Disappearing Earth

MAY

Oksana knew something was wrong when she saw the door. Her security door stuck into the hallway like a dislocated finger. Behind that metal panel, a line of white light shivered out. Both her apartment doors, the outer steel and the inner fiberglass one, hung open.

She was half a flight below, alone on the landing, and heard the blood in her ears. The double-layered entrances to other apartments were shut tight. Oksana held on to the railing for one second, looking up, and then called for her dog. “Malysh?” No one answered. “Malysh?” Oksana said, climbing now. Running. She pulled the security door the rest of the way open and pushed back the inner one to find her apartment quiet, clean, frightening. Her laptop rested on the coffee table. So she hadn’t been robbed.

Oksana called the dog’s name again. She went first to the bedroom to see if he was asleep in there—“Malysh, come!”—then to the living room, kitchen, bathroom in turn. She got on her hands and knees in case he had somehow squeezed under the tub. Feeling a bite on her palm, she turned a hand over to find her unused keys still looped around one finger. She pushed the keys into her pocket and bent deeper on her elbows. Malysh was not there.

The dog had gotten out. Her building’s entrance door always stuck either open or closed, so it had been open for months, all winter long, as snow blew in and mounded ankle-deep over the ground floor. There was nothing to stop Malysh from running. He could be anywhere. Oksana hurried back to the landing and down the flights of stairs—“Malysh, Malysh,” she shouted. The stairway was cool blue, its concrete walls washed by spring light. Up on the fifth floor, the apartment was open for the dog’s return. Oksana was already at the building’s entrance. She was already bursting back into the world.

She had no time to pause and take her panic in hand, so instead she rode it, shock turned to speed in her legs. The day’s strains, the last decade of stiff work in a sediment laboratory, were subsumed by fear. She was moving quickly as a child. Out the building’s door, she ran downhill. Toward the playground—Oksana and Malysh went there each morning before she left for the volcanological institute, when the neighborhood was draped in shadows and empty enough to let Malysh off-leash. Please, she thought, looking into the alleys between apartment buildings as she ran. Cables, trash bags, early patches of grass. She watched the ground though she was sickened to picture what she might find. Beyond the playground was a row of vendors, fruit and bread and flower stands, so there were always cars coming down these streets. Always trucks. Oksana’s shoes flew over the pavement. She thought, Let him be there.

Why did she lend Max her keys at lunch? Why did she ever allow him to stop by? All those instructions she gave over their two trays and the speckled plastic table—“Turn the lock on the security door three times,” she told him expressly—and the confirmation she asked for when he returned the keys to her desk this afternoon. “Everything good?” she said. Something like that, she could not remember now, her mind couldn’t track the details, her breath was short. “Max. Found your papers? All good?” She only knew that he had smiled, agreed, asked her some facile thing about sulfide ore. He certainly hadn’t mentioned he left both her apartment doors open. And now Malysh was gone.

Her heart, that distractible creature, raced inside her chest. As amusing as Max was with his big talk, his optimism, Oksana never really trusted him. Why did she not remind herself of that this afternoon? Of all people to put her confidence in—Max. Oksana’s ex-husband used to roll his eyes during the evenings they spent with Max and Katya last fall. “At my climbing gym, we’re organizing a trip to Kathmandu,” Max once told them. “You should come with us. Haven’t you ever wanted to climb the Himalayas?” Even Katya, sitting beside him, had looked embarrassed. And the way Max talked of their work at the institute was delusional. As if he would become deputy research director, then supervise the department, then lead the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Romanovich told me I just need to wait a few more months for my promotion. He told me, ‘As soon as we permit you to begin rising, you’ll never stop.’ ”

Oksana’s husband had made to pull out Max’s chair. “So go ahead and rise,” Anton said, not really joking.

