Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

In the end, it was a calculated risk. Failure, they must have figured, would be worth little. And success would be worth quite a lot.

On the plane, Aleksandr imagines, they fell ten thousand feet in ten seconds, and it was the usual scene: dropping oxygen masks and flight attendants shouting at everybody to get down, get down . The people clasped hands with strangers, social protocol made suddenly, aggressively irrelevant. They prayed in six languages. They shuddered, cried, threw up. Was Irina scared? Of course she was scared. But the thing was (he thinks, he hopes), she was used to it.

They angled over the water, and there was a horrible silence from the cockpit, and then the plane came undone — a great unraveling of pieces, bits of people’s lives coming unhinged along with it. The windows exploded, and magazines and gum wrappers, teddy bears and toothbrushes, eye makeup kits and rosaries and foreign affairs magazines were whipped out and into the water. The bags were drowned, and later, what emerged was absurd and mundane — tennis shoes, self-help books, bras. Nothing as poetic and tragic as a tiny baby shoe, or a wedding ring still in its case, or an unpublished novel. People died with their lives intact, in full swing, not yet ready to be reduced to symbols or eulogies.

And Irina? Did she die praying, or cursing, or cursing herself for praying? Did she hold the frail hand of the old woman sitting next to her, stroke the arm of the girl her own age? Did she go down flirting with a handsome stranger? Did she cry? Did she scream? Did she learn finally, abruptly, whatever it was she’d needed to learn?

We don’t know, and Aleksandr doesn’t care to imagine that part.

We do know the oceanic light came in gusts. It was sheer white before they hit the water. At the end, in a way — like some sad things, although not all sad things — he likes to imagine it was beautiful.

The embassy was notified. The American press liked the story of an American girl who ran away to find an adventure and a fate. Viktor got no mention on any television program, American or otherwise, although Novaya Gazeta wrote him a nice obituary. Aleksandr cried over it — partly because that poor young man was dead, and partly because there were so many things that the newspaper had discovered that he had never asked and thus never known.

Interest in Irina spiked and subsided in a week. The final Harry Potter book was released, and the world was momentarily awash with the kind of worldwide goodwill toward men that usually accompanies only the Olympics or international terrorism. A month after her death, her name had dropped back into obscurity, and anyone who remembered her could conjure up only the sketchiest of narratives — the story of some American girl who had run away to Russia and died there for reasons that nobody remembered or perhaps ever knew.

For Aleksandr, there were a few drawbacks to Irina’s brief posthumous notoriety. It raised certain suspicions in certain corners, suspicions that never fully went away. But for the most part, his stock rose modestly after the crash, both at home and abroad. Everybody knew who the intended target had been, and even people who hated Aleksandr admitted that he’d been lucky to escape. (On BBC, Misha, who was now a regular commentator, called Aleksandr “almost suspiciously lucky.”) Everybody liked the notion of the government trying to kill someone and failing, and some even seemed to regard the whole project with a degree of baffled amusement. Later, on CNN, a geriatric host would compare Aleksandr to a cartoon bird who perpetually outsmarts a malicious wild dog — and for the first time on live television, Aleksandr was utterly nonplussed and did not know what to say.

For weeks, Aleksandr thought constantly, unendurably of Irina and Viktor. Their names were in his ears, in his skull. They were in every synapse in his circuitry. He couldn’t shake them out no matter what he tried. And Viktor and Irina were not the only people to whom Aleksandr owed his tenuous continued existence: they assumed their places alongside Ivan, and the three of them gazed at him with unswerving and disappointed reproach. It was too much: there was an entire aggrieved population in his head.

He sat and looked out the window for God knows how many nights in a row. He watched an escarpment of black descend upon the city, over and over and over again.

Boris came back almost immediately. He arrived on a sunny afternoon to find Aleksandr still in his pajamas, letting rings of cold coffee seep onto the stacks of newspapers that were piling up around the apartment. Boris eyed him up and down and said, “None of this looks very presidential.” Through raw eyes, Aleksandr stared at Boris and thought of the long life ahead of him — the long life of a survivor. It was his penance for being right, or his reward for being scared, depending on how you thought about it.

Then they sat in silence watching Channel One and counting the lies until the sun went down and the only light was coming from the television.

It was some days after the crash — maybe seven, maybe ten: Aleksandr would never remember precisely because his brain stopped forming new memories for a while — that he heard a knock at the door. Even though it was foolish to have done so, he’d put Vlad on paid leave, and he was living alone in the apartment, issuing statements to the sliver of free press whenever they called him, writing letters to all the editors in the West, living around the ghosts of the many people who had lately taken their leave. Vlad had told him how stupid this was, and he’d known it was true. But he couldn’t bear the thought of living with only his armed guard — he imagined Vlad manning the kitchen with a machine gun while he made spaghetti in his slippers. He couldn’t stand it. Not now, especially not now.

The knock came in the evening. Aleksandr had concluded his e-mails and teleconferences for the day and had settled into his new evening routine of reading his death threats and drinking a quarter of a bottle of vodka and sometimes having a hand at the elite online chess forums, though this was no challenge nor, ultimately, much entertainment. It was Boris, he figured, when the knock came again — he’d probably left something, or had a piece of news that could not adequately be conveyed by telephone. Maybe there was something depressing on television that he didn’t want to watch alone. Or maybe he was only lonely, only aimless, only bereft and roaming the streets and finding himself back at Aleksandr’s — because where else, at this late hour, would he go? Aleksandr felt sorry for Boris, but even so, he did not want to see him. He’d already spent a non-negligible amount of time with the vodka, and he was experiencing a sensation of pleasant indifference: a sneaking suspicion that the pulsing lights of Petersburg out the window were the most important thing, and everything else was quite secondary. He liked this suspicion even if he didn’t entirely believe it, and he wanted to hang on to it as long as possible. So when he opened the door, it was probably with a bit of a scowl, and that was probably the first thing that Elizabeta saw when she looked up at him for the first time in twenty-seven years.

His mouth filled with ash; his bones turned fragile, ornithological. For a moment, or maybe longer, he wondered whether he’d lost his mind — whether solitude and sadness and the repeated imaginings of this exact event had ultimately pried apart his grip on reality. It was true that he hadn’t thought to imagine this moment for a good long while. There’d been too much intervening grief, and lately, even his subconscious hadn’t been indulgent enough to dip into this particular fantasy — there were, after all, so many other, more dangerous, more pressing ones.