Distressed Assets #2
“Look, I’ll sign whatever you need,” she says, walking past him as fast as she can. She cannot do this; she refuses to do
this. “An NDA, whatever—just, I don’t know, email it to me, I can’t—”
“That’s not why I’m here,” he says, following her.
Suddenly panicked, Lili looks back at the car. “Wait, is he—is he here—”
“It’s just me,” he reassures her. His tone is calm, the way you’d speak to soothe a child or a scared animal. Lili hates that;
she doesn’t deserve that. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Then why—”
“I’d like to speak with you. Please.”
“Why?” she repeats, walking faster down River Street towards Domino Park. Michael keeps up easily as the bright blue gantry
cranes come into sight. Leave, he needs to leave—she can’t face this. “Your stock price is doing fine, I’m not sure why you’re so concerned.”
“I don’t care about the fucking stock price, I care about him,” he snaps. “He’s going crazy, all he’s doing is worrying about
you. I think he’s a few hours away from just camping outside your house, but he doesn’t want to suffocate you. All he does
is work—hasn’t stopped working except to call you.”
“Shouldn’t you be happy that I’m not your problem anymore? That it’s over?”
Suddenly, Michael steps in front of her, blocking her way. “Does he know it’s over?” His gaze is sharp, like he’s caught a new detail.
“What?” she breathes. “Are you kidding me?”
“Lili, he’s out in the fucking cold. He has no idea what’s happened—doesn’t know if something happened with your family, if you’re shutting him out because you
want to deal with it on your own, or something with school, or anything.” His tone is insistent. She’s never seen Michael
this close to unpolished. “He’s grasping at bloody air—”
Lili shakes her head. “Look—I don’t know what he thinks,” she whispers. “But it’s not—it’s not his fault, there isn’t anything
he did, I can’t talk about it, just—please, leave me alone. He doesn’t . . .” Shutting her eyes for a moment, she exhales heavy air before looking at the ground. “He
doesn’t need me in his life, I don’t need him in my mine. It’s not a fit—you’ve said as much yourself.”
Michael sighs. “Lili, please.” He gestures at the park benches. “Can we sit?”
She bites her lip, hard. Staring at the ground, the paving stones blur, breathing inching up into a panic—his shoes gleam
black against the pavement, compared to the scuffed brown leather of her worn-in Blundstones—she should just run; she should
run, and block his number, and cut this entire summer out of her life—anything, fucking anything, to avoid swallowing this guilt and shame, realizing the magnitude of what she’s done—
“Lili,” Michael repeats. She looks at him. His gaze is steady, careful, focused. Concern for his friend, she supposes, but
also—surprisingly—for her. It makes her want to cry. Again and again, faced with things she does not deserve. She needs to
end this: the extent of the weight she exerts on the world.
Lili nods, once. Taking a seat on the nearby bench, she curls her knees into her chest, setting her phone beside her. As Michael
sits down, she stares straight ahead at the East River. She hears the happy shriek of children from the playground, the rush
of waves against the shorefront. Across the water, a glorious view of the city stretches from the white stone of the UN and
Midtown skyscrapers down to the Williamsburg Bridge. Ferries pass, churning white water.
“Did he tell you how we got out?” Michael asks.
“Got out?”
“After the fall. How we left Leningrad, got to England.”
A memory of morning light, bruises on her neck that he’d traced, regret and a father’s ring. Was it worse, afterwards? A different kind of worse.
“For school,” she replies. It hurts, repeating what he’d given her. “He said he left in ’93. That when there was a chance
to get out, he took it.”
Michael huffs a hard laugh. “A chance,” he repeats. “He got out—got us out—tooth and nail. We had no money, no real connections. That boy—this man—saved his life, and mine.”
“What do you mean?” she whispers, because she can’t help herself.
He sighs, staring at the water: the chop of ferries, sunshine over the city.
“He’s a few years older than me,” he says. “He left for Oxford first. I came a couple years later—exhausted, stunned. It was
the first time I’d ever left Russia, and it felt absurd and improbable, near Technicolor, to suddenly be in the West—cars
on the wrong side of the road, a late British summer, willows on the Cherwell. Foreign, everything felt so completely foreign.
