A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



7





FOR EIGHTEEN DAYS Natasha slept as if her lidded dreamland were her true home, to which she was repatriated for fifteen hours a day. So what, then, could Sonja do? Natasha was here, safe, alive, and real enough to begin resenting. In the flat white light of morning she entered her sister’s bedroom, a cup of hot tea in her hand, and inspected her sister’s body as she might a corpse, or a comatose patient, or someone whom she had, once, long ago, envied. Her gaze crawled the curves of Natasha’s hips, the odd angle of elbows she could unhinge and bend at will, the bitten rims of fingernails, her legs, still long, still lithe, and the little brown hairs on her forearms, which, when they had first appeared in puberty, Sonja had used as evidence to convince Natasha she was turning into a boy. Natasha’s skin said what she wouldn’t. The scars of habitual heroin use webbed her toes. A buckshot of cigarette burns stippled her left shoulder. If Sonja found these scars on a patient in the hospital, she wouldn’t feel pity, but in Natasha’s bedroom, she felt it all over. For eighteen days she went to wake Natasha and turned back, afraid of the dreams her sister would rise from, leaving no alarm louder than a cup of tea cooling on the nightstand.

But Natasha wasn’t right. On the eighteenth evening, standing at the cutting board, chopping two onions and a potato, Sonja broached the subject. “I think you should talk to a psychiatrist or someone.”

From the look her sister gave her, she might have announced they’d be eating the cutting board for dinner.

“I just think it would be good for you to talk with someone. About what happened in Italy. About what it’s like being home,” Sonja said.

“Talking doesn’t do anything.”

“It might do one or two things.” Sonja punctuated her sentence with a chop.

“All the words in the world won’t put those onion halves back together.”

“The human mind is a little more complex than a yellow onion.”

Natasha held back her hair as she lit a cigarette from the hot plate her father had, twelve years earlier, purchased secondhand from a woman who would never find a flame that cooked an egg quite as well. “Some of us would be lucky to have something as large as a yellow onion between our ears.”

Sonja could see her sister backing away from her, from the subject, from whatever had happened in Italy. “Think of the mind as a muscle or bone instead,” she said, looking down to address the more respectful audience of cubed potatoes. “Emotional and mental trauma doesn’t heal itself any more than a broken bone left unset.”

Natasha nodded to the cutting board. “You talk those potatoes and onions into jumping in that frying pan and I’ll talk with a psychiatrist.”

Despite its monumental aggravation, Natasha’s resistance was a good sign, wasn’t it? The obstinacy was a pillar running alongside her spine that would support her when not lodged firmly in Sonja’s hindquarters. And while she might yearn for a little civility to grease the rusty gears of their relationship, she gladly endured the backtalk and eye-rolls to know that Natasha hadn’t lost the ability to drive her f*cking crazy. Her sister was a snarky chain-smoking hermit crab that emerged from her shell in the safety of Sonja’s presence. When Natasha believed she was alone—those days when Sonja slammed the front door and stayed to spy on her—she searched for thicker shells. It was awful, watching Natasha through the keyhole as she divided her room into smaller increments of shelter. She moved the desk, bed, and bureau like a child arranging the furniture into a make-believe castle, even encircling the structure with a moat of water glasses. On the keyhole’s far side, Sonja prayed it would keep the dragons at bay; her heart, as if drawn on a piece of paper in her chest, crumpled every time. When she returned in the evening, the fortress was disassembled and the pieces of furniture had returned to their white rectangles of wall space. She never mentioned what she’d seen, holding it as a reminder to be gentle and patient as she prepared dinner. She whispered sweet nothings to the potatoes and onions, but the little f*ckers were as stubborn as her sister, the great big f*cker.

Natasha relented when Sonja pointed out that compared with her inexhaustible exhortations, a chat with a psychiatrist would be as pleasant as a summer picnic. She admitted to having spoken with a psychiatrist at the women’s shelter in Rome—the one that had provided the six-month supply of Ribavirin, which Sonja found in the bathroom, which was generally used to treat hepatitis, which Natasha refused to admit she had, which Sonja thought was total bullshit.

