Alligator - Lisa Moore [26]
He knew that tipping his glass, as he did, appeared disdainful; he knew there was some slight adjustment required; some subtle aspect of the North American culture he needed to grasp before his attentions could be appreciated. But he had never mastered an easy charm. He attracted women, instead, with a wily sense of purpose that was itself intoxicating.
The door to the bar was open and it was raining hard. He could smell the rain and heavy cigarette smoke and some dank, despairing smell — the mouldy carpet, briny harbour, and pigeon-shit reek the rain released.
He was waiting for a young woman who had a supply of prescription drugs he was willing to sell for her. She was fifteen minutes late.
The woman was on a month-long OxyContin binge and he imagined she would probably be dead by the end of the summer. It had impressed him how long she had hung on already. She might have been beautiful, but the binge had left her jaundiced, bony, and drawn. He might have made love to her, but she was fitful and distracted. He found that when he made love he liked to have a girl’s attention. It was a mandatory courtesy he hadn’t cared about or noticed when he was young.
Valentin had a heavy brow and broad cheekbones. His eyes were large and almost rusty brown and his mouth was crooked and sensuous. He assessed himself every morning when he shaved, gave himself a cold look, but he found himself handsome.
In Russia, as a teenager, Valentin had been a chess champion. If the girl didn’t show he would play a game of chess. He had an Old World cunning that amounted to a talent for being flexible.
He knew he was the picture of European sophistication when he sat behind a chessboard with his arms resting on the table. He affected a brooding look. He could win without much effort. He liked the feel of onlookers. He liked the way they didn’t speak, and would wander away and come back to see how the game progressed. He liked the good-natured losers who shook his hand or clapped him on the shoulder.
Flexibility meant a prismatic comprehension of all aspects of experience. A burst of intuition that stripped a situation of its complexity and made plain what was most advantageous. What he believed in most was being thorough.
He had travelled through countries where the worth of a loaf of bread had soared and dropped in the time it took him to eat it. He’d seen a Jeep fly into the air; he’d seen legs torn from bodies.
He’d seen his father dragged from his bed and made to kneel on the ground and then shot in the back of the head. It was a night that came back to him frequently in dreams. He had not seen it; he had heard it through an open window. Or it had been recounted to him. His sister had whispered the story to him while he was falling asleep; he had heard the neighbours speak of it. Here or there, a spoken phrase so vivid he couldn’t remember what he’d seen for himself and what he’d been told.
His father kneeling in the mud is a memory he feels he must have seen with his own eyes, first one knee then the other, the concentrated spot of a flashlight jiggling on his father’s bare white neck and then becoming diffuse, flying off into the trees. But he cannot remember a gunshot.
Valentin and his sister were hiding under a bed, he remembers, and the smell of mothballs still brings the night back distinctly, though he was only three, though he might have been sound asleep throughout. Mothball is not a word he has ever read; he doesn’t even know what they are made of. Perhaps mothballs are natural, occur in nature.
He had been tortured once for six days in a cinderblock cell and believed himself to be abandoned in this cell, buried alive, and lived with this belief for two and a half days and three cracked ribs and an eye swollen shut — they had dislodged the retina in his left eye and now it caught the light in a strange way, like the irregularities in a piece of amber — and had then been released for no reason he could figure out, though he’d examined every detail of his experience in confinement for logic or pattern.