WAXING GIBBOUS
Nick went back to the sports bar in Parkdale. It stank.
He didn’t see anyone he recognized. He asked for Johnnie Walker and drank it down quickly; it felt as necessary as water, a thought he kept having lately and kept dismissing. He asked for another.
The people in the sports bar—midafternoon on a workday—were a sad assortment of older men and two women, all with the leathery skin of serious drinkers. They stank too. Nick buried his nose in his scotch instead, inhaling the tear-jerking fumes of it.
Drinking alone sucked. He didn’t like being one of the people alone in this bar. When he’d been here with Jonathan, he had felt protected, exceptional; they were travelers from someplace better, observing the locals like they were a different species. Now Nick felt a bit too much like he belonged here.
He kept catching people looking at him, though. Maybe they didn’t agree that he belonged. Maybe they all knew one another, and the silence in the place was just because they didn’t have anything to say to one another. Maybe Nick was the only stranger.
Having a best friend meant you weren’t a stranger anywhere you went—you were one of the citizens of a two-man country. Only Nick’s country was undergoing some kind of annexation right now, and how was he supposed to deal with that? Half of him knew that marriage—if that was really where Jonathan and Hannah were heading—was a two-person country too, only maybe even richer and better than friendship, and of course it was normal and sweet to want that and to take it when the world graced you with it. And the other half of Nick wanted to nuke that country right off the map and keep Jonathan for himself.
Nick didn’t think he could be a country all by himself.
The logical thing to do would be to find a girlfriend of his own: as Jonathan kept pointing out, that was a normal thing for people their age to do. And it wasn’t like Nick wasn’t hot, he thought, preening a little. He had great abs and a tan and cool-looking eyes. Girls gave him the once-over all the time.
He hadn’t dated anyone since Sue Park, though, and if he was honest with himself, it had only been a few dates before she’d stopped returning his calls.
Maybe it would be different now. Nick was different now. Maybe he would call Sue Park later and see if she picked up.
He’d come here to Parkdale for a reason, though: a vague reason, sure, but since he was here, he might as well explore. He paid up and went outside, around back.
The place looked seedier in daylight. Nick observed the Dumpster and the security light and the gravel and the sparkle of broken glass.
He didn’t see anyone in the alley. Hadn’t expected to, really. Now that he was here, he didn’t know why he’d thought seeing the place again would mean anything. It was only that things had changed for him that night, in a way he hadn’t yet comprehended. He felt a bit like someone visiting the grave of an old friend.
He followed the alley west, aimlessly kicking at beer cans and chunks of broken paving. Weeds grew lush here, massive dandelions and other bitter things, leaves weighed down with a patina of dust and soot. Nick found an old mattress, springs rusting through; an assortment of gas cans; a discarded sweatshirt that his nose, even from ten feet away, told him was stained with come. He didn’t think he’d always been able to identify stains by smell, and he was not sure he enjoyed having this particular ability.
Nick found a homeless man sleeping on an opened-out cardboard box. He found a trio of black kittens playing beneath a flat-tired Topaz; the car’s windows were all open, and in the backseat, the kittens had made a nest of rags. He found a small baggie of pot, also by smell, which was cool.
He found a fight.
Two guys were beating up another guy. The victim was on the ground, wheezing through bloody lips. The two attackers circled him, kicking and cursing.
When they saw Nick coming, they stood still and turned their heads to him like jackals. “Stay cool,” one of them said. “You’re cool, right?”
Nick ran at him, swinging. Everything he didn’t know about fighting felt flooded out by the sheer strength in his body. He broke the first guy’s nose on the third try. The second guy jumped him from behind and tried to trap his arms. Nick threw him off, twisted around, and kicked him in the stomach.
The one with the broken nose grabbed a bottle and swung at Nick with it. Nick slid away, faked right, and punched left and hit the guy in the broken nose all over again. When the guy fell down, Nick stamped on the hand that held the bottle. More breakage. The sound of it was like meat between his teeth. He stamped on the guy’s other hand, for good measure.
The one he’d kicked in the stomach was still on the ground, moaning.
“You suck at this,” Nick said. “You shouldn’t be in this business.” He knelt down and took the man’s earlobe between his fingertips. He put his lips to the ear and shouted, “Got me? You can’t go around beating people up!”
He stood up, light-headed with adrenaline, and looked around. The third guy, the victim, was limping up the alley as fast as he could, looking over his shoulder; he rounded the corner and was gone.
“You’re boring,” Nick said to the two on the ground. “Next time, fight back a bit.”
