She used to tell me stories of growing up in Russia and that the biggest change during the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the Glastnost years, was literature. It was there, suddenly, like a magic trick and everyone was reading. I imagined the whole country grinding to a halt under a deluge of heretofore repressed writing. An amazed peace descends followed by silent starvation while imaginations are fed to the point of bursting.
That is what Katya remembers, but on television I saw Gorbachev held captive for three tension filled days by his own military. I saw the violence on CNN as tiny republics stood up to claim their freedom from Union. I read exposes of the Russian Black Market and sad tales of an economy spiraling out of control. But Katya has her own kind of vision and it's just that one day she had literature to read.
Her family was Jewish and any witness to the whole of Russian history can imagine why Katya's family came, in 1990, to the United States. Katya would never tell, save to say it was for her father's work. And what that was, she also never managed to say.
She appeared one day, like magic, in my high school English class which had yet to feel the ripples of Glastnost. I could not take my eyes from her dark, Muscovite features. Some ancient mother of hers had known too well the Mongol invasion. Katya still bore the reminders of a once, small and insecure city-state.
Inspired, I left roses on her doorstep, but it was mid-January and they were lost to the winter night. She took it as some cruel joke and did not open herself to me for the remainder of the year. I never understood my offense and she was hardly forthcoming, but the following year she spoke to me, suddenly, as if we were old friends. Without explanation, the anomaly became truth and we were inseparable.
It lasted only the year and then she was gone. To college, I heard, but she said nothing of it to me and supplied no clues for my recovering her company. Rumors came back to me, but nothing I could be sure of. The last word was that she had taken a Greek lover and moved in with him, but that was more than a year gone. Her entire world could have changed a thousand times over.
And then I saw her. She was nearly at the top of the hill in Deming Park as I pulled my car over the railroad tracks at the entrance. Barely more than a glimpse of her from behind, but an instinct that it was her. I accelerated, afraid she would vanish, if for an instant, for an eternity.
It was fall and a soft rain was coming down. The windshield wipers cut over her image, making her movements as if in an old movie. She turned from the road and headed toward the footpaths just as I came upon her. She wasn't wearing a coat and her short-sleeved shirt looked to be soaked through.
I jammed the brakes and skidded a little in the excitement. She turned to look as I pulled myself halfway out the car window. Her face lit up with fear and she turned to run just as I called out her name. And, for a moment, her disappearance from my life was intentional and without reprieve. But she stopped in her tracks as my voice carried to her. She studied me over her shoulder through strands of wet hair and I received a look that seemed as much relief as pleasure.
"Alex!" she exclaimed, and began running toward the car. I started to get out to meet her, but her face lost any hint of joy. "Stay!" she ordered. "Let me in!"
It did make sense given the weather, but she seemed more frantic than rain and chill would demand of a native Russian. I pulled myself back in the window and reached across to let her in. She seemed more beautiful than ever as she slipped in beside me, perhaps because I'd always found disheveled an irresistible style, but perhaps also because there was something significantly different about Katya.
She looked around nervously.
"Drive," she said.
"Where to?" I asked.
"Do you have gas?" Her voice was somewhat agitated.
"Yes," I said, looking at the gauge to be sure.
"Nowhere, then. Just drive."
Driving for hours while arriving nowhere was a talent I had mastered early, growing up in Terre Haute. There was never anywhere to be, but always an overwhelming desire to get there. I drove. Katya rolled down her window, adjusted the passenger side mirror to her own needs and then relaxed back into the seat.
"Do you have any sunglasses?" she asked. "Ray Bans?"
"No, no Ray Bans," I told her. I could never afford them. "I had a pair of cheap of sunglasses I got at the beginning of summer, but I can't seem to find them anymore."
"Good," she said.
We wound to the back of the park, the exits of which had been locked since I was a small child. I took the turn back toward the front entrance, but veered sharply onto an access road used by the park workers. It led back to the storage sheds where park vehicles and such were stored and encountered a fence that separated the park from the annex of Roselawn Cemetery. A length of the fence had been missing for as long as I could remember and a brief jog across ten yards or so of grass would pass a car from park to cemetery thoroughfare. A very well known secret, it is hard to imagine that it still served any of its initial, subversive intent, which was an escape route for parkers, drinkers, or dope-smokers, finding themselves ensnared in one or the other venue.
