Aetherial Worlds

Smoke and Shadows

It’s December, 4:00 p.m., and getting dark. I am sitting in the student cafeteria. The space is enormous; its ceiling disappears into the dim light and cigarette smoke somewhere around the third floor. It’s the mid-1990s and they haven’t yet prohibited smoking in American public places, but they soon will. In the halls and in the classrooms, it is, of course, already forbidden. The professors’ lounge has also been sterilized. But in this dingy student cafeteria it’s still allowed, and so all the professors—the ones who haven’t yet signed on to a healthy lifestyle—eat, smoke, and conduct their student conferences right here.

“Life is but smoke and shadows,” as the sign over a gate that shall remain nameless proclaims. Smoke and shadows.

The food, of course, is god-awful. One popular dish is a chunky pasta we call “little horns” in my faraway, snowy homeland. It’s drowned in a yellow sauce, but not of egg—I’m scared to dwell on its provenance. They serve pale turkey meat, but it’s taken from parts nowhere near the bird’s bosom: if you poke around with a fork, you might find the trachea, which looks like a little tube; also some bits resembling knees, or skin with hair. Hopefully that’s just the comb, which doesn’t rest on the turkey’s head but hangs from its nose down to the neck. Lord, that is what You decided on the fifth day of Creation, and I am no judge of You. Here they serve, in all seriousness, canned pureed corn. Not to mention the tepid brown water they call “coffee,” although if you add some soy creamer it’s not that bad—quite potable, actually. I’m used to it.

At a table across the room from me is Eric. He’s an American. We’re having an affair.

I can’t say anything particularly good about Eric: he’s not all that handsome, his main virtues being his teeth and his height. I also like his rimless glasses and his fingers, lanky like those of an imaginary pianist. Alas, he’s no good at the piano, and all that he can extract from the instrument is “Chopsticks.”

I couldn’t even say whether he’s smart. I don’t have enough to go on. How can I gauge someone’s intellect if he doesn’t speak a lick of my mother tongue, which is Russian, and out of my country’s entire literary canon he has heard only of Uncle Vanya? Not that I would claim to understand the first thing about what Eric does. He’s an anthropologist, specializing in the Pu Pèo people of Vietnam, an ethnic minority of just four hundred members. The Pu Pèo are part of a larger group called the Yi; well, not that large—eight million, living mostly in China. Out of China’s entire population it’s a pitifully small handful. The Yi people speak a number of different languages, including Nousu, Nisu, and Nasu. Just to keep things interesting. Yet Eric specializes not in the language but in the everyday life of this distant minority-within-a-minority. He’s traveled to their part of the world and brought back their national costume, their headdress (which resembles an overnight train window with the drapes drawn back), wooden bowls, and an exotic grain: buckwheat!

A few months ago he hosted a small get-together for some colleagues from our department: standing buffet, wine in plastic cups, smoking outside only, in the chill, autumnal air of the backyard—“Please close the storm door, not just the screen door: it reeks of smoke in here, yuck, yuck.” Crudités and spreads—“Dip the celery sticks in the hummus and the carrot sticks in the guacamole.”

With triumphant false modesty, Eric’s wife brought out a dish filled with hot buckwheat; the guests—the bravest, anyway—reached for it with plastic forks. Exclamations of multiculturalism and feigned delight. I tried some, too: they forgot to add salt to the kasha. It was inedible.

It was necessary to explain some things that may have escaped Eric and his colleagues, to lower the flame of exoticism down to a common, grocery store fact: this rare pinkish grain can be obtained under the name Wolff’s Kasha at any American supermarket. Yes, it’ll be expensive, and yes, outrageously so. Cheaper buckwheat, of the dreaded Polish variety, can be obtained in any Russian store in Brighton Beach or beyond. The quality will be awful, and so will the taste; it is under-roasted and upon boiling it swells to mush, but at least there is no need to travel to Vietnam. We Russians can eat kasha for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Doctors prescribe it for diabetes. There is even an old Russian saying—“Buckwheat compliments itself”—meaning it’s so naturally delicious, there is no need to compliment the cook. You could fry it in a pan; you could slow-cook it in a cast-iron pot inside a Russian masonry stove if you had cast-iron pots and Russian masonry stoves, but you don’t; and you can never add too much butter to kasha. Oh, and if you add mushrooms!… and onions! Actually, why don’t I just show you!

