Michael Bunker - WICK

Not since Marc Antony stood before the Romans, had a crowd been more receptive, more quiet and attentive, more thriving with pent up energy.

“But I am not here to say that Russia is our enemy! No! WE are our enemy. We who will not unplug from the dialectic and refuse to participate are the enemy. No! Refuse . Never again. Not anymore! No. Simply, No.

“I did not betray my country. I betrayed a handful of wicked men—some Russian, some American—who want to annihilate the world…

“…so that they can have their worldwide revolution.

“America has always been the only bulwark against that worldwide revolution. And whatever side we are on we must admit that. So, no, I did not betray America. I told them the truth about what was about to happen, not because I love America—”

He paused.

“—but because I love truth.”

Volkhov looked around, worn out from speaking, and his eyes seemed to close as he glanced at faces he knew around the room. “I’m tired,” he said, “and I don’t care if these young boys shoot me now. I’ve said what I had to say.”

The old man slowly moved back to his seat and sat down, ignoring the thunderous applause and some boos and hisses from the gathered villagers. Mikail stood and once again froze the commotion with his icy stare.

“Nice speech old man,” he said with no hint of affection or emotion. Then he raised his voice to silence the crowd. “I wanted everyone to hear his confession from his own mouth, and he did not disappoint me. Now, I told you that one of the men up here will die, and I am a man of my word.”

He turned on his heel and walked over to where Clay was sitting, right beside Officer Todd Karagin. He stood over Clay and indicated to the officer with a wave of his hand that he wanted him to hand over the pistol from its holster, snapping his fingers at Todd as though he were a dog. Even Pavlov couldn’t have asked for a faster reaction, and Todd complied, handing the pistol, butt first, to Mikail who made a display of examining it to make sure it was loaded. He checked to see if there was a bullet in the chamber and that the safety was released and then he walked around Clay ominously, peering into his eyes and looking into his soul.

Clay’s pulse had been racing dangerously ever since Mikail had repeated his statement that one of them would die. But now, as he looked into the eyes of the man who was menacing him, he suddenly felt a calm come over him. He felt at one with his surroundings. He looked into the tough exterior Mikail was putting out and he saw a pitiful vulnerability. He thought of the look in the eyes of the red haired man on the bicycle as they’d parted, and the eyes of the young man named Vasily from his cell when they first met. He then watched as the sad vision of Mikail turned around and confronted the room full of peasants, by waving his loaded gun. The impotent threat of the thing. Clay had decided that such a threat could have no long-term hold over his soul anymore. He watched and he felt a surreal sense of calm flood through his body. Is this it?

He tried to think of everyone he loved, but now, with death staring him in the face, he could not. He really could only think of what Volkhov had said, and that he had also been a pawn and a prisoner in a system of lies that his own lusts had enabled. All of this, this microcosm of world conflict and agitations playing itself out in a gymnasium in a little town in New York, was all engendered by his own lust for comforts and stuff, and air-conditioning, and cheap gas, and gadgets, and the soul-killing desire for more . That was the root and the base of it. That was the prison he’d tried to escape when he left Brooklyn. Everything else was just theater. Perhaps dying is the only real freedom . His interpreter had moved away from him and, after pausing for a moment, had returned to her seat. Poor girl. She doesn’t want to get shot by accident. I don’t blame her. He saw her looking at him and he nodded his ‘thank you’ to her.

Mikail spoke again to the assembled villagers, but Clay could not understand him. Suddenly Mikail was walking very rapidly towards him. Clay closed his eyes and bowed his head and he heard the deafening shot from the pistol.

But he didn’t feel anything,

His heart raced again and his eyes opened and his breath caught in his chest.

Looking up, he saw Mikail walking by him and out the door with the pistol still in his hand.

What happened? He looked up and saw the crowd and they were all frozen in shocked disbelief and there were screams and a few people fainted. Clay looked out over the crowd, his ears still ringing from the blast, smoky confusion rising in the air.

He scanned the crowd with his eyes and suddenly felt the thick, wet, fluid seeping into his prison jumper. He thought it might have been urine at first, but then he reached down with his hand and wiped the viscous stuff from his arms, and realized he was soaked in blood. He instantly came into awareness of the people rushing to the figure beside him and he looked to see if Volkhov had been shot, then saw the blood seeping underneath the old man’s chair. Without any particular notion of volition in doing so, Clay stood up to see where Volkhov had been shot.

But Volkhov’s eyes met his and they both looked down into each other’s souls and they confirmed in that look that they each were still alive.

The body of Officer Todd Karagin was writhing on the ground. He had been shot in the head.

It looked like the old man was going to collapse, and Clay motioned to him and Volkhov stood up and they both backed away from the body as it kicked and twitched there on the ground. A young boy came up—he could not have been more than fifteen—and he pulled the trigger on his machine pistol hitting Todd’s body three or four more times and eventually, after an agonizing few seconds, the writhing stopped and Todd’s blood ran into the hardwood of the gymnasium in Warwick.

The crowd watched the frenzy at the podium in silence and no one even noticed the weary, haggard traveler helping the old bearded saint off the podium and into a chair at the edge of the crowd.

An hour later Clay and Volkhov were locked in a cell together. Not the cell Clay had been in earlier, not the Tank, but one of the cluster cells where the young boys had been held prior to Clay’s arrival at Warwick Prison.

Clay and Volkhov talked, but only after a moment or two of silence. Upon entering the cell, they’d sat quietly, collecting their thoughts and breathing. Then they had talked. Clay heard more of the old man’s story and he told a bit of his own. They clung to one another in the exhaustion and euphoria that grips two people who have temporarily escaped death together.

Clay did not know Lev Volkhov, but in a strange way, he felt a kinship with the old man. Somehow he even had affection for him, this man he did not know. Like everyone else in America, Clay had been trained to call every idea that flew in the face of the collective talking points a conspiracy theory . But he’d identified with Volkhov’s speech to such an extent that, except for the details about spying and such, the old man could have been reading the text directly from Clay’s heart. This is not merely to point out that Clay felt at peace with the man ; it is to notice the more important fact that Clay felt at peace within himself in the man’s presence.

He knew that both he and Volkhov had been on a long journey that had led them here. His own journey had not started on the steps of that Brooklyn brownstone the day after Sandy. He’d been traveling all of his life. Clay thought of friends and loved ones—the ones still alive, and the ones he’d lost—and he imagined telling them the story of this journey. Would they believe it? Who knows. Everyone carries their own baggage into a story.