Katya left the kitchen drying her hands on a cloth. She bent over to look in the eyes of the American, to check if he was mocking her.

"So I big funny joke?" Katya barked at the American, whose smile vanished.

"Kat, don't, " Andrei said, standing up to take her away. The American stared at her with all traces of humor gone. "I honestly can't wait to get married, " said the American, with sincerity. "You two have a wonderful life together." Andrei and Katya stood bolt upright, staring back at the American with complete shock. "I pray I can be so lucky." In confusion, Andrei steered his gaze up to look at Katya. Like him, Katya was shocked. In his mind and through his eyes, Andrei reached an understanding with Katya, a sharing of a common belief. As Andrei thought of the words himself, he saw in the eyes of Katya that she thought the same thing: "Okay, baby."

Katya poured the men a pair of shots and she gave herself a splash in her tea cup.

PETTI CRIED as she walked forward on Hickory Drive in New Orleans. As she walked down Hickory, she shivered from the cold of the black water up to her waist that she walked through. Petti could not stop crying, for on either side of the road she walked through was a pack of ravenous dogs, left behind in New Orleans, roaming hungry, rabid and furiously angry, foam dripping from their wild-eyed heads. The dogs growled at Petti as she walked in the water, and she knew the dogs wanted to tear the meat from her arms and legs and eat her on the spot but the dogs hated the foul stinking black water more than they wanted to eat her. As she took step after step through the water, waves splashed up on her and when the water dripped down her wet skin stung like she had been burned. Then she looked forward and saw she was about to walk into a patch of bodies floating, swollen, with black tar-like skin, white and frothy at the edges of their ballooned feature-less faces. Petti began all over again to cry and she wanted to bend over and rest her hands on her legs but to do so she would have put her face closer to the black water and nearer the swollen bodies. Petti turned her head and faced the mangy-furred dogs, which answered with snarls. They all stared at her with their eyes glassy and their dirty fur standing in patches as they stood fidgeting back and forth, staring at her with anger and ravenous hunger. Petti wanted to walk past the body floating in front of her, swollen and black in the oily black water that made her skin itch and made her feel dizzy like she was doing rush. Petti could not move forward because the bodies were floating in her way and to go around the bodies would deliver her to the snarling dogs with their mangy fur, oily and black as their mouths from drinking the rotten black water, which was poisoning the dogs but not quickly enough for Petti and she again cried. From under the hand she held up to her eyes, Petti saw the mummy-like body floating up to her legs. She shrieked and kicked the body away. The kick sent Petti falling backwards in the water and the body twisted to the left, bringing it drifting into the shallows of the street, where the dogs set on the corpse and fought each other for the rotten tar-like meat of the dead body. As Petti watched in horror, one of the dogs-a black and white spotted mutt about 60lbs-pulled off the corpse's left arm, snapping tendons and jerking out muscles from the shoulder as the last piece of skin stretched and snapped, leaving the grey meat exposed to the air. The mutt dragged it off around a corner with the arm drizzling fluid and flakes of skin that were eagerly snatched up by the few dogs who made chase for a little forearm meat or maybe a finger. The rest of the pack of dogs stayed with the body of the dead man, who they had dragged fully on the sidewalk and two were nipping and snarling to lap the juice seeping steadily from the socket of the severed arm. Petti screamed as the dogs on the far bank of the water ran back to a shallow water to jump across. Still other dogs backed up and leaped off the sidewalk, all landing short in the black water, with a splash from which two did not rise while a third one splashed closer and the splash water landed in Petti's eyes where it stung like acid. She ran forward but she couldn't keep her balance from the pain and she tumbled forward into the water face first. When she arose, soaked in the horrid black water, she opened her burning eyes to the sight of a shiny pair of white fangs, belonging to a grey mutt, with a deep growl and eyes dilated with a look of madness, not two feet from her face. The dog lunged at her and she threw herself backwards and fell down, leaving waves of black water that rose up the sidewalk like a tide, forcing the growling dogs to take steps backwards from the wet. The grey mongrel who had wanted to get a taste of her skin was dog-paddling back for the sidewalk. Suddenly, Petti felt a bite on the hair on the top of her head, and she lifted up the scrambling legs of a dog that held on to the skin and hair on the top of her head. With a shriek, Petti shook her head, feeling the dog's teeth driven deeper into her scalp. She shook the dog free and it landed in the water with a yelp and a splash. Petti held her hand to the top of her head, which stung when she touched it. Her hand came away wet with bright red blood.

At that second, she called out the name of Darnell, who was a corporal in the infantry, stationed in Baghdad, fighting the Iraqi war at that very moment, and she knew that Darny could not save her. Holding her hand on the crown of her head, Petti got angry and she started to run as best she could through watery Hickory Drive. She made a huge series of waves in the black water, and the sounds of the dogs mauling the dead body faded away and she could only hear her own voice, gurgling as she thrust one thigh after another through the murk. She abruptly stopped running and the waves in the water spread on forward as she stayed in one place wet and with her skin tingling all over.

As Petti stood there, holding the top of her head, she found her attention drawn away to the distant sound of a helicopter, a thwap-thwap-thwap, moving almost in slow motion over by the 9th Ward, and the helicopter approached closer to her, with the shock of its blades pushing the air and making the vibration resonate in Petti's lungs. She realized at that moment that the helicopter was her rescue and she began screaming "Help! Darnell!" as she stood shivering in the waist-high black water. The noise of her screaming invited a while new pack of dogs to join the first in menacing her with their snarling lips coated with dried foam from rabies and a deep resentment for the water. Petti continued to yell and the helicopter saw her and tried to circle around. The noise was deafening and it scared off the dogs so Petti could actually step out of the water. A man in a military outfit leaned out of the helicopter, which was white and had orange stripes from the Coast Guard. The guardsman was about to lean out on a wire when, amid the thumping of the helicopter and the water whitecapping around her, spraying the black water away, Petti heard the crack of a pistol. The guardsman leaped back in the helicopter and the chopper pulled away. The water settled down and Petti sobbed openly, standing on the dry sidewalk. From a window half a block away, Petti saw old man DuBois, his grey hair zig-zagging like dark wire out at odd angles from his head, standing in his wife-beater t-shirt.

"Loud mothfuckers, " yelled DuBois before he disappeared in the building.

Petti stood and wailed without walking a step. Then she looked up and saw, running towards her, the original pack of dogs. She saw from their swinging heavy bellies, that they must have stripped all the flesh from the corpse and now they had come back for her fresh flesh. The dogs set on her as she fell to the ground. Teeth ripped into her forearm and her arms felt on fire. In horror, she felt teeth latch on to her legs and arms and back, each whipping side to side and then an all black dog grabbed her lower lip and ripped off her face.