I took the kasha from his wife and quickly refried it properly. Her heart filled with hate. And Eric’s with love. Or something like it. It’s hard to tell. When I see Eric, my heart swells. But what swells in him—I just don’t know.

Our affair proceeds with some complications, and, frankly, it’d be better if it weren’t happening at all. The clock points to December, and when it’s over, I’ll be leaving here never to come back. I’ll return to Russia; I’ll visit New York occasionally—that bolted, splendid, acicular, cast-iron, windy anthill that never sleeps; I’ll visit my friends in San Francisco, where it’s always spring and where, as the song goes, “a lilac coatroom man will hand you your manteau”—maybe he’ll hand me my coat, too, a belted cashmere one with a shawl collar, if I buy it in time. I’ll rent one of those really wide jeeps; buy myself some embossed-leather cowgirl boots with pointy toes, a cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses; stock up on water and beef jerky; and, cigarette a-danglin’, I’ll zoom through California, Nevada, and Arizona, across rocky deserts—brown and pink, lavender and purple—their mirages trembling over salty and waterless lakes. Where to? No idea. Why? No reason, just because: there is nothing better out there than the desert. The fresh, dry air through an open window, the smell of rocks, the smell of emptiness, loneliness, freedom—the right kind of smell.

But to this tiny, ornate, gingerbread town covered with the purest of snow, I will never come back. So what do I need this love for? As I keep telling myself: I’d be better off without it. Or maybe it just seems that way.

In the Yi language, “snow” is vo.

Every day I keep repeating to myself that Eric is limited, poorly educated, and generally not that smart. Or if he is smart, it’s not readily apparent. And not even that attractive—teeth, shmeeth. And we have nothing to talk about. I mean, we can’t keep talking about the Pu Pèo, can we? But every time we meet, be it in that smoky student cafeteria, or in the chichi little bagel shop (and there, progressive bagels “with everything” for intellectuals and also cranberry scones, rare coffee varietals, and a free copy of the latest New Yorker for quick browsing—this could be Paris!), or at the post office—accidentally on purpose—or quite unexpectedly in the boundless campus parking lot, every time he’s back to chewing my ear off about the Pu Pèo, and every time, to my dismay, I find myself listening to his mumbling as if it’s a chorus of angels. With every passing day I get more and more stuck in this love like it’s glue.

In the Yi language buckwheat is nge. At least that’s how I hear it. Nge.

I’m a steadfast tin soldier: nothing gets to me—even love can’t get to me—but, dear God, when I see that lanky four-eyes; when I watch him climb out of his car like a daddy longlegs; when I suddenly recognize him, absurd in his long coat, as he materializes out of the whirling snowflakes, turning his face from the wind, covering his eyes against the blizzard, all my inner towers, bastions, and barricades melt, crumble, and disintegrate in slow motion, as in a lousy, drowsy cartoon. Tell me, dear God: Why him, specifically? Aren’t there other absurd and inarticulate bespectacled gents? Why him? I don’t understand You, Lord. Please reveal Your plans to me!

