“Eventually he stopped and stripped off his clothing and froze under the golden sky like some grieving angel.”
In Gondatevka we huddled under a freeway overpass, catching our breath and shivering there in a crust of waning autumn. The sky was a smokescreen of blue night, black shadow. This neighborhood was mostly auto-repair shops, and all around us was a galaxy of twisted chassis and empty car bodies – here the front of a taxi cab, there a three-wheeled van tipped on its side – and everywhere a scattering of shattered windowglass, stars all aglitter on the pavement like the sky had fallen. Just beyond, a vacant factory let moonlight pass through shattered windows.
Terry and Hunt were ahead of me, talking, but they were having separate conversations, each answering the other’s questions with complaints about their own lives. I wasn’t saying anything. We were on our way back from some dive of an expat bar and already the alcohol was beginning to lift us off our feet.
Soon Terry and Hunt ran out of complaints and the three of us drifted across an empty street past busted windows and empty shops. A car headlight sat in the road like a plucked eye.
“I think this is where Dennis died,” Terry said. “Isn’t it? Somewhere in this neighborhood.”
I looked around for some sign of the hospital. It was just off this half-clover interchange, and in the daylight I probably could have found it, but now in the dark it was a hopeless errand. We moved on.
“One fewer foreigner,” Hunt grumbled. “If the rest of you could jump out of windows, too, there’d be more girls for the rest of us.”
“You’re only after the Russian girls,” I said. “Do they have to jump, too?”
“Of course they don’t. Don’t be foolish.”
Hunt was drunker than Terry and me. He spoke English well and affected a decent American accent, but the bones of his mother tongue were starting to poke through, and in drunkenness his odd turns of phrase stood out in sharper relief.
“He was thrown out the window, mate,” Terry said. “No one jumps off the fifth floor.”
“I think he probably deserved it.”
“You don’t have to be so blunt about it,” I murmured.
“He didn’t kill himself.” Terry sighed and jammed his thumbs into his pockets. “The police threw him out the window.”
Silence settled. Not even Hunt would mention that for a full week Dennis had inched toward his agonizing death in the same hospital room he’d fallen from, his body broken and paralyzed. Had the window looked the same to him then?
We’d been wandering awhile. At first we were just walking to sober up, but now we were walking because it was easier than stopping or going home, and anyway how could anyone ever find their way out of a neighborhood like this – the sky was dark with the loops and circuits of the ring road, and that was all these blocks were good for anymore, just a place for traffic jams and interchanges, never a destination. Elevated highways bypassed Gondatevka so wholly that the city had forgotten its name. Now it was just another New Town slum.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” Terry said, to no one. “The neighbors were fighting again. He was just screaming fucking cunt, fucking cunt all night.”
I looked around. I used to work in this neighborhood two or three years ago, and this was the first I’d been back. It was hard to tell if anything had changed. In the daylight it lurched along in dull poverty – all traffic caught up in the tangle of off-ramps and on-ramps that paralyzed the streets, narrow for throngs of prostitutes and touts and collapsing labyrinths of bungalows, trash heaps, salvage yards, factories-turned-apartments, and those identical tenements that littered the city whole. But now the streets were quiet apart from us, and I barely remembered what I used to do here. I’d worked in a shabby office next to a karaoke bar. There was a little electric fan and two or three chairs, and none of us really knew what we were doing, except we were supposed to be writing copy and translating legal documents, and most days my mind would wander and I’d watch the prostitutes – underdressed and overdressed all at once – promenade up and down the street in hopes of snagging one of the boys from a nearby university. Since then nothing had improved.
“Hunt,” Terry mumbled, “where’s your house, mate?”
Hunt clapped him on the shoulder.
“You boys think you’re taking me home?”
“I think I’m heading back,” I said, checking the time on my phone. “It’s late.”
“One more drink. I’ll buy it this time.”
“Your generosity is unprecedented. What’s the occasion.”
“Celebrating another dead foreigner.”
