Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“For real?”

“Yep, or I could not have a kid. I can interrupt my pregnancy. I can start it up again. I can put spells on spiders and scorpions. I can forge signatures.”

“Well, I definitely won’t be needing that.”

“We’ll live at my place. You’ll help me take care of my grandpa.”

“Since when do you have a grandpa?”

“It’s a long story. He’s really old. My mom wanted to put him in a home, but I felt sorry for him, so I started looking after him. He drools a lot when he talks. But he says some wise things that are worth listening to. So, whaddya say?”

“Nah,” Mark said after thinking for a bit, “you’d better move in here. And bring your grandpa with you, too.”

“Whatever you say,” Nastia answered calmly. “It’s your call.”

She left in the morning, trying not to wake him up. She did, though. Kolia came by in the early afternoon. He brought oranges. He sat there in silence for a while, clearly wanting to ask something, but then deciding against it. Finally, he suggested Mark start working with him. Mark thought for a bit and then agreed.

The deceased looked even worse in death than he had in life—gray hair, sunken eyes, pointy nose, sharp wrinkles on his sour face. His Adam’s apple had protruded, his fingers had elongated, and his nails had turned blue. He had been silent for two days, apart from occasional coughing fits that would rip his chest apart from the inside. Then even the coughing was gone. He lay there, breathing slowly, like a fish that had been caught but not yet soused with cooking oil. His heart stopped shortly after noon. The young guy crossed the room, bent over the deceased, and examined him with great interest. One could have thought that he was studying the patterns on his hospital gown.

“Why don’t ya take out a magnifying glass while you’re at it?” Yura suggested.

“Why don’t you?” The young guy got all offended. “What should we do?” he asked. “He’s gonna start decomposing.”

“He’s just skin and bones. There’s nothing there to decompose. Just leave him,” Yura answered.

Yura figured that whoever told the doctor about the deceased would have to help carry him out, so he opened a National Geographic from last year that someone had brought him, and stumbled upon a piece on the fauna of Mesopotamia. “Mesopotamia… what’s that? Something to do with water. Something made out of stones and sand,” he thought. The fauna of Mesopotamia was hardly having a bad time of it, according to the article, at least. Most of the livestock belonged to the monasteries; the locals sacrificed animals to express their appreciation to the gods for the bounty they bestowed and pay off their debt to heaven. The word debt made Yura anxious, so he put the magazine off to the side. Dozing off, facing the wall, he heard the young guy shuffling around the room, circling the deceased. We gravitate toward death—especially someone else’s.

He woke up in the early evening and peered out the window. Dark trees, early twilight, the beginning of July. The young guy was sitting on the next bed over, his eyes fixed on the corpse.

“Are we actually gonna sleep in the same room with it?” he asked, seeing that Yura had woken up.

“Sleep in the hallway then,” he suggested.

But the young guy just shrugged his shoulders, clearly spooked. The young guy’s name was Sania. He wasn’t all that young, as a matter of fact—about twenty or so—he just looked inexperienced, especially compared to those who’d already died here. He was scrawny, yet fit, constantly biting his nails, making his fingers pink and raw. He had long black hair and a fractured shinbone—a soccer injury. When he got to the hospital, the doctors suggested a full examination, as per standard procedure, and an X-ray revealed that something was up with his lungs. Sania said it was all the stress that had worn him down. He’d been receiving treatment full time for about a month now, but he couldn’t get used to the clinic. His mom would come to visit him. His friends on the soccer team would send their regards. This was apparently his first inpatient care experience. He was scared of dead people. Now here he sat in his soccer shorts and red T-shirt, veins standing out in his forehead from the tension, probably imagining what he’d dream about tonight. Yura couldn’t take it anymore, so he threw a shirt on, stepped out into the hallway, and found the doctor. He had hit it off with the doctor right away, partially because the doctor didn’t like any of the other patients here either. Who would like all those goners, constantly trying to spit out their pills and sneak alcohol into the wards? Yura nodded; the doctor rose to his feet laboriously and stepped out of his office. He was proper and rather friendly, yet much too lethargic for a man his age. He mostly kept company with the patients, and he could have easily passed for one of them, if not for his snow-white coat and the thin, gold-framed glasses resting on his pudgy face.

