Карл Бистром - 4:17

Her father announced the move on her eleventh birthday. He foresaw an imminent crash that would swamp Russia’s economy and decided to preemptively relocate the family to the States. She only had to listen to her mother complain about the man and his idiot ideas for a couple of years before her father’s prognostication finally bore out. He suddenly transformed, in her mother’s eyes, from a paranoid narcissist into a political genius.

To Anya, her father always seemed the same—remote, disengaged, and sporadically appearing with some proclamation of supposedly high import but little actual impact on her life. Occasionally he’d spare a few words about what a ‘beautiful young lady’ his daughter had become.

From the beginning, Anya ventured into her new life with bluster, costuming herself as an American teen. Anya’s beauty—real, imagined, acknowledged, or denied—became the central focus of her life.

Anya learned to leverage her own appeal. Because of her heavy accent, boys found her alluring and exotic, but they also assumed she was dumb. She took advantage as best she could. Bored with school and under-supervised at home, she eventually found herself caught up in the rave scene.

Anya spent the last few years before the Curse literally dancing every night away in one warehouse or another, drenched in drugs and used by men. Although her allowance could have easily covered all of her whims and expenses, she emphatically refused to pay for anything. Not with money anyway. All of her drugs, all of her cover charges, all of her access to the DJ lofts and backstage scenes were covered by guys. She didn’t have boyfriends. She didn’t date. She just leveraged her wiles and her underfed, teen-aged body to get whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was to escape into the soft, blurry warmth of designer drugs and let her body bounce, bend, and twirl in time to the pounding rhythms of electronic dance music.

After the Curse, during one of her late night conversations with Scott, Anya realized that the rush of the drugs hitting her brain while high-decibel beats pulsed through her body, reminded her of the cosmonaut daydreams from the childhood car rides with her mom.

Anya didn’t pay for anything, but that didn’t mean it came for free. She sold a bit of herself nearly every day in one way or another. She never considered herself a victim—she defiantly owned her decisions and took responsibility for her choices. She thought of it as a kind of double cross. As guys used her, she used them. She played with boys like toys—she’d ride his arm at a party for the price of admission, exchange a blow-job for blow—but then dump him on a dime, leave him standing on the floor in favor of some other piece of meat that caught her fancy.

The constant reinforcement that Anya had no value apart from her attractiveness to men, confirmed her sense of her place in the world—and it felt good to be right. As she was fondled and fucked by boys taking payment for the coke or the ride or the privilege that they provided, she took comfort in the honesty of the exchange, the recognition of her real worth.

She didn’t really enjoy the sex itself, but she thrived on the idea of sex. When some dude fucked her behind the DJ booth in the middle of the party, she got off, not on the sensation of him inside her or pressing her face against the wall, but on the hotness of the scenario—what it must look like from a distance.

On rare occasions, something would bring her back into her body—a cocky redneck slapping her face instead of her ass, or a drunk punk pressing a knife against her neck while he fingered her—something that made her afraid. She lived then, for a moment, in her body, feeling the sensation of shock or panic. A brief spark of life amidst the haze, until she fled from the pain to watch how hot it all was from afar. She developed a taste for those moments—like coffee or whiskey—finding a subtle flavor in the burn.

Anya once told a man that she had a rape fantasy—a man she hoped to trust, maybe even care about. She imagined that they could explore the scenario safely, on her terms. But of course it didn’t happen that way, instead he took her that same night. Punched her when she resisted, pinned her down when she told him no.

She used to think that the lines had been blurred, that it couldn’t be rape if you liked it rough or if you’d fucked the guy before, but now, as she stood clear and tall in a brand new world, she recognized that her entire experience as a woman had been a kind of rape. Everything had been forced, even as she reached for what she wanted. All her desires had been dictated by dicks. In retrospect, the illusion of her agency vanished, like the mystery of a magic trick revealed, leaving no space for wonder.

Anya had no delusions about the Curse. The Curse was a blessing, a great equalizer, an unmitigated and unimpeachable democratization of power. No class differences, no racial prejudices, no national boundaries, no governmental regulations could secure, partition, or amass the power that had been gifted on the population. It only took a few days before she realized the anarchy that had descended on the world was not temporary, but rather the new order. Anya recognized immediately that this meant freedom.

Her first kill, in the coat check at her final rave, struck as a stranger came inside her. After that she executed every man she saw. Their deaths, she realized later, were gifts they hadn’t deserved; she’d inadvertently spared them the horror of the days that followed.

After her brief but satisfying spree of revenge in the chaotic three hours it took for the warehouse to clear out, her deep psychological need to be thinner, tighter, more beautiful, and more attractive, lifted like steam from a bath. Her anorexia disappeared almost overnight. The immediacy of real power, of real equality, of superiority, cleansed her of her self-loathing. The curse washed away the stain that had soiled her soul ever since her first summer in the States, when her ‘uncle’ had groped her so boldly while playing Sardines.

In the first apocalyptic days, she ate. Deeply and thoroughly. Not gorging but fully enjoying the flavor and satisfaction of each nourishing meal. She indulged in the richest foods, tasted the unusual and exotic, sampled everything she could find—until the food ran out. At which point her experience with years of anorexia surfaced as an unexpected strength; as the weeks wore on and the violence settled and people began to group and divide, pair up and die off, she became a figure of fortitude. She didn’t complain about missing meals. She summoned energy that others couldn’t tap. She emerged as an asset amongst crowds of weepers and weaklings. Her value as a clear-minded and ruthless survivor attracted Scott, and their mutual respect, his respect for her, kept them together.

Her bond with Scott led to Peter and his utopian ideas of a new society. Peter had appeared one day walking boldly along the center of a downtown street, head held high—a tall, thin stick figure draped in oversized clothes clomping brashly over debris. She and Scott had been sleeping in a department store bedding section and stepped out just as Peter passed. Anya wanted to hide but Scott told her to wait and he called out.

“Hey!”

Peter dropped his eyes, raised his hands and turned. “Hello friend,” he said. “I’m just passing through but I’m looking for companions.”

“Haven’t seen anyone down here in a few days,” Scott said. “What did your friends look like?”

“Sorry,” Peter said, smiling. Even from across the street his grin was disarming. “I meant I’m looking for people to travel with. I know that some prefer to be alone and if that’s you, no worries, I won’t disclose your position. But if you need a friend, well… I certainly do.”