A free sample from The Extrasense: A Novel by Alex Rozen

Max’s story #1

“Reagan, Hitler, and Jane Austen walk into a bar,” I said.

Nick and Watson had just carved a fresh piece of Neanderthal art on a wooden bench. The new masterpiece celebrated the impossible anatomy of their dream woman. Watson wiped the blade on Nick’s pants, ducked a punch in the face, and hid the knife in his pocket. The locker room was perfumed with teenagers and industrial disinfectants that the cleaning staff sprayed around us to no avail. We had fewer legs than roaches, but we also scattered and thrived.

“What happens next?” Watson got up from the bench and coiffed his hair in front of a mirror that had long suffered from chicken pox.

“No idea yet,” I admitted. “But I like this line. It’s got potential.”

“Potential for what?” Watson tried to scare his own reflection with a baboonish grin. “Anya is smarter than that. You need a better pickup line.”

“Who the hell is Jane Austen?” The red-faced Nick had finally solved the shoelace puzzle on his left sneaker and cursed as he started on the other one.

“What would Reagan and Hitler want with her?” Watson said.

Nick sliced his throat with his thumbnail and clicked his tongue. “Kidnap for ransom, I reckon. Was she rich or something?”

I couldn’t tell them it was the first line in a story I wanted to write. Despite my spasmodic attempts at sketching the plot, the blockbuster epic eluded me, dangling that opening in front of my bespectacled nose. I had a vague idea of roping Lenin into the orgy as well, but all those men would require another female lead, which left me scratching my skull and wasting scarce typewriter ribbon.

From a wall-plugged radio speaker, Swan Lake drifted over the fumes of the guys’ locker room.

“Who died this time?” Nick said.

“That wheezing chap. White hair.” Watson scrunched up his forehead and twirled his forefinger around an unruly lock. “What was his name?”

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Was he the general secretary?”

Watson’s reflection shrugged.

On March 11, 1985, we goofed in the locker room as the radio droned about the need to huddle together around the Party. The TV joined the radio in playing Swan Lake all day, the sure sign that another Kremlin patriarch had kicked the five-year plan. The last two fell way short of their obligations. The previous guy had lasted fourteen months only to be undercut by the last victim. I could never understand why they didn’t let those old men enjoy the rest of their retirement. I guess a candidate for the top position improved his chances by indicating that he wouldn't last long. The latest casualty of the system hadn’t even completed his own obituary, thereby shirking his terminal Communist duty.

We climbed the stairs into the indoor arena and inhaled the smell of the rubber track. Slanting rays of the sun flooded the dusty air through the glass wall, teasing the runners and jumpers with a fake promise of an early thaw. Away from it all, at a table tucked into the corner, a couple of younger girls played ping-pong. One of them, a lanky brat with a pointed nose, returned her opponent’s serve with a perfect topspin smash and yelled, “I win!” She whirled around and froze as she saw me. The smile drained out of her face. She studied me for a long time, lips quivering, eyes glistening, cheeks losing color as I watched her and fumbled for words. I thought she’d say something and save me from the silence, tell me she’d forgiven me, call me Stinky Dog again, but she turned slowly and trudged away, head down, ping-pong paddle dangling between her fingers.

Alas, long-term brooding wasn’t in the cards for me. When you are fifteen, physical torture is an excellent antidote to pangs of conscience. Coach Papa saved me from guilt that day by kicking our collective asses. By the time that workout was over, our bodies littered the center of the arena with wet silhouettes; other coaches flippantly yelled at Papa to stop the execution, and the runners who pranced around the track cast sorry eyes on this perspiring bunch of losers who had the nerve to call themselves track and field athletes. Our gang of beefy bozos threw hardware—heavy, dangerous, and chick-repellent. Hammer. Discus. Shot. I was the only skinny one in the bunch, but my slim physique never scored me any points with girls. I was tainted by association, or maybe I looked skeletal in comparison. Be wise when you select your reference group, especially when Anya is around swinging her hips and feigning disinterest.

Her dark blonde hair was always pulled back in a braid as thick as my arm. Yeah, I know it says something about the girth of my limbs, but I couldn’t do much about it. I could never compete with the rest of our squad in muscle mass. Genetics, like class, was destiny.

Later that night, while my mom cursed Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece and mourned the loss of regular TV programming to the death of another Dear Leader, I pulled out my notebook in the solitude of my room. I wrote the line about Reagan, Hitler, and Jane Austen and stared at it stupidly for half an hour. My muse was definitely on strike that night, probably queuing for typewriter ribbon.

Disgusted with myself, I scratched the troika out of existence and began a story about Anya as a Greek goddess. In the first scene, she holds a discus in her hand while her feet are planted wide apart in a marble circle, with the Parthenon still intact in the background and all the other gods watching. I figured they had a divine Olympics or something. Ancient Olympians were supposed to compete naked, but since I’d never seen Anya without clothes yet, I skipped that part piously.

Where was I? Right, so she raises her right arm and rocks the discus in the air a few times, back and forth, gaining momentum and winding herself up. Without a pause, she corkscrews her left foot into the marble, whips herself around, and utters a short moan, sensual, tender, and strong at the same time. She stands erect and still, watching the discus flying away into the fluid morning sun, all grace and glory and a few hairs straying from her braid and stirring in the cool wind. Chubby cherubs descend from the sky and adorn her head with a laurel leaf crown because she beats the crap out of Athena and the rest of the Olympus-dwelling mob. Her throw demolishes the Parthenon a mile away.

She turns to me and says, “How was it, Max?” She is smiling. She is as close to perfection as anyone can get. Her discus hides far in the smoking ruins on the Acropolis. She has beaten everyone, including me. I’ll have to go out there and help her find her discus after my throw. We’ll spend a few moments away from the rest of our squad looking for our projectiles among the rubble and pretending to brush against each other by accident.

But that will be later, after she forgives me. Being a dork, I don’t praise Anya. I critique her. I even show her where she messed up while she watches my undulations with her patented smirk.

