Danylo and Oleh were the last people to show up; it was already after noon. They stood there in the hot sun, smoking and thinking. Finally, Danylo suggested they head home.
“Let’s go,” he said, “this whole shindig is a joke.”
Then Oleh took a drag so long he nearly fainted and wiped the amber sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his leather jacket. He was thirty-six. Danylo was four years older, but most people would’ve pegged him for at least fifty. Oleh renovated old buildings, assembling crews of manual laborers and carting them around town to his various job sites. He’d always carry a small Panasonic camera with him, taking pictures of turrets and decorations on dilapidated buildings, zooming in to see details the naked eye couldn’t. Oleh wore hiking boots, faded jeans, and a brown bomber jacket and had dark, unkempt hair. He hadn’t shaved or slept in a while. Danylo wore athletic gear and had a bald, bruised head, but his wise gray eyes toned down his rough exterior. Nobody ever looked him in the eye, though; generally, all anyone ever noticed were his fists, blue with tattoos he’d given himself during his time in the service down in the Caucasus. All that ink made him look like an ex-con, but he really just drove a taxi, putting his Benz on the books at some state-owned company, giving rides to students and anyone else who was too drunk to drive. It was parked outside his apartment, across from the McDonald’s; Danylo would wake up every morning, grab his thermos, and go sit in his car to get some more shut-eye.
“Hey, you positive we were invited?” he asked Oleh.
The surly Oleh thought for a bit, spat anxiously, and motioned, as if to say, “Get off my back.” “Yeah, we were invited, obviously. We’re their friends, aren’t we? They just forgot to remind us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They just forgot,” Oleh said, nodding. “It’s no big deal. I’ll go remind them.”
Danylo grumbled skeptically, but kept standing next to his brother.
They fired their cigarette butts through the warm air and drummed their palms against the outside of their pants pockets—“We got what we need, let’s roll.” They smacked around some wet-behind-the-ears punk, briefly but thoroughly, sized up some curly-haired guy in ripped clothes who was looking at everyone with utter disgust, shoved their way over to the bride, pulled some old-timer with red, drowsy eyes away from her, smacked the punk around a little bit more (he’d latched onto them after his first beating), and said hello to her. Danylo extended his hand, Oleh didn’t.
Sonia was taken aback at first, but she quickly regained her composure, smiling at Danylo and reaching out to shake Oleh’s hand. He blatantly ignored her, so she pulled him in and kissed him wetly on the cheek, scratching her face on four days’ worth of prickly stubble. Flustered, Oleh apologized for showing up late, not dressed for the occasion, and with no present. He was getting even more flustered, but Danylo butted in, taking his keys out of his pocket and handing them to Sonia.
“Here kiddo, my Mercedes is all yours today. I’m gonna go grab a drink.”
Sonia cracked a smile to ease the mounting tension and took the keys, something she wouldn’t usually have done. “Join the party,” she said. “I’ll hold on to these for now. I don’t want anybody playing bumper cars.” Somebody was already pouring Danylo a drink; Oleh wanted to say something, but he just waved his hand dismissively and headed over toward the tables as well.
“Why ships?” she thought. “Where’d they even come from?” She’d been keeping a diary for the past few years. Some cheerful quack shrink would come to their office for sessions and hit on all the secretaries and accountants, but they all loved him, so he didn’t get canned for it.
“You’re in a good place, Sonia,” he said. “You have a good job with prospects, and you’ve got your health. And it’s a good thing you don’t have a man in your life. Overall, everything’s going well—you’re in an excellent position to start worrying.” So he suggested she keep a diary. “It’ll be just for you, so there’s no need to hold back. Write whatever you want—nobody else is ever going to read it.”
Sonia went with it. It didn’t usually take much coaxing for her to try something new. “But what am I gonna write about?” she thought. She immediately decided that none of the entries would cover her professional life. “What’s the point of making the auditors’ job any easier? And no love or romance either.”
Love was the least of her concerns. Sonia was always the one who broke things off—none of her men ever had the guts to dump her. She’d been married twice, and her two ex-husbands had vanished from her life without a trace. Sonia would crack jokes about that, saying that she’d bitten their heads off… and some other things, too. She had a lot of sex, plenty of interesting boyfriends, and a couple of girlfriends thrown in—women liked Sonia. She was always calm and had incredible stamina; they saw her the way they would have liked to see their men. Men liked her too, obviously; she was tender and open with them, and she always paid for her own drinks.
So she started logging her dreams, attentively and in detail. She described the rooms and buildings she saw and the faces that appeared, transcribed conversations, drew trees, flowers, and wild animals that didn’t have names yet, sketching and carefully captioning meteors that had fallen on the city’s old neighborhoods, diagramming systems of mines that had been buried under sand dunes, and mugshots of serial killers who’d been caught and sentenced to hang. The murderers in her pictures looked like the crew of a ship—exhausted, yet unbroken—they all had some faint resemblance to one another, as is generally the case with men who spend a long time together in a confined space. This had all been welling up for so long, eventually she couldn’t restrain herself, so she showed it to her mom, who was still alive at the time. When she was done reading the diary, she told Sonia to burn it so she’d be able to sleep at night. She heeded her mother’s advice and burned the diary, but then she started another one right away, filling it with more portraits of men standing in profile.