Fyodor, drunk, out in his truck, listening to the engine click and cool. Golden light in the living room window. The porch light’s bright halo in the damp cold. The glint of blue salt spread over the front steps in case of early snow. Out in the truck, listening to the engine click and cool.
Timo was staying over.
He thought about backing out and driving until he ran out of gas or ran off the road into the river. It was after midnight. Timo still up. Probably meant a fight—another one. It had been a long day at the plant. His teeth hurt from the screech of the hydraulic presses, the pneumatic hiss of the air guns they used to blast away the powdered snow of bone dust and flash-dried flesh. He was still in his coveralls, could still smell the ferrous odor of the blood, the peculiar salinity of the ice baths that had made his skin chalky and sensitive. What he wanted was a long shower and a long sleep. It had been a mistake to go with Hartjes to the bar. But go he had, and now he was drunk, head-heavy, trying to get up the guts to go into his own apartment.
Fyodor worked in beef, as a leaner. He cut away the pinkish fat and connective tissue from the dark red flesh, which was rather soft and delicate, like cloth or dough. You had to respect its natural geometry, the irregularities of how the muscle broke, the way it fell and lay. If you went too hard or too fast, you might ruin the cut, turn a luxury piece of beef into something better ground into chuck. What startled him at first was how little the meat resembled any animal at all by the time he got his hands on it. But then, he thought, if the meat reminded people of the docile animals it had come from, no one would ever eat it.
The difficulty of the work was in its capacity to lull you into a trance and then punish you for carelessness. What you needed was inattentive alertness. The noise of the machines made earplugs necessary, but you also had to be able to hear the shouts of the line leads, as sometimes conditions shifted on the fly. It was cold, too. And your hands got ate up from the sanitizer and disinfectant. The nitrates and the ice baths, the hiss and spray of liquid nitrogen. And there was the danger of the hydraulic presses and the constant, gleaming inner machinery that powered the belts. You sometimes got into such a rhythm, flying over the grain of the cuts, the fat coming away easy, like nothing, that you forgot yourself. Strayed too close to something and got your arm sliced open through your coveralls.
Most dangerous thing was thinking you had control when you didn’t. It required a certain humility. But then, that was life.
Timo considered this work a variety of animal cruelty. He liked to say that Fyodor was a participant in a system that cost millions of animals their lives.
He and Timo had met on an app and had been together for about a year. The fighting about Fyodor’s job had been constant, but at first, it had been a little hot. It had been a point of contention that let them work themselves up, and it improved their sex life because it gave the sex another dimension, some depth. The sex was a way of arguing without arguing, or the arguing was a way of fucking without fucking, which would hopefully end with fucking. Still, in some moments, Fyodor found it strange that their sex life was the result of an unresolved argument about what he did for a living. Timo was a vegetarian.
Out into the cold he went. The sky was clear and smooth. The street was empty, except for the rowdier undergrads down in the row of apartment buildings fronting the hospital parking garage. Loud music, shouting, windows up: they were having a great time. They didn’t need an excuse for anything, Fyodor thought. They just went on living how they wanted. Time had no meaning to them. It moved over them like a stream. Time’s passage. What could it mean when you had so much of it?
Up his own steps and into the front hall of the old Queen Anne, which had been busted up into apartments. Fyodor could hear something like classical music. He stood in the cool hall, pressing his head to the door, listening. It was piano. Timo never shared that part of himself anymore, not since those early weeks when they’d first gotten together. Now, he guarded that part of his life as if to share it would be some kind of betrayal of a promise he’d made to himself.
Fyodor found Timo lying on his back in the living room, listening to music coming from a small conical speaker on the table. He had one arm over his eyes and he was keeping time with his free hand. The music was melancholy.
“You’re up,” Fyodor said.
“I wasn’t waiting for you. I was grading and needed a break.”
“Fair enough.” The clarification hurt Fyodor’s feelings a little, but he wasn’t totally sure why. “You eat already?”
“With Goran.”
Fyodor poured a glass of water for himself and drank it at the sink, looking into the yard at the tall pine. Blue light from the neighbor’s porch caught the ends of the needles. The sink was empty. He washed his glass and set it upside down in the rack.
“Must have been good to see him.”
“I’m listening,” Timo said. The music had grown louder but also more melancholy. Fyodor unsnapped the straps of his coveralls, pulled them down to his waist. Then he pulled at the black sweatshirt and thermal underneath. The apartment was warm. He should shower before the heat switched off. He watched Timo’s hand in the air, seeming to shape the music as it poured from the speaker. There were bright spikes of something in the melody, a series of notes played rapidly and then revisited more slowly a few moments later.
Eating with Goran—that certainly explained the mood. Fyodor undressed in the small bathroom off the living room, then stepped into the shower and switched on the water as hot and as forceful as he could get it. The music was underneath the sound of the water pounding at the back of his head. He tried to unhear it, but it was so present in him now. Then it went away, and he realized that Timo must have turned the music off. This hurt his feelings, too.
He toweled himself off in the bedroom. Now Timo was heating something in the kitchen. Fyodor could smell tomato sauce, hear the brassy play of the potlids. His feet were so sore. Timo brought him a plate of pasta and sat at the foot of the bed while Fyodor ate it. He was grateful for the food—for the oily salt of it, the brine of the tomato sauce. They could hear, in the absence of the music, their neighbor moving above them. Signs of extraterrestrial life. Timo looked up. Fyodor watched the tendons of his neck, the swing of his eyes.
“That was nice, what you played earlier,” Fyodor said.
“I better get back to grading.”
Timo stood up. He stopped at the doorway, looked back.
“It’s just music,” he said. “It wasn’t anything special.” Then he left.
Timo’s eradicating impulse, like everything was a battle to be won, was exhausting. Fyodor ate his pasta and thought about the argument in the bar with Hartjes, whether he should just cut bait with Timo and save them both a lot of trouble. These arguments—these petty, petty, passive aggressive fights about nothing that lasted for days. Why? And for what?
He dabbed up the red oil from the plate and licked his fingertips clean. There was a greasy sheen to his nails. He leaned against the headboard. His back was sore. His joints ached now that he had been sitting. The hot water had done its job pummeling him. He could sleep for years. But he got up, took his plate to the kitchen to wash it. He was running the plate under lukewarm water when Timo shouted from the bathroom, “It smells like a death camp in here. Why can’t you just leave these work clothes in your truck?”
“It’s my bathroom,” Fyodor called back.
They did not live together. This was Timo’s choice, and Fyodor had no complaints about it, really, except that Timo sometimes acted like they did live together. Timo said nothing. But then, coming around the corner, he leaned against the doorway and frowned like a spoiled child. Fyodor shook the water from his hands. “You don’t listen to me,” he said.