Any other girl would have been mad at me. I tried that with Olga once. She spat between her teeth on the concrete and told me to get lost and do something obscene with myself—I didn’t quite get the details—accompanying the verbal insult with a flexed bicep.

Anya only grins and says to me, “Your turn now. See how far your wooden knees will bend.”

Alas, after an hour of pen-wiggling convulsions, that story also remained unfinished. I blamed the lack of typewriter ribbon for the failure. Who said being an author was easy?

I never made my advances toward Anya, well, not in the conventional way. She intimidated me. Her taunts stung to the quick. She was two years older than me. When she batted her eyelashes at me and smiled seductively, I felt like the butt of another prank of hers. Surely, she was setting me up for another failure. Besides, Nick was constantly pulling my attention away from Anya toward the skinny runner types prancing around the track. Apologies to my audience who may entertain high hopes for me. I haven’t improved much since then. Stop reading now if you expect character development.

As you can gather, I represented the wimpy end of the teenage spectrum. A bodyguard looking like Anya in the rough streets of our city? What was I thinking? Even sans divine powers, Anya could have knocked out any hapless assailant with one blow of her dainty, discus-hurling fist. To this day, I’ve never witnessed her deliver a punch, even though I am still hopeful.

Despite the proximity of such a supernova, Nick, the perfect idiot, fancied girls who ran and jumped, not those who threw heavy objects. That meant three things. First, those girls were on other teams. Second, they were unavailable in principle because they ran too fast for Nick to catch them. Besides, catching them would have done him no good because back in the day, he could only moo when a pretty girl was around. The prettier the girl, the more abject the mooing. And third, as far as Nick was concerned, those girls were not humans. They were ethereal creatures with long legs. Elves, maybe. Or Martians.

I wanted to write a story about Nick conquering Mars and opening a harem because he could never settle on one girl. At that particular moment in his life, he had his eyeballs on a couple of them. The lesser star of his cravings was called ‘Two,’ a fitting title he gave her due to her pigtails. This name also reflected her ranking in his hierarchy of affections. She ran, jumped, and threw stuff. She was the tiniest heptathlete we’d ever seen. Maybe that’s why he was attracted to her. Two was different and exotic, the perfect mix of pure types, a transitional candidate fit for Nick’s pimply imagination. I guess he sublimated his unacknowledged adoration of Anya, a strong blonde braid too close to be appreciated, into infatuation with darker twin braids just beyond his reach. His genes lusted for novelty. His unimproved body wanted to crawl out of his cave and mate with someone exquisite in the next one. Anya was simply too muscular for his liking.

The main subject of Nick’s passion was definitely a bad girl. If there ever was a cat in female form, that was her. Can you imagine slanted green eyes with pupils that squeezed into vertical slits? Can you picture a lithe whirlwind that hugged every hurdle without ever knocking one down, the spikes on her shoes ripping the rubber track like claws? Not that I cared. Those were Nick’s observations transformed into high prose by my writing genius.

The problem was, he never found out her name. He had no idea what to call her until I decided to bail him out. I suggested ‘One.’ The reason? Simple enough. One wore a ponytail. Two had pigtails. Nick and I were dolts, but we could still count. I was always good at math, and even Nick, God bless his science-challenged IQ, managed to remember the first digits.

Despite all my help, the closest Nick ever got to One was when we slacked off and got away with it. Coach Papa told us to do the squats at the end of a long workout, but I was pissed at him for yelling at me earlier. So, when Coach was away, probably unscrewing another bottle with his cronies, I put an empty bar on my shoulders and jumped up and down with it, which kept Nick and Watson mocking throughout my performance. Having finished my set, I staggered off while a distinct feline cadence pierced the din of the arena behind my back.

Seconds later, Nick came running. “She mentioned you!” he enthused, grabbing my shoulder and shaking it. “One did!”

“What did she say?”

“Did you see that moron do the squats?” He made a windmill with his arms. “Max, you gotta talk to her! Introduce me to her! She noticed one of us. Finally!”

“Moron?” The nearby Watson barged in like he always did, his fangs gleaming in the artificial light. “Is that what we call Maxi now? Maximoron?”

“Come on, Max!” Nick jerked his head and pointed over his shoulder. Behind his back, One snickered in our general direction in the company of her girlfriends. “She’s right there!”

I pushed him toward One. “You want her; you talk to her. Watson, take Comrade Nico to the damsel.”

Watson flipped us both the finger so convincingly I could swear he’d learned it from me.

“Cowards. Both of you. Filthy backstabbers.” With this diagnosis, Nick lumbered off, shaking his head, while Watson and I bent over holding on to our bellies and trying not to burst. We watched him stagger in her direction, but Nick never said a word to One. As I’d expected, he stumbled on a mat and nearly sprawled on the floor to the snickering of One and her lady friends. They ran off like a flock of twittering birds. Nick’s obsession was ready to rest in peace, but it took another episode to erect a tombstone.

It involved Vlad, a decathlete on Two’s team. He was everything Nick, Watson, and I weren’t. The only things we had in common were height (he was also tall) and dark hair. Beyond that, the differences multiplied. Vlad had movie star looks, reminding me of a young Alain Delon in the scene where he shags a gorgeously made-up peasant chick in a haystack (God, we loved that movie). No glasses or pimples on his face (and no thought, either). Muscles without fat. Smirk without conscience. But worst of all, he could talk to girls. Not just talk. He’d position himself next to his target on the track, jogging without even panting, and say a few words in his inimitable suave tone, both casual and loaded at the same time. Next, she’d be snickering and begging for a sequel.

Vlad put the moves on Two, the backup pick of Nick’s carnal folly, but she turned out to be a prim young lady of unshakeable morals. I suppose she was also looking outside her cave, while Vlad was a specimen of Homo erectus who shared her fire pit, someone who gnawed at mammoth bones and performed bodily functions too close to her fragile personality. Therefore, she brushed him off like an annoying brother.

Years later, Nick, Two, and I studied at the same university. We even learned Two’s real name. That achievement impressed Nick so much that he married her. By then, we had stopped mooing in the presence of females, but my newly found coherent speech graced the ears of Anya and no one else.

