Aetherial Worlds

Aetherial Worlds

“You do understand, don’t you, that from this moment on, all the rights as well as all responsibilities and liabilities associated with this property will become yours,” the lawyer patiently repeated. “This will no longer be David and Barbara’s responsibility, it will be yours.”

David and Barbara were watching me sullenly, without blinking. In my hand was a pen with black ink, and all I had to do was imprint the purchase agreement with one last signature. David and Barbara were getting a divorce and selling their Princeton, New Jersey, home. I was the buyer. And we were all sitting in a lawyer’s office. A heavy American downpour raged outside, the weather bearing similarity to that of the flood of Saint Petersburg in 1824; it was coming down with a particular kind of vengeance, you couldn’t see more than thirty feet ahead of you—there was just a wall of rain—and what you could see inspired consternation: the furious waters had already climbed halfway up the tires of the cars parked outside and were rising as fast as a second hand sweeps the face of a clock.

“Yeah, we may see some flooding,” the lawyer said indifferently, following my gaze. “In New Jersey, thousands of cars wind up at used car lots after a downpour like this. But I wouldn’t recommend buying one. They’re all lemons. However, that’s entirely up to you.”

“What about the house?” I asked. “Might the house get flooded?”

“The house sits on a hill,” David interjected, fidgeting. “The neighbors do get flooded, but not us, so far—”

“Mister P., please!” came a strict reminder from counsel.

This lawyer forbade David from speaking to me and me to him. Perhaps he feared that David would let something slip, possibly exposing the hidden flaws of the house, whereupon I’d gasp, and the sale price would immediately plummet. David would suffer a loss. Or—just as now—he would ply me with false promises, like the one about the hill allegedly ensuring the safety of the property, and I’d believe him, only later to walk into the house and find water undulating in the basement. This would mean that David had lied to me in the presence of two attorneys and so I would file a lawsuit, there would be litigation with no end in sight. No, according to the playbook, David was supposed to be cold, reserved, and neutral. Courteous but distant.

But this David? This David could scarcely hide how tickled he was that somebody wanted to buy his pitiful—at least by American standards—dwelling: a long gray unfinished barn with a leaky roof, tucked away in the back of an overgrown plot in an unprestigious rural corner. The address may have said Princeton, but really it was Bumblefuck, New Jersey—dense forest, a rutted road leading toward neglected, dilapidated structures. At the end of the road was a shack I would come to call “the End of All Paths”: boarded up, broken windows, decayed to the color of ash, it would have collapsed long ago if not for two dozen thin but sturdy young trees that pierced it like spears and improbably, impossibly, un-fucking-believably held it upright.

David was simple and honest, so very simple and honest that his eyes would bulge from the fear that he might cheat me or hoodwink me, even by accident. He showed me where the floor was rotted in the kitchen: the linoleum was so worn it had holes in it, having gone unchanged for thirty years. But the wood underneath was still holding up. He proposed that we both get on all fours to look under some cabinet, where a big chunk of the floor was missing. He’d yank at the window frames by the latches now formless from all the coats of paint—“Look, these are no good! They’ll need to be changed!” He thoroughly described where the roof leaked, where I’d be obliged to put buckets when it poured. He told me about the patio fiasco. That is, David didn’t have a patio—it existed only in his dreams. “Go see for yourself.” After banging his hip against it several times, he was able to open the swollen, warped plywood door that lurked in the back of this squalid abode—and there… a most magical room!

You take but a step and escape the semi-dark, narrow, low-ceilinged pencil box of a house for this airy sunroom, suspended just a bit aboveground. On both the left side and the right were floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking lush gardens where little red birds fluttered, and something in bloom entwined in the trees swayed in the wind.

“You see, I had the door and window frames made by a great craftsman—he has a two-year waiting list,” said David apologetically. “I ended up spending a lot of money. Maybe two grand. Or two and a half. Didn’t have anything left for the patio.”

He pulled at the sliding glass door—transparent and patterned, like the wing of a dragonfly—and the whole thing moved to the side. Beyond the threshold there was a green abyss, and a little beyond that, a lone pine tree. Beneath that tree, a latticework of sun rays on a carpet of last year’s needles, through which had sprouted lilies of the valley, their gaze shy and averted. My heart skipped a beat.

“No patio,” repeated David ruefully. “Right here is where it should have been built.”

Like a true fucking lunatic, David had begun building his Garden of Eden before making a budget. And so this absurd, wonderful addition, this airy, translucent box promising entry into an aetherial world, was stuck in our terrestrial one, weighty and stifling.

“But it can still be built!” he said. “All you need to do is to apply for a permit at our local municipal building; they’ll grant it.”

“And why are you selling, if I may ask?” I asked.

“I want to buy a ranch and ride horses,” said David, lowering his gaze. Behind us Barbara began to weep quietly, stifling her sobs, and by the time we reentered the dimly lit house, she had already pulled herself together.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “It suits me fine.”

And now, once I imprint this American document with my illegible scribble, an entire acre of the U.S. of A. will become my personal property.

It was 1992 and time was flowing by—just whirling, raging past—as I had recently moved here from Russia, where everything had fallen apart, where the rug had been pulled out from under us, where it was impossible to tell what belonged to whom, and where nothing belonged to me. But here, in the New World, I could buy a green rectangle of dependable land and own it in a way that I’d never owned anything before. And if somebody dared to break in, I’d have the right to shoot them. Although I should probably look up the Constitutional rights of thieves and robbers first.

So David and I came to an agreement that I would definitely be buying his house. We even sat down to have a celebratory drink, trying not to pay any mind to Barbara weeping alternately in the bedroom and in the backyard. David told me that the house’s original owners were a childless African-American couple, and that all the flowers—he encircled the fading, autumnal yard with his hand—all these flowers had been planted by the wife; what the husband did, no one knew. “She had a real green thumb, as you’ll see later, when spring comes—you will see it all.”

The sale dragged on through the entire summer: first the college had to confirm my future employment, then the bank had to approve my future salary and calculate what mortgage terms I qualified for, then the lawyers had to figure out David and Barbara’s divorce and the distribution of proceeds from the sale of the house—there were a lot of bureaucratic steps, by which time the summer had passed, the foliage had wilted, the house was left sitting dark and cheerless.

We figured out all the terms ourselves and even became friendly—Barbara no longer bothered keeping up appearances; she’d walk around the house hunched over, eyes red and face puffy, her arms dangling limply, resigned to her fate and awaiting the inevitable. David had already showed me all his manly treasures, which he kept in the garage: jack planes, chisels, screwdrivers, and drills. Men like to show these instruments to women, and women like to pretend that these instruments are absolutely fascinating. He even took down his grandfather’s sled from the wall. His grandpa had used it back in the 1920s, as a rosy-cheeked, chubby five year old; when he started school—a mile and a half on foot in the freezing snow—his mother would get up before dawn to bake him two potatoes, one for each pocket, to warm his hands during his long, unaccompanied journey. David gave me the sled as a gift and I didn’t know what to do with it. He also gave me his proposed alteration plans, which he no longer had any use for—a whole binder of them on tracing paper, one more fantastical than the other: here is the house, all in ruin, and here it is growing wings on either side; here is a loft with an oval window taking flight above it; here are terraces encircling it like ruffles. In short, David poisoned me, lured me, entrapped me; he sold me his dreams, his fantasies, his ship in the sky with no passengers and an invisible captain.

Meanwhile, I was renting an expensive and no-longer-necessary apartment, where I kept all my belongings, accumulated during my three years here. Our stuff wasn’t anything special, but a family of four does acquire quite a few earthly possessions: earthly suitcases, earthly dishes, and earthly clothes, not to mention our earthly table and our four chairs, which were the earthliest of all. I asked David if I could keep all this crap in the house—David’s house, but mine, too, in a way—perhaps shoving it all in the basement. David didn’t mind. But, just in case, he consulted his attorney, who immediately reacted, restricted, and rejected the idea: the storing of my things in this yet-to-be-purchased house would create, under the laws of New Jersey, some sort of tricky loophole, the victim of which would be David, since I would thereby have the right to simply take his house without paying, or otherwise rob, bind, and deprive him, the owner.

