Aetherial Worlds Read online

  I, for one, have never been in love with waterfalls, or high-heeled shoes, or a woman, or dancing, or inscriptions, or coins, but I know those who have been and were blinded by their love, and I understand them. Maybe one day I’ll fall in love with something from that list—who’s to know? It happens suddenly, without warning, and it envelops you immediately and completely.

  In this way, Eric was the object of my obsessive and inexplicable love. I had to rid myself of it somehow. Overcome it, somehow.

  * * *

  —

  I’m sitting in a bagel shop (the one that feels like Paris), looking out at the blue night, the snowy scene like a stage set. We’ll take Route 50, just follow me, then we’ll make a turn at the fork, Eric telepathically communicates. I drop my magazine, steal a bunch of napkins to wrap up my cranberry scone, bus my table, bundle myself up in my scarf—I’m warm, my blood is red-hot, my palms and my heels are like boiling water; I don’t know about you, but I could burn holes in the ice; yes, I’m the only one like this in your gingerbread town—and walk out onto the street, which is spruced up with swaying garlands of sparkling lights. I drive down Route 50, make a turn at the fork, and pull over. Cars are whizzing past me in a hurry to get home. Or away from home. Who’s to say?

  Eric stops his car, gets into mine.

  “I have an idea,” he says. “We should go to Lake George.”

  “What’s there?”

  “A motel. It’s beautiful there. We can go this weekend. She’ll be visiting her mother in Boston.”

  “And what’s happening in Boston?”

  “Uh…her mother has some sort of anniversary coming up. She can’t miss it.”

  “Why aren’t you going?”

  “I have an urgent deadline and an inflammation of the gallbladder.”

  “I wouldn’t buy that.”

  “Neither will she. It’s just an excuse.”

  I look into his sad, gray, sincere eyes.

  “In our culture,” he says, “the most important thing about an excuse is that it be plausible.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes.”

  “So any kind of a lie is okay? Even an outrageous one?”

  “Yes. As long as there is plausible deniability.”

  “You know, we’re big on lying, too. I doubt you’re the world leaders there.”

  “We respect other people; we try to lie credibly.”

  “Okay. Good thing I’m leaving soon and never coming back.”

  “You can’t leave!”

  “Sure I can.”

  “What if I killed her?”

  “What for? She didn’t do anything.”

  “No, I think I’ll kill her. It’ll make things easier for me.”

  “But not for me.”

  We both just sit there, sulking. Then Eric asks, “Did you know that buckwheat, sorrel, and rhubarb are related?”

  “I didn’t. What stunning news.”

  “There are two types of buckwheat: bitter and sweet.”

  “There is also a Polish type, a special varietal called ‘Crappy.’ ”

  “You’ll leave and fall out of love with me.”

  “Yes. I’ll leave, fall out of love, and forget you.”

  Eric’s feelings are hurt. “Women shouldn’t say such things! They should say: ‘I’ll never, ever forget you! I’ll never, ever stop loving you!’ ”

  “That’s women lying plausibly out of respect for other people. Of course they’ll forget. Everything is forgettable. In that lies salvation.”

  “I’d like to break your heart,” says Eric vengefully.

  “Only solid things break. I am water. I’ll run off and seep through somewhere else.”

  “Yes!” he says, with sudden anger. “Women are water! That’s why they cry all the time!”

  We sit in silence for a long time, as our car is swept by a fine, dry, rustling snowstorm.

  “It’s coming down like rice,” says Eric, “like tsa.”

  It’s as if he’s reading my mind. It’s hard to stop loving Eric. I have to pull myself together. I have to turn my heart into ice.

  But then wouldn’t that mean it could break?