“She spoke Russian in this ridiculous Italian accent,” Natasha said. “I was always afraid she’d start singing an opera.”

“I never make promises to my patients, but I promise that whoever I find won’t speak a word of Italian.”

And she tried. She combed through her contacts only to find that every psychiatrist in the city was dead, exiled, or missing. The ranks of the hospital staff didn’t contain a single mental-health professional. She fumed one afternoon in the hospital parking lot, wanting to punch the clouds from the sky but instead venting on a closer object, the hood of an ’83 Volga so decrepit she felt the sickening thrill of beating a wounded animal to reiterate its pain. How had she got to this point? She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat. In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister’s absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality. The fact was that her exile had prompted Natasha’s. The fact was that she had left Chechnya first. The fact was that she had escaped the war Natasha had endured alone. It only made sense that her sister would attempt the same transaction with the only currency she possessed: her body. But now she was home and needed medical care Sonja couldn’t provide. Being a bad sister was one thing; being a bad doctor was the more serious sin. Deshi found her out in the parking lot, beating the rust off the Volga hood. Her tears turned brown when she wiped them with her knuckles. “Do you want to talk about it?” Deshi asked. “Go to hell,” she replied.

At dinner Natasha took the news with typical smugness. “It’s just as well,” she said. “Head doctors are a decadence unsuited to a country like ours. They are the bidets of the medical profession.”

“You could talk to me,” Sonja offered with enough snarl in her voice to ensure that Natasha would demur. Which she did. In seven years and three weeks, when Natasha disappeared for a second time, Sonja would orbit that moment, circling every angle without ever touching down: what if she had tried harder, been kinder, gentler?

As the street noise filled the gap in the conversation, Sonja gave up. If the world was determined to drown her, she’d stop swimming. She lengthened her hours at work, then lengthened her commute. At the bazaar, vendors sold everything that could be lifted and carted away: emergency rations, grain sacks, spools of uncut cloth, raw wool, floorboards, industrial kitchen appliances, abandoned Red Army munitions, traffic lights, and oil-refining machinery. She wandered past racks of used shoes that had clocked more kilometers than the average Federal fighter jet, past blocks with more craters than her sister’s left shoulder blade, past exoskeletal scaffolding, workmen hoisting wheelbarrows of masonry, all the way to Hospital No. 6.

And as eighteen days turned to twenty, forty, sixty, the trauma ward became the capital of the reconstructed republic. Each day patients arrived with heart attacks and kidney stones, the lesser emergencies of peacetime. When a man limped in with a soccer injury she kissed his cheek; that man and his wife would create the plaque honoring the hospital staff of the war years, which was to be set into the sidewalk eleven years later to little official fanfare. The war was over; no one knew it was only the first. Still, the scarcity of medical supplies remained a constant problem.

She contacted the brother of a man with a mustache made of dead spider legs whose life she’d saved when a land mine had lodged eight ball bearings, four screws, and three ten-kopek coins in his left leg. The brother met her in the backseat of a Mercedes that drove in tight circles on a tennis court–sized slab of asphalt just outside his Volchansk garage, the only unbroken stretch of road worthy of such a fine Western automobile. He pinched a Marlboro filter between his manicured fingernails. She didn’t need to look past his first knuckle to verify his access to the smuggling routes snaking through the southern mountains.

“You saved Alu’s life,” the brother said, setting the cigarette between his delicate lips, moisturized nightly with aloe balm. “For that I owe you a favor. A small one, because of my six brothers, I like Alu the least.”

She handed him a list limited to easily procurable medical supplies: absorbent compress dressings, adhesive bandages, antiseptic ointment, breathing barriers, latex gloves, gauze rolls, thermometers, scissors, scalpels, aspirin, antibiotics, surgical saw blades, and painkillers. “It’s basic stuff. Any medical distributor will have it. You can find most of it in an average first-aid kit. I just need a lot of it.”