Hunt grumbled and disappeared into a nearby business. The lights were out and the place looked closed, but he lived around here and apparently knew better.
Somewhere in the dark Terry sighed.
“I was friends with Dennis.”
“Was it true what they said about him?”
“I don’t know, comrade.” He grimaced, and it looked like he was struggling hard to hold back his real feelings. “I heard the stories, too. They probably came from somewhere.”
“And you were friends with the guy?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “We just talked at the bar sometimes. Just politics, football…”
But it didn’t matter anymore if the rumors were true. Dennis was gone, and Terry was visibly shaken by it.
“I can’t believe how many people…”
The tenement blocks cut jagged rooflines against the blue night. Sometimes I thought I made out the shapes of men up there – standing, watching – but these were only satellite dishes and antennas.
Yesterday I saw a video of a man pacing back and forth along the edge of a high-rise rooftop. Eventually he stopped and stripped off his clothing and froze under the golden sky like some grieving angel. For a long time he waited, barely moving, and the videographer zoomed in and leered at the man’s naked body, devouring it whole, and for a moment everything went out of focus. In a final jolt the man leaped over the side with his arms forward and hands together. The impact occurred out of frame.
It was the third such video I’d seen this week alone, and I was starting to wonder if there weren’t some mass hysteria compelling people to dive off rooftops.
“I know it was the police,” Terry said. “I heard he punched one of them up when he was arrested.”
“You’re making this all sound very inevitable.”
“Maybe, mate.” He sighed. “I just can’t believe he’s dead.”
That was the overall tenor of public opinion since Dennis’s death – no grief, just shock.
Hunt shambled out of the dark with a bottle of liquor in his fist.
“You can be my dead foreigners,” he said as he uncapped the bottle. He took a drink and passed it around. I took a drink. It was counterfeit whiskey and we’d probably end up sick. “Dennis was an inspiring leader to all of you.” The bottle had found its way back to his fist. He raised it in a toast. “I hope that he will continue to inspire you.” He drank. “Follow him always.”
Terry glanced at me in a rare moment of discomfort.
“Let’s find some little sisters,” Hunt went on, motioning broadly down the street.
“You’re married.” Terry sighed. “Comrade. Don’t cheat on your wife.”
“I’m an artist.”
I snatched the bottle away and took a sip myself.
“Yeah? What’s your medium?”
“I have an artistic temperament.”
“Then we’re all fucking artists, aren’t we.”
The streets moved passed us, and alleys leered blackeyed from secret corners of abandoned blocks. The whiskey traveled from one mouth to the next, making endless circuits, and soon Gondatevka started cracking at its old seams. The shadows changed shape as we wended deeper into the heart of the neighborhood – fewer highrises, sharper angles – here the jagged arches of an old streetcar garage, now a repair shop – there a looming Art Deco tenement, already half-collapsed and yearning for a wrecking ball. Some of the buildings were decorated with cheap press-on trim – probably to add a bit of European charm – but they were as sad and broken as anything else here.
Terry’s voice murmured dust in the shadows.
“I should just go next door and stop him from hitting her.”
The hospital was coming up on the right. If it weren’t for the flickering sign I never would have distinguished it from all the Stalinist apartment blocks that looked exactly like it. I left Terry and Hunt and drifted closer to the place. There were no lights anywhere and the windows were black to a pane. Which window had Dennis been thrown from? I looked for some telltale detail, though I couldn’t imagine what such a detail might look like. Maybe I’d know it when I saw it.
Dennis was hardly the first person we knew to have died like this, and although his situation was more peculiar than the others, he probably wouldn’t be the last. But it felt unlucky to talk about, so I kept my mouth shut, and so did Terry. Instead I thought of medieval dancing plagues and laughing manias and strange compulsions. But maybe it wasn’t so mysterious – I knew just as many people who’d drunk themselves to death here.
The complete version of ‘Gondatevka’ can be found in Moon Tenements, a forthcoming chapbook of short fiction.
Leave a Reply