Launchpads

Alexander Ivanovich Kuznetsov has a very peculiar feeling.  He’s not certain from whence it came, or what it means, or where it may take him.  Only, when he counts the twenty-eight rubles for the trolley, and when he stands by the sooty ashtray and quickly devours his vending machine baguette, and when he hears the accordion player near the overpass, the feeling becomes so strong he can’t hear, and he only knows he’s breathing because he’s half-certain he’s not dead.  The orange streets and the tumult of the traffic wash over him, and he’s disgusted, he’s disoriented, and he knows for sure that the greatness within him is going entirely unfulfilled.

Alexander hands out flyers outside of the Metro.  The men wear ushanka hats, dark woolen coats, and lace-less fur-lined black shoes.  The women deck themselves out in drab shades of gray, in vibrant reds and purples, in orange fur, in brown fur, in black-striped white fur.  The women are quite proud of their fur coats–it’s one of the few status symbols that can fit in the Metro, a mode of transporation that is, in and of itself, a conflicting status symbol.

It’s cold today, too cold to be outside, and so he tucks the thick sheaf of flyers inside his battered vinyl satchel and walks toward the pool hall.  He won’t get paid without exhausting his supply of leaflets, but he doesn’t really care–he has beer money.  The one thousand rubles he pays to his friend Nikolai in the government nets him 4000 rubles per month in disability.  As far as the government is concerned, Alexander is paralyzed from the waist down.  He nimbly leaps the fence that lines the avenue, takes the cement steps two at a time, and weaves through the pool hall’s doors as others leave.  He’s grateful for that–Alexander doesn’t much like to touch public doors.

Peculiarly enough, the pool hall has lacquered walls and red marble floors, and chandeliers that, at the very least, look crystal.  It’s not as nice as the hall in the Seven Sister near Polezhaevskaya, but Alexander doesn’t care much for opulent decor.  A true man does not demand beauty be brought to him, but finds it for himself.  The weather-beaten man takes his coat and slides a plastic tag with a "104" embossed across the front of it.  The coat checker does not hand it to him, as he doesn’t like to touch the customers.  He runs a hand through his steely hair, slick and shiny with pomade, and murmurs a rote pazhaluista.  Alexander mutters an obligatory spasiba, turns, and nods across the hall to the perpetually nervous bartender, who has already begun to pour Alexander his beer.  The glittery light and the soothing music floating casually from the system are beautiful and soporific and Alexander knows that this pool hall is an undeniable shithole.

Sasha and Misha hash out half-baked plans for the future, mourning unfulfilled ones.  Could school be so long ago?  They’re old, too old, they think, to have done so little.  Misha wears an amber earring in one ear, and is missing part of the other.  A belligerent gopnik broke his nose outside of a Sberbank branch a year ago, and Misha hadn’t had the money to have it set.  Sasha had met his friend later, taken a swig of cheap vodka, given Misha a swig of cheap vodka, and tried to set it himself.  Now when Misha purses his lips and furrows his brow in thought, his nose emits a soft, high-pitched whistle.

Misha speaks of greatness, of wearing it like a halo into a cresting tide of turmoil and discontent.  Sasha knows that greatness is just as much a product of circumstance as strength, and there is a more humble sort of greatness that goes to work every day for sixty years and dies silently in the night.  But who would wish for such a thing?  Nobility without a crown is no gift at all.  So their talk turns to school, all those years gone.  How good they were at physics and calculus and how they still remember most of the important dates and some of the cosmonauts.  Misha and Sasha are launchpads without rockets, rockets without fuel.

The trolley screeches through the early Moscow night, and the dull weight of Alexander Kuznetsov’s thoughts fight against the buoyancy of the beer.  The pensioner women in dour silence ignore him, another Russian man soaked in drink riding aimlessly about the city.  What does one do?  Where does one go?  What is there ever to find?  Shrieking to a halt, the doors open at Sokol.  The end of the line.  Sasha lurches out the door and into the waiting night.