He walked on, shaking. Tasting the air through his nose and his open mouth, the smells on it of blood and food and drink and heat.
He’d had a plan, earlier, hadn’t he? Yes: to call Sue Park and make her his girlfriend or something. Something stupid. He didn’t care about that anymore, not with his blood up like this. He didn’t think quiet, musical Sue Park could even handle who Nick was becoming.
Nick might be living in a country of one, but right now he felt like the king.
It was the second time Maksim had joined the Red Army. He saw right away that he was not going to have as much fun this time around.
For one thing, the Red Army was bigger than ever, and its web of allegiances ever more tangled. Its opponents, the mujahideen, were made up of several factions nominally united by their faith, but as far as Maksim could tell, it was the same faith practiced by most of the Afghans who were Soviet allies. Maksim saw that he would not be able to take much satisfaction in the idea of fighting for his homeland, which was not under threat from the mujahideen at all. He would have to fight for his comrades, which meant he would have to get to know them. And in turn, they would get to know him, something he did not always wish to chance.
For another thing, he was not issued his own Afghanka. Supply of the heavy winter uniforms was limited to two per squad, said his commanding officer, Starshina Petrov. They would go to whoever pulled night duty or was posted in the windiest spot.
In Maksim’s long experience of soldiering, complaining was one of the things every soldier enjoyed and a quick way for him to form bonds with the rest of the squad, among whom Maksim was the newcomer. So he complained about the Afghanka shortage to one of the other men in his squad over mess one night.
The man gave him a long look. “We are fortunate to have Afghankas to share,” he said. “Zampolit Ogorodnik would not order us to share if it were not for the best.” He moved away from Maksim and sat by himself near the tent flap.
Later in the evening, Maksim heard someone else toasting Zampolit Ogorodnik, wishing the political commissar long life and excellent health, wishing him the pick of the loveliest brides, wishing him fortune in battle and untroubled sleep.
Sarcasm. It had to be. No one loved an officer that much. The rank of Zampolit was a new one since Maksim’s last campaign, and he began to see it meant something unfamiliar to him.
Maksim did not find out much more until he met Ogorodnik himself, coming from the hastily dug latrines a few days after their deployment into the Panjshir. Ogorodnik said to him, “You seem like a sensible fellow. Quiet.”
“Sir.”
“People like to talk to those who’ll listen,” Ogorodnik said.
“Not to me. Sir.”
“No? I find that … surprising.”
Maksim inclined his head.
“If you ever feel a need to talk to someone … share confidences … you may talk to me—Volkov, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Maksim thought for a moment that he had been propositioned.
Then he understood that he had been asked to report on his comrades.
Maksim could not go running—not here, in a hostile valley, with orders not to stray beyond the pickets—but he stormed back to his squad’s tent and sat stabbing his bayonet into the dirt until Starshina Petrov ordered him to stop.
He made more of an effort not to be separate after that.
His squad numbered eight, including himself; they and two other squads made up the platoon, led by Starshina Petrov and Junior Lieutenant Ushakov. His squad slept together and messed together; in addition to sharing a duty roster, they shared a single light machine gun.
“Lady Wasp,” they called it; no one told Maksim who had stenciled the name on the gun’s dark, lean cheek, but there it was, in slightly crooked Cyrillic. They took turns carrying Lady Wasp. Maksim’s turn came more often than not, because whoever had the gun could not have one of the Afghankas, and Maksim was one of the ones who minded the cold less.
They all—even Maksim—had thought Afghanistan would be warm.
They met the mujahideen two weeks after deployment—or rather, the mujahideen met them.
Maksim’s platoon was in convoy, his squad walking beside one of the tanks. Maksim was paired with the radio operator, Netevich, who was sweating under the weight of his extra gear. The road ran down the dry cleft of the valley, where a river must have run once. Maksim was not the only man scanning the ascents; scrubby trees and stone outcroppings offered too much cover for anyone’s comfort.
When the first of the mujahideen sniper bullets winged in, he felt it as a comfort: action at last. Maksim relaxed into the Starshina’s orders. His binoculars spotted a muzzle flash, and if he didn’t manage to mark the sniper right off, he at least sent the man scuttling to different cover, and Lady Wasp took him down on the way there.
The gunners were few, though, and the skirmish over far too soon. Maksim had to walk on in the convoy, chest tight with unsatisfied blood rage. He thought he would choke.
He had an hour, no more, to simmer and clench and chew upon his lip. Then the mujahideen came back in greater force.
