David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“No. That was bullshit. I’m talking about not being able to remember anything at all… reliably. I have memories — but they’re not full. For instance — I can recall being in Moscow in 1986 — I remember that: Alexei was in Moscow. But do you know what comes to mind when I think of it?”

James shook his head.

“Nothing! That’s what. Just words: Alexei worked for a guy in Belarus until last year . If I think hard I can remember an address where I lived; a part of a telephone number, maybe some street names. But nothing — nothing of the senses. I don’t think I was ever in Belarus — do you know that?”

“That’s fucked up,” said James.

“Yes,” said Alexei, “it is. But,” he added, not wanting to make James feel badly having been outdone, “your story is fucked up too.”

“Thank you.”

They clinked their mugs together.

Fyodor Kolyokov’s afterlife had become like the ocean he feared so much as a dream-walker — a great, chattering place where the language of the mind became a drowning medium; a metaphoric sea all its own.

A sea of Discourse.

It was useful to think of it in such a way, at any rate; metaphor had always been Kolyokov’s lifeline in life — and here in death, it helped.

It helped a great deal in fact: for although a state might in some forms be inescapable, a metaphor sometimes pointed to an otherwise invisible exit.

And this sea — well, no matter how deep their bottoms, didn’t all seas also have a surface?

Kolyokov apprehended that surface now — by pinpricks of light, wavering down through the tumult.

So Fyodor Kolyokov swam up to them. His metaphorical lungs strained, and the sea bottom called to him, but Kolyokov strove upwards. As he drew closer, he saw what those pinpricks were — they resolved into binocular pairs looking out upon a thousand vistas. They were, Kolyokov realized, the eyes of sleepers. A thousand sleepers, maybe more.

Many of the vistas were meaningless to Kolyokov; the back of a bus seat; a magazine article; a highway ahead, white dotted line strobing beneath the hood of a car.

But one — one caught Kolyokov’s eye.

Kilodovich.

Kolyokov’s penultimate hope.

With his last strength, Kolyokov swam towards the vision of Alexei Kilodovich — closer and closer, until the sleeper’s vision became his own.

As he emerged into the young man’s vodka-soaked consciousness, Kolyokov felt like a man who’d traded one drowning for another. Alcohol was one thing that made dream-walking difficult — if he had it himself, it would send him straight to a dreamless stupor; and in another… well, it was like trying to make sense to a drunk at a party. An exercise in frustration.

Nonetheless, this time he had to try. The young man was talking to Kilodovich — and before it was too late… before he had diminished too much to even make a peep — he had to take over that conversation himself.

But first — he listened, and watched. This was the first time he’d seen Kilodovich in weeks. The man looked good — healthy. He had a discolouration on his forehead, some kind of a bruise, but that looked to be healing now. If Kolyokov had still had lips, they would have pulled into a smile. The boy looks good , he thought.

The phantom smile vanished, however, as Kolyokov listened to what Kilodovich was saying.

“The old bastard jerked me around like a puppet from the time I was a boy — just like you, James. He made me do God knows what — replaced my memories. Worked me like a Goddamn marionette. It would have been better” — Kilodovich paused to sip his drink — “it would have been better, you know, if he’d just sent me to a work camp. That, at least… That might have left me my soul.”

“Hear hear!” said Kolyokov’s host.

“Fuck Fyodor Kolyokov,” said Alexei, raising his glass. “Fuck him, wherever he is!”

Kolyokov reached out, to take hold of his host’s drunken lips and tongue and larynx. He grasped at them, but they slipped from his fingers again and again. Finally, Kolyokov let them be.

I wouldn’t know what to say with them anyway , he thought miserably, as he sank back into the murk. He opened his throat, and let the metaphor of water, the spreading Discourse, flood into his lungs. Drown me , willed Kolyokov. I’m done here. I am past done .

Mi , thought Heather. Mi mi mi mi .

“Have some more tea,” said the big bald man who had introduced himself as Miles. His friend, Richard, who looked about a hundred years old, wiped tears from his eye. Across the dining room of the little café, a table of fishermen avoided looking at them. The big bald man picked up the little steel teapot and started to pour it into Heather’s mug. She put her hand over it. Any more tea, and I’m going to be peeing a whole ocean , she thought, then, as the tendrils of her master tickled behind her ear, remembered to stop thinking.

Mi! Mi mi mi mi !

“Okay,” he said. “No tea for you. Richard?”

“Y-yes. P-please. Oh God.”

Miles poured more into weeping Richard’s cup. Hands trembling, the old man lifted it to his lips and slurped it noisily, like soup.

“You’re wondering why my friend’s crying?”

Mi , thought Heather.

“Well I’ll tell you. Richard’s a scientist. He spent — how long, Richard?”

“Oh God — thirty years! Thirty years !”

“Thirty years, at MIT. He was a full professor there for a while. Isn’t that right, Richard?”

“Oh God!”

“Actually, Richard, you know God’s got nothing to do with it. You were robbed of your life by a Devil, weren’t you now?”

The old man shook his head and lowered it over his teacup. His sobbing intensified. Mi , thought Heather, and put her hand on his shoulder. Mi mi mi mi .

“O-one d-day,” said Richard, “I-I just… left.”

“And where did you end up?”

“E-E-E-E—”

“The Emissary ,” said Miles. “Say it, Richard.”

“E-Emissary.”

“Good man.” Miles reached over and gingerly pulled Heather’s hand off Richard’s shoulder. “I know you think you’re comforting him. But human contact — well. Old Richard’s had enough of that.”

You can fucking say that again , she thought.

Hey — bitch — go kill the fuckin’ Russkie , said Gibson, from a corner of her mind.

Mi! Mi mi mi mi !

Miles smiled coolly. “Yeah. You had enough of that too, haven’t you? Everybody here’s like us, aren’t they?”

Not — mi mi mi mi — not everybody . Heather glanced out the front window of the café, up the slope, to the greenhouse. The place where they all slept — all the ones that ran things around here. It was a sprawling thing like a giant cut diamond. At one end squatted a little outbuilding, fashioned out of cut logs, with little windows painted brightly. Its roof was highly peaked, and wood smoke billowed out of the top of it. How hot was it in there? she wondered. As hot as that bathhouse up the hill?

Okay, baby. I’m not gonna hurt you. Let me in .

She shut her eyes and summoned the mantra. Every time, it seemed more difficult to do. But she still could — the idea of Holden Gibson walking around in her brain — making her do stuff, like he was doing to everyone else on the crew…

Mi. Mi. Mi. Mi .

“So how’d you come here, little girl?” Miles gingerly set her hand back on the table in front of her. “Was it a smell? That was how we got the call — wasn’t it, Richard?”

Richard nodded, still not looking up.