Ezra DuBois held his hot revolver in his palm like it was his date for the prom. Ezra ran his wrinkled right hand through his wiry gray hair that stuck out like a fan brush. Ezra's thick lips were encrusted with dried saliva from his mouth, which had not had any water since he drank the last of the salty water from the toilet. He still had cigarettes as he had just purchased a carton the day before the hurricane. Though he was on the second-to-last pack, he felt like it was a requirement that he smoke each when and how he wanted, which ended up meaning one after another. The lack of water had begun its effect on him and after he had smoked his last cigarette around 7:17 that same evening, while he listened to the sound of the helicopters going overhead without the recourse of his pistol, whose bullets he expended the last of about 5:39pm, when he shot at a pack of dogs who were tearing apart the corpse of some black woman who appeared to have been alive and fresh at the time the dogs took her down. "Mothfucker, " Ezra said and, contrary to his usual method, he resisted the urge to light up another cigarette, since he had by this point only 6 left. Ezra lived on the second floor of his apartment building and his apartment had never faced a single drop of water but not far down on his building was the black water, and he could only go a short way down the stairs before he was presented with salt water lapping on the tenth step below his floor. Ezra, instead, decided to break into the other apartments. The first door he tried to bust in injured his shoulder. Then he lay on the floor and attempted to press his head and arms on one wall while his feet stretched just enough to touch the opposite door. Then, Ezra got the heavy ceramic lid off the toilet. He held the lid and tried to use it as a battering ram. It shattered on his first full-speed hit. After wandering around the apartment looking for some bludgeon, Ezra took apart his metal bed. The foot was a metal half-loop with a strong metal rectangle between the two vertical ends, which were on casters. After leaving the rest of his bed, mattress with his sheet hanging on the floor, he had a battering ram on casters. He ran at a diagonal down the dry hallway at high speed and at the end of his run he veered off to the left and slammed the heavy bed frame and into the doorknob. The blow made the doorframe shudder but the door did not open. However, Ezra perfected his technique and shortly he was busting open a door in two impacts. The first one he opened was the apartment of Wes and Bess Canary and it looked just like Bess had left it, clean, the teacups drying upside down on a blue dishcloth. Ezra's anger was raised by the sight. He had courted Bess when they were young but she went for Wes, because he was taller and better looking. Ezra looked around the apartment, which was unaffected by the flood and so Ezra unzipped his fly and cast his urine in a wide arc around the carpeting, squirting his stream all over the furniture and he saved the last of it for a picture on a shelf of Bess smiling with Wes behind her. Ezra then went to the bathroom and took the lid off the tank to the toilet. Water looked up at him and he dipped his cupped palm into the reflective surface and carried the cold water to his lips and he drank of its smooth cold fullness. He spooned palmful after palmful into his mouth and he was happy. Satisfied, he looked out the window of their apartment at the black water that engulfed the neighborhood. He could not swim and so he did not even consider trying to leave the house.

CALVIN JERENSEN III sat at his desk on the 99th floor of the North World Train Center tower with his Italian shoes up on his mahogany desk, talking over his headset to Jay Fendi, in the office next door. Cal had been crowing about the reaction of a British currency trader when Cal bested him in a trade. Cal knit his fingers behind his head as Jay laughed and then Cal shifted his focus to look out the window where he heard a whining engine noise. He looked out and saw an airplane flying toward the building, a dozen floors below him.

"Jay-look!" Cal said in a near whisper. "The hell is that." And before Jay had time to reply the jet flew right into East side of the North tower of the World Trade Center. The building shuddered, a loud bank sounded and orange flames rose outside his window.

"Ah, shit!" Jay shouted at the same moment Cal heard the sound of Jay's window shattering. Through the wall, Cal heard the tinkling of thousands of pieces of glass against the wall. The entire building leaned toward the Hudson River farther than he had ever felt before and Cal was sure the building was falling over but it stopped bending and slowly came back to the center. The smoke and fireball raged outside his window but it was unbroken. Cal picked himself off the floor, threw off the headset and set his chair back on its wheels. He ran for the door of his office and found the door jam had shifted into a slight parallelogram and it wouldn't open.

"Help!" Jay screamed through the wall.

"I'm coming to help you, buddy, " Cal said. He pulled and pulled on the door until it popped open. Then, Cal entered the main area of the floor and he saw smoke billowing out of the stairwell. Seeing the smoke billow out of the North stairwell, several well-dressed men and women in heels and with their earrings swinging ran for the South stairwell but they ran into another group of traders running away from the South stairwell, because it too was billowing smoke. At that moment, Cal saw in his mind's eye the crying face of his beautiful wife Cheryl, with her blond hair dancing in the wind. He knew he would not see Cheryl again. Cal heard Jay screaming again and he found the door to his office stuck also. Cal took a few steps back and rammed his shoulder into the door. It popped open and instantly smoke and heat filled the main office through the office, whose window had shattered, and the drapes hanging from the window were on fire. Cal saw Jay lying on the floor covered in blood. Cal ducked under the flames and saw Jay was covered with shards of glass, most sticking into him like quills. From a gash in Jay's neck, red blood flowed out steadily, rising in waves of red as it pumped out in a spreading puddle beneath Jay's head. As Cal prepared to pick up Jay, he saw the light go out of Jay's eyes as his face drained into a still, gray pallor that told him he need not bother. He ran out of the office and saw those still alive ran around in panic as the heat built and the smoke worked its way down from the ceiling.

"I'm getting out of here!" screamed Sarinda Theasneddy, who was from India. Cal watched as she ran out of the center of the floor into Jay's office. Moving on his hands and knees, Cal saw Sarinda's feet as she flew out the window and disappeared in the flames. Cal knew that Sarinda was at that moment tumbling as she fell down the building, gathering speed for the impact that would scatter her entrails all over the plaza. Cal could not get himself to believe that he was going to die, that every escape but Sarinda's was blocked. He found himself panting and trying to think of a way out. The screams on the floor died down to a steady wail, punctuated by a sudden scream as another one went out the window. Cal then thought of the bed sheet that Jay had in his office. He crawled in and overturned Jay's file cabinet, which had the sheet in its bottom drawer. Working quickly, Cal knotted the four corners of the sheet. Then, using his teeth, he made short slits on the inside of the sheets. Into these slits he slipped his left foot, then right. Then, he routed the remainder of the sheet behind himself like a cape. He slipped his hands through the other two slits and then walked in a deep crouch to the window. The flames had died down and Cal looked at the debris on the ground below. The heat was intense and he thought of Cheryl as he leaped out the window, outstretching his arms and legs with the sheet above him, billowing. He felt himself float down and turn to the left. Floating down under his sheet parachute, Cal wheeled to the left in the updraft and sunk toward the Hudson River.

THE GIRL DASHED on the Metro train at the Mayakovskaya station going North. As she landed inside, the overhead Russian voice on the intercom said: "Ah-sta-rose-knee-yah! Be careful, the door is closing!" and the doors to the car shut. She had dark hair split into two ponytails with gauzy white flowers and a yellow center holding her hair back. I felt twinges of a strange unconscious attraction to her and felt like my body was sensing a resonance with this stranger who hopped on at Mayakovskaya as if she were the one person on earth I was supposed to spend my life with. My heart raced and I felt out of breath and mute. I stood, hanging on to the chrome pipe across the alley from this girl who dashed in my train car but I felt as strong as life that I should not let her go. The car entered the Chernishevskaya station. Several people got off the train but the girl-who I will call Dasha-hung on to her pole. She had raven black hair and a form-fitting deep blue sweater that had sleeves that reached her wrists.