The Soviet tank gunner, Trinkovich, tossed a couple of shells out, but the mujahideen were thin spread, fast, and not in any kind of order Maksim could see. They spilled down the hillside like pebbles, right into the convoy, yelling in breathless voices. Maksim did not need to know their tongue to understand what kind of thing they said.
He met them laughing.
He did not recall the fight once it was over. It seemed to happen more than ever, recently, that he lost the consciousness of what he did in battle. But he came to himself by degrees, crouched beside the tank, with the blood song subsiding into a delicious comfort that could come from nothing else in the world but this.
He smiled at the nearest man: Aleksei Andreev, he thought.
Aleksei Andreev shouldered Lady Wasp and made a surreptitious face-wiping motion.
Maksim raised his eyebrows. After a moment, he understood what he was being told, and he swiped his sleeve across his mouth, bloodying the khaki.
“That’s right. Even wolves lick their jaws clean,” Andreev scolded.
They called him the Wolf after that; it was not the first time he had been nicknamed so, given his patronym. His squad, having given him a pet name, owned him now. They learned, as his Cossack brethren had in times past, that Maksim was good enough in a scrape to make up for his strangeness at other times.
The man who bunked next to him, Sergei Stepanovich, who had no sense of self-preservation, even grew teasing with him, cuffing him in the back of the head sometimes and laughing when Maksim turned on him. The laughter disarmed Maksim somehow; at least he never really hurt Stepanovich, always recovered himself quickly enough. It helped that he had real enemies.
He began to have a friend, too, in Stepanovich. Just as the other men were wary of Maksim’s temper, they were often annoyed with Stepanovich’s nonstop talk, but Maksim found he could relax into it, as Stepanovich did not truly expect him to respond. Stepanovich talked about anything: birds he had seen, books he had read as a boy, the shapes of clouds, his great-aunt. On the occasions when he talked about something he should not, Maksim would clap a hand over his mouth until he shut it, and Stepanovich would dissolve into snorting giggles once Maksim let him go.
Stepanovich knew how to sew and darn; once Maksim realized this, he began to switch his socks with Stepanovich’s every time they grew worn, and it took Stepanovich at least four socks to figure it out. When he did, he kept right on mending in exchange for Maksim washing his mess kit after meals.
Nine months they had together, his squad; nine months in which Maksim could live almost as he was meant to live. He came to like, or at least tolerate, the taste of the bulgur porridge that augmented their rations. When Stepanovich received the news of his great-aunt’s passing, Maksim got him drunk. When Maksim got his arm broken, Stepanovich strapped it up for him secretly so that no one would think of invaliding him out, and Stepanovich had the sense to keep quiet a week later when the strapping was back off again.
Maksim nearly had a skirmish with Zampolit Ogorodnik once, but they were both drunk when they should not have been, and so nothing was said afterward.
They got to know the Panjshir end to end, or so it felt, although the mujahideen kept enough secret places to continue surprising them. The squad finally received enough Afghankas to go around.
“Means we’ll be staying awhile longer,” Stepanovich said to Maksim as they both sank their faces into the new-smelling quilted collars.
Maksim said, “Good.”
“What, Volkov? Afraid if you go home, your wife will cut off your balls? I knew you were hiding from someone!” Stepanovich did not wait for an answer but laughed uproariously and ran away around the camp perimeter, Maksim in pursuit.
Winter returned. With it, illness. Trinkovich and Tretiak, on the tank squad, took sick first, limp and yellow and vomiting, and by the end of the week, a third of the platoon had it.
Something to do with their livers, said the medics, and so everyone was ordered not to drink. Something to do with contaminated rations, said rumor, and so rations were stopped and started and stopped again. Men grew thin. Tempers grew unpleasant. At half-strength, the squads had to pull double duty. Even Maksim grew fatigued.
Still, it was war, and he much preferred it to peace.
Or so he told himself, even as he watched himself fret at his leash, growl at his comrades, say the wrong things to the Zampolit. He told himself he was too tired to run off his anger. Told himself it did not matter that there was no liquor ration now, because he didn’t love it the way Augusta did.
Told himself it was not taking him any longer than usual to come back from his battle rages; told himself he had never been able to remember much from them, anyway.
Told himself he could handle everything. Told himself this was better than desertion.
Until he proved himself wrong.
“I’m so tired of Russian food,” Lissa said into the refrigerator, where a gallon jug of borscht was getting down to the dregs, separating unattractively, pulp floating atop a livid purple brine.
