Underworld

grandchild, they could keep the two houses, all the cars, he could have both wives if he wanted them. None of it ever belonged to me except in the sense that I filled out the forms.

I don't have to get out of the chair to kick the side of the cot. I just extend my leg and kick.

Then I watch him come awake.

'So. The fastest lover een Mayheeko.'

'What's that?'

'Old joke, You don't know this joke?'

'Jesus, I was dreaming. What was I dreaming?'

'A guy's worried about his wife because there's a famous lover on the prowl. What, you don't know this joke? The Speedy Gonzalez joke. Goes way back. Took decades, this joke, to get from there to here.'

'From where to here?'

'Fuck you. That's from where.'

I kick the bed again.

He says, 'What?'

'How long, Brian?'

'How long what?'

'You and Marian.'

'What do you mean?'

'What do I mean?'

I kick the bed. He sits up and puts his hands over his face and begins to laugh miserably.

'We used to talk more or less. That's all.'

'Don't contradict me.'

'We used to exchange, all right, a confidence now and then. We were close that way but it didn't last long.'

'I'm smoking a cigar and drinking a brandy. Don't contradict me.'

He looks at me. I don't have a cigar and I'm drinking vodka.

'I mean now? Is this the time we want to discuss the matter? Here? Can't we think about finding a more suitable?'

'She told me everything.'

He looks away.

'I'm prepared to be very open about this but I think we need to reconsider the timing,' he says.

I lean over, the plate in my left hand, and I cuff him with the right. I throw a right, openhanded because we're being open about this, hitting him with the heel of the hand on the side of the head-a token blow that improves my mood. It is even better than eating. It is better than the meat, the fish, the eggs, the fish eggs and the vodka. I feel good about it. I think we both feel better.

Once he adjusts to the knowledge that he has just been hit, he looks at me again. I know what he sees when he looks at me. Someone bigger than he is, readier to act, sitting between him and the door. This is the message that hums in the air. Not the words, the personal histories, the moral advantage or disadvantage, whatever maneuvers of bluff and counterbluff might ornament the moment. It's the force of the body. It's which body crushes the other. Not that he has anything, really, to worry about. But maybe he does.

'When you say she told you everything.'

'She told me everything. We talked for a long time. The talk we had lasted a couple of days, on and off. She said a lot. She told me everything. Then I got in the company car and went to the airport and there you were.'

He grins at me.

'Fucking women. Can't trust them for shit.'

I hit him with the flat of my hand across an ear. His head jerks impressively. It is not a hard blow. It is a token blow and the head-jerk is overdone.

'Watch what you say about her, Brian.'

He lowers his eyes, looking for a fetch of sympathy. Here he is, hungry, thirsty, jet-lagged, unkempt, being held prisoner, sort of, cuffed around in a basement cell. But I don't think he has serious reason to worry.

'She told you about the heroin?'

'She told me everything.'

'Only once, I swear. Scared the shit out of me.'

He reaches over and takes some food out of my plate and begins to eat it. I watch him. He keeps his head down, reaching into my plate, eating and reaching, and I let him do it.

'I'm sorry, Nick. Kill me. I want you to. But I have to tell you it didn't last long. And I have to tell you I was not always-how do I want to put this if I don't want to get hit again?'

'She told me.'

'I was not always willing.'

I watch him eat.

'I'm the one who was reluctant and I'm the one who was scared you'd find out. And when you didn't find out, she told you.'

He reaches and eats, head down. I let him go to the sink and splash water on his face. Bomb or no bomb, he says, that's a boring bunch of people out there. We head back to the room with the food. The guests are spread through several areas, drinking coffee or tea or brandy, some of them, or holding dessert plates up to their chins, those who are standing.

We feel a ground motion, a rumble underfoot. There is a guncot-ton thud, some far-off shift or heave that is also a local sensation, a hollow body sound. Someone says, 'Da' or 'Ja.' Then people begin to head for the exit, one by one, leaning under the low portals, room to room, trying not to be overeager, a chain of rustling sighs, and we gather outside the complex and look toward ground zero although there is nothing to see, really, but the sweep of the Kazakh plain.

We stand and look for some time, a few of us speaking briefly, soft-voiced, and there is a sense of anticipation left dangling in the wind.

No ascending cloudmass, of course, or rolling waves of sound. Maybe some dust rises from the site and maybe it is only afternoon haze and several people point and comment briefly and there is a flatness in the group, an unspoken dejection, and after a while we go back inside.

We spend the night in the city of Semipalatinsk drinking warm beer and eating horsemeat pate and in the morning, instead of flying back to Moscow first thing, Viktor Maltsev decides we ought to see something.

He takes us to a place he calls the Museum of Misshapens. It is part of the Medical Institute and I note how Brian begins to shy away, to fall back a bit even before we enter the museum proper, a long low room of display cases filled with fetuses. Viktor is a man who evidently likes to deepen the texture of an experience. The fetuses, some of them, are preserved in Heinz pickle jars. There is the two-headed specimen. There is the single head that is twice the size of the body. There is the normal head that is located in the wrong place, perched on the right shoulder.

We look into the jars in silence. We go slowly from one display case to the next because the occasion seems to demand a solemn pace and we say nothing and look only at the jars and never at the walls or windows or each other. Then Viktor says something but not about the jars. He talks about the years of testing. We look into the jars and listen to Viktor and move slowly from one display to the next. Five hundred nuclear explosions at the test site, which is southwest of the city, and even when they stopped testing in the atmosphere, the mine shafts they dug for underground detonations were not deep enough to preclude the venting of dangerous levels of radiation.

He looks at me when he says this.

Then there is the cyclops. The eye centered, the ears below the chin, the mouth completely missing. Brian is also missing. We find him outside, standing by the taxi and looking through factory smoke at the low mountains that run across the steppe. But we don't take the taxi to our hotel to pick up our luggage and go to the airport. Viktor gives directions to a radiation clinic on the outskirts of the city and we drive out there in a mood of some disgruntlement (Brian and I) even if we are unresisting, too stilled by the pickle jars to make an open complaint.