Most People But Not Everyone

The other ones might have deserved it, thought Degvan, staring briefly at the crushed blackening nail of his right fourth finger, but surely not this one. The thumb was a brute, a masher; the second, a poker and a jabber, a pushy ringleader; the third pushed its way ahead of the others like an arrogant know-it-all; and even the puny fifth had a curling cunning, a book-end’s complicity with the plot. The poor fourth finger couldn’t so much as nod without dragging half of its mates with it. What in the Holy Father’s name was the good of punishing the fourth finger.
    “The world ignores the guilty,” he announced to the stout, droop-cheeked man at his feet, wincing as he bound his bulging wrists, “and it does not particularly give a shit about the righteous either. What it likes best is to smash the innocent. It enjoys seeking out your fourth finger and pulverizing it, when it is all of the other fingers that are culpable.”
    Mamut moaned incoherently, ten feet away.
    “Mamut, brother in God,” said Degvan. “What is mine is yours. Know this, if I die today. If my head is broken open, out of it will flow my wisdom and accumulated learning, and it will pour like milk into yours. To the dregs, you will sop me up. To the last scraps of my vocabulary and half-formed notions of my subconscious.
    “I would estimate the likelihood of this happening today, however, as very low,” he added, shouldering his gun and approaching the steep decline to the river.
    
    *
    
Three days ago, Brendan Kozyczski was floundering in the capital, badly.
    “WHY IT IS, YOU WANT TO TRAVEL AUTONOMOUS ZONE,” demanded a man named Captain Gorvit. They were in a cold echoing room, barren but for a painting of some grim-looking mustachioed strongman. It was, Brendan was trying not to think and therefore thinking, an interrogation chamber.
    “I am a student of linguistics,” Brendan said, in his best Russian. “An American student of linguistics. My dissertation is on the Bakhas dialect. In order to research—”
    “Autonomous Zone is considered terrorist by your government,” interrupted Captain Gorvit. Presumably for rhetorical purposes, he added in English, “TERRORIST! OUT OF BOUNDS!,” and then he paced languidly, in silence, like a zoo lion with epaulettes and a cigar.
    This had been the universal attitude in the capital city. The American Embassy had been no help whatsoever—“right now I’m afraid there is absolutely no dialogue coming out of the Zone,” averred a consulary aide, a Texan whose grammar was like granules of sand deep in his ear—and the local government officials were monolithic in their suggestion that the Zone was bristling with drug-inspired separatists and Al Qaeda cells, and if they were foolish enough to permit Brendan to enter, he would be on television with a gun to his head within twenty-four hours.
    Or perhaps Brendan was himself a terrorist, an idea which Captain Gorvit now pursued with all the delicacy one might expect.
    “You have a friend in the Autonomous Zone,” insinuated Captain Gorvit, unknowingly paraphrasing his own country’s tourism board slogan.
    “Unfortunately not,” said Brendan.
    “Then how did you become interested in the language?” inquired the military man.
    “Well, it was one of a number of languages I studied,” said Brendan—what a stupid fucking question—“and I at one point had an advisor who was Bakhasian, and—”
    “Friend,” philosophized the officer. “Advisor. They are the same.”
    “Yes but she’s not currently in Bakhasia.”
    “You have a terrorist friend affiliated with the separatist movement of the Autonomous Zone.”
    “She is not a terrorist—”
    “Do not raise your voice.”