Dasha stood there hanging to the pole in her ankle-length black skirt and sleek heel boots of black shiny leather. I fell into a waking dream of the life that might ensue if I were to marry this girl. I see myself living in a magical world of our own Eden, of small children walking around, seeing in the beauty of the fullness of her lips and the look of unblinking adoration for me. For seconds, I am left without breath. She rotates around the chrome post and her eyes alight on me. She keeps looking at me with that slight smile that said she herself was imagining sitting for the rest of her life with me beside her, taking care of her and putting food in the mouth of her little boy and girl by me. Around us rattled the clattering of the wheels on the rails as the train speeded up on its way to Veeborgskaya and on to Lenina. I wanted to go to her and take her hand in mine because she was the right one on earth for me and that if I didn't go to her at that exact moment the rest of my life would be shuttled down a dark pathway of loneliness, torment and unhappiness. I would become an old white-haired man who lived alone in the top floor of a wooden building without family friends or even a cat. I saw this destitution in my life if I failed to make contact with this girl, Dasha, who was smiling and looking in my eyes in a way that made us share the same world between our gazes, as if we could see the future life and existence that stemmed from our shared embrace, desire and the warmth of foggy breath that would come out of our mouths as we lay together in the front seat of a car, cuddling in the chilly night.

The Metro train neared its next stop and a fleet of panic coursed through me-Lesnaya was next. This next Metro station, Lesnaya, had some problems with the stretch of track that ran between itself and the next station down the line, Ploshad Moozhastva. So, all the passengers would need to exit the train and take Avtobus #80 from the Lesnaya station to the Moozhastva station. The stop arrived and I found myself walking quickly to keep behind her but she vanished in the crowd and I panicked. I had lost the only girl in my life who was right for me. I would now enter the downward spiral.

I held my breath. I had wilted during the now-or-never moment when I should have leaped out into the traffic and run to Dasha so that she would know we were soul mates, destined to spend our lives together. Then the train arrived in Lesnaya, the place where everybody had to get off the yellow line, take bus number 80 to Ploshad Moozhastva, where I lost Dasha forever, following a set of ponytails that turned out not to be her, a fact I only discovered at the last moment.

I fell out of my rapture for this girl, this Dasha who had been the perfect one for me. I walked and stared at the cement floor. I looked beyond the crowd coming down the escalator, off in a reverie of memory about the precious girl. Then the moving zone of perfect stillness that moved with her began to burn off and I was alone, and the stillness was replaced by the buzzing and hum of the others. I walked on feeling dizzy and came back to being used to the normal noise of life.

NATASHA WOKE TO THE SOUND of furious pounding on her glass sliding door. Her black cat Charley flew in the air from his spot next to the glass. Instantly Natasha thought "rapist murderer" and lay petrified in bed. She saw Charley, puffed twice his size in fright, staring at whoever stood outside, right outside her bedroom. Natasha laid under the covers and whimpered while her other cat, Marik, dug his claws in her comforter in horror. The pounding did not appear again that night. Natasha knew this because she did not sleep another second.

The next night at around 3am, she was again awoken by a furious pounding on her glass. Charley, sleeping in his usual spot next to the sliding door, was airborne, a puff of black fur and eyes with huge irises. Natasha cried and called her boyfriend Nicholas on the phone. He lived in Goodyear, forty minutes away, and could not get there in time.

"Call the cops, Tasha, " Nick said to her. "Please, call them!" But Natasha had come from Ukraine, where the police more resembled bullies and troublemakers. She could not bring herself to dial 911. She cried and whimpered and, as usual, her two male cats showed they were more of the scaredy variety of cat, rather than tomcats. Natasha waited, praying that tonight would not be the night when she was raped and killed with no one to protect her, since she lived alone.

The next night the horrible sequence of events repeated: the sudden pounding on the sliding door, the freaked-out cats, her lying in bed, petrified, defenseless.

On the fifth night, Natasha had been staying up late, doing her biology homework, trying to understand the peculiar role of NADPH in cell energy transfer, when she heard the pounding on the glass sliding door. She had been studying at the kitchen table. She felt the hairs on her arms stand and nausea in the pit of her stomach. She grabbed a glass coke bottle from the counter and held it by the neck. She ran toward the door and approached Charley, puffed out and petrified, facing the intruder. As Natasha rounded the corner, she came face to face with her attacker: he was black and hairy and had tufts of hair sticking up from his ears: it was a desert bobcat. While she watched, the bobcat slapped its big paws against the outside of the glass. Charley, usually the alpha-male cat of the neighborhood, held back, craven. Marik, no better than Charley, cowered in the bedroom. Angry about her week of terror, Natasha rushed toward the door and threw Charley in with Marik. She flung open the sliding door and shouted at the animal. The bobcat ran around the corner but not away. So, she turned on the garden hose and gave him a good soaking.

For the next week, Natasha had restful nights and Charley slept far away from the sliding-glass door.

JACK WAS TIRED OF GETTING JANIE OFF. They met in the beer garden of a bar called the Sluicy Goosy. Tuesday nights the Sluicy sold cheap beer and the crowds overflowed into the beer garden. Jack attended these beer nights, as he had grown tired of jerking off to pictures of naked, big-breasted women. Now he still wanked but in the same bed as the sleeping, cranky, frigid girl who he was dating.

Janie didn't really like sex. She endured cock. She had a condition that made it impossible for her to suffer through more than five weekly passes of the dick. Of course, this condition only surfaced after they had been dating and fucking for about a week. Janie now blamed him for rubbing her back, for "starting it, " she said.

Janie had been sitting in the beer garden next to her then current boyfriend, Darren. Darren was a broad-shouldered, alcohol-steeped moron from a rich family in Houston who Janie had endured in the hope that he would marry her and then die in a car crash. Instead, he fucked away all the skin in her vagina and made her useless to men ever after. She currently despised Darren, and he knew her grousing about Darren was a preview of her future grousing about him. He knew the same things she said about Darren today she would in the future say about him. With these considerations in mind, he was growing tired of going down on her and expertly licking her clitoris. Jack ate pussy well. He concentrated. He used his tongue like a fine paintbrush, not like a sanding block. She loved it, and he knew their relationship hung by his paintbrush.

The first night he got her off, after they had discussed her condition, after Jack had magnanimously offered to lick her without her reciprocating, was the first hint of the anger to come. She came and rolled the blankets off of herself. From his position of supplication, his knees barked from standing on the bare floor at the foot of the bed, he wiped the cunt juice on the pillowcase her hips had rested on, and then he rolled over as she-naked-crossed the room.

"Don't look at me, " she barked at him, the man who had just had her most private regions inches from his eyes. "Look away." Jack was accustomed to acceding to her commands, which she often issued. Jack lowered his gaze, as his tongue tracked down a stray pubic hair in his mouth. His tamed and flaccid penis slowly fell down at bay like a bull that had chosen not to attack the matador's red cape.

