Vaclav & Lena (25 page)

I REMEMBER THIS PLACE
…

S
ometimes the feeling of holding hands is too much for one or the other or both, so they let go, drop their hands, and sit silently on the subway, like drunks trying to arrange their minds.

By the time they are at Vaclav’s stop, they are both experiencing significant stress, significant anxiety, their skin unable to contain their nerves, to hold in ever-expanding galaxies of desire.

When they get off the subway, Lena finds that she is walking on a sidewalk she recognizes, on a street she recognizes. She feels like she is in an unfriendly place, as if in a bad dream, and her ears are getting hot, like when she has a blood test at the doctor’s office. Also, she can’t hear anything, not really, but then again, maybe she can; she hears a car go by, and then she can’t hear at all, like someone is cupping their hands over her ears.

Vaclav looks at her, and she’s sure he’s going to see in her face that she’s green, that her blood is turning to rubbing alcohol, light and harsh in her brain, that she’s about to pass out.

He looks at her, and he smiles, a big, honest grin, and he says, “Can you believe you’re here again?”

“Yeah,” Lena hears herself say, far away. She wonders if that is enough to say, and she opens her mouth and says, “Yeah, I can’t believe it.” She’s surprised that she is able to talk; her voice doesn’t sound normal. She is surprised that Vaclav seems to think that she’s fine, that nothing is wrong with her, and for a while she thinks she might actually be okay, putting one foot in front of the other on this familiar sidewalk. Step, step, step, step, and if she doesn’t look up, at the trees, at the familiar houses, she can keep stepping, step in front of step in front of step. She watches her own two feet moving in their strange rhythm over the sidewalk.

Walking in this neighborhood, Lena feels like she is returning to the site of her own death. This is strange and paradoxical for a human being, a living, breathing thing, to look and say,
Oh, yes, I remember this place. This is where I died
.

Is it less paradoxical for Lena, who, after all, has been feeling of late that a part of her is missing, is rotted, is perhaps dead? Yes. It is slightly less paradoxical for Lena. Recently she discovered that something inside of herself was dead, and here she has come upon, unexpectedly, a crime scene. To her, it makes sense.

Vaclav is pulling her toward a door. Lena has to look up now, at the house, at the same brick, at the same windows, the same mailbox. All the same but sharper on her eyes than in her foggy memories. The house seems to announce its realness, its solidness, its actuality, with its obnoxious stance, with its lifelike details, the mortar between the bricks, the garage door, the pile of shoes outside the screen door, the same as she remembers.

Lena is not prepared today to be dusting off this part of her mind. She is not prepared for how this feels. She is dreading going into the house, she realizes, as Vaclav fumbles with the keys. The house looks mean, the way a knife that you cut yourself with once never looks the same.

THE FALL OF EMPIRES
…

L
ena walks with Vaclav through the front door of the house, and it’s all exactly the same, exactly. It has been here the whole time, and it was not just a memory. It was not just a big, fuzzy, dark, rotting memory, it was an actual place, and no matter how much she forgot, here it is just as big and powerful as ever. Vaclav’s parents are frugal people, they’re immigrants, they’re ex-communists. They’re refugees from a place and time when nothing was owned, when you battled the neighbor-woman for a mealy potato. Not really, but really. What is real is that they have been citizens of a great empire and watched it fall. They have felt the rug pulled out from under them. So even in America they save every penny, glue together the broken dishes, stitch together the rips in the couch, and they would never, never, throw away a good rug.

Because Vaclav is born of these two Soviet refugees, savers of everything, buyers of nothing, the house Lena walks into is identical to the house she last saw when she was nine.

She’s taking it all in, wide-eyed, trying to breathe, afraid that she is about to lose control, when Vaclav grabs her and kisses her, and she wants to push him away and say, “No, I can’t be here,” but the words aren’t coming.

Her knees buckle a little bit, but Vaclav takes this as her leaning into him, and he holds her and kisses her more.

