the big electron

    The boy’s dedushka—poorer yet another pawned possession—grows somber over the wire-thin wheel of his Zhiguli. His hooded eyes look heavier, grayer, their severity ever-growing. A once lively blue sheen within them dies, fatigued to silver over the passing road, and those familiar lines which form thoughtful creeks and valleys to flow grandfatherly thoughts across his forehead seem now deepened to canyons: rumpled, furrowed beds of tumbling dread.

    The drive home from the city lock-up has grown routine. The dedushka drives like his age, rolling a reasonable speed down the highway to rural nowhere—an unmarked path of snow save for skids of gray where other tires have rolled before—while the boy sits humbled in the passenger seat and says his usual sorries. Dedushka, who at this point in the drive would normally have offered a few deluded words of forgiveness and certainty about the boy’s innocence, says nothing.

    Their noses stay cold while their boots warm in the max-blast of the drafty Vaz-2101’s heat. Permanent polar dusk hangs the sky midnight sea-blue overhead: a lightless ultramarine that soaks into snow, rendering the winter scene around them an abyss of blue. Mountains rise and fall on either side of the sturdy old car (whose Lada-factory himmelblau also blends right in), their peaks indistinguishable from sky. The lonely Murmansk Oblast highway—its asphalt brittle with subzero cracks, scabbed over with quick-fix tar adhering the scabbed patches of scaly concrete, pale and salty and fractured—takes on this same color of undersea nothing. Only the fiery gold of the Vaz’s headlights and the far-off glow of another car’s tail lights (which disappear in a blink now over the winding road, red ghosts retiring from their haunt of the cold night) offer any splash of color to the arctic landscape. Another quarter hour passes before finally a growing treeline rises to separate snow from sky: its green dulled to lightless black, the heads of spruces forked and horned, rising proud to border endless night.

    The Vaz roars slatted, dusty heat at its passengers—the meager byproducts of its overworked engine—and though it struggles to make their slice of cabin space any warmer as they rocket through subzero tundra, it easily fills the air between the boy and his grandfather with an odd, buffering tension. A disquieting tension, specially produced by inanimate objects who noisily carry on their purpose in the face of those momentous and traumatic peaks of human experience. Deaf and steady, no matter the social context nor the emotional climate around them—these things belonging of course to the abstract tangles of feeling, territory of a dark jungle existing only on an unseen plane, and as such fully impossible for the copper radiators of Soviet-era Vaz-2101 compact sedan Zhiguli’s to gauge. Ghostly broadcasts from the realm of the unsaid. And even in the human animal who both creates and occupies this realm—one foot in the material, the other in the immaterial—it is a peripheral place of shadow, slippery, fleeting, dodging and scurrying away whenever one looks for it, and its existence, if not doubted and dismissed by its creators altogether, is at the very least ignored. 

    And so the heat roars while the boy tries once more to tell his dedushka he's sorry, forcing him to come out with the words much louder than feels appropriate. “I didn’t mean to get in trouble again,” he says. He balks after that, nearly shuts up, but something in him finds the nerve: He asks Dedushka what he had to give up to pay the cost of bail.

    The question sits naked and profane between them. A lewd thing, a sacrilege making mud of their now beaten-path pilgrimage from the dirty claws of the city ports back to the unsullied snow of the forest cabin. His dedushka, stormy in the mouth and eyes, shakes his head.

    The boy pushes luck further: “I’ll pay you back,” he says.

    His dedushka Volodya, who ran his usual rounds this morning assuring everyone who’d heard the gossip that there was some sort of misunderstanding, that his grandson was a good boy with bad luck, that he was an innocent fallen into the clutches of trouble, that he had to do whatever it took to get the boy out of jail, says now, “Whose money would you put in my hand?”

    The boy knows not to answer. He doesn't know the answer anyway.

    “Whose blood would I find on it?”

    The incorrigible boy, who has always seemed to know nothing of law and order, of conscience and scruples, whose destructive spirit seems to his dedushka to hold the beastly innocence of a wild pup who mauls a smaller creature—a neighbor’s pet—and returns, tail wagging, with blood on his maw and limp carcass in his teeth, is once again shamed to silence by that lone hallowed star of his life: his grandfather’s disapproval.

    And that’s the problem, isn’t it?