It must have been new to Katya, who seemed genuinely pleased with the wending of our path through the graves and out into the traffic of U.S. 40. "You always know how to please me," she said as we drifted from town. I thought immediately of the winter roses and said nothing. I pretended to be occupied with divining the ultimate path to nowhere, but, in truth, could have found my way by instinct, alone. I was afraid to speak, to show my weakness--that I had thought of her all these months. I believed she both knew and expected exactly that, but she seemed not to succumb to woman's more predatory instincts as the scent of my weakness filled the car.
"It's a beautiful day for a walk," she observed, looking all around. "But a better one for a drive," she added, laughing like a glass that teeters before it falls and breaks.
She looked into her acquired mirror and I turned sharply right at the foot of the Seeleyville Bridge. The river of traffic flowed on as we trickled toward the golf course that was a friend's farm when I was young. We rolled past the fancy new clubhouse and traced worn out old roads back to my friend's old homestead.
The house was abandoned and falling down, but the old steam engines that occupied strips of broken track seemed the same as they had 20 years before when Mark, Jonathan and I got in trouble for seeking refuge in one of the old engines during a particularly violent thunderstorm. I followed the intermittent tracks back through abandoned farmland until they intersected Highway 42. I turned left toward Brazil.
"I didn't expect to find you walking in the park today," I ventured.
"Neither did I," she admitted. "The last place I thought I'd be a week ago."
"Did something go wrong with the Greek?" I asked, hoping he was not old or inaccurate information. "I'm sorry. I don't know his name."
She smiled, pleased that I had at least tried to keep tabs on her. "Nick," she said. "Did something go wrong with Nick?" Again she gave a strange laugh, teetering between hilarity and hysteria. "No, I think Nick is just fine," she finished, tears forming in her dark, mourning eyes.
"Alex," she said, glancing in the mirror, "I have something I want to tell you, but you mustn't think I'm crazy."
"How could I ever think such a thing?" I replied, shocked that she would even entertain such a possibility and, at the same time, quite certain that I'd never considered Katya completely sane. I tried to look assuring.
"I started classes at I.U. last fall," she began, and the air in the car immediately changed. I recognized the frantic look from back in the park as it emerged in her every mannerism. Katya had always been obsessed with academic success. Her unrestrained bravado in the face of the worst our high school could offer us was a signal of the chink in her armor. Academics, in large part, defined her sense of self. Her attraction to me, I have always believed, was due to my lackadaisical scholastic performance and the flattering contrast it offered.
"Since I had Doc's organic chemistry class in high school, I figured I would be ready for second year Organic at Indiana."
Typical of her. Doc's organic chemistry class consisted solely of Katya. It wasn't normally offered because most high school students had the good sense not to work that hard. Not Katya. She pushed ahead and forced Doc to create a class just for her. Typically, Terre Haute high schools are poor at preparing students for the next academic step. In the case of Katya and Doc, I think this bad result only intensified as Doc took it personally that Katya had loaded onto his mental shoulders the creation and execution of an extra class on a subject with which he had little interest and less knowledge. I suspected Katya had just came face to face with the inadequacies of her chemistry background in a mildly embarrassing way. Lessons learned.
The hills leveled out on 42 and the Brazil 70 Truck Stop stood on the horizon. Supposed to have some of the best milkshakes around, but I've never tried one. I suffer from lactose intolerance, though I believe the problem is related to Bovine Growth Hormone and other doctorings.
"The T.A. working registration, Tycho Kessler, was absolutely adamant that the courses should not be taken out of sequence and that I should wait for Spring Semester. I explained that I had taken the preparatory work already, but he wouldn't even look at my card. I asked why the Hell they offered the courses out of sequence if they didn't intend for people to take them, to which he responded that exceptions were made for special cases. I said that I was a special case and lied that Professor Clausen, whose course it was, suggested I take second year in the fall. That worked well enough that Kessler finally took my registration card, but, as soon as he looked at it, he started laughing. 'I don't think you're ready for this course,' he said and flicked my card back at me."
