Songs of the Dead Page 3

  She hears steps on the stairs outside the apartment, and starts to put the memories back into their box, starts to shut it up tight and lock it. But then, as so often happens, another memory forces its way before her. An advertisement in a newspaper. She sees the newspaper as though it’s before her now, sees the ad circled in red pen. A secretarial job in Vilnius. She remembers begging her mother to let her have this adventure the summer before she begins her college, and her mother and father finally approving. She wishes she would have not chosen that day to look in the newspaper, wishes she would have listened to the dreams that told her not to go.

  The steps are closer on the stairs, and she needs to conjure another memory before she can shut the box. She cannot bear to end on this one. She searches, her eyes moving below her eyelids. Seven years old, she thinks. Eight. She needs to find something good. And then she remembers. Six years old. Christmas. A gift from her parents. Normally the gifts were simple and necessary, like pencils or notebooks. But this time she rips apart the paper to find a toy drum. Her parents smile as she bangs on it. She almost laughs now as she wonders whether a few days later they were still smiling, or whether they regretted bringing all that noise into their home.

  The footfalls cross the hallway outside the apartment. The front door opens. She locks her box of memories, closes her eyes tight, then opens them wide. She’s not in Russia. She’s in the United States. Spokane, Washington, in a shitty apartment just off East Sprague. The door slams shut. She hears Viktor’s voice, in Russian, as he shouts, “Nika, you lazy slut. Get up. It’s time for work.”

  Kristine gets out of the car, done with her first john of the day, a regular who likes things, as he says, vigorous. She walks to the corner, sees Nika putting her pendant around her neck. That means she must have just finished a job, too: she never wears it around men.

  “Hello, Kristine.”

  Kristine nods, smiles. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m making some money.”

  “Viktor letting you keep any?”

  “He says I’m not making enough to keep him happy.”

  “Fucker.” Nika makes more than anyone else Kristine knows. She’s what men want. She’s young, blond, pretty, slender but not crack-thin. She doesn’t use. She’s quiet—you have to strain to hear her speak.

  Kristine doesn’t know much of Nika’s history—the woman doesn’t open up to anyone, at least to Kristine’s knowledge—but she presumes from the accent and the shared apartment that Nika was part of a big shipment of women from Russia by way of Lithuania and then Amsterdam.

  Kristine envies Nika. Certainly not her being so far from home, but half a world or half a continent, does it really matter? Besides, “home” was the last place Kristine would ever go again. At least here she gets money for her services.

  Nor does she envy Nika’s looks or figure. She knows how long they’ll last. No, she envies Nika’s ready access to a shower. In order for Kristine to bathe, she has to convince a john to rent a room, then afterwards take a quick shower and put on makeup before heading back out to the street. She sometimes fantasizes about a long hot bath, with soap and bubbles and bath oil in those squishy, slippery marbles that slowly dissolve. She could live in a house or apartment— and she has spent a fair amount of time in squats, though of course that doesn’t solve the shower problem—but then she’d have to put up with the other women, and especially with the pimp.

  Kristine asks, “How much does he say you owe by now?”

  “I’ll never see the end of this. The more I make, the more I owe.”

  “You and me both, sister.”

  “Who do you owe?”

  “My dealer. You’ve got Viktor, I’ve got heroin.”

  Nika looks at her for a long moment, then to the ground.

  Kristine continues, “At least the heroin makes me feel good.”

  “And it won’t kill you if you run away.”

  Kristine laughs. “Oh, it will kill me all right if I try to leave. I’ve done that a couple of times, and it came right after me to bring me back.”

  Nika is silent.

  Kristine says, “I don’t know how you do all of this sober.”

  “The tricks?”

  “All of it. Look around. Do you ever actually look at the people? Not just the johns. All of them. They’re as dead as we are. Only we’ve got the sense to know it. And the cars. Do you ever notice the air? It tastes like shit. No, it doesn’t. I grew up on a farm, and this smells far worse than shit.”

  “I grew up. . . .” Nika trails off.

  Kristine doesn’t look at her directly. She wants to know more about her friend, but knows if she says the wrong thing she’ll scare her away. The silence stretches longer.

  Finally Nika says, “In the country.”

  More silence. Kristine wants to ask where, what it was like, who was her family, but doesn’t know where to start. So she does what she knows is best. She lets the other be.

  Nika says simply, “I’m never going home.”

  Kristine knows better than to disagree directly. She says, “It has happened before. Some women have made it.” A pause before she continues, “Do you want to go home?”

  “More than. . . .”

  A car slows, pulls up to the curb. It’s one of Kristine’s semi-regulars. Kristine says to Nika, “Fuck. I’m sorry. Maybe later?”

  The man opens the passenger window, leans across, says, “Hey, Kristine, who’s your pretty friend?”

  Kristine senses money slipping away, and wouldn’t mind if it were slipping to Nika. She would mind it going to Viktor.

