Chapter 17
When Rai arrived at the Place a half an hour before breakfast, she sat down in the common room and pulled Anna from her bag. But before she could even read a page, she heard a commotion in front of her, then looked down to see a chess board and Toker’s hands arranging the pieces. “You’ve avoided me enough. Today, we’re gonna play.”
“Oh, please, Toker. I barely slept last night. You’re just gonna whoop my ass.” She liked Toker, and even felt a bit bad about having ignored his offer of a game for so long, but right now, she wanted to be in Moscow, not New York.
“We both know better’n that. Half your brain tied behind your back, you’re still smarter’n Einstein. But if you wanna be a wimp, take white.” Toker noticed Rai’s eyes on his motley collection of pieces: blacks, browns, reds, even a blue bishop. “There ain’t any full sets of dark left. This is multicultural chess.” He seemed proud of having used such a long word.
Rai shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs and opened with her queen’s knight. Toker responded with his queen’s pawn, and the game developed quickly. Rai surprised herself with her play; her mind and her instincts were working much better than she had feared, and though Toker was clearly the better player, she kept in the game for quite a while. Several other kids gathered around to watch them play. Rai felt good about her game, even when, after half an hour of play, Toker slid his queen onto the C2 square and mated Rai’s king.
Petey, sitting beside Rai, laughed. “He’s always gonna win with that square. Defend C2, then put the queen there. Ya hadn’t already figured that out?”
“Don’t blow my game, you fucker.”
“She’d see it soon anyway.” He turned to Rai. “Wanna play?”
“After breakfast,” she said, gesturing at the kids filing out of the common room.
Over breakfast, she considered telling Toker and Petey about the graffiti that she and Z were planning around the city, but she decided that, smart as the boys were, such erudition was throwing pearls before swine. Great chess players, sure, but hardly well-read. Hard to read great literature on the street, after all. Though quite true to her character, it does not speak well of Rai that she had failed to notice the tattered copy of The Dharma Bums that poked from Petey’s rear pocket.
The call for breakfast had saved Rai for a moment, but when they returned to the common room, Rai played three games against Petey and lost all of them. Badly. She continued more out of sheer perversity and inertia than from the delusion that she might be able to win a game; he was so much better than she that she didn’t even feel like she was learning. Finally, she realized that these losses were not doing any good at all for her already delicate self-esteem, and she begged off yet another rematch.
On the way out the front door, Rai heard her name. “Whoa, I got a message for you,” Tanya said, and dug into her desk.
“Thanks.” Rai read her name in Z’s handwriting.
“He seemed way high on himself. Boy’s smart, but I got no clue how you put up with him.”
“Me neither.” She raised her eyebrows, turned out the door, and opened the envelope.
Midnight. Prince and Lafayette. Be there.
Couldn’t he just have come into the common room to tell her? Rai thought. And why all the secrecy? And midnight in Soho? Wasn’t that a trifle melodramatic, even for Z? And where was she going to sleep afterward?
As she turned uptown on 6th, she finally realized what was going on. He was just planning a dramatic apology. But why did he have to wait so long? 12 hours…
Several days had passed since she had last seen Mike, but Rai instantly dived into the finest details of her personal drama. Whether her story was happy or tragic, she always felt an intense narrative pleasure when her life merited story-telling. In the flowing words, misery became story; yet in that pleasure, she failed to notice the shadows of concern that passed over her friend’s face. “It’s so fucking dramatic, don’t you think? I almost feel like Anna.”
“I see you have fallen for yet another of my countrywomen.”
“Yeah. She’s way cool. But it’s really not that complicated for her, is it? She wants to know what it’s all about, too, but she doesn’t have to live on the streets and stop terrorism all by herself and obsess about Lermontov and tell her stories to other people so she can think she’s cool. Meaning just shows up, and she grabs it.”
“It?” Mike asked, with more than a touch of disbelief in his voice.
“Meaning. Vronsky. Whatever.”
“But meaning and Vronsky are not the same. Not even close, I think.”
“The dude is a bit of a loser, huh? Bummer she couldn’t have fallen for Pechorin. That would be a kick-ass novel. Maybe I’ll write it some day. But even if Vronsky is a dweeb, she meets him and suddenly something’s going on in her life. It’s going somewhere. I mean, who the fuck would read a novel where Anna and Karenin are happily married? Boring shit.”
“Going somewhere is not always going somewhere good–”
“Don’t blow the ending for me, huh? The thing is that it’s interesting. That’s the deal. She’s got a narrative arc in her life, and–”
“Sometimes, I wish that you did not have these theories about your books.”
“What, narrative arc? Cope with it. I just like the phrase. It sounds good. Lotsa words do: onomatopoeia, Ouougandougou–”
“I’m sorry?”
“Capital of Burkina Faso. I used to sit at the kitchen table with Dad’s globe, look around the world, imagine where I was gonna go when I grew up, y’know? Ouougandougou. I wanted to go there. I don’t know anything about it, it’s prob’ly just some podunk shithole in the middle of the desert, but what a cool name.”
Unexpectedly, Mike spoke a couple of lines in Russian; though Rai didn’t understand a word, she loved the sound. She asked him what it meant.
“By chance, on a pocketknife,” he said slowly, as if unsure of the translation, “you will find the dust of faraway lands, and strange, vague colors will wrap your life.”
“That’s awesome.”
“That’s Blok.”
“ ‘Cept for me it wasn’t dust. It was maps. No, really, like words. Ouougandougou. Pretoria. Mogadishu. Windhoek.”