   He’s sorry to have disappointed his dedushka, and he means just that.

   The boy is sorry to have fallen out of his favor, but he’s not sorry for what he’s done. Like Kazak and Tsaritsa and Jezebel, who know that pissing in the house incurs their master’s wrath, the boy doesn’t see the why of it.

    Dedushka, who has never seemed quite this angry with him before, offers a final warning: that the boy shouldn’t tell his babushka of any of this, lest he strain her heart to its early grave. Grigori Rasputin. And a Solonik on top of it. “What did your mother expect? You’ve all the good sense of your namesake!” A disgraced mystic con man, and the boy's drunken wretch of a father. He can’t decide if his daughter is a fool who doomed her son with such a name, or a clairvoyant who merely assigned him the most appropriate title. (His mother, were she there in the car to defend herself, might explain that the boy--who was born on the feast day of Saint Gregory--had all throughout her pregnancy announced himself through many a kick as a hellraising little rasputnik, and once she finally held the newborn in her arms and saw for the first time those hypnotic green eyes, she knew there was simply no other name for him. Furthermore, she found it harmlessly amusing to tell her rambunctious little Grigori Rasputin what a lady’s man he would grow up to be.) “At the docks again, consorting with vory. You didn’t mean to get in trouble? Smugglers and black marketeers? Grebenschikov? Sturgeon?”

    Grigori, who perhaps has more than a foot in the immaterial, struggles as always to see the forest for the trees. Though he has been able to solve calculus equations in his head, diagram the syllogisms inherent in French existentialist philosophy, recall every historical date ever mentioned to him, and monthly earn fluency in new languages since before all his baby teeth fell out, the complex thoughts and feelings of others—especially those rooted in material concerns like safety, practicality, tribal instinct—are to him impenetrable. And so he means just what he says when he answers his grandfather: “I wanted to see what they looked like...”

    There’s nothing more to say. The boy doesn’t get it. Dedushka offers one last head-shaking remark, more to the universe than to Grigori: “You were almost called Nikolai.”

    He has an answer for his grandfather, but he keeps it in his head: Perhaps then I’d be a passion-bearer shot in a basement…

    The remainder of the drive passes without a word, Grigori shamed and droopy and window-gazing. He doesn't know how to make things right. The clunky Vaz, its noisy heat, its rubbish brakes, and the unyielding highway rush of winter air on its boxy frame supply the rest of the drive’s soundtrack. Paved highway eventually tapers to snow-cased dirt path, and the woods grow thick and cluster tameless along the road. Trees crowd in chess formation: At the front lines stand the straight, thorny stalks of dead birch. Their branches fork like wooden lightning, joining hands to fence themselves as pawns along the perimeter. Beyond them the proud evergreens—thick, impenetrable, immovable pine and spruce—stand together. They shroud their forest under cover of darkness. Their king, their queen, wherever they are, cannot be seen or found. And when civilization is out of sight, when pointed trees consume the world and the road is lost to forest and snow, the boy and his grandfather drive through this darkness wherever the Vaz will fit, forging their own path.

Both patients, upon receipt of week-long meal plan menus at intake, checkmarked egg-based breakfast items for the following morning and Swedish meatballs for that night’s dinner. The thief’s daughter, who received her meatballs in Unit 1’s dining room under unremarkable circumstances, was predictably unable to eat her food. The ex-convict ex-Marine had not fared any better. He received his meal tray in the intake interview room a short time after intake nurse Sam—who is the sort of girl that the ex-convict ex-Marine, in better circumstances and cleaner clothes, would normally find himself compelled to flirt with—concluded her interview by asking him to recall the last time or thing that he ate.

“Alright. One more question for you, Mr. Scarpacci. What did you have to eat today?”

