I wake up with a start. My stomach hurts.
I take the subway to the university. I usually read so I don’t have to meet people’s eyes. “Station Lenin Hills,” the announcer on the intercom says. “The doors are closing. Next station is the University.”
I look up and see the guy who spoke of dead women sitting across from me. His eyes, bleached with insanity, stare at me with the black pinpricks of the pupils. He pointedly ignores the old woman in a black kerchief standing too close to him, trying to guilt him into surrendering his seat. He doesn’t get up until I do, when the train pulls into the station. “The University,” the announcer says.
We exit together.
“I’m Fedya,” he says.
“I’m afraid of zombies,” I answer.
He doesn’t look away.
The lecturer’s eyes water with age. He speaks directly to me when he asks, “Any other resurrection myths you know of?”
“Jesus?” someone from the first row says.
He nods. “And what was the price paid for his resurrection?” “There wasn’t one,” I say, startling myself. “He was a zombie.” This time everyone stares.
“Talk to me after class,” the lecturer says.
The chase across all the stairwells in the world becomes a game. He catches up to me now. I’m too tired to be afraid enough to wake up. My stomach hurts.
“You cannot break the covenant with chthonic gods,” he tells me. “Some resurrection is the punishment.”
“Leave me alone,” I plead. “What have I ever done to you?”
His fake eye, icy-blue, steely-grey, slides down his ruined cheek. “You can’t save them,” he says. “They always look back. They always stay dead.”
“Like with Euridice.”
“Like with every dead woman.”
Fedya sits on my bed, heavily although he’s not a large man but slender, birdlike.
“I could never drive a car,” I tell him.
He looks at the yellowing medical chart, dog-eared pages fanned on the bed covers. “Sluggish schizophrenia?” he says. “This is a bullshit diagnosis. You know it as well as I do. Delusions of reformism? You know that they invented it as a punitive thing.”
“It’s not bullshit,” I murmur. It’s not. Injections of sulfazine and the rubber room had to have a reason behind them.
“They kept you in the Serbsky hospital,” he observes. “Serbsky? I didn’t know you were a dissident.”
“Lenin is a zombie,” I tell him. “He talks to me.” All these years. All this medication.
He stares. “I can’t believe they let you into the university.” I shrug. “They don’t pay attention to that anymore.” “Maybe things are changing,” he says.
“Are you feeling all right?” the lecturer says, his yellow hands shaking, filling me with quiet dread. Same beard, same bald patch.
I nod.
“Where did that zombie thing come from?” he asks, concerned.
“You said it yourself. Chthonic deities always ask for a price. If you don’t pay, you stay dead or become a zombie. Women stay dead.”
He lifts his eyebrows encouragingly. “Oh?”
“Dead are objects,” I tell him. “Don’t you know that? Some would rather become zombies than objects. Only zombies are still objects, even though they don’t think they are.”
I can see that he wants to laugh but decides not to. “And why do you think women decide to stay dead?”
I feel nauseous and think of Inanna who kind of ruins my thesis. I ignore her. “It has something to do with sex,” I say miserably.
He really tries not to laugh.
In the hospital, when I lay in a sulfazine-and-neuroleptics coma, he would sit on the edge of my bed. “You know what they say about me.”
“Yes,” I whispered, my cheeks so swollen that they squeezed my eyes shut. “Lenin is more alive than any of the living.”
“And what is life?”
“According to Engels, it’s a mode of existence of protein bodies.”
“I am a protein body,” he said. “What do you have to say to that?”
“I want to go home,” I whispered with swollen lips. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
He didn’t answer, but his waxen fingers stroked my cheek, leaving a warm melting trail behind them.
“I thought for sure you were a cutter,” Fedya says.
I shiver in my underwear and hug my shoulders. My skin puckers in the cold breeze from the window. “I’m not.” I feel compelled to add, “Sorry.”
“You can get dressed now,” he says.
I do.
He watches.
The professor is done with chthonic deities, and I lose interest. I drift through the dark hallways, where the walls are so thick that they still retain the cold of some winter from many years ago. I poke my head into one auditorium, and listen a bit to a small sparrow of a woman chatter about Kant. I stop by the stairwell on the second floor, to bum a cigarette off a fellow student with black horn-rimmed glasses.
“Skipping class?” she says.
“Just looking for something to do.”
“You can come to my class,” she says. “It’s pretty interesting.” “What is it about?”
“Economics.”
I finish my smoke and tag along.
This lecturer looks like mine, and I take for a sign. I sit in an
empty seat in the back, and listen. “The idea of capitalism rests on the concept of free market,” he says. “Who can tell me what it is?” No one can, or wants to.
The lecturer notices me. “What do you think? Yes, you, the young lady who thinks it’s a good idea to waltz in in the middle of the class. What is free market?”
“It’s when you pay the right price,” I say. “To the chthonic deities. If you don’t pay you become a zombie or just stay dead.”
He stares at me. “I don’t think you’re in the right class.”
I sit in the stairwell of the second floor. Lenin emerges from the brass stationary ashtray and sits next to me. There’s one floor up and one down, and nowhere really to run.
“What have you learned today?” he asks in an almost paternal voice.
“Free market,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “It will end the existence of the protein bodies in a certain mode.” A part of his cheek is peeling off.
“Remember when I was in the hospital?”
“Of course. Those needles hurt. You cried a lot.”
I nod. “My boyfriend doesn’t like me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “If it makes it any better, I will leave soon.”
I realize that I would miss him. He followed me since I was little. “Is it because of the free market?” I ask. “I’m sorry. I’ll go back to the chthonic deities.”
“It’s not easy,” he says and stands up, his joints whirring, his skin shedding like sheets of wax paper. He walks away on soft rubbery legs.
“Things die eventually,” I tell Fedya. “Even those that are not quite dead to begin with.”
“Yeah, and?” he answers and drinks his coffee.
I stroke the melted circles in the plastic, like craters on the lunar surface. “One doesn’t have to be special to die. One has to be special to stay dead. This is why you like Euridice, don’t you?”
He frowns. “Is that the one Orpheus followed to Hades?”
“Yes. Only he followed her the wrong way.”
There is a commotion on the second floor, and the stairwell is isolated from the corridor by a black sheet. The ambulances are howling outside, and distraught smokers crowd the hallway, cut off from their usual smoking place.