Stella made a face. “I didn’t want to say anything, but thank God. Want a falafel?”
“I don’t know how to make a falafel.”
“Well, you walk into a Middle Eastern fast-food place, and you hand them a couple of quid, and you tell them whether you like hot sauce—”
“Seriously?” Lissa said, laughing.
“What? I don’t like cooking.”
“Me neither.”
“And yet when I first got here you were messing around with all kinds of things—which I don’t think I even got to taste, now that I think about it—”
“I’m not any good. It was just to keep me busy.” More true than she’d meant.
“Fair enough, but it doesn’t really help right now, does it?”
Lissa shut the fridge and leaned on the counter. “I just want french fries.”
“Come with me to the Duke, then. We can grab a bite before my shift. Rafe would love to see you.”
“No. No, no, no. You can’t—”
“Can’t be a matchmaker? Come on, it’s a grand old British tradition, meddling in people’s love lives.”
“I don’t have a love life,” Lissa blurted.
Stella looked at her, really looked, drawing her sculpted brows down. “You’re not joking, are you?”
Lissa felt her face going hot, blotchy, shamed pink. She shook her head.
“Do you mean right now? Or never?”
Lissa shrugged one shoulder.
“Never? Seriously?” Stella said. “Like … wow. Okay. No wonder you don’t … no wonder we aren’t always on the same page, you know?”
“I don’t think it’s that weird,” Lissa said.
“Of course not. You wouldn’t, I mean. And it’s not. It’s only, my friends and I, we were kind of … precocious, you know?”
“This is really awkward.”
“Yep. Kind of,” Stella said, and she burst out laughing. She swung her hair back and whistled up at the ceiling. “Hey, at least there’s something I can really do for you, you know?”
“No. You can’t.”
“Oh, yes, I can. You’re going to be kissed, sister. I can make it happen.”
“Shit,” Lissa said, trying to back away.
“So what is it? You don’t seem that shy. And you do like boys, right? Maybe your baba scared all of them away with a broom or something—”
“Stop pitying me,” Lissa said, and it should have come out firm and cool, but somehow there was a laugh in it.
“Ha,” Stella said. “You’re into it. I can tell. Put on a nice top, then—that candy-striped kind of one. You’re coming with me. There’s chips in it for you, anyway.”
“That’ll make me feel much better when I’m dying of embarrassment,” Lissa said, but she went upstairs and found the candy-striped cotton blouse, twisted her hair up into a loose knot, and stuck a chopstick through it.
“Lovely,” Stella said. She’d changed into her little kilt, black sneakers, and a black tank top, an inch of skin showing at her narrow waist. As if anyone would look at Lissa when Stella and about ten other nineteen-year-old stunners were dancing around like that, Lissa thought.
At the Duke, they sat at the end of the bar closest to the kitchen. Rafe grinned hugely, showing his off-kilter canine, and said to Stella, “Good girl—that’s worth a nice bonus right there. Now there’s a raise in it for you if you can get her to actually talk to me.”
“Get Seamus to make her some dinner first,” Stella chided. “Can’t you see she’s about to keel over? She wants chips.”
“Let her speak for herself, you overbearing brat. What’ll you have, Lissa?”
“Yes. Chips, please,” Lissa managed. “And a pint?”
Rafe brought her the organic lager without being reminded and said, “Your money’s no good here, you know. Just get comfortable and let me know if you need anything at all. I’ll be right here when you’re ready.”
“See?” Stella said as soon as his back was turned.
“He’s just nice,” Lissa said. “Or you’re putting him up to it somehow.”
“Just let him talk to you. You don’t even have to talk back.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Come on—you know how to talk to other people. I’ve seen you. It’s the same with guys you think are fit, only you might also eventually get to have sex.”
“That’s what I’m…”
Stella’s face shifted, her brows going wider and her chin tilting, signaling readiness to listen.
“—not going to talk about,” Lissa said. “Look. I think I’m doing pretty well. I’m still here, right?”
“And now you have chips,” Stella said as Rafe went to the kitchen pass-through and brought over a plate for Lissa and a burger for Stella.
Lissa doused her fries with vinegar, earning an approving grin from Stella. They were crisp, with the skin on, deep brown, just the way she loved them. She added extra salt.
Just as she’d filled her mouth, Rafe asked, “Did you bring your books tonight?”
Lissa shook her head.
“Did you come to check up on your sister? We haven’t broken her yet—I think she’s going to be okay.”
Lissa shook her head again.
“So you came just to see me,” Rafe said, hand to his toque.