Smells from the past are rushing into her nose, and pictures are rushing into her head. The smell of the leather cleaner on the couch. The smell of ammonia in the kitchen. The smell of the vodka in Oleg’s glass, and Rasia, her perfume, her face, her chins, her mole.

TELL YOURSELF IT’S HAPPENING
…

L
ena walks to the couch and sits down because she is sure that she is about to pass out. Vaclav comes close to her, and she opens her mouth to say something, but before she can, Vaclav is on her, his hands on the couch on either side of her head, his feet still firmly on the floor. He is in an incline push-up over her, and he kisses her, hard, then drops to his knees, one knee on either side of her hips. He is crouching above her, and kissing her and kissing her, and it is fantastic, and it is not hard enough, and he will never be able to kiss her enough, and it is torture.

He breaks away from her, sits on the couch next to her, breathes heavy, big athletic breaths, before he pulls her across his lap and kisses her more, more and more and more.

He stands up and says, “Let’s go in my room.” She stands up, dizzy, and takes his hand, and reminds herself that this is what she knew would happen all along, that this is what she wanted.

Lena follows Vaclav to his room and stands right in the middle, taking everything in. Above his bed he still has the poster of David Copperfield stuck to the wall with ticky-tack. There are large framed black-and-white photos of Vaclav in a top hat and a T-shirt, pulling a rabbit out of a hat. She wonders who took them. On his desk she recognizes
The Magician’s Almanac
, which she gave him for his ninth birthday, and his Harry Houdini book. Tacked to the wall above his desk there is a brown paper bag. Written on the bag, in Vaclav’s deliberate handwriting, is a list.

THINGS THAT
ARE:

1. One day being a famous magician

2. Lena being lovely assistant

3. Perseverance toward those goals in spite of any and every obstacle

In the corner, there is a six-foot-tall wooden box painted in gold paint. The Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus of Mystery. She knows what it is; she remembers when they were little, sitting on the floor and planning to build it, reading over and over again the detailed plans in
The Magician’s Almanac
, and here it is, he’s really done it. She wants to ask him about it, she wants to slow everything down and just talk, but Vaclav leans down and kisses her, his hands traveling from her shoulders down her arms to her hips.

Every time he touches her, Lena tries to figure out how it feels. She asks herself, over and over again,
How does this feel?
She gets no answer. There’s a panic somewhere; somewhere inside she’s yelling at herself to pay attention, to be present, something big is happening, but from some important part there’s no answer, a phone ringing off the hook, no answer to this very important question. All of her selves are out to lunch.

Vaclav lifts her shirt swiftly up over her head. Lena, standing there topless, feels as if she’s just surprised herself by counting to three and then jumping feetfirst into a cold lake. She’s surprised at what her body can do, even when her mind is three steps behind. Or five steps behind. Or not there at all.

Lena is now very dizzy. The smells in the house seem to be coming up out of her own horrible rotten insides, big, shameful, embarrassing smells. She looks down, expecting to see fumes wafting from her belly button.

Lena has only sensations. His hands are all over her in a way that’s entirely pleasant, in a way that suggests that he sees her body as some natural wonder or some perfect creation. There’s awe in his hands, and she’s the thing that’s so awesome. She doesn’t really feel naked. There is a draft from the windows. Vaclav is tall. He is fully dressed, and she is undressed.

Lena is trying to think, but she feels drunk, and her nose is full of a strange smell. It smells like her missing, rotted-out, dead piece. It smells like she has found it, or that it is nearby, stinking.

This place, which she is discovering today is a real place, a real place where a piece of her has been rotting all these years, is pulling on other strings of memory, knocking into other buried synapses, and things are starting to come back to Lena.

Vaclav leads her to his bed. There’s more kissing, and they lower themselves down, and he seems to slow up. He’s kissing her slowly, and his hands are lingering more, but not in a careful way, not in a gentle way. It feels like she is riding a roller coaster, not the crazy up-and-down part, the slow, chug-chug-chug up the steep incline part, where you are starting to feel afraid and realizing that there is no way out.

