On the plane, Viktor and I looked at each other and blinked. I suspect Viktor was wondering what he had gotten himself into—whether he would lose his job; whether in a wiser, more abstemious age, he would come back to look at this bad decision as the one where everything started to go disastrously wrong. I was beyond this kind of worrying. I didn’t know how the trip would go, or what it would mean, or whether it would be a mistake. But I did know that I wouldn’t look back on it with anything—pride or regret or misery or guilt or misty-eyed nostalgia—from some unimaginable vantage point. Who I was now was who I would always be. And what I did would have to be admired or despised or corrected by someone else.
The landscape below was quickly tapering off into countryside: dull stamps of beige and eggshell; clusters of villages; long patches of phlox and silver grass, sliced by the occasional vein of a creek. I’ve always loved flying, watching the earth resolve into its most basic elements: clean, subdued colors; starkly geometric designs. When you watch it all from an airplane, it’s difficult to take anything too seriously or too hard. From above, the world and its teeming civilizations looked like nothing more complex than a series of cave drawings.
I thought of my flight into Moscow all those many months ago. The person I was before I touched down in Russia, the person who walked around Cambridge and fell in love and played chess with a strange Swede for whimsy—that person felt so thoroughly remote to me that it was as though she were a memory from a previous lifetime, or an identical twin with whom I had a troubled though persistent psychic connection. I could look back on her—and look back on that life—with something approaching indifference. I could recognize that there had been value there, and that there were memories that the other woman had clung to with the tragic self-importance with which we all cling to ourselves and our cherished little souvenirs. But that woman wasn’t me anymore. Or if she was, she wouldn’t be for long.
After a few minutes on the plane, Viktor twisted toward me and issued a frank and unnerving stare.
“Yes?” I said. “What? Having regrets? Too late now.”
He continued to stare at me, long enough that I started to wonder what Aleksandr had told him about me.
“Look, now that we’re in this mess together, I need to know some things,” he said.
“Okay,” I said carefully. I was thinking that I needed to know some things, too, but that didn’t mean I ever would.
“Who are you? Who are you really, I mean?” I looked at him. Maybe he’d always wanted to ask that. Maybe he’d been afraid that doing so would offend Aleksandr or antagonize Boris. Or maybe it’s simply the sort of question that you ask only once it’s too late for a proper answer.
“What can you possibly mean by that?”
“I mean.” He sighed and pressed his eyes shut. I could see him trying to frame his interrogation in some kind of civility. “I mean, why did you come here? What was this? Besides running away. Anyone can run away. Anyone can run away from anything, in fact. You don’t need to be dying to want to do this. I just mean, why here? Why this?”
All at once I was telling him—telling him things I’d never told anyone, telling him things I hadn’t even known I knew until I said them, and they became unequivocally true in retrospect. I told him about my last chess game with my father, how that was simultaneously a benediction and bewilderment; it had announced the arrival of my adulthood as it had prophesied the onset of my father’s obsolescence. After my father had substantially disappeared from us but before he had died, I looked back and tried to find some of the clues to who he had been, to what had mattered to him, to how he had made sense of the world, to how he had addressed his own end. Sifting through the morass of information that was left to me was like pawing through a riverbed and trying to figure out which things are fossils and which things are just stones. But I’d pulled out the fragment that was Aleksandr, and I’d squinted at its flinty sheen, and I’d decided that there—there—was a treasured clue, or a missing link, or a splinter left to me by a divine prankster intent on testing my faith.
And then there was the unendurable pressure of having to die gracefully in front of people I knew. There was the childlike suspicion that this thing chasing me was something that could be outrun; there was the sneaking sense, only three quarters ironic, that Huntington’s might not qualify for a visa. Even more primal and even more shameful was the fleeting question of whether my father had ever died at all. I’d watched him die from superego down to cells, but even as a child, I’d had the good sense to darkly scrutinize what I was supposed to be taking at face value. How was the man in front of me—the man who flailed and shouted, threw things across the room, shat on the piano—how was this man the same one who had composed choral arrangements for Bach, and had the capacity to carry on simple conversations in a truly unfathomable number of languages, and followed geopolitics like other men follow sports? Even as a teenager, I suspected that the whole thing might be a sham. This man’s leprous face was not my father’s face; his syncopated animation was not my father’s gestures. If this man was not my father, then my father wasn’t here. And if he wasn’t here, he was somewhere else—perhaps he’d outmaneuvered everybody, as he always outmaneuvered me at the chessboard in the days before he couldn’t anymore.
I told Viktor all this. And then I told him something simpler and just as true: sometimes there are things we don’t understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we’d never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that—even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them—we still wouldn’t know.
It was only four hours to Perm, and I slept most of the way. We touched down and shuffled out and rented our car glumly, with the air of hungover teenagers who know that, in a burst of inebriated inspiration, they’ve done grim damage to their future lives. I let Viktor drive.
We didn’t speak as we skimmed along the Kama River. I rolled down the window and looked at the water—blue as a femoral artery, running off to five different seas. Somewhere beyond the thicket of trees lay the ruins of Perm 36, but we didn’t have time to go looking for it. Even if we did, there probably wouldn’t have been much to see: a ghostly archipelago of stones, a husk of barbed wire, and withered trees. Through the window, the air came at us mossy and dense and rich with the complicated, metallic scent of industry. The city skyline was strangely ridged, which made the horizon feel askew: buildings jumped at us in weird ways as we approached, and off in the distance we could sense the hulking presence of the Urals, their humped backs like fossilized ogres guarding the entrance to Asia. And between them, perhaps: snatches of weak intercontinental light, backlighting the contours and making paper lanterns of the foothills. And beyond that, seven more time zones. You could squint and almost see it: tens of thousands of fields of wheat, overgrown collectives where nature had clotted over agriculture. Unrelenting taiga pocked by the occasional relic of the odd, enormous universe: a putrefying missile silo, the void left by a comet. And beyond that: a smattering of volcanic islands and then America. I could close my eyes and give myself vertigo just thinking about it. I am not ready to die. I’m not. I am not even bored of the fact that the world is round.
Outside the window, the sun was brutal, bright and horrible as an exposed organ.
We checked in to a hostel that was similar to my old hostel. I thought of my things back there in the building that had been something like a home—my pile of myriad clothes and books, all the lingering things that I would soon have to grimly assess and stow, like a pathologist at an autopsy. Better to leave nothing behind than to leave behind so little—just enough evidence for people to know that you only made it two thirds through War and Peace, and you were overly fond of shirts with collars.