Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

“I don’t have to show you anything.”

“Listen, this is plutonium. Do you know what it is?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Do you know what’s it’s used for?”

“I don’t got to know. All I got to know is that people will buy it. That’s the free market.”

“Idiot! Who are you going to sell it to?”

“Private enterprise. They’ll buy it from us just like they’d buy it from you. And did you call me an idiot?”

“Listen, I’m just trying to explain to you”—Shiv thought for a moment—“the material’s radiological properties.”

Shiv was too close to be surprised, it happened too quickly. In one moment he was trying to reason with Andrei, intimidate him, and was only beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the problem, and had just observed, in a casual way, that the entire time of his life up to the moment he had stepped out of Timofey’s car seemed equal in length to the time since then, and in the next moment he was unconscious, bleeding from a large wound in his head.

“Well, fuck you,” said Andrei, or, more literally, “go to a fucked mother.” He had never shot a man before, and he was surprised and frightened by the blood, which had splattered all over Shiv’s clothes, and even on himself. He had expected that the impact of the shot would have propelled Shiv off the bridge, but it hadn’t. Shiv lay there at his feet, bleeding against the rear tire. The sound of the little gun was tremendous; it continued roaring through the woods long after Andrei had brought the weapon to his side.

Neither brother said anything for a while. In fact, they weren’t brothers, as everyone believed, but were stepbrothers, as well as in-laws, in some kind of complicated way that neither had ever figured out. From Yegor’s silence, Andrei guessed that he was angry with him for shooting Shiv. They hadn’t agreed to shoot him beforehand. But Yegor had allowed him to carry the gun, which meant Andrei had the right to make the decision. Yegor couldn’t second-guess him, Andrei resolved, his nostrils flaring.

But Yegor broke the long silence with a gasped guffaw. In the bark of his surprise lay a tremor of anxiety. “Look at this mess,” he said. “You fucking near tore off his head.”

Andrei could tell his brother was proud of him, at least a bit. He felt a surge of love.

“Well, fuck,” said Yegor, shaking his head in wonder. “It’s really a mess. How are we going to clean it up? It’s all over the car. Shit, it’s on my pants.”

“Let’s just take the stuff and leave.”

Yegor said, “Go through his pockets. He always carries a roll. I’ll check the other guy.”

“No, it’s too much blood. I’ll go through the other guy’s pockets.”

“Look, it’s like I’ve been telling you, that’s what’s wrong with this country. People don’t accept the consequences of their actions. Now, you put a hole in the guy’s head, you go through his pockets.”

Andrei scowled but quickly ran his hands through Shiv’s trousers, jacket, and coat anyway. The body stirred and something like a groan bubbled from Shiv’s bloodfilled mouth. Some of the blood trickled onto Andrei’s hand. It was disgustingly warm and viscid. He snatched his hand away and wiped it on Shiv’s jacket. Taking more care now, he reached into the inside jacket pocket and pulled out a gold-colored money clip with some rubles, about ten twenty dollar bills, a few tens, and a creased five. He slipped the clip and four or five of the twenties into his pocket and, stacking the rest on the car’s trunk, announced, “Not much, just some cash.”

Yegor emerged from the car. “There’s nothing at all on this guy, only rubles.”

Andrei doubted that. He should have pocketed all of Shiv’s money.

“I wonder what the stuff’s like,” said Yegor, taking the closed canister from Shiv’s lap.

He placed it next to the money and pulled off the top, revealing inside a coarse, silvery gray powder. Yegor grimaced. It was nothing like he had ever seen. He wet his finger, poked it into the container, and removed a fingerprint’s worth. The stuff tasted chalky.

“What did he call it?” he asked.

“Plutonium. From Bolivia, he said.”

Andrei reached in, took a pinch of the powder, and placed it on the back of his left hand. He then closed his right nostril with a finger and brought the stuff up to his face. He loved doing this. From the moment he had pulled the gun on Shiv he had felt as if he were in Chicago or Miami. He sniffed up the powder.

It burned, but not in the right way. It was as if someone—Yegor—had grabbed his nostril with a pair of hot pliers. The pain shot through his head like a nail, and he saw stars. Then he saw atoms, their nuclei surrounded by hairy penumbrae of indeterminately placed electrons. The nuclei themselves pulsed with indeterminacy, their masses slightly less than the sum of their parts. Bombarded by neutrons, the nuclei were drastically deformed. Some burst. The repulsion of two highly charged nuclear fragments released Promethean, adamantine energy, as well as excess neutrons that bounced among the other nuclei, a cascade of excitation and transformation.

“It’s crap. It’s complete crap. Crap, crap, crap!”

Enraged, Andrei hoisted the open container, brought it behind his head, and, with a grunt and a cry, hurled it far into the night sky. The canister sailed. For a moment, as it reached the top of its ascent beyond the bridge, it caught a piece of moonlight along its sides. It looked like a little crescent moon itself, in an eternal orbit above the earth, the stuff forever pluming behind it. And then it very swiftly vanished. Everything was quiet for a moment, and then there was a distant, voluptuous sound as the container plunged into the river. As the two brothers turned toward each other, one of them with a gun, everything was quiet again.

Thickened by a myopia left undiagnosed, a mist gauzed the small town, rounding the forms of the low, pale concrete buildings and the naked trees. The trees’ branches were brown, smelling of color in a shadowed, variously grayed landscape. Patches of mud rose from the depths of the snow and ice. The horizon loomed, a wall only a few paces ahead. A truck drifted down the street, powered by a breeze. Otherwise, the town’s capacity for motion was lost. The smoke from a chimney froze, curled like a beckoning finger.

The girl, Anzhelika (the stress rested on the penultimate syllable), was entirely enveloped in warmth, more warmth than could have been latent within her ragged coat. The heat dampened her hair and the hollows under her arms. This odd, close nimbus, which had swelled around her in the course of the day, was composed of two envelopes, the innermost a soundless vacuum. The outer envelope had been fed on the squeal of desks swinging open on their hinges, the dull, brute clatter of shoe leather in a hallway, and the brassy din of a schoolyard. She heard the clamor only at a distance. Her own shoes, loosely wrapped in oversized galoshes, pressed silently into the tender late-winter road, leaving a precise record of the weight she brought to this world.

Little Kolya was playing with some boys in the gaping alleyway between two houses, poking a stick at something in an oily puddle. He was ten years old, the son of Aunt Olya and Uncle Fedya, who lived in the front room. Anzhelika occasionally watched over him when Aunt Olya was out, and even helped him once with his mathematics homework, though she was not good at sums at all. He had paid close, devoted attention, contemplating every question at length. Anzhelika had liked being in that room, working at Uncle Fedya’s rolltop desk alongside the dark mahogany wardrobe that had been constructed in Vilna in 1879, according to an inscription inside the mirrored door. Kolya had showed the inscription to her; it was the year of Comrade Stalin’s birth. The room smelled sweetly of the polish with which Uncle Fedya cleaned his boots.