“Alu spoke highly of you,” the brother lamented. “I should have known you would be a bore. Anything else?”

“I thought I only had one favor?”

“Let me tell you a story,” the brother said, holding his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. “When I was a child I had a pet turtle, whom I named after Alu because they shared a certain—how can I put it—bestial idiocy. Once I went to Grozny with my father and five of my brothers for the funeral of my father’s uncle, and we left so quickly I hadn’t the time to provide food for Alu the Turtle. My brother, Alu the Idiot, had a fever and stayed home with my mother. In a moment so taxing on that little intellect that steam surely shot from his ears, Alu the Idiot remembered to feed my turtle. He caught grubs and crickets, likely tasting them before he gave them to my beloved crustacean. Since then Alu the Idiot has grown into a Gibraltar-sized hemorrhoid, but when he was a child he used the one good idea this life has allotted him to feed my turtle, and because of it, you get a second favor.”

“Turtles aren’t crustaceans,” she said.

“Excuse me, half crustacean.”

“They’re full-blooded reptiles.”

The brother gaped at her. “You should hear yourself. You sound ridiculous.”

“A turtle is one hundred percent reptile,” she said. “I imagine even Alu knows that.”

“Don’t insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is crustacean on its mother’s side.”

“Explain that to me,” she said, shifting in the seat as the car spun in circles.

“A lizard f*cks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.”

“I hope your biology teacher was sent to the gulag,” she said. She caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. The driver had grown up in a mountain hamlet where more people believed in trolls than in automobiles. The first war had catapulted him from the back of a mule to the inside of a Mercedes, and he would look back at that war as the one stroke of good fortune in a life otherwise riddled with disappointments.

“I can’t believe you’re allowed to operate on people with such an incomplete understanding of nature,” the brother said.

“Any other animals come about this way?”

The brother pursed his lips. “A whale.”

“Let me guess. A fish f*cks a hippo?”

“Close, an elephant,” the brother said, laughing.

“Of course,” Sonja said. “How could I forget about the herds of elephants roaming the open ocean.”

“I would never dishonor my mother, but someone less noble might suggest that Alu is half monkey. So shall I include Darwin as your second favor?”

She wrote several titles on the list and passed it back.

“My god,” he said. “You’re worse than I could have ever imagined. No wonder you and Alu got on famously. Modes of Modern Psychological Inquiry. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment. From Victim to Survivor: Overcoming Rape. This is what you want? I was thinking cocaine and a prostitute or something.”

“Do I look like someone in need of a prostitute?”

The brother was all grins. “I’ve never met someone in greater need,” he said.

“Can you get them or not?”

“We’ll see. Guns, drugs, uranium, whores, hostages, no problem. But I’ve never been asked to find books or medical supplies. These will be a challenge.”

The Mercedes drove in dizzying circles. She wanted out of this spinning, nauseating contraption. What was wrong with Alu, anyway? Compared to this ridiculous man, who spoke as if he lived in a genie’s lamp, Alu was a model citizen. But what could she do? Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.

“Can you get them or not?”

“Don’t insult me,” he said. “I can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”

“Then thank you.”

“That’s it? Nothing else? Once you leave this car you’ll never see me again.”

Could she ask for it? Transport to Georgia? A plane ticket from Tbilisi to London? A visa stamp in the passport she still carried with her, in the money belt around her waist, each time she left her house?

“Yes,” she said. The air hummed. The yellow clouds watched indifferently. “I’ll have one of your cigarettes.”