Back in the day, One hadn’t become a hooker yet, even though the trajectory should have been obvious in hindsight. She had that combination of badassery and looks that made Nick conspire to get her despite the platitudes spewing out of her mouth. Every time she capered nearby, chatting with her friends, we listened hard, hoping to absorb an arresting thought but only hearing hogwash about fashion and pop music. She seemed to dig the tunes we all despised, the kind where girl wants boy but has no idea how to get him. How could those songs resonate with One? She had no trouble in that department, for sure. But Nick cared not. One could have talked about rubber duckies and the latest Communist Party congress in the same sentence. A beckoning of her manicured fingernail would have turned Nick into a zombie, spirals in his eyes, ready to follow her anywhere.

The very next day, Vlad positioned himself next to One on the track with his crooked leer of a perennial winner. They left the arena together that night under the same umbrella, and the following night, and every night after that. Seeing Nick’s dejected mug, I swore to kill Vlad. Watson swore he’d kill One. Our friend’s disgrace would be washed away with blood. We spent the next couple of months perfecting our revenge plans and gathering weapons of mass destruction: sticks, stones, and a hand-made glass shard that required a precise blow to an empty champagne bottle. Unfortunately for Nick, by the time the two months were over, Anya decided to terminate my existential misery and pinched my butt. The impression of her fingers lifting a segment of my skin off my scrawny gluteus maximus created an immediate effect of the world finally plopping down into its right place. All of a sudden, I couldn’t care less about my friend’s amorous fiasco. I donated my arsenal to Nick and abandoned myself to the mighty embrace of Anya Gromova, later to become an adrenalizing doctor and the best reader in the world.

Nick forgave me, eventually. Watson, Nick, and I betrayed each other many times and remained friends. We never even gave each other a bloody nose for fear of smashing our glasses. I guess Nick married Two to spite me and beat me to connubial bliss. But one betrayal I could not forget, the most painful of all, one that almost drove me insane. It happened later that spring when apple trees blossomed, bears awoke from hibernation, and the Soviet army looked for fresh meat to toss into the Afghanistan grinder.

Nick was three years my senior, which made him a year older than Anya. Big, wide, and bear-like, he was tailored for the shot put. His results were so much better than mine that I refused to practice next to him, drawing Coach Papa’s ire. One day, Papa’s patience snapped, and he made Watson and me wrestle Nick together in the spirit of collective responsibility. Anyone’s back on the floor meant five butt kicks dispensed by the victor. While Watson, being a little shorter than I, dutifully chewed on Nick’s leg, the safest part of him, my big friend went to work on me. I assumed the classic pose of a Greek wrestler I’d seen on TV so many times: feet firmly planted while head rested on the mat. My back formed a perfect arch. The mat smelled of plastic, perspiration, and thousands of footprints.

“Try to pin me to the floor,” I growled between my clenched jaws. My stance was impregnable. I knew I had won already.

Nick grunted, shook off Watson’s teeth with one kick, and positioned himself on top of me, dousing me with his aromatic sweat. Crunch went my neck, and my back kissed the mat. Relieved of my combat duty, I prepared to die right there and then because Anya was watching the showdown with her customary sarcastic smile, standing next to me, and egging me on with utterances like, “Hold on, Maxik, he’s about to get tired! Three more hours, and he’s dead!”

But my neck turned out to be sturdier than I thought. I sat up and shook my head, wondering why it was still attached to the rest of me. Nick was already getting up and toweling off, sweat dripping off his face and forming a series of puddles on the mats. Watson lay on his back, holding on to his swollen lip and cursing me while Coach Papa stood nearby and gave instructions about the proper positioning of our asses. Faces and hands to the wall in the corner. We couldn’t run away from there.

Anya gave me my specs and turned to Nick. “You’re not kicking him,” she said, pointing at me. Coach Papa muttered something about obligations and teamwork, but she waved him off.

I hoped my ears burned from exertion and not from the double disgrace.

“We’ll discuss that over a cup of tea,” Nick said. “At my place.”

With mute horror, I watched Anya flap her eyelashes at him. She was considering it; I could see that.

“Are you asking me out?” Anya said playfully, arching her eyebrow.

“I’ll be off to the army soon,” Nick said.

“And you’re ashamed of going as a virgin?”

“Tea or butt-kicking.” Nick cast a sideways glance at me. I could swear he was nervous. He kept swallowing and crossing his eyes.

I should have jumped in and stood between them. I should have told him to get lost because she was mine, because I couldn’t care less if Nick went to hell, because even Afghanistan wasn’t enough punishment for him, the treasonous snake, because his parents would surely negotiate somewhere safe and cozy for him to serve, a warm place close to food and capitalist merchandise. I should have punched his face. He’d have killed me for sure, ending my life with dignity. A real man would have locked horns for a woman, but later I realized why I merely stood and watched the sweat trickling down Nick’s broad face as he crossed his eyes at Anya’s gorgeous freckles.

I wanted her to choose me publicly. I wanted her to commit to me on her own free will.

“Tea.” She smiled at Nick.

Watson snuck up on me and whispered into my ear, “Max, Nick, and Anya walk into a bar.”

Bingo, I thought. I knew how to continue that story. Only two would live after the clock struck midnight.

Anya played with her braid and flapped her eyelashes at me. Sorry, Max, her lips formed.

Anya. October 8, 1994. Her Parents’ Apartment.

“Are you feeling all right?” Mother says.

Anya stirs the tea with the spoon, looking into the swirling brown liquid. The overhead living room lamp reflects in the steaming vortex as an undulating bright spot. Anya remembers the lights of the Spartacus Arena where she met Max for the first time. How long ago it was, and how recent. Every time Max writes another story of them together, she feels like a teenager again, carefree and only concerned with satisfying that sweet yearning deep inside her.

“Honey?” Her dad wheezes.

“What?” Anya jumps a little as if someone pulled her braid again.

“You keep drifting off,” Mother says. “You haven’t taken sick, have you? Put some lemon in your tea.”

Anya shakes her head. “Mom, Dad, we need to talk.”