If someone had told Oksana then that in six months, Anton would be gone but Max and Katya would still be together, and that the two would come over for dinner, Max would leave his notes behind, and Oksana, trusting in her long friendship with Katya, would momentarily believe in this cretin enough to share her keys, she would have poisoned the ice cream she served them all that night for dessert.

The playground held a few schoolchildren, two elderly women, no Malysh. Oksana spotted the dog’s absence from a distance. There were no walls for him to hide behind, just rods, ropes, and slivers of rubber. She circled the little park to make sure. “Malysh,” she called. Her voice was faint behind her pulse.

Once she came back around to where she started, she chose the plumper of the pair of women and said, “Auntie, have you seen a dog?” The other one stared ferociously at Oksana’s exposed knees below her skirt. “He’s white,” Oksana said, holding her hands apart to show Malysh’s length. “A Samoyed. A big, handsome beast, a sled dog, very clean, well fed, strong.”

“No, sweetheart,” the woman said.

“We don’t look after street dogs,” said the other.

“I’m not talking about a stray,” said Oksana. All the blood in her body collected, turned, slammed forward in rage. Her feet stayed planted but her hands wavered.

She could shove the old bitch down. A street dog—a street dog—if this hag had pulled her head out of her own ass for one minute today and seen Malysh, she would not speak this way.

Oksana herself had been a witness to a disappearance; she understood from experience what drew the eye. Ten months ago, Oksana noticed a well-polished car. These days on the street, she looked after smiling women or too-affectionate couples. God knew Oksana was not the most attentive person in the world, but she turned her head in public often enough to know what looked exceptional.

Arms crossed over her chest, Oksana turned away from the women to shout. “Malysh!” Identical apartment blocks filled her view. Behind her, kids giggled. Oksana chose the wide avenue to her left and started running.

By the time she crossed Akademika Koroleva, where true street dogs tricked her with their movements, she burned. Sweat slid down her spine to collect at her waistband. Her dog was nowhere. She called Katya from her cell. As soon as Katya picked up, Oksana said, “Are you with Max? Does he have Malysh?” Katya’s voice drew away from the phone. Oksana shouted, “He left my doors open!”

Max came over the line. “The dog? But—”

“Both doors! What were you thinking? Idiot! Both doors open,” Oksana said, and she was not weak enough to cry, but her voice was cracking. “Didn’t you know Malysh would run? How could you?”

“Oksana, slow down, I don’t know what to say.” She could hear Katya talking in the background. “I didn’t—I couldn’t figure out your locks, so I just pushed the doors shut behind me. Shouldn’t they have stayed closed? Could they have swung back open? Malysh was in the apartment when I left.”

She stared down the road. “He’s gone now.”

Katya, distant, said, “Ask where she is.”

“Where are you?” Max asked. “What can we do?”

Oksana did not respond. They did not understand. Even Anton hadn’t appreciated her bond with Malysh, not really—Oksana had met the man who would become her ex-husband when the dog was two, and Anton moved out when the dog was seven. A few months ago, during one of those calls she had come to expect from Anton, those after-midnight ones, those his-new-lover-is-sleeping ones, Oksana told her ex, “Malysh almost caught a fox today. He ran off in the forest and came back to me with red fur between his teeth.”

“I’m not interested in what’s been in the dog’s mouth,” Anton said. He lowered his voice so the sound stroked her ear. “I’m more interested in what’s going to be in yours.”

No one in this world cared enough about what Oksana treasured, but only Anton’s disregard ended up feeling like love. Nightly, as Malysh slept beside her, Oksana listened to her ex swear over the phone that he still wanted her most of all. No matter the woman he was staying over with—Anton’s tongue and teeth waited for Oksana. He came back to the apartment every few weeks to fulfill that promise. The dog laid his white head on Anton’s lap in celebration; the dog huffed with pleasure outside their bedroom door.

Oksana looked out across the roaming strays. Through the phone, she heard jostling, before her friend came back to the line. “We’ll pick you up,” Katya said. “We can search for Malysh together.”