“Fries,” Lissa said through the last of her mouthful.
Rafe sighed. “I’m being such a git. I shouldn’t be talking at you, should I? How about I’ll be over here at the bar, and you come and say something when you feel like it?”
Lissa blinked after him.
“See?” Stella whispered. “Smarter than he looks.” And she tucked away the rest of her burger, wiped her mouth, and went to start her shift.
Lissa finished her fries. She twisted up her napkin into a greasy corkscrew. She finished her pint.
She ran lip balm over suddenly dry lips and wrapped her hand around her empty glass.
“Hey,” she said. “Rafe? I’d like another, please. And…” What could she talk to him about? She couldn’t tell anyone about magic, of course. He wasn’t going to be interested in the gossip of the church she wasn’t allowed to attend. Her job at the print shop was utterly uninteresting. They had Stella in common, but another person wasn’t the right thing to talk about with someone you wanted to date.
She took a deep breath. “You were asking the other day about what I’m studying. It’s Russian folklore. My grandmother left me some books—she was kind of a specialist.…”
Maksim came to himself like a sleepwalker awakened by a shout: he stood dizzy and shocked for a moment, quite blank, before a flare of pain caught up with him. He saw that his hand held a Zippo lighter, and the flame bit hard against the web of his thumb.
He snapped it shut, cursing. His voice came out in an overused rasp. He swayed a little.
He’d been fighting, then: the fatigue told him so, and the way his voice did not answer. And he could smell blood.
He was standing in some of it. He felt the warmth and wetness on the bare soles of his feet. And he was standing on something soft.
He looked down and saw that it was an ear.
He looked around him then. He was in the rough, single-roomed house that his squad had been using as a barracks. But instead of orderly sleeping bags and a card table, the room held a haphazard haystack of splintered planks, bundles of straw, kerosene-soaked rags. And bodies.
Maksim wondered in that first bare moment, coming to himself among the wreckage, if the mujahideen had come into the town, had penetrated the house. If he had somehow driven them off. If he had somehow survived such an incursion alone.
All the bodies in the pyre wore the same, familiar Russian uniform. There were no strangers. No mujahideen.
His hands trembled with fatigue, the muscles of his arms swelled with oxygenated blood. His chest heaved with breath. Splinters pricked here and there in his palms.
His right hand, when he looked down at it, was still clenched over the blistering-hot Zippo lighter. His forearm was red with gore up to the elbow.
He had done this himself. He, Maksim Volkov. This was his work.
Maksim looked at the pyre. Most of the bodies were tumbled, chaotic, facedown or thrown like dolls into the man-high heap of scrap: it looked as if Maksim had built it out of every piece of wood in the building, every door and window frame and cot and chair. But at the peak of it, laid out cleanly with arms crossed, lay Stepanovich.
As Maksim jolted forward in shock, he knocked against the pyre, and the balance of the loosely piled kindling shifted, sending Stepanovich’s body rolling down. Maksim caught him reflexively, smelling the reek of his long illness, seeing the gauntness of his stubbled cheeks.
He had not killed Stepanovich. He remembered that much: Stepanovich had been taken by the same illness that had taken so many others. Maksim had been holding one of Stepanovich’s dry, bony hands in his own while Stepanovich made wordless gasping moans and turned his yellowed eyes upward.
It was the last thing Maksim remembered with any clarity, although he thought maybe someone had offered to pray.
He did not think he had taken the idea with good grace.
He would have taken it now if he could. But his voice had not returned to him yet. And he had to make himself face the fullness of what he had done.
Maksim hefted Stepanovich’s body in his arms, carried him a few feet from the pyre, and laid him down. His weight was too slight, eaten away by weeks of sickness; his mouth caved in around jutting teeth. He looked nothing like the Stepanovich who was always talking, always joking, keeping Maksim’s temper from rising too high.
Without him, Maksim had barely lasted ten minutes.
Maksim returned to the pyre, digging at the rubbish, flinging planks aside. He found Starshina Petrov’s body next: face mostly unmarked, eyes unclosed. Gutted. It looked as if Maksim had reached his knife all the way into Petrov’s abdominal cavity.
Why Petrov? He had always been kind to Stepanovich, hadn’t he? And tactful toward Maksim himself; surely he wouldn’t have said or done something to set Maksim off.
Trinkovich was next. Trinkovich had been shot: once in the shoulder and once in the face. Maksim wondered dully why he had used a gun instead of his hands.
He went on unbuilding the pyre, plank by plank. Comrade by comrade. Looked each of them in the face.