She’s still trying over and over to get in touch with distant parts of her, and they’re not answering. She wants to ask herself an important question:
Is this something I want to do? Am I saying yes? Yes to this very big thing? Get back to me as soon as possible, I need an answer
. Girls on television and in movies and books seem always to know if they are ready to have sex for the first time. Lena does not know. Not in a way that she is unsure but in a way that she, as a person who wants and does not want things, does not exist. Like the part of her that is responsible for this decision is missing.

When they tangle together and they are both out of all their clothes, and his explorations bring them to the brink, she has to tell herself,
It’s happening, watch, pay attention, it’s happening
.

For Vaclav, it is what his body has been dreaming about without his permission. It is the missing piece, or he is the missing piece and he has just found his puzzle. It is exactly right and wonderful, and impossibly, he thinks, for all the poetry and song and painting and verse dedicated to it, underrated. The feeling, in fact, is so wonderful that Vaclav can feel himself in his body like he never has before; it is impossible to think, to step outside of pure physical wonder; all he feels is all he feels, and Lena, Lena is another planet, and he is a star shooting through the cold, black sky. He cradles her head in his hand, and he loves her so much he would shield her from a meteorite with his body, and he tries to be gentle, and he asks her if she is okay.

She is not okay. She feels something, finally, and it is bad. She feels as if she has unzipped herself from her belly button to her throat and found nothing inside. The feeling is like reaching for an orange and finding it hollow, rotted out, giving sickly beneath your fingers.

STOP
…

L
ena grabs Vaclav’s shoulder.

“Stop,” she says, trying to scream, but it comes out only in a tiny whisper, and he doesn’t hear her.

“Stop,” she says again, louder, “please,” and he stops, but he still hasn’t heard her.

“I have to get out of here, Vaclav. You have to get me out of here. Something horrible is happening, and I need to go to the doctor or the hospital, and I need to go home, so please take me home.” She talks as fast as possible, even though she can’t hear her own voice. She tries to make herself shout, though she is not sure if any sound is coming out. She talks as fast as possible, even as she is getting less and less sound into her ears, less air into her lungs, less light into her eyeballs, and horrible, gruesome things are popping into her head.

Vaclav is frozen; he’s not moving or saying anything at all. She’s pinned beneath him. She is panicked and trapped, and when she turns to wriggle out, to free herself, she sees what he sees, which is Rasia, standing in the door.

WHAT RASIA HEARS AND SEES
…

A
t work, there was a fire alarm going off in the warehouse all morning. Over and over again, a faulty alarm. So loud your thoughts fell right out of your head. The fire department had to come to take apart the alarm and fix whatever was wrong to make it scream and scream when there is no fire, no nothing. The manager said, “Go home, the day is lost.”

What Rasia hears when she walks in the house is the thing she has always dreaded hearing. Moving around in the bed and hushed voices.
Ryan’s back
, she thinks.
That batonchik is back
. This is the truth. This is what she thinks. She does not like this, to think of the girl this way, but this is what she thinks. She walks slowly through the house; her intention is not to sneak up on them, but she is afraid also of embarrassing them, really of embarrassing Vaclav, and also, she wants confirmation that what she thinks is going on is what is really going on. So she goes a little bit closer, a little bit closer, down the hallway, her big body moving silently.

Outside the door of Vaclav’s room she hears a girl talking, and this is not the big, horsey sound of the American girl. Not at all. She can hear sounds of the girl talking, and the sound is familiar and frightening—it is a sound like thieves in the nighttime.

This is not Ryan.

Rasia pushes open the door of Vaclav’s room, which is just slightly ajar because he is not expecting her, and she sees her son, naked, on top of a girl with an explosion of hair that is so dark it has no color, like the black of darkness in a cave. Who is this girl that Vaclav has brought home? In her worry, her absorption, Rasia has forgotten about hiding and has pushed the door open all the way. Rasia stands in the doorway, mouth open, heart pumping, and Vaclav sees her, and their eyes connect.