“You’re just annoyed at me because you know your job is morally indefensible.”
Fyodor leaned against the sink and gripped it tight. His head throbbed. One of the men at the plant, Tom Stein, had cut himself badly, and he’d screamed so loud that everyone could hear him over the roar of the belts and clank of the presses. The scream had made the enamel of Fyodor’s teeth ache. Fyodor had picked up the man’s slack, which made it a long, bloody day. His back hurt. His shoulders hurt. Fyodor thumped his fist against the edge of the sink and hummed three quick times.
“This is what my life is. You think that this is temporary, but it isn’t. This is what my life is. What I will be.”
“That’s not true,” Timo said with a bored drawl. “You have so much potential, and this is just murder, and it’s awful that you do it. I’m not sorry for saying so.”
Sometimes Fyodor thought Timo was the smartest person he had ever known. But there were other times when he thought Timo was a moron. Or, if not stupid, then just very naive in the way some black people could be when they’d grown up with money and parents who believed in them. They were both mixed, but apart from that they were nothing alike, and this at first had been thrilling to Fyodor. Someone so like him that he wouldn’t have to explain the weirdness of not quite being one thing or another, while obviously being black even though he was also mixed. It was like a puzzle whose stated solution was obviously wrong but also irrefutable. If you were mixed, you were black. Fyodor had no issue with that. But Timo was irritatingly middle class, and sometimes that gave him illusions about how the world saw him.
Timo’s naivety on the subject was cute. Sometimes sexy, like someone pretending to be dumber than they were. But sometimes, like now, Fyodor wanted to wring his neck. He looked so complacent and sure.
I’m not sorry for saying so was a thing you could say only if you’d grown up thinking you had options. Only if you did have options. But Timo wasn’t totally without self-knowledge. He’d gone to college, Fyodor knew, and he was smart—so smart. Timo was a logician, which sounded a lot more fanciful than it was. Fyodor didn’t really understand the term except that it involved math and strange symbols. He played piano and knew about music and art. In the summer the city put pianos out on the sidewalks for people to play, and sometimes, when they were walking home, the air fragrant and fizzy in the falling dusk, Timo would stop and play him something. Just a little fragment of something astounding and beautiful. The first time, Fyodor had been so startled by the effortlessness with which Timo pulled something wonderful out of the rickety old pianos that he’d stopped and choked on his beer. They were walking home from the bar. Fyodor with his brown paper bag, sipping discreetly. But then Timo had done that thing with the piano, and the whole world had shifted.
“Goddamn,” he’d said.
Timo had just shrugged, moving toward him, and said, “That thing needs tuning.”
But other times, like now, in the kitchen, Timo just gazed at him in bored hostility, totally unreachable.
Fyodor felt that if he opened his mouth again, what would come out would be not his own voice, but Tom’s scream. Tom had taught Fyodor how to use the knife to separate the fat from the flesh, how to pull the fat away without stressing the muscle fibers, what to look for when you ran your hand along the cap. Tom, dark-skinned with a big gap. He was bulky and good, with hands so fast they were like elegant blades. Tom. How had he cut himself? He was so careful.
Fyodor closed his eyes. “I don’t think we’re gonna make it.”
“Why do you want to be this way forever?”
“I don’t want,” Fyodor said. “It’s not about wanting. Some of us don’t get to want.”
“Ah, the nobility of the working classes. Here we go. You don’t have to work in this plant. There are other jobs. Other things you could do. We all have agency, Fyodor.”
“You’re right,” he said. “We do.”
Fyodor left the sink and crossed the room in three swift strides. Timo flinched. At the door, Fyodor took a deep breath. The air in the apartment was stale and too warm. Fyodor pulled the door open. Outside, on the front porch, everything was cold and dark.
“Please leave my apartment,” he said. Timo squinted at him in disbelief, but Fyodor merely pulled the door open wider. “Please.”
Timo did leave that night, and they didn’t talk for the rest of the week. They didn’t talk the following week. And then it was as if they had never been together at all.
Things went on.
Things always have a way of getting on.
Fyodor was in the café above the bookstore. It was where you could get the best espresso for the lowest price downtown, and on his days off he liked to spend time there watching the students, whose lives seemed unremarkable and therefore pleasant. It was mid-November, the end of the semester, and the students had an anxious, jittery quality. They were on Adderall and speed. Memorizing atlases of the body and columns of facts about various wars and catastrophes.
There had been a time when Fyodor wanted to be like them. When he still harbored certain ideas about what he might be capable of. But then he’d run into undergrads at bars and clubs, and he’d seen the way their eyes dimmed when they spoke to him and he tried to speak to them. The way they slowly became aware that they belonged to different worlds. He’d stopped admiring them then. They were just kids. This, he understood now, was why it hadn’t worked with Timo.
He was reading a book of short stories by Garshin. Fyodor’s own father was Russian. Or had been Russian, from a long line of Russians. He had named Fyodor after his great-grandfather. Because you are Russian, don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t, his father had said. But fathers sometimes said things they didn’t mean, or things they meant but that didn’t really matter in the grander course of life. He hadn’t spoken to his father in some years now. That life was behind him. Down in Alabama.
Still, Fyodor read the stories, experimentally, trying to see if something came back to him. Something ancestral and mysterious. There was nothing in the café that day. It was just clean, bright descriptions of ordinary life shifted subtly and irrevocably off course. Russian dramas of the mundane variety. The stories had nothing at all to do with him and the cold steel of the belts or the spinning blades of the saws. There was nothing in them at all that was the same as his life, yet he read on.
He wasn’t the best reader. He and Timo got into fights about it—Timo would hold up his phone to show Fyodor something and then get tired of waiting for Fyodor to finish. Fyodor tried to explain that he had to go slow because sometimes his eyelids grew heavy and the words spun around on him. But he did like stories, and he remembered what he read. He could hold it in his head for a long time, turn it over. Poke at it. He liked to listen to Timo read in English and French. He didn’t really understand the French, but he could feel the meaning deep down in the sounds of the words. But then Timo would tell him to get an audiobook subscription, or get tested for dyslexia, he was old enough now to do it himself. So, no, he wasn’t a great reader. But he did enjoy the exertion of it. And the slow seep of the stories into his mind.
With the benefit of retrospection, now that they’d been broken up for a few weeks, he thought Timo was kind of an asshole anyway.
Then, as if he’d conjured him, Timo walked into the café with Hartjes, who waved at him. Fyodor waved back. Timo did not wave, which hurt Fyodor’s feelings a little.
While Timo was ordering coffee, Hartjes came over to speak to him. “It’s been a while,” he said. “Hey, what’s this about you two splitting?”