  Nika comes over to the car. The man looks from her face to her breasts and back to her face. He does the same to Kristine, then says, “I’d forgotten how much your shoulders turn me on. Same price? Get in.”

  The street is hot, and empty. No people, no cars. Nika paces back and forth, facing then going with the nonexistent traffic. She doesn’t see the truck pull up next to her, and jumps a little when she hears it close by. She turns, looks at the man inside. His passenger window is already down.

  She walks to his vehicle.

  He says, “Would you like to party?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Depends on the price.”

  “First,” she says, “you’ve got to show me something I don’t have.”

  The man has done this before, knows the game. Cops can’t expose themselves. He unzips his pants, pulls out a nondescript penis.

  She licks her lips. “Very nice,” she says. Make the sale, she thinks.

  “Well?”

  “Makes me want to drop my price. For you I’ll do a blow for twenty-five, a lay for fifty, half and half for sixty, and for a hundred you get me for an hour.”

  “That’s a discount?”

  “That’s my discount.” She pushes back from the truck.

  “No, wait, here.” He pulls a couple of fifty dollar bills from his shirt pocket.

  She puts the money in the front left pocket of her tight shorts, pulls the pendant from her neck, puts that in the other pocket, and gets in.

  The man says, “Buckle up. I don’t want to get a ticket.”

  She does. He begins to drive. They make small talk. He asks her name. She tells him. She asks his name, and he gives her one she knows is false. He asks her other questions and she lies, too. He doesn’t pull into an alley like she was expecting, but drives around, as though uncertain what he wants to do next.

  Finally she says, “You’ll need to pull over if you want me to do you.”

  The man just says, “We’ve got time.”

  She thinks, It’s your money.

  Then the man says, “Do you believe in God?”

  She doesn’t say anything. She tries to read what he wants, give it to him. It is safest—and makes the most money—if you give the man what he wants before he asks. But he already asked, and she doesn’t know how to answer.

  “Do you,” he repeats, “believe in God?”r />
  She frowns, then says, “Do you want to fuck?”

  “Look,” he says, “I bought you for an hour. If I want you to answer my question, you’ll do it. Do you get it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So. . . .”

  She remembers that once, long ago, she did believe, and still does enough to wear her mother’s cross. But that’s in memory of her mother, not Jesus. And it was two years and fifty lifetimes ago that her mother gave it to her, and now both Jesus and her mother are too far away to help. She says, “Yes, I believe—”

  He cuts her off. “Oh, I get it. You’re afraid I’m some sort of fundy and if you say you don’t believe that the Lord Jesus Christ died for you I’ll spend the next hour trying to save your soul. Well, I don’t believe in souls. I’m a scientist, and so it’s against my religion to believe in superstitions.” He laughs at his own joke, then says, “It’s your body I want.”

  She doesn’t understand his joke. She says, “Should we stop here? We can go down this alley.”

  He reaches with his right hand into his shirt pocket, pulls out two more bills, and says, “Instead of buying an hour I’m buying two. Let’s go somewhere private.”

  She takes the money. “There’s a hotel on North Division, just a few blocks. We can get a room.”

  “A room? Where other men have fucked you? And even if they didn’t fuck you they fucked someone else and left their sperm on the sheets. It doesn’t wash out. It leaves traces even after cleaning. Do you think I want some man’s DNA all over me?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Do you?”

  “Where, then?”

  “South of town, a nice little park where we can get out of the car.”

  Again, she doesn’t say anything.

  “So like I was saying, I’m a scientist. I look at things from a scientific perspective. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-Christian, though. That’s a mistake a lot of scientists make. The truth is that science and Christianity are two sides of the same coin.”

  She tries to look interested. If he wants to spend his money lecturing her, she’ll take the money. Maybe he’ll buy her something to eat.

  He continues, “Both of them are attempts to explain the universe, attempts to explain what is. They’re both articulations of systems of power. They both tell us how to live, how to experience the world, how to be in the world. They tell us how to relate to each other. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” she says, wondering what science and what religion would cause a man to pay to fuck a woman, what science and what religion would cause another man to force a woman to have sex for money and to give that money to him. What sort of science and what sort of religion would cause people to value money over another’s freedom or happiness? What sort of science and what sort of religion would cause someone to want to wield such power over another? She says none of this, shows none of this on her face. There are very few men she does not hate.

  He says, “There’s one line from the Bible I’ve always especially liked, a line that says everything we need to know about the relationship between men and women. Do you know the Bible?”

  “I—” Her great-grandmother used to read the Bible to her.

  She no longer remembers much of it.

  “I read a lot of books. I want to know everything I can. Because knowledge is power. It really is. The more knowledge you have, the more power you have. Do you see that, too?”

  “I understand,” she says, but she thinks: no, power is a fist in my face, a knife at my throat, rape after rape after rape until I don’t care anymore. You and your books and your science and your religion don’t know anything.

  He says, “There’s a line from the Malleus Maleficarum that has always spoken to me. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of that? No? Not many people have. It’s the Christian response to witchcraft. You could say that’s one superstition taking out another, but once again I think that’s a mistake. There’s a reason they burned those witches . . .”

