Татьяна Толстая - Aetherial Worlds

“Thanks, I changed my mind. No, I don’t need the pillowcases, either.”

Eric is hosting a Christmas party, his last gathering of the year. He sends me a wordless invitation—we have fine-tuned our communication technique: Come by tonight, I’ll make nge properly. Don’t you want nge? Oh, for God’s sake, Eric, I only want one thing—for someone to erase you from my eyes, from my heart, from my memory. To forget everything, to be free. “No dreams, no recollections, and no sounds,” surrounded only by a dark sky in a snowy blizzard, and nothing else, just as on the second day of Creation. So I can purify myself of you and begin anew. I need to begin anew, for I won’t be coming back here again.

Lights are shimmering; Christmas songs are seeping out of everywhere, making their way inside your brain. In a few days the baby Jesus will be born. Does this mean He’s not among us now, absent, just as before Easter? Does this mean that He’s abandoned us during the darkest, gloomiest, most commercialized and hopeless week of the year? And does this mean there is no one to turn to inside your heart, no one to ask what to do? Figure it out yourself, is that it? Not far from town there is a Russian monastery. The monks there are sullen hobgoblins, of the standard sort, but perhaps it’s worth a visit for some advice? What if among them is one with a strange, all-seeing heart? I could ask him: Is it a sin to kill and trample love within yourself?

Alas, the blizzard has swept over the back roads, and there is no way of getting to the monastery in this weather. There is no Russian Orthodox church in town. I can’t go to the Evangelicals, or whatever—those aren’t churches, they’re community centers where they encourage bright-eyed honesty and where you’re greeted by a ruddy man in a blazer—“Hello, sister! Jesus Christ has a wonderful plan for your salvation!” Somehow that plan will entail loving thy neighbor and immediately sitting down to gift-wrap donations with youthful, undertreated drug addicts from broken homes. Or coming together for a sing-along with tambourine accompaniment. Or listening to a sister-in-Christ speak: some lady in a nubby cardigan, in the manic stage of a bipolar episode, who insists it’s because of her relationship with our Lord and Savior that her chocolate chip cookies always come out so well. Always.

Well, I don’t want to love my neighbor. I’d like to stop loving him, actually.

The Catholics have a much better setup. Their church is more mysterious, but now is not the time to be there: it’s too bright, too festive, too joyful, full of too many happy expectations, and I just can’t; I don’t want joy, I just want to sit in a dark room full of vile and bitter people so I can turn my heart into ice. Because life is but smoke and shadows.

I drive to visit the hexadactyls: there is a small town nearby where almost everybody has six fingers. They are all related, from one big family. Way back, one of their forefathers happened to have a sixth finger, and the deformity was passed on to subsequent generations. Now they are everywhere: at the gas station, in the bank, at the local stores. At the pharmacy window. At the bar. At the café. Full of bitterness and spite.

It feels good here, it feels right. A bitter waitress brings me my coffee; she knows that I’m looking at her hand, and I bet she has already spat in my cup as a preemptive measure: cappuccinos are well designed for this. Okay, lady, I feel you. A spiteful hexadactyl bartender is wiping down glasses, and a sullen young man sits on a barstool talking to him; it’s so strange to see which fingers he’s using to hold his cigarette. Is there a name for this extra digit? And do the local six-fingered grannies knit special gloves for their six-fingered grandkids?

They cast unwelcoming side-glances at me, knowing full well I’m here to gawk at them. They instantly sniff out us nosy scum, the normal, regular-looking strangers, who out of boredom or schadenfreude, to lift our own spirits and have a cheap thrill, come to seek out those for whom having more is no cause for joy.

One could also spit into seltzer with great pleasure. Or into Diet Dr Pepper, the cherry-flavored one with fewer calories. Me—I’m water. Spit at me, you ugly and miserable people, for I am planning a murder.

The Nativity is only a day away—just twenty-four hours left without our Lord. Eric is right: it’s time for decisive action—time to get rid of her. She’s a witch: she’s sewn all the clothes in town, made all the quilts so I couldn’t hide under them with Eric, knitted all the scarves and the shawls to strangle me with, stitched all the boots to hobble my feet so I couldn’t escape, baked all the bagels and scones so I would choke on their crumbs. She poisons food, cuts up bird tracheas into the pale sauce, boils cartilage and skin to put a curse on me, to turn me into a turkey with a comb for a nose. She picks cranberries in a swamp, ones that smell like a crow’s armpit. She paints sets. Once she’s finished, it’ll be too late. If not now, then when?

I arrive at Eric and Emma’s. The screen door has been removed for the winter, the wooden one is wide open, and through the storm door you can see the flames dancing in the fireplace. The guests—campus colleagues that I’m, quite frankly, already fed up with—stand around the buffet, twirling wineglasses filled with cheap wine. Eric has made nge; he’s proudly admiring the pinkish heap of buckwheat, as if it contains a secret meaning of some kind.

But there is none.

It’s crappy food.

He bought that Polish muck again.

A lovely Mozart recording is playing in the background. Emma’s third eye has finally hatched: blue and bloodshot, without eyelashes, it’s covered with a translucent extra eyelid, like a bird’s. But what good can it do her now? It’s useless.

Eric, Eric, get ready. Don’t drink any wine—you have to drive. We’ll go to Lake George and drown her there.

Telepathy is a wonderful and truly convenient means of communication. It’s indispensable in social situations.

Why Lake George, specifically?

I don’t know any other lakes around here. It was your idea.

The guests disperse early to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities, to wrap presents in sparkly paper. As for us, we get into the car: Eric and Emma in front, and me in the back. Emma is using two eyes to look ahead at the snowstorm and her third eye to look into my heart, that piece of wicked, black ice; thanks to my silver amulet she can’t see what’s in store for her.

It’s pitch-dark at the lake, but Eric has brought a flashlight. We walk along a fisherman’s path—seems we are not the only ice-fishing enthusiasts in the area. Today, however, the others are all at home, warm and cozy, by their decked-out trees.

The ice hole is covered with a thin layer of frost.

“What are we doing here?” Emma wants to know.

“That’s what!”

We push Emma into the ice hole. Black water splashes my feet. Emma struggles, trying to grab on to the sharp, icy edges. Eric pushes her, using an ice pick for good measure—wait, where did the ice pick come from? Doesn’t matter. Bloop. Done. They won’t find her till spring.

“My hands are freezing,” Eric complains.

“So are my feet. Let’s have a drink.”

“You brought booze?”

“And meat pirozhki. They are still warm: I wrapped them in foil.”

And right there on the ice, we drink Popov vodka out of a flask—awful swill, truth be told. We eat meat pies. We finally kiss as free people—relieved to know that no one will see us, or stop us. Freedom is precious, as every American understands. I toss the flask and our leftovers into the water. Take off the silver amulet and throw it in there, too: it’s served me well but I don’t need it anymore.