Fyodor didn’t want to get into it, both because Timo was standing just a few feet away and also because he didn’t know if he could explain it well. Any part of it felt insufficient: that Timo had not taken him seriously, that Timo was selfish, that they’d just wanted different things. All true, but Timo was also generous and funny, kind in his own prickly way. He was good to spend time with, and their arguments had a certain animal heat to them that made Fyodor hard and want to fuck him. The tension that had made Fyodor ask Timo to leave that night was also the very thing that made Fyodor want to be with him. But how to explain that without sounding nuts?
Nothing would sound sufficiently convincing or even truthful, and so Fyodor said bluntly, “It’s complicated, but also stupid.”
Hartjes smiled and sat down. He picked up the book Fyodor had been reading. “What’s this?”
“Just some stories,” he said.
“Garshin. Never heard of him,” Hartjes said.
“He’s Russian,” Fyodor said.
“Figures. Though I never took you for the story type.”
“What did you take me for?”
Before Hartjes could answer, Timo had come over with two paper cups of coffee. He pulled up a third chair, and there they were, the three of them.
Timo had a turn looking at the volume of stories. Fyodor’s face grew hot. It was like being examined. He wished suddenly that he had just stayed in his apartment, where he’d spent the past three days feeling ill. He had bought the book just an hour or so ago, and he had read only the first couple of stories. He couldn’t think of a good reason to explain to Timo and Hartjes why he’d bought the book at all, and they appeared slightly amused at him for it, like he was suddenly displaying altered behavior. Hartjes leaned back on the chair, and its spindly legs creaked a little. Fyodor took the book when Timo offered it back to him, and he shyly looked down into the surface of his coffee.
“I didn’t know you liked Russian literature,” Timo said. There was something mean and mocking in his voice. It was how certain of their mutual friends spoke to Fyodor when they felt he had done something out of character. When he offered to julienne the vegetables for stews, or when he delicately and with great tenderness lifted their quivering pets into his arms and spoke in soothing, quiet tones into their ears and they stopped shivering, or when his eyes grew teary at the conclusion of movies, as the music became soft and optimistic, like fine rain or mist on hopeful faces. In these moments he often saw himself through their eyes, and understood that they thought of him as something else entirely—as hard and stupid.
“I can read, you know,” Fyodor said quietly.
“I didn’t say you were illiterate,” Timo said.
“How have you been?” Hartjes asked.
Fyodor drummed his fingers on the table. “I was a little sick the last few days, I guess. But I’m feeling better now.”
“Good,” Hartjes said.
“Sick how?” asked Timo. “You don’t look sick.”
“Because I’m better,” Fyodor said. “Better people don’t look sick, do they?”
“Whatever.”
Hartjes sighed. “Well, this is lovely.” He drank his coffee and then got up for a refill, leaving the two of them together. Timo did not look at him at first. Fyodor studied the grain of his beard. It was thicker than he remembered it. Dark red now, especially at the edges. His hair had a soft curl to it, especially where it sloped behind his ears. His neck was smooth, and Fyodor could remember the exact temperature and texture of that skin there, where he had kissed him, especially at night, when they were going to sleep.
He wanted—though perhaps want was not the correct word for it, because want implied something conscious, something of awareness, which was not present, and so it was maybe better to say that Fyodor felt, somewhere, deep and central to his body, a compulsion—to touch Timo. He slid his hand across the table, but stopped just before he touched his wrist, and the motion of his coming to a stop caused the surface of the coffee to ripple. For a moment, they watched the ripples in the coffee expand. The two of them were, for the first time in weeks, staring at the same thing, occupying the same space, watching it happen together.
“I miss you,” Timo said. “I miss you, and I don’t know what to do about it, except to say it. So I said it. There it is.”
Fyodor touched Timo at the place where his sleeve pulled back from his wrist. The bones were firm, and the hair there was fine like cornsilk. Timo’s eyelashes were thick with moisture. His nostrils flared subtly. Timo’s thumb rested on the cup in front of him. Fyodor’s fingers were laced together. Neither of them said anything because what was there to say? How could they bridge this impossible space? The rupture that had come about because of silence could only be fixed with silence, except that silence was no good for fixing anything. But silence and time were all they had. Timo’s face grew red. He was embarrassed, Fyodor could see that. He had gambled and been rebuffed, but Fyodor wanted to reassure him somehow. He took Timo’s hands apart and lay his palm against Timo’s right hand, as if in benediction, and he closed his eyes.
“I miss you too,” Fyodor said. That was only a part of it. But he could say it with his eyes closed, that was the trick of it. If he held his eyes closed, he could say some of how he felt without the burden of seeing Timo’s face. That was pathetic.
“Okay,” Timo said. Fyodor took his hand away. He cleared his throat. Hartjes returned.
They chatted a little in the halting, halfhearted manner of people who would rather be on their way, but who feel that they cannot without being rude. In the end, it was Fyodor who got up first, said he had to go. That there was something he had to do, and as he stood up, Timo flinched a little. Hartjes smiled and waved. They shared a hug. And then Fyodor wrapped his scarf around himself and went out into the cold and the damp gray of a winter afternoon.
Across the street, big white park service trucks had pulled in the Ped Mall. They were taking down the diseased ash trees. He had seen a little thing on the news about the trees, how before, back in the fifties or sixties, there had been elm trees all over Iowa City. But the trees had died of Dutch elm disease, and ash trees were planted to replace them. And now they, too, were dying.
Fyodor had never paid much attention to the trees in the Ped Mall. But now he could see that in the summer there would be no shade. It would be the sun beating down on all of them as they walked and shopped and listened to music on the square. The birds and the squirrels would have nowhere to go. It was sad. Too sad. The great dying off of things.
He walked over to the Bread Garden and bought two apples. He stood under the heat lamps of the patio and ate one, listening to the wind howl across the empty playground. He sat down and tried to read again but found it difficult. He kept thinking about Timo, how in the end they hadn’t been able to say more than a few words to each other. It was unfair of him to be annoyed, he knew. It was his fault they’d broken up. But still.
When he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere with the stories, he stood up. He put the other apple in his pocket for later, tossed the core in a garbage can, and walked away, leaving the book there on the table with his receipt for the apples. On his way home he thought about watching a movie, but he couldn’t think of what to see. Nothing interested him. Nothing was good. Besides, movies reminded him of his dreams. Movies were uncanny and strange to him. Like something private playing on the outside. He always had too many questions about movies: How many people were involved in the shoot? Where had the camera been placed? How had they moved around while filming, recording? His thoughts all felt extremely literal when he watched movies, and he couldn’t shake the habit of thinking that way. So he was caught between those two disconcerting feelings—that he was watching his own dreams unfold before him, but also that he was watching something fake but that almost approximated reality.