"How is it, Janie, " Jack said, emboldened, "that I can lick your pussy for twenty minutes, yet when you're naked I can't look at you?"

"Listen, Jack, " she said, setting one leg locked on her hip, with the nasal edge in her voice that told him he should expect a lecture, "if you want to keep seeing me, to keep fucking me, there are some things your going to need to accept."

"Fucking you? You don't fuck me. You lay there with your ass on a pillow, letting me do all the work, letting me get a crick in my neck, letting me do all the work-as usual." He watched a whole new set of creases form as her jaw tightened, as the anger drew her brows together, as she geared up for a fight.

"Women do all the heavy lifting in this world, Jack, and this relationship is no different. I'm the one who decides what we do , where we go, which parties we attend."

"Because you need to do those things. You're a control freak!"

Her eyes squinted and her upper lip flattened and curled out in a surly arrogance that meant she was digging in.

"What you mean is you're a wimp, " she said and played her trump.

"You're a dweeb who needs a woman to tell him what to do." Then she smiled that angering, superior pose that meant she considered that word un-toppable.

Jack knew that under the bounds of honor, she had delivered the death blow. Jack was fortunate in being a dishonorable man, a man prone to rabbit punches, able to kick someone who had fallen. He was not averse to fighting entirely dirty.

"I may be, Janie, but I consider that better than being a frigid bitch." It had been a moderating choice when he consciously permitted himself to perhaps continue seeing her by substituting bitch' for his intended word cunt'-a word he knew few men could survive using. Still it had not been moderated enough. Her rage caught fire.

"Listen, buster"-ohh, this word meant he had miscalculated. "You take so long to come I can't imagine any woman staying awake long enough for you to get off your sorry rocks." She paused for effect. "Besides, you can't even eat pussy right."

At this, Jack flung off the remaining tail of the blanket and leapt up to confront her with his naked human body standing next to her.

"Your dry, crusty hole is impossible to eat. I'm sick of it, my cock is sore and I'm glad I don't have to fuck you anymore. You know what Janie? It bores me to fuck you. I think you're a shitty lay."

This trump card delivered its intended blow. Civility was gone. She was silenced. He had gone too far. She stared at him. He watched her lips gradually peel apart with sticky saliva gluing them together. Her leg started a rhythmic shaking that told him he had scored a direct hit. She was unable to respond for twenty seconds. He already regretted actually hitting her weak point, and wished he could reach into her ears to extract his hurtful words and the sad associations they triggered. The vast, wordless gorge of tears came forth, as she released the long brewing emotion that had actually been generated by his use of the word "frigid"-which touched on her deep seated fears of being exactly that.

Jack now wished he could retract those words but it was not possible. Her tears flowed, landing in shiny oblong blotches on the wood-parquet floor.

Jack found himself drawn to the tiny circles of reflected light in the blotches, a testament to the small light she liked to have on while they made love. It was the same lamp that triggered the argument. All of Jack's manly impulses drove him to go to her, to hug her, to rub her back and rest his cheek against her throbbing temple, as the wetness trickled down his neck and cooled the skin over his carotid artery. He grimaced and stood apart from her. He was the reason for her tears.

Another half-dozen drops fell from her now-lowered head and she turned on her heel quietly-with the most refined anger that is silent. She moved efficiently to the bathroom like someone who needed to vomit up the overflowing torrent of emotion.

Jack remained in the room and flopped on a corner of the bed. He gazed around the room at the blond-wooded wardrobe with the doors that wandered open when anyone crossed the floor.

She returned in her dark burgundy bathrobe with an agenda.

"You can't stay here tonight, Jack." she said in a nasal tone. "I need to be alone tonight. And I don't think you should call me tomorrow."

That was it. Jack knew he was again alone. It was finished. He would retrace this night for months to come, as he thought of alternate rejoinders, other ways he could have responded that would not have ended it. She stood with one elbow cradled in her fist. He drew on his trousers, found his shirt, tightened the laces in his Addidas and prepared to exit her life forever.

As he did so, all the magic experiences they had shared flashed in his memory: the concerts, the first early embraces, the first kiss, the time in the hotel room they had shared with two other couples when she had pulled him into the tiny bathroom to silently make love to her with her hand over his mouth. He remembered the feeling he had had on all those lonely, desperate, suicide-flirted nights of agony. These feelings came back and made him swoon in the stupidity of what he had said just now to this lovely girl he had dreamed about, this charming dove he had lain awake panting with on their first night together. All these thoughts blended together with memories of a rainy night, when he walked alone in a downpour without any sense of peace, knowing the true agony of seeing the Louvre alone and having no human being to share the feeling with, or to say, "this is what I loved."

Unable to dally any longer, Jack tightened his laces into bigger bows and looked up into her eyes-now cold towards him, now treating him like any other man she despised. He knew from her set jaw and the patient way she crossed her arms and pursed her lips flat at him, that she was organizing her reasons she would give to her friends. She would not give the real reasons-that he had called her frigid, that he had misled her about his desire to offer oral sex. Instead, she would re-evaluate previous sins she had forgiven him for and use these as the reasons for having dumped him. His actual sins were less relevant and would only embarrass her. He knew the important things were be the reasons she would give to her girlfriends. But none of these really mattered, as girlfriends were only too willing to believe in the sins of former boyfriends. Boyfriends were the two-faced enemy, the men who made love to them and then later had "gotten off their rocks." When Jack had heard Darren described as despicable, he knew this was a re-interpretation of the man who had invariably been described as having so much potential, as having prospects, which was code for the feminine equivalent of , "he's rich." Darren's father had been a drinker, had horrible health, had been one step away from delivering his inheritance to Darren and, in effect, the hands of Janie. If only she been capable of tolerating the fuck pig, drunken fool, gin swilling, dry-twat scrogging, emotion-ignoring swine.

Jack knew he had always been compared to Darren. In truth Jack had been pleased to hear the stories as they gave him a benchmark idea of how to behave. But he couldn't imagine Darren having called her a "frigid bitch, " and Janie would have never admitted to such an exchange. Losing such control would have been too revealing, and if it had happened, she would not have told him.

There were no more viable excuses so Jack found his coat and donned the role of a spurned man exiting her life. Apparently, the tears on the bathroom floor had been the only witness to the bargaining she had endured as to the viability of their now autopsied relationship.

Jack went through a whole scenario of apologies in the seconds he buttoned his coat and with each button he discarded each tack as unviable. Quite politely, she endured his delayed parting as she had endured his cock. Jack knew that she would not consent to see him again.

"Janie, you know it doesn't have to be like this...."

"Listen, Jack, this isn't going to work. I've known it for a long time. Finally, I've realized there's no more point to going on." Jack stepped outside.

A light rain began to fall.