I thought, momentarily, of offering to get her a milkshake to tide her over on the way to nowhere, but the day, and her wet clothing, didn't seem to call for it. I decided without tendering the offer and crossed 59 at the stop sign, remaining on 42. We were nearing 'nowhere territory,' anyway. I did not want to waste the spell so far cast.
"I was just about to take my card, this jerk's name and head for the Dean when this tall, blond guy appeared behind Tycho and said, 'Let her take the fucking class, Kessler.' And he was wearing Ray Bans, you see?"
I didn't see at all, but nodded as I turned off 42 onto a small, poorly paved road leading north. Empty fields lay to our left and right with the occasional farmhouse to break, or complete, the monotony.
"So, you got the class?" I asked to get her back on track. She seemed to be phasing.
"Yeah, I got it," she said, rolling her head to look out the window. I could see the highlights of her melancholy reflected in the glass. For the second time that day, I didn't know what to say to her. I resorted to simple, stock communication, ashamed by how little I knew her.
"It couldn't have been that bad," I said. "You can always retake the class."
Her face came back to life, her head spinning to look at me in horror. She studied me a moment and smiled. That smile. I'd never seen it before and have not forgotten it since.
"Oh, Alex!" she pleaded. "You have no idea!" She started to cry and then to laugh. "But how could you?" she asked. "How could you?"
She was right. I had no idea. No idea what to do or say. No idea what awful thing she was preparing to tell me.
"I shouldn't get you involved," she said, shaking her head. "I shouldn't have gotten into your car. I don't know how far it goes or who might have seen," tears mixed with laughter.
Her mood was catching. I felt a pang of regret that I'd decided to drive through the park; that I hadn't let her slip away down the footpaths and into the woods. And, at the same time, I felt an obligation to help her, whatever her trouble and whatever the risk. But it was more fear than bravado which caused me to demand that she tell me what was going on. I tried to tell myself that anything stemming from Organic Chemistry registration had very little potential for danger. Paranoia, however, plays no small part in my interpretation of the world and I felt my heart pound as I envisaged one thousand and one ways to die on a lonely country road. I began scanning my mirrors compulsively, every vehicle taking on a suspicious hue.
"I felt paranoid from the minute I walked into the classroom. Eyes burned my skin, staring openly. Smiling with contempt. At first I put it down to academic competitiveness, but I gradually noticed that the stares and laughter were reserved for myself and one other girl in the class, Jenna Cisavalta. Oh Alex!" she broke. "Poor Jenna!"
She laughed sharply and I could almost feel the tears that didn't come.
"What about Jenna?" I asked in my most soothing voice.
"It could have been me that night," she said, though she spoke as if I were no longer relevant to her conversation. "I was there, too..." She trailed off and stared at the empty fields.
"What could've been you?" I asked after a long, heavy silence. "What happened, Katya?"
She spoke in a near-monotone as if to match the cast of the day. "At the apartment complex across from the Stadium. Varsity Villas. We went to a keg there and the whole rest of the class was there, too. I just saw one or two at first, but then they were all there. All of them. I remember seeing the Ray Bans all around us. Crowding us. We couldn't get out. And then Jenna was gone."
I panicked.
"Gone where!?!" I begged. "I don't understand, Katya. What did they do to Jenna?"
"She didn't come to class anymore," she said, as if this explained everything. "She wasn't in her dorm room and I didn't have a lab partner anymore."
Katya lapsed into silence as we approached U.S. 40. I crossed the highway and began to skirt the Northeast edge of Brazil, angling gently back to the west. I half expected to encounter a roadblock or to end up in a high speed chase, but I felt safer out in the rolling midst of nowhere than barreling through the hordes of unknown travelers on 40.
"We were lab partners from the very first day of classes," she started as if she had never paused. "Tycho assigned labs at the end of class, after Professor Clausen had gone. He'd said, 'What do you say we put the JAPs together as lab partners?' Everyone laughed. Everyone, but Jenna and myself. I didn't understand the joke- slang is always the last thing to be learned; but Jenna got it. It was us. The two Jewish American Princesses. Do you know that one?"