No, we couldn’t do that, and so I watched in dismay as the last of my savings were depleted—I guess I won’t be fixing the roof this year, or putting in a new bathtub to replace David’s old trough. Wouldn’t have enough for a lawn mower, either, which I knew was a must here, but at least the linoleum—that I could afford, as I’d be installing it myself, and not buying it as a single piece but in those dirt-cheap squares instead. The black-and-white ones, just as in the painting of Nikolai Ge’s, wherein Tsar Peter interrogates the Tsarevich Alexei.

Looking out the window once again, I saw that the waters had already roiled up to my car doors, and that if I didn’t sign right now I wouldn’t have anything to drive away in. And so I bit the bullet. The house became mine, and I—its.

All the participants, who either received or parted with their money, experienced their complicated and contradictory emotions and went their separate ways: David disappeared into the wall of rain, conveyed by his pickup truck; Barbara glided off into the waterfall of her unhidden tears, and my family, we made our way toward our new home, unsure whether it was still standing.

It was completely empty, naked, and old. The floors were drab and worn, the windows swathed from the outside in dark spruce branches. I don’t like pine trees—to me they feel like the trees of the dead. Blue pine trees are the worst; they are the color of a Soviet general’s uniform, and so they plant them where those high-status corpses lie. Our neighbor had one such pine. And so I was forced to look at it, see.

Brown spiderwebs were already dangling under the ceiling, in the corners. The agile American spider produces a high-quality web overnight, and since Barbara had long stopped taking care of the house, the accumulated layers of web could easily support the weight of small household items, if somebody decided to place them there for some reason, as if in a hammock. My boys gloomily inspected their dimly lit cubbyholes, unpacked their computers, and proceeded to stare at their screens.

The magical room was also sad and cold. And its glass doors opened onto nothingness.

I alone loved this house.

Spring in the states, on the East Coast, is basically crazy. Overnight, everything that just yesterday stuck out its dead branches is resurrected. Cherry blossoms adorn the green lawns like pink fountains, forsythia bushes are sprinkled with yellow flowers without a single green leaf—the leaves come later. And the pear trees—my God, I can’t take such beauty! By the time the magnolias begin to bloom it’s already too much—a simple heart does not require such splendor. Flowers should be crumpled, torn, and ragged, like peonies, for instance.

The original owner—the African-American lady about whom I know nothing—had, as promised, truly planted the entire property with flowers. Along the walkway from the street to the front door was a long row of irises. Under the tree they call “catalpa” she had a small rose garden: it had grown wild, and when I ripped out the gigantic American weeds and cut down the monstrous American thorny bushes—spirals with spikes that could easily have served to secure the perimeter of a gated property—I discovered lovely white roses, surprisingly fragrant considering that in America flowers usually have no scent, vegetables no taste, and that, generally, smells of any kind are culturally unacceptable.

In the middle of the front lawn she had planted a Japanese maple, the kind with little red, filigreed leaves. That was a great thing she had done! I often thought about her, imagining her for some reason in a sky-blue dress: here she is, walking out of our little house, squinting at the sun, walking over to the white roses, to the purple irises wildly gynecological in their construction; touching red leaves with her dark-skinned hand and looking around to see that, behold, it was all very good. I also found out that she had planted daffodils, but over the years they had migrated south, and I would find them on the border of my neighbor’s property, in thickets and vines, in places where my legs couldn’t go but my hands could still reach. Of course, I dug them out and moved them back to the house—that was where she’d wanted them from the very beginning. And I had an intimation of her walking by, casting a glance.

I could see traces of her presence everywhere on the property—and the property was huge. I soon found out what she had planted on the south side and what on the east, what she’d hidden under the pine tree—such as those lilies of the valley—and what she’d wanted to make visible from the front stoop, our flimsy little three-step porch. When lush American summer came, I finally saw her vision in its totality: an immense wall of bushes rose up at the edge of the property and completely shielded us—from the street, from the cars, from the fumes, sounds, and prying eyes. We couldn’t see anyone and no one could see us. If you didn’t know that our house was just there, behind that green wall, you’d have never guessed it. After sunset it disappeared in the crepuscular light, so that I myself could easily miss it from the street.

In the hallway, from the ceiling, there hung a rope. I tugged at it, and a squeaky folding staircase came down. It led to the attic, of course. There, boxes filled with junk from the 1960s were drying out and falling apart—blouses and aprons, the kind one wouldn’t have wanted to wear even then but couldn’t bring oneself to throw out. Nothing interesting. A whole mess of postcards—Christmas, Easter—also boring and unremarkable: “Merry Christmas, dear Bill and Nora.” So her name was Nora. Funny, I had imagined her as a Sally.

Once again she walked by, undetected, running her hand over the droopy branches of the Liquidambar—a beautiful evening-hued tree, full of sweet sap. But Bill didn’t walk by—he never walked in the garden. He stood, camouflaged by the wall, semi-transparent, eyes glistening in the dark.

According to custom, our neighbors came bearing pie. We already knew that this is what happens when you first move in but weren’t sure if we were supposed to reciprocate. These neighbors had a farm.

“Do you eat meat?” they asked.

“Yes, of course,” we answered naively.

“Then come by and pick out a baby lamb. We will slaughter it for you and you’ll save some money.”

We were city folk, and this offer somewhat paralyzed us. Not that we were considering becoming vegetarians, but the idea of coming to a farm, pointing to that one—sweet, curly, innocent—and… what? “Kill it, I want it”?

I reckon they ascribed our sudden stupor to that general idiocy of foreigners.

“Then come by for blueberries, you can pick all you want. We have so many this year, don’t know what to do with them.”

Blueberries I could agree to. I grabbed a basket and off I went, taking the long way through the fields. The distance between our houses was no more than five hundred feet, but those feet were densely forested. The thicket between my neighbors and me was absolutely impassable. Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, entering from opposite sides, would never have found each other.

I looked around for the blueberries, but couldn’t see any. The missus walked me over to some sort of aviary—in the Moscow zoo, such cages are used to house sullen feathered creatures with complex Latin names.

“We have to keep the berries under a mesh or the birds will eat them,” she complained.

I walked into the aviary. High above my head, on the upper branches of the bushes, there were, indeed, berries, but not the cute little blueberries we Russians crouch and kneel to pick. These were industrial-sized, overgrown, American monster-berries. And to pick them, one had to get on tippy toes and reach high overhead. The sun was blinding. The birds desperately stalked the mesh roof but couldn’t reach anything. I didn’t last long. After picking a small boxful, I stopped and decided to head home. Watching me go, the neighbor’s wife concluded that I was a moron, but politely concealed it with a fake smile. Thank you, Lord. I am free! Under a canopy there was a little black boy with a frightened and unhappy face. The husband was busy instructing the child.

“We adopted him.” The neighbor’s wife pointed her finger in the direction of the little one. “Say hi!”

The little boy hurriedly got up and gave a nod.

“He had a bad life before, but he’s happy here,” said the husband, and then turned back to finish his lecture: “First you work, then you eat.”

I took the long way home, through the fields. You could say that nothing bad had transpired, but as often happens with introverts, I felt as if my soul had been trampled on. Was it the birds…? The path veered off into the forest, where houses stand empty, propped up by trees that pierce them like spears.

“Nora,” I said to an empty house in the empty forest. “Nora, he had a bad life before them, but he’s happy here.”

But she was looking far into the distance, and was almost no longer here.

I was working at a small college way up north. Two days a week—Mondays and Wednesdays—I was to teach creative writing. We’d tell the students right away that it can’t be taught, but they’d only smirk, thinking that the grown-ups were lying: “Somebody must have taught them!”

