Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“Paid?” Slava said. “No.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Slava laughed and said nothing. They sat watching the street, the occasional car blazing by, leaving the echo of Russian songs in the air. Two elderly men in house slippers shuffled past, arm in arm, evening walk. “They’ll freeze off their balls sitting on the pavement like that,” one said to the other as they passed.

“What’s the story about?” Slava said. He pointed at the bags. Oleg nodded, and Slava started making another roll.

“It’s this chip that goes in your head,” Oleg said. His large black eyes became larger. “It’s a trip you can take wherever you want. Another country, another planet. In your mind, I mean — it’s like you’re really there, and when you get back, you have the memory of being there. Without your body ever going there, you understand?” Slava nodded. “Do you understand?” Oleg repeated.

“I understand, I understand,” Slava said.

“But this guy gets stuck,” Oleg went on. “And it’s about him trying to get back to earth.”

“Like Odysseus,” Slava observed. This drew no recognition from Oleg. “And what happens? He gets home?”

Oleg gave Slava a wolfish grin, bit into his new roll, and said, “You have to read it!”

Slava nodded admiringly. He liked sitting there — the day had lost some of its heat; he was not expected anywhere; he was briefly invisible.

Oleg stopped chewing. “Can I read one?” he said. “A letter.”

Slava looked over. “Sure. You just have to keep it between us.”

“I promise,” Oleg said, his eyes full of seriousness, then stuck out his hand, and Slava took it. The skin was moist, a newborn’s.

“If you get good grades,” Slava said, “your parents won’t bother you about your stories.”

Oleg nodded gloomily.

“You’ll go to college, won’t you?” Slava said.

“I’m just going to Brooklyn College.”

“Go farther.”

“With what money?”

Slava tossed into the roadway a fleck of pavement he had been working loose with his nail. “Write a letter,” he said. “That’ll be enough for a semester somewhere. You can figure out the rest.”

“My grandparents don’t qualify,” Oleg said. “We’re not even Jews.”

The Dolins had conveniently neglected to share that they were having theirs made up, at least that.

“In this letter, you can be whatever you want,” Slava said cautiously.

Oleg, his face darkened with doubt, nodded. If Slava said to stop eating, return home immediately, and confess to his parents that the practical person they were grooming was cuckolding their plans, Oleg would have done it. So this was what it was like to have a younger brother.

Slava brought the papers to Oleg’s eyes. “You see this?” he said. “‘Curled from his cigarette like silver panty hose’? Change ‘panty hose’ to ‘stocking.’ Isn’t that better?”

Oleg nodded.

“You don’t have to agree because I said so,” Slava said. “Is it better?”

Oleg nodded again. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Slava said. “It just is. Better yet: ‘A stocking of smoke curled from his cigarette.’ Okay, finish this sentence: ‘The heat hangs in the air like a—.’”

“Like a stocking,” Oleg said obediently.

“No, no, something new. Cigarette smoke curls like a stocking; heat doesn’t look like a stocking. It doesn’t look like anything. It’s invisible, but it won’t go away.”

“The heat hangs in the air like a bad thought,” Oleg said.

Slava clapped him on the back. “You see?”

The boy smiled diffidently.

During this period, Slava continued to finish his nights at 322 West Ninetieth Street. Arianna didn’t volunteer to spend the night at his apartment, and though he occasionally reminded her of the unfairness of this arrangement, in truth he had come to prefer her apartment, only that his refrigerator was full, as Slava had to economize on lunch, and hers was congenitally empty. She ate only takeout, Slava parting with more cash in a night together than on his own in a week, though he didn’t bring this up to Arianna, and she never seemed to think of it.

The rest of her apartment, however, was filled with irrefutable evidence of human habitation. None of it was plain — even the wooden lattice that the original builders had installed to give the studio the sense of a one-bedroom; Arianna had painted it white and carved the tops into the crown of a skyline. Then she dotted the panes with black marker all the way down to the floor — windows. “This is what I do when I veg,” she explained. “I like to think about what’s going on in the windows. What’s going on in this window?” Her nail tapped a black dot. “They’re arguing,” she answered herself.

She loved the city. It made her quiet — her words — an inconceivable idea to Slava because it was so incredibly noisy, though it was this comment by her that made him notice, returning late from Brooklyn one Sunday night, the stone prairie into which the Upper West Side turned at that hour, the bright vitrines gleaming madly for no one. New York gets weary, and New York does sleep. She returned to Brentwood twice a year: Passover and Rosh Hashanah. She couldn’t bear it any more frequently — its empty streets made her too lonely, refilled her with the uncomfortable noise of her childhood and youth. Even though she had lived in New York for seven years and knew the parts of it that she wanted to know — she rarely left Manhattan — she continued the introductory walks she had taken as a new arrival.

He envied her love of New York, a feeling he had never experienced for it, or any place, having left Minsk too soon to have any feelings about it save for an unfocused dread of bodily harm due to his being a Jew and the magic scent of the lilac bushes that clotted the yard. Perhaps that was why he didn’t mind coming to her, he would reason as he lay in bed next to her, she long asleep. In the small space of her home, the cat darting around like a fiend, the television on to no discernible purpose except to vanquish the silence, he could draw off the sense of home she felt in the city, the way poor people in poor countries got light by siphoning from the municipal wires. He never spoke about this to her. He was resentful to a degree; it wasn’t as if she was born there. She was an émigré, too, of sorts. But her relocation was to a place that was meant for her all along — somehow she had sniffed out the right destination all the way from Los Angeles. Slava had neither liked nor disliked the place he was born. He noticed it as a trout notices water. He understood that he was in some place only when he was let out at JFK. And this place he hadn’t chosen, the way Arianna had chosen New York. Did that mean he had to keep looking? But he couldn’t smell what place was right for him. Instead of exhausting him into sleep, this pinballing forced an ever wearier wakefulness, and many mornings he woke blearily tired.

The only thing that Slava preferred back on his side of the island was its river. Sometimes, before heading to work, he would take a detour and head across the park before heading downtown to the office. Across this river, if you kept going past Queens and Long Island, eventually, you would come to Europe and then, a little beyond it, Slava’s Minsk. Was it any more his by now than New York? Over there, he would be finished with army service by now, probably married, probably a child, probably two. Would Grandmother still be alive in this replacement life? he wondered. Maybe the blood from transfusions went bad only if you took it outside of the Soviet Union. Maybe the blood didn’t work anywhere else.

Arianna had asked once what he was working on all those evenings at the office. Trying to look her in the eyes, he said he didn’t want to say that much about it, would that be all right? It was a family story but unformed, and he didn’t want to jinx it. She nodded and ran a hand down his cheek. She never asked the question again. He burned with guilt mixed with satisfaction at the mastery of the lie: He had looked her in the eyes, asked her permission not to explain, ostensibly left it in her hands; of course she would do what he asked. He had thought hewing as close to the truth as the lie could afford — a family story — would lessen his burden, but it increased, as if he were teasing her without her knowing.