Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Look,” he said, leaning close to me, and he smelled unexpectedly delicate, like expensive shampoos in lavender and men’s cologne in some scent that purports to be masculine. “We don’t need to decide anything today. I’ve already told you who I am. I am looking for my old friend.”

“You really haven’t told me who you are. Why are you looking for him?”

“And why are you?” he countered.

I was quiet for a moment. “Because my father knew him, almost,” I said. “Because I couldn’t stay home.” I was aware of how I sounded — simultaneously lame and wildly suspicious, an incompetent spy with a ridiculous cover.

“Okay,” said Nikolai. “Something about your father. Fine, sure.” He handed me his card, which suggested he had several addresses and an implausible number of mobile telephones. “Call me anytime, if you decide we could work together.”

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. Nikolai heaved his mass to standing. “Well. Perhaps we’ll be in touch. In the meantime,” and he slammed a few rubles down on the table to cover his coffee, “remind your customer that you’re supposed to be registered.”

He plodded out of the café, leaving his half-drunk coffee still steaming on the table. It was only after he’d left and walked out into the misting gray afternoon that I thought to wonder how he’d known where to find me.

After that, it got harder to sit still. The mosquitoes in my hostel kept me up; I spent long nights hitting myself in the ears and hissing profanities, but nothing worked. Welts rose on my knees and calves and feet. I looked maimed, leprotic. I thought of all this as St. Petersburg’s little way of telling me to go the fuck home, idiot. But I didn’t. The bites puckered and exploded and left scars the color of dust, but still I did not go home. And by midsummer I was inured to them — along with much else.

The air grew dense with littoral winds. The white nights came, and the skies stayed pearly and cloud-streaked until dawn. It was impossible to sleep. Down on the Neva, kids sat around smoking and tossing fire, and I found myself down there with them — walking along the banks, absorbed in that dazzling azure sky, staring at the upraised bridges that looked like the forked jaws of a felled beast. The Neva, so I read, would not flood this year. It flooded with some regularity, when low-pressure regions in the North Atlantic moved onshore and created seiche waves that brought the river up too high. It had flooded catastrophically in 1824, in 1924, in 1998. I’d stare at the Neva — with its reflected floodlights and shimmering midnight sun — and try to believe that its beauty was just a cover. And I liked to imagine it for some reason: the tempestuous twisting of water into a seashell spiral, the creation of mammoth standing waves, the river rising to the bridge until it buckled and broke. There was something terrible about any disaster, of course. But maybe there was something worse about things you could see coming and could not stop: celestial flash of earthbound meteor, or terminal diagnosis in tiny font, or cyclonic lows on the Baltic Sea.

At nights in the hostel that summer, I’d lie on my bed and remember. I would think about my father, and my memories of him always unspooled backward, from most recent to most distant. First, his rasping shallow breaths right before we turned up the morphine; then the staggering ghostly men of his ward in the years of his institutionalization; then his juddering mouth and his carved-out eyes and his hands, which threaded endlessly forward as though obsessively stringing an invisible rosary. The way he’d sit at the piano and play nothing, then aimless trills, then flawed Mozart sonatas. And before that: indoor soccer when my mother wasn’t home, chess games after dinner, hugging trees well after it had gone out of vogue.

At the end of his life, I remember staring into my father’s eyes and trying to make them the eyes of the man who’d taught me world capitals and music. But I couldn’t. My imagination failed me. The man who died as my father was not the man who lived as my father. I don’t think he would disagree with me on this.

I would be thirty-one in the fall. That meant I would be entering the three-year time frame in which 70 percent of people with my CAG number start to exhibit symptoms. After onset, there can be variation in the progression of symptoms, in the length of time certain competencies are maintained, in life span. But I wasn’t interested in gambling on these details. A disease that takes away your cognitive abilities also takes away your capacity to value your cognitive abilities. You can decide ahead of time that you never want to be a zombie person, that once you can’t write a sentence or tell a joke you are gone, the part of you that is unique and recognizable and human is gone, and that there is no value to life as a nonperson once you’ve experienced life as a person. But by the time you get to that point, you don’t think that way anymore, if you think at all. By the time you’re there, you’re interested only in being warm, in being well fed, in being pain-free. Your demands are modest.

So strategizing your own exit ahead of time is a challenge. You have to outsmart your future self; somehow ensure that the priorities of today inform the choices of tomorrow. And you have no partner to rely on in this, since nobody — nobody — will help you. Even your own mind will someday turn on you and sell you out.

So I lay on my bed, those early nights in St. Petersburg, after Nikolai first found me, and started thinking seriously about my options. I didn’t know what I’d see first — a lurch or a lunge or a throbbing jerk of my head — but whenever my body started driving without my steering, I’d know. And as the days grew longer and longer — my bank account emptying like a hemorrhaging organ, the nights growing luridly bright past midnight, the drinkers outside my window shouting into the dawns the hoarse joy of being young and alive — I’d start to imagine. And then my hands shook so hard that I’d wonder if they would ever stop before starting again.

Leningrad, 1982

A year passed, although Aleksandr would never be able to fully account for it. He began playing independently, he knew; he acquired a useless second, Dmitry, who’d been expelled from the academy for relentless mediocrity; he registered in some tournaments around the city, where he avoided the gaze of any academy students who were playing or, increasingly, watching. During the spring and summer, he played brilliantly, apparently, on more than one occasion — he knew because he could look the games up on microfiche and, later, on the Internet. At the Leningrad City Chess Championship, he’d done tricks nobody had seen coming, he’d outwitted people who were older and more accomplished and more applauded. But his chess games had become like the functions of his autonomic nervous system — no more joyful or willful just because they were miraculously complicated. He regarded chess as his very best party trick. Something about living around the edges of the journal had made Aleksandr lose chess. And something about losing Elizabeta had made him not care.

It was startling how completely an absent person could fill the empty spaces in your brain — how all the uncharted dark matter could illuminate to reveal nothing but the same face, the same voice, carbon-copied over and over like a piece of underground artwork. It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility. It was nonsense, he’d be the first to admit, to pine for a year for a woman whose moment in his life had been incidental, glancing, as implausible as a meteor shower or a brain aneurysm. She had bobbed to the surface of his life, then disappeared again. She’d hovered for half an hour above his personal lake of loneliness, a sea monster in a smudged photograph, probably not even real. She’d been abovewater for minutes. She’d barely even waved.