Few of them truly applied themselves, but that wasn’t what irritated me. Much worse was that they didn’t really know how to read and couldn’t be bothered to learn. Didn’t care about what was actually written down on the page.

I’d assign them a five-page story to read. Hemingway. Or maybe Salinger. “So, Steven, can you tell me what this story is about?”

“I dunno. I didn’t like it.”

“Thank you for sharing—your opinion is very valuable to us. Can you tell us specifically what you didn’t like?”

“I didn’t like that the guy was cheating on his wife. That’s just wrong. I don’t like to read about such things.”

“Tell me, Steven, do people sometimes cheat on each other?”

“Yes.”

“So why not write a story about that?”

“Cheating is wrong and it doesn’t teach us anything.”

“So you’re saying that literature must teach us? An interesting and debatable point of view. Can you please elaborate?”

I didn’t give two shits about what Steven would say. What I gave a shit about was not letting this smart-ass little punk—who’d spent the entire night before smoking weed (and still reeked of it) and who’d just cut me off in his Porsche to take my parking spot—think he’d hoodwinked me about even having read the story. Must have just asked his girlfriend outside: What’s this story about? And she said: Some dude steps out on his girl. Now here he is, answers at the ready. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, I’ll corner you and eat your brains for breakfast.

But here is the conundrum: if you simply and guilelessly expose a student as a liar and fail him for being unprepared, he’ll avenge himself at the end of the semester. Every single one of them gets a teacher evaluation form from the dean’s office twice a year. They sit down and, diligently bending their wrists unaccustomed to writing, fill out said forms with block letters and slanderous accusations. “Professor didn’t hold my interest.” “Didn’t create an entertaining atmosphere for me.” “What’s with those crazy ties?” “Gave me Cs and Ds but didn’t explain why. Overall, I was disappointed.”

And so the instructor must find more nurturing and beguiling ways to make the student realize he is a lazy ignoramus (if that is, indeed, what she wants him to realize), so that very student will be forced to admit it to himself and his friends will be able to corroborate it. Any earnest appeal to principles, to conscience, to exemplars worth aspiring to, or other such highfalutin crap that’s so popular in my homeland, doesn’t work here at all. Here one must provide nonstop entertainment for the group while simultaneously making each and every student feel they are number one, the subject of boundless and incessant care. All this without familiarity. And without fulsome praise. If a professor attempts to weasel their way into a student’s favor with too much fawning or too high a grade in the hopes of receiving a good evaluation, the student will only come to despise them and, upon getting the last word, shit all over them.

It’s also advisable to put aside one’s intellect: intelligence is annoying. Employ a simpler vocabulary—the students already complained I was using too many words they didn’t know. Try being Puss in Boots infused with the Stanislavski method.

An experienced educator knows: there’s no point in teaching the students. What you need to do is make them feel taught by term’s end.

I turned out to be a poor instructor, but at this psychological trickery and buffoonery calibrated for local conditions, I excelled, though not immediately. At the end of the first year, the students, to whom I’d stupidly and earnestly given my all, gave me poor marks and wrote negative evaluations. The other professors, my friends who cared about me, were devastated.

“You’re a foreigner, Tatyana, you don’t get how it works here. Let us help you, train you, try to fix this.”

“It’s okay. I can manage.”

“But if you get poor evaluations next year, they’ll fire you! And we don’t want to lose you!”

And I don’t want to lose my house, I said to myself. I need this job, and I will keep it. If I need to get on all fours and bark, I’ll get on all fours and bark. Because I love my house, and it loves me.

The following semester I received top marks from all my students. My friends marveled as if I were Uri Geller and had just made a stopped watch tick.

“How did you manage that?! In a single semester? That’s never happened in the entire history of the college! What did you do?”

“I dunno,” I lied, impudently looking them straight in their earnest eyes of liberal intellectuals. I mean, I couldn’t very well admit to them that I had indeed got on all fours and barked for love.

Door to door, it’s two hundred twenty miles from my house to the college—four hours of driving. It’s winter.

On Monday, may it be damned, the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m. I jump up like a soldier; half an hour to shower and brew five cups of strong Turkish coffee: one for now, four for the thermos. Sandwiches are prepared the night before; a pack of Benson & Hedges menthols is always in the car. Apples are quartered and thrown into a Ziploc bag. Cassettes of Russian rockers Grebenshchikov and Khvostenko, angels of the divinely absurd. Also recorded lectures about something obscure and complicated, so my brain is forced to work and not sleep: Chinese philosophy, the history of opera, quantum mechanics. Also audiobooks of British detective novels (can’t do classic literature, too soporific; to avoid conking out during the drive one needs simple impatient curiosity: who dunnit?). If you assume that five hours of sleep is enough, you are assuming incorrectly.

So as not to wake up my family, I sleep in the magical room. It has a door that opens straight into the garage. A cold draft whooshes in under the door, making the room feel uninviting during winter nights, but only for those who don’t know and can’t see: there is entry here into aetherial worlds. The house is surrounded by snow, piled high; when the sun comes up, it illuminates the room from one side to the other, from the pink southern snowbanks to the pale blue northern ones, and the room will be like a ship, swaying in the air. We don’t know where happiness comes from, but places do exist where it’s sprinkled into heaps. Each time I take off, I leave happiness behind.

I walk out into the garage, get in the car, slam the door, turn on the headlights: the shelves with old crap from David and Nora, the cans with dried-up paint, Grandpa’s sled, curled-up green water hoses, rusted rakes—all is illuminated. I’m an automaton, all my moves repetitive, economical, and calculated.

Opening the garage door with the remote, backing out, closing the door with the remote. Peeling out into the street, making a U-turn, and going north—by feel, slicing through the inky darkness, diving down hills into valleys, on empty narrow roads, past sleeping villages and lonely farms demarcated by tiny beads of light.

This pitch-black hour is the most horrible in my life; it repeats week after week, year after year. I am half reclined in a sarcophagus scattered with litter, as if a long-forgotten, distant relative of some pharaoh, surrounded by her ushabti and her vessels for drinking and eating, which are supposed to last until the Day of Judgment, when one is called and asked: Didst thou steal? Didst thou take from a widow? Didst thou add to the weight of the balance and didst thou falsify the plummet of the scale? There is no greater loneliness, no sharper coldness, no deeper despair. No one is thinking of me in this emptiness—my father is dead, and the rest are sleeping. I have no friend, and no place to find one.

But this death alights upon me for only an hour, and then it’s annulled, as all death is annulled, its sting removed, as we’ve been promised. I know what intersection I am about to cross and under which trees I’ll be stopped at a red light when the heavy, heatless crimson sun appears over the horizon. I know which road I’ll be turning onto as it rises up in the sky in all its morning glory—raging and white, as in those ferocious Turner paintings—blinding all who are speeding northeast behind me. Lower the visor, put on the sunglasses: an entire army of drivers gears itself simultaneously; we are all automatons, all gnawing our way through this difficult world with our crumbling teeth.

No, five hours is not enough sleep, and so the entire journey is devoted to keeping myself from nodding off and hitting the divider; from flipping over, crashing into an oncoming car. Methodology is as follows: continuous coffee-drinking and smoking, cracking the window to let in the frigid air, munching on something and listening to Grebenshschikov at full blast, or, better yet, singing at the top of my lungs and drowning out my idols. This car full of crazy is speeding down American roads, flying onto the four-lane highway, and I can see that I’m not the only one: there is smoking and singing in other cars, too, while the most passionate are dancing at the wheel, drumming away with one hand or both. Finally the highway goes its own way, whistling and rattling, as I veer north; the sun is already high up in the sky, back to its normal size, nothing special.

The air outside is razorlike, the landscape now of cliffs, pines, and new types of birds—perhaps eagles, even. From the mountaintops one can see spectacular valleys, rivers snaking through them, and new skies opening up; everything is different, and beyond the blue mountains—Canada.