“You speak like you say the name of a lover.”
“Yeah, huh?” She paused. “That’s what I wanted, y’know? Travel the world, find out if there was really anything there under the map.” A note of real melancholy had entered her voice.
“You speak as if you cannot. But you have only 17 years, Helen. Much time to voyage.”
“And loads of money to do it with. Does it look like I’m saving up for a cruise to fucking Namibia?”
“I would not expect these words from one who survives with no money at all. You are a clever girl, Helen. You decide to go, and you will go.”
“I’ll swim. Get into the Gulf Stream and follow it around.”
“You are much less charming when you are cynical.”
Mike’s words brought Rai up short. He was right, of course, even if she did not want to admit it. She could do what she wanted. “Like Abdul,” she said, half aloud.
“Abdul?”
“This guy. He’s from Sudan, I guess, but he got here by stowing away on a ship in Cairo or some shit. I met him at the Place. Not exactly the experience I want, ‘cause it sounds like he almost starved to death… but there’s a narrative arc, huh?” She looked at him sideways, with newly coquettish eyes.
“There are better ways to travel.”
“I gotta get Z to go with me, though. They say Kinshasa’s pretty dangerous, so a bodyguard would help, huh? Pity apartheid ended, ‘cause I coulda got him to go to Mozambique and join the ANC. Any other oppressive governments he might want to overthrow?”
“Helen, I had wanted to talk to you about your friend…”
“I guess pretty much all of them, huh?” Rai continued as if she had not heard him, though she had. “Mugabe sure sucks, but no way Z’s gonna get on the side of those white farmers. What about taking up the with Tutsis in Burundi? Think he’d go for that?”
“I do not…”
“Y’know where I really wanna go, Mike? Lethsotho. Now that’s a fucking cool name. And y’know what? I did this report on apartheid in social studies class once, right? And there was this king of Lethsotho named Mshwshwsh. What would you do to have a name like that? Fucking whack!”
“Helen.” He spoke in a tone that finally got her attention.
“Yeah?”
“I believe that you do not think enough of the actions of your friend. To destroy a car, this is not something small.”
“I talked him out of it. I told you that. Z can be a dick, but he listens to reason.”
“You know I do not lecture you, my young friend. It is not in my character.”
“And it wouldn’t work.”
“Yes. But I worry about this. I do not want to see you in jail.”
“No jail for me. That’s why I put Z back on the straight and narrow. He’s gonna listen to me. When I put my foot down–”
“Your foot is heavy.”
“Pure strength of will. I’ll show you how to do it some day, if you ask real nice.” She was relieved that a teasing tone had re-entered their conversation. She hated it when Mike voiced her own worries. “Hey, so I got a question. Why the fuck did Anna marry Karenin in the first place, huh? You’d think she was smarter than that. Dude’s a complete fuckface.”
“I believe you are not correct. Yes, the man is formal…”
“Fucking boring.”
“Perhaps. Bus he is not unkind. He gives his wife much freedom, he does not beat her. When you think of most husbands of that age…”
“But there’s no sex appeal. Zippo.”
“We are speaking of marriage. Helen. Not sex.”
“But it’s so unfair. Marrying somebody ‘cause your daddy says so, or ‘cause you gotta pay fifteen million servants to keep the estate. I mean, these people are just prisoners: to daddy, to money, to tradition…”
“You are normally more original in your attacks.” He raised his left eyebrow, and she laughed.
“Pretty obvious, huh? Thing is, everybody and her cousin’s already read this book, so it’s not real easy to say something new.”
Mike stayed in the fields longer than he often did, staring out over the grass when they were not talking, but eventually he needed to return to Queens, and she still had seven hours before the time Z had set for their meeting. During Rai’s first days on the street, boredom had attacked her like nothing else, for the hours stretched out with nothing to do: no homework, no obligations, not even the fixed hour of a curfew or a bedtime. For someone as impatient as she, those stretching hours had been pure torture. At some moment, she had learned the term “horror vacui,” and she used it about time. She needed something to fill those hours.
Z, of course, had always provided that service. One could complain about almost every aspect of her friend’s character, but he was never boring. To argue with him, to listen to him pontificate, to prowl the streets late at night… he gave content to her days. How long until she was supposed to meet him? The big clock above Columbus Circle marked 5:15.
With a sigh, Rai ceased her pacing around the fields and strode over to the rocks where climbers always gathered. She envied their grace on minuscule holds, but she wondered how the girls there survived the testosterone poisoning. She scrambled to the top, where the sun would last longest, and opened Anna.
Tension overcame even the memory of boredom. Stress filled the stables where Vronsky prepared Frou-Frou for the steeplechase; sexual tension filled the mansion, as Anna and Vronsky tried to escape the servant boy who would surely gossip if he saw anything interesting. God, but that repression was exciting, Rai thought, that search for any chance to insinuate a flirt where the boy would not notice, the imagination of a furtive touch so much more thrilling than any real caress…
Had she stepped back to think, Rai might have said that time dashed like Vronsky’s horse, but she had no time for such thoughts. She only felt Anna’s anxiety, watched the horses race, jump, trip… God, to be at that steeplechase, to hear the shouts, the rustles of satin dresses, to feel the gaze of a too-bold cavalry officer. Vronsky’s horse sprinted; Anna and Rai rose with the crowd. He would win! The horse leapt the last ditch. Vronsky sat back too far…
Frou-Frou writhed on the ground, its back broken. Rai ran onto the field… or perhaps she did not. She could no longer make out the words on the page, for darkness had fallen on Central Park.