“Don’t bother,” Oksana said. Katya sighed. To ward off any accusations of coldness, Oksana said, “We’ll cover more ground in separate cars.”

“No, we’ll come get you. You should focus on looking for him without also being at the wheel.”

“All right,” Oksana said finally. A truck rolled past and she shut her eyes against its bulk. “Anyway, I might find him here, by foot, in the next minute or two.”

“Okay,” Katya said. “I’m sure.”

Max’s meaningless words were rising in the background. Katya hung up.

Eight years ago, one of their coworkers had come into the office with a picture of four pups lined up, as soft and squinty-eyed as polar bear cubs. Oksana kept returning to his desk that day to look. “I need one,” she said at last, as the coworker packed his bag to leave. She brought Malysh home that night.

Oksana threw out her best shoes after the puppy got to them and stopped wearing dark colors because they showed his fur too well. Though she called him naughty, squeezing his face between her palms, she adored those little inconveniences. She lived for them. With Malysh, she—who grew up an only child, lying on the pullout couch and hearing her mother through the wall, who maintained friends she could intimidate and lovers who broke her faith, who had never been chosen for marriage and was told she was too old for babies, who was always apart from herself—was not alone anymore.

They went to the playground, the city center, the woods that lined their neighborhood, and the mountains beyond. Their legs grew the same muscles. After Anton came and left, Oksana returned to the habit she’d formed when the dog was small. She slept on one side of the bed and Malysh slept on the other, and when she woke up in the silver middle of the night, she turned toward him for comfort. They lay facing each other like two parentheses. His paws pushed across the blanket. Oksana reached out to touch the fine hairs that snuck between the pads of his feet, and in his sleep Malysh drew away, lifted his head, sniffed around, then relaxed back toward her.

Loving the dog best had become simple. Who else was there?

She described him to vendors at the fruit stands while the sun cooled above. She looked behind parked cars, in truck beds, into echoing lobbies. Other building doors, like theirs, were left propped open—Malysh might have gotten confused and ducked inside. If he were hurt…She peeked, mouth dry, into a dumpster, where someone might have heaved him…Reaching the edge of her neighborhood, she crossed into a patch of forest. Trees crowded her along the path. “Malysh,” she called. Her footsteps were the only ones around.

At every crisis over the past year, the dog was her companion. When Anton betrayed her, when he moved out, when he started calling again, Malysh listened. When the ruble collapsed, and the institute’s funding was frozen, so she no longer could do any field research and had to halt a two-year-long project on calc-alkaline rocks, she left work with the excuse of walking her dog and used the drive to pound her palms against her car’s steering wheel.

When she had the bad luck to walk by the Golosovskaya sisters at the moment of their abduction. When she saw their school pictures appear on the television that night. When she sat up on the sofa and said, “I saw them,” a declaration, and her husband said, “What?” and she said it again, “I saw them,” now a shout. The feeling inside her was dense and swift and devastating. She was the one who could have stopped it—she was the one who now could help. She called the police, and as she waited for an officer to pick her up, Anton followed her around the apartment promising she was doing the right thing. He told her they had every reason to be hopeful. The dog trotted alongside, grinning.

Even after the police questioned her, and when the description she gave them of the kidnapper, which was nothing, really, a glance at a stranger, was spread in whispers around the city as if her word were fact, and when she watched local officials swear the sisters would be recovered, and when her colleagues and friends drew away as if she were solely responsible for the girls’ absence, and when she wondered if she was, and when she swore to herself she wasn’t, Malysh lay at her feet as if the world was all right.

She touched her cell phone. For an instant, she was tempted to call Lieutenant Ryakhovsky. But if he could not find two humans over ten months, he certainly would not be able to track down a dog tonight.

The woods grew dark. She emerged to a city that had lost light. The phone was buzzing—Katya.