  She has no idea what he’s talking about. She hates him. She hates these pompous theories that she knows will somehow— surprise—pretend to prove that men are superior to women and to everything, and that this superiority grants them the right to the lives and bodies of women. She hates all men, except her father and Petya and Osip. Listening to him drone on—no, pretending to listen to him drone—is worse than giving him a blowjob. She wishes he would shut up. It’s bad enough that he wants to fuck her for money— to buy her, as he accurately put it—but she wishes he wouldn’t try so hard to rationalize it. It is what it is, and he should just be honest about that.

  But then he tells her the line from the Malleus Maleficarum, “A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.”

  Nika doesn’t understand. The man is starting to scare her. She wishes the car would slow so she could jump out. But he turns onto the on-ramp of the interstate.

  He asks, “Are you happy?”

  “What?”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I don’t. . . . That’s not what most men ask.”

  He looks her straight in the eye: “I am not most men.” He looks back to the highway. Then he says, light, casual, “Or maybe I am.” A pause, then, “You’re one beautiful woman, and I’m sure every man wants to have you.” Another pause, then, “You have an accent, where are you from?

  She hesitates, then says, “Russia.”

  “What makes you happy?”

  “It’s my job to make you happy.”

  “It’s your job to do what I say.”

  She doesn’t want to think about happiness. That’s back in the box. No one knows about the box. No one gets into the box. She asks, “Do you want to take me in the ass? I won’t make you pay extra. I like it. Just. . . .”

  “I want to know where you go when a man takes you. Where do you go when you go away?”

  She closes her eyes and then opens them. She thinks, He will not get inside. She takes a deep breath, but quietly so he can’t hear, and tries to force away the answers to his questions.

  They turn south off the interstate onto the Pullman Highway.

  He says, “I just want to know.”

  But she knows that’s not true. She knows what he wants. He’s a liar and a thief. He doesn’t want only her body. Him and his words and all his belief that knowledge is power. He wants those deep places inside no one ever touches, not that Lithuanian man Linas who broke her with his lies, beatings, rapes, not Viktor the pimp who now continues where Linas left off, not even the other girls. No one.

  He doesn’t say anything, and she knows why. He knows that she knows, and she can tell he likes it.

  They drive. She tries not to think about the box, tries not to think about anyone back at home, all those who surely by now think she is dead.

  “We’re here,” the man says. He turns right onto a two-lane road, then soon left onto a dirt trail that heads sharply down. He stops next to a small creek, turns off the truck. “Should we do it?”

  “Where?”

  He points to an opening on her right. She nods, unbuckles her seatbelt, and gets out.

  He reaches behind the seat and says, “I brought something for us to put down on the grass.” It’s a towel, folded tightly and sealed with duct tape. He opens his door and gets out, walks to her side of the truck. He motions for her to walk ahead, then gestures before them, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s nice,” she says. She is concerned about being where no one can hear, but the forest just right here, the sound of the stream, reminds her of home. In the opening she sees three young apple trees. She knows apple trees from home. These trees should begin to bear good fruit this year. The trees make her smile. And the smells. They aren’t like the city. Kristine was right: How do we all survive this?

  She begins to walk down the path.

  She hears him walking behind her. He says, “Did you know that the word vagina is Latin for sheath?”
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br />   She doesn’t know the English word sheath. She keeps walking.

  He says, “I never did tell you my favorite line from the Bible. It is from the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, where God instructed his chosen people to kill every woman who has had intercourse with a man, but spare for themselves every woman among them who has not had intercourse.”

  For just a moment too long she puzzles over the meaning of what he has said, and when she finally begins to understand, the last voice she hears is his, asking, “Nika, have you had intercourse with a man?”

  The ground is tilting and she is trying to run but the ground is moving far too quickly. She doesn’t know why the ground is tilting but the sound she heard must have been an earthquake that brings the ground up to meet her face. She sees the tan soil, the small stones, the yellow blades of dried grass and the green that lies beneath, and then she falls through all of these and into the dark inside the earth, and she sees her mother and her father and she reaches out to them as she hears her voice say inside her head, “Oh, mother, mother.”

  five

  the muse

  I wonder if this is what it is like to be dead. I hope not, because I don’t want to spend all of eternity this confused. It takes as much effort to think as it does to move my hands, to move my feet. I wonder if this is how it feels to be stupid: maybe this is why people watch sitcoms, why they vote for Democrats or Republicans, why they don’t fight back: real thinking is too hard for them, so they simply don’t do it. I try to say this to Allison, but it takes too much effort, so I sit. Finally I say, “I’ll never be able to write like this.”

  I wonder if I am insane. I wonder if my brain has somehow become scrambled—and I wonder if I even think with my brain anyway—and if I will spend the rest of my life this way. I think I could do this for a day, maybe two, and then I would kill myself and hope I didn’t wake up like this after I was dead.