Whenever confusion stirs within my soul, instead of going to the student cafeteria to dine on turkey corpses, I drive to that progressive bagel shop, buy myself the biggest cup of real coffee they sell and a cranberry scone, and sit by the window with the local paper. Turn it inside out and then fold it over twice to read about the latest goings-on. Pretty standard stuff: Two sedans collided on the highway with a van that was transporting dry ice—four casualties. A house was robbed: the owner stepped out for a bit and didn’t lock the front door, pinning his hopes on the storm door—hopes dashed, computer stolen. Two people fell into an ice hole on the lake and couldn’t get out. Once again campus police have detained J. Alvarez, a homeless man who for the sixth time had ignored warnings about loitering around the university. He was taken to the local precinct, where the situation was explained to him yet again, to no avail. Alvarez likes the campus; it’s spacious and pretty, and with its tree-lined paths it’s equally beautiful in the winter and summer. The female students are pretty, too, and so Alvarez comes to check out the ladies, who, in turn, complain to the administration.

“What do you want from me, Eric?”

“Tell me something surprising about your alphabet. The Russian alphabet.”

“In Russian we have the letter Ъ. The ‘hard sign.’”

“What does it sound like?”

“Like nothing.”

“At all?”

“At all.”

“Then why do you have it?”

“It’s a certain type of silence, Eric. Our alphabet has elements of silence.”

Of course I could easily explain to him the reason for using the letter Ъ, its derivation, as well as its modern and historical contexts—but why? He’s not planning to learn Russian, and he really has no need to know. It’s a waste of time. And besides, it’s already December, and I’ll soon be leaving, never to come back. I look out at the bluish evening, the town all lit up and covered with beads and tinsel—it’s close to Christmas, and here the shops have started selling gifts, sparkles, candles, and flickering well in advance. Right around Thanksgiving they start. This is a northern town, as far north as they get. Farther than that, where the earth curves, there are only simple little settlements with savage Poles and detached-from-reality Canadian-Ukrainians, cliffs and snow, giant stadium-sized supermarkets selling only canned goods to the local population that consumes no fresh greens for historical reasons, and then again cliffs and snow, snow and cliffs.

Up there, up north, is the boundary of the habitable world, and beyond that the kingdom of darkness; from there the Arctic air comes down in massive blocks and hangs in the dark above our uncovered, or perhaps bundled-up, heads, while stars piercingly shine down through an icy lens, prickling our eyes.

Americans don’t seem to wear hats—perhaps they are waiting for their ears to fall off from the cold? I’ve seen them wear gloves, scarves, sure, but not hats. Perhaps they feel that it looks weak to wear them, unless, maybe, one has gone to Moscow’s Red Square and bought one of those Chinese-made polyester ushankas with earflaps and a red star; then they expect all Russian hearts to melt at the sight of them. Eric is no exception: in order to get closer to my heart, unreadable by means of his cultural codes, he tried wearing an Uzbek doppa—a square, pointed hat—only his was embroidered with beads and pink paillettes. This reminded me of Maksim Gorky when he was terminally ill. I banned it.

Me, I swaddle my head in a warm scarf to ward off meningitis, arachnoiditis, and trigeminal neuralgia; I’ve forbidden Eric to call this scarf a “babushka” with the erroneous stress on the u. I’ve already weaned him off saying “borscht” instead of “borsch” and likewise explained to him that in Russian, as opposed to Yiddish, there are no “blintzes” but only “blinis,” no “schav” but only green “shchi,” also known as sorrel soup. I know I’m disseminating useless knowledge. I’ll leave, and he’ll go back to his erring ways, his linguistic and cultural poverty. He’ll go back to adding cumin and star anise to buckwheat, to making salad with cold farfalle pasta, red caviar, and sesame oil. Driven by his unbridled imagination, he’ll make a heap of something awful and ridiculous from mushrooms or beef.

Rice, I’d bet, he could do well. Rice is rice, a basic, simple thing, no need to invent anything. Some things should be simple and clear. You don’t need to add anything to it—let it stay pure and unchanged, as it’s been for thousands of years.

“Eric, how do the Pu Pèo say ‘rice’?”

“Tsa.”