    “She is not a terrorist though.”
    “Do not raise your voice. You see why we cannot allow you to visit the Autonomous Zone at this time. Now you will give me your visa to inspect.”
    The obligatory earthy, celadon bills were tucked firmly in Brendan’s passport, but unaccountably, they were tucked there just as firmly when the captain handed it back to him. Please, Brendan wanted to say. Just tell me who to bribe. Or how much. His prospectus had included a bribe budget of $1000.
    “I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in our country,” said Captain Gorvit, firmly and ambiguously.
    That would be unlikely. Whatever charms the capital had, they were not on display. It was a mean, low-slung, remarkably unremarkable city, all stained pocked concrete and rumpled pavement. Its wide boulevards echoed with their own emptiness, punctuated by the inevitable few Mercedes with tinted windows. Its citizens met Brendan (spindly and easily a head taller than almost everyone else) generally with terror or hostility. Even the prostitutes lounging in his hotel lobby seemed afraid to approach him. After a half-hearted “Misteh Misteh” (not even inflected as an attention-getter—more observational than interrogative), they were content to send him on his way. Coldly leaving the interrogation room, in a fit of bloodymindedness, Brendan contemplated attempting an encounter—of any kind—with one. Would it even be possible? Would he actually be able to accept that behind the Duran Duran hair, the absurd blinding lipstick and eyeshadow, there was a human being with thoughts like his own? No, it would be impossible. It must be easier to pay for sex with someone who looks ridiculous, thought Brendan. It’s the only explanation.
    “Misteh! Misteh!” It was whispered, and by a small, froglike man. Though he was still in the Ministry of Tourism, and the man had no makeup, Brendan was willing to accept that this was a prostitute, and continued walking. The froglike man, however, matched pace with him.
    “Misteh, you need guide.”
    “I don’t need a guide,” said Brendan in Russian.
    “I can take you to see our many beautiful tourist attractions.”
    “I’m not a tourist.”
    “I know,” said the froglike man.
    “I’m a scholar.”
    “Yes, a student.”
    Well, what the fuck, thought Brendan, who hoped his silence would deter the man. It was not so.
    They emerged onto a central boulevard. The city was suffering under the thick wet summer heat, sighing burning-garbage sighs and sweating oil and black water. Predictably, there were no taxis in sight, and the only moving thing seemed to be an unreally giant flock of birds, wheeling and lurching hundreds of feet overhead, like a crazed particulate comma.
    “Many tourists leave this country without having seen our most beautiful bridge, the Bridge of a Thousand Sorrows,” continued the man in a solemn whisper. “Surely you, however, would not pay a visit without a glimpse of this beautiful bridge. You are an astute and worldly traveler. I can arrange for a driver to deliver you to the bridge, then allow you to photograph it in peace.”
    “I have less than no interest in this proposition,” said Brendan, who had carefully been formulating this phrase during the man’s sales pitch and was pleased to have delivered it properly. He walked faster. Some birds shrieked, distantly agonized.
    “You are astute and worldly,” repeated the man, in a tone that suggested he was becoming less sure of this assessment. He was jogging arrhythmically to match Brendan’s pace. “I know why you have come to this country,” he added. “I am certain this tourist attraction holds some interest for you.”
    Slowing, Brendan realized that he was being obtuse.
    