Lately, he had been dreaming about Alabama. It was always some version of the same dream. That he had gone home to visit his mother and could not leave. He’d lost his car keys, or his license, or he was his teenaged self again and couldn’t drive. The dreams always twisted in some mundane, terrible way. An aunt said something cruel, his mother punished him for some childish thing, or else he just got frozen out by everyone and they refused to know him. No matter what he did, though, he could not leave. In the dream, they said things like, We’re family, why you wanna leave us? Even as they were doing horrible things to him. Things that were not done to him in real life. Not really.
The worst things that had happened to him never made it into the dreams.
He’d been dreaming of Alabama ever since he got sick. And he wondered what it meant. It probably had no significance. Dreams—well, his mother used to believe in dreams. She had forbidden Fyodor to talk about his dreams with her. “I don’t want that on me,” she used to say. Meaning, what if it came true?
Fyodor did not watch the movie. He went home and sat on the porch, eating the other apple in the cold. When he was done, he lobbed it across the street where it split apart against a tree.
He wished he had said something to Timo. But he didn’t know what.
Fyodor’s mother called the day after Thanksgiving.
He had inherited to some degree her very pragmatic view of things—that you had to survive, and that survival was the most important part of life. Hardship was just what soft people called living. That sort of thing. But Fyodor knew that his mother saw in him a streak of something yielding and wasteful. When he was young, she used to catch him in the kitchen, drawing or arranging things on the shelves. Sometimes she caught him watching cooking programs on the special channel that was intermittently watchable on their TV. At those moments, he looked up to see her watching him with disappointment, and, later, with something like fear. She was afraid of what she saw in him, and her voice often trembled when she spoke to him about life. You need to do something with yourself. Something good and honest. When they spoke on the phone, she was always short with him. Wanting to be off.
And yet she called him and chastised him because they didn’t speak more often. “If I didn’t call you, we wouldn’t talk at all.” He didn’t know what she really wanted from him. But he did know that she loved him. This was one of the fundamental truths of his life, although her love was at times inscrutable, indistinguishable from the routine rhythm and course of life itself. Love had been in the tension of his freshly made bedsheets, in the astringent cleaner she used on their bathroom and kitchen. Love was everywhere in their life. But then he had moved away.
“Boy, I’m tired of having to chase you around creation just to hear from my own kin.”
“Ma,” he said. He was lying in bed, sweating because the radiator was throwing out too much heat.
“What ailing you?” she asked, and Fyodor rolled onto his stomach. His shoulder was sore, and his knees ached. He had a body full of ailment, a list of complaints.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t sound like nothing to me.”
“I said it’s nothing, didn’t I?”
“Not that you’d say. You act like someone want to rule your life.”
“Nobody trying to rule my life,” he said.
“I sure ain’t.”
“Didn’t say you was.”
“You ain’t gotta say.”
“Ma,” he said, but his face was pressed into his pillow.
“One of them boys is dead.”
“What?”
“I said one of them boys is dead.”
“What boys?’
“Them boys,” she said slowly, as if she were peeling away a curtain to show him a magic trick. Fyodor sat up on the mattress. He put his hand to his face and wiped at the stiff mask of oil and sweat.
“I don’t want to try to figure this out, Ma. I don’t feel well.”
“Thought it was nothing ailing you,” she said.
Fyodor let out a loose, hoarse laugh at that. Fair enough, he thought. But he felt elsewhere in his chest the corner of what she was trying to say to him. He suspected, slightly, that she was trying to say that one of his brothers was dead.
They weren’t really his brothers anyway.
Fyodor’s father had lived three towns over with his wife and their two children. Fyodor’s mother had not hidden this from him. When he was growing up, he spent one or two weeks each summer with his father’s family at their white house in the woods.
What he remembered most from those times was the smell of pine sap and freshly cut grass. The sap had smelled so powerful that it burned Fyodor’s eyes and nose. His brothers were two chubby boys who looked almost like twins. They sweated all the time and smelled like okra, which strangely was their favorite food. The older of the boys was two weeks younger than Fyodor. The heat in those days was immense, powerful, almost like a living thing. The house was old and they cooled it with big fans shoved into the tallest windows. But the air wouldn’t budge. The boys spent a lot of time running through strips of shade out in the woods, until one day the younger one fell down and broke his arm, and that was the end of Fyodor’s time with his brothers in their house in the woods. That night his father packed up Fyodor’s clothes, even the dirty ones, into a plastic bag and shoved them into the back seat. Then he told Fyodor to get in, and they drove for a long time in silence.
The car windows were down, and the air was cool. His father had his arm out the window, a flash of pale white. The shadows of the trees, like a corps of dark, conspiring monsters, sometimes broke suddenly, sharply into a wide-open field, flat and perfect, silvery under the moon. Fyodor thought about the smell of his father’s aftershave, the scent of his soap. And the hard tightness of his jaw as he drove. When they reached Fyodor’s house, his father turned to him and he said, “See you next time,” like nothing at all had happened. Like nothing at all was the matter or wrong. And Fyodor felt a weight rise up from him. He felt it dissolve and fade, and he leaned over and hugged his father as tight as he could, and his father let him, and then Fyodor got out, and his father backed down the long gravel driveway, and was gone, and that was that, except for the place where the headlights had swung through the air—it seemed somehow like a lighter darkness there, channels of gray cut through the dark continent of night.
By the time Fyodor reached the front door with his bag over his shoulder, his mother was already there waiting for him. He was afraid she was going to hit him, but she didn’t. She put her arms around him and she hugged him and kissed his cheeks and his forehead, and she said, in a voice he didn’t recognize as belonging to her, that scared him because it was foreign and strange, “You didn’t do nothing wrong. You didn’t.”
Fyodor never saw or spoke to his father again.
But now his mother was saying that one of those boys was dead, and Fyodor didn’t know what to make of it, except that all his life he’d gone around with a soft piece of hurt just below his ribs, where he stored whatever disappointment or sadness he felt at his father and his brothers not trying to know him. It was not sharp. It was not hard. But it was a persistent, soft ache, like a sore gum through which a tooth threatened to rupture. And now one of those boys was dead.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Saw your daddy. He said.”
“What did he say?”
“That one of them boys was dead.”
“No—I mean, what, exactly, how did he say it?”
His mother sighed. The baseboard clicked. She was somewhere windy, probably on her porch. He could hear paper crinkling, the soft hiss of television in the background. Her life had gone on without him. It was after dinnertime. She was probably watching Wheel of Fortune, or one of those crime shows, with the window cracked.
“He said the boy died. That’s all he said. I’m not trying to fool you.” She sounded annoyed that he had pressed her. He felt annoyed that she hadn’t told him more. They were locked for an instant in a tense knot of silence, neither one seeming to know how to give way to the other.
