Mid-Pirouette

As I watched him field dress the deer, my stomach turned at the balloon-like, oddly-shaped organs as they struck the snowy ground with a sick, sliding plop.  The redness of the ground beneath us held us fast, much like a jailer just after the indictment.  You can sift through organs, dissect the heart and scour its chambers, you can lift a brain above your head and smash it like a jar of gelatin against the trees from which men hang, and never find that flighty bird that is the soul.  It pipes from the autumn trees, a starry starling that refuses to be seen.

There is a vacant apartment in suburban Moscow, oaken end tables polished, couch and love seat worn.  The electrical outlets stare out at the room, waiting for prongs set too far apart.  The windows face the east; the distant blade of the Urals cleaving Eurasia in two, a vast ocean of dwarfed pines, the bustle of east Asia building anthills to and through the clouds.  There is an uninhabited seat on a subway train; every other seat is filled, and the shocking and incongruous silence of the passengers harmonize perfectly with the whish/whish/whish of a multitude of wheels striking a new rail.  There is a girl in a bathroom in a cheap restaurant on the Moskva, and when she looks in the mirror, the world falls away.  She is a reliquary, beautiful on the outside, and holy on the inside.  There is a fur-clad outdoorsman field dressing a Siberian brown bear in Kamchatka, whimsically wondering which organ wields the soul.  Most importantly–or perhaps least importantly, I can never remember–there is an empty box at the Bolshoi, the gold lacquer on the molding framing the lofty seat like a museum masterpiece.  And there is a dancer on the stage, mid-pirouette, the precise motions of her hands tracing the contours of words that have yet to be invented.  Those words describe precisely where I am, and they gently knead away the words that came before.

Every year has flowed through the one following, and there’s a tsunami of history crashing across an encroaching continent.  I wonder if Rurik had nightmares about Catherine, or if Ivan saw Gorbachev in the margins of his history books.  The sadness that resonates will not be subsumed by exhilaration; we gather at the bar, and we dominate the jukebox, and we toast and we hug and we laugh the pall away.  I spend the last few days packing away the artifacts of a quarter-century.  I ask myself if I might ever play archaeologist, carefully and lovingly uncovering the remnants of my own lost civilization.  Extant pieces of promises issued from an old bank and waiting to be redeemed.  I wonder if old me ever saw new me in forgotten dreams.