Her parents give each other a look and stare back at her with silly expectation, their mouths open, their eyes twinkling. “You’re pregnant?” Mom says. “Finally?”

“No! Why would you think that?”

“You gobbled up those pickled cucumbers like they were the last in the world.”

“I’m fine, and I’m not pregnant.” Anya puts her spoon on the table.

Reading Max’s latest story, Anya caught a thread of her own memory, a dim spot not yet erased by Max’s fiction. She barely knows what true remembering feels like. Every time she turns to the past, Max’s tales offer a crutch, always beautiful, always exciting, but a crutch nevertheless. She’s read them so many times that her own recollections have been buried under the shining luster of his prose.

If only Mom had been there. If only Anya could tap into her mother’s mind to get her own life record straight. But no, Mom has never met One and Two. She was never there when Max and his pals cavorted around. She never saw Max and Nick salivate after One whenever she skipped by, wiggling her tail. Both of them did, and Watson, as well. Maybe Max didn’t pay much attention to Two, but One was definitely on his radar. They were boys.

“I’m not happy,” Anya says. “I mean, I am happy, but it feels fake.”

“What’s fake?” Mom says.

“I don’t know. The whole thing. Life. My past.”

“Did Maxim do something to you?” Dad says.

“No. It’s just—” Anya stops and stares past her parents out the window, where darkness has swallowed the city whole. The few remaining streetlamps wage a losing battle against the late autumn gloom. Max told her about a student of his who was attacked as he entered his building. A month later, the lad was released from the hospital straight into a dentist’s office to have the missing teeth replaced. Anya already knows she won’t be going home tonight. Not after dark.

“Anya?” Mom says. “What’s on your mind?”

Anya shakes her head. “Have you ever thought, this isn’t my life? Have you ever wanted to rewrite it? Start from scratch? Do something else?”

“You don’t want to be a doctor anymore?” Dad says. “I spent the last of our money to get you into that office with all that equipment. You want to squander it all?”

Anya watches his reddening face with alarm. Dad took the Soviet collapse hard. A lifelong apparatchik, he was vilified in the press as if he had personally supervised executions of prisoners in the Gulag. When the Communist Party was banned, Dad retired, but the old habits refused to die. He kept consuming the news and ate nitroglycerin. Anya and her mother spent two nerve-racking days in the hospital when Dad had a heart attack. Anya’s cardiology professor from the medical institute released him with a stern warning: no more nervous shocks. No newspapers. No politics. Make your father happy. Spoil him. Pretend he’s a toddler. He shouldn’t hear the word no when he wants something.

Anya swallows hard and thinks of what to say before she begins talking. “Dad, I appreciate your help. I couldn’t do it without you and Mom.” She pauses and looks into his face. “It’s not about my career. That part of my life is OK.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Dad says. “Maybe you should get married. I wouldn’t mind bouncing grandkids on my arthritic knees while there’s still bounce left in them.”

Anya listens for the wheezing in his voice as he speaks. A bit more than usual. She’s been told to pamper her dad. That was the best that conventional medicine could do for him now.

“Are you well, Daddy?” she says.

He sighs. “If only I could get a decent healer.” He casts a wary look at his wife, who pours more tea and pretends not to hear it.

Anya thinks how funny it is that her father, an old Communist bigwig, is given to superstition. Ever since she was little, he has believed in all kinds of quacks on TV who claimed to heal people by magnetism, hypnosis, and the energy of their hands. She remembers coming home after a tough anatomy exam one day and finding her father in the company of a Rasputin-like character wielding a crucifix and chanting unintelligible couplets into her dad’s blissful face. Back then, Anya still sported considerable muscle mass, so she threw the healer out of the apartment and threatened Dad she’d tell Mom. She regretted this bitterly as years wore on, and her father’s heart did worse despite treatment.

“Why do you believe in healers, Dad? I’m a doctor, in case you forgot.”

Mother frowns, but Dad ignores that or pretends not to notice. “Unlike doctors, they help,” he says. “Ask Maxim.”

“What about him?” Anya says.

“He no longer wears his glasses.”

“So what?”

“Ask him how he lost them.”

“Contacts?”

Her father snorts. “How can you sleep with a guy and not see that he doesn’t use contacts?” He looks around as if afraid to see Max lurking in the corner. “He asked me to keep it a secret,” he says in a low voice. “Maxim saw an extrasensory healer. I asked him to take me there, but he refused. Said his guy could only fix eyesight, not heart trouble.”

“Oh, God.” Mother rolls her eyes. “Anya, I hope you’ll marry someone else. I don’t need another wacko in the family.”

Dad slaps Mother’s hand playfully. “Nah. Maxim is all right. It’s just that a poor teacher isn’t what I’d call a good match for Anka.”

“Do you have any other candidates?” Mom says.

“How about Vlad?” Dad winces and rubs his chest. Anya and her mother watch his knotty fingers with instant alarm.

“Vlad?” Mom says. “The guy from Maxim’s story?”

“Rich, well-connected, and good-looking.” Dad takes another bite of toast covered with butter and red caviar and washes it down with white wine. “What else do you want in a guy?”

“Hello?” Anya waves her hand in the air. “I’m still here. Shouldn’t you ask me?”

“Asking kids is a bad idea,” Dad says.

“Kids? I’m twenty-six.”

“Still a baby.” He gives her a wry smile. “And your Maxim is even younger. He’s, what, twenty-three?”

“Twenty-four.”

“You need someone older. Someone you will gain with.”

“Gain what?”

“Everything. Money. Position. Respect.”

“How about love?”

“Love is overrated.” Dad gives his wife a wink and places his hand on hers.

Mom pulls her hand away from him and turns to Anya. “Tell us.” She looks Anya straight in the eyes, all mirth drained from her face. She’s the prosecutor again, analyzing, questioning, looking for evidence. “Something is going on between you and Maxim. I can see it. Not that extrasensory idiocy. Something deeper.”

“Mom, why did you marry Dad?”

They both freeze for a few seconds as if Anya had told them she decided to join a hippie commune in the Amazon jungle.

