Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

It was late that night when my wife came home. She was distracted. She was hungry, angry with her choreographer. On the top floor I prepared an omelette. I chopped onions. She prowled the crowded kitchen, unaware that the house had been excavated, its secrets parcelled up. She ate with knife and fork, talking at me; she did not search my face. Later we lay in bed, side by side. I wondered what I would write in a letter to Henry Solomonoff, to Missy and Bugs Rusk, if I were writing letters. Would I apologize to the Rosens, send them schematics for a new theremin? Would I thank the Bolotines? Lavinia stretched her arm across my chest. I gazed at the ceiling. The clocks were all ticking. “Let’s take a holiday to Haiti,” she said to me. “For the winter.”

We were in a house of dreams. When I was gone, Walter Rosen would take it back.

At 11:28 p.m., into the darkness, the doorbell buzzed. Lavinia stirred. “Ignore it,” she said. I remained frozen. After a few minutes, the door buzzed again. I got up. “What is it?” she said.

“The door.”

“What time is it?”

“Never mind,” I said.

I put on my trousers and belt. I put on the jacket I had set aside. Lavinia shifted. In a parched voice she asked, “Are you getting dressed?”

I tied my shoes. “Yes.”

The door buzzed again.

“For the door,” I said.

She propped herself up on her elbows. I went downstairs, all the way downstairs, drawing open the door and pulling in all that moonlight. Three men awaited me. “Comrade,” they said.

I let out a deep breath. “Here you are,” I said. They hesitated when I invited them inside. They wanted to know if I was ready

“Yes,” I said, “just a moment.”

They said we had to leave. “Yes,” I said again. I stood in my parlour, looking around, unsure of what I was seeking, what I was waiting for. I heard Lavinia’s voice from upstairs. I called her. I rubbed my face. I gave the men a suitcase that I had hidden in a broom closet. It held more clothes, my shaving things. I gave them a case containing a Skylark Mk II typewriter. They took these things without speaking. Then Lavinia was on the stairs behind us. She wore a shawl across her shoulders. She was long and young, ravishing. She seemed like something borrowed, in that moment; something I had borrowed and was now returning. Her brow was knotted, her wide hazel eyes hardening.

“I have to go,” I told her.

“Go where?”

“They are taking me away,” I said. “I do not know when I will be back.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I do not know if I will be back.”

She came down the stairs. “What do you mean you do not know if you will be back? Who are these men?”

The men took a step toward me, instantly an entourage.

“We must go,” one of them said to me, to her, in accented English.

“Where are you taking my husband?” Lavinia demanded, in Russian now.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Lev!”

They had taken me by the arms and were guiding me to the door. She came at us, tried to pull them from my shoulders. She was stronger than they expected and abruptly we were standing together, in the night’s halo, the two of us.

“I have to go,” I murmured, and I saw her jaw set, saw frozen water at her eyes. “I have to go.” With this last speaking, she suddenly became smaller.

She kissed me once, fiercely. She had questions in her face.

“I love you,” she said. Her glance flicked to the other men.

“Good night,” I said. I swallowed.

She grabbed the scruff of my coat and stayed that way, holding me, until one of the men removed her hand.

I went away with them.

WE DROVE THROUGH the city’s darkness. Young men on street corners, holding cigarettes. Dogs in the middle of the road. Hobos in doorways, curled on their sides. Neon signs spelled words. POMADE, CABARET, CHOP SUEY, each in red, each somehow a goodbye. The men I was with didn’t speak. I wondered whether I had seen my last familiar face? Was I already given over to strangers? New York flickered outside my window. Now I was thirsty for farewells.

We dipped into the Holland Tunnel.

I leaned back in my seat. I looked at the wedding ring on my finger. How long would I wear it? Perhaps they would send for Lavinia after all. Perhaps Lavinia would follow, in a fortnight, her trunk packed with sundresses. Perhaps she would dwell with me in the hills beside Lake Ladoga, planting dill and tarragon, while I strained with wires and tubes and the distance of you.

We emerged in New Jersey, where the sky was pricked with twenty thousand stars. The road lifted us up and set us down and we followed the bend of the water. It was like a sea. Slowly, I remembered: it is a sea, it is a sea. The lights streaked and glittered, New York City across the bay, and then everything beautifully deafened by the roar of a locomotive running beside the road, fine and sparking, iron. I realized I was going home. Home to Russia, the motherland, canyons and cities and three million rivers, rushing. The Physico-Technical Institute. Sasha and Helena. Blini from the stall on Kolokolnaya Street. Springtime and the bitter winter that makes enchantment out of candlelight.

I could see the boats now, in the harbour. They were as big as mountains. One of them was mine. The men in the car were more attentive, roused somehow, looking. The tires beat a rhythm on the road. I folded my hands in my lap. We twisted into the docks, stopped at a sign, wheeled round and into the shadow of the Stary Bolshevik . Lights shone down on us. The men got out of the car and I followed them, alive in my shoulders and ankles; the wind was everywhere, whipping, salted. Lev was there, talking to a man in uniform. I shook his hand. I was smiling now, girded. He introduced me to the captain, to the ship’s master. “Our log keeper,” Lev said. “That is what you are.”

“Log keeper,” I said.

The captain spoke with a Samaran accent. “Assistant log keeper.”

“It is my pleasure,” I said, bowing my head.

Lev watched me with a certain skepticism. I did not care about his skepticism; I knew who I was, where I was headed; I knew what I carried in my heart. I was Lev Sergeyvich Termen.

“My equipment is all here?”

“Show him,” said the captain.

The man who appeared at my elbow was like a polar bear. “Follow me,” Red said, and he led me up the gangplank into the body of the ship. Just as I passed through the bolted doorway I turned and glimpsed Lev with two other men — were they the Karls? — and I think there was a huddled warehouse and the silver imprint of a city spire, and in a certain way there were countless other figures, friends, enemies, and a thousand acquaintances, Katia, Jin and Nate Stone, Rosemary Ilova and George Gershwin, perhaps Pash, watching from the darkness, as I disappeared into the Stary Bolshevik .

I would not come out until we landed. Red would show me the room with my equipment, the theremins packed in crates, the boxes of files, and he would show me the room I am now inside, eggshell blue, with its tidy cot. I remember the key turning in the lock. I remember the heave of the ship as its engines wakened. Like that, so simply, like a folded piece of paper, I was gone.

ONE DAY SOON I WILL arrive at the Leningrad port. I do not know what will await me. I do not know the forces that will swiftly act upon my being. They will let me out of this room and I will go to the mouth of the vessel, shake hands with my captain, feel no more seasickness. After weeks of waves I will wobble on the pier. I will do my duty. I will build new wonders.