Mikhail says I need to get a dirty martini with Belvedere at the Carlisle the next time I’m in New York when I asked him what he’s doing for work these days. He’s sleeping on a twin-sized air mattress on my kitchen floor because I said we should have our own space but the mattress keeps deflating in the middle of the night. The loveseat is too small to sleep on. I gave him an Ikea throw pillow and a gray duvet without a cover.
I’m a bad hostess. We should have our own space is such a bad excuse in a studio apartment. Last night we watched Badlands on my laptop, pressing ourselves into opposite arms of the loveseat like the charged ends of batteries. I wondered if ingenue had any etymological roots to engineer in Russian, which sounds the same as ingenue in English, and also wondered if Mikhail would sleep next to me again if I asked him to.
But I’m old enough for my wants not to hurt me. Sissy Spaceck’s character in Badlands is too young and she wants Kit so desperately that she stands by while he shoots everyone unlucky enough to walk into his crosshairs. Bang! Bang! I lay in my bed pretending to sleep and listened to Mikhail toss and turn in the kitchen as the air mattress deflated beneath him onto the tile floor.
Tonight, Mikhail wants to go to the Free Library because a Soviet poet exiled from Russia is reading. He says the poet was framed for the assassination of a KGB officer in 1990 and now a consortium of universities help fund his frequent, discreet location changes and make sure his food isn’t poisoned. They keep a sniffing dog around. It’s on his Wikipedia. We walk briskly up the parkway in the dark, past the empty fountain, shuttering our eyes from a man jacking off on a bench, and I want to turn to Mikhail and ask what are you doing in Philadelphia? But I don’t want to sound like a bad hostess.
The poet is weathered and bald. Folds of skin pile up around his grubby neck like cold cuts. His accent sloshes like soup and he motions at his translator because he doesn’t know English.
Eh, what do you call them… pretty women that like a man… the little girls… they live in a house… he flails his arms at the translator.
The translator interrupts him. The girl next door?
The girl next door, yes, she is my wife… until I went into hiding. I went into hiding because the, eh, the Kremlin was going to… he makes a finger gun with his bulging hand and pulls the trigger next to his ear. …kill me, He smiles tepidly. The crowd of Penn academics, hippy couples and literary hipsters snickers a little. …and I knew this…
A long time ago, Mikhail slept next to me in my dorm bed and told me that ICE might not renew his student visa because he was a Russian foreigner studying nuclear engineering. The government does not like me going back to Russia as an engineer—an инженер. I would have studied something different, but how was I supposed to know? Now he sits next to me in a metal folding chair and I can’t remember how to breathe when our shoulders barely brush as he raises his arm to cough into his elbow, and then again when he lowers it to his side, and then again when he pulls a revolver.
Bang! Bang!
The Soviet poet’s body hits the ground after part of his bald head does. The folding metal chairs echo like gongs when they hit the floor as the Penn academics and hippy couples and literary hipsters and I shriek and clamor for the library doors. I sprint into the street, blinded by the headlights of honking cars slamming on their brakes as the panicked crowd spills away from the library and into the night.
Bang! One more gunshot is muffled from inside the marble walls of the library as I run onto the parkway. I picture the bullet like a pinball ricocheting in the Free Library. Points for hitting a copper statue. Points for bouncing off a shelf and sending shredded pages fluttering. Score for hitting Mikhail. The library chandeliers and cop car lights flicker and spark with celebration. But I am running so fast, so far away, that I can’t remember how to breathe.