“For love,” Mom says with a giggle that sounds a little strained. “What else could it be? He was a factory worker at that time. If you think he lavished roses on me, you’ll be sorely disappointed. His forte was castles in the air.”

“But did you make the choice, Mom?”

“Of course, I made the choice. Who else could have made it for me?”

“Dad?”

“What?” he says.

“No,” Anya says. “I mean, did you ever feel it wasn’t your choice, Mom? Did you ever feel Dad made the choice for you?”

“What nonsense!” Mom makes a grimace. “I would never have allowed anyone to choose for me. Not even Dad. Yes, he is a man, so it was his job to propose, but it was up to me to accept.”

“Is Maxim pressing you to marry him?” Dad says. “Did he threaten you in any way?”

“He has proposed, but it’s not what you think, Daddy. I can’t put my finger on it. I just feel uneasy about it, as if I have to accept, and if I don’t, I’ll feel guilty.”

“But why?” Mom says.

“I don’t know. I just feel that way.”

“Wait a second.” Mom stirs her own tea slowly, her eyes fixed on the middle of the table, where the remains of the cake form a picturesque ruin on a plate. “When did he propose?”

“Yesterday. Why?”

“Did you read this story before or after that? About Vlad, One and Two, Nick and Watson?”

Anya rubs her forehead. “Before. I read the story, and then he proposed.”

“How did you feel after reading it?”

“As usual. Happy. Sad. Elated. Pensive. A little sorry when it was over.”

“The story ended with Maxim wanting you to choose him,” Mother says.

Anya realizes her mouth is open. She closes it and swallows. “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing for now,” Mother says. “Did that episode really happen? The wrestling scene?”

“Yes.” Anya is sure of that. Almost sure. Yes, it did happen, no doubt. She remembers details that Max omitted: One looking at the wrestling boys and snickering, Vlad standing next to One, his arm around her waist, whispering into her ear, a stupid grin on One’s pretty, cat-like face, her green eyes misting over when Vlad’s hand slides down and cups her butt.

“Did Maxim get his ass kicked?” Dad says.

“I stepped in. Nick had to be placated.”

“You really dated him?”

“We just had tea in a café.”

“That’s it?”

“I swear, Dad. He tried to kiss me. I pushed him off. He sulked and didn’t speak to me until we said goodbye.”

“What happened to him later? Did he come back from Afghanistan?”

“He never went there. Max says his parents bribed the right colonel at the army office. Nick is a lawyer now.”

“Damn it.” Dad bangs his fist on the table cautiously. “Nick’s a lawyer, Vlad is a businessman, and my daughter is pondering a proposal from a starving adjunct.”

“Honey, it’s not important now,” Mom says. “Our daughter needs help, not reminders of the mistakes she made.”

“Max wasn’t a mistake,” Anya says.

“But you’re wondering if you should marry him,” Mom says.

“Of course, she’s wondering,” Dad says. “I’d be wondering, too, if I had the prospect of tying the knot with a poor math teacher.”

“Dad, it’s not the money.” Anya feels exasperation building inside her but stops herself in time. She can’t lash out. “Something is holding me,” she says as calmly as possible. “Something about Max. What you just said got me thinking. Why do I often feel like he’s a healer, and I’m his patient?”

Mom takes a sip of her tea, her hazel eyes pensive behind her massive eyeglasses. If anyone can solve the riddle, it’s her. Anya has always marveled at the genetic distribution in their family. Dad was the emotional, volatile Party boss, able to scream at people and cool off within seconds only to heat up again when someone needed a kick in the pants to get them to fulfill the next five-year plan. Anya wondered if his heart trouble was the result of his burning at the job or his natural mercurial temper. Mom has always been the cool, level-headed legal scholar, examining evidence, writing opinions, drafting subpoenas. She stepped into the prosecutor’s office around the time Anya entered the medical institute. Before his heart attack, Dad would shout and flail his arms while Mom purred and soothed. Even in the courtroom, she never raised her voice.

“Do you always feel that way after reading his stories?” Mom says.

“What are you getting at?” Anya says.

“Try to remember the very first time you read Max’s story.”

Anya closes her eyes. The weight room. Max, Nick, and Watson horsing around with the other guys. Coach Papa yells at them for taking too long between sets. Anya lies down on the bench to press the bar. Olga is spotting her, standing between her head and the wall. Max’s voice suddenly disappears as Anya strains to press the sixty kilograms one more time. Olga yells at her, cursing and ordering her to do one more rep. Anya almost passes out from the effort, unable to press the bar, and Olga pulls it up with her mighty biceps. Anya sits up and shakes her head, colorful donuts swimming before her eyes. Olga rubs her back and calls her “Beauty Beast.” Max is walking away from the place where her gym bag rests against the opposite wall. He whistles a Beatles tune and fakes nonchalance.

Later that night, when Anya came home, she found a thick wad of typewritten sheets in her gym bag. Point of Return by Maxim Dronin.

That night, she sank into the manuscript, sleep forgotten. She devoured Max’s story into the small hours, turning the pages over and re-reading them line by line, savoring every sentence in the warm glow of her night lamp, Max’s crafty teenage voice narrating his story deep inside her head. She knew it was fiction, and she didn’t care. The world Max had built sucked her in.

She was afraid to face him at the next workout lest she betray herself. Had she ever sweated so much during a warmup? Had her heart ever fluttered like that? Had she ever noticed that he wasn’t ugly at all but rather cute in his nerdy, bespectacled way?

She knew one thing. She wanted to read the sequel.

“Love at first read,” Anya says. “I was hooked.”

“When did you and Max become a couple? How soon after that?”

Anya shrugs. The halcyon days of their youth seem to have blurred into fog, thick, sweaty, and filled with carnal pleasure. The only thing she remembers vividly is their first date, which ended when her parents unexpectedly came home early, and Max was ready to jump out the window. Anya forced him to pull on his pants and face the possible in-laws like a man.

“Weeks, I guess,” Anya says. “Maybe a few months.”

“Did he ever write anything else for you?” Mom says. “Between the first story and the first date?”