“All right, then,” he said.
“All right” was her answer. “I better go. I got these dishes.”
Fyodor made an assenting sound, but she had already hung up. He rolled onto his back. His eyes stung from sweat. His stomach roiled. His brother was dead. A brother he’d never known except in the glancing, incidental way of their childhood. He didn’t even know which brother it was. The older or the younger. He hadn’t seen them in so long that he probably remembered them as being more alike than they actually were. Maybe one had a mole and one didn’t. Maybe one was left-handed like Fyodor and one wasn’t. He couldn’t separate them. They were alike, unindividuated, a mass of white boy–dough. But one of them was twenty-nine and the other twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
They were men, not boys.
It was a shame that now they knew nothing at all of one another. But this was not their fault. Like everything else concerning their families, it was something done to them or for them, or whatever. His father hadn’t blamed him for the younger one breaking his arm. It had been the boys’ mother, a tall, tawny woman with a hard face and mean hands. She used to pinch Fyodor when no one was looking. She’d reach under the table and squeeze his skin until he let out a sharp cry, but by then she’d already have her hands back above the table. When she bathed him when he was really little, she’d pinch him between the legs. She wouldn’t let him bathe with the other boys. She’d make him bathe after them, and he’d sit in their gray water, shivering because it had gone cold. Her cruelty to Fyodor was of the bored, unremarkable sort. She reached for it when it was convenient, but otherwise left it alone. That is, she treated him fine until she decided not to. Once, after Fyodor had given the younger one his cup after drinking from it himself, the mother had come in and slapped the cup out of Fyodor’s hands and said it was disgusting, a bad habit. Then she turned to the younger one and said, evenly, Don’t drink after him.
Still, it was a shame that one of them was dead. They were young, too young to die, and their parents were too young to have lost a child. It was unfortunate.
Fyodor left his mattress and pushed up a window. Outside, the air was dense and cold. Everything glinted. The snow was luminescent. The church bell tolled deep and resonant. There was a conifer in the front yard, its branches heavy with snow. The sidewalks were slushy and gray. No one was out in the streets. It wasn’t late, but the cold had kept everyone inside. Fyodor stretched until his bones popped, then sat back down on the mattress and took up the book he had been reading. But he found, every now and again, that his vision went hazy or blurry every couple of pages. He couldn’t see the letters. He was crying.
The room cooled.
The baseboard clicked louder.
Laundromat day.
Fyodor knocked the snow off his boots as he stepped inside. When he looked up, he saw Timo near the back. They hadn’t seen each other in about a month, not since the café. Timo still had the beard, and his body had changed. His chest looked broader, his shoulders wider somehow. He seemed more precisely himself. In a quantitative sense, as if there were more of him. He was wearing all black, jogging pants and a long-sleeved spandex shirt. His hair was shorter, but curlier. He didn’t see Fyodor, so his face was calm and open, smiling slightly to himself as he folded his laundry.
Fyodor felt like he was seeing something he wasn’t supposed to see. A hot pulse of desire raced through him. Something damp and wanting. He looked away, down to the gray slab floor, where he was still dripping snow melt. He stayed away from the back as he dropped his clothes near one of the machines and began to sort them into two separate washers.
Out came the coveralls. The bits of gristle and white fat that he picked from the fabric melted or turned stringy between his fingers. The coveralls smelled so strongly that he held his breath as he pushed them in. The lights were bright, too bright, drilling down into his skull. His head hurt. Fyodor counted out the quarters he needed from the plastic sandwich bag where he kept them. It was twice as much for the larger machine that held his coveralls. He slotted them in one after another. It was like a game. He scooped the dry powdered detergent. He waited for the machines to come to life, and when they did, he picked up his mesh sack and looked around for somewhere to wait.
Timo was looking at him.
Fyodor waved stiffly, all wrist. Timo waved back.
The laundromat was humid, though it was cooler up front where people kept coming through the door. A boxy television sat overhead, beaming news and weather at them. There was a remote control somewhere, Fyodor knew, but he’d never seen it. The channel was always locked on cable news, but never the same one twice in a row. This one was the conservative news. The volume was turned all the way down. The captions lagged, so that often a report of some gross disaster hovered over a cheery hamburger commercial, or news of a mass shooting in Florida framed a commercial about erectile dysfunction. Fyodor found it funny sometimes, but mostly, he wondered why it was that things couldn’t work the way they were supposed to. But then maybe this was the way things were supposed to work, he thought. Maybe things were supposed to bleed together.
He couldn’t sit near the television this time anyway because a group of undergraduates had taken that booth—four of them, all nearly identical in their fleeces and moccasins, eating chips and drinking Diet Pepsi, talking more than doing homework. Early December was finals season. Undergrads were everywhere. Taking every available surface for their performance of studying. A performance that they had been neglecting for most of the semester. You could always tell, like when someone showed up to hoop and holler in church on Easter and Christmas. There was something insincere in it. Desperate.
Fyodor walked past the line of machines, feeling dread as each step brought him closer to the back of the laundromat, where Timo was. When he got to Timo’s table, he stopped and smiled as best he could. “Good to see you,” he said.
“You can crash here with me if you want,” Timo said.
“I don’t want to get in your way,” Fyodor said, but Timo just shook his head. He was folding his clothes and setting them up in neat stacks. Shirts and pants and underwear and socks, all of it laid out like the parts of an animal. “You look good,” Fyodor said.
“Huh? Oh, thanks.”
Timo’s hands moved slowly and carefully. There was a kind of grace to his folding. He knew exactly what to do, where to place tension, where to pull, where to lay, how to truss up a garment so that it held together. Fyodor never folded his clothes right. Timo glanced at Fyodor’s hands, and he pulled them away self-consciously. He had split two knuckles on his right hand into a bloody mess getting out of his truck that morning. His skin was dry and tight already, and in the bitter cold it had taken next to nothing to split it open. He’d hissed and howled, and the pain, while minor, had been first hot and then cold, as if it reached down to the bone. Now his knuckles were crusted over dark red. His nails were always in bad shape, split and chalky, but under the fluorescent lights they looked alien.
It hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
“How have you been?” Timo asked, studying his laundry very carefully. His tone was careless, casual.
“I’ve been all right,” Fyodor said mirthlessly. “My brother died.”
“Oh. Fyodor, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s not. Thank you,” Fyodor said. He picked at the crust of his knuckles, which stung, and he winced.
“And your dad?”
“I don’t know.” Fyodor laughed a little at that. “That must sound strange to you.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not strange.”
“Come on, you don’t have to be so nice to me.”
“Fyodor.”
“No, say it. We’re not like you and your beautiful family. It’s fine.”
“That’s not what I think at all,” Timo said.
“Okay. Right. Okay.”
