Stuart Kaminsky - Hard Currency

“My arm will be black. Look, it’s bleeding,” the old man complained.

“You will survive,” said the woman. She put the hypodermic carefully on a towel.

The old man rose, looked at Yevgeny, and left the room.

“How many more out there?” Yevgeny asked, removing his white smock.

“He was the last,” she said. She turned to Yevgeny and folded her arms. “You look tired.”

“I did not sleep well last night,” Yevgeny admitted.

“You work too hard. The Metro, here. May I ask you something?”

“No,” he said, rolling down his sleeves and buttoning his shirt.

“Why do you do it?” she asked, reaching into her pocket for a package of cigarettes.

“Do …?”

“Work so hard,” she said. “You live alone. You have only yourself to support. But you’re always running. It’s a killing pace.”

Yevgeny removed the Metro motorman’s jacket from the peg behind the door and put it on. The woman lit her cigarette and watched him.

“I’m a restless person,” he said. “It is a combination of my genes and the hell of life in Moscow. I run to stay ahead of the two-headed monsters who pursue me. I run so I can find a place I can hide and then leap upon the back of the monster and ride him till he breaks.”

“And then what happens?” the woman said with a smirk.

“Well, then,” said Yevgeny, adjusting his Metro line cap, “I become the monster.”

“Odom,” she said, inhaling deeply, “I think you may be a little bit mad.”

“In a city of madness, with whom do you compare me to make such a judgment?” he asked.

“You’re going to kill yourself at this pace.”

“I think there is a good chance that you are right.” He headed for the door. “I think there is a good chance that I will die this very night.”

“In Moscow, that is always possible,” she said, looking around the room, deciding that there was much to clean up before she could head home, wondering if her husband was out drunk or had actually spent time in some food line so that there might be something for her to eat at home besides stale bread and pasty tasteless yogurt.

He left her standing in the middle of the room, whose alcohol odor always remained with Yevgeny for hours after he left the clinic. He wondered for the first time if he smelled of alcohol and whether those he found for Kola thought perhaps that he was drunk.

He moved slowly through the halls of the clinic. The place was almost empty.

In the small lobby of peeling linoleum a woman had set up a table to sell small baked biscuits. Now she was packing up what she had not been able to sell.

“Wait,” said Yevgeny. “What have you left?”

The dry, sagging woman turned with the pain of an arthritic, a pain Yevgeny’s own mother had suffered as long as he could remember.

“Three left,” the woman said. “Twenty rubles.”

He dug in his pocket for the money and handed it to her. She took the money and looked at him as she reached into her cloth sack.

“They are a little dry,” she said.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Yevgeny.

“And,” she said, handing the small biscuits to him in her knotted hand, “they may have lost some of their taste. Flour is-”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Yevgeny. “It will fill my stomach. The sky is dark early tonight. Go carefully and be safe.”

Yevgeny ate the first biscuit in two bites as he stepped onto the street. The night was heavy and the air moist. He breathed deeply and considered the possibility of returning to the clinic, letting Kola murder both the biscuit seller and Lana, who thought her pain was so great. He had to clasp the nails of his left hand into his fisted palm to keep from trembling at the release it would give him to let Kola bring them to their knees and then tear their self-pitying faces.

A pair of young lovers, both with long hair and wearing identical black jackets, watched him as he forced the molecules of his body to stop vibrating. He imagined himself breaking up into molecules-not exploding but simply breaking up and joining with the air and the bricks of buildings.

He walked along briskly past the Peking Hotel and across the intersection toward the Metro station.

“Soon,” he said. He was unaware that he had spoken aloud, and unaware that a well-dressed man carrying a newspaper under his arm had heard him and automatically cut around him and down the stairs, a maneuver most Muscovites had perfected over years of encounters with an increasingly mad population that talked frequently to invisible gods and demons.

Yevgeny checked his watch and hurried down the steps, past a pair of begging Gypsies-mother and sleeping child-to whom he handed the last of his biscuits. The woman accepted the food, looked at the hurrying man in uniform, and crossed herself over the sleeping child.

A pair of boys, one with green hair and the other with scarlet, jostled past him, taking the steps down two, three at a time.

Yevgeny Odom followed them into the hole of the earth, toward the sounds of roaring metal beasts that swallowed the wailing somnambulists of Moscow’s living dead.

Sasha Tkach was riding the Metro and trying not to blow his nose. He pretended to read a book about welding and watched passengers come and go. From time to time at a station, he would get off, find the phone, check with Karpo, and resume his aimless riding.

A peddler of viruses and promises, he thought. He thought of Pulcharia, blowing her nose with the help of Lydia, who muttered about the way children had been cared for better when she was a young mother.

Sasha smiled.

There was little to do and much time to think. Other Metro engineers had been lulled by the routine; some had been known to fall asleep, others to write poetry. At least four that Yevgeny Odom knew of had gone mad, overridden the controls, and sent their trains smashing into waiting trains in stations ahead of them.

Stop. Ease forward. Switch. Open. Roar. Sway. Hush. Lulling lights. Burst. Ease. Doors open.

It took Yevgeny five stops to notice the pairs and trios of young people with wild rainbows of hair. They were roaming the stations, riding the trains, laughing, looking while trying not to look. There were always some of these in the Metro. More all the time. It was not their number that Yevgeny noticed but how evenly dispersed they seemed to be. They were, in fact, at every station, VDNKh, Rizhskaya, Prospekt Mira, Kolkhoznaya.

It was something to think about while he searched for Kola’s prey. Was this some new game? A mass robbery of passengers at a given time? The passenger load was light at this hour. What could they be up to? Could it be a bizarre coincidence? Were they all heading for some site where a ritual would take place?

He thought of other things too. When he ended his shift, he would ride, blending in among the neon and the sleepy, one of many late-night uniforms, until he spotted a lone victim lounging, waiting, just getting off of a train at an empty station.

After the first hour, he could not deny the presence of this army of pale, rainbow-haired, animal youths.

Halfway through his shift, Yevgeny Odom developed a theory, perhaps a fantasy. They were looking for him. Somehow, Karpo, the policeman with the flat voice, had wormed into his brain, torn open his plan with his teeth, and enlisted an army of the damned that now lay in wait for him. No, it could not be. The police had their own armies.

Something else struck Yevgeny as the train pulled out. Where were the Metro police-the nonuniformed men who dealt with thieves, muggers, and pickpockets? He knew them all by sight and had seen none tonight.

Yevgeny Odom decided that he would not change his plans. Kola might have to kill more quickly than in the past, but he would do what he had planned. It was the only way to quiet Kola.