By November’s end my students completely stop applying themselves. The other professors tell me:

“What do you expect, they had an entire week off, they spent it skiing in the Adirondacks—you must know how hard it is to get back into it after vacation! If you want learning, writing, thinking out of them, you’ve got to get it before Thanksgiving. Because now, the plague is coming.”

“What do you mean, ‘the plague’?”

“You’ll see, their aunties will start dying off; grief will prevent them from coming to class and taking tests.”

And what do you know, two groups of students suffered the loss of three aunties, a few uncles were writhing in agony, and the fiancée of one of the most arrogant pretty boys was rotting alive.

“Rotting alive?” I asked again, fascinated.

“Yep!” he confirmed shamelessly. “At first it was just, like, her legs to the knees, then it kinda, like, spread further up, and now she’s literally in her last hours. One more week, I think, is all I need. Such a tragedy, you know?”

I took pity and gave him a passing grade for such beautiful fiction. Yes, I have added to the weight of the balance. Yes, I have falsified the plummet of the scales.

During my years there I did have some talented students, if unexceptionally so, a few of those even planning to make a career out of writing, stocking store shelves with their uninteresting, timid stories tinged with soft-core porn. Most often, they’d pick my brain about getting published in The New Yorker—what and how did one need to write to make that happen? I’d tell them that I didn’t know, that getting published is a different skill altogether. But they wouldn’t believe me. One young lady grumbled: “Fine, I get that you need to sleep with the editor. But what else?”

Every student was supposed to write three stories per semester. And to rewrite, for improvement, each story at least once. This means that during my time teaching there, I read five hundred and forty short stories. And reread them. By the end of my sentence, all the delicate passageways by which I found access to aetherial worlds had thus become clogged with nonbiodegradable plastic waste. Full of ennui, I’d pick up the next one: “Susan felt a strong connection with George. They preferred the same brand of toothpaste, they both enjoyed listening to the Smashing Pumpkins….”

During this entire time, I had only two encounters out of the ordinary. There was one girl completely free of any storytelling constraints and conventions—the others all eyed her with fear. She wrote a story about how much she liked shoplifting: both to ease things when cash was low and for the intrinsic joy of it; how, when planning to shoplift cheese, she’d put on a thick sweater with wide sleeves and traipse through the store with the most carefree expression, bending casually over the cases with prepackaged triangles of formaggio as if searching for something, but then, surreptitiously, with her sleeve held taut, she’d scoop up a package of Roquefort, or something just as expensive, never actually touching it, and holding something else in her other hand as a decoy. If someone bothered to look, they wouldn’t even notice. Once the cheese slid down to the elbow, she had only to lift up her arms, as if to fix her hair, which had deliberately been left disheveled. At this stage the cheese would pass through the armhole and into her baggy sweater, securely cinched at the waist.

This wasn’t even so much a short story as it was an étude, a study, yet it was more than any of the others—the lazy and the diligent alike—were capable of. They couldn’t feel what the trick was, and I didn’t know how to explain it: a culture that makes blanket pronouncements such as “Yes means yes and no means no” and orients itself squarely toward a puritanical ethic fails at parsing metaphors and acknowledging paradoxes; it fears play and runs from even fictive sins. I grew attached to this girl, who though from a wealthy family enjoyed shoplifting and lying precisely because, with nothing denied her, she was bored. She’d look into thin air and see visions. She yearned for different worlds and, by her own admission, had a way to reach them. She had a mild form of epilepsy, and every once in awhile she’d have a seizure, petit mal—almost unnoticeable by others. And as we know—from Dostoyevsky, for example—other worlds opens up right before an epileptic seizure. Everything around you begins to make sense: the workings of the universe, all causes, all meanings, everything. But then a dark veil descends and you thrash about in convulsions, and when you come back you don’t remember anything. She told me that as a little girl, whenever they gave her anticonvulsives, she’d purposefully not take them, so as to be “elucidated,” “to keep things interesting.” Oh, how I envied her! Sure, I was also able to go there, but not deep inside and not without effort; there was no elucidation or convulsions, the key to the entry gates being tears. Or, occasionally, love.

The second exception was a lad who, in his standard academic classes—and this was an academic institution after all, albeit one of liberal arts—was widely considered an idiot. His looks didn’t help—the physique of a potato sack, a backwards baseball cap, a rumpled white sweatshirt, coarse features and heavy tread. His parents, farmers, apparently belonged to some reclusive religious sect. It seemed that prior to college, the most sentient being he had come across was a cow. I suspected he was autistic.

When I saw his writing, I couldn’t believe my luck. I can’t reproduce it now and the manuscript has been lost—those New Jersey floods finally did reach my basement, annihilating my entire archive—and to be honest, I don’t even remember what the story was about. But there was something wondrous in its brute savagery. A brother and sister. She’s sitting at a wooden table, eating pea soup. He throws an ax at her. He misses. I don’t remember why. The atmosphere is downright Bruegelesque. It wasn’t so much the plot—but the smell of stables, peas, and smoke veritably emanated from the pages and I could just see those people, slow-moving and oafish. This bumpkin was possessed of an inexplicable ability to glide effortlessly through walls of words to those subterranean fields where intentions are sown, where the winds of meaning blow, and where motives rustle. But his story didn’t end. It simply stopped.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know yet what comes next.”

We were sitting in an empty auditorium; no one was disturbing us.

“What if you lift it here and pull this way?” I asked carefully, and pointed with my finger. He looked.

“That could work,” he said after some thought, “but won’t it sag there?” He also indicated.

“Yes… but if you pad right here, la la la, maybe four lines or so, no more, and then trim the beginning?” I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t believe that this was happening.

“Yeah, I see it! And then thread it through like this.” He chuckled with delight. “I got it, I got it! That works! And then I’ll add some heft right about here.”

He pressed his finger into the paper, as if adding weight.

“I’d get rid of this phrase… or maybe move it. Seems too pink, and right here, it’s too smoky.”

“No, I need that. I’ll move it into the shadows. And, and… and I’ll add a J, it’s nice and graphite.”

I was completely besotted. An astral twin had been sent to me in the form of a potato sack. I could have spent hours next to him, although not eye-to-eye—there wasn’t much to look at—but voice to voice, so that we, like Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, could read any book, sifting it with four hands as if it were sand from the ocean, laughing with the joy of little kids who, when the grown-ups weren’t looking, had snuck in through an unlocked door that leads to Eternity.

“What are your plans after college?” I asked him.

“I want to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”

“I’ll write you a recommendation letter.”

“But I haven’t even finished my story yet.”

“But you know that you will, because the story is already there, it just isn’t visible yet.”

The potato sack brightened and nodded his head. We were speaking the same language. Then he gathered his pages and walked out, treading heavily, blending in with the wall.

I don’t even remember his name. It was a square one. Maybe Carter? Let’s call him Carter.

Every Wednesday I drove back home from the college. It was the same commute as on Monday, but in reverse. The sun took a long time to set, the sky grew darker, early twilight washing out the surroundings before darkness fell; the main thing was not to crash my car and flip over—Sing, Boris, sing, help me out. A long road through the cliffs, then the wide highway, then a country road, and then the final stretch, almost by feel—from unseen hills into unseen valleys, then hills once again, past sleepy villages and lonely, dimly flickering farms. And I was daydreaming about how, who knows, perhaps inside one of those gloomy houses—maybe that one, or possibly this one—another Carter was sitting, his heavy hands resting on the wooden table, the clock ticking as he lowered his heavy ear to the ground, listening to the pea pods sleeping under the snow, and thinking of how a cow is staring at the wall, about how the wax cloth smells, about how the night flows.

And he won’t say anything to anyone, because no one will ask him.