She took that cigarette and smoked it while walking to the bazaar, where several days later, on a trip in search of fabrics, she stumbled upon an industrial ice machine at the stand of a Wahhabi arms dealer. It was a great gray piece of machinery with a plastic interior the color of potato broth and fretwork ventilation at its back end. The steel lid held her unfocused reflection within the logo of the Soviet Intourist Hotel. Three half brothers, now sixteen, eleven, and eight, had been conceived on that steel lid, none yet aware of the others’ existence. A merchant with nicotine-stained fingernails, wire-rimmed glasses, and the long beard of a Wahhabi described the machine. “Gorbachev, Brezhnev, and the Bee Gees all had their drinks cooled with the ice produced by this magnificent machine. It is a celebrity among ice machines, envied and admired among its kind. All around Chechnya ice-cube trays have photographs of the Intourist Hotel ice machine pinned on their freezer walls, and they are all told that if they work hard, and believe wholeheartedly in the ideology of ice, they may someday rise to its ranks. And you might say, ‘But Mullah Abdul, I don’t need an industrial ice machine that can provide twenty cubic meters of ice an hour, when required.’ To that I counter, what about clean water? You see, pure flawless H2O freezes at precisely zero degrees, the temperature at which the carefully calibrated thermometer of this magnificent colossus is set. Water containing minerals and sediments and bacteria and parasites freezes at slightly lower temperatures, and thus remains liquid and flows out the drainage. The frozen water left behind is as pure as the virgins in Paradise, with whom I hope to soon be acquainted, should God see me fit.”

Sonja nodded, not unimpressed. On the card tables beside the freezer lay guns of all sizes and caliber, brass belts of ammunition, septic pipes fashioned into homemade Stinger RPG launchers, land mines, and VHS recordings of Baywatch.

“What are you looking for?” the merchant continued. “Fragmentation grenades? Hollow bullets? If you give me a few days, I could find a C-4 vest that would fit you nicely.” She remembered him as the chemistry professor who had slapped her behind three times in as many months, and expected her—a first-year university student then—to thank him for saving her from the invisible bee that lived in his office. He’d been a different man back then, arriving to class each morning with freshly shaved cheeks and a stale-smelling corduroy jacket, but she recognized his delicate bee-swatting hands, now curled around the butt of a rifle. “Perhaps it would be better if I spoke to your husband,” he said. “I’d like to have a word with him about how he allows you to dress.”

“F*ck off, you disgusting little man,” Sonja said, in English.

“She speaks in tongues, too,” the merchant muttered to himself. “Another sign of the end times. Listen to me, woman. This is serious business. If you dress with your hair and your face uncovered for the devil himself to see, the Russians will come back, make no mistake, and you women will be responsible.”

Had he not had the contents of a small armory in arm’s reach, she might have kicked him squarely in his now-pious balls. Instead she shook her head and turned toward the fabric stand.

She returned home with sheets of green and purple cloth, and unfolded them across the floor of her bedroom. As a teenager, she had declined her mother’s offer to teach her to tailor her own clothes; even at that age, such a domestic skill had insulted her ambitions. Now, eyes downcast, glaring as though a pair of trousers might materialize from the cloth by force of her concentration, she felt like Sonja the Idiot. Only one idea came to her. She took her measurements with a ruler and drew them on the cloth and cut outlines of her legs with nail scissors. For the next half hour, she stitched together the two cutouts with the same stitch she used to close wounds. When finished, she examined her creation. The stitching held tight when she pulled the seams, and her pinky just fit through the holes of the button fly. She envisioned pockets, perhaps even belt loops. If this worked, she might design a jacket and a blouse. Perhaps she could even begin a clothing line—haute couture du guerre-zone, all proceeds to support the hospital—and export handmade fashions to the boutique-lined avenues of London, where she had been privy to the conscience-balming Western consumption of Third World charity art and cheeseburgers.

It wasn’t until she tried on the trousers that she realized her error. She had traced the exact measurements of her legs without allowing any extra wiggle room, and so she struggled with the trousers, falling onto the mattress and raising her feet toward the ceiling in the vain hope that gravity might pity her. An exhausting effort. It had been years since she had floundered this much without at least the prospect of an orgasm. When she finally pulled the trousers past her hips, she found Natasha’s hundred-watt smirk in the doorway. “How long have you been watching?” she demanded.