PAVEL SHIVERED IN THE MARKET on Bolshoi Prokovskaya street. In front of him on a folding table lay his potatoes. He had not sold one the entire day. The sun neared the horizon. To his left, Irina and Yulia pulled out the frame of their green canvas tent and packed their remaining cans into a brown backpack. Irina stopped and looked at Pavel's potatoes. She clicked her tongue and shook her head twice.

"Tomorrow will be better, " she said. Pavel said nothing. He was worried about the Lubiyanka Embankement. It grew dark. He stood alone in the market. He packed his potatoes into his green duffle bag and folded up his table. He threw the duffle bag on his back and walked up Bolshoi Prokovskaya. His breath whistled through the hairs in his nose. His forehead grew damp as he walked. He looked at the sidewalk. The red #10 tramvai train passed him on the tracks in the center of the street. The train bobbed side-to-side and gave off bright blue flashes from the arc where the contact touched the wire overhead.

Pavel did not notice the blue flashes that lit up the darkness. He did not hear the screech of the wheels. He did not smell the ozone or feel the cold through his thin jacket. That morning he and Alyanka decided they needed a different crop, but even that was not on his mind.

Pavel thought only of the Lubiyanka Embankment, a creek that ran alongside their dacha. Every day the Lubiyanka ate away a few more crumbs of soil from his land. Never before had they worried about the Lubiyanka, because it had been a trickle. Then, after the second revolution of 1989, there came great troubles. Pavel lost his job at the Kirovskii Zavod, where he painted white glaze on bathtubs used all over the Soviet Union. Pavel, Alyanka and her father Volodya Sergeivich lived in the dacha twenty minutes by avtobus from Leningrad. Pavel never got used to calling St. Petersburg by its new name. What did this new name bring him, but suffering?

When St. Petersburg was called Leningrad, the Lubiyanka had always been a little creek. But now, upstream, in the Golovory place, they combined ten smaller dachas into one large farm. The runoff from the new farm had been diverted by a long embankment that channeled the majority of the water into the tiny Lubiyanka. This change wiped out two old bridges made of felled trees. The government only tied a flagged rope across the bridge on either side. Now, the upstream bridge was the only road across the Lubiyanka, which itself fed into the mighty Slavyanka. Now, thanks to the diversion, the hamlet of Petro-Slavyanka--a small village of tiny one-man dachas--was half cut off. But this change only presented an inconvenience. The diversion of water into the Lubiyanka caused the edge of his land to erode and steal precious crumbles of soil, the earth that grew the vegetables they needed to survive.

As Pavel got on the avtobus for home, he looked at his bulging duffle bag. The heavy load had torn it where the straps joined the seam. Alyanka would have to mend it. But his greatest fear was not his broken backpack, nor was it the unsold vegetables sitting at his feet, slowly rotting. His great fear centered around a leak in the pilings he had built to stop the erosion. That morning, he had gone out and shorn up the pilings he had sunk.

As the avtobus left the city, the moon rose and shed its light across the fields. The bus stopped and Pavel shouldered his bag. He got off into the cold wind. The leaves of the trees flickered under the moonlight. He crossed the bridge and saw the Lubiyanka, moving swiftly under him. He reached the dacha and went to look at the pilings. His duffle bag slid off his shoulder and he crumpled to the ground. The Lubiyanka had broken through the pilings and eaten a meter of land. Pavel held his head in his hands. His eyes began to blur and he felt tears in his eyes as he listened to the current lick and cluck against the pilings. He lay down on the ground and rested his head in the dirt. Then he heard a sudden splash of water. He opened his eyes. A fish jumped out of the water and landed on the bank, flopping.

I MET TERESA IN A BAR. I was already angry at women, because I fell in love so easily. For some reason, Teresa was nice to me, god-damn her. She was one of those feminist types, and she took pleasure in messing with men like me. I always felt guilty about that feminist crap. I felt I should give them the benefit of the doubt. But she played around with my emotions. I decided I really hated her. I had decided that one only really hates someone one used to love. That's how a later girlfriend, Lee-Anne, grew to feel about me. Lee-Anne used to love me madly and I couldn't forgive her for that. I'm just a bastard when it comes to women. I've had my heart broken too many times to be nice to them.

But Teresa was the one who really screwed with me. She shattered my heart and as I walk the streets of St. Petersburg Russia, I find myself being angry at her, like I'm sure Lee-Anne sat in her room in Wisconsin and hated my guts.

I came to Russia to forget Teresa, and it wasn't working. I went out walking last night. I just picked a direction and went walking through the snowy, dirty Russian landscape. Everything in Russia was falling apart: buildings, roads, people-and I found myself colder than the melting snow that made every puddle into a lake. I no longer cared and only wanted to get lost so that maybe I could lose a small part of the bitterness that was devouring me inside. Half-way across the world I was alone and finding myself running out of money, patience and options.

I finally saw what I was seeking, the word "bar" in Russian. I had always been one of those clods who called himself a non-drinker but there's no such thing in Russia. Life here is too bleak. There's too much anger and hostility and frustration. Another way to say I fit right in. Originally, like a fool, I followed this skirt into a bar. She couldn't have been more than 15, but I didn't care. Although I'm in my mid-thirties, I'm tired of older women. They piss me off with their smirks and ready laughter. Because they laugh at me, and I have no desire to vent my anger at them. At least I fooled myself into believing this young skirt wouldn't laugh at me; maybe she was young enough not to laugh at me the way Teresa did and ruined me. Always I held everything against Teresa. She let me fall in love with her; she was nice enough at first to let me love her, and then when she had me hooked, she slapped shut her heart with mine pinched in the opening. She knew how I felt and she opened herself to me just enough to let the life spring in my heart, not letting it die. For that I cannot forgive her.

But this young thing, PonyTail, still had the questioning look, the uncertainty that I prized. Soon she was joined by two other girlfriends. One of them was another uncertain girl like PonyTail. The other girl I hated right away. She wasn't especially beautiful, but she had that smile that pinches mens hearts in the breach. And the figure that drives men wild, men like me. I was too smart to walk right up and talk to her. I was too pissed off, but eventually I had drunk enough beers that I did.

I went up and asked some stupid question. Vixen' flashed those eyes at me. She made sure I got a profile of her chest, just like Teresa would, to make sure I was hooked. Of course she spoke only Russian, and I understood most of what she said. I didn't care about what I missed. Teresa was the last woman who I really listened to and then she buried me and I'd never listen to a girl again. Vixen started to play that "look at me so I can ignore you" crap. So I began to ignore her myself. She had two other girlfriends: Ponytail' was shy, interested, full of longing in her eyes, and boring. Eyelashes' had on one of those short skirts that hiked aboved her thighs and made a guy have difficulty standing up without making a fool of himself--but all that was for other men--not me. I was too jaded. Finally, Vixen began to notice the crappy way I spoke Russian and then she became interested. I played it and started to think maybe I might get to spend a few sweaty hours with this girl. But that was a mistake. After Teresa I knew never to let a woman know I cared. As soon as Vixen started to lean back in her chair, started to profile for me again, I remembered my cynicism. Pull that crap on me, willya? So I let some pure unadulterated English slip. I said a sentence in English. I glanced over at Pony and saw she was in love, and I hated her for it. Don't love me girl--I'm ruined. I'm hurtful; my heart has been broken of love and now all I have is the urge for sex, for some woman to hold, for a few hours until she begins to love me and then I remember what rot is love. But I started to talk to Pony, not because I liked her, or thought she was especially cute, but because I wanted Vixen, and knew the only way to get her was to ignore her, to make her angry, to piss her off. I enjoyed it, as if she were a stand-in for Teresa.