Meanwhile, my family quietly fell apart—dried out with time, everyone going their separate way. My kids had families of their own. And nobody needed my house anymore—not the green door with the round brass handle, not the off-white walls, which I painted with my own hands, nor the birch parquet, which began to shine like old gold after I, on all fours, scrubbed it clean of all kinds of crap with a special American oil formulated for scrubbing the parquet clean of all kinds of crap. I also had a glass table, which allowed one to examine one’s knees, an interesting endeavor. And I had purchased an old china cabinet at a flea market; it was the color of dark cherry, with curlicues on top. One of its drawers contained an unexpected bonus: a green-felt-lined case containing two protractors. The unknown, long-gone owner had possibly drafted something—perhaps he’d sketched a patio for his house. And so I decided I too would add a patio to the house, just as David intended.

I went down to the municipal building expecting long lines, misery, inexplicable restrictions, and insurmountable obstacles, but there was nothing of the sort. I paid all the necessary fees, the inspector came and, measuring my house, he gave the patio his approval. He also gave me a list of licensed carpenters, pointing out which ones charged more and which ones less, and advising me against hiring someone just off the street. That was because a licensed carpenter knows that the most important thing about patios is the distance between the balusters. It can’t be less than a certain number of inches, or some kid is bound to get their head stuck in there. The year before, the inspector told me, they’d made the standards stricter, reducing the distance further. Apparently the average American head had grown smaller. And all the licensed carpenters have been notified about this. When the patio is finished, the inspector will come and survey the job.

That’s how simple and boring this process turned out to be. Where were the bribes—the sliding envelope, the lowered gaze, the anxiety that it won’t be accepted or that he’ll take a look and deem it too little? Where were the nervous jitters about removing stolen goods from a warehouse, as I had done in Moscow? I remember how, early one July morning, the construction workers I’d hired took me to a yard near Myasnitskaya Street, to a door, and behind that door were rolls and boxes of supplies; the workers gesturing to it all: Choose whatever you want.

“What is this?” I asked

“A warehouse. Go ahead.”

“Whose warehouse?”

“The military prosecutor’s office. It’s Sunday, so go ahead! But quietly…”

We loaded up on tiles and parquet flooring as well as rolls of mesh, its purpose unknown: I asked, but the workers had no idea, they simply took some because it was there. They found some sort of yellow, bubbled glass and offered some to me as well; the temptation was great, but my renovations did not call for bubbles, so it stayed behind, about which I still feel pangs of regret, and God, what year was it?—1987? Yes, I think so. The early-morning pedestrians were scurrying down streets made wet by watering trucks, July was waking, fresh and luxuriant, life was in full bloom. We stole quite a bit that day, cleared out the prosecutor’s office quite nicely; I still feel the thrill and gratitude.

My Moscow construction guys were certain that I was an actress; all protestations to the contrary were dismissed—they knew better. Hair to the waist, red lipstick, unstructured behavior—must be an actress! In the end, I suppose it didn’t matter, but the problem was that having fallen into a kind of proletarian cultural paradigm I was expected to act the part, though of course I couldn’t possibly live up to standards I wasn’t familiar with. I could see that this offended my workers; everything I did defied their expectations. What, oh what, did they want from me?

Another heroine from their proletarian folklore was the General’s Wife, a character that existed primarily in the fantasies of such men. The myth of the General’s Wife was basically that she—of Yugoslavian negligees and German bubble baths, surrounded by rugs and lacquered dressers, and bursting with passion—is waiting for him, a simple worker, a plumber. She would leap into his arms, perfumed and ready: Take me! I’m yours!

The General is obviously “in the field,” so to speak.

Women, too, were conduits for this lore. Take Galina, who, by the way, hung my wallpaper upside down. She surmised that her crew’s last job had been for a General’s Wife. There was air freshener in the loo—it had to have been a general’s shitter.

“Just imagine: plop—whoosh—orange blossoms.”

Unfortunately, I was already familiar with all the details of Galina’s personal life, her complicated relationship with her lover and his mistresses, none of whom, of course, could hold a candle to her.

“I told him—you listening? I told him: ‘Fine, I’m a slut, I’m a whore, I suck cock, but I am still a WOMAN.’ Was I right or was I right?”

As an actress I was expected to have an artistic opinion: about a woman’s dignity, about the craftiness of men, about fashion.

“Ain’t too bad, right? Sewed it out of two shawls.” Galina was examining her skirt, but, secretly, of course, she was admiring her wizened fifty-something legs. The skirt wasn’t half bad. Galina and her team weren’t even planning on working: they positioned some wooden scaffolds around the room, climbed on top of them, and were playing cards while incessantly and virtuosically cursing. They’d send the elderly Kostya to go get booze, and I should note that Kostya, as a parquet artisan of the highest caliber, consumed only cognac.

“When will you be able to finish hanging the wallpaper?” I’d bleat.

“Can’t do it now! The spackling hasn’t dried! Notice how damp your apartment is? Takes time to dry. And by the way, actress! You owe us two hundred rubles.”

“Two hundred? For what?!”

“Prepayment!”

Around the twelfth century BC, Mycenaean civilization was obliterated by flooding and fires. The fire baked some of the clay tablets that contained accounting notes, thus preserving them. When in the twentieth century AD these tablets were excavated and painstakingly decoded, what wisdom of the ages had scholars discovered? “Carpenter Tirieus didn’t come to work today,” and such like.

Exactly! The eternally flaky carpenter is fickle and unpredictable. A Russian carpenter (or plumber, tile layer, spackler) stretches out his arm to his Mycenaean brethren across millennia: Workers of the world unite, if not in space then in time. Anyone who decides to build or rebuild their home knows that they are entering into a different world, one full of instability and surprise, and that there can be no knowing that the work paid for will be finished, or indeed even started. Just as with Schrödinger’s cat, there is only the probability of this event happening. And in my case, I didn’t even have that.

The spackling paste had been drying for the second month when I concluded that my workers had no intention of getting on with it. They considered my apartment, which had suddenly fallen into their lap, to be their private den of debauchery, and here they would drink themselves silly in three shifts; at some point a harmonica even entered the picture. Of course, I tried to get them to leave by appealing to their conscience, even bringing in my husband and father-in-law as reinforcement—but all was futile in the face of this construction gang. Whenever other people came to the apartment, the proletariat would do an energetic impression of activity: they’d furiously run the paint rollers up and down the walls, move boxes of parquet from corner to corner, struggle hauling buckets of cement, bang the ceiling with sticks, as if to loosen the old plaster. But as soon as my visitors had gone, the fuckers would jump back on the scaffolds, where a feast was already set: canned sprats, salami, beer, vodka—food for every taste—and the crème de la crème of parquet layers would be off and running to buy the most expensive of cognacs.

“It’s still drying! It’s all part of the process. No way can it be rushed. We even turned on the space heaters.”

I had stopped paying them long ago, but therein lay the rub: “If you don’t pay us, we won’t leave.” Basically, this has been the modus operandi of our entire country for the past six hundred years.

Finally I gave up and asked my older sister, Katerina, for help. She was a formidable woman. Formidable! I explained: This and that, they think I’m an actress, a subhuman, they’re not working, they are bleeding me dry. Anything you can do?

“Who’s in charge there?” asked Katerina after giving it some thought.

“Galina.”

I brought Katerina to my apartment. She threw the door open and walked up to the scaffolds with a deliberate, slow, and heavy step, her feet firmly and widely planted, as if wearing a pair of shiny general’s boots. With the low rumbling voice of a herald, Katerina bellowed:

“Galina! I vanquish thee and cast thee the fuck out of here!”

Galina grew apoplectic on the wooden platform.

“What the hell? Who are you?”

“I’m the Devil.”