“Not nearly long enough.”

“You’re always f*cking asleep! You’re always asleep when I’m making dinner or sweeping the floor or finding car batteries or crying or doing anything mature and useful, but then you always somehow wake up to witness me making a fool of myself. Do you have clairvoyance? If you do, you can see what I’m thinking; and if not, I’m thinking of a very rude gesture.”

“Try to stand up,” Natasha suggested, far too cheerfully. Sonja would rather have amputated her legs with the nail scissors than further humiliate herself, but what could she do? Refuse? Admit failure? No. She placed her palms on the edge of the bed. She pushed forward. Arms flailing, legs inflexible, she would have let the prurient chemistry professor slap invisible bees from her behind all afternoon for a pair of trousers that fit. At the apex of her ascent, when she saw Natasha, her eyes burst into coals, because was it really too much to be thanked? To be appreciated? To be assured that all the scones in England were worth less than all the potatoes and onions with one’s own sister? Yes, apparently that is too much to ask, Sonja told herself, or at least too much to ask from you, my potato-eating friend, you who believe you are the only person in the world to understand loss, and even that you’re unwilling to share with me.

But her glare broke with her balance. The wooden planks of her trouser legs pitched her forward and, arms flapping, she reached for Natasha. There was no one else to help her.

And Natasha caught her. The impact shimmied down Sonja’s spine, loosening the tension coiled between each vertebra. How had they descended so far? How had they become so embittered that Natasha preventing her from falling on her face felt like an act of tremendous sisterly love? Tears squeezed through Sonja’s closed eyes. A plug was pulled from the center of the floor through which the tension drained.

“Those are the ugliest trousers I’ve ever seen,” Natasha said, still holding her. It was the first time they had hugged since she returned. Two and a quarter years would pass before it happened again. “They look painted on.”

“I can’t feel my toes,” Sonja cried. “I don’t think my blood is circulating past my knees.”

“You should use them as tourniquets at the hospital.”

“I don’t want to be here, Natasha. I’m so f*cking unhappy. I want to be back in London.”

“It’s okay. They’re only trousers. Here’s what we do.” Clasping the waistline, Natasha halved them in one clean flourish. Sonja pulled the ends over her heels and stretched her sore thighs. She picked up the sheet of fabric stenciled with the silhouette of her legs, and tilted her head to see Natasha through the cutout.

“I think this is my knee.”

“It is a lovely knee.”

“What should I do with it?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever asked my opinion before.”

“I won’t make a habit of it.”

“You could.”

“Tell me what to do.”

Natasha looked to the fabric. “I could use a new pair of trousers, too.”

Sonja smiled and gave Natasha the nail scissors.


Despite their moment of reconciliation, they soon returned to a policy of polite avoidance. When, after work, Sonja wanted less complex company, she visited Laina next door. Laina never looked particularly pleased to see Sonja, but she never looked particularly pleased about anything these days, and Sonja didn’t take it personally. The old woman received daily visitations from ghosts, angels, prophets, and monsters, and some evenings, Sonja wondered if she herself was, to this old woman, a trivial hallucination.

“I saw an ice machine at the bazaar the other day,” she said. Laina didn’t look up from the scarf she was knitting, afraid to raise her eyes with so many visions crowding the air. “It once cooled the glasses of the Bee Gees, or so said the freezer merchant. Never turn your back to him, Laina. There is no bee.”

“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man,” Laina said, without lifting her eyes from the needle tips.

“You know that song?”

“Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn’t know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur’an.”

Sonja smiled, glad she could still be surprised. “I never knew the Bee Gees were so profound.”

“I saw six chariots in the sky today. I would have rather seen an ice machine.”

