A Broken Egg

Christmas in Moscow, it should be noted, is not Christmas at all.  It is a day much like any other.  Sure, the average Muscovite might casually comment upon it in passing.  A bit of small talk: "Say, it’s Christmas in the west today, isn’t it?"  But it’s just as likely that a random American might stop on January 7th and remark to another, "Say, it’s Christmas in Russia today, isn’t?"  That is to say, not likely at all.
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For the most part, Christmas is not a big deal in Moscow.  Under Communist rule, the Russian Orthodox Church was largely suppressed; it was not outright illegal, but it can be frightening to celebrate Christmas when you know your priest is currently splitting rocks in a gulag.  They don’t teach quarrying in seminary school, either.

There are some Christmas trees, sure, but they feel almost obligatory.  Today, January 7th, is Christmas in Russia, and it feels like a random-ass Friday.
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It has been a month.  Adam died some time back.  Although I did not know him well, I knew enough to know it a bit selfish of the universe to steal him away so young.  Not that the cosmos was ever an entity for bargaining; I never knew a universe less inclined toward compromise.  Sometimes I dream that I’m dead, and the afterlife is spent driving around a massive city encircled by skyscraper walls, and I’m increasingly impatient for an invitation.  I imagine some unabashedly self-unaware onion domes placidly peeking above the battlements, crested by an uncertain symbol against a paisley sky.

Adam and I had acted together in a community troupe.  Last I’d seen him, he’d been the Sheriff to my King John.  He liked to tuck his long blond hair behind his ears, exposing an open and gregarious face.  I can recall him as witty, and playing "The Final Countdown" by Europe before the opening curtain.  All-in-all, however, I do not remember him well.  Our respective lives were tangential, a line skipped across the surface of a circle.  And it wasn’t that he bounced off, but it was that I did not let him in.  So I spent a few hours reading a growing litany of memories on a Facebook Wall, and it felt eerily enough like reading the first installment of a trilogy to which there would never be a final two books.  The author had retired, and he had wandered home.  And now that man’s social networking identity has become a constant memorial.

It is odd to think that in a hundred years, Facebook might be a virtual catalog of inane conversations amongst the dead, a web of relationships which unfolds and then spreads like the passages of some medieval catacombs.
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I’ve no concept of how Moscow spreads out.  None.  Traveling underground keeps me from understanding where I am, where I’m going, and where I came from.  I walk by Metro stations in which I’ve transferred, not recognizing it, not understanding I’ve been in the same place, if only an escalator’s length downward.  It’s amazing how a person can travel for some period of time within the earth and come out into an environment that is entirely alien.
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It’s fucking pathetic how five months can transform "You’ll always have a special place within my aorta" (an odd phrasing) into "I trusted you, and it was the biggest mistake of my life."  These are the things that happen when you travel underground; if you don’t surface to confront the reality overhead, it will tumble down the stairwell like a bouncing twelve-pound cannonball.  Now most of the year is a trail of carnage; mine mixed with hers, much to her chagrin: it should be harder to slap the shackles on a man just as bit.  I wonder at the fickleness of passing the buck and espousing regret only in the face of consequence: the words were worthless, I guess, yesterday’s newspaper lining the bottom of a myna bird’s cage.  Good only for being shat on and recording the repetitions of history.  I’ll take all of the blame, I suppose, if she promises to bear the burden of all of my foolishness.

She once told me I was permanent.  I guess I am, and maybe I do "have a special place within her aorta," but only as the mid-beat palpitation, an arrhythmic anomaly keeping oxygen or refusing to accept it; a little chamber in the subconscious, the insane asylum of the psyche, that little "special place" where, for a split second, in a place between the lungs and the heart and within the aorta, where the blood blackens and sours.  I suppose that place is mine, though I’d rather it not be so.  It may be my place, but I’m not in at the moment.  Truth be told, that empty office and that line of work is half of a world and a year of half-finished nightmares away.  That building was condemned, and is post-demolition.
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When I stand watching a train to pull into the platform, I’ve a second of certainty that the random person standing behind me is going to push me in front of the screeching locomotive.  I feel a second of pity for bugs on a windshield; I ponder that, and feel a second of pity for myself.  I bury it deep and let it turn into indigestion.
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Ordering food here is annoyingly difficult.  No, they do not make you fill out a questionnaire or sing for your dinner, but they do prefer a person to speak in Russian.  It’s a bugger, it is, and as I strain over the counter pointing at the picture of the sandwich I want, I feel like a profoundly ignorant dipshit.  There’s nothing like pantomiming a chicken, fake slaughtering myself (the chicken), and then mimicking putting my slaughtered chicken carcass on a sesame seed bun.  In order to circumvent the hassle of performing charades for a bored-looking adolescent in a filthy black visor, I stand behind my company in line.  That way, after they order, I point to them and say in a loud, sonorous, and idiotic voice: "the same."  It doesn’t matter if I wanted it or not; at some point, a person will choke down a cat meat sandwich–and this person is allergic to cats–if it means salvaging a scrap of dignity.  Not to mention you can forgo the weight of having nine people behind you who, for about three minutes, would be perfectly willing to personally purchase you a ticket back to the United States.