  * * *

  §

  It’s the second half of December, only a week till Christmas. The central street of our town, that ubiquitous “Main Street,” is ablaze with gold, green, and crimson shop windows, strings of lights stretched from pole to shining pole. There are so many Christmas lights that the snow, as it blows through the street, appears multicolored: multicolored sparkling vo that sounds like tsa. “Jingle Bells” creeps and seeps ad nauseam from under every door, drilling holes in your brain and turning it into a sieve; by the umpteenth store you want to run up swinging a baseball bat, and—whack! whack! whack!—smash the crap out of the mirrored glass. But, of course, one has to contain oneself.

  I’m picking out some gifts for myself: an embroidered tablecloth, scented candles, and striped pillowcases. I don’t need any of it, but that’s no reason not to buy it. Back in the day, the Magi also brought strange gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It’s unclear what they meant by it, what they were hinting at, and where those gifts wound up, although all kinds of beautiful explanations were later proposed: gold for kingship on earth, myrrh for mortality, frankincense for burning, believing, and praying. Legend has it that the gold was stolen by two thieves, and that thirty-three years later those two very thieves were crucified, one to the left and one to the right of our Savior. Jesus promised that if they would believe in Him, they would be with Him in heaven that day. Since they all went back to nursery days, as it were. Here, truly, was a case of someone benefitting both from Christ’s birth and His death.

  I also really like this beautiful, soft purse with silver inserts, but something about it perturbs me. Who is the artisan? What if it’s Emma? The saleswoman doesn’t know, and the owner of the shop isn’t here. An inner voice, perhaps it’s the amulet, tells me: Don’t buy it. Don’t buy anything; put back the tablecloth, and return the candles to where you found them. Nothing here is yours; it’s all Emma’s. All of it.

  “Thanks, I changed my mind. No, I don’t need the pillowcases, either.”

  * * *

  —

  Eric is hosting a Christmas party, his last gathering of the year. He sends me a wordless invitation—we have fine-tuned our communication technique: Come by tonight, I’ll make nge properly. Don’t you want nge? Oh, for God’s sake, Eric, I only want one thing—for someone to erase you from my eyes, from my heart, from my memory. To forget everything, to be free. “No dreams, no recollections, and no sounds,” surrounded only by a dark sky in a snowy blizzard, and nothing else, just as on the second day of Creation. So I can purify myself of you and begin anew. I need to begin anew, for I won’t be coming back here again.

  * * *

  —

  Lights are shimmering; Christmas songs are seeping out of everywhere, making their way inside your brain. In a few days the baby Jesus will be born. Does this mean He’s not among us now, absent, just as before Easter? Does this mean that He’s abandoned us during the darkest, gloomiest, most commercialized and hopeless week of the year? And does this mean there is no one to turn to inside your heart, no one to ask what to do? Figure it out yourself, is that it? Not far from town there is a Russian monastery. The monks there are sullen hobgoblins, of the standard sort, but perhaps it’s worth a visit for some advice? What if among them is one with a strange, all-seeing heart? I could ask him: Is it a sin to kill and trample love within yourself?

  Alas, the blizzard has swept over the back roads, and there is no way of getting to the monastery in this weather. There is no Russian Orthodox church in town. I can’t go to the Evangelicals, or whatever—those aren’t churches, they’re community centers where they encourage bright-ey
ed honesty and where you’re greeted by a ruddy man in a blazer—“Hello, sister! Jesus Christ has a wonderful plan for your salvation!” Somehow that plan will entail loving thy neighbor and immediately sitting down to gift-wrap donations with youthful, undertreated drug addicts from broken homes. Or coming together for a sing-along with tambourine accompaniment. Or listening to a sister-in-Christ speak: some lady in a nubby cardigan, in the manic stage of a bipolar episode, who insists it’s because of her relationship with our Lord and Savior that her chocolate chip cookies always come out so well. Always.

  Well, I don’t want to love my neighbor. I’d like to stop loving him, actually.

  The Catholics have a much better setup. Their church is more mysterious, but now is not the time to be there: it’s too bright, too festive, too joyful, full of too many happy expectations, and I just can’t; I don’t want joy, I just want to sit in a dark room full of vile and bitter people so I can turn my heart into ice. Because life is but smoke and shadows.