“A few snippets, like notes in a diary. They were funny.”

“About you?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel?”

“Happy.” Anya’s ears grow hot.

“I bet you wanted to take his pants off.” Dad guffaws. “Like that first time, remember?”

Anya and Mom roll their eyes in chorus, but Dad must be humored per his cardiologist’s orders, so Anya says nothing and prepares for the worst.

“I say to Mama: look, Anka brought a lad home.” Her father points toward the corridor. “His sneakers sat right there next to your heels. I say, honey, I bet she put on that short dress as well. We go around the flat, sniffing the air like a pair of basset hounds and listening for any strange noises, maybe a moan or the bed’s squeak, and here’s that dress in the bathtub along with a sweater of unknown origin.” He chuckles. “And then we see your door open, and you edge out, all pink in the face, braiding your hair in haste, and I know that look on a girl.” He winks at Mom. “I think to myself, she’s got some stallion in there, judging by the glow coming from her. Then I see this long-haired, skinny boy in the doorway, and I think, who the hell is he? A page? A sidekick? Did he help his master? I look inside, and there’s no one else, only this geek in glasses, shaking and looking like he’s about to faint.”

“Dad, stop that.” Anya doesn’t know if she should laugh or slap him.

Her father sighs. “I thought I’d kill him right there, but how could I kill a kid? I swore to myself I’d personally castrate him if he got you pregnant, but he’s been careful; kudos to him. Hasn’t knocked you up in all these years.” Dad takes a sip from his wine glass. “You sure he’s fertile? He’s so damn skinny. We don’t need a sick son-in-law.”

“Dad, Max is perfectly fine. That’s not what we’re talking about here, so please, can we go back to the topic?”

Dad raises his hands. “Just sayin’. An old geezer has a constitutional right to a little fun.”

Mom cocks her head to one side and squints. The revelation is coming. Anya knows it. That’s how Mom looks when she has pieced a puzzle together. She lives for the triumph of discovery.

“Has Maxim written a lot of stories for you?” Mom says.

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“One for every birthday.” Anya starts to count on her fingers. “Always one for Women’s Day. Two or three between those.”

“Those stories between your birthday and Women’s Day—were they clustered in some way? How did you feel before Max wrote them to you?”

Anya rubs her forehead again. “Sometimes sad or tired. I recall one time when I’d had a tough week at work. Max brought me a funny story, and I felt so elated that we ended up—” Anya stops and bites her lower lip to hide her smile.

Mom and Dad watch her, Dad with a saucy grin, Mom with a slight frown.

“Did he ever try to make up to you by writing a story?” Mom says.

“How do you know?”

“You’d have a fight, and then Maxim would come with a bouquet of roses, some chocolates, and a new story, and you would melt. Correct?”

“What are you driving at, Mom?”

“You’re a doctor, honey, so you studied biology. You should know the symptoms. A light comes on; an experimenter brings food; the dog salivates. In a few days, the saliva flows without food. The light does the trick.”

Anya stares at her mother in horror. No. That can’t be true. She’s not Pavlov’s dog. Her love for Max isn’t a conditioned reflex. She chose to be with him. She chose him.

Or did she?

She takes Max’s most recent story in her hands. As she scans the lines, and the story seeps through her neurons, a familiar warmth spreads over her lower belly every time Max talks about her, his craving for her, his agony at being unable to tell her what he wanted. She puts the story down, but the desire refuses to dissipate.

Yes, she needs him now. She’s willing and ready. The light is on, and the dog is drooling.

“That’s called manipulation, my darling,” Mom says. “I bet he proposed to you right after you read this. Am I correct?”

Anya shakes her head slowly. “I can’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to believe anything. Gather the evidence and see for yourself.”

“How?”

“Ask Maxim to write another story for you. Tell him you’re feeling sad or depressed or whatever. Tell him you need to be cheered up.”

“I know the outcome, Mom. That won’t be much of an experiment.”

“Ah, there’s the trick.” Mom reaches out and puts her hand on Anya’s. “Tell him to write a story about someone else. See if you react differently to that.”

“But why did I react to his very first story back then? It wasn’t about me and him. It was a fantasy about a young couple traveling in time.”

“What were their names?”

“Jake and Becky.”

“But did you see yourself in the female protagonist?” Mom says.

Anya pulls her braid from behind her back and begins to untie it. “Well, Becky was blonde, like me. Braided her hair. Freckles on her nose. Blue eyes. Pretty.”

“There you go!” Mom seems triumphant. “And was Max like the male hero?”

Anya laughs. “Hell, no. Jake was cool and composed. Played the guitar like an Olympian god. Always had a sharp rejoinder. Nothing like Max. He can barely play three chords.” Anya pauses and thinks. “Well, maybe they had a little in common. They do have somewhat similar voices in the stories. I mean, Max wrote them both, so that makes sense, right?”

“That story could be a metaphor for you and him. Maybe Maxim was projecting his fantasies. Was there a love subplot?”

“Of course. That’s what Max writes about.”

“Did the girl fall for that guy?”

Anya remembers the scene in the forest. Becky chose Jake in the story. Anya chose Max in real life.

“Did she?” Mom says.

Anya nods.

“I rest my case.” Mom eases against the back of her chair and folds her arms. “Do as you please, honey. Just don’t tell him the real reason.”

Anya closes her eyes. No. This can’t be true. Surely, Mom is mistaken.

“Let me help you out, Anka,” Dad says. “Tell Maxim we can’t allow you to marry him until he earns some serious dough. Tell him there’s competition. Vlad, for example.”

Anya glares at him. “I’m not going to do that,” she says.

“You will, if you know what’s best for you.” Dad leans forward. “I may be an old Communist, but I know competition makes people tick. I don’t believe in all this crap about manipulation that Mama just talked about, but I know people respond to stimuli. Dangle an attractive physician bride before him and watch him join the race—or not. That’s your criterion. Wanna know if he really loves you? Tell him he must write a bestseller. If he loves you, he’ll jump in the hamster wheel.”