I nodded.
"Of course, I'm a Russian, but I guess that's too many consonants. Why do we learn slang last?" she asked. "It should be near the 'greetings and salutations' section of any decent language course."
"All of your classmates were anti-Semitic?" I asked, appalled. She became animated again, as if I had asked the most fascinating of questions.
"Did you know that many of the most important Nazis did not stand trial for their crimes during World War II?"
"I guess so," I shrugged, failing to see how this was going to answer any of my questions so far. "Big people never take the fall."
"Yes, well, many of these 'big people' vanished from the lists of those slated to stand trial for war crimes, never to be heard from again."
"Assassinated?" I asked, completely losing the direction.
"Employed," she smiled, "by the government of the United States of America. Your modern C.I.A. is built entirely from the Nazi intelligence apparatus of World War II. You didn't know this?"
"No," I said, somewhat skeptical. It was hard to know whether it was her knowledge or my skepticism that was born of nationalist propaganda, but I had to admit it would explain a lot about the C.I.A.
"You shouldn't be skeptical," she said. "You should watch the Discovery Channel. It is not so secret."
I blushed.
"There was a scientist, Karl Von Plunderung, famous for his work with chemical weapons. He did the initial studies of Zychlon-B for Argy Farbin on the effects of human inhalation. It was his job to know the logistics of humans, space and death to minimize the cost of exterminating Jews. It was by no means the extent of his career. At the end of the war, he was considered the world's foremost authority on chemical weapons. A valuable man indeed."
"So he shows up at Dow Chemical or something, right?"
"Hardly," she said dismissively. "If you have a valuable tool, what do you do with it?"
I puzzled.
"You do your best to replicate it," she insisted. "And how do you replicate a tool like Von Plunderung?" she led.
"Are you trying to tell me that Clausen is a disciple of this Von Plunderung guy?"
She smiled.
"Even after Jenna left, I stayed with the class," she continued. "To me, it was like some kind of challenge, but it was crazy. People in the class were always discussing works like, "The Bell Curve," "To Renew America," and that sort of thing. Tycho Kessler went on about his grand scheme to renew the Aryan civilization in a space colony that would, one day, reclaim the earth. It was almost too weird to be real. As if I were in a deep-cover psychology experiment instead of a chemistry course. These people spoke openly about their Zionist Occupational Government theories staring directly at me!"
"What about Clausen?" I asked. "What did he have to do with this?"
"At first I didn't know," she said. "It was as if these fanatics just happened to all be in one class--or these ideas were just more pervasive than I could have ever imagined. Clausen never seemed to notice the goings-on and just taught class. But now, I think he handpicked the people who were in that room. It wasn't until I started to look for Jenna that things started to come together."
I'd lost my healthy skepticism along with my ability to ride in the shadow of nowhere. Our place, move as it might, began to seem oddly conspicuous. I was glad we'd foregone the milkshake.
"First," she said, "I went to the R.A. of her floor in Forrest. She said that Jenna's folks came and took all of her things one day, but she hadn't seen Jenna for at least a week before that, which coincides with the party at the Villas. Other than that, the R.A. didn't know much. I went to the Dean of Arts and Sciences offices to try to find her parents' address or something. They said, finally, that they were unable to release that kind of information about their students, but they led me through hoops for at least an hour first. And here is where things get weird."
I cringed.
"When I left the offices, the blond with the Ray Bans who'd made Tycho let me into the class was outside. I hated that I couldn't see his eyes. He didn't seem to be following me, but he was everywhere I went."
More and more, nowhere was becoming here and now. I was losing my hold on the wheel as I wound through the emptiness of North Brazil. The gray skies were turning black and our headlights becoming our screaming points of existence.
"That went on for a whole week, while I tried everything I could think of to find Jenna. And it wasn't just being followed. I'd pick up my mail and find that it had all been opened. I got phone calls all the time where no one spoke, but I could hear them breathing on the line."