  * * *

  —

  I drive to visit the hexadactyls: there is a small town nearby where almost everybody has six fingers. They are all related, from one big family. Way back, one of their forefathers happened to have a sixth finger, and the deformity was passed on to subsequent generations. Now they are everywhere: at the gas station, in the bank, at the local stores. At the pharmacy window. At the bar. At the café. Full of bitterness and spite.

  It feels good here, it feels right. A bitter waitress brings me my coffee; she knows that I’m looking at her hand, and I bet she has already spat in my cup as a preemptive measure: cappuccinos are well designed for this. Okay, lady, I feel you. A spiteful hexadactyl bartender is wiping down glasses, and a sullen young man sits on a barstool talking to him; it’s so strange to see which fingers he’s using to hold his cigarette. Is there a name for this extra digit? And do the local six-fingered grannies knit special gloves for their six-fingered grandkids?

  They cast unwelcoming side-glances at me, knowing full well I’m here to gawk at them. They instantly sniff out us nosy scum, the normal, regular-looking strangers, who out of boredom or schadenfreude, to lift our own spirits and have a cheap thrill, come to seek out those for whom having more is no cause for joy.

  One could also spit into seltzer with great pleasure. Or into Diet Dr Pepper, the cherry-flavored one with fewer calories. Me—I’m water. Spit at me, you ugly and miserable people, for I am planning a murder.

  * * *

  —

  The Nativity is only a day away—just twenty-four hours left without our Lord. Eric is right: it’s time for decisive action—time to get rid of her. She’s a witch: she’s sewn all the clothes in town, made all the quilts so I couldn’t hide under them with Eric, knitted all the scarves and the shawls to strangle me with, stitched all the boots to hobble my feet so I couldn’t escape, baked all the bagels and scones so I would choke on their crumbs. She poisons food, cuts up bird tracheas into the pale sauce, boils cartilage and skin to put a curse on me, to turn me into a turkey with a comb for a nose. She picks cranberries in a swamp, ones that smell like a crow’s armpit. She paints sets. Once she’s finished, it’ll be too late. If not now, then when?

  * * *

  —

  I arrive at Eric and Emma’s. The screen door has been removed for the winter, the wooden one is wide open, and through the storm door you can see the flames dancing in the fireplace. The guests—campus colleagues that I’m, quite frankly, already fed up with—stand around the buffet, twirling wineglasses filled with cheap wine. Eric has made nge; he’s proudly admiring the pinkish heap of buckwheat, as if it contains a secret meaning of some kind.

  But there is none.

  It’s crappy food.

  He bought that Polish muck again.

  A lovely Mozart recording is playing in the background. Emma’s third eye has finally hatched: blue and bloodshot, without eyelashes, it’s covered with a translucent extra eyelid, like a bird’s. But what good can it do her now? It’s useless.

  Eric, Eric, get ready. Don’t drink any wine—you have to drive. We’ll go to Lake George and drown her there.

  Telepathy is a wonderful and truly convenient means of communication. It’s indispensable in social situations.

  Why Lake George, specifically?

  I don’t know any other lakes around here. It was your idea.

  The guests disperse early to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities, to wrap presents in sparkly paper. As for us, we get into the car: Eric and Emma in front, and me in the back. Emma is using two eyes to look ahead at the snowstorm and her third eye to look into my heart, that piece of wicked, black ice; thanks to my silver amulet she can’t see what’s in store for her.

  It’s pitch-dark at the lake, but Eric has brought a flashlight. We walk along a fisherman’s path—seems we are not the only ice-fishing enthusiasts in the area. Today, however, the others are all at home, warm and cozy, by their decked-out trees.

  The ice hole is covered with a thin layer of frost.

  “What are we doing here?” Emma wants to know.

  “That’s what!”

