Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

My mother knew, of course, but pretended otherwise. It came to an end when she discovered that I was my father’s errand boy.

“Where were you?” she asked when I strolled through the front door one August afternoon, fingers still sticky with ice cream melt. She’d come home from work early.

“Delivering a living,” I said proudly. She slapped me with her right hand and embraced me with her left.

“Criminals, everywhere,” she said. “On the TV. In the street. In the Kremlin. Now in my home. I won’t live with two of them.”

She called the police. That afternoon my father was arrested outside our apartment block.

NOW that I was wheeling Kirill around, I had to avoid my friends. I didn’t return their phone calls and kept away from the parks, school yards, and apartment block basements we’d pass out in. Our paths only intersected once, in late June, on the Gostiny Dvor metro platform, as Kirill rambled on and on and on and on and on about the history of rail ties. Valeriy’s zombie eyes latched onto mine. He was scratching his crotch. The head lice must’ve migrated to his southern tropics.

“Tupac, where you been at?” he asked. Behind him Ivan stood in baggy jeans and a T-shirt XXXL enough for a family of four.

I nodded to Kirill. “Just working.”

Valeriy smirked. “New friend?”

“My dad’s making me.” I tried to speak soft enough that Kirill wouldn’t hear.

“You get word about Tony? Knocked off a computer store last week,” Ivan said. “He left his internal passport right on the counter and still couldn’t get himself arrested. Had to walk to the police station and insist that he was a criminal. Embarrassing, really.”

“He’s in Kresty?” I asked.

Valeriy nodded. “Till the trial at least. It’s not bad, by the sound of it. No water shortages. Free electricity. Bet he’s making all kinds of connects. We’ll join him this weekend.”

“On what charge?”

“We’re gonna steal a police car,” Ivan said, grabbing his jeans as they slunk toward his knees. Kirill pretended he wasn’t listening by looking away. “You want in?”

“I promised my dad I’d help him move some furniture this weekend,” I said. “But I’ll see you there.”

“You promise?” Ivan asked.

“Yeah, no doubt.”

“It’s your neck,” Valeriy said, before walking off. “In prison, your head might stay attached to it.”

Kirill didn’t speak until Ivan and Valeriy had disappeared into the white-tiled pedestrian tunnel toward the Nevsky Prospekt station. A gypsy vendor passed by with a tray of single items usually only sold in packs: disposable razors, condoms, Twix bars.

“Will you go through with it?” Kirill asked. There was no disdain in his voice, nothing even approaching disapproval.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“In my time, mental illness deferments were the most popular way to dodge conscription, besides university. You’d bribe a psychiatrist into saying you were certifiably cuckoo. The problem was that so many of the new rich received mental illness deferments, none were left for the actually mentally ill. My unit had two schizophrenics, a handful of manic depressives, and a guy who received regular visitations from angels. The insanity of war, eh?”

“How much did the deferments go for?”

“More than you can afford,” he said. The breeze of an approaching train whipped through my hair, but Kirill’s, slick with vegetable shortening, remained unmoved.

THE weeks passed. I hadn’t touched heroin since the night my father found what remained of the five-hundred-ruble check. I kept waiting for withdrawal to kick in — they can’t send me to Chechnya if I’m bouncing around a padded room — but I guess you don’t get withdrawal after using it four times in five months. Can’t even get addicted to drugs properly. Each morning I woke at four thirty and helped Kirill dress. We breakfasted on Java Gold cigarettes and worked the train cars until noon. One day we bought lunch from an elderly Georgian whose osteoporosis lived in him like a black hole slowly sucking his whole body stomach-ward. Kirill was going on about the metro system again.

“It’s the thirteenth busiest in the world,” he said between small bites of sausage. It was a holy day, the Feast of Peter and Paul, and humidity leached from the city’s pores. “Yet Petersburg is only the world’s forty-fifth biggest city. What does this tell you?”

“That we’re too poor to afford cars?”

“Idiot. It tells you we have a metro to be proud of. New York, London, you think their metros have crystal chandeliers and marble floors and bronze statues?”

“Of course they do.”

“They do not,” he insisted. “They have graffiti and crumbling walls and hoodlums who push decent commuters into oncoming trains. They do not have beauty. They do not have a Palace of the People.”

“That’s a TV show, right?” I said. Finally, a shared interest.

“I’m not talking about a TV show! I’m talking about the metro. The Palace of the People, that’s what Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev called it. A palace not for tsars or princes, but for you and me.”

“Off to your palace then, Comrade,” I suggested, and wheeled him to the Pushkinskaya station entrance.

“You shouldn’t work on April twentieth,” he said as I lifted him over the turnstile. “The skinhead gangs are always the worst on Hitler’s birthday.”

It was still summer. I didn’t see how his advice applied to me.

“What would you do if, you know,” I said, nodding to his stumps when we reached the platform.

“If I still had legs?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d start an autoerotic asphyxiation service,” he said without hesitation.

“What?”

“Autoerotic asphyxiation. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it?”

“Is that a new TV show?”

His jaw slackened with disbelief. “It’s a hobby. You should try it. It’s great fun.”

“What is it?”

“It’s when you tie a belt around your neck and get off.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said. “It sounds pretty awful, in fact.”

“A virgin and a puritan. You’ll grow up to be a nun!”

What he’d lost in limbs, he’d gained in lip. “So what’s the service?” I asked. “It sounds like a private affair.”

“There will always be a risk when you wrap a belt around your neck and bring yourself to the point of strangulation. It can be a life-changing or life-ending experience. Like skydiving. My service would provide the proverbial parachute. Say you wanted to autoerotically asphyxiate yourself. You’d call me up ahead of time. I’d already have the spare keys to your flat. If you didn’t call back in, say, one hour, I’d come over to check on you. By then you’d probably be dead. So I’d hitch up your trousers so your loved ones would have the comfort of thinking you’d died by ordinary suicide.”

“And if they didn’t die, you’d have the keys to their flat, so you could rob them blind.”

“There’s hope for you yet, molokosos .”

We waited at the platform edge and I don’t know why it came out then but it did. I asked Kirill why he never recounted how he had lost his legs, why he was silent and defiant when seeking charity.

He frowned, displeased that the conversation had taken a precipitous turn into seriousness. A train arriving on the opposite track nearly whooshed away his words. “You can live off others’ guilt,” he said. “But if you want a dacha, you must also make them proud.”

Air surged from the tunnel with the catcall of train breaks. “But how did you lose them?” Saying the question aloud, hearing the tremor of my voice, I recognized what I’d long suspected: I was a coward.