“Chthonic deities,” I mumble. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Chthonic.”
When I was eight, I had nightmares about that visit. I dreamt of the dead yellowing man chasing me up and down the stairs of our apartment building. I still have those dreams. I’m running past the squeezing couples and smokers exiled to the stairwell, and mincing steps are chasing after me. I skip over the steps, jumping over two at once, three at once, throwing myself into each stairwell as if it were a pool. Soon my feet are barely touching the steps as I rush downwards in an endless spiral of chipped stairs. I’m flying in fear, as the dead man follows. He’s much slower than me but he does not stop, so I cannot stop either.
“Zombies,” he calls after me into the echoing stairwell, “are the breach of covenant. If the chthonic deities do not get their blood-price, there can be no true resurrection.”
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 his 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 with me now. I’m too tired to be afraid enough to wake. 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 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 through 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 for 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 it 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 learnt 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 realise that I would miss him. He’s 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.”