This town, to which I’ll never return, is small, so everyone sees everything. Even if you don’t know someone, they know you. Students are the majority here, and of course they know their instructors’ faces. There is virtually no place where Eric and I can be alone. Sometimes, when we manage to see each other in some coffee shop while his wife, Emma, is teaching, we don’t even get to talk: too many acquaintances around. I know how watchful they are of other people’s affairs—I myself have gossiped with them about this one and those two. Eric is scared of Emma. And so he sits in a far corner, looking past me staring at the wall or at his cup. I respond in kind. I get heart palpitations. Don’t know what he gets.

Emma is a beautiful, high-strung woman with long hair and anxious eyes stretching back to her temples. She teaches something artsy and can make anything and everything imaginable with her hands. She sews complex blue quilts covered with the delirious stars of otherworldly skies, weaves beaded shawls, and knits thick, puffy white coats resembling snowy hills. She hand-makes lemon and vanilla soap and other such things, conjuring up acute jealousy in women and fear and bewilderment in men. She orders emerald- and tree-bark-hued cowhides from special designer catalogs and from them makes little boxes with silver inserts—I bought one myself at a local shop, not knowing that it was made by Emma.

She’s a real woman, unlike me; she’s a goddess of the hearth and a protector of all arts and crafts, not to mention that she volunteers at the student theater, designing and painting sets for plays that her students produce. She suspects that while she’s painting those sets Eric isn’t sitting around his office but circling the town trying to run into me—accidentally, inadvertently, unintentionally. Emma is a witch and she wishes me ill. Or maybe it just seems that way to me.

Due to the fact that we are often unable to speak, Eric and I have developed an ability to read each other’s thoughts. It’s not terribly difficult, but of course it results in many mistakes, and our limited vocabulary comes down mostly to the nitty-gritty: Later. Yes. Not now. Me too. No. I’ll get in the car and drive—follow me.

We tried meeting in another town, fifteen miles away from ours, where, at the edge of human settlement, we scouted a quiet inn surrounded by snowbanks but at the last minute, almost on the threshold, we ran away in fear: through a lit window and its little lace curtains we spotted two professors from our college, two married ladies—who would have thunk it?—kissing and embracing quite unambiguously over a cup of coffee in the cozy bar draped with premature Christmas lights.

Sure, we could have wandered in saucily from the cold and resolved our mutual awkwardness with a jovial cackle: Ha-ha-ha! You too? But Eric is timid and considerate. Me, not so much, but he’s the one who lives here and I’m leaving and never coming back.

I couldn’t have brought him back to my place: I lived at the campus hotel for homeless professors. It was cheap, but splendid and mysterious, like a haunted house. Back in the 1930s, some wealthy patron of the college donated this house when she inexplicably found she had no more use for it. The building was surrounded by the world’s fluffiest snowbanks; the rooms were so overheated that everyone kept their windows open regardless of the weather; and the beds were so narrow that one would fall off of them without fail, even while sleeping on one’s back and at attention, like a soldier in formation, there being no other godly way to sleep on them. The rooms also had odious little low armchairs, with legs like a dachshund’s. There was no smoking allowed, but of course everyone smoked while hanging out the window. No, this was wholly unsuitable for a clandestine rendezvous.

Theoretically, we could have risked meeting at Eric’s place while Emma was teaching or set-designing, but I feared it wouldn’t end well: there have been times in my life when I was scared to death—or conversely, to laughter—and when it was necessary to urgently hide in the closet or under the bed. Emma may have been a mind reader, too; I could see it in her eyes. Having caught us, she would have given chase, pursuing us through the snow, over the treetops, through the dark blue night, leaving her students behind.

Emma, you see, had a third eye, clearly visible when she was lit from the side, when it pulsated under her thin skin. When she would turn her head in alarm, it picked up my thoughts, like a radar detector. I felt it whenever she and Eric hosted one of their get-togethers for colleagues, which had become a weekly thing. I kept attending these by default. Not coming would certainly have aroused her suspicions. At these parties Emma would read my thoughts, watching me with her subcutaneous, still-unhatched third eye, as she filled with hate.

