Fireproof

It has become increasingly evident that this bus driver has lost his mind.  Either that, or he’s paid by the mile.  He has the massive diesel beast mostly in the shoulder with the left wheels in the road on the other side of the curb, so the bus is tilted like a Formula One car careening around a banked turn.  The Russians around me pay no mind; an Umberto Eco novel has absorbed my wife’s attention, and our English/Polish friend is held rapt by a Polish book that I know nothing about because it’s in Polish.  Behind the mucous-green aluminum sheeting that the bus threatens to scrape along are the ramshackle dachas on checkerboard plots that have caused the current congestion; come the weekend, those who can leave the city’s chaos for the relative serenity of the countryside do so.  They crawl along the main highway that was built to handle Soviet-era traffic between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, which, many decades and an economic revolution later, is in no way near sufficient.  There are no overpasses or underpasses, just stoplights, and a shocking dearth of lanes.  We–the bus, I mean–suddenly and completely leaves the road and accelerates, and the mucous-green aluminum becomes seafoam green aluminum, waves of it skimming by like a final approach to a Caribbean airport.  I’m pressing my head against the window contemplating a nap, staring down at idling motorists in the midst of fiddling with the A/C or the radio or a vanity mirror, and one particularly nonchalant driver perusing a newspaper.  I look left and then right: the deathly gray of the suburbia-scape is behind, and Crayola summer is ahead.  One start, one wild swerve, one screeching, break-pad-shredding stop at a time.

There are a lot of thoughts in my head wrestling for my attention.  My true attention, my higher consciousness, some bit of existential evidence to be seized upon and inspected closely.  I’ve always been too overwhelmed to remember things well.  Instead, in my eagerness to analyze and file things away, they jostle one another forward and backward, and it’s a thousand unrelated pictures in a single schizophrenic flip-book, with this peripheral but never fully confronted notion that there are countless species of anxiety lurking, identified, but never named.  There is so much stuff to do.  I need to go to the Russian Post, which I figure to be the closest possible approximation of hell outside of a war zone.  It’s an alternate universe where everyone waits and waits until frozen and mournfully statuesque or absently statuesque and nothing ever happens, and you can feel everyone’s irritation, or even worse, their ground down weary acceptance.  I need to wring a few rubles from the insurance company before I leave my job and lose coverage.  Fill in their slate gray forms and scour bank statements for alphanumeric codes and add money to our savings that I don’t yet have.  I need to teach, teach, teach, despite the waning enthusiasm inherent to the last two weeks of a job.  The cloud overhanging of imminent unemployment swells with rain at every "And what are you going to be doing?"  Memories of the acid anticipation, the fiery fear burning acres of my insides on an airplane in November 2010, a one-way ticket finally finding its bookend. And I’ve got clipped bits of old Death Cab for Cutie lyrics in a loop, but incomplete, like a spent reel of unfocused film flipping around and the loose tail of it goes thwap…They’re all different names for the…thwap…like someone would hold…thwap. But now, today, a beautiful Saturday in the poignantly brief Russian summer, I’m sweating a kamikaze bus ride to Solnechnogorsk.

The coat-of-arms for Solnechnogorsk depicts a golden sun emitting a golden triangle of light upon three stylized golden trees, all against a pristine, azure sky.  This is false advertising.  Perhaps it was meant to be ironic–which I doubt–but an honest emblem would feature one normal-looking birch tree, a smoggy film of diffused light, and the dirty faces of anonymous, cookie-cutter apartment buildings with clothespin sails, and distemperate rubbish in the unkempt yards and ambling alleys.  The plastic facades of imported hypercapitalism proudly inform: 24 hours.  24 hours of shoveling shit into a bottomless pit, quietly cursing as the shovel becomes somehow both smaller and heavier.  And every person I see I assume that they would live somewhere else if they could, but it’s an idea no longer countenanced in order to yearn for; it’s in the slumped shoulders weighed down by over-packed grocery bags, in the harlequin make-up and gauzy, translucent skirts, lithe legs silhouetted, the countless beer bottles jigsawed across the fractured parking lots.  It’s East St. Louis or Detroit through the looking glass, soot-souled heavy industry stripped down and reassembled in foreign parts unknown.

We’ve brought my mother-in-law a new 32" LCD TV.  It’s the most expensive present I’ve ever bought a person; indeed, it’s one of the most expensive things I’ve ever bought, period.  A hobbled warehouseman at M-Video had placed his hand atop the box and shrieked his tape gun over it repeatedly, creating a dubious handle that has held up surprisingly well during the journey.  As I walk, I’m uncomfortably aware of the alarming thump of the back of the television’s box against my foot, and I quietly dread opening the box to find a very nice and very broken television.  My mother-in-law, Lyudmila, is delighted to see us and exclaims in Russian, which still seems to me like a waterfall of patternless sound.  She is wearing a tight black dress and her gray hair closely-cropped, and her face unfurls in an amazed smile at the present, which I may or may not have bought in part to assuage some feelings of guilt.  She says something to me, and I shrug bashfully, hopelessly, and she kisses me on the cheek.  We pry the television out of its box and plug it in: success.  Lyudmila’s boyfriend, a potbellied former Soviet soldier sporting a sleeveless blue t-shirt with a zippered breast pocket (the type of early 90’s anachronism one expects to see in Russia), arrives with barely post-toddler daughter in tow.  It’s an incongruous match, the middle-aged man and a single-digit-aged daughter, but I don’t know and I can’t ask.  We load six butts into five seats and head for dinner.  I try to file it away, all of it, things packed in too tight to move to board trains of thought to nowhere destinations.

At dinner, the boyfriend asks me through my wife, a certified translator, how long I’ve been in Russia.  I know the follow up question already, so I’m loathe to answer.  Why don’t I speak more Russian? for which there is no reasonable excuse.  My sister-in-law, Svetlana, and three year-old nephew, Roman, arrive.  Roman is disgustingly cute, tow-headed and bright-eyed, and I know that my wife will miss him something terrible.  He walks with a strange sort of bounce, as if stepping over an invisible, miniature hurdle, and takes strides that are too long for his legs.  Our English/Polish friend (usually one or the other, but almost never both) chases him around; I think if he could fit in a suitcase, he’d probably wake up one day in Krakow. He rambles on at me in what sounds to me like a cartoon voice, no doubt made cartoonish by my inability to understand.  The fact I neither respond nor react to what he says does little to discourage him.  The vodka arrives in a small decanter, the type of which I’ve only seen in Russia.  I’ve this sudden suspicion that I should drink it with the boyfriend, although he has fifty pounds on me, and he pours me at least three fingers of it.  He stands up, and sticks his elbow out while holding his wrist in.  It has a veneer of formality, like someone being Russian for a non-Russian’s sake, until a percussive laugh escapes his chest.  I stand up and smile, assuring myself that even if I vomit, I’m only in Russia for another two weeks.  The vodka scalds all the way down, but the way I see it, my guts are fireproof.