When her friend’s car pulled up, Oksana climbed into the back. Max was in the passenger seat. His eyes were wide with apology. “I’m so sorry, Oksana, really. I don’t know what could have happened.”

“You don’t know?” Oksana said. “I know. You let him out.”

“I mean I didn’t realize.” They were rolling down a pitted road together. Katya’s hand was on the gearshift and Max’s hand was on Katya’s thigh. Oksana hated this: the cozy pair, the pain inflicted. Why did she ever have Max and Katya over? Oksana grew up training herself to be independent, strong, less trusting than her mother, and still somehow she ended up inviting in those who hurt her.

She pressed her forehead to the window. “Where to?” Katya asked.

“The cross-country ski track. We spent a lot of time there this winter.” Oksana stared out. “It’s good it’s getting dark,” she said to the car. “I’ll be able to spot his fur in an instant.”

Malysh might have left because he, like her husband, hated Max’s company. Max’s boasts, Katya’s laughter, their infiltration into Oksana’s home. They swung through the ski base’s empty parking lot, where they scanned the snowless skiing paths and the limitless forest. Oksana lowered her window to shout. No movement came from between the trees.

Through the hours Ryakhovsky interviewed Oksana at the police station in August, he had been dismayed at her inability to describe the sisters’ kidnapper. “Think again,” he said. “Go over it once more. You saw these children climbing into a strange man’s car and you didn’t pause at all?”

“How could I have seen he was a strange man?” Oksana said. “He looked common to me.”

Ryakhovsky narrowed his eyes. He struck Oksana as a boy playing in a police uniform. “My superiors need you to produce something,” he said. “A memory, a detail. There must have been something in the experience that stood out to you.” She stared at him. “Do you try to be this useless?” he asked. “You work at it in your spare time?”

“It must come naturally to me,” she said. The words were bitter on her tongue.

The long, long list of what she had not seen. All that she failed to do. At Oksana’s direction, Katya turned the car back to the street, looped around the traffic circle, and headed toward the city center. Meanwhile Max described to them Malysh’s behavior this afternoon. The dog had been normal, even mellow, sniffing at Max’s empty hands then returning to the bedroom to rest while Max gathered the work he had left the evening before. “Malysh wants an adventure, that’s all,” Max said. “He’ll come back when he’s tired himself out.” Oksana kept her eyes on the sidewalks. After some silence, Max said, “This afternoon Romanovich—”

“Please stop talking to me,” Oksana said, and he did.

They passed the squat block of the library, the gold-topped church, and the pedagogical university. They slowed at the monument of a full-size tank at the corner of Leningradskaya and Pogranichnaya. The tank’s armament tipped toward the twilit sky. In the blackness of every sagging bus shelter, Oksana looked for Malysh’s body. The summer’s missing-person posters, rippled from a year’s rain and snow, were sealed with packing tape to the shelter walls. For the first time, Oksana really understood how the Golosovskaya girls’ mother must feel. Because Malysh was not in the bus shelters. He was nowhere.

From the open window, Oksana called his name. Every so often some group of teenagers shouted back. The car continued south, past rows of stand-alone metal garages and the twinkling lights of the container terminal. It took more than an hour to climb from one point of their crescent city to the other. Katya and Max murmured to each other in the front seats. Once they reached Zavoyko, where Petropavlovsk’s hills rose into cliffs facing the black ocean, Katya turned them around.

Oksana pictured Malysh somewhere bloody in the dirt. Could not help it—as they passed other cars, she searched between their headlights for pale fur, and when their car was alone on the road, she imagined all the places her dog might be crumpled.

You believe that you keep yourself safe, she thought. You lock up your mind and guard your reactions so nobody, not an interrogator or a parent or a friend, will break in. You earn a graduate degree and a good position. You keep your savings in foreign currency and you pay your bills on time. When your colleagues ask you about your home life, you don’t answer. You work harder. You exercise. Your clothing flatters. You keep the edge of your affection sharp, a knife, so that those near you know to handle it carefully. You think you established some protection and then you discover that you endangered yourself to everyone you ever met.