Max’s Story #2

11 July 1984

When I was little, I used to love going to Grandma’s, but now I fancy myself beyond enjoying life’s simple pleasures. Fresh berries, cow shit, and elevated levels of oxygen have somehow lost their attraction. Most chicks in the village are my grandma’s age. There is one girl, Vera, my country friend’s little cousin, but she is too young. She wipes the snot from her upturned nose with her muddy wrist. That’s why it’s upturned. The wiping direction is always up. Her wrists are muddy because she plays with dolls, burying them in the sand.

Normally, I would approve of such a pastime. I would even help her. I’d bring a shovel from the shed. I’d oblige a young lady. But since my goal is finding eternal love, Vera’s monotone humming about the joys of burying dolls provides no inspiration. I asked her how old she was, to which she grinned at me toothlessly and told me it was none of my stinky dog’s business.

Vera is ten years old, her cousin told me later. She pulls my hair, presses her boogers into my palm, and runs away laughing. I feel so grown-up when I’m near her. She’s like the annoying baby sister I never had. Maybe that’s why I need to be around her. She makes my fourteen years feel like a grand achievement. I’m ready to meet Anya in the fall when I come back from Grandma’s, and Anya stops smelling the roses or whatever else she does when she’s away from me.

But is Anya coming back? Coach Papa drove her to tears too many times. Sometimes I want to kill him. There’s something in his criticism of her technique that makes her cry. I guess I’m dumb. Maybe he possesses the verbal acuity to cut through her defenses. Anya will be eighteen in two years. Could he be interested in her? Shivers and shudders. Fuck him. He has that mighty woman on the team, ten years Anya’s senior. The regional record holder. I’ve seen them together. Can I do anything to make them get married sooner? I’ve heard the rumors.

While I’m stuck in my country exile, Vera is the only human being I see every day besides my grandma and her two drunken sons, my uncles. Disturbing as it is, Vera has begun to cling to me big time. Her cousin is gone, and all her dolls have been buried, so she has no other victims. After she tripped me up during my foray to the outhouse, I asked her if that was her confession of love. Her reaction was a gag reflex coupled with rolled eyes and a tongue stuck out so far that she caught a fly with it. But whenever I go out to the shops for bread and books, Vera tags along, jumping around me and telling me about her dolls and begging me to buy her another one. I tell her to get lost, and she calls me a greedy stinky dog.

Today, we hung around the village bookstore for an hour. Watson had told me about a magazine with an article about the Beatles, the first ever in the Soviet press, so I was hoping to find that. Alas, the woman working in the store had no idea what I was talking about. She had never heard of the Beatles, poor soul. Seeing that my pocket money remained unspent, Vera clutched a kiddie book on paleontology and pleaded with her huge eyes. Even her nose stopped running, no doubt to put me in a generous mood. The woman told me to buy the damn book for my sister. I was about to tell her Vera wasn’t my sister, thank you very much, but the little brat flapped her eyelashes and made a maudlin face, pretending she was about to cry. I sighed, figured that dinosaurs were better for a growing brain than doll burials, and pulled the money out. Vera glowed on the way home, looking at pictures of extinct beasts and occasionally stumbling on rocks. I patted myself on the back and called myself a new word I’d learned: humanitarian.

20 July 1984

I know how to win Anya’s heart. Funny that little Vera gave me the idea.

It rained today, and Vera was visibly bored. Equally apathetic, I watched her from the covered porch of my grandma’s flat. I guess burying dolls in wet sand wasn’t much fun, and the book I’d bought for her had been read about fifty times, so she roamed around the yard in her rain poncho with the hood covering her head, moping, humming to herself, chasing chickens. The rooster finally came out and chased her. She ran up the stairs leading to my grandma’s porch and hid behind me for protection, her poncho dripping on the back of my neck. “Save me,” she said. “From the monster.” She pulled my ear and pointed at the free-ranging source of lean protein watching us from a safe distance.

“That ain’t no monster, missy,” I said in my best fake country drawl. “Them monsters hide real far.”

She giggled and said, “Like you know anything?”

“Shore thing, missy.” I took an imaginary cigarette out of my mouth and pretended to blow smoke rings.

“Tell me.” She plopped down on the step next to me and flicked dirt off her knee. She was wearing jeans for a change, already contaminated with mud and chicken dung beyond repair. One of her knees had developed a hole.

I thought about her request, and a brilliant idea came to me. In all likelihood, I’d never see her again, so she’d be my guinea pig. I told her to stay and sauntered back into Grandma’s flat. The goal of my expedition was the story I’d written in the past few days, the very first in my life. Vera’s new book about dinosaurs had been the inspiration. She’d chewed my ears about it for a few days straight. Now, it was payback time.

I returned to the porch, where Vera was sitting and waiting for me patiently. She couldn’t leave anyway, because the future breaded cutlet was still blocking her retreat. I sat down next to her and opened my notebook.

“Wanna hear a story?” I said.

She shrugged. “Does it have monsters in it?”

I started to narrate the adventures of my protagonist (a thinly veiled me) who travels to the Cretaceous Period in a Soviet tank of World War II vintage, shoots some dinosaurs for breakfast, and returns to his own time with the aura of a hero.

A funny thing happened to me when I was reading aloud. Vera’s dead silence had a peculiar effect. I felt like I was a little boy again, sitting next to my mom and listening to a fairy tale. I was aware that it was me reading this time, but the slight unreality of the scene lingered and shimmered around me as I heard my voice narrating the story. At some point, I felt as if I were outside my body, hovering next to me and listening. What’s more, I sensed Vera was feeling the same. I felt like I was her, sitting nearby in a trance, her mouth ajar, her eyes big and misty and far away.

When I was done, neither of us spoke for a long time, afraid to scare off that wonderful shimmer. Raindrops fell on the porch steps with a monotonous sound. Chickens clucked and scratched, looking for worms and bugs. The day smelled of moist earth and wet, sappy wood.

“What’s next?” she whispered. A line of snot came out of her nose, and she sniffled and wiped it up with her wrist. The spell broke; the buzz went away. She was sorry the moment ended; I could see that. She shook her head, but it was no use. All we had was the rooster in the rain. Judging by his aggressive comb and warlike plumage, he objected to the hunting of his evolutionary ancestors.