    **
    
Two days ago, Mamut had had a dream.
    “How many people do you think there are in the world,” he said, after a silence of about an hour, as they sat in their kiosk, slurping tea and rice whiskey and listening to the failing thin-toned radio.
    Degvan was astounded.
    “What,” he said.
    “Fuck it,” said Mamut, returning to his habitual silence.
    “No no no,” said Degvan. It was a typical irony of life, he knew, that he had been assigned to spend practically his every waking hour with such a taciturn person. If Mamut suddenly wished to talk, to converse and be social, by God, he would wring this opportunity of its every drop. “Oh no no. Let’s figure this out. How many people live in the capital? I would say ten thousand.”
    But now Mamut stared sullenly at the radio.
    “Perhaps twenty thousand,” said Degvan, musing.
    “It’s at least a million,” grunted Mamut.
    “What,” said Degvan.
    “Fuck it,” said Mamut again. “It’s not important.”
    And that was that. Fuming, Degvan cursed inside his own head. The bastard Mamut. What an inexplicable fate, to be paired with him. To care for him in all honesty like a wife. Making tea, tidying their little lean-to, living at the mercy of his moods.
    Degvan’s own parents had been innkeepers, out at the foothills of the mountains just visible from the capital city. They had entertained freedom fighters, then Soviets, then the free-spending functionaries of the new regime, then freedom fighters again, all with a simple mercenary lack of bias that had struck the child Degvan as ineffably wise.
    Now he was parodying the lives of his parents, he thought ruefully, and not for the first time. Another outpost, another set of services to be bought. Where travelers paid his parents for beds and dumplings, they paid him just for the right to continue. A government-sponsored parasite on the Silk Road, as it were. A spider waiting for silkworms, who came so few and infrequently that he had little to do but ponder the mysteries of Mamut’s internal world, and the atrophying contents of his own skull. A mind like an oven, Degvan had, consuming conversation so greedily that there was quickly nothing left but ash. Already he had blazed away Mamut’s little scrap, hardy as it should have been.
    Eventually, instinctively, Degvan let the silence ripen and rot.
    And after another hour, Mamut said, “I dreamed last night that I had to shoot every person in the world.”
    “Why,” said Degvan. He couldn’t help himself.
    “They were trying to cross the bridge,” said Mamut. “It was countless people, and they were running towards the bridge. White people, black people. Russians. Chinese.” He was quiet.
    “It was fucking crazy,” he said.
    “You shot them dead?”
    “Their bodies piled up,” said Mamut. “They fell into the river.”
    Again, he couldn’t help himself: “What do you think it means,” said Degvan.
    Mamut said nothing, as if he had heard nothing.
    Then he went on: “And then later on I was driving through the capital, except it was a part that I didn’t recognize, and then I wanted to go hunting, and I was looking for my gun, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. And you were in the car with some other people. You were talking politics, and I kept telling you to shut up, and you wouldn’t shut up. Then I was in this other building, and I was running around, and people wanted to know why I was there, and I told them, ‘I have to go hunting, I have to go hunting.’”
    “The first part of the dream is more interesting,” said Degvan.
    “There’s more but I forget,” mused Mamut.
    “You’re drunk,” said Degvan.
    “A little,” said Mamut.
    Degvan was also a little drunk.
    After another hour Mamut said, “One day I would like to see the inside of an airport.”
    Agreeing, Degvan excused himself to vomit.
    
    **
    
One day ago, Brendan was riding shotgun in a surprisingly sleek and tidy car, a Volvo, wondering if he was indeed making a mistake by traveling to the Autonomous Zone; after all, it was the word of the entire U.S. government against that of Andrea. Andrea was his dear friend, and she had been to Bakhasia dozens of times by now, but he was now wondering if she operated in a different world than he did. Brendan had come to believe that some people moved through borders and bad neighborhoods and poor, hostile territory like liquid, transfiguring themselves, and others like the clumsy, cooing, plump, pigeonlike, flustered people that they were. Now he was about to find out which one he was, only he knew already. He imagined himself through the eyes of a local, money-starved and alert to opportunities: easily identifiable, transparent of motive, ripe and juicy with money like fruit. Brightly colored like an orange. He peered furtively at his squat, frog-like driver, gauging how they thought of each other.
    “To you, I’m Jacques,” he had said, picking Brendan up near a park in the pre-dawn dimness, adding, “I really wish you hadn’t brought that.” He was referring to Brendan’s suitcase. Already he had broken the rules. “Did you think it wasn’t safe in the hotel?”
    Frankly, yes. “No,” said Brendan. “I just thought I’d need clothes, and things.”
    “You worry about that when you arrive,” said Jacques.
    Should they take it back? “Will that cause problems?” said Brendan.
    “Maybe,” said Jacques. “We’ll see.”
    It was strange that he called himself Jacques. Also, if someone had just told Brendan the rules, he would have followed them to the letter. No one told him not to bring his suitcase. How should he have known not to bring his suitcase? Where is this rule encoded? IF suitcase THEN leave it in a hotel room. It was early and Brendan was not up to figuring this out. This must have been another characteristic of those special people for whom the boundaries of the world are porous: a morning sharpness. An acuity in all circumstances. Andrea was never flustered or overmatched. Then again, she had the advantage of growing up in a war zone.
    Outside, as they tore down the empty highway, the world was lightening, and the distant mountains sharpened in Brendan’s view as they left the city behind.
    