There was a silence in response, and, for a second, the platform gang froze. Katerina darted into the corner, lifting her hands up, each forming a set of horns. She declared:

“I call upon the forces of darkness to unleash the evil eye!!! Everybody—out! One… two…”

Sure enough, they jumped off in unison and made a run for it, shoving one another and cursing under their breath as they bounded over the creaking floorboards; Galina’s wizened legs carried her the fastest, as she hollered shrilly: “The Devil, the damned Devil!” as if she’d met Him before and knew that she’d run up a tab with Him. I never saw any one of them again.

“What did you do?” I asked. “How?”

“It’s the proletariat. You can’t talk to them in any other way,” shrugged Katerina.

But the American carpenter was not “the proletariat”; he didn’t nap in his parka with his mouth open, did not indulge in riotous fun at the job site, attempted no entry into aetherial worlds with the aid of moonshine and a processed cheese product; a hot and bothered Venus disguised as the General’s Wife did not haunt his dreams—mythopoeic power bubbled up inside him not at all. And so he approached building the patio drily and diligently. He didn’t try to pad the bill, instead charging me the agreed-upon amount; he didn’t belatedly discover that the terrain was somehow unruly, or that the logs were unusually difficult to work with and so it was only fair to add a little sumpin’ sumpin’. For that matter, when the time came, the municipal inspector didn’t cast an eye on the ceiling and indicate with a polite cough that it wouldn’t hurt to have a drink, nor did he suggest that I invite a priest and a cat—the priest to christen the new space, the cat to absorb the negative energy. No, he simply patted the beams with his hands, measured the distance between the balusters to ensure that some average American kid’s head didn’t get stuck there, and that I, as owner, wouldn’t get sued for triple the value of the house on account of someone else’s microcephaly.

My patio—the deck of a ship that’s stuck on earth—was finished. What next?

I spent summer evenings there, reading and smoking, as the sun set, and as the filigreed lilac leaves of the Liquidambar blended with the twilight, and as a deer roamed the woods, or maybe it was a unicorn—who’s to say?

Can’t make out the words on the page anymore.

Every person has their own angel, for protection and compassion. The angel comes in different sizes, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes he’s the size of a dachshund—if you’re visiting a friend or if you’re in a crowd; sometimes he’s the size of a person—sitting in the passenger seat of a car, if you’re hurtling down the highway, shouting and singing; sometime he comes in his full size, approximately as tall as one telephone pole atop another, and hangs quietly in the air, the stuffy and empty evening air of a pointless July in a year unknown. In a certain light, with your peripheral vision, you can glimpse the micaceous glint of his wing.

You can talk to your angel. He’ll sympathize. He’ll understand. He’ll agree. That’s his way of loving you.

What next? you ask him. What comes next? Exactly, he’ll agree, what next? You love and love someone and then you look up and the love is gone, and if you feel sorry it’s not for him but for your feelings—you let them out for a walk and they come crawling back to you, all bruises and missing teeth. Yes, yes, he’ll agree, that’s how it is. And also people die, but that’s just nonsense, isn’t it? They can’t just disappear, can they, they still exist, you just can’t see them, right? They must be up there, with you? Yes, yes, they’re here, all here, no one’s disappeared, no one’s been lost, everyone is well.

A transparent sort, hard to make out, like a jellyfish in water, he hangs in the air and undulates as fireflies pass right through him; and if starlight is refracted when piercing his aetherial body, it is refracted just a little.

Almost all the money that I was earning at the college was going toward the upkeep of the house. And working at the college was killing me. Only a few years before, I had the ability to see through things, but now a mental glaucoma descended upon me, dark water, as they say, and I needed to put an end to it and to go home—to my old apartment, to Moscow, for instance. Or to Saint Petersburg. Okay. Once my contract ends, I’ll leave.

I allowed tenants to move in. I rented out everything but the magical room to an elderly Russian couple. They were kindred spirits—he was a theoretical physicist, she was a journalist—such kindred spirits, in fact, that I felt uncomfortable taking their money. Every Wednesday evening, when I returned from the gulag up north, I’d climb out of the car, my legs weak, and see them already waiting for me, table set with a bottle of wine; they were happy to see me, and I them, and we’d sit around discussing everything we knew, even my knowledge of quantum mechanics, pumped into my brain via books on tape during long and grueling journeys north.

He’d come to our United States of America for medical care, but the doctors couldn’t save him. And the house stood empty again.

That’s when I decided to rent it out entirely and to find a cheap apartment for myself near work. Turns out, it’s not so simple to rent out a house in America. That’s not because there are no takers, but because all of those people are your potential enemies.

The law comes down squarely on the side of the renters. For instance: I, as the owner, must abide by a certain sense of égalité, may it rot, and consider everyone to be equal. A nice intellectual couple, let’s say two Princeton professors, shouldn’t in my eyes be more desirable than a family of strung-out junkies, or a gang of Gypsies with shifty eyes, or a foreign couple who don’t speak any English. If I express too distinctly my displeasure at the possibility of their inhabiting my house, in theory, they can sue me. So one’s forced to express regret: Oh, so sorry and what a shame, but the space has just been rented.

There is a danger of renting to people too poor to afford it. If these people have nowhere to go (and can’t pay you), they have the right to just stay in the house until their situation improves, and of course it never will. Meaning that I can’t just kick them out. That I myself may have nowhere to live; the law doesn’t give two shits about.

There is also a danger of renting to a handicapped person, or to a family with small children, who’ll stick their head through the balusters, those rascals, or slip and fall, breaking their leg, and it’ll be my fault for not making sure the place was childproof.

So I kept my eyes open. First to arrive were a couple, both Indian programmers. Exactly what I wanted: a young married couple, with beautiful British English, clean-cut and very sweet. But they were looking for something else. They wanted carved door frames and marble everywhere. My barn was too simple for their tastes.

Then an elderly black couple, both around sixty, came by. He walked through the door with no problem, but she took one step and got stuck in the door frame, couldn’t move. He, apparently used to this, grabbed her by the hand and pulled her in—about 650 pounds in all, I’d guess. We exchanged smiles and on they went to inspect the rooms. I didn’t follow them—I was afraid that my house would tilt. The wife tried the bathroom but couldn’t fit through the door. Trying again, sideways this time, she fit, although a quarter of her remained in the hallway. A muffled consultation between them could be heard. They continued on their tour and I sat there, full of trepidation that she would decide to check out the basement. She decided to check out the basement.

I sneaked in from the other side so I could eavesdrop and not miss the impending disaster.

“This won’t work. Let’s go,” said the husband.

“No, I want to look downstairs.”

“This house is clearly not an option for us.”

“So what, I still want to look.”

“I’m telling you, it’s best we go.”

She began squeezing herself through the narrow basement door, and…

“Benjamin!”

“I told you.”

“Okay, sir, less talk, more action!”

He leaned against her and with both hands forced her through the door. The stairs were next. She took one heavy step and I heard the wood cracking.

“Vanessa, damn it!”

“Language!”

She was clearly the queen of the household, and he was just a footman. A few more ominous tremors from below. Then silence. I tiptoed back to my den and pretended to be working on the computer. Benjamin peeked in and asked nonchalantly:

“Um. Is there another way out from the basement? Or just the one?”

“Just the one.”

“Oh, okay, just wondering.”

He disappeared again, and I turned on SimCity; I loved laying underground water pipes there and watching them come to life, elbow after elbow, blue musical water streaming down them at last. Besides, I had some cheat codes for the game and I didn’t need to be stingy with my virtual money when irrigating my virtual cities. And those two will probably be down there for a while anyway. Benjamin popped in once again:

“Do you happen to have a screwdriver?”

“Maybe in the garage? It’s through this door. I also have ropes there and other things.”

“Got it. What about a hammer?”

“Also there.”

About half an hour later—I was already running electricity to the prison, university, and hospital—they reappeared together. I had my best poker face on, and so did Benjamin. Vanessa looked a bit disheveled.

“The house is lovely, simply lovely. But we’re going to think about it. What a wonderful, wonderful garden!”

“Thank you! Yeah, let me know.”

“So lovely meeting you!”

