Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

Vladimir moved to Sergei’s seat. The computer stared him down. No more than a television lashed to a typewriter by wiggly telephone cords, as far as he was concerned. He tried the headset. Nothing.

A halved egg of plastic sat on a square of blue foam. The receiver? He put it to his ear. “Are you there, Gogol? I’m searching for someone.”

The monitor didn’t blink. “Hello? Gogol?”

The waitress tapped his shoulder. A long grin was pressed between her wide lips. Her eyelashes were thicker than a fountain pen’s line. “It’s a mouse. You don’t speak into it.”

He assessed the plastic egg thing. “I know mice,” he said. “This is not one.”

“It’s only called a mouse,” she explained. “Set it on the mousepad and move it around.”

A little white arrow drifted across the blue bird sky.

“Do you see this?” he declared, dashing his palm against the table. “The machine has surrendered without a fight. It may have beaten Kasparov but it knows better than to test me.”

The waitress laughed, her thin fingers just touching his shoulder, and ah, what a day this was. She opened Internet Explorer before returning to the register. “It’s Google, not Gogol. You type what you’re searching for and hit enter.”

He studied the keyboard. No sense to its arrangement. Not even the alphabet would submit to alphabetical order. Everyone had to be an individualist, everyone thinking they’re precious little snowflakes when really they’re just boring drops of water.

Best to start simple, let this Google warm its engine.

is the earth flat , he typed.

Images of globes, biographies of Columbus, circumferences and curvatures crowded across the monitor with dizzying suddenness. Vladimir had expected Google to come back with a simple da or nyet , but this, this was something else.

He typed japan : chopsticks, Tokyo high-rises, Wikipedia articles, travel guides, mushroom clouds.

He typed knee and a thousand different knees popped up along with exhaustive accountings of its every bone, muscle, and tendon, diagnoses and treatments for every injury from arthritis to gunshot wounds.

How was a universe of information compressed into this little metal box? He couldn’t fit a whole chicken into his toaster oven and this thing fit the entire world. It felt tinged with sacrilege, even for an atheist. No one should know this much. It must be illegal. He glanced behind, certain that dark-suited security forces would storm the room, confiscate the computer, lead him away in handcuffs. Nothing but jittery teenagers blasting each other in blood-splattered squares of light.

If this machine knew everything, would it know his father?

vasily osipovich markin . He didn’t hit the enter key, not yet, because he’d never written his father’s name before, never seen it written. The cursor blinked impatiently. What good could come from this? You had to keep your eyes forward. Don’t turn your head. Don’t mind what lies in the periphery. Behind you is only ruin.

He deleted vasily osipovich markin and typed roman osipovich markin .

He wanted to hit enter but he was already standing, out of the chair, backing away. He was…devil, was he crying?

You’ve ripened into a pungent piece of cheese, Vladimir.

Yes, fine, okay. Just get me out of here.

“What’s wrong?” the waitress asked, when he reached the door.

“I have a lump in my throat,” he admitted.

“Oh my god,” she said. She was young enough to be his daughter-in-law but she looked at him like his mother. “Is it malignant?”

“Tell Sergei I’m not feeling well. Tell him I’ve gone home.”

When Sergei emerged from the bathroom, his father had already left. He sat down at his computer. The cursor blipped behind roman osipovich markin in the search bar. His father’s uncle. Curious, Sergei hit return.

Nadya

On a July morning in 2004, a surgeon in Moscow unwound the bandages from Nadya’s head.

“Everything will be blurry,” the doctor said. Nadya opened her right eyelid and three years of darkness peeled away.

The surgeon’s office was a 1970s Gerhard Richter, a quarter turn of the focus away from clarity. When she extended her arms, she couldn’t count the fingers on her hands but she could see they were there. Ruslan was too. Her fingers slipped into his.

Three nurses ran into the surgeon’s office when they heard Ruslan shout. They stood at the door, hesitant, because the cries of the ill, the suffering, the dying, and the bereaved had become well known to the three nurses. They had heard every iteration of pain. They were less familiar with the howling awe of rejoicing.

On her second day of sight, he gave her a paint sampler. It contained eighteen hundred named colors. Coral Fuchsia. Cream of Amethyst. Golden Evening. Siberian Russet. She read and reread until she could identify by name every shade in an ice cream freezer, in Journalists’ Park, in the morning sky. As poets went, Aleksandr Pushkin had nothing on the paint sampler copywriter.

They married eight months after she left the hospital. As a teenager, she’d imagined love to be a flare sparkling upward, unzipping the night sky. What she had with Ruslan gave off a warmth nearer to friendship than romance. That was fine with her. Better the dim heat of a hand in yours than all the fire in the sky. He massaged vaseline into her scars and she sat through endless American slapstick comedies. They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.

She gave birth to a daughter, Makka, at Hospital Number Six in Volchansk. A green-eyed girl, daughter of the head of surgery, mascot of the maternity ward, demanded a souvenir from her with the stubbornness of a bridge troll. Ruslan gave her one of the tourist brochures he still carried in his coat pocket.

The end of Ruslan’s career as a tour guide was the beginning of his career as a ministerial figure. The oligarch who had bought the Zakharov had taken a shine to Ruslan and had him installed as a temporary deputy minister. His predecessor had moved to a place in America called Muskegon and, to Nadya’s knowledge, still lived in the basement of his son’s pharmacy. As a deputy minister, Ruslan’s daily responsibilities largely consisted of accepting bribes. His subordinates nicknamed him The Natural. Someone always had to be paid off and the world seemed to think it was Ruslan’s turn. Nadya wasn’t one to argue.

To prove he understood that private enrichment was the first commandment of public service, Ruslan’s first official act was to de-mine the highlands of his ancestral village, beginning with Zakharov’s field. Nadya had never been there herself, had only seen it in the painting. She’d heard stories that Ruslan’s former father-in-law, a pumpkin of a man with links to the insurgency, had used the property as a rebel safe house. Some said he’d even kept Russian soldiers prisoner there. Ruslan told her that the property had fallen into disrepair long ago and that they shouldn’t be surprised if it was all ruins now.

It was to Nadya’s surprise, then, that when they returned for the first time after the mine removal Ruslan pulled her to him. She felt his weight drape over her shoulder. The meadow was mottled Cézanne green. At a dozen meters before her, the land melted in spring light. It would be another year before she could see all the way to the crest of the hill.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“It’s all there,” he said in a voice touched with wonder. Nadya knew the sensation, the eeriness of discovering a corresponding point between past and present, of realizing that not all memory is mirage.