Even the man she married had put her at risk. One terrible Sunday last June she and Anton parked at the foot of a little mountain outside the city and hiked to the clearing on top. Oksana sat down to settle her breath, while Anton threw a stick for Malysh. The dog’s black lips were wet with excitement. Listening to Anton’s voice, the joke in it suddenly surfacing, Oksana lifted her head in time to see her husband throw the stick over the cliff and Malysh run after. She screamed. She saw it: the dog’s perfect body following, its arc, its vanishing, she would not be able to stop it, she would have to watch him go. The noise ripped through her. In that instant, she was so prepared for tragedy that she could not believe how Malysh gave up the game and turned back to jog toward Anton. Her hands were already on the ground. Her mouth was open and wailing.

Malysh, all dumb with life, was looking at her husband, expecting the next stick. She threw her arms around the dog’s neck. He smelled like exertion, the outdoors, and her devotion. “What is wrong with you?” she shouted at Anton.

“Don’t be silly, come on,” he said. “He never would’ve jumped.”

Her eyes were filled with the vision of her dog doing exactly that. “He trusts you.”

“This is an animal descended from wolves. You understand? His grandparents survived in the tundra. He has a hundred times more survival instincts than you or me.” She buried her face in Malysh’s side. “Sana, I was fooling around,” Anton said, and she cried out, “It wasn’t funny.”

They returned to the car that afternoon the way they so often ended up walking, with Oksana ten meters ahead and her husband letting her go. The dog ran back and forth between them—galloping up to one and turning back to the other. In the hundredth round of this, Oksana dug her hands into his fur. “Stay with me,” she commanded. They were far enough ahead of her husband that she could no longer hear Anton’s feet. Malysh’s body trembled under her. He stuck to her side for an instant, shaking, then dashed backward to find Anton and shepherd them together again.

There were worse times of her life before that afternoon. When none of her school classmates spoke to her for three months after she bit a boy at recess. When her mother pulled out the photo albums every holiday and made Oksana stare at pictures of her father as a young stranger deployed in Afghanistan. When Oksana lost her scholarship in her third year of university, or could not get out of bed after her mother moved to the mainland, or stopped her birth control but never got pregnant, or found those strings of text messages on Anton’s phone. Worse periods, yes, but no worse moment, because no other grief distilled so well into a single instant: that stick sailing off into the sky and her dog following.

Katya guided the car around a curve. The streets poured past their windows. Rising curbs, parked cars, empty intersections. Collapsed single-family houses, snapped-together prefabricated buildings. Teenagers fell away and old drunk men took their places. Apartment lights turned out on the hills.

Watching for evidence of Malysh, Oksana saw Kamchatka as it really was. The August day she walked past the kidnapping, the weather was warm, and the air in the city center smelled good, salt and sugar and oil and yeast. Anton had gotten down on his knees that morning to apologize for the other woman—at the time he swore there was only that one. And Oksana forgave him. While she left her desk, picked up Malysh, and drove the dog to the center for a walk by the water, she felt light. Hopeful. Even in the parking lot, after she secured the leash and let Malysh out of the car, the city looked beautiful to her. The sun was bright, brilliant, playing across the dark panels of freshly washed hoods. In front of her, two elf-faced girls climbed into leather seats in a big car. Oksana believed the world might be wonderful.

Those two girls were gone. Anton, too. Oksana let them all go without noticing. And if that round-faced child killer she’d walked past flagged down Katya’s car at this moment, Oksana would not recognize him. Why should she? He looked just like anyone else in this ugly place. She never saw what was in front of her until it was too late.

The last time she spoke to Ryakhovsky was when the detective called to say they were winding down the investigation. “Oh,” she said. “Why? Are you sure?” That was when she still had the security of her fingers buried in the warm fur on her dog’s shoulders. Now she thought of calling back—not to ask for police help but to tell Ryakhovsky she understood.