Teresa, who I had to fight the urge to call and curse and humiliate for how she broke my heart--when I finally got Lee-Anne--for taking just enough interest in me to break us up.

"Where do you think I am from?" I asked Pony, setting up curiosity in Vixen. Pony shook her head and lifted her brow in anticipation. She knew, but wanted to hear me say the word they all love to hear:

"America, " I said, knowing that one word meant freedom, riches and a ticket out of this run-down, hopeless country. The only thing I wanted from this country was its women, the flower of youth, and I was willing to break a few hearts to get what I wanted. After you've had your own heart smashed, you don't look so fondly upon the heart of another. If I had to shatter Pony's soul to get a night with Vixen, with those fresh eyes and that chest, it didn't matter.

But now I knew what I wanted, so I plucked Miss Vixen off from the other two. In the old days before I became a jaded son of a bitch, I would have been nice to her, would have told her how sweet and pretty she was, what lovely eyes she had, what round supple lips, but now I'll have none of that. Now it was getting what I wanted and I knew now sweetness and nice wasn't the way. I took her to another table with her back to her friends, so she'd feel alone.

She asked me questions designed to reassure herself and those I ignored. I knew mystery was my friend and I wasn't about to let some 17-year-old Vixen mess with me the way Teresa had. We talked for another few drinks until I told her we were going and to get her coat. I had to be sure she was ready as I didn't want her to slip through my fingers back to her friends. There were protests, recriminations, all that and still I prevailed. We walked home through a snowy park in the moonlight, and I waited till we were in an avenue of parallel Aspen trees to spin her around and kiss her. She was putty and I had nothing to fear.

THE SNOW BLANKETED the dirt path between the two buildings. I turned off the path and when I turned my eyes to the front door of my apartment building on Metallistov Prospekt in St. Petersburg Russia, my eyes encountered a Russian man who had the dark skin of the Georgian Mafia and the look of electricity in his face. He led me to know that he had realised that the young man who had moved into his neighborhood in St. Petersburg Russia was a relative of Uncle Sam, an American and from that moment on he became curious about my activities. Every day, in front of our building waited a Mercedes station wagon, which a young Russian man with his hair cut short waited in the cold snow with a Russian Belamor Kanal cardboard cigarette to keep him warm.

I had come to Russia for an adventure, to meet women and in the back of my brain was the fear that I was making enemies unconsciously with the local men by being such an inveterate flirt.

Because I spoke Russian, I hadn't worried too much. I carried with me the conceit I had developed in the States in college, of thinking there was no situation I could not get myself out of.

The only aspect of it that bothered me were the little Gypsy kids, who I had read carried stick pins, and they massed around you with their pins and stabbed you repeatedly until they could get your wallet and flee. This part alone scared me, and made me want to be careful.

But tonight I couldn't sleep because of the cold wind blowing through the cracks in my Russian apartment's windows. I stuffed toilet paper that felt like rough sandpaper into the cracks and that started to dent the feeling of cold. I had only one odd-e-yalla (blanket) and I was tired of turning on my little radio that could pick up scraps of BBC from over Finland. A few days earlier, I had been reading some Hemingway and it made me need to get some rum or brandy. I circled my apartment a few times and then grabbed my wallet. I had three hundred-thousand Ruble notes, or about sixty bucks. I figured a good bottle of brandy might cost me about nineteen bucks or maybe ninety-thou rubles. I didn't want ot show myself in the store next door as having that much money, it wasn't a good idea. But I wanted a drunk badly. I had worked like an ox for three years to learn the language and for two to save up the money. I wanted to be drunk reading literature in the morning in Russia. I put on my coat and my shopka (fur hat) and my gloves. I opened the inner door and then the outer door and stepped into the hallway. The wallpaper was old and in a blue plaid pattern that reminded me of the decorations on the walls of my grandmother back in Iowa.

I went down the three flights and exited out the broken-down wooden front door. I followed the snowy path to the left and after I had walked the length of the middle building, I turned right and a little farther reached the Produkte magazin (grocery store). The front of it was lit up and it sold beer most of the night.

Everytime I entered this store I put on my mantle of the flirty American. The store was arrayed with counters around the outer edge. Women in blue smocks stood between you and the things for sale. If I wanted to buy a bottle of brandy, I would gander over at the girl who sold the bread in loaves. She was slightly heavy in a way that made her look solid but still attractive in a farmer's-daughter sort of way. She alternately looked at me with romantic dove eyes. [to be continued]

THE BELLS OF THE TROIKA jingled all around me as I rode with Yuri to Varikino. I was a young lad of 5 and had never before been to Russia. I was with my brother Ron at the Indian Hills Theater watching "Dr. Zhivago" on the 110-feet-wide screen that wrapped around nearly 150-degrees, making it feel as if I was, actually, in Russia riding behind the horses in the snow. Such was the magic of that now departed movie theater, the largest indoor movie screen until its lamented conversion into a parking lot in the Summer of 2001.

Anyone who lived in Omaha from the sixties through 2001 knows what I mean. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the subdivision called "Indian Hills" and my brothers and I were able to walk down the street to our favorite movie theater on earth. My brother Ron always described the Indian Hills as his "temple".

To someone who has only viewed a movie on a postage-stamp-sized screen-standard for today's multiplexes-the effect of watching a movie in Cinemascope on a screen that wrapped in a semicircle around you cannot be explained. The immense screen in the Indian Hills extended beyone one's peripheral vision, thereby evoking the feeling of actually being there. When a young boy like myself grows up two blocks from such a movie theater, it tends to affect one forever. Since then, I have lived in Iowa, Phoenix, Cincinatti, Houston, Salt Lake City and St. Petersburg, Russia. In each of these places I have found myself longing for a movie-going experience such as I had as a child. These longings have gone unfulfilled. When I have attempted to explain this desire to friends around the world, they invariably mention the word "IMAX" with their eyebrows raised, expecting that to strike me like a revelation. When I consider the many flat, square screens on all the IMAX theaters I have encountered, it does not compare. To date, there has never been an IMAX theater made in either the size or configuration of the Indian Hills theater, which was designed in the format called Cinerama, which whithered on the vine because of technical challenges. However, Cinemascope-the successor to Cinerama-is nearly as powerful. Seeing "Lawrence of Arabia" on "the big screen" (as all afficianados call the Indian Hill's screen.), with Peter O'Toole's brilliant blue eyes shining their radiance twenty-feet high, is a sight like no other. Seeing Luke Skywalker fly his X-wing fighter down on the Deathstar on "the big screen" was miraculous. Movie going has never been as pleasurable to me since "the big screen" was no more.

