“This is very bad for you,” he told me, when he let me watch him work after school. He used my mother’s measuring spoons to divide the powder into folded paper pouches. “You must never eat it.”
“What are you making?”
“A living,” he replied.
In the summer, he’d send me on daytime deliveries. Nothing major, just a few envelopes to university students and prostitutes, infractions so slight they’re illegal only by technicality. Before I left, he gave me a series of directions.
“You need to count the money before you give them the product.”
“You need never look a policeman in the eye.”
“You need to obey all laws but the one you’re breaking.”
“You need not stop to speak with anyone.”
“You need to pretend you’re a man and then you will become one.”
I bought metro tokens rather than hopping the turnstile, and I waited for every crosswalk signal. I was shorter than the peepholes and had to knock forever before anyone opened up. The prostitutes sometimes invited me in for tea and an Alenka chocolate bar. A few years after, I began to feel like Tsar Dipshit II when I realized I’d entered the flats of some of the most beautiful, least virtuous women in Petersburg and been only tempted by sweets. Now I just feel sad for whatever happened in those rooms that they needed drugs to endure.
Heroin on the kitchen table and snow on the windowsill; the tattoo of a lone wolf running up his forearm; the surgical mask halving his face; gloved hands performing a delicate operation: That had been my father. He was a capitalist, a man built for the New Russia, someone I thought I would forever look up to.
My mother knew, of course, but pretended otherwise. It came to an end when she discovered that I was my father’s errand boy.
“Where were you?” she asked when I strolled through the front door one August afternoon, fingers still sticky with ice cream melt. She’d come home from work early.
“Delivering a living,” I said proudly. She slapped me with her right hand and embraced me with her left.
“Criminals, everywhere,” she said. “On the TV. In the street. In the Kremlin. Now in my home. I won’t live with two of them.”
She called the police. That afternoon my father was arrested outside our apartment block.
NOW that I was wheeling Kirill around, I had to avoid my friends. I didn’t return their phone calls and kept away from the parks, school yards, and apartment block basements we’d pass out in. Our paths only intersected once, in late June, on the Gostiny Dvor metro platform, as Kirill rambled on and on and on and on and on about the history of rail ties. Valeriy’s zombie eyes latched onto mine. He was scratching his crotch. The head lice must’ve migrated to his southern tropics.
“Tupac, where you been at?” he asked. Behind him Ivan stood in baggy jeans and a T-shirt XXXL enough for a family of four.
I nodded to Kirill. “Just working.”
Valeriy smirked. “New friend?”
“My dad’s making me.” I tried to speak soft enough that Kirill wouldn’t hear.
“You get word about Tony? Knocked off a computer store last week,” Ivan said. “He left his internal passport right on the counter and still couldn’t get himself arrested. Had to walk to the police station and insist that he was a criminal. Embarrassing, really.”
“He’s in Kresty?” I asked.
Valeriy nodded. “Till the trial at least. It’s not bad, by the sound of it. No water shortages. Free electricity. Bet he’s making all kinds of connects. We’ll join him this weekend.”
“On what charge?”
“We’re gonna steal a police car,” Ivan said, grabbing his jeans as they slunk toward his knees. Kirill pretended he wasn’t listening by looking away. “You want in?”
“I promised my dad I’d help him move some furniture this weekend,” I said. “But I’ll see you there.”
“You promise?” Ivan asked.
“Yeah, no doubt.”
“It’s your neck,” Valeriy said, before walking off. “In prison, your head might stay attached to it.”
Kirill didn’t speak until Ivan and Valeriy had disappeared into the white-tiled pedestrian tunnel toward the Nevsky Prospekt station. A gypsy vendor passed by with a tray of single items usually only sold in packs: disposable razors, condoms, Twix bars.
“Will you go through with it?” Kirill asked. There was no disdain in his voice, nothing even approaching disapproval.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“In my time, mental illness deferments were the most popular way to dodge conscription, besides university. You’d bribe a psychiatrist into saying you were certifiably cuckoo. The problem was that so many of the new rich received mental illness deferments, none were left for the actually mentally ill. My unit had two schizophrenics, a handful of manic depressives, and a guy who received regular visitations from angels. The insanity of war, eh?”
“How much did the deferments go for?”
“More than you can afford,” he said. The breeze of an approaching train whipped through my hair, but Kirill’s, slick with vegetable shortening, remained unmoved.
THE weeks passed. I hadn’t touched heroin since the night my father found what remained of the five-hundred-ruble check. I kept waiting for withdrawal to kick in — they can’t send me to Chechnya if I’m bouncing around a padded room — but I guess you don’t get withdrawal after using it four times in five months. Can’t even get addicted to drugs properly. Each morning I woke at four thirty and helped Kirill dress. We breakfasted on Java Gold cigarettes and worked the train cars until noon. One day we bought lunch from an elderly Georgian whose osteoporosis lived in him like a black hole slowly sucking his whole body stomach-ward. Kirill was going on about the metro system again.
“It’s the thirteenth busiest in the world,” he said between small bites of sausage. It was a holy day, the Feast of Peter and Paul, and humidity leached from the city’s pores. “Yet Petersburg is only the world’s forty-fifth biggest city. What does this tell you?”
“That we’re too poor to afford cars?”
“Idiot. It tells you we have a metro to be proud of. New York, London, you think their metros have crystal chandeliers and marble floors and bronze statues?”
“Of course they do.”
“They do not,” he insisted. “They have graffiti and crumbling walls and hoodlums who push decent commuters into oncoming trains. They do not have beauty. They do not have a Palace of the People.”
“That’s a TV show, right?” I said. Finally, a shared interest.
“I’m not talking about a TV show! I’m talking about the metro. The Palace of the People, that’s what Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev called it. A palace not for tsars or princes, but for you and me.”
“Off to your palace then, Comrade,” I suggested, and wheeled him to the Pushkinskaya station entrance.
“You shouldn’t work on April twentieth,” he said as I lifted him over the turnstile. “The skinhead gangs are always the worst on Hitler’s birthday.”
It was still summer. I didn’t see how his advice applied to me.
“What would you do if, you know,” I said, nodding to his stumps when we reached the platform.
“If I still had legs?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d start an autoerotic asphyxiation service,” he said without hesitation.
“What?”
“Autoerotic asphyxiation. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it?”