  We push Emma into the ice hole. Black water splashes my feet. Emma struggles, trying to grab on to the sharp, icy edges. Eric pushes her, using an ice pick for good measure—wait, where did the ice pick come from? Doesn’t matter. Bloop. Done. They won’t find her till spring.

  “My hands are freezing,” Eric complains.

  “So are my feet. Let’s have a drink.”

  “You brought booze?”

  “And meat pirozhki. They are still warm: I wrapped them in foil.”

  And right there on the ice, we drink Popov vodka out of a flask—awful swill, truth be told. We eat meat pies. We finally kiss as free people—relieved to know that no one will see us, or stop us. Freedom is precious, as every American understands. I toss the flask and our leftovers into the water. Take off the silver amulet and throw it in there, too: it’s served me well but I don’t need it anymore.

  We slowly walk back toward the shore.

  The ice cracks under Eric’s feet, and he falls up to his armpits into a snowed-over ice hole.

  “Ahh! Give me your hand!”

  I step away from the ice hole’s edge.

  “No, Eric. Farewell!”

  “What do you mean, ‘farewell’?! What the—What do you mean? Why ‘farewell’?”

  Yes, farewell. Don’t grab at me, don’t call after me, just forget me. Well, you won’t remember, will you, because you don’t exist, you’re an invention; you don’t exist and never did. I don’t know you, I never talked to you, and I have no idea what your name is, tall stranger, sitting at a table across the room from me in a dingy student cafeteria, enveloped by darkness and smoke, in your rimless glasses, holding a cigarette with your lanky fingers, like those of an imaginary pianist.

  * * *

  —

  I finish my last cigarette—it’s easy to get lost in thought and absentmindedly go through an entire pack. Wrapping myself up in a warm shawl, I leave without looking back, walking from the shadows and smoke into a blinding December snowstorm.

  Passing Through

  Things, as we know, disappear—often under strange circumstances—and they don’t come back. That which happens with socks and the washing machine is known to all. It’s a universal mystery, and some even refer to the washing machine as a “sock eater.”

  Of course, there are rational explanations for this strange and selective disappearance phenomenon. Basically, three of them:

  1. The washing machine sucks the socks in through the holes in the drum during the spin cycle.

  This explanation is ignorant and ridiculous.

  2. Socks get entangled in the other laundry, perhaps slipping into the corners of duvet covers and staying there quietly, like flattened mice.


  This isn’t actually so much an explanation as it is an attempt at avoiding one—every experienced doer of laundry, furious at yet another disappearance, shakes and turns all bed linens inside out. And besides, duvet covers must be ironed—there is no place to hide.

  3. You’re imagining things.

  Nope, not imagining. I spent almost a decade in an apartment I absolutely loved, but all good things must come to an end, and I had to move out. The apartment was stripped bare to the wallpaper, and I ended up taking that down, too, by way of revenge on the new tenant, a young communist-turned-priest, who pulled some political strings to evict me unfairly, just as the rain did to the itsy-bitsy spider. Not only did I strip off the wallpaper, I also removed all the doors. So with everything open to view, in the corners, under the ghosts of beds and sofas, a few socks were recovered. Four socks, to be exact, unmatched.

  I had long suspected that my washing machine was up to no good, so I developed a system: any unpaired sock that was extracted from it, instead of getting thrown out, was carefully stored in a special box. Times were tough—Soviet tough—good socks didn’t grow on trees, and I had two boys and my husband to think of: that’s six feet total! But I wasn’t saving these socks out of poverty or thrift, but rather out of spite. The machine’s name was Oka. She was semiautomatic. I hated her.

  And so, after recovering those four single socks and finding their pairs in my sock box, I counted the rest: there were forty-seven single socks. Forty-seven! That’s what my “Oka” had swallowed in eight years. So no, I’m not imagining. Not at all.

  * * *

  —

  Other things dear to one’s heart also tend to disappear: they were just here, and now they’re nowhere to be found, but no one could have taken them, and there is no explanation for this. That little jar—it was just on this shelf! Where is it? Where did it go?