“Same here!”

He pushed her through the green front door to the street, and through the window I could see them walking down the brick path: she, marching regally, and he, scurrying behind, weaving around her from side to side. They still had loading into the car ahead of them.

And then Nielsen came. He was twenty-two. Shrimpy, pasty white, with bleach-blond hair and the hands of a prepubescent boy, an expression of mild disgust on the flat face of a mealworm.

“It’s dusty in here,” whined Nielsen.

“Dusty?” I responded, surprised. The house was spick-and-span—scrubbed with renters in mind.

“I need the house to be sterile,” grumbled Nielsen. “I am allergic to even the slightest bit of dust. Once the entire house is sterile, I’ll take it. And I need this fireplace to be completely clean, like new.”

Oh, curses! The fireplace? More expenses! By definition, a working fireplace cannot be “sterile.” Thirty years of soot on its stone walls, traces of ash—and anyway, it’s not like you’ll be performing open-heart surgery in there! And what could be cleaner than fire, Nielsen?

In New Jersey, sterility was provided solely by two Belarusians. They were here illegally and so they took on any hard labor that the local Russian-Americans would hire them for: from housecleaning to roof repair. They overcharged woefully, but at least no job was too dirty for them. These two terminators were also married to each other, and it should be noted that against any expectation the wife’s last name was Kock and the husband’s Chik. This, seemingly, was not their only perversity. Keenly aware of their irreplaceability, cruel and adept in their united front, they always performed the same routine: give an approximate, acceptable estimate, but warn that there might be unforeseen adjustments, and shortly before finishing the work, just when everything is torn apart and upside down, jack up the price to a horrific sum. Chik looked to be the brutal sort. Kock had an elfin face, and her case history included work in a bar: perhaps this was why, when it came to arranging glassware, for instance, she would line the glasses up not randomly but strictly by type, one behind the other and deep into the cupboard, away from the owner’s eyes.

Kock and Chik finished their work—polished all surfaces, horizontal and vertical, with their potent acids and ammonia, destroying all that lived, sterilizing the fireplace—and Nielsen, after playing hard-to-get, at last rented my house for a year and gave me a security deposit of fifteen hundred dollars. Legally, I was supposed to keep this money in an escrow account, and not to touch it until the end of the lease. But I had no money at all to my name. And I needed to rent something for myself, and even a dog kennel required a security deposit. So I borrowed his money unbeknownst to him. What difference would it make? I’d return it at the end of the year anyway.

Yes, yes, I’ve falsified the plummet of the scales, played foul with bank accounts and cheat codes; I’ve exceeded the speed limit at times, driven under the influence, and stolen from the military prosecutor’s office; I’ve given false testimony in court; and I’ve committed adultery in my heart, numerously. What’s more, I intend to keep on doing so in the future. Dear Lord, what obnoxious messengers You send to remind us of our sins, and of our promises made to You and then forgotten. Even so, not according to my will, but Yours. You truly do work in mysterious ways! Please forgive and forget.

Something was wrong with Nielsen. I must have made a mistake.

This was my house, after all, a living thing that I loved, and that had put its trust in me; where the sun danced on the golden floor; where the invisible glass table, the one I loved to sit at, existed: when I was away, the shadows of the dead and departed would take my place at it, no longer alive but still refracting the light that went through them, like prisms—where else could they gather to converse and drink wine? And now Nielsen was walking through this house touching everything with his sterile, prepubescent hands.

Perhaps it was Nielsen permeating my nightmares. He appeared as worminess, as decay, as rot, white fungus, pustules, lichen. A meaningless path that veered left onto a dimly lit road, or a treacherous scree—that was him. Houses with open doors, strange faces in the twilight, wet shoes—that was him. Ominous beaches, lost keys, leftovers, missed trains, a threat from above—that was him, all him. This house was my earthly pod, one of my shells. He infiltrated it, making his way under the skin. And he called upon the forces of darkness to unleash the evil eye.

I’d betrayed my treasure and I alone was to blame.

It was a bad year. I lived near the college that was sucking my soul dry, bleeding me of all that was alive inside me. There was extraordinary beauty everywhere: tall spruces, white snow; Beauteous Death. I was already in the habit of waking up at five in the morning, but there was nowhere to go at that hour, and nothing to see other than my ceiling. Hang in there, I’d tell myself, the year will go by quickly. Nielsen will leave, then I’ll sell the house and go home. This isn’t the right place for me. Once again it’s not right. I should know by now that the right place is inaccessible; maybe it exists in the past, over the green hills, or maybe it’s drowned, or, perhaps, it hasn’t materialized yet.

What if the Lord wants us to know that we can’t get anywhere on this earth, can’t own anything, can’t hold on to anyone. Perhaps only at five in the morning, though not every day, is the truth revealed to us: everything, everything that we’ve ever desired is simply a mirage, or a mock-up. Maybe… But then the night begins to vanish, the outlines of rented furniture come into view, and it’s time to get up and make coffee, strong, the way they brew it in the East, not this muddy American dishwater, and then set off for the college to give out unearned grades: I’m leaving soon anyway. I have already decided.

I gave an A to a Haitian girl for a short story that wasn’t worth a C. She knew this and freaked out when she saw the A, expecting there to be a catch. There was no catch. It was just the story of her escape in a boat, illicit, with bribes, from her island to the United States. The crew—their guides—collected payment in the form of dollars and sex: they raped all the women and girls on board. They gave no water—that was also paid for with sex. A baby died and was thrown overboard. All these details seemed matter-of-fact to her: “Does it happen any other way?” She made the journey with her mother, grandmother, and boyfriend; everyone suffered the same fate, but all were happy: they’d made it from a grave world into an aetherial one. Not everyone gets to finish that journey.

The story was simplistic, poorly put together; showing no imagination, she told everything exactly as it had, alas, happened. I sat with her for an hour after class, asking questions. Her family members were well settled here: the grandmother back to practicing voodoo, the mother taking in laundry. The boyfriend had already bought a Mercedes, and we don’t want to dwell on how he managed, but we have an inkling. As for the girl herself, thanks to a government program, she was taking a creative writing class to rack up credits toward a degree.

She was gathering her papers into a pile with trembling hands; I was collecting mine and also trembling. She couldn’t understand why she got an A and so she had come to find out; my job was to hide the reason—My goodness, I’m a dishonest Russian person, I’ll throw ten As your way: go ahead and rack up the necessary credits, you sunny, pure being who holds no grudge against her tormentors!

Oh, these scales of mine. What weights and plummets!

My lying was inspired—yes, I’m good at that!—and she bought it, trusting me that there was value in her composition, that the details had been ably chosen, that the beginning was great and the ending even better—Of course, you can improve slightly here and rewrite a bit there, but you do understand, don’t you, nothing’s ever perfect, and some writers rewrite their novels six times, if you can believe it!

I acquired a taste for this sort of thing and broke bad. I walked around with a horn of plenty, pouring out splendid grades, generously bestowing them upon anyone whom I perceived to have even the tiniest of dreams, the slightest timidity before the darkness of being—howdy, folks!—the smallest desire to get on their tiptoes and peer over the fence. Mean idiots got Ds from me, kind idiots got Bs. I forgave some slackers and not others, according to whim. When, at the end of the semester, my teacher evaluations came from the dean’s office, I tossed the entire package without even taking a look. I was done!

Goodbye to the North, to the snow and the cliffs, to the fairy-tale wooden cabins, to the faraway blue mountains, beyond which Canada lies, and to you, my friends—ours were real friendships, and I did love you, but now it’s your turn to become translucent jellyfish, now fireflies will pass right through you, as starlight is refracted just a little.

I came back to this Princeton of mine, which wasn’t really Princeton. Nielsen had already left. I walked into my house and began to inspect the rooms. I was gripped by terror and dread.