“We spoke Russian, when he picked me up at the airport. But when I came down the stairs the next morning, to him and his roommates
in their kitchen? Perfect English. Not just the language—he’d always had very good English, but now, no Russian accent. Like he’d been raised here,
all British, bleached away some dark stain of history from himself. I was stunned. I spoke good English—I got into Oxford,
obviously—but not like him.
“‘You need to get rid of your accent,’ he told me later. ‘Remember your Russian, but in English, no accent. Understand?’ He
had me anglicize my name, too. Michael, instead of Mikhail.
“That’s how it always was, since we were children. Always a few steps further ahead, walking a bit too fast, but at the last
moment, when I thought he’d forgotten about me, about to leave me behind—he’d look back to see that I was still there, scrambling
after him.”
Lili barely breathes, listening. After a few beats of silence—consideration, carding through thoughts—Michael continues.
“We’re a strange generation, children of the collapse.
The nineties . . .” He shakes his head. “Fatal nineties, some called them. Shock therapy applied to a whole country. The Gorbachev years, then Yeltsin, Gaidar’s reforms. At the end of the day, it was just a painful mess.
It’s difficult, living in the twilight of something, the gray dawn of something else.
I think everyone was exhausted, but braced for .
. . well, we didn’t know what, but it came. It came.
“I met Aleksandr for the first time in the kitchen, when we were children. He likely didn’t mention this, he doesn’t tell
many people, but we grew up in communal apartments, they’re called—”
“Kommunalka,” Lili murmurs. “He told me.”
Michael looks at her, reevaluation. She glances away.
“Exactly, kommunalka. About ten families in this dilapidated aristocratic apartment, 3 Ligovsky Prospekt, ornate ceilings high above our communal
near poverty. Shared kitchen and bathroom, a private room for each family, old oak floorboards that creaked. After his father
died, when he was seven or so, his mother moved them into our kommunalka.”
Michael exhales a hard laugh. “It was perhaps one of her only defensible, if unintentional, parenting decisions. Anyway, I
met him in the kitchen right after they moved in. For Russians, the kitchen isn’t only the place we cook, it’s where we lived,
hosted guests, late-night conversations; where children did homework. The radio played Vysotsky, and illegal international
broadcasts. Hard-boiled eggs, stacks of the week’s old newspapers.
“He was seven. His mother had just left for the evening, while everyone else was coming home from work and school. I remember
him sitting at the table. Hard stare, serious boy. It felt like there was the air of an argument, just passed. My grandmother
was cooking, and I was half hiding behind my older sister, who was helping as she gossiped with one of her friends. As I watched,
he started studying—I think he was doing maths? My grandmother loved him—all the grandparents and parents loved him. They’d
let him linger in the kitchen most nights after they’d put the rest of us to bed, as they started talking late and drinking.
“I still remember the tick of the heavy clock in their room, Aleksandr and his mother. That faded, golden wallpaper; the Cyrillic
alphabet poster. Books everywhere—Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. Elena taught at the university, always brought books home.”
“Elena?” Lili asks, frowning.
“Ah—Elena is his mother.” He nods. “But she was almost always gone. In the classroom, in the streets, who knows where else. When Sasha studied, I’d wander into their room and read—it was quieter, there.
He was alone, most of the time. I had siblings, my parents, my grandparents, I could never think straight in the noise. ”
Michael laughs, quiet with genuine recalled affection. “I learned to read earlier than most, because I was irritating Aleksandr.
Constantly asking him to read headlines aloud, trying to look over his shoulder at his books, getting bored when he wouldn’t
come play in the courtyard. Some of the first things I read were about the millions dead, suddenly ‘discovered.’ Like the
gulag had blinked into existence. People read reports, finally uncensored, in paralyzed astonishment.
“Yes, people could speak a little more openly now, but all our money vanished with Gaidar’s reforms. A drunk was running the
country, everything was for sale, black marketeers in charge, street fighting. I remember Tchaikovsky on every channel, Swan Lake looped on state television, as tanks filled the capital.
“Nothing was certain, nothing was safe. For almost eighty years, we’d lived in one kind of world, and now, what? Free markets,
free people?”
“You sound like a socialist,” Lili murmurs.
Michael shrugs, as if indifferent. “You don’t feel like much of anything, in that type of aftermath. You’re just . . . hands,
really. Reduced to what you can grab. Most people can’t survive a switch like that, from gray to teeth-rotting Technicolor.
People’s minds broke a little, realizing this new world necessitated another species of person, a different type of man.