To ward off this evil eye, I bought an amulet at a local antique shop. In our little town there were many such shops with all kinds of delightful thingamajigs, from old license plates to empty glass perfume bottles. Tin watering cans; porcelain kitties; dishes, washbowls, and chests of drawers. Lifeless corsets, for women with small breasts and unimaginably tiny waists; hopelessly rumpled lace parasols, for a sun that had set and stopped shining long ago. Faded enamel jewelry, old magazines, and patterned ice trays.

The charm jumped out at me right away from where it lay, between a silver jewelry box and a Victorian lorgnette. It was a small mano fico, a real amulet, a thing of power—it was unclear how it had got there and why no one had purchased it yet. The shop owner hadn’t picked up on its value and meaning, and so, luckily, it didn’t cost me that much. I took it to a jewelry store to have a little loop soldered to it, and I also bought a silver chain for it.

“Do you want to have it engraved, perhaps?” asked the saleswoman. “Usually these things get engraved with a name. Or a word. You know, like an incantation.”

I looked out the window at the swirling flakes and the snowdrifts. Pure and endless. I’ll leave and they’ll stay. They’ll melt into water, and then it’ll snow again.

“Okay, engrave it with vo. V-o.”

“Good choice!” exclaimed the saleswoman, with not a clue what I was talking about. An excellent professional reaction.

I started wearing the amulet under my clothes. I kept it on at night. Emma panicked and twitched, but she was powerless against it.

Love is a strange thing; it has a thousand faces. You can love anything and anyone. I once loved a bracelet from a shop window, but it was too expensive and I couldn’t afford it: I had a family, I had children. I worked hard, burning out my brain, so I could pay for our apartment and the kids’ college tuition, so I had something to set aside for illness, for old age, for my mother’s hospital bills, for unexpected emergencies. I couldn’t buy that bracelet, and I didn’t, but I did love it. I thought about it while falling asleep, I pined for it and shed tears for it.

Then the spell passed. It unclasped its jaws from my heart and mercifully let me go. What difference does it make who or what it was? It could have been a person, an animal, a thing, a cloud in the sky, a book, a strophe in somebody else’s poem, the southern wind tearing at grass on the steppe, an episode from my own dream, an unexplored street making a turn in the honey glow of a setting sun, a smile from a stranger, a ship’s sail upon a blue wave, a springtime evening, a pear tree, a few notes of music from an incidental window.

I, for one, have never been in love with waterfalls, or high-heeled shoes, or a woman, or dancing, or inscriptions, or coins, but I know those who have been and were blinded by their love, and I understand them. Maybe one day I’ll fall in love with something from that list—who’s to know? It happens suddenly, without warning, and it envelops you immediately and completely.

In this way, Eric was the object of my obsessive and inexplicable love. I had to rid myself of it somehow. Overcome it, somehow.

I’m sitting in a bagel shop (the one that feels like Paris), looking out at the blue night, the snowy scene like a stage set. We’ll take Route 50, just follow me, then we’ll make a turn at the fork, Eric telepathically communicates. I drop my magazine, steal a bunch of napkins to wrap up my cranberry scone, bus my table, bundle myself up in my scarf—I’m warm, my blood is red-hot, my palms and my heels are like boiling water; I don’t know about you, but I could burn holes in the ice; yes, I’m the only one like this in your gingerbread town—and walk out onto the street, which is spruced up with swaying garlands of sparkling lights. I drive down Route 50, make a turn at the fork, and pull over. Cars are whizzing past me in a hurry to get home. Or away from home. Who’s to say?

Eric stops his car, gets into mine.

“I have an idea,” he says. “We should go to Lake George.”

“What’s there?”

“A motel. It’s beautiful there. We can go this weekend. She’ll be visiting her mother in Boston.”

“And what’s happening in Boston?”