Everything that could have been broken was broken, everything that could have been damaged was damaged. This was no accidental destruction, not the result of boisterous horseplay, which could be expected from a young man—no: this was premeditated, demented, and bizarre. It was as if a worm, or a large arthropod, or a mollusk, had inhabited my house, and in some obscure stages of its life cycle hurled heaps of roe, sprayed the walls from its ink sac, laid eggs high up under the ceiling, stopping, perhaps, for a week or so in its pupa stage, and then, cracking its chitinous cocoon, emerged in new form and with a fresh need to crawl through things.

He carved holes the size of dessert plates in the walls, holes big enough for an adult’s head, let alone a child’s, to fit through; every wall had a hole at eye level. Wooden window frames, David’s pride and joy, were defaced with deep grooves, as if Nielsen had suddenly sprouted a polydactyl paw with bone claws and a desperate need to scratch against something. Upon finding a screen door, Nielsen apparently enjoyed shredding that, too, until it dangled like a ripped spiderweb. Perhaps he slept in it, or maybe hung in it upside down.

He liked to chip away at the bathtub with a hammer and chisel, but only in the near left corner. The bathtub was cast iron, and he must have been trying to get to the metal through the enamel. Apparently he didn’t find the other corners palatable.

The basement had housed some air ducts below the ceiling; they carried warm air to heat the house. Now the basement no longer housed them: Nielsen had cut them out. He ripped out sections, three yards in all, according to a plan he alone understood, a plan that no human brain could comprehend. Thinking that my eyes deceived me, I dragged a certified American contractor in to inspect the damage: What is this? Can you, please, explain?

“Holy shit,” whispered the certified American contractor, backing away in fear. In American B movies, that’s the facial expression that earthlings have as they stand there looking and not knowing what to do next when suddenly—thump!—something covered in spiderwebs and goo jumps into the frame and carries off in its jaws a young actress of average looks, the one that you always knew was going to get quartered and eaten after getting entangled in something sticky.

Sure, the house was also dirty, but what difference did that make? It was finally clear why he required sterility specifically, and not mere cleanliness: if you’re a messenger from hell and you’re building a pentacle, you need to purify the space of all specters, of all the lares and penates, both the household and the basement variety. That’s when you need demons-for-hire to arrive with their fumigators—Kock and Chik, transvestites joined in matrimony, if not in surname; I should have figured this out earlier, when I saw Kock arranging glassware contrary to all human convention.

Bushes were pulled out by the roots in the garden, roses were cut down to resemble ski poles, and at the border with my neighbors there were signs in the soil of indiscriminate digging. The mailbox contained two letters. One a month old, in which Nielsen gives notice that he has vacated the premises and demands the return of his security deposit of fifteen hundred dollars. And the other letter, informing me that, because of my failure to return his security deposit, he is suing me. He is suing me.

So there you have it, girlie, that’s the finale: you find yourself alone in the middle of the great American continent, not a penny in your pocket, and a crazed arthropod bent on suing you. Have you ever tried to wrap your mind around the behavior of, say, cephalopods? Consider, for example: “The fourth left arm in the males is distinctive in its formation and is used for fertilization purposes.” Clearer now? The above is a scientific fact, by the way.

I found the address of a Princeton law firm in the Yellow Pages. Drove to their office. I picked the lawyer whose last name to me hinted at a knack for cunning pettifoggery. Described my situation.

“And why didn’t you keep the monies in an escrow account, as the law prescribes?” inquired the lawyer.

“I just borrowed it, no big whoop.”

“I see. Well, now he has the right to demand from you not just the security deposit, but also a penalty—I would guess around three thousand dollars. My fee, by the way, is two hundred dollars per hour.”

“Shit. Um. Okay. So what’s the plan?”

“I would be delighted to handle this case.” The shyster’s eyes lit up. “I think we can expect a very interesting fight in court.”

American courts are not as they appear on TV—things proceed a little differently. In my nonprofessional opinion, everything could have been handled in just an hour. But at two hundred dollars for my lawyer and probably the same for Nielsen’s, it would hardly be worth showing up for. So both shysters delight in playing for time. After a few hours, it’s our turn to question Nielsen. Here is my lawyer, leisurely getting up from his seat, strolling ever so casually, as if contemplating something, then sloooowly spinning on his heel, slooowly asking:

“Your full name?”

There followed ten minutes of irrelevant questioning, then Nielsen’s lawyer doing the same—and how polite, how respectful toward each other these shysters are. You don’t need to be a detective to know that they take turns driving their bimmers to each other’s house’s to sip whiskey on the rocks after work. Weekends are for barbecuing by the pool.

“Do you recognize the damage, as shown on these photographs, as the damage you caused to the walls?” slooowly asks my guy.

Nielsen is silent.

“Were you the one who damaged these walls?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you cut an opening in this wall?”

“I did.”

“And did you cut an opening in this wall as well?”

“Yes.”

“For what purpose did you cut these openings, as shown in exhibit A and exhibit B?”

Nielsen is quiet, as the meters continue running. We are playing double or nothing: If I win, Nielsen will have to cover all my fees, including those for my attorney, in addition to the repairs. If he wins, I’ll have to return his security deposit, pay a penalty, and cover his attorney’s fees, and my house, desecrated by this beast for his séances of evolutionary regression, will hang around my neck like a millstone. What to do?

They stall and stall and then break for lunch. Another hour, another two hundred dollars. After lunch I ask my guy: So? How is it looking? He goes to confer with Nielsen’s shyster. Through closed doors I can hear them laughing, obviously discussing other things and not just my case. This is how it’s looking: Nielsen was unable to answer any of the questions clearly—his lawyer is furious. Furious! It’s a special kind of lawyerly fury, because it doesn’t cost him anything. But this doesn’t mean that I am sure to win this case! It remains a fact that in failing to deposit his check into an escrow account I did violate state law. My chances are fifty-fifty. But we can end all this right here.

“He is willing to withdraw his claim,” says my guy. “In exchange, he wants you to withdraw yours. That’s the cautious way out. But I would be delighted to fight this!”

Of course you would! But I can’t risk it. To hell with him. Let’s end it right here. To leave and to not look back. After all—“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

“What a shame, what a shame!” calls my guy after me. “It was just getting interesting. I was looking forward to a good fight!”

After somehow repairing and cleaning up the house, I was able to sell it to a Latino couple. They weren’t particularly friendly, never smiled, not even out of politeness. So I didn’t tell them about the leaks in the basement. They never asked and I never said, just as my realtor had taught me. “I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!” he’d exclaim, putting up his hands.

I sold all my belongings at a yard sale. Dragged some tables outside, set out my forks and corks, curtains and schmertains and other crap—just like the stuff they sell in the subways in Moscow. I put my furniture up for sale, too: a sizable crowd came to check it out; hard to keep an eye on everyone, so many things were stolen, including the draftsman’s kit, but it wasn’t mine anyway. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Americans also pinch stuff, not just us Russians. The patio had lost some of its color over the years, the wood turning silvery, and it was almost time, according to the licensed carpenter’s schedule, to treat and stain it. Won’t be me—I’ll leave it to the buyers! Their kids, by the way, had enormous heads.

I sold my car to a neighbor down the street—he had a grimy little shop in his backyard: taking apart junk for spare parts, tuning up engines, and selling it all to auto supply shops. I asked for five hundred dollars but he turned me down. In the end he paid me one buck, and this was fair: the bottom had rusted out so much that, between the pedals, you could sometimes spot the remnants of skunks who hadn’t quite made it. He actually did me a favor: you can’t simply abandon an old car here—they’ll fine you. Unless maybe if you take it deep into the woods, to a forgotten plot of land, to a shack called “the End of All Paths,” and leave it there until the cows come home, until the fat lady sings, until Columbus’s second coming, until the day when they come for us all.

Thou comest naked into this world, and naked thou shalt leave.

I stood at the fork in the road, looking.

Yanked out the needle from my heart and walked away.