She understood. There was no reason left for hope. Outside, buildings blurred against the night.

The day’s adrenaline had emptied away. Katya glanced at the rearview mirror as they entered Oksana’s neighborhood’s traffic circle. “It’s late,” Katya said. “Wherever Malysh is, he’s sleeping. It may be time for us to do the same.”

Katya turned onto Oksana’s street and slowed to navigate around potholes. Max said, “When you get home, you’ll probably find him curled up on your landing.”

Bottles, hubcaps, and first-floor windows turned into spots of white that could be, but never were, Oksana’s dog.

“Do you want us to stay over?” Katya asked.

“No,” Oksana said.

“Are you sure?”

Oksana’s dry face did not move. “I’m certain.”

The car bumped downhill in neutral. The phone in Oksana’s lap started to buzz. She flipped the phone over, glanced at the screen, and silenced it. Max, turned around in his seat, raised his eyebrows at the interruption. “Is that Anton? Still trying to call you?”

“Are you really in a position to be asking me questions?” Oksana said. “Because, believe me, while I’m looking for my dog’s body on the street, I’m thinking of many questions I’d like to ask you.”

“I’m only—” said Max.

“Don’t be cruel to him,” said Katya. Defending that idiot.

Oksana said, “I should be nicer?”

“You should understand he made a mistake. A terrible mistake. One he wishes he could take back.”

Oksana stared at the side of Katya’s face. “I understand perfectly.”

They rolled to a stop in front of Oksana’s building, left gap-toothed by its broken entrance. Oksana climbed out, shut the door behind her, and then opened it again. The car’s interior light illuminated Katya and Max, those awful dinner guests, those traitors. They waited for her to speak as though they expected her to invite them upstairs after all.

“Whatever was between us, it’s finished,” Oksana said. “Katya, don’t text me. Max, no more lunches.”

“Hold on,” Max said. “I did this, it was my fault. Don’t— Katya’s only here to help. Don’t act as though she hurt you.”

“Did you not hear me?” Oksana asked. “Could I say this more clearly?”

Max, mouth open, turned to Katya, whose knuckles were wrapped high on the steering wheel. He turned back. “Are you serious? I lose weekday lunch privileges, but she loses a fifteen-year friendship?”

“You would have never been in my house if it weren’t for her. I don’t want your kind of mistakes in my life anymore.”

“You know, you can be a real bitch,” Katya said. Her eyes were shadowed. Oksana scoffed. “Truly,” Katya said. “We came out tonight to help you. I know you’re upset, but if you would just look outside yourself, you would see that we’re here trying.”

“What fine help,” Oksana said. “Should I be grateful that your boyfriend murdered my dog?”

Katya shifted her car into gear. The engine got louder. “Malysh is probably upstairs. But you want to be alone, we’ll leave you alone. I can’t imagine how I hung around this long anyway.”

“I’ll be alone,” Oksana said. “You’ve both made sure of that. You’re right. Thank you.”

The apartment building’s stairwell was dark. The landing was empty. Oksana’s security door jutted forward.

She slipped inside her double doors and called, “Malysh?” He did not come.

Oksana pressed her hands to her chest, the phone hard against her ribs as punishment. One of her doors bent onto the landing and the other hung into her home. Outside them, the building slept. In her living room, fists pressed to skin, Oksana blamed herself. Sloppy. As deliberate as she had tried to be all these years, she was sloppy, and this was the consequence. She had closed her eyes to the world around her. Walked happily past a murderer of children. Put all of herself into an animal that ran…

If only Malysh had jumped that day on the mountain. Oksana should have thrown the stick for the dog herself. In August, in the very first few hours of police questioning, the missing girls’ mother had come to the station to talk to Oksana. Only now, months after that desperate conversation with her, did Oksana appreciate why. It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter.