I find my spear in the back of a coat closet, and my arthritic fingers close over its smooth, cool shaft. I do not even attempt to put on my old armor—my girth is too great now, and my back is too bent and weakened by years at the desk to bear its terrible weight. But I brush my fingertips against polished bronze of the breastplate. I pick up my shield and strap on my sword.
I pause in the driveway, thinking whether I should take my car. I decide against it—it seems undignified somehow. I let my feet carry me past and out of the sleeping development.
I pass green lawns and neatly trimmed hedges; somebody’s dog follows me, its docked tail wagging in tentative friendship. I do not know where I am going, but I am certain that I will find it, and all mistakes of the past will be rectified. I think of what will become of Andromache, of her delayed widowhood. I find comfort in thoughts about pension, Social Security, life insurance. With all that, she won’t have to do any more telemarketing, and she will drop her pretense of happiness. As I think, I do not notice as I arrive here, at the miniature golf course.
Hector stopped, the trimmed grass soft and submissive under the soles of his scuffed brown shoes. He surveyed the battlefield from under drawn greying eyebrows. His eyes squinted against the lashings of the wind and hardened to narrow slits.
A windmill chopped the air into thick, humid slices, and the wind whistled between its four wings. A giant ape, its low forehead wrinkled with malice, grinned with bright wooden teeth and shuffled its massive foot back and forth, exposing and covering a narrow pipe, just wide enough for a golf ball. A dinosaur reared up as its mouth opened in and closed in silent screams of presumed pain.
These were the only worthy adversaries, and Hector hefted his spear, choosing his target. The ape seemed the most malignant of all, and he shouted his challenge to it. The ape grinned and shuffled in one place, too dumb or too conceited to take cover.
Hector’s arm felt weak as he raised his spear and hurled it toward the ape. The spear hit its shoulder and sunk into the wooden flesh, trembling from impact. The shaft swayed, and the spear fell to the ground.
The ape roared and cowered for a moment, and then stood to its full height, its fists the size of millstones pounding on its chest. It swung at Hector, but he ducked the blow. The giant fist passed inches over his head, and his grey hair ruffled in the wind.
Hector ripped his sword from the sheath, and lunged for the ape’s unprotected side. The gash his blade left dripped with ichor the color of papier-mâché, and the ape howled in pain.
Hector retreated, waiting for his chance to strike, as the enraged ape chased after him, its cries piercing like Andromache’s tears. Hector was running out of breath, weighed as he was by age and manacles of guilt. He remembered the ape’s name: King Kong. It was too young and too strong for him, and he retreated until the back wall of the windmill blocked his passage—he could feel it with his shoulder blades. The ape’s fists swung in an easy rhythm: king-kong, sigh-kill, maim-kiss.
Hector’s sword slashed across the ape’s knuckles, making it cry out again, but inflicted as little damage as a toothpick. He still waved his weapon about as the ape picked him into one of its fists, as his ribs cracked, as his world narrowed to a swirling, rolling singularity of darkness.
In his last moments his thoughts sped up so that his short time of lingering lucidity between blindness and death stretched forever. Hector dreamed of Achilles, guilt, and ape, of the forces that grinded him into a bloodied, limp husk, of the destiny of loss and defeat. He dreamed of Andromache’s peppy voice traveling over the telephone wires, “Have you considered switching your long-distance provider?” He had spared her degradation in the Grecian hands, he had saved her from a lifetime of slavery. She would be grateful.
And he thought of his son, of his legacy, of a sigh and a kiss. He would graduate from college and enter a law school, and become a king—like King Menelaus, King Priam, the King o’Cats, King Kong. And Hector smiled.
CHAPAEV AND THE COCONUT GIRL
I discovered that my mom left for Indonesia (Bali, to be exact) on her birthday. I called to wish her a happy one, but my dad answered the phone instead and informed me that she was traveling. To Bali. “She told me to tell you that she is in paradise,” he said.
“Give her my best,” I said.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled for my mom to be able to travel like this, because really, for people of her generation and ethnic disposition (she was born in 1942, in German-occupied Lithuania) life never promised anything remotely tropical or whimsical. Yet, I was a little troubled as I had been since 1989, when the world shifted askew cracking the foundation of our existence, and the cracks spread all over the formerly impenetrable and imaginary air bubble that surrounded the then-USSR. I found myself among those who somehow slipped through those cracks, like a goldfish in a temporary prison of a plastic bag, right into the cold and big world—or a fish tank; not that it made that much difference. And this was really the crux of the issue: people like me left so that the change around them would be explainable by travel and culture shock rather than by the impossible overturning if the world which suddenly folded, did a little flip, and pulled itself from under their securely planted feet. Travel lets you pretend that the world didn’t really change, that you just chose your terms. My terms include working in an AI lab at MIT; could be worse.
My parents stayed behind then, as they still do every time I visit, and when I leave them at the airport, I always look back, at how small they are, and my heart fractures anew. So I’m thrilled now that mom is getting to travel a little, and she doesn’t feel quite as abandoned to me when she does. She gets to do some abandoning of her own, and I console dad over the phone. Of course he can cook his own dinner, but he appreciates the sympathy. I think he does—at least, as effective as sympathy across the Atlantic can be, conveyed by sighs whispering through the impossible length of telephone wires.
And after we hung up, I was still pensive, thinking of my mom in such a distant place, even more distant than before. The positive thing about travel though is that if you go away sufficiently far, at some point you start getting closer. And of course distance was conducive of deceit: for all I knew, mom could’ve still been at home, giggling on the couch, and not at all in Indonesia. Distances are tricky like that.
There is a secret I have, a really embarrassing thing: I worship Chapaev. Despite the jokes that are his later legacy and the revolutionary terror of his earlier days, these people, their horses, the Red Army, and all that elementary school-level propaganda is lodged deep in my heart, like a metal splinter. Horses and steppes and wars fought with sabers rather than guns. They probably did have guns though; wouldn’t they? Of course they had guns. It’s just this is not how I imagined it in my childhood or now, for that matter. Temporal distances are tricky as well.
Dealing with the dead is frustrating because you can never ask them anything—you could, but they wouldn’t answer. So I compose long conversations in my head, asking about the Red Army and how did it all really happen, what the dirt under the horses’ hooves smelled like, if they were crawling with lice, this sort of thing. If he really drowned in the end, trying to swim across River Ural, or did he fake it, tired of war and fame, tired of being a hero. If he decided to quit the revolution gig and instead grow pumpkins somewhere. I wonder if he’s still alive, even though he would be over a hundred years old, hundred and twenty, to be exact, but that doesn’t seem too old for a hero. Come and think about it, all heroes of the revolutions are relatively young in historical terms. And I’m left to my own yarns, recursive narratives I spin as I drink my tea and stare out of the window at the houses across the street and imagine Charles River far behind them. I squint and the buildings disappear and I can see in my mind’s eye Charles, thick and green, speckled with oil slicks like a multicolored serpent, and if I squint further, it becomes Ural on the shores of which my stories either end or begin—it all depends on a day.