“Well, where am I supposed to put him?” the doctor said, stepping into the ward, sliding his chubby hands into his coat pockets, and nodding at the deceased. “It’s only till tomorrow.”

“Maybe we should carry him out into the hallway?” the young guy suggested timidly.

“Oh, great—then we’ll have people stepping on him all night. All right, lights out.”

“Whatever you say, Doc,” Yura said, bumming a cigarette from one of the goners in the hallway and slipping out the back door. He took a seat on the edge of the fountain and found the lighter he’d stashed there. July nights are so short you can hardly finish your cigarette.

The fountain was in the middle of a large open area between buildings, across from the main entrance of the TB clinic. It was littered with last year’s leaves and cigarette butts. There wasn’t any water in it—never had been. The yellow building poked through the trees; the windows on the first floor were dark. Yellow blots of light ran down from the second floor, where the wards were, treacherously offering asylum to moths, only to snatch them out of the night’s hands. The goners were getting ready for bed. Yura wanted to stay there, out in the night, but he stubbed out his cigarette and headed back inside. The young guy had waited up for him, and he tried to strike up a conversation, but Yura blew him off and plopped down, right on top of the National Geographic. Offended, the young guy hid under his blanket, casting despairing glances at the corpse, and Yura thought that the deceased’s soul might be lying right beside it. There they lie, all cramped, like a married couple that didn’t spring for a double bed.

Yura had been hiding out here for two days already. He immediately made the right connections, used the doctor’s phone to call his friends, took plates and bowls from the nurses and never gave them back, and traded tobacco with the patients. He knew the ropes. It felt like the last week of your hitch in the army. Or your first stint in jail, the one repeat offenders always remember fondly.

It hadn’t been the best of years for him. He’d poured everything he had into fixing up a recording studio, but somebody broke in and cleaned the place out right after it opened. Yura couldn’t think of anything else to do but run himself into debt. He borrowed 20K from Black Devil, who told him not to worry, that he’d make it back. He got his business rolling again. A few months passed. It was time to pay his debt, but he had nothing to pay it with. Black Devil kept finding ways to make his presence felt, joking with Yura over the phone, showing up at the studio a few times, asking about his insurance policies, his fire safety precautions, and his family. Yura didn’t have a family, though—he and his wife had gotten divorced, his daughter was all grown up and living in Canada, and he hadn’t talked to his old man for ten years or so. He’d spent the ten years before that thinking about how to do him in. That’s rock and roll for ya. Hatred and malediction come with the territory—and Yura had been in rock and roll forever. Long story short, when Black Devil started sending him blank texts, he went on a serious bender. When they carted him off to the hospital, he got his “chilling diagnosis,” as they would have said on TV. “Well, is it really all that chilling?” he thought, standing at the entrance to the clinic, holding his fancy white suit jacket in one hand, and an X-ray, hot off the press, in the other. It could be worse. “Sometimes people are born without a voice or with a voice that folks would rather not hear. Sometimes people have extra body parts removed when they’re babies, sometimes the extra parts start growing later. It’s hard to say which is better. At least I can still control my bladder. All right,” he said to himself, “don’t get your panties in a bunch. Everything’s gonna be just fuckin’ fine.” He bummed a cigarette off someone, turned himself in to the TB clinic (wearing his white suit jacket with no shirt underneath), went through a battery of tests, met the staff, and scored a spot in one of the three-bed wards. The young guy was already there. Some sports magazines were lying by his bed and somebody was decaying, slowly but surely, in the next bed over. “It’s nice in here—it even looks pretty clean,” Yura thought, and decided to stick around for a while. He immediately made friends with the doctor and started hitting on the nurse and smoking with the rest of the gang that hung around by the empty fountain. He turned off his cell, used the doctor’s to call some of his buddies and tell them where he was, what to bring, and what not to say. Then his friends would show up and stand outside the window. They were too afraid to come inside.