For the next hour Laina described abounding supernatural phenomena. The angel Gabriel had fluttered into a rooster-less henhouse in Zebir-Yurt, and the next morning a farmer found eight immaculately conceived eggs. A boy in Grozny defeated his grandfather, a chess master third class, ranked one thousand six hundred and eighty-fourth in the world, after a game lasting thirty-nine sleepless days and nights that left the grandfather so bewildered, proud, and exhausted he promptly died. A band of corpse-devils rose from the earth at the Dagestan border to hijack three Red Cross cargo trucks, leaving the drivers hog-tied and blindfolded and magically suspended three meters in the air.

“Stalin has been resurrected,” Laina said.

“I know,” Sonja replied. “He’s the prime minster of Russia.”

On her way to work a week later, when the black Mercedes found her, she was sure she’d wandered into one of Laina’s deliriums. The Mercedes braked sharply, drawing a curtain of dust along the street. The tires—before so dainty they could only drive in circles on a tennis court—were replaced with those of an armored jeep, raising the body of the car by a half meter. Swedish license plates, she noted, were still attached. The window descended and those gorgeous fingernails beckoned her.

“I thought we wouldn’t see each other again,” she said, pulling the door closed.

“And I keeping saying I’ll never see Alu again and he keeps on being my brother. You intrigue me. You lived in London for several years, if my information is correct, which it always is. Had you stayed, you would be eligible for citizenship now. Even I can’t get my name into one of those beautiful maroon passports. And yet you returned.”

“I have family here,” she said uneasily.

“I hide the toilet paper when my family visits so they won’t stay too long.”

“Could you get me back to London?”

“You could ask. But then who would I have to talk to? No one with your intelligence would return from London, which means you are either one of those idiot savants, light on the savant, or something entirely different. The only people who return are people like me, people who know how much money can be made.”

Through the window, the city limits gave way to brown fields tilled by tank treads. They were on the road to Grozny. “I’m not here to make money.”

“That’s why you are so intriguing.”

They reached the Grozny garage two hours later. Two dour-faced men met them at the door holding Kalashnikovs, one still three weeks from killing the other in an argument that would begin over driving directions, and Sonja feverishly hoped that the smuggler’s love for Alu the Turtle still surpassed his loathing for Alu the Unluckiest Younger Brother in History. Three trucks sat at the end of the concrete tarmac. The brother led her to the first truck, whose shot-off lock clung by a half-broken, glimmering grip. He lifted the door and shined a flashlight into the trailer. A Red Cross first-aid kit sat in the circle of yellowed light. The circle spread to illuminate torn cardboard boxes and hundreds, no, thousands of first-aid kits. “These were stolen,” she said.

“Of course they were, and not without some headache, I’ll have you know. But as you said, nearly all of what you asked for can be found in a first-aid kit.”

“What happened to the drivers?”

“Why do you care?”

She could feel him testing her, ready to blunt the slightest edge of moral outrage with a lecture on relativism in war, or maybe with another example of his contempt for Alu. She unsnapped the first-aid kit and surveyed the contents. Four absorbent compress dressings, eight adhesive bandages, a tube of antiseptic ointment, a breathing barrier, two latex gloves, a gauze roll, a thermometer, a packet of aspirin, and a scissors. She closed the lid, refastened the clips, had nothing but gratitude to give him. For all she cared, the drivers could be hog-tied and beaten, since she now had the ointment to disinfect their cuts, the gauze to bandage their wounds, even scissors to cut through whatever magical threads held them three meters off the ground.

“What about the morphine?”

“I nearly forgot.” He pulled a black nylon duffel bag from the front seat, set it on the bumper, and unzipped it. A plastic-wrapped brick of white powder lay at the bottom. “Morphine is too expensive,” he said, handing it to her.

“What is it?”

“Heroin.”

The word alone weighed ten kilograms. This powder had been boiled and squirted between Natasha’s toes twice a day for eight months. My god. And for the first time in how many days, she breathed the relief of knowing Natasha was safe at home, barricaded behind a water-glass moat, safe from the fangs of dragons. “Is it unadulterated?”

“Not enough sugar in there to sweeten a cup of tea.”

“I asked for morphine.”