“Uh… her mother has some sort of anniversary coming up. She can’t miss it.”

“Why aren’t you going?”

“I have an urgent deadline and an inflammation of the gallbladder.”

“I wouldn’t buy that.”

“Neither will she. It’s just an excuse.”

I look into his sad, gray, sincere eyes.

“In our culture,” he says, “the most important thing about an excuse is that it be plausible.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes.”

“So any kind of a lie is okay? Even an outrageous one?”

“Yes. As long as there is plausible deniability.”

“You know, we’re big on lying, too. I doubt you’re the world leaders there.”

“We respect other people; we try to lie credibly.”

“Okay. Good thing I’m leaving soon and never coming back.”

“You can’t leave!”

“Sure I can.”

“What if I killed her?”

“What for? She didn’t do anything.”

“No, I think I’ll kill her. It’ll make things easier for me.”

“But not for me.”

We both just sit there, sulking. Then Eric asks, “Did you know that buckwheat, sorrel, and rhubarb are related?”

“I didn’t. What stunning news.”

“There are two types of buckwheat: bitter and sweet.”

“There is also a Polish type, a special varietal called ‘Crappy.’”

“You’ll leave and fall out of love with me.”

“Yes. I’ll leave, fall out of love, and forget you.”

Eric’s feelings are hurt. “Women shouldn’t say such things! They should say: ‘I’ll never, ever forget you! I’ll never, ever stop loving you!’”

“That’s women lying plausibly out of respect for other people. Of course they’ll forget. Everything is forgettable. In that lies salvation.”

“I’d like to break your heart,” says Eric vengefully.

“Only solid things break. I am water. I’ll run off and seep through somewhere else.”

“Yes!” he says, with sudden anger. “Women are water! That’s why they cry all the time!”

We sit in silence for a long time, as our car is swept by a fine, dry, rustling snowstorm.

“It’s coming down like rice,” says Eric, “like tsa.”

It’s as if he’s reading my mind. It’s hard to stop loving Eric. I have to pull myself together. I have to turn my heart into ice.

But then wouldn’t that mean it could break?

It’s the second half of December, only a week till Christmas. The central street of our town, that ubiquitous “Main Street,” is ablaze with gold, green, and crimson shop windows, strings of lights stretched from pole to shining pole. There are so many Christmas lights that the snow, as it blows through the street, appears multicolored: multicolored sparkling vo that sounds like tsa. “Jingle Bells” creeps and seeps ad nauseam from under every door, drilling holes in your brain and turning it into a sieve; by the umpteenth store you want to run up swinging a baseball bat, and—whack! whack! whack!—smash the crap out of the mirrored glass. But, of course, one has to contain oneself.

I’m picking out some gifts for myself: an embroidered tablecloth, scented candles, and striped pillowcases. I don’t need any of it, but that’s no reason not to buy it. Back in the day, the Magi also brought strange gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It’s unclear what they meant by it, what they were hinting at, and where those gifts wound up, although all kinds of beautiful explanations were later proposed: gold for kingship on earth, myrrh for mortality, frankincense for burning, believing, and praying. Legend has it that the gold was stolen by two thieves, and that thirty-three years later those two very thieves were crucified, one to the left and one to the right of our Savior. Jesus promised that if they would believe in Him, they would be with Him in heaven that day. Since they all went back to nursery days, as it were. Here, truly, was a case of someone benefitting both from Christ’s birth and His death.

I also really like this beautiful, soft purse with silver inserts, but something about it perturbs me. Who is the artisan? What if it’s Emma? The saleswoman doesn’t know, and the owner of the shop isn’t here. An inner voice, perhaps it’s the amulet, tells me: Don’t buy it. Don’t buy anything; put back the tablecloth, and return the candles to where you found them. Nothing here is yours; it’s all Emma’s. All of it.

“Thanks, I changed my mind. No, I don’t need the pillowcases, either.”