Timo was holding a black T-shirt, larger than the others. Fyodor recognized the gray worn spots under the armpits. The specks of mint green paint.
“That’s mine,” he said.
Timo turned deep red. Fyodor laughed.
“You stole my shirt.”
“You gave it to me,” he said.
“Oh, did I?”
“Yes,” Timo said. “Or maybe you left it at my place. I don’t know. I didn’t steal it.”
“And you’ve been wearing it?”
“Yes. I have.”
“It must be a dress on you.”
“I’m taller.”
“Still, I’m bigger.”
Timo hummed, and he folded the shirt one more time and set it on the stack of other shirts. Fyodor smiled because he couldn’t help himself.
“What are you smiling about?” Timo asked.
“I like the idea of you wearing my shirt.”
“That’s what you said when you gave it to me. Do you want it back?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I didn’t say I wanted it back.”
Timo took up a white shirt then and folded it, then set it on top of Fyodor’s shirt.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Timo said. “I know you weren’t close, but it’s still hard.”
“It is, surprisingly,” Fyodor said. He leaned back in the chair, its cheap gray plastic warping slightly under the strain.
“What’s so surprising about that?”
“Just that . . . I didn’t expect it, I guess. For it to be so hard. I mean, I only saw him a few times. And the weird thing is, I don’t even know which brother it is.”
“Those are just details,” Timo said, “you feel how you feel.”
Fyodor wanted to laugh, if only because laughter might have precluded his crying. It was another of those moments in life when he felt he’d realized something about himself. Except he could not put into language what he understood or why. Sudden knowledge always made him want to cry. Because it brought with it a sense of relief—that it was okay, that he was okay, that the world would be okay. It was like when his mother had said on the porch that night that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Watching Timo as he shook out a towel and quartered it, Fyodor was overcome with great love and admiration. The long flexion of his arms, the precision of his fingers, the bored tension of his gaze. Timo noticed him staring, and he almost dropped the towel.
“Jesus, Fyodor. What is it?”
“I think,” he began, but then he paused as if to draw a line through what he had just said.
“Well?”
“It won’t sound right,” Fyodor said.
“Try me,” Timo laughed. “Come on. You’re scaring me a little. What is it?”
Fyodor stood up. At the very back of the laundromat was a bright red door. Fyodor opened it and stepped into the cool, dark bathroom. He held the door open, and he looked directly at Timo, waiting. Timo remained at the folding table, surrounded by all the soft stacks of his clothes, and he squinted, seemed to think for a moment, and then there was the flash of recognition.
A channel had opened up and something clear and bright moved between them. Fyodor stepped backward into the bathroom and let the door go. Its pressurized hinges pushed it forward, but Timo caught the door before it closed. He came forward until he was standing in front of Fyodor in the bathroom. The door snapped shut. They stood in the dark room, with only the streetlights wicking through the skinny window overhead.
Timo reached for him, pulled at the drawstring of his pants. Fyodor reached for Timo, for the warm skin of his belly under the spandex shirt. Timo’s body had been soft before, but now he was compact and firm. Not hard. But firm. They did not kiss. Timo licked at Fyodor’s neck, and Fyodor bit the bony process of his clavicle. Timo dug his nails into Fyodor’s lower back. Fyodor gripped Timo’s throat. Timo pulled too hard on Fyodor’s testicles. Fyodor raked his teeth across Timo’s thighs. They took turns kneeling between each other’s legs and sucking one another off. Timo tasted salty and clean. He watched Timo’s head bob between his legs, and the soft crown of his head. The wet heat of Timo’s mouth felt like kindness. Timo stood up and leaned against the cold white concrete of the wall under the window. Fyodor came up behind him and pressed his face into Timo’s curls. There was a low groan. The damp press of their bodies. Timo arched against him and he reached back and guided Fyodor until Fyodor felt himself breach then sink through the resistance of Timo’s body. He gripped the long metal safety rail in front of Timo’s hips, using it to lock Timo in place, and they fucked there in the bathroom of the laundromat in the cold darkness, the world gleaming white beyond them. He came inside of Timo, who panted and whined and came hot and lush and sticky in Fyodor’s hand. Fyodor extricated himself slowly. The bathroom smelled like piss and shit. They cleaned up in the sink, washing and rinsing. The tap was cold, and Fyodor flinched when he pressed the wet, coarse paper towels to himself. They left the bathroom first one and then the other. And they took up their places back at the table. Fyodor’s body was still humming, still tight. His shoulders were tense. He had come, but he felt still that there was something unvented in him.
Timo looked pale. He said, “I didn’t ask before. Are you . . . are you good?”
“Oh, yeah,” Fyodor said. “I had a test a month ago.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Are you?” Fyodor asked.
“PrEP,” he said.
“Oh, good.”
“You should. Well, think about it.”
“Insurance,” Fyodor said. “Condoms. Usually.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, I haven’t, anyway.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Haven’t. Since you. Since we. Yeah.”
Timo nodded. But he did not say the same thing in return, which Fyodor knew he shouldn’t have blamed him for, but he couldn’t help it. He felt a little angry about that.
There was a loud buzz then. Fyodor checked his laundry. It was time. He took out his clothes, their damp weight, their hardness. He tossed them into a red cart and wheeled them to the back, near the driers. He transferred them, trying all the time not to look at Timo. But he could smell him still, too, or at least smell the hand soap from the bathroom. It was on both of them.
They had never had sex in a public place before. It was strange that after their relationship had ended, they would still be doing new things together. Finding new ways to be together. It felt strange to have new history when it was all over. He snapped the machine shut, but then, in the reflection of the glass and the spinning clothes, he saw Timo looking at him.
“What?” he asked without turning. Embarrassed.
“Nothing,” Timo said.
“It’s funny. We never did laundry together,” he said. “Before, I mean.”
“And we had that fight about your clothes.”
“Those fights,” he clarified.
“Yeah. Those fights.”
“I don’t hate you. I’m not mad at you. Obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
Fyodor turned then. He sat down in the chair. Timo sat, too. Between them were the towels and the shirts.
“Well, because of what we did. We wouldn’t have done that if we were mad or hated each other.”
“People fuck people they hate.”
“I guess that’s true. But I wouldn’t.”
At this, Timo laughed and flicked away a lump of dryer lint from the table.
“Did you like that? In the bathroom?”
“Yeah, I did.”
Timo nodded, like he’d made up his mind about something.
“It’s nice to do things together.”
“I don’t think that means fucking in public for most people, right?”
“You started it.”
“Fair enough,” Fyodor said.
One afternoon, in the new year, there was a shooting in Alabama.