Some years back, Kentucky Fried Chicken tried to open a few franchises in Russia, and they failed miserably.  Evidently, the Russian people don’t feel any strong predilection toward Kentuckian cuisine.  They did, however, have an already-existing franchise called "POSTNK’C" (I can’t really faithfully depict the Cyrillic Alphabet, so imagine the "N" backwards, and it’s pronounced Rostick’s) that was quite popular.  American business ingenuity being what it is, KFC simply bought it.  So now below every "POSTNK’S" plastered on a business facade, there is, almost as if a footnote, a teeny "KFC."  They don’t have the mashed potatoes or southern-style biscuits, however.  I’d be more willing to make an ass out of myself for those.  Instead, I just wait for my next opportunity to tie a few on; there’s a little bit of jackass in every drink.
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It’s amazing the type of courage a bottle of Jack can rivet into your constitution.  I woke up next to her kind of confused, but mostly just self-satisfied.  Not in that sense; more along the lines of tripping step one in a Rube Goldberg machine, and now it was time to see if the end result would be a broken egg.  She was mad at me, she said, because I had refused, before climbing into her bed, to remove my clothing.  "You told me to undress?"  She nodded solemnly.  "And I didn’t?"  She nodded again.  What the hell?

The New Year was spent drunk, true.  But it was also spent reveling in a jawline that smells like milk and honey, or resting my a nose in the hollow of her neck, as if her clavicles had been pointing and insisting upon it.  It was spent in the early-evening half-light in underwear, following emotions like signposts to a place where uncertainty punches your gut and kisses your brain all at the same time.  I left, quietly hoping that that wouldn’t be the end of it.  There was something interesting beyond the English accent and the daybreak smile and the sexy walk in a pair of "knickers."  There was a weight in that heart and lead in that head I wanted to remove and toss to the bottom of the Moscow River, so that daybreak smile might transform into a permanent sunrise.
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As we sit in the Japanese/Italian cuisine restaurant (that is not a joke–this seems to be a common culinary combination in Moscow), I order drinks that remind me of home.  A mojito that was fairly well-made.  A Bloody Mary that wasn’t so impressive.  She orders a couple of glasses of red wine.  "The cheapest kind," she had cheerily informed me, before ordering again–in Russian, of course.  When the bill came, she insisted upon paying.  This put me in an odd place; as far as I know, it’s quite taboo to let the woman pay.  She insisted, and being the deferential Midwestern lad that I am, I reluctantly agreed.

She told me that she loved Chelsea, a soccer team in the Premier League.  I nodded and asked semi-informed questions; she humored me and answered them.  I learned about differences between Russian authors and the things expected of Russian students.  About her family, about her lovely nephew, and she pulled "home-laminated" photographs out of her purse.  Most of all, somewhere between the words, I realized she was a person somehow trapped; a person looking for a way out, almost.  Of what, I wasn’t certain.  But I’d hoped she knew that beyond all of the wonderful things she did, there was something profoundly worthwhile about her, and that she deserves to be happy.

As we walked toward Chistye Prudy, her mittened hand held mine.  As we rode the long escalator downward, I pretended like my head was crashing into the supports along the tunnel.  She frowned at me, asking, "Are you drunk?"  "No," I’d said, "I just feel happy."  She cocked her head quizzically, almost as if she couldn’t understand it.  I wanted to hold a mirror up to her face and a tape recorder up to her ear, so she could see how beautiful she was as she listened to the things she’d said.  But I didn’t have those things, so I grabbed her by the arms and kissed her on the forehead.
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As she smoked a cigarette upon her balcony, she had a delightfully dreamy look upon her face.  My lips still stung with the salt from her neck.  I talked happily along, relieved that she seemed so content.  Little did she know, even while we talked, I’d taken to the work of a linguist.  I was trying to decode the things we’d breathed into each others mouths in the darkness, as she stretched languorously beneath me, and the white skin of her flat stomach shone in the ambient light.  It might have been the sound of a box opening.  It could have been the sound of a barque passing the breakwater.  Thinking back, it must have been the sound of an egg breaking.