“And even had you done me the favor of lobotomizing Alu while he was under your care, I wouldn’t get you morphine. Heroin is much cheaper.”

“I want something else, then.”

“So do I. There are only a few departments open in your hospital, yes? If you rent me some unused space, we can continue this arrangement.”

“For what?”

“My wares.”

“No guns, drugs, or people.”

“Of course not,” he said. “I keep them at home. No, mainly national treasures looted from city museums that can be sold abroad.”

“Fine. I want an ice machine. The hospital has been without one for several months. A bearded man at the bazaar is selling a nice one from the Intourist Hotel. Feel free to be rough with him. And where are the books I asked for?”

“You’ve chosen the wrong profession,” he said, enjoying her stubbornness. “You’re a natural swindler. You’d run me out of business. I’ve had difficulty finding them, but they should come in shortly. A third cousin in the West is asking for them from Amazon.”

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t any idea. This kid can make your books appear from the ether. He’ll run me out of business, too.” He shook his head. “The whole world is conspiring to run me out of business.”

“And another thing.”

“Now you’re really beginning to annoy me. If you keep it up, I’ll have to bring my brother with me next time.”

“I want new clothes.”

And he laughed and laughed and laughed.


Two weeks later Sonja returned from the hospital wearing a maroon cashmere sweater, tan leather boots, and a pair of one-size-too-tight jeans displaying curves that the chemistry professor would have found a whole hive nesting on, had his eyes still worked. The weight of the psychology textbooks strained the rucksack straps against her shoulders. Her left hand, wrapped around a glass of ice, was numb.

In the hall she stopped at Laina’s door, wanting to leave the ice for her neighbor. The murmur of voices inside stopped her. She crouched to the keyhole. Were Laina’s hallucinations speaking back to her?

“There were twelve chariots in the sky today? That’s two more than yesterday.” Natasha’s voice basked beneath a sun that never shone when she addressed Sonja. It was good to hear Natasha care, even if it wasn’t for her.

“Twelve,” Laina said. “I think they’re up to something.”

“Like what?”

“Who knows? Trying to steal the Moon to sell at the bazaar. Protecting the skies from Federal planes. Maybe trying to figure out how to get their horses down from the clouds.”

Natasha’s voice softened. “In the winter of the war, before I went to Italy, when the bombing was at its worst, I was afraid the apartment block would be hit. So I lived in City Park. I remember the City Park Prophet once said everything that isn’t darkness or death is a vision. I remember he said we are all God’s hallucinations.”

“I remember once, on my birthday, when I was a child, I came into the kitchen and saw a huge wooden box on the table,” Laina said. “I was so happy. I couldn’t imagine what wonderful present lay inside such a big wooden box.”

“What was it?”

“A casket. My aunt was inside.”

Sonja bit her knuckle. When they were children they had pretended to have a third sister, a black-haired girl named Lidiya. Like Alu, the ghost sister was never around, and in her absence they had teased, chided, scorned, blamed, and hated Lidiya so they could love each other more simply.

“I’m afraid to leave the apartment,” Natasha was saying. “I’m afraid of the city. There’s just so much open air now. I’m afraid of nearly everyone. I don’t know why. Everyone scares me but you. Even Sonja can be scary. Sometimes, if I let myself think about Italy, my body shuts down. It’s like I’m not in charge anymore, my brain turns off, and I have to lock myself in my room and barricade myself with furniture. I feel so stupid. I’m such an idiot.”

“Do you see the chariots?”

“No, not yet. I see a wallet, though.”

“A wallet?”

“Yes, there was this man, and when he was dressing his wallet fell out of his trousers and he had a picture of his children in one of those plastic credit card flaps. That was the day when I gave up.”

“It’s good to talk about these things. It will keep the chariots and wallets of the world honest. They will know we see them, and are not afraid to sound like madwomen.”

“Yes, I like talking with you.”

“We’re staying alive.”

Sonja stood and walked to the flat, afraid of what she might hear next. At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. She raised the glass to her lips. The water was clean.