Andreev, who had first given Maksim his nickname.
Junior Lieutenant Ushakov, who always carried with him a picture of the two hounds he had left at home in Moscow.
Tretiak, who had a pair of sunglasses he’d said had come from America.
Netevich, who could not grow a beard.
And Zampolit Ogorodnik. It was his ear Maksim had been standing on.
When he saw the place he had cut it from, Maksim fell down in the bloody wreckage and lay there for a while. Of course it would have been Ogorodnik he’d killed first. His body was there at the bottom of the heap, and he was the one Maksim had always disliked.
He had probably said something stupid or cruel. Probably while Maksim’s hands were still feeling the warmth ebb from Stepanovich’s skin.
Probably Maksim had killed him without thinking at all, and the others would have reacted, of course. They tolerated Maksim’s nature when he was using it on the mujahideen, but they would be duty bound to stop him when he used it on one of their own.
And Maksim must already have been too far gone to do anything but kill again.
He thought this was how it must have been, but he could not know. Maksim was the only one left alive, and he did not remember anything much, and so there was no one to bear witness to his squad’s passing. He lay boneless in the dust. Kerosene fumes and the stench of opened bodies surrounded him. He did not move until he felt a warm, slow crawl upon his shoulder. He slapped at the place, thinking it was a fly, and the flare of pain told him instead it was a bullet hole he had not noticed before.
It broke his paralysis. He had a duty to these, his comrades. He should see it through.
He rebuilt the pyre then. Neater this time. He tried at first to close everyone’s eyes and lay their hands in place, but he had waited too long and could not. He could not pray, either, his voice still gone from him: when he tried to force it out, he ended up vomiting at the base of the pyre.
He doused everything with more kerosene, which stank. All the doorways were open, since he had torn the doors from them; there was plenty of oxygen to fuel the blaze. He lit the Zippo lighter and tossed it onto the pyre.
The ball of flame was so sudden and hot that he reeled right out one of the open doors into the yard. He tripped backward over nothing and lay where he fell.
The rescue squad found him there, some time later: both eyebrows burned off, bullet holes in his biceps and trapezius. No one imagined it was anything other than an insurgent attack.
Maksim let the medics stitch him up. He thought, while they did so, about Stepanovich, who had died of illness as mortal people often did. He wanted to blame Stepanovich for leaving him or for being his friend in the first place. He was coming out of his madness enough to know those thoughts were mad thoughts.
He thought about how Stepanovich would not have died of illness if Maksim had made him kin.
Maksim could have made any of his comrades kin. All of them, even. He thought about what he’d done instead.
He did not mind having killed Zampolit Ogorodnik, but the others had been good enough comrades. Kind, even. Now that he was less mad, he did not see how it made sense to turn them all into some kind of tribute to Stepanovich instead of letting them go about their lives. Stepanovich would not have appreciated it.
Stepanovich would not have appreciated being made kin, either, he saw. Not when being kin led to things such as this.
While Maksim was thinking, the medics, careful and clinical in their latex gloves, washed the worst of the blood from him. He had bled enough from his unnoticed injuries that they did not seem to realize not all the blood was his own.
He had bled enough that he was slow and shocky with it, which kept him from doing anything rash right away. He saw the Starshina of the rescue squad enter the infirmary tent and come to stand before him, and he heard the man’s questions about the mujahideen, about their numbers, about the direction from which they had attacked.
He saw that there was no point in answering these questions, even if he had been able to speak. Eventually, the Starshina shook his head sadly and departed again, and finally Maksim was alone.
Maksim still had his pistol. He spent a calm half hour sitting on his cot in the infirmary tent with his mouth around the muzzle. As long as the pistol was there, he could think about his options. He did not need to move quickly.
He thought of only one thing that made sense: Iadviga Rozhnata and the promise she’d made him years ago.
Two things that made sense. Iadviga Rozhnata and the pistol.
The pistol tasted salty. After a while, Maksim found that it was because his tears had run into his open mouth. He put the pistol in his pocket, slipped out of the infirmary, and began running north.
Maksim met Gus at the roti shop this time.
“He was here,” she said without preamble. She had a beautiful black eye.
“Did I do that to your face?” Maksim asked.
“Forget about it. The guy you’re looking for, that’s who I’m talking about. Here. In my part of town. Did some damage to some people who probably deserved it. A man I know said it was a young white guy, a stranger, came up the alley and just laid a beating on these other guys. Knew I was looking for a white kid mixing it up with people. Came and told me. I found the place; I’ll show you the way.”