"Why didn't you just go to the police?" I asked. "Weren't you afraid?"
"Too afraid, I think. I felt like I was going mad. But that all changed on Friday. I showed up early to Clausen's class and my blond shadow was there, talking with Clausen. I stood in the doorway staring, unable to move. The blond nodded toward me and Clausen looked. He smiled at me like I was dinner and I knew that he'd thought it would be funny to have Jenna and I encounter his little group. That we'd been let in on purpose. A sick joke. I ran, crying, all the way home."
"Couldn't you have gone to the head of the chemistry department? Obviously, something wasn't right."
"Clausen is the chemistry chair," she said.
"Oh." I felt hopeless.
"I did decide to go to the police first thing on Saturday and see if I could get a restraining order on my blond shadow. Then, on Monday, I was going to drop the class and skip town a few days to sort things out. Recover, you know?"
"And..."
"And I never made it to Saturday morning," she laughed nervously, tears starting down her cheeks. "They came while I was sleeping. I awoke restrained and gagged with all those faces around me--like at the Villas. They'd destroyed my bedroom and painted obscenities all over the walls. Clausen was smiling from back in the corner. Old as he is, he came to watch. The shadow held a knife to my throat and I thought it was over, but the next thing I knew, Jenna was beside me, telling me things would be o.k. That she knew, too."
"How did she find you?" I asked.
"I found her," she said. "We were institutionalized. The police found me, like they had Jenna, alone in my bed, screaming hysterically. The people, the paint, the bindings and the damage were all gone. Or so I've been told. I remember none of it from the knife to the hospital."
"But that's been..."
"Nearly a year," she said.
"What happened with Clausen and his cohorts?"
"Nothing!" she laughed, as if she might not stop. "Jenna and I are delusional. Clausen is not Von Plunderung..."
"Clausen is Von Plunderung!?!"
She looked at me as if I were simple and went on.
"I was never followed or accosted. I just cracked under the pressure of school. Really. Its all in my file."
I didn't know what to say as we made our way into her old neighborhood and headed toward her parents' house.
"I think they're watching me," she said. "Maybe you too, now." She paused. "Sorry. I know they were all around the hospital. The Ray Bans."
I stopped at the end of her parents' drive, turning off the lights, but leaving the car to idle.
"Its not me I'm worried about," she said. "It's what was traded for weapon secrets. With his knowledge comes his hatred, and no one seems to care. Everyday, he spreads the virus. His research group is the top in the country, drawing some of the brightest chemists we have and they will all bear his taint. He heads the whole department. Hires staff!"
It was sinking in. Indiana was not exactly infertile ground for Aryan idealism. It's Klan country, to be sure. Under the protection of a secret brotherhood, Clausen was teaching a respectable class his hatred. A class of people who carried the markings of objective scientists, unswayed by anything short of positive proof. A secret injection quietly into the body where is could spread and grow until the body broke out in fevered madness.
"When did you get out of the hospital?" I asked, mulling over in my head the weight falling on my shoulders.
"I left today," she said. "Anymore haloperidol and I might really lose it," she smiled.
"You escaped!?!"
She gave a wan smile.
"Maybe you could help," she said, suddenly. "If they don't know who you are yet. I mean, if they haven't seen you with me..."
I reflexively checked my mirrors for activity.
"You could take the class," she said, hopefully. "Expose them."
"Maybe," I said, nervously. "I don't know if I'm the best person for this."
"You'd be great," she laughed. "Great!"
"Hey!" she said. "The Mighty Mighty Boss Tones are in Indy next week. Maybe we could catch the show and stay the night or something."
"I'll call you," I promised, shocked by the sudden slip from cloak and dagger to Ska.
"And we can work out how we're going to get you onto Von Plunderung. Have you seen the 'Unbearable Lightness of Being'?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"Ray Bans," she said. "They all wear Ray Bans." As I pulled away, I wondered if madness was the beginning or end of Katya's story. Madness is hard to trace in this world. Things like this didn't happen in real life. Only in literature. I promised I'd call her, but tried to forget her. I've done neither. |