Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“One of yours?”

“I wish.”

A lone trumpeter tooted into a microphone on the stage at the western end of the park. There was going to be a concert later in the day.

“Do you try to publish them?” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s for me.”

“Maybe you’re just shy,” he said.

“Maybe you’re an exhibitionist.”

“Do you know what you want to do?”

“Fact-checking not a persuasive career?” she said. “I don’t know yet. I’m waiting for a sign. I envy you — you know exactly what you want.”

“It’s brought great triumph.”

“You’re not patient.”

“Can you tell me about fact-checking?” he said cautiously.

“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

He shrugged. “Anything. I’ve been sitting next to you a year and a half — I’ve been sleeping in your bed for a week — and I don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Will you sleep in it this weekend?” she said.

“Depends how well you answer my questions.”

She laughed, the white blocks of her teeth gleaming in the sun. “Fact-checking?” she said, leaning back on her palms. “I don’t know. You check the facts in the story.” She shrugged.

“The piece you’re checking now.”

“A missing painting at a museum in Italy. But you can’t reach anyone half the time because of their farkakte siestas. Also, ask me if I speak Italian. And Sheila, God bless her, doesn’t remember the curator’s name. But she’s embarrassed to hand in incomplete copy, so she makes it up . Instead of leaving it blank, she makes up the curator’s name. Oh, Arianna will find it. Ask me how many hours I spent this morning hunting down Massimo the False Curator.”

“But how does it work, you know?” he said. “Like, what sends up… a red flag?”

“A red flag,” she repeated. “Well, they write the story. Or let’s say they report a story. For instance, last week: Lehman Brothers. Company of the decade, blah blah. Simons reports the story. I have to go through the entire thing and underline everything that seems like it could be a fact. And then check it.”

“But what counts as a fact?”

“A fact? Mr. Grayson would kill me if he heard me saying this out loud, but — a fact is anything that can piss somebody off by being wrong. That’s why stories about a murder in the forgotten tribe of Waka-waka on the lost island of Wango-dango are actually the easiest check, in a way. Those people don’t read Century . They don’t care if you counted wrong how many stripes of cow dung they have on their faces.”

“But is there anything you don’t need to check?”

“Personal impressions. Conjecture. Things that can’t be checked can’t be wrong, you know? If there’s no record, it can’t be checked. I’m sorry— why are you so interested in this?” He couldn’t see her face, but he knew its expression, the way her eyes grew narrow when she was skeptical.

“I’m interested in you,” Slava said quickly, and leaned up to kiss her.

FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2006

Israel lived in a grotto-like basement apartment on Quentin Road, across from a Russian grocery and near a squat outer-borough edition of the public library. The living room was through a galley kitchen sheeted with the usual gloomy linoleum. Mailbox-sized packs of saltines and tuna-can skyscrapers peered from dusty cupboards — complimentary provisions from the local synagogue. The same dreck piled in Grandfather’s cabinets, only his home nurses made Ukrainian magic from it. On Israel’s wall was a pharmacy calendar, a bottle of Lipitor reclining suggestively in place of a supermodel. There were four identical calendars from other Russian pharmacies neatly stacked underneath, as if Israel were going to do the year over.

“My small castle,” Israel said, spreading his arms and stepping into the living room. It was a line from an old Soviet film about a man who returned home to the wrong apartment because the concrete apartment blocks all looked the same, and fell in love with the woman who lived there. Israel was short and round, a pair of dark blue gym trousers keeping the basketball of his belly in place. His face was as seamed as a topographical map, the curved headland of a nose holding the landscape together. It bucked slightly when Slava introduced himself.

Slava had ignored Israel for a week. His original plan was to ignore him forever. But the week after his call, instead of combing the Charlotte Observer and the East Hampton Patch , Slava invented three flubs and went to search for his grandmother in the Belarus forest. The night that Arianna had fallen asleep in his bed, his grandmother had come to him. A mercilessly brief visitation, but for forty-five minutes, time had stopped so that he could enter a void and talk with the old woman. As long as he kept writing about Grandmother, Arianna would remain asleep in his bed, the sun would remain banished outside his window, and the city would be kept from reaching the following day. But then the story came to its natural end. That was the mercilessness of a story; you couldn’t keep it going beyond where it wanted to end, even to keep your grandmother alive. So, he wanted to travel with his grandmother once more. However, when he tried to write something about her without intending it as a narrative for the restitution fund, without Grandfather providing the spark of a few truthful details, nothing would come. The story had no purpose, no framework. It made Slava feel wretched; what kind of writer was he if he couldn’t invent on his own?

On the third day of inaction, he lifted his phone. Israel hadn’t called back, and Slava would have sooner knocked on every door in Brooklyn than ask Grandfather, at whose cavalierness he intended to remain furious. Grandfather had told him that both he and Israel had gone to a Dr. Korolenko. “Korolenko gout knee problems Brooklyn nyc,” Slava typed, and there was the number: 718.

“Dr. Korolenko’s office, you’re being greeted by Olga.”

“Hi, Olga. My grandfather asked me to call and confirm his appointment?”

“Sure. What day?”

“He doesn’t remember, of course. He thinks it’s next Wednesday or Friday. Definitely not the first half of the week.”

“His name?”

“Israel Abramson. Do you see it?”

“Israel Arkadievich! He’s one of our favorites. But no, nothing in the book for Abramson next week.”

“No, he definitely said Wednesday or Friday.”

“Maybe we made a mistake,” Olga said. “I have a free slot Wednesday morning, if that works for him.”

“Well, when do you have him?”

“I don’t have him till September.”

“You know what, just leave him there. I’ll explain it to him. No, he should remember these things. I bought him a little notebook for his birthday expressly for this purpose, and do you think he’s opened it?”

She laughed. “Go easy on your elders! It’s only been two weeks since his birthday!”

“Yes, of course,” Slava said, cursing himself for the unnecessary arabesque. “I forget he’s an old man sometimes. You know how it is — you don’t want them to get old. Anyway, Olya, just one last thing. He said last time the ambulette was waiting for him a block up? Can you tell me if you have the right address?”

“I have 2070 Quentin Road, is that wrong?”

“No, that’s right. I don’t know why the driver was on the wrong block.”

“We’ve got someone else at 2130, maybe there was a mix-up. I’ll check.”