“Now.”
“No, Maks. When I’m done eating. And don’t give me that look. You know I can take you, especially these days.”
He did know. He was still limping from whatever she’d done to his knee.
He sat in tense silence, rubbing his thigh, while Gus ate her roti and drank unsubtly from a bottle of something in a paper bag.
“You should have something,” she said. “It’s killing me to watch you.”
Maksim accepted a slug from the bottle, which turned out to be Canadian Club.
“I guess you’d prefer vodka,” Gus said at his wince of distaste.
“It is only that nothing tastes right.”
“Because of what your witch is giving you. Well, it’s unnatural. What do you expect? You’d be better off living like me.”
“I would not be happy.” An understatement. He’d rather die than live like Gus. She did not manage to hang on to anything precious, neither people nor belongings. She said she liked Parkdale, but that couldn’t be more than a half truth. He’d always believed she came to this city because in a pinch she could ask Maksim for help, money, a sofa to sleep on.
Gus drained the bottle and led Maksim outside. The alley was not far from where he had met the boy in the first place. “Did he return here because of what happened? Or because he comes here often?” Maksim wondered.
“What happened,” Gus said. “It’s got to be. He didn’t just come and wander around; he came and kicked some ass. He’s starting to figure it out. That means he’ll probably be back again, even if we can’t find him today.”
“If he is beginning to understand his nature, we must find him today.”
But the trail of scent stopped at the Lansdowne subway station.
Maksim, enraged, overturned a newspaper box and kicked the glass in. Gus had to punch him in the ear to get his attention. A bystander shouted that he was calling the police, and the two of them ran away together, Gus laughing breathlessly and Maksim almost sobbing.
“Five more days until I may stop rationing eggs,” he said to himself aloud when they slowed in a laneway a kilometer or two on.
“You sure you can make it that long?” Gus asked.
“No.”
He sat down against the door of a garage, covering his face. Gus slid down beside him and gently touched his hair. He let her leave her hand there, but the pressure made his scalp crawl as if with lice until his whole body wanted to twitch miserably away; and still he sat unmoving, clenching his teeth.
“Let me take this for you,” Gus said.
“If I do not have something to do…” Maksim said.
“What are you afraid of? You’ll trash some of your stuff?”
Maksim shook off her hand then, shuddering. “Look to yourself, Augusta. Have a care.”
She leaned in and scrubbed a rough hand over Maksim’s scalp. “You raised me right,” she said. “I’m not an idiot.”
Maksim slapped her hand away and replaced it with his own, tugging on the short hair at his nape. “God help me, I will agree,” he said. “Take it for me. See me home and go hunting without me. I cannot.”
“It’s okay. It will be okay. Truly, Maks.”
He could only shake his head. “God help me.”
Hannah was visiting her parents. Jonathan arrived at Nick’s place with a guilt gift: two-thirds of a bottle of wine and a tiny foil-wrapped lump of hash.
“That smells amazing,” Nick said, turning from the sink.
“You’re doing dishes,” Jonathan said. “Why are you doing dishes?”
“They were dirty.”
“That’s new. Not that I’m complaining. I was just wondering if your head injury had more of an effect than we first realized.”
“Ass-kisser.” Nick angled his face toward the lamp over the stove. “All good. Look. Hardly any scar, even. Pour me something, will you? I’m almost done.” He fastidiously rinsed the sink of soapsuds and dried his hands on his cargo shorts. “Tell me you want to go to Parkdale tonight.”
“I’m not in the mood for a dive bar, honestly. Maybe one of the new hipster places there.”
“I fucking hate hipsters.”
“The Cammie, then. Whatever.”
“We can start there,” Nick said, smiling with teeth.
“Oh, no. It’s not going to be one of those nights. I’m too bagged,” Jonathan said, thinking of the next morning’s classes.
“Sure, the Cammie, then. We’ll just have a pint or two on the patio and head back here for a bit. But first … you brought me a present.”
“I was feeling bad about letting you smoke me up all the time, and then I happened to run into that guy who used to live next to me in the Annex, and look what he was carrying.” Jonathan was already crumbling the hash into pellets the size and consistency of mouse droppings. He mingled them with some shreds of tobacco and filled the bowl of Nick’s bong.
“Fantastic,” Nick said through a held breath, tendrils of smoke escaping from his lips and nose.
“It’s kind of strong. Go easy on it.”
“I,” said Nick, “am not in the mood for going easy.”