    **
    
    “What happens when we arrive?” asked Brendan.
    “You have the money?”
    “Yes.”
    “Let me see it.”
    Jacques took the roll of bills and counted it aloud to himself as he drove, glancing only occasionally back at the road.
    “It’s all there,” said Brendan, against his better judgment.
    “It’s not enough,” said Jacques.
    “You said five hundred.”
    “Seven hundred.”
    There was a brief silence.
    It was in the way that Jacques said it, determined Brendan. Eyes now unswerving from the highway, he delivered his utterance a few fractions of a second too fast, and too low, like a set piece. It didn’t fit the rest of the conversation, somehow; it was a different color, a smoother texture. There was a kind of strange rigid fatalism in it. In his head, Brendan had been a nervous sheeplike creature just five minutes ago, crying out blindly for instructions, orders; but now something in the air between them made him alert.
    It was too perfunctory, realized Brendan. It was delivered in the voice of a haggler. He was being gouged. The bribe wasn’t really seven hundred, it was just five hundred. If he didn’t stand up for himself, then Jacques—and Captain Gorvit—and for that matter everyone else in their crooked, desperate country would eat up everything he had. No, he was not giving up the extra two hundred. (His blood warming, he found that he was even prepared to fight for it. He envisioned himself suddenly springing at Jacques, his fist in the man’s cheek, hammering against the man’s teeth through the soft wet flesh of the cheek.)
    “Five hundred’s all I have.”
    “It won’t be enough,” murmured Jacques, but they didn’t turn around.
    Silently, Brendan exulted. He had become part liquid.
    
    **
    
That morning, Mamut spoke again unprompted. It was just after dawn, and he and Degvan were huddled around the stove to bleed out the mountain chill.
    “I had the dream again,” he said.
    “The dream where you are a psychopath,” said Degvan.
    “No,” said Mamut forcefully. “Not a psychopath.”
    “What were you then.”
    “I was doing my job, bastard.”
    “You were guarding the bridge against everyone in the world?”
    “They were all terrorists,” said Mamut.
    Degvan took a swig of rice whiskey.
    “Everyone in the world was a terrorist,” he ventured, after Mamut offered nothing more.
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “Most people but not everyone.”
    The radio predicted another boiling day for the capital, then launched into some melancholy plunking guitar and a man wailing about his unrequited love, cloaked heavily in crackle and hiss.
    “Do you think it’s”—Degvan paused; if they were talking, he would talk the way he wanted to talk—“portentous?”
    Mamut ignored him.
    “What do you think it means?”
    “It was a dream.”
    “Sometimes dreams are omens.”
    “You sound like an old woman.”
    “This is an outstanding dream. You don’t think it means anything?”
    Mamut was staring at the radio as though it had insulted him.
    “It wouldn’t be absurd to draw the conclusion from this dream that you think the world is full of terrorists.”
    “I don’t think anything,” snarled Mamut.
    “That’s an idiotic thing to say,” Degvan started to say, but Mamut exploded: “Why do you need to talk so much? Why can’t you shut up?”
    Somehow they had never had this argument before, and Degvan, having anticipated it for years, quickly martialled his argument.
    “Talking is human. If you don’t—”
    “Talking all the time is what women do, you faggot.”
    Degvan heard his chair smack awkwardly against the wall and felt his knuckles crack against Mamut’s jawbone—the back of it, below the ear—before he regained control of himself. Then, staring at the top of Mamut’s hairy head, he saw his friend somehow spring into his belly, felt something hard compress his gut, his head slamming against the wall of the shed; he balled himself up against the ground, constrained by the walls and the stove, a bottle in his back.
    When he looked up, sucking hard on the cold insubstantial air, Mamut had left. Crawling out the door, Degvan found him standing solidly in the middle of the road, gazing back at the bridge, smoking a cigarette, his face almost wistful.
    
    **
    
An hour later, the Volvo appeared, about a thousand yards away. Wordlessly, somehow pleased with each other, the guards rapidly picked up their weapons and left the shed. Mamut stationed himself in the grassy shoulder, his gun trained on the driver.
    Degvan stepped into the road and walked slowly toward the car. A beautiful melody was singing in his ears. The sun shone a little brighter. His fingers had already begun throbbing.