Eric is hosting a Christmas party, his last gathering of the year. He sends me a wordless invitation—we have fine-tuned our communication technique: Come by tonight, I’ll make nge properly. Don’t you want nge? Oh, for God’s sake, Eric, I only want one thing—for someone to erase you from my eyes, from my heart, from my memory. To forget everything, to be free. “No dreams, no recollections, and no sounds,” surrounded only by a dark sky in a snowy blizzard, and nothing else, just as on the second day of Creation. So I can purify myself of you and begin anew. I need to begin anew, for I won’t be coming back here again.

Lights are shimmering; Christmas songs are seeping out of everywhere, making their way inside your brain. In a few days the baby Jesus will be born. Does this mean He’s not among us now, absent, just as before Easter? Does this mean that He’s abandoned us during the darkest, gloomiest, most commercialized and hopeless week of the year? And does this mean there is no one to turn to inside your heart, no one to ask what to do? Figure it out yourself, is that it? Not far from town there is a Russian monastery. The monks there are sullen hobgoblins, of the standard sort, but perhaps it’s worth a visit for some advice? What if among them is one with a strange, all-seeing heart? I could ask him: Is it a sin to kill and trample love within yourself?

Alas, the blizzard has swept over the back roads, and there is no way of getting to the monastery in this weather. There is no Russian Orthodox church in town. I can’t go to the Evangelicals, or whatever—those aren’t churches, they’re community centers where they encourage bright-eyed honesty and where you’re greeted by a ruddy man in a blazer—“Hello, sister! Jesus Christ has a wonderful plan for your salvation!” Somehow that plan will entail loving thy neighbor and immediately sitting down to gift-wrap donations with youthful, undertreated drug addicts from broken homes. Or coming together for a sing-along with tambourine accompaniment. Or listening to a sister-in-Christ speak: some lady in a nubby cardigan, in the manic stage of a bipolar episode, who insists it’s because of her relationship with our Lord and Savior that her chocolate chip cookies always come out so well. Always.

Well, I don’t want to love my neighbor. I’d like to stop loving him, actually.

The Catholics have a much better setup. Their church is more mysterious, but now is not the time to be there: it’s too bright, too festive, too joyful, full of too many happy expectations, and I just can’t; I don’t want joy, I just want to sit in a dark room full of vile and bitter people so I can turn my heart into ice. Because life is but smoke and shadows.

I drive to visit the hexadactyls: there is a small town nearby where almost everybody has six fingers. They are all related, from one big family. Way back, one of their forefathers happened to have a sixth finger, and the deformity was passed on to subsequent generations. Now they are everywhere: at the gas station, in the bank, at the local stores. At the pharmacy window. At the bar. At the café. Full of bitterness and spite.

It feels good here, it feels right. A bitter waitress brings me my coffee; she knows that I’m looking at her hand, and I bet she has already spat in my cup as a preemptive measure: cappuccinos are well designed for this. Okay, lady, I feel you. A spiteful hexadactyl bartender is wiping down glasses, and a sullen young man sits on a barstool talking to him; it’s so strange to see which fingers he’s using to hold his cigarette. Is there a name for this extra digit? And do the local six-fingered grannies knit special gloves for their six-fingered grandkids?

They cast unwelcoming side-glances at me, knowing full well I’m here to gawk at them. They instantly sniff out us nosy scum, the normal, regular-looking strangers, who out of boredom or schadenfreude, to lift our own spirits and have a cheap thrill, come to seek out those for whom having more is no cause for joy.

One could also spit into seltzer with great pleasure. Or into Diet Dr Pepper, the cherry-flavored one with fewer calories. Me—I’m water. Spit at me, you ugly and miserable people, for I am planning a murder.