In the Summer of 2001, my brothers and I joined with many other locals to attempt to save the Indian Hills, after we realised it was in danger. We rallied and organized, meeting in a Village Inn just East of the theater on West Dodge road, for a month. In the end, as anyone in Omaha can confirm, we failed in our quest. Monied interests exercised the perogatives that go with ownership. Those arguments are long past and are not germane to this appreciation. Knowing in hindsight that the events of September 11th, 2001 would shortly unfold might seem to cast the efforts of the Indian Hills Preservation Society, our group, as being trivial. But in this world where nothing anymore seems sacred, we still find ourselves reaching out to proclaim the beauty of Botticelli's "Venus". Though millions died in the trenches of World War I, we embrace Hemingway's novel of the period, "A Farewell to Arms". Though we know they were built upon the backs of slave labor, we admire and treasure the Great Pyramid of Cheops. All through our shared history on this planet, we humans have endured the challenges and cherished the creations of our species. The greatness of that round red departed landmark on West Dodge Road is not diminished by its death. Those of us who were fortunate enough to sit in its purple velvet seats will forever be affected by the experience of seeing films on "the big screen." To those who have not ever had the experience, we might as well try to convey the flavor of chocolate to the uninitiated, or the joy of lovemaking, or of the feeling of love. If you didn't see it, I can't make you see it.

There exists a documentary movie by Jim Fields about the efforts of the Indian Hills Preservation Society to save the theater. This movie, heartbreaking as seeing a loved one murdered, contains glimpses of the theater in its heyday. It also contains scenes that will plunge daggers into your heart.

Though it is only a memory, to this day I carry a love for the Indian Hills theater. Seeing Omar Sharif in "Dr Zhivago", living in Russia, affected me for the rest of my life. I credit that movie, seen in its glory on "the big screen", with inspiring me to learn Russian in college. The strength of of my feelings for "Dr. Zhivago" led me to live in St. Petersburg, Russia for all of 1997. As I walked around St. Petersburg in the cold Winter chill, I remembered the jingling bells of the troika and of the neighborhood where I grew up, next to the Indian Hills theater, the greatest movie theater ever made.

AGNES DOMASCIO stood with her right palm in a fist, with the tops of her fingers pressed against her upper lip as she stared through her shaded eyeglasses in the middle of the street, her billowing pink scarf holding to the side in a slight breeze as she stood beside her 1997 Buick Skylark, staring behind her Skylark at the asphalt splashed with blood and bouncing on the asphalt like a fish, was a wet furry tabby cat 5 years old, Kelatch, who somehow gave the first impression to a car passing seconds later of being a pair of cats, one a kitten, thrashing and whipping its solitary self in such a way to whipsaw itself as if it were trying to escape from some terrible agony that was torturing the cat enough to make it splash blood and behave such, because this 5-year-old tabby Kelatch had just been run over by the back left tire of Agnes Domascio, the 67-year-old woman who had been speeding in the parking lot and not paying attention because she was late for a Thanksgiving day dinner. Agnes stood in horror watching the cat slowly die by flinging itself apart under the incredible pain. Agnes Domascio, who had already gotten directions on how to find her daugher's apartment once before, was making a living cat Kelatch spend his last precious moments of life fighting, thrashing, raging with every ounce of strength, to escape the grip of sudden utter death when all expectation ended. Death. Now.

I GOT MY FIRST PAPER ROUTE when I was twelve. I slung the Omaha Sun-a paper that came in thick stacks of newsprint every Thursday. The Sun was light--that is, before you added the Advertiser, a smaller canary-yellow ad rag I had to stuff in each paper. Delivering the Sun gave me a window on the lives of my customers.

I saw my brothers grow into teens who had to earn money mowing lawns. Every one of my brothers carried the Omaha World-Herald, a merciless daily grind of a paper that sapped the will of the hardiest boys. Much like my pre-emptive choice to play the saxophone (instead of the piano lessons my mother inflicted on my brothers), I carried the Sun so that I wouldn't have to lug the World-Herald.

I picked up my bundles in the parking lot of Countryside Village. Carrying home those stacks of papers taught me the joy of toil. Another Thursday would roll along. I would be tempted along with my friends to goof off and deliver my papers late. From having been chewed out for even having delivered a house's paper late, I knew better than to goof off. At a later time I encountered the first time I had to endure knocking on doors and wheedling white-haired dads who answered the door to fork over the week's $2.35 required to keep the Sun coming to their door every Thursday. The Sun, with its brash headlines, photos that spilled below the fold and muckraking style, set me on a course that would later include a stint as a foreign correspondent in St. Petersburg, Russia. I honestly did not read the paper as much as I pulled papers off the stack and wrapped them in rubber bands with the speed of summer lightning. Then, knowing the 46 houses on my route almost by heart, I set out on my bike, racing around the Indian Hills neighborhood experimenting with alternate strategies for flinging them with greater accuracy and haste. It took about an hour and 45 minutes out of my day and so, as I joined my favorite after school programs, in progress. I did not understand the impact felt by the kind of solitary work called a paper route would have.

After about six months of carrying the Sun, I began to covet the larger incomes of the World-Herald carriers and so, sure as I wanted to put my neck into the traces, a retired postman named Monte somehow saw a light go on in a console where they track boys who are inclined to become paperboys. Monte, having spent his whole life pushing envelopes around, sat next to me in my mother's living room and gestured wildly as he described the vast wealth that would come to me when I switched from the single Thursday edition to everyday deliveries. I accepted the challenge. It was November and would shortly be a snowstorm the likes of which rarely come to Nebraska anymore. Gone was the leisure of an afternoon delivery. The World-Herald is a morning paper and so the chore of a paper route comes at the expense of sleep because you never want to explain to your friends that you can't stay out because you have to go home and do your paper route. It isn't Mission Impossible.

Delivering a paper such as the World-Herald meant starting the route early in the morning at o'dark-thirty with an overflowing double-bag full of World-Heralds bound in red rubber bands, hanging fat and dragging low like the belly of a bloody-faced hyena. The load got lighter with every cart-wheeling paper until it hung slack and the day's route was done. It was time for school.

If one did not include the odious task of collecting from the old man who answered his door with a forkful of hash brown stabbed, dangling in the air like doll hair, as he flailed with his fork to add illustrative color and flourish to his tantrum about why did didn't want to pay for the darned paper.

"Nothing but ugly stories in it, day after day, " said the old man. "Now why should I have to pay for that, " said the man before he plunged his hand into a jelly jar for quarters. Under protest, the man satisfied his bill and accepted whatever the World-Herald news editor chose to send him for another week.

