Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

Mustn’t let Sergei forget these last few years when he’s fabulously wealthy. Mustn’t let him forget that first day home from the hospital. White plaster and bandages had braced Sergei’s leg. Poor kid had looked at the knee-high bathtub lip as if it were Everest. “I don’t want to take a shower. I’m not dirty,” he had said.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Vladimir had said, but it wasn’t okay. Not at all. He’d never given his son a bath before. Where to begin? Take off Sergei’s socks? His shirt? Run the water first? Does he get in with Sergei? Does he look away?

“I don’t want to. I’m not dirty.”

One whiff would wake a coma patient.

Vladimir had swaddled the bandaged leg in plastic bags and rubber bands. Set a stool in the tub. Changed into his bathing suit. He had lifted his son into the tub and set him on the stool. Spat out the rusty aftertaste of shower hose water. Too hot. Lathered up his son’s hair and shoulders. Too cold. The armpit, the hip bone, the belly button. Strange parts he’d last seen unclothed when his son was still too young to spell his own name. This grown man still fit in his father’s arms. Just right.

“Are you okay?” Vladimir had asked.

Sergei had replied in a garbled sob, the compact heat of his breath like a hand dryer on Vladimir’s skin. If you could trade, but you couldn’t. If there was a way to make it okay, but there wasn’t. If you can, but you can’t. Why are children doomed to remain beautiful to their parents, even when they become so ugly to themselves?

“It’s not fair,” his son had said.

“It isn’t,” Vladimir had agreed.

He had gone on soaping Sergei’s fingers and underarms. Who can you be but the chest your child shouts into. The shoulder he balances on. The hands washing him clean. The shower drizzled steamy gray stripes. A towel lolled on the closed bathroom door. There was so much Vladimir wanted to make right.

Six months later, he had signed Sergei up for language classes taught by an Australian man with English teeth. Al Pacino quotes and Tupac lyrics qualified as rudimentary English and Sergei placed out of the intro course. Within two years, he spoke well enough to take Business English I and II, which used Donald Trump’s autobiography for a textbook. In such richly manured soil, a seed hardly needs sunlight to grow.

“Very good, Mrs. McGlinchy. Last four digits are two nine two one? I will correct the error into the system and we will avert the audit. Indeed, I am originally coming from Russia. Now a resident of Florida. Drinking the orange juice and sitting on the beach most often.”

The world’s greatest bullshit harvester ties himself to the crop’s most insatiable market with no more than a phone line. If this is capitalism, no small wonder communism failed.

Sergei wished Mrs. McGlinchy a fine day and rang off. “Well, what did you think?”

What did Vladimir think? His son was slaying giants, that’s what he thought. “I don’t know what you said, but you said it wonderfully.”

Sergei gave a bashful smile.

Vladimir wanted to pull his boy into his arms and say, Do you see? I told you you’d have a happy life. Now do you see?

Instead, he asked, “Why do these foolish Americans believe you?”

“When I first started, they didn’t,” Sergei admitted. “I was calling numbers at random from online telephone directories, saying to them, ‘Hello, you have won the sweepstakes, please give me your bank account number.’ ”

“And no one believed you?”

Sergei shook his head. “Took a long time to understand the American mind-set. The fear of their cruel and capricious government weighs heavily on their psyches. They’re more inclined to believe they’ll lose what they have than receive what they want.

“Better to be the tax man than the sweepstakes, I decided,” Sergei went on. “But it wasn’t good enough. Too many skeptics, still. Then I remembered something you told me.”

Vladimir leaned in.

“About the list that you and your mother were on. Because your dad was an enemy of the people. I figured that somewhere online, there must be a list of Americans who will believe anything, no matter how implausible or insulting to their intelligence.”

“Is there such a list?”

Sergei spun white froth in his glass. “Tom Hanks’s Facebook fan page.”

Vladimir had no idea what his son was talking about.

“You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook. And Forrest Gump , you must have seen Forrest Gump. ”

“It is a nature film?”

“No, no. Classic cinema. About how every achievement in American society over the last fifty years was really just the dumb luck of a mentally challenged man.”

“This was a Soviet propaganda film?”

“No, it’s a big Hollywood movie. They play it for children in history class there.” Sergei took a final sudsy sip of his Baltika 7. “So I cross-reference the names and birthdays pulled from Tom Hanks’s Facebook fans with WhitePages. Why, you might ask, would they put their birthday right there on the Internet when it’s one of the three pieces of information necessary to steal their identity? So that strangers will wish them a happy birthday! It’s incredible, I know. When I called up Mrs. McGlinchy, I had her name, address, and birthday, told her I was from the IRS, and asked that she provide the necessary information to prove her identity. The trick is to make the American feel he must convince you of his identity, rather than the other way around. Tom Hanks’s fans are maybe ten times more likely to fall for this than the average American.”

“Because there’s something wrong with them?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Sergei cautioned. “I’d just say that those who enjoy his acting are unfamiliar with human nature.”

Wasn’t this what every parent hopes for? To equip your child with the confidence and support to seize opportunity, to succeed where you failed? His boy, an entrepreneur. He felt a strange surge of patriotism, a gratitude for the vision of his leaders. Here in the New Russia, you weren’t bound by the past. The grandson of an enemy of the people, the son of a convict, his boy, a successful businessman.

Sergei explained that even though he had Mrs. McGlinchy’s bank numbers, he wouldn’t touch a penny. Of course he wouldn’t. Vladimir’s boy was honest and sensitive to the feelings of others, his primary school teachers had always said so. Instead, Sergei would sign her up for a few dozen credit cards, link them to phony PayPal accounts, and transfer thousands of dollars into his personal account at Sberbank.

“Even if she’s got bad credit, we should still get three or four thousand dollars. And it’s not like we’re taking anything from Mrs. McGlinchy personally. Just the credit card companies.”

A beautiful word, we . To be taken into the intimacy of a personal pronoun. Go forth, my child, but take me with you.

“I don’t even think what I’m doing is illegal. MMM and those other pyramid schemes? They didn’t go to jail. The bankers in the West who cratered the world economy? They didn’t go to jail. It’s just the free market at work.”

“Only terrorists go to jail for what they say on the telephone,” Vladimir said. Water this seed of ambition with much love and encouragement. “Don’t apologize for your success. The layperson cannot possibly understand the complexities of high finance.”

“I’m trying to do good.”

“My Seryozha, my little oligarch. You’re doing so well.”

Sergei limped toward the WC, enough cheer to his gait that he nearly walked right.