He thought for a long time. He found himself painfully aware of how long this took him—painfully aware of his muddled thinking, of his cognitive slowing. This, like every other vulnerable, revealing admission he’d been forced to make to the highly attractive yet highly clinical intake nurse Sam, pained and embarrassed him. He had by this point told intake nurse Sam of how much he wanted to die and how often he’d thought of it, of how at first it had crept into his mind at low points in the week, perhaps just a fleeting thought on the drive home after a terrible day or while reflecting on some future work task he dreaded, “I could always just kill myself,” and how it had initially presented as a relaxing little nothing, a thing to say to himself, an imagined route of escape down which no one and no annoyance and no stress and nothing at all could follow him, an innocent fantasy, therapeutic even, especially when he imagined the feelings and conversations of the bewildered people he'd leave behind, people who thought he seemed so carefree, and how this once relaxing thought had at some point thereafter fully entered and possessed him, how it had become the only thought he had, how life had become relentless blistering cold, how suicide was a warmth to which he was drawn, a warmth he longed for but which he didn’t have the courage to reach, how it had eclipsed even the warmth of cocaine, alcohol, sex, how it had become the only warmth in his life, the only possibility. He told her how many times he’d tried to die. This admission, which had made him cry in front of her, was the most embarrassing of all. Several times, he’d realized aloud, had been passive attempts. Small things like walking into traffic and hoping a car might hit him. He regretted telling her these things. He regretted coming here. And here his mind fled reality and refocused instead on the diminishing prospects of successful sexual pursuit of intake nurse Sam, which—if they had not already been such the entire time—had surely slimmed to nothing. And with this thought came also the thought of the woman he had spent the past several months risking contraction of venereal disease to forget: his soon to be ex-wife.

And so he fled these winding caves of his mind and returned to the present. He returned to intake nurse Sam’s question. What did he have to eat today? He searched for a meal, a snack, a single crumb across the gray, fading, waterlogged pages of his memory, blurred beyond recognition by alcohol. Unfamiliar face upon unfamiliar face consumed upon unfamiliar bed, accompanied by all manner of drugs—some current companions, some old forgotten friends (he’d managed to come into possession of a few tabs of Dexedrine), and some new acquaintances. His memories of this morning blurred into last night, which blurred into last morning and so on. He remembered the cliff, he remembered the officers, he remembered jail, he remembered vomiting. He recalled no regurgitated traces of food, no familiar colors, no identifiable tastes; only alcohol and bile.

He thought and then he said, “I don't know.”

“No breakfast? No snacks?”

“No.”

She wrote something on her pad.

“When did you last eat?”

“I don't know...”

She continued writing.

“What's the last food you can remember eating?”

“I think I had some Cheerios... a while ago.”

“Was that today or yesterday?”

“I don't think so...”

More writing.

“How long do you think it’s been since you ate?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d like to get your weight and your vitals.”

When it gets slow at Sova’s, the cashiers trade stories about how they imagine Mr. Lansky lost his eye. Upstairs at the main register, this morning’s cashier and floor person have gathered to talk with their elbows collected at the glass tobacco counter, pointing toes to dig at the tile with wandering feet. As is his custom on dead days like today, Kirill abandons the deli to lend his skeptical Slavic ear to the gossip of bored first- and second-generation Americans.

Sharp angles of bent stock girl, deli boy, and cashier meet slumped and sleepy over both sides of the glass tobacco counter. They form a flesh and apron archway across this low wall of the cashier’s pen. Rows of empty store aisles, fluorescent and echoing oldies radio and meticulously faced—all their products pulled forward with labels facing out after repeated, ambling, monotonous, time-killing rounds—yawn lonely boredom through the store. Under its perched gossipers, down alongside their denim jeans, the glass counter’s shelves of tobacco products and novelty gifts have all been—by this point—dusted and arranged to perfection. Pouches and tins of tobacco in baby blue and dark blue American Spirit, gold Drum, yellow Top with red or brown trim; classy boxes of Sobranie cigarettes – White Russian, Black Russian, Gold, and pastel-papered Cocktail; packs of Top and Zig-Zag rolling papers; round chew-tobacco tins of Grizzly and Copenhagen and Skoal in wintergreen and mint blue; little Tic Tac boxes of Camel snuff in all colors of the rainbow; yellow and black Ronsonol and Zippo lighter fluid bottles, large, medium, and small; metal lighters and cigarette cases adorned with bears, Russian eggs, hammer and sickle insignia, church cupolas, Byzantine double-headed eagle, Trans-Siberian Express, red-starred U.S.S.R; and then the souvenirs, the matryoshka dolls, the mugs and plates, the ornate eggs and spoons and music boxes and dinner bells. These all lay quietly perfected in their case, gazing up at the idle workers in their empty store.