A man had gone into a local bank and shot all of the workers and customers. It was such a strange idea. That a person could go into a bank and shoot every single person there. Had they all lined up and been shot down? Had they tried to run and had he just had excellent aim? It was a kind of miracle, bestowed by a bloody and ruthless god of carnage.
Fyodor read the news on his lunch break at the plant. He stood out in the parking lot. The sky was a tranquil blue. The trees at the edge of the parking lot swayed.
The bank was in the town where his mother lived. He had not been to Alabama in years.
He called her, but she did not answer. He called again, but she did not answer. He called again, and when she picked up, he almost fell to his knees in relief.
“What?” she asked. There were sirens behind her voice.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At home,” she said.
“Why are there sirens?”
“Oh, boy, I don’t know.”
“The bank,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“It was some boy,” she said. “Some stupid, stupid boy. Shot up everybody. They all dead.”
“How many?” he asked.
“Seven, eight, I don’t know.”
“He shot all those people.”
“Well,” she said, like she meant to say something else, but she didn’t. Fyodor felt stupid for feeling so worried. It seemed stupid to think that his life might intersect with the greater, terrifying course of life in the world. “You all right?”
“I called you, remember?” he said.
“That don’t mean you all right.”
“I’ll make it,” he said.
They got off the phone, but Fyodor couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking. He got into his truck and turned on the radio, trying to find a station, any station that would ease the silence. He found a classic oldies station and slid down in his seat. The cab of his truck smelled like oil and dried blood. He could see his breath. The snow had turned soft, and the parking lot was bathed in filthy water. The plant looked like an elementary school. Set a short distance behind the main building were great silver towers and other steel structures. It looked, in this way, like a real factory rather than just a place where they took apart animals. Fyodor gripped the wheel. The music was familiar. He tried to think of that night in the car with his father, tried to remember what had been playing on the station, but he couldn’t. How like memory to abandon him when he most needed it.
How like memory—so full of empty promises.
Fyodor really had thought his mother was dead. In those long moments before she picked up, he had really thought she’d been shot and killed. But she had been as indifferent to the fact of violence as she was to him. The violence hadn’t pierced her life at all.
He tried to breathe.
His hands still shook. He wouldn’t be able to handle the knife. He shut his eyes. The phone rang. He answered it.
“Hey—I just saw the news. Hey. Are you okay?” It was Timo.
“I’m fine. My mom’s fine,” Fyodor said. “I just called. She sounded pretty bored by it, actually.”
Timo clicked his tongue. “Well, I’m glad she’s all right. Still, fuck. I hope he fries.”
“You do?” Fyodor asked.
“He killed like ten people. Normal, ordinary people. Running errands. Yeah, I hope he fries.”
Fyodor clenched the wheel harder with his left hand. Something nagged at Fyodor. Something prickly, like coarse new wool.
“You hope he dies?”
“He’s a murderer.”
“Oh,” Fyodor said.
“I mean, you don’t think he deserves to live after what he did, do you?”
Fyodor watched a hawk skim low to the roof of the sandstone building before turning and shooting back up into the sky. It was an oppressively beautiful day.
“That just seems like a cruel thing to say, when it’s already such a painful situation.”
“Cruel is murdering people.”
“And animals,” Fyodor said.
“What?”
“That’s what you think, right? That murdering animals for food is cruel.”
“Jesus Christ. I am not having this fight with you.”
“Isn’t electrocuting him or injection or whatever, isn’t that just as bad?”
“No, Fyodor, it’s not, and if you can’t see that, then we don’t have anything to discuss.”
Timo hung up on him, and Fyodor sat there with the phone still pressed to his ear. He could hear the air inside his own head. His ear was warm and sweaty. He tucked the phone into his pocket.
His hands smelled like the powerful cleaner they used when they left the line, so intense that it left your palms white and hard, and tingling. He could still feel the burn of it.
It was unfair of him to have said that to Timo, he knew. But Fyodor hadn’t been trying to win a fight. He had been trying to articulate something about what he felt and thought. He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.
Fyodor got out of his truck. His shift was starting back up.
When Fyodor and Timo had been sleeping together again for a while, they went to a show at one of the campus galleries.
There were supposed to be some talks by minor but charismatic artists who Timo had spent a week researching on the internet. For that week, Timo had been slipping into their conversation small references to the artists’ paintings or to their philosophy, and Fyodor, drowsy from work and full of dinner, would nod as the conversation carried him along. This was a part of his effort to be a different sort of person, so that Timo would not feel quite so much like he was bad or stupid or whatever. Fyodor didn’t find art pretentious. He didn’t find it overrated. He wanted very much to like art, but he always felt more or less on the outside when he looked at it. Sculptures were easier for him because he could understand the manual nature of the work. But paintings, no matter how conventional, always felt cold and inert. Not that he couldn’t appreciate their beauty. It’s just that he was without a context. He found himself sometimes wanting to compare the postwar geometric work that Timo loved so much to certain cuts of meat he had handled that day—the marbling, the fat cap, the rich deposits of fat in their rhomboidal shapes, which were so beautifully and cleanly delineated that it was like they had been drawn by hand. But the one time he had tried, Timo had grown so angry at him that they hadn’t talked for the rest of the night. They’d just laid there in Fyodor’s overheated room, sweating and stewing. Timo thought he was trying to reduce the work somehow. But that wasn’t it at all. He just wanted a context.
But now here they were at the show in the gallery. Fyodor had worn his best jeans and a chambray shirt with no burns or paint on it. Everyone looked elegant and smart. He felt thick and slow. They sipped champagne from small plastic cups. Fyodor took two at a time and poured them into one cup. Timo lingered near his arm, looking tense in the shoulders and in the jaw. Fyodor nudged him gently and tried to catch his eye, to smile or laugh. At one point during the reception he brushed his knuckles against Timo’s hand, but Timo jerked away from him like a startled animal. They had driven over in Timo’s car, so Fyodor couldn’t just leave, though he wanted to. His shirt was too tight and his throat was dry the whole time from the champagne and later from the gin and tonic he ordered. He went out through one of the side doors and stood on the concrete patio. There, he looked out over the frozen green pond to the hillside that sloped up behind the gallery. The lights inside cast a hazy glow, and he breathed the cold air in deeply.
Fyodor still thought sometimes about the shooting in Alabama. There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance. He sometimes also thought of his dead brother. He’d found out from his mother that it had been the older one who had died, suddenly, from a heart defect. He’d been out with friends at a bar, drinking after work, as common as anything. And then, just like that, he’d died.
Fyodor went across the patio onto the grass and the dirt. He crouched near the pond and leaned forward until he could see his own shadow on the surface. He put his palm flat to it and held it there, feeling how cold it was, how slippery. At the center of the pond, there was a place where the water was not frozen. It churned and foamed as a spigot there spat out new water. He thought he could feel the water moving under the sheet of ice, that he could feel the ice shifting. Maybe he could. He swayed in his crouch. His thighs burned. The hill was a sheer cliff face, fragile clay and mica, pale stone cut away in rectangular sheets. Fyodor glanced over his shoulder. In the golden light of the first-floor gallery, he saw the people of the party as if they were fish in an aquarium. He didn’t see Timo anywhere. They were anonymous, elegant people who seemed a part of a different species. Nothing like the men at the plant, who were like trees that had been stunted by too much wind and not enough water. Hard chunks of men, their yellow teeth, their jagged hands, their flesh bronzed and burned, turned to leather almost. Nothing in his life had anything to do with this place.
Fyodor stood up. He wiped his hands on his jeans, and he thought, with a dull laugh, that he could have leaped into the pond and sunk through the ice and the water and no one at this party would have noticed or cared at all.
He joined the party again, this time hugging the wall, watching Timo from across the room, over the tops of the beautiful heads. Timo was handsome, smiling or laughing now and then with groups of people he knew from the university. But he never looked out toward Fyodor. Instead, there was a solid, dark, inward turning on Timo’s part, away from them all. Fyodor recognized this habit of Timo’s. A way of getting along without requiring anything from anyone else. It was his particular way of being selfish. Fyodor drank more of the champagne. He drank white wine. He drank more gin. He grew more and more drunk, which he measured by the deepening of the gold light in the room and the haziness of the figures. By the time the artists were ushered behind a dais to deliver their talks, one dreary monologue after another, a procession of gray still shots or slow-motion video, Fyodor’s eyes were barely open. He could feel the sluggishness of time. The wavering loose amalgamation of moments. Nothing was adhering to anything else. It all slipped by him. He was very cold by the end of it. And he realized that he was not leaning against a wall at all, but against a windowpane, and he was sweating, so his back was damp and then cold.
Timo looked up then, toward the end of the last talk, and saw Fyodor. His expression was sour and hard. Fyodor nodded to him blearily. He waved. Timo turned away. Fyodor was tired. His body was sore. Timo was being cold to him again, for reasons that were opaque. It was hardly fair. What had he done to deserve it? Nothing, he thought. He had done nothing at all to deserve any of this. He laughed quietly to himself. And then less quietly, and less quietly than that, until he was laughing out loud, and everyone turned to look at him. He doubled over laughing. The heat in his stomach expanded, reached up into his chest, and he just kept laughing, so hard his body shook and then hurt. Sharp pain down his back, along his spine, and then up his front to the base of his throat. He laughed, and then it was no longer funny and he stood up and wiped the tears from his eyes. People were staring at him, but trying to avoid his eyes. They kept looking away. Timo came up to him and said stiffly, “That’s enough.”
In the car, on the way home, Fyodor rested his head against the cool glass of the window. He kept his eyes closed, except that sometimes they hit a rut in the road and his eyelids parted and he saw a flash of streetlight or the glow of a passing building. Sometimes the darkness broke open and he saw into a person’s life—folding laundry, walking, eating dinner, that sort of thing, all of it in rectangles of orange-gold light. People in their tanks like animals. The cold air helped his headache, helped the stinging in his eyes. It was a relief.
“Goddammit. We can’t do anything without it turning into a fucking circus,” Timo was saying. The music on the radio was distant and hazy, an old standard. Fyodor sat up. The car made him sway. He tried to hum the song, but he was out of rhythm.
“Fucking nonsense,” Timo said.
“I’m drunk,” Fyodor said, as if by way of explanation, but Timo just shook his head.
“Obviously.”
“I’m sorry,” Fyodor said, but it just made him laugh.
“It’s not funny.”
“I know,” he said, but the laughter persisted. He coughed. Put his head back against the window. “Did you have a good time?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that.” Fyodor’s hands were sweaty. He held them clasped in his lap, ran his thumb over the ridge of his other thumb. His hands felt filmy and greasy. The car smelled like pine air freshener.
Timo leaned forward at a stoplight and turned on the heat. It rattled faintly and then settled into life. The air was warm on Fyodor’s knees and thighs. He thought he’d fall asleep right there. Timo looked at him. Fyodor could see him in the window, a nearly translucent reflection. He recognized the course they were on. They were going to Fyodor’s house. There were trees overhead, clustered close to the street. Snow dripping, like rain almost. It was late March.
“What was that back there?” Timo asked.
“Do you remember that day we talked about the shooting?”
“What?”
“You said you hoped that man fried. That he died because of what he’d done.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I didn’t say anything at the time,” Fyodor said. “But I don’t agree with you. I think killing people is wrong. It is always wrong. Even if you do something really awful or heinous. Nobody should get to kill you.”
“You butcher animals for a living. Don’t lecture me about capital punishment.”
“But, see, that’s the thing. You act like . . . ,” and here Fyodor closed his eyes. His mouth felt acidic. He smacked his lips several times, like that would help surface the words. He could feel his mind reaching for them, searching out the contours of what he meant to say. Yet it all felt useless somehow. Like nothing he said would matter much. They had passed the old church on the corner, which meant they were close to his house. He sighed. “I mean, what, you want to kill me, too? Because of my job? Because of how I feed myself? You think I am a murderer.”
“You’re right,” Timo said. “I do think you’re a murderer. And I hate your job. And I think that if you walk into a bank and shoot a bunch of people, yeah, you deserve to die. Like an animal.”
Fyodor nodded slowly. There it was. He reached out like he could grab the point out of the air and hold it. He folded his fist around it. The point was solid in his hand and he turned to hold it in front of Timo’s face. He opened his palm.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s cruelty.”
“What?”
“You said die like an animal. But you don’t think animals should be killed. So that’s cruelty. Isn’t it?”
“Get out of my car, Fyodor. You can walk home.”
Fyodor nodded. He closed his palm. He got out of the car. His balance was okay. He could make it. The snowdrifts had turned filthy and porous. He kicked some of the brittle snow and it went down dry and hard, like flakes of dandruff. He grunted with satisfaction.
Animals lived and animals died. They were friend and they were food. They began and they ended. All that separated humans from animals was bitter hypocrisy. They were all just upright beasts, walking on their hind legs, baying at electric moons. They were nothing. But they had in them the dignity of life, a right to be. He had not always understood this. But he understood it now.
When he got home, twin headlights fell across him as he slid his key into the door. He turned back and put his hand over his eyes so he could see. There was Timo’s car in the street, pulled up into his usual spot. Timo got out and stood there with his hands in his pockets. Fyodor understood then. Timo had followed him down the three houses until he had made it home. It was kindness. It had the indifference of love.
Fyodor raised a hand. He pushed the door open. The front hall was stale. The stars above them were cold and white.
Work in the morning.