I must have been ten, Kolya thirteen, on the afternoon we watched two men kill a third. But I’ll come back to that. We woke in the room we shared to the dueling cries of my father and the teakettle. Kolya climbed from bed. His hair was a typographical error someone had scribbled out. He hit me, as he did most mornings, to toughen me for my own good, but it’s difficult to muster much brotherly gratitude while getting slapped. We skated across the floorboards and into the kitchen in our woolen socks.
My father had begun lending sweaters to Kolya. As Kolya grew, the neck and shoulders of the sweaters slowly stretched, giving my father the appearance of a man incrementally disappearing when he wore them once again. But that morning, my father looked years younger, taller, larger. His eyes were bloodshot rivets of inspiration. He paced before the charred stove top.
“This is it, boys!” he exclaimed. “The exhibition that will send the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics to the dustbin of museum history.”
My father was an outer-space freak in a city roofed by pollution so dense he’d have to drive a hundred kilometers to see starlight. A few years earlier, in what was a moment of either personal courage or mental collapse, he had quit his comfortable position as a furnace technician to pursue his dream of opening a cosmonautics museum. His passion was rivaled only by his ineptitude, and he presided over the Kirovsk Museum of Inner and Outer Space as its founder, director, docent, archivist, press secretary, ticket inspector, and janitor. Quartered in an abandoned warehouse adjoined to one of the city smelting complexes, the museum was not only the kingdom of my father’s unfulfilled ambition, but my playground, my classroom, and, in the lofted flat above it, my home.
If you haven’t seen the museum, let’s say it’s one of the world’s most unique science museums and just leave it at that. If you have seen it, my apologies. You could say my father built a Potemkin space station, that he forged every exhibit, that he had an intensely one-sided rivalry with the Moscow Cosmonautics Museum. You could also say that compared with the greater inhumanities of our city, my father’s misdemeanors are so trivial they seem virtuous.
“What’s he on about?” Kolya asked my mother, the family bilingual who translated my father’s ravings. She stood at the sink. A postcard of the Black Sea had been pasted above the tap. As the discolored water softened her fingertips, she stared into the breakers unfurling over a sandy strip. Perhaps she strolled along the white-painted promenade, a slender leash wrapped around her wrist, a lady with a lapdog. Perhaps she imagined a summer romance, the thrill of unfamiliar hands, the unknown warmth of sunlight on her shoulders, the gasp of seawater on her toes. Sealed within the worn postcard edges was a sunlit world where my mother splintered into thousands of imagined selves, none of whom answered Kolya’s question.
“The End!” my father declared. He punctuated the declaration with a blow to the kitchen table that scattered the silverware.
“The end of what?”
“The end of everything. An exhibit on all ends, from the end of a day to the end of a life, a civilization, a planet, a universe. It will put the museum in the guidebooks.”
The museum had opened the previous year with my father christening the front door with a thrown bottle of saccharine Soviet champagne. It had hardened into a puddle of frozen glass that had resulted in the broken hip of our third visitor. My father dropped to one knee and clamped his hands on our shoulders. As we huddled together, linked through the chain of his grip, the current of his fervor sank into our muscles. “Go to the forest. See if you can find anything we might use.”
The floor of White Forest had filled with waste in the decades since its construction. Over the years Kolya and I had found a collection of refrigerator doors, a dozen leaky barrels of toxic waste, a file cabinet filled with classified documents, knives and bullet casings in police department evidence bags, a cat caged in a kennel, a drunk driver sobbing in the car he had somehow skewered to a steel tree limb, and an electric heater in perfect working order. Most of the displays in the Hall of Inexplicable Phenomena came from the debris.
The last house we passed before crossing a wide field to reach the forest edge belonged to Lydia’s family. She was the same age as Kolya, twelve or thirteen then. The metal skeletons held on to late spring snow. Broad plastic leaves wilted from a few barbed branches. Like the sky, the snow, and the insides of our lungs, these too had yellowed. They sagged over us like the spineless skins of a nuclear people.
“What are we looking for?” I asked. Except for a few hypodermics we poked each other with, we hadn’t found anything worth keeping. “This is stupid. Where are we even going?”
“We’ll know what we’re looking for when we find it,” Kolya answered loudly and slowly, as if I were both deaf and dim-witted. A note of vexation pulsed beneath the equanimity of his logic. I was afraid I’d disappointed him. You’re probably thinking that I’m a high-density, dehydrated slab of manliness, a testosterone prune, if you will, but as a boy I was a plum. My family nickname was Little Radish: Even as a taproot, I didn’t rise to the stature of greatness. I was terrified of nearly everything, from atomic war to other people’s belly buttons, Kolya’s displeasure most of all. When he was annoyed, he’d look just over my head when speaking to me. It made me feel shorter than I already was and embedded the conversation with an expectation I failed to meet unless I stood on stilts. We carried on. Ten minutes later, we heard voices.
“You’re not scared, are you?” The rasped question carried the ghosts of ten thousand cigarettes.
“Scared of sharks,” answered a second, younger voice. Through the gaps in the trees, we saw the two men standing a dozen meters ahead. We crouched to get a better view. The first man must have been in his early thirties, wearing the circular spectacles and pressed trousers of a gulag-bound academic. A deep cleft made his chin look like a small dog’s testicles. The other man wasn’t even a man, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old in a tracksuit, his hair slicked into an aerodynamic wedge, his upper lip feathered with a mustache as useless as a brush missing half its bristles, his little teeth swallowed by gummy arches.
“Sharks?” the older man asked.
The younger one shuddered at the word. “Those bastards just swim around the ocean eating kids, biting turtle heads, fighting giant squids and shit. The messed up thing is that they can’t even stop swimming and fighting squids and eating children. They don’t have hot air balloons shoved up their asses like normal fish.”
“Good thing you were born a land mammal,” the older man mused.
“Only good luck I’ve ever had,” the young man agreed. He kicked at the pile of clothes lying at his feet.
A moan rose from the pile. Then the clothes began to move. A man was in there, his mouth expurgated with a strip of black tape, his hands bound behind him within the buttoned overcoat. When he shook from side to side his empty coat sleeves slapped the ground in a hapless dance. I wanted to run, but Kolya held my shoulders.
“If we move, if we make a sound, they’ll put us right next to him,” Kolya whispered. His eyes locked on mine for the first time that day. That little acknowledgment of my existence quieted the terror that clambered in my chest like a kitten locked in a suitcase.