Люциус Шепард: Eternity and Other Stories

Bewildered and full of dread, Chemayev stood and began making his way toward the sound of the voice. He knew this story, he was familiar with every detail, but how anyone else could know it was beyond him. The elderly men and women shuffled out of his path clumsily, reluctantly—it seemed he was pushing through a sort of human vegetation, a clinging, malodorous thicket comprised of threadbare dresses, torn sweaters, and blotchy, wrinkled skin.

“Nicolai glanced up from the corpse to discover that his friend had become his executioner. For an instant, he was frozen. But after the initial shock dissipated he made no move to fight or to plead for his life. He just looked at Viktor, a look that seemed fully comprehending, as if he knew everything about the moment. The mechanisms that had created it. Its inevitability. And it was the composition of that look, the fact that it contained no element of disappointment, as if what was about to occur was no more nor less than what Nicolai might have expected of his friend… that was the spark that prompted Viktor, at last, to fire. To give him due credit, he wept profusely over the body. At one point he put the gun to his head, intending to end his own life. But that, certainly, was an act to which he was not committed.”

Standing near the door, his back to Chemayev, the center of the krushova dwellers’ attention, was a squat black-haired man in a blue serge suit. Chemayev stepped in front of him and stared into the unblinking eyes of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, his clothing identical in every respect to that worn by the painted image in the elevator, complete down to the pince-nez perched on his nose and the red blossom in his lapel. Flabbergasted, Chemayev fell back a step.

“If it were up to me,” Beria said, “I’d have you shot. Not because you betrayed your friend—in that you were only carrying out an order. But your penchant for self-recrimination interferes with the performance of your duty. That is reprehensible.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth and regarded Chemayev dourly. “I suspect you’d like to know how I came to hear the story I’ve been telling my comrades. No doubt you’re trying to rationalize my presence. Perhaps you’ve concluded that if Yuri could create doubles for himself, he might well have created a double for Beria. Perhaps you’re thinking that when Lev Polutin sent you and Nicolai to kill Fetisov, he also sent a spy to make certain you did the job right, and that this spy is my source. That would be the logical explanation. At least according to the lights of your experience. But let me assure you, such is not the case.”

Having recovered his poise somewhat, Chemayev seized on this explanation as if it were a rope that had been lowered from the heavens to lift him free of earthly confusion. “I’m sick of this shit!” he said, grabbing Beria by the lapels. “Tell me where the fuck Yuri is!”

An ominous muttering arose from the crowd, but Beria remained unruffled. “People have been trying to talk to you all evening,” he said. “Trying to help you make sense of things. But you’re not a good listener, are you? Very well.” He patted Chemayev on the cheek, an avuncular gesture that caused Chemayev, as if in reflex, to release him. “Let’s say for the sake of argument I’m not who I appear to be. That I’m merely the likeness of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. Not God’s creation, but Yuri’s. Given Yuri’s playful nature, this is a distinct possibility. But how far, I wonder, does playfulness extend? Does he only create doubles of the famous, the notorious? Or might he also create doubles of individuals who’re of no interest to anyone… except, perhaps, to Viktor Chemayev?” A meager smile touched his lips. “That doesn’t seem reasonable, does it?”

There was a rustling behind Chemayev, as of many people shifting about, and he turned toward the sound. An avenue had been created in the ranks of human wreckage from the krushovas, and sauntering toward him along it—the way he used to walk when he spotted you at a bar or on a street corner, and had it in mind to play a trick, his head tipped to the side, carrying his left hand by his waist, as if about to break into a dance step—was a blond, slender, blue-eyed man in a fawn leather jacket, gray silk shirt, and cream-colored slacks. His boyish smile was parenthetically displayed between two delicately incised lines that helped lend him a look of perpetual slyness. In fact, all the details of his features were so finely drawn they might have been created by a horde of artisan spiders armed with tiny lapidary instruments. It was the face of a sensitive, mischievous child come to a no less sensitive and mischievous maturity. He looked not a day older than he had on the last morning of his life three and a half years before.

“That’s right!” Nicolai said, holding out his arms to Viktor. “In the flesh! Surprised?” He wheeled in a circle as if showing off a new suit. “Still the handsome twenty-two-year-old, eh? Still a fucking cloud in trousers.”

Logic was no remedy for this apparition. If the floor had opened beneath him to reveal a lake of fire, Chemayev would not have been more frightened. He retreated in a panic, fumbling for the pistol.

“Man! Don’t be an asshole! I’m not going to give you any trouble.” Nicolai showed Chemayev his empty palms. “We’ve been down this road once. You don’t want to do it again.”

Guilt and remorse took up prominent posts along Chemayev’s mental perimeters. His breath came shallowly, and he had difficulty speaking. “Nicolai?” he said. “It… it’s not you?…”

“Sure it is. Want me to prove it? No problem.” Nicolai folded his arms on his chest and appeared to be thinking; then he grinned. “What’s that night club where all the whores dress like Nazis? Fuck! I’m no good with names. But you must remember the night we got drunk there? We screwed everything in sight. Remember?”

Chemayev nodded, though he barely registered the words.

“On the way home we had an argument,” Nicolai said. “It was the only time we ever got into a fight. You pulled the car off onto the side of the Garden Ring and we beat the shit out of each other. Remember what we argued about?”

“Yes.” Chemayev was beginning to believe that the man might actually be Nicolai. The thought gave him no comfort.

“We argued about whether the goddamn Rolling Stones were better with Brian Jones or Mick Taylor.” Nicolai fingered a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, tapped one out. “Stupid bullshit. I couldn’t chew for a fucking week.” He fired up his cigarette and exhaled a fan of smoke; he closed his right eye, squinted at Chemayev as if assessing the impact of his words. “Want more proof? No problem.”

He dropped, loose-limbed, into a nearby chair and began to reel off another anecdote, but no further proofs were necessary. His unstrung collapse; his languid gestures; the way he manipulated the cigarette in his left hand, passing it from one pair of fingers to another like a magician practicing a coin trick—the entire catalogue of his body language and speech was unmistakably Nicolai’s. No actor alive, however skillful, could have achieved such verisimilitude.

As Chemayev looked on, half-listening to Nicolai, a consoling inner voice, a voice of fundamental soundness and fine proletarian sensibilities that had been there all the time but only became audible when essential to mental stability, was offering assurances that beyond the boundaries of his temporary derangement the world was as ever, humdrum and explicable, and no such thing as this could be happening—drugs, alcohol, and stress were to blame—rambling on and on with increasingly insane calmness and irrelevance, like the whispered litany of a self-help guru suggesting seven simple methods for maximizing spiritual potential issuing from a cassette playing over a pair of headphones fallen from the head of a gunshot victim who was bleeding out onto a kitchen floor. Yet simultaneously, in some cramped sub-basement of his brain, urgent bulletins concerning zombie sightings and karmic retribution were being received, warnings that came too late to save the iniquitous murderer of a childhood friend…