Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“For homosexuals,” said Viktor, leaning in close to me. “Boris, do you need to make a stop?”

The driver dropped us off in front of a club called Absinthe. In the upper windows, I could just make out a stack of pink cubes, a faint dusting of purple light. At the door, a gorgeous woman was turned away; in a rage, she threw her purse into a snowbank.

“How are we going to get Irina through face control?”

I stuck out my tongue.

“Nice,” said Boris. “That will definitely improve your odds.”

“Good thing we’re bribing our way in,” said Viktor. He pointed to the top windows. “They watch them from up there.”

“Who?”

“The rich men. They get private booths up there with one-way mirrors, and they watch the women dance. If they see one they like, they invite her up for a drink.”

We assembled in a line behind red velvet ropes. I stamped my heels against the snow and clamped my hands against each other, trying to keep myself warm. I was thinking that the inadequacy of women’s formal wear in the face of extreme weather was probably a patriarchal conspiracy.

“It is not really an invitation, I shouldn’t think,” said Viktor, rubbing his nose. His time at Oxford had left his English peppered with uniquely British affectations — arabesques on his speech that seemed funny when paired with his accent. “Our blatnoy is up there, I’d bet.”

“Why would he want to meet here?” I said through clenched teeth.

“I think it’s where he spends most of his evenings. We wouldn’t want to disrupt his schedule.”

We watched more. In that top corner, something was skewing the light coming through; a phosphorescent-green entity floated out to the window and then flicked away.

“Do they have — Is that an aquarium in there?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Viktor. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a three-ring circus in there.”

“They only serve sushi up there,” said Boris. “It’s why the world’s oceans are running out of fish.”

“Have you been to a club like that before?”

They laughed. “No,” they said. “But tonight’s the night.”

“And we’re going to make a habit of it someday,” said Viktor.

“What day is that?”

“When we’re rich,” said Viktor. “We’re men, so we don’t have to be pretty. Only rich.”

“Oh, yes?” I said. “And when are you planning on being rich?”

“In the new world order, I suppose,” said Boris.

“I thought we were already in that,” I said, because I was freezing, which was making me feel difficult.

“When Bezetov’s president, he’ll make us his most trusted advisers,” said Boris.

“Ha. When Bezetov’s president, he’ll probably start by cutting the salary for federal employees,” said Viktor.

I looked at them. “Do you guys really believe that?” I said.

They looked at me. “Which part?” said Viktor.

“You actually believe that Aleksandr will be president one day?”

“Sure,” said Boris. “Not this year, sure, we know that. But one day. Look at the Ukraine, you know? It’ll happen here eventually. And when it does, he’s the obvious choice, right?”

Viktor nodded. “He’s been the voice of reason, always. He’s Vaclav Havel. Except he’ll be the chessmaster president instead of the poet president. Uniquely Russian thing.”

“And he’s young still,” said Boris. “Youngish. He’s got a long career ahead of him if he can be careful enough. It’s a long life.”

I looked at them again. Listening to Aleksandr’s speech — as he extolled the virtues of futility, the courage of working against the current — one could believe that nobody thought he would ever succeed. One could believe that failure was, in a way, the point.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose that for some people, it is.”

“What?” said Viktor. “You’ve got your money on someone else? You throwing your hat in the ring? Who else could it be?”

I squinted at him, and when I did, I could see snatches of a future — Aleksandr at the Kremlin, throwing open the windows, firing the security apparatus while the people cheered in the streets — that would happen, if it happened, without me there to watch it. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I guess I really don’t know.”

At the door, Viktor slipped the bouncer a wad of cash. We’d called ahead about this. The bouncer eyed my diaphanous costume bemusedly but took the money. He ushered us through the door. Inside, the music was loud enough to make small reverberations in my sternum. The aquarium, it turned out, was built in to the wall and part of the ceiling. It cast a wash of watery light over the dance floor, and when the fish flicked close to the pane, the light mottled with the psychedelic colors of tropical marine life. The bouncer gestured at a staircase that coiled around the back of the club. “He’s up there,” he said, pointing up the stairs. “He’s always up there.”

The air was overrun with the competing claims of outlandish body sprays; I thought of ads featuring alpine vistas and wild rivers. The club’s floor was covered in a film of some unidentifiable substance that was the color of mercury and the consistency of silt. At the bar, Technicolor cocktails emerged from behind a smoke machine. The whole place had the feeling of modernity gone amok, as though it were the most elite club in outer space, although along the edges, it was a little more baroque: the sweep of the staircase, the heavy velvet tapestries along the back walls, made me feel that I might look up into the rafters and see horrified operagoers gazing at all the nudity through their lorgnettes. In the center of the room, women danced around in enormous translucent cubes. “SexyBack” was playing. The girls crept up to the sides of the cubes and licked the glass. They were wearing silver pasties and shimmery body paint and nothing, discernibly, else. Boris stared, but Viktor pulled him along.

“Another day,” said Viktor.

“In the new world order?” I said.

Our soldier, Valentin Gogunov, was sitting upstairs in a VIP lounge. As Viktor had predicted, he was watching the girls from behind a mirror while drinking an iridescent cocktail. When we closed the doors behind us, the room was corked with silence. We waited. We could feel the throttle of the song under our feet, but we couldn’t hear anything anymore. Gogunov ignored us for several long moments with one finger in his mouth, until, presumably, Justin Timberlake’s distorted hiccupping was over and the girls had stopped dancing. Then he spoke. “Hello,” he said to us, not looking at us. “You are Bezetov’s posse.” A woman in a shred of pink fabric was dancing near a sullen security detail. “If you could go get us some drinks,” Gogunov said to the woman. She pouted momentarily and went.

“The posse,” said Viktor. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Sort of a ragtag assortment, aren’t you?” said Gogunov, turning in his chair to face us. There was something rehearsed in his manner, and I found myself liking him for that. Here was a drug runner who really thought about the impression he was making, and you don’t see that every day. “You look like graduate students,” he said. At this, Viktor cringed.

“You like any of the girls out there?” Gogunov said to him. “We could have them sent up.”

“Not just yet,” said Viktor. “We’d like to do the filming first.”

Gogunov eyed me. “What’s the story with the American?”

I wasn’t sure how he’d been able to tell that I was American before I even spoke.

Viktor looked at me. “What’s the story, American?”

“Mr. Bezetov hired me,” I said. “I’m fixing the syntax on the English subtitles.”