The Nativity is only a day away—just twenty-four hours left without our Lord. Eric is right: it’s time for decisive action—time to get rid of her. She’s a witch: she’s sewn all the clothes in town, made all the quilts so I couldn’t hide under them with Eric, knitted all the scarves and the shawls to strangle me with, stitched all the boots to hobble my feet so I couldn’t escape, baked all the bagels and scones so I would choke on their crumbs. She poisons food, cuts up bird tracheas into the pale sauce, boils cartilage and skin to put a curse on me, to turn me into a turkey with a comb for a nose. She picks cranberries in a swamp, ones that smell like a crow’s armpit. She paints sets. Once she’s finished, it’ll be too late. If not now, then when?

I arrive at Eric and Emma’s. The screen door has been removed for the winter, the wooden one is wide open, and through the storm door you can see the flames dancing in the fireplace. The guests—campus colleagues that I’m, quite frankly, already fed up with—stand around the buffet, twirling wineglasses filled with cheap wine. Eric has made nge; he’s proudly admiring the pinkish heap of buckwheat, as if it contains a secret meaning of some kind.

But there is none.

It’s crappy food.

He bought that Polish muck again.

A lovely Mozart recording is playing in the background. Emma’s third eye has finally hatched: blue and bloodshot, without eyelashes, it’s covered with a translucent extra eyelid, like a bird’s. But what good can it do her now? It’s useless.

Eric, Eric, get ready. Don’t drink any wine—you have to drive. We’ll go to Lake George and drown her there.

Telepathy is a wonderful and truly convenient means of communication. It’s indispensable in social situations.

Why Lake George, specifically?

I don’t know any other lakes around here. It was your idea.

The guests disperse early to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities, to wrap presents in sparkly paper. As for us, we get into the car: Eric and Emma in front, and me in the back. Emma is using two eyes to look ahead at the snowstorm and her third eye to look into my heart, that piece of wicked, black ice; thanks to my silver amulet she can’t see what’s in store for her.

It’s pitch-dark at the lake, but Eric has brought a flashlight. We walk along a fisherman’s path—seems we are not the only ice-fishing enthusiasts in the area. Today, however, the others are all at home, warm and cozy, by their decked-out trees.

The ice hole is covered with a thin layer of frost.

“What are we doing here?” Emma wants to know.

“That’s what!”

We push Emma into the ice hole. Black water splashes my feet. Emma struggles, trying to grab on to the sharp, icy edges. Eric pushes her, using an ice pick for good measure—wait, where did the ice pick come from? Doesn’t matter. Bloop. Done. They won’t find her till spring.

“My hands are freezing,” Eric complains.

“So are my feet. Let’s have a drink.”

“You brought booze?”

“And meat pirozhki. They are still warm: I wrapped them in foil.”

And right there on the ice, we drink Popov vodka out of a flask—awful swill, truth be told. We eat meat pies. We finally kiss as free people—relieved to know that no one will see us, or stop us. Freedom is precious, as every American understands. I toss the flask and our leftovers into the water. Take off the silver amulet and throw it in there, too: it’s served me well but I don’t need it anymore.

We slowly walk back toward the shore.

The ice cracks under Eric’s feet, and he falls up to his armpits into a snowed-over ice hole.

“Ahh! Give me your hand!”

I step away from the ice hole’s edge.

“No, Eric. Farewell!”

“What do you mean, ‘farewell’?! What the—What do you mean? Why ‘farewell’?”

Yes, farewell. Don’t grab at me, don’t call after me, just forget me. Well, you won’t remember, will you, because you don’t exist, you’re an invention; you don’t exist and never did. I don’t know you, I never talked to you, and I have no idea what your name is, tall stranger, sitting at a table across the room from me in a dingy student cafeteria, enveloped by darkness and smoke, in your rimless glasses, holding a cigarette with your lanky fingers, like those of an imaginary pianist.

I finish my last cigarette—it’s easy to get lost in thought and absentmindedly go through an entire pack. Wrapping myself up in a warm shawl, I leave without looking back, walking from the shadows and smoke into a blinding December snowstorm.