In short order, the weather turned Nebraska and there were drifts of depth that would shock a Nebraskan under 20, used to living in modern Nebraska, where the appearance of palm trees growing wild in Memorial Park would seem more likely than ten-feet-deep drifts covering Dodge street. Though my paper route, around Swanson Elementary school had been inundated in deep drifts, I was expected to venture out into the blizzard and get my papers on the porches. I recall trudging through the snow, where every step required a fight and feat of lifting and planting six inches farther ahead. When some of the fathers, just home from work, ties loosened around their necks, sweaty, hot and grateful to get their paper, saw me fighting my way over a snow drift with the latest news. They gave me that look men sometimes give each other. The look gave an acknowledgement that I had done a good job and deserved a "well done". The dignified joy I received from coming through on the implicit contract I had signed with those homes to provide the paper on their porch whether doing so was easy or hard, became one of my lifelong cravings. Once a young man has tasted the honey of respect, he craves having his ego fed from then on. I delivered my entire route and never enjoyed it as much as the day when it was impossible.

Like any job, garnering respect became harder. When I struggled in warm weather with a heavy Sunday paper, no one looked at me with pity for having chosen a hard job. They regarded me with scorn. Collecting on a regular basis was numbing. It involved the kind of personal contact that no businesses like to do: walking up to a stranger's house asking for money for the ostensible purpose of buying a small square of cardboard with "May Week 3" on it. It was also interesting for me as a twelve year old to see into the many houses and the many dramas going on there. Often, the person answering the door carried on a command-inflected conversation with either a spouse or a child who was misbehaving at the dinner table. At the time, perhaps, I did not understand the significance of what I had observed. Years later, I still remember the woman in a purple housecoat, holding it shut at her neck with one hand while she held the door open long enough for me to see her face, pale and looking like it was covered with a white powder, as she first gave a scalding reply to one of her children, a small blond-haired boy of maybe seven, sitting at the kitchen table in view of the open door with his little knife and fork resting on their dull ends in the air, as a symbol of protest.

"Until those mashed potatoes and gravy are cleared off your plate, Jeremy, " shouted the powder-faced woman over her shoulder. In response, Jeremy banged his fork and knife like drumsticks on the table and then I saw him fling potatoes on the floor, which caused the brown sharp-snouted mutt dog to scramble over to lap up the bounty.

"What can I do for you, " she said, cinching up her purple housecoat and turning her tone of pre-irritation my way. "Young man?"

"Collecting for the paper, ma'am, " I said.

"Oh damn it, " she said with rapid irritation in her tone. "I don't have time for this."

"$2.35 for the last week, " I said.

"Oh Jesus Christ, " she said. "Can't you go away and come back later?"

"Sure, " I said and turned away as she slammed shut the door.

I went on and made sure that every torn paper I had for the next week went to her house, until she followed me on the seventh day and paid up. Although it felt good getting the occasional praise for a job well done, it was the humiliation of doing the collecting that taught me the last lesson I was to learn from having my paper, which was that it was not difficult to get customers. The difficulty was getting paid. The Omaha SUN was another of those businesses that had the drive to continue publication. I don't know why but the Omaha SUN was no more in a few years. I had left the newspaper delivery business and had taken up the life of an Usher in the 6-West theaters.

I CLIMBED UP THE SMALL HILL and, over the top, beheld a large flat pond. The deep green waters of the pond stretched for a hundred yards. I listened to the sound of the wind hissing in the treetops. The wind blew at my back and barely covered the lowing of cattle in the adjacent cattle yard. As I stared at the ripples flowing over the green water, visions of Huckleberry Finn danced over my imagination. My plan was set. I turned on my heel and left a trail of dust as I ran in my Keds sneakers down the hill, back toward my Grandmother Clara's farm just outside of Wisner, Nebraska. All my life I had been a child bent on building, whether that involved hauling away scrap lumber from building sites in my hometown in Omaha or nailing two-by-fours into the sides of Willow trees to make a tree house. I went to my grandfather's shed and stopped at the entrance. Painted along the walls were the outlines in whitewash of the wrenches and hammers and other hand tools my grandfather Bill had used everyday on the farm. My grandpa was only a memory as I had been a baby when he passed on. I went to the wooden box on the workbench and foraged for rusty bent nails that I could use in my project: to build a raft big enough to sail on to the pond and ride the wind. I went back to the wood pile and began to drag back the long flat barn boards that I planned to use for my raft. Being all of 8 years old, I did not know how many boards would be needed for the raft so, I continued to drag board after board from the pile behind the chicken house to the garage. On one of the last of these trips, my cousin Bob, who was twelve years my senior, caught sight of my labors. Bob came out of the place with a sweaty green aluminum glass of water that he finished off and left on the mailbox.

"Whatcha up to, Tommy?" he asked me. Having grown up with three older brothers, I was used to receiving inquisitive questions from older males about my construction efforts.

"Nothin' much, " I said. "Building a raft."

Bob smiled big and stuck his hands in his pockets.

"Why that's a fine idea, " Bob said. "I was always doing things like that when I was a boy like you." I had always liked Bob because he never acted suspicious about my ideas like my brothers did. Bob followed me around to the garage where I had laid down three of the barn boards and another three after that crosswise. I took the hammer and began to pound in the nails I had found. Bob hunched down on his knees and scrunched up his mouth.

"Well, Tommy, you're going to need a lot more wood if you're going to float." Bob disappeared and I kept hammering. When he reappeared, he was dragging three larger four-by-fours that had been wall studs from the old barn.

"The best way, " he said. "Is to place these studs crosswise and then add another row of the flat boards." He dragged one of the studs from the pile and lay it across the flat boards. Then, he lay several more of the flat boards over it and picked up the hammer. He was able to drive in the nails with two blows. Then he examined the hammer's head, which wobbled. He slid his hand up near the neck and slammed the base of the hammer down, to make the head tighter. Then he finished hammering and we had the makings of a pretty good raft. I grabbed a long mop pole and Bob nailed two smaller boards on the bottom. We tied an old sheet to the top of the pole and added a tack to keep it from sliding down.

"Hmm, " he said. "This is looking pretty heavy. Got any idea how to move it to the pond?"

"You bet, " I said and ran over to a four wheeled baby carriage. The basket had long since fallen apart but the base was iron and pretty tough, as were all things made in the 30s. Together, we hoisted the raft on the carriage. The wooden wheels groaned under the weight and the suspension springs stretched near the ground. The carriage was still mobile and so we began to steer it out of the garage and down the lane to the gravel road. I turned us left and Bob started to look around for the pond. The breeze began to pick up the old sheet sail and we went in the direction of the pond I had seen. We reached the bottom of the hill and I stopped the carriage.

"Why are we... stopping here?" Bob asked me, with his eyebrows pinched together in curiosity.

"Because the pond, it's at the top of the hill, " I said and started to lift.

"Whoa whoa whoa, " Bob said and started to laugh. He jogged up the small hill and stopped at the edge of the lagoon. At the top, he covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. "Tommy, you can't put a raft on this lake--it's a lagoon."

"What's a lagoon?" I asked.

"It's... it's poop, " he said. "Poop from the cows."

We turned away from the pond and slowly walked down the hill. We pushed the unused raft back to grandma's farm and unloaded it behind the chicken house. Years later I saw it and recalled my aborted voyage on the green lagoon.