corporation or government or municipality-between three hundred dollars and twelve hundred dollars per kilo. Tchaika is connected to the commonwealth arms complex, to bomb-design laboratories and the shipping industry. They will pick up waste anywhere in the world, ship it to Kazakhstan, put it in the ground and vaporize it. We will get a broker's fee.
The plane comes into heavy weather.
'There's some concern in Phoenix,' I tell him, 'about the extent of your operating capital. The kind of safety equipment we're talking about to move highly sensitive material can result, Viktor, in expenditures that are quite dizzying.'
'Yes yes yes yes. We have the expertise.' He unzippers this word with a certain defensive zest as if it sums up all the insufficiencies that have mocked him until this point. 'And we have the stacks of rubles that are also quite, I may say, dizzying.
Brian is lying on his side wearing his coat and gloves.
'I forget,' he says. 'Where are we going exactly?'
I call across the heaving body of the plane. 'The Kazakh Test Site.'
'Yeah but where's that?'
I shout. 'Where are we going, Viktor?'
'Very important place that's not on the map. Near Semipalatinsk. White space on map. No problem. They will meet us.'
'No problem,' I call across to Brian.
'Thank you both. Wake me when we land,' he says.
I look at him carefully. It's cold and we're dead tired and I look at Brian. The knowledge of what he's been doing, the calculated breach of trust-I want to stay awake while he sleeps so I can watch him and fine-edge my feelings and wait for my moment.
Viktor takes a bottle of Chivas Regal out of his overnight bag. I do a mime of polite applause. He goes to the flight deck to get some glasses but they don't have any or won't share them. I go through my bag and come up with a bottle of mouthwash and take off the cap and lurch across the aircraft shaking out the grooved plastic piece as I go. Viktor pours some scotch into the cap and I return to my seat.
We have no seat belts and the passage is growing rougher. I have the bottle of mouthwash wedged upright in my bag so the stuff won't spill. We are the three of us alone except for the person or persons flying the aircraft and I think we feel a little forlorn in the huge tubed space, more like people in a shabby terminal late at night than lucky travelers aboard their plane. I sip my Chivas from the cap, listening to the shaking structure around us, the minimum ribbing, a sort of endoskeletal arch that makes every groaning noise in the hymnal of manned flight. The scotch tastes faintly of gargled mint.
'What did you do before you joined Tchaika?'
'I teach history twenty years. Then no more. I look for a new life.'
'There are men like you in many American cities now. Russians, Ukrainians. Do you know what they do?'
'Drive taxi,' he says.
I notice the way his eyes leap to catch mine, slyly, a brief merged moment that allows him to mark my awareness of his superior status.
He is drinking from the bottle.
I see the plane as if from some protected position in the sky. It is a swift shape hurtling through the dark-I felt sure it was dark by now. It is a mass of dark metal racing through the rain and wind as if in a swift scene from an old black-and-white movie, scored with urgent music.
Viktor asks me if IVe ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says, how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don't know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight. They had to convince themselves with numbers and bulk and mass.
'And the U.S.?' I say
Eyes flicking my way, happy as carnival lights. It was the U.S., Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property
I watch Brian sleep.
'ibu have your own capitalist tools now. Don't you, Viktor?'
'
'A small private army, I hear.'
'Also intelligence unit. To protect our assets.'
'And scare the hell out of the competition.'
He tells me that the name of the company was his idea. Tchaika means seagull and refers poetically to the fact that the company's basic business is waste. He likes the way seagulls swoop down on garbage mounds and trail after ships waiting for the glint of jettison at the bow. It is a nicer name, besides, than Rat or Pig.
I look at Brian. It's better than sleeping. I don't want to sleep until I'm finished looking. Traveling with the man from Arizona to Russia, side by side through all those time zones, sharing magazines and trading food items from the little peel-off receptacles, my dessert for his radishes because I'm fit and he's not, Sky Harbor to Sheremetyevo, all those hours and oceans and pales of plotted land, the houses and lives below-maybe it was just the seating arrangement that made me want to wait before I confronted him. It's much too clumsy to accuse a man who's sitting next to you. I wanted a quiet face-to-face in a cozy room somewhere.
I see us hurtling through the dark.
I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste. I don't know exactly what. He smiles and puts his feet up on the bench, something of a gargoyle squat. He says maybe one is the mystical twin of the other. He likes this idea. He says waste is the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground.
All those decades, he says, when we thought about weapons all the time and never thought about the dark multiplying byproduct.
'And in this case,' I say. 'In our case, in our age. What we excrete comes back to consume us.'
We don't dig it up, he says. We try to bury it. But maybe this is not enough. That's why we have this idea. Kill the devil. And he smiles from his steeple perch. The fusion of two streams of history, weapons and waste. We destroy contaminated nuclear waste by means of nuclear explosions.
I cross the body of the aircraft to get my cap refilled.
'It is only obvious,' he says.
I see that Brian's eyes are opened.
I return to my seat, an arm out for balance, and I sit carefully and pause and then knock back the scotch and blink a bit.
I look at Brian.
I say, 'The early bomb, Brian, they had to do the core material in a certain way as I understand it. They had to mate this part to that part. So they could get the chain reaction that's crucial to the whole operation. One design had a male element fitted into a female element. The cylinder goes into an opening in the sphere. They shoot it right in. Very suggestive. There's really sort of no escape. Cocks and cunts everywhere.'
I see our plane racing through the wind and rain.
Because I knew unmistakably now, I was completely certain that Brian and Marian, whose names sound SO nice together, a good friend now and again, that he and my wife were partners in a deep betrayal.
In my jet-crazed way I could almost enjoy the situation we'd found ourselves in. I was so time-zoned, dazed by fatigue and revelation, so deep in the stink of a friend's falseheartedness that I started talking nonstop, manic and jaggy, babble-mouthing into the plane noise, hinting-I hinted insidiously, made clever references. Because I knew it all now, and here we both were, and there was no place he could go to escape our homey chat.
At the gate we are given badges to wear, gauzy strips that register the amount of radiation absorbed by the body in a given period. Maybe this is what makes the landscape seem so strange. These little metered tags put an element of threat into the dull scrub that rolls to the overwhelming sky