Jonathan, in the bathroom twenty minutes later, splashed cool water on his face and sipped some from his cupped palms. He was higher than he’d meant to be, high enough that he didn’t want to deal with Nick’s weirdness, and thought he’d suggest that they stay here and play video games.
He came out to find Nick waiting for him on the other side of the door with a shot glass.
“Take your medicine,” Nick said.
Jonathan sipped. “Wild Turkey?”
“Bulleit, idiot. Clearly, it’s wasted on you.” Nick reached for the glass, so Jonathan dodged him and swallowed the contents.
The taste of it, the burn of it, tripped an old reflex. He had a half-conscious sensation of dropping the reins. “Wouldn’t that be nicer with a beer chaser?” he said.
“The Cammie has beer. Get your shit together. I want some air now.”
Nick nearly dragged him out of the apartment, while Jonathan dithered and stumbled. “I’m high,” he muttered. “Go easy on me.”
“I’m not,” Nick said. “Not high enough, anyway. Come on.”
At the Cameron, the patio was crowded. Nick and Jonathan found a seat by the railing, sandwiched between a table of guys in polo shirts and a table of young women in tube tops.
“I had a great fight,” Nick said.
Jonathan hid his face in his nice chilly pint and didn’t meet Nick’s eyes.
“Some guys were beating on another guy. I stopped them. I felt like a superhero.”
“Why were they beating on him?”
Nick shrugged. “Didn’t stop to ask.”
“Why’s it your business, then?”
Nick slammed his palms on the table, causing his pint to rock and splash. “What is it with you? Nothing I do is right for you anymore.” His words sounded too loud in the sudden silence that followed the impact of his hands. The girls in tube tops looked over anxiously.
“Dude…” said Jonathan.
Nick smacked him playfully on the side of the head. “Give it a rest. For tonight, at least.”
“Ow.”
“I mean it. We’ll talk about something else. Something you can’t judge. So. You and Hannah. When are you moving in together?”
“End of summer,” Jonathan said after a heroic gulp of pale ale. He signaled the waitress for another round. “She thought it was romantic, actually. How I hadn’t asked her, and then it came out in that—never mind. Anyway, we were thinking about how to break it to Hannah’s parents, because you know they’re kind of a bit conservative.”
“Holy Christ. Oh my God, dude. You’re going to propose now?”
“Not yet. I think we need to live together first. I was going to take her mom and dad out for dinner, though. You know. Show them I’m the kind of guy that won’t do anything awful to their daughter.”
“Except, like, have premarital sex with her.”
“Right.”
The waitress came with pints and bourbons.
“I thought you wanted a quiet night,” Nick said after she’d gone. He leaned over the table and let his eyes fall half-closed, inhaling the aroma of the bourbon.
“I do want a quiet night,” Jonathan said. “And I’m clearly only going to get one if I make you drink yourself stupid. So those are both for you.”
Jonathan ended up having one himself, though, of course, and then another. He came back from the bathroom to find Nick had introduced himself to the tube-top girls and bought them a round of some kind of nasty-looking layered shots.
“When was the last time we even had shots? This is stupid,” Jonathan said, but he took it, anyway, and shared in the high fives of the girls, who were celebrating a bachelorette.
Then at some point, the girls were gone, and he leaned on the wrought iron patio railing and tried to light the wrong end of his cigarette, which he should not have been smoking in the first place. The guy who’d given it to him seemed to be talking about psychotherapy or something. Jonathan turned his cigarette around and got it to burn properly.
“There you are,” Nick said from the other side of the railing. “God! Put that out.” He snatched the cigarette from Jonathan’s lips. “What a stink.”
“You used to like them.”
“Only when I was drunk.”
“I’m drunk. Right now,” Jonathan said, raising his hand. Nick came around the railing and led him away. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace more interesting.”
“Don’t we have to pay and stuff?”
“I took care of it.”
“Are you, like, mad about something?”
“You sound like a girl,” Nick said, slowing. He turned to face Jonathan. Under the streetlights, his face looked open and wild.
“I just can’t … I can’t figure you out right now,” Jonathan said.
“Nothing to figure. I’m just me. And I’m really, really, really tired of getting shit from you.”
“Not giving you shit,” Jonathan said, spreading his hands. “Really. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”
Nick wrapped his fist in the collar of Jonathan’s T-shirt. “No.”
Jonathan flailed at Nick’s hand. “Let go. What the fuck are you—”
“Trying to get you to shut up,” Nick said. His eyes were narrow and dark and too close for Jonathan to focus.
And then they were far away, and the ground was much closer.