“That’s all I have for now,” I said.

“Will you write more?” She was almost begging me.

“Don’t know.”

“My parents are coming tonight.” Her eyes narrowed. “We’re leaving soon. I wanna know what happens next.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, Stinky Dog. Write more. You gotta.”

“Says who?”

“Me.” Her fierce greenish-gray eyes skewered me and didn’t let me look away.

“Only if you stop calling me Stinky Dog.”

“Deal.” She held her pinkie in the air. “And you promise you’ll write more.”

“I promise to write more.”

We clasped our pinkies; she shook the knot three times and cut it with her little hand. I didn’t tell her this promise didn’t include any deadlines or the proviso for an oral reading of my future classic in her presence, but I didn’t want to burden her pre-adolescent brain with legal trivialities. It didn’t matter anyway.

I expected her to stick her tongue out or pull my ear again, but she got up and walked away slowly, hands shoved in her poncho, head hung low and getting wet under the weeping rain. I couldn’t believe it. It worked. She was thinking about the stupid story. Or maybe she was thinking about the shimmering. Or both. The rooster looked offended.

I followed her with my eyes, and a resolve cemented in my head. I’d write another time-travel tale, not this baby crap about dinosaurs but something good, something about a guy trying to change history. I’d polish it and plant it on Anya. That would be my competitive advantage. She’d never get that from anyone else. I didn’t know if my story would give Anya a buzz, but I might as well try.

Ideas swirled in my head for a few minutes as I thought about what my hero might try to do and who he might meet. Vera slipped into the barn on the opposite side of the yard. Rain hadn’t stopped yet, but the first rays of the sun broke through the clouds. Chickens continued to claw and peck before me. The opening scene painted itself in my head with the clarity of a color movie. Yes, I’d have a ten-year-old girl there. I’d name her Becky. I always loved that name. She would grow up and meet my male protagonist. He would be called Jake, of course. They would change the world together. Unfortunately, her mother would have to die in the first chapter. Otherwise, the plot wouldn’t work.

I flipped my notebook to a blank page, pulled out a pencil, and started to scribble.

“I know who I’d want to kill,” Mother said.

22 July 1984

Until today, I never realized a ten-year-old girl could make me feel like a scumbag.

Vera followed her parents out of the house. Her grandpa stepped out behind her, carrying her bag. Her dad wanted to grab it, and I offered to carry the bag for them, joining the men willing to serve the little brat, but Grandpa clutched the bag with the ferocity of a bodyguard and sent me off with two curt words I dare not repeat.

At first, Vera refused to look at me. She trudged behind the adults, stirring clouds of dust with her sandals despite her parents’ admonitions to raise her feet. Her white stockings quickly matched the street dirt in color, but she didn’t seem to notice. Log cabins were tucked into orchards all around us as we made our way down unpaved streets. Crows watched us from huge birch trees growing in roadside yards. Some of them cawed, and I felt like I was a twelve-year-old kid back in that forest again, and the pines rustled above me, and there was no one around, and the crows sat on branches and waited for me to start panicking. Unfortunately, I had been unable to forget.

To lighten everyone’s mood, I tried to tease Vera about her wearing stockings with sandals, but my joke somehow missed the mark. She turned her head away from me, her hands deep in the pockets of her shorts, her nose running again. With a practiced movement, she wiped it with her wrist and sniffled.

“Don’t be so upset, honey,” her mother said, turning back and watching us with a patronizing but warm smile. “Come winter break, you will see Maxim again. You will be here in winter, won’t you, Maxim?”

I nodded. Vera ignored her mother and narrowed her fierce eyes. Her mother sighed, and her husband took her hand. Her mother’s handsome face looked cracked to me, as if a worm was eating her inside, and her flesh was about to break and fall apart. She must have been dazzling in her youth. Vera’s father, by contrast, looked as plain as they got, the kind of face you’d miss in a police lineup. His Cuban heel boots added a few centimeters to his height, while his wife walked on flat soles. Her head came slightly above his.

A small crowd waited at the bus stop. Vera’s grandpa pulled the tickets out of his pocket. The sun beat down on our heads, coloring Vera’s hair a lighter shade of linden honey. She still wouldn’t look at me, standing by the edge of the road and peering into the distance where the bus was supposed to come from. Sporadic cars drove by, coughing and preparing her to meet the city with all its exhaust and fumes. She was biting her lower lip so hard I was afraid she’d poke holes in it.

Nobody spoke. Vera’s gloom must have infected us all. Minutes dragged. The damn bus was late.

When it finally arrived, everyone rushed to the door that swung open. A few passengers got out with heavy sacks and suitcases, pushing through the crowd and yelling to let them pass. Slashing the air with their tickets, Vera’s parents made their way through the clamor of the throng, turning around, searching for her, and shouting her name. Her grandpa tried to push Vera forward, but she shrugged him off and turned to me.

“You broke the pact, Stinky Dog,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t find anything else to say. That’s how I felt, anyway. I didn’t want to lie to her.

“You broke the pact,” she insisted, her eyes suddenly glistening.

“I’ll write another story for you.”

“When?” She blinked fast and held on as hard as she could. She wanted to cry; I could see that, but Stinky Dog was here, so she had to be strong.

“Winter,” I said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I promise. Come back for the winter break. I’ll be here. I’ll have my next story ready. It’s gonna be a lot better.”

She sniffled, wiped her nose again, leaving a dirty smear across her face, and stuck her hand in her pocket. Out came the ugliest, most soiled doll I’d ever seen, a tiny, genderless figurine with arms and legs all crooked as if it had been put through a medieval chamber of torture. Without a word, Vera stuck the doll into my palm, whirled around, and drilled her lanky self into the unruly crowd. Shoving with her elbows, she caught up with her parents and flew up the stairs. The bus swallowed her; the door swung shut; with a purple diesel roar, the bus came to life and crawled off down the road toward the city.

That was the last time I saw her at my grandma’s.