Chapter 7Ana
Ana
I feel like I’ve been duped by Vasily.
I am three days old with a lifetime of knowledge. Not a lifetime, not quite, but when I asked Vasily how old I was yesterday, he just yawned and said, “Why the twenty questions? We’ll talk about everything tomorrow.”
How was that a ‘twenty question,’ even? Is he one of those husbands who can’t remember basic facts about their wives and just expect their wives to remind them when it’s time to do husbandly things?
That’s a thing. I got confirmation from the show we watched last night.
I had the vague sense from what I saw that an apocalypse was happening, but that was all background story to the main plot of the couple trying to figure out their relationship.
So I guess life could be worse. This could also be an apocalypse. I have this strong sense that, despite my kitchen skills, I would not do well in an apocalypse.
When I wake up, it’s morning again, and I’m back in my bed.
The neurologist warned me that I’d be a lot more fatigued than usual, and despite not knowing what ‘usual’ is, I have to agree.
The moment I heard the shift in Vasily’s breathing and took the chance to curl up next to him on the couch and just sort of fantasize about this being a normal night between normal people, I was sound asleep yesterday.
I dig through every box in my closet, every cabinet in my bathroom, every drawer in my vanity.
I conclude that I’m a crazy person. Like the pots and pans, like the toiletries, like the clothes, I have an entire collection of make-up that’s gone unused.
I can’t tell if it’s brand new or if I just bought it all on a whim and never used it.
I sit at the vanity and play around with it, decide I’m not nearly as skilled at make-up— or matching skin tone when buying make-up— as I am at cooking, but I’ve got the basics down.
I must want everything to be new all the time.
It’s entirely possible I married the CEO of a 3D printing company because I needed a man who could afford my spending habits.
Coordinator at a local theater sounds fun but not particularly lucrative.
Or my husband skyrocketed up a corporate ladder because I was spending more than he was making.
I have a tattoo of Vasily’s insignia just above my vulva, so I’m leaning toward the latter.
I don’t think a CEO would want his wife to have that, but a guy who was a bit of a thug— I don’t want to say my husband was a thug, but all evidence points that way— who climbed the corporate ladder after getting married? That makes sense .
Because I’m frustrated with him, I raid his bedroom again. He didn’t tell me not to, and he had to have noticed I was in there. How else would I have gotten his hoodie? Again, I get the impression of a much more lived-in space, but it’s the only space in the apartment that feels that way.
I find a scrapbook, but I’m not in it. No wedding stuff or candids. No vacations or parties. Mostly childhood stuff. Someone took the time to embellish it and write out descriptions, but they’re in Russian. Cyrillic, so I can’t even guess at their meanings.
I find a ridiculous stash of pill bottles, but they’re all prescriptions, most of them current. I don’t know what any of them are. Maybe I’m a germaphobe, which is why I need all my stuff to be brand new, but he’s either immuno-compromised or a major hypochondriac, so it works out.
I find a bottle of lube in his nightstand.
I find over twenty thousand dollars in cash at the bottom of a duffel bag that’s packed with clothes, a toiletry bag, a handgun with a designer-looking navy-blue grip, and a passport with a slightly changed name— still Baranov, but Artyom.
The photo looks like him. It’s the sort of thing I’d expect a criminal to have, or a militia man.
Someone who thought, whether rationally or not, that he might have to run at a moment’s notice and needed to be prepared if that moment came.
I do not have one of these bags. Do I need one? Did I know Vasily had one before my brain deleted itself?
Also, I find several more guns stashed around. And knives. Brass knuckles.
My husband was definitely a thug at some point.
I’m going a bit stir-crazy, I admit to myself, and when I discover I can’t turn the TV on— I’m now remembering Vasily used his phone for it yesterday— I decide I will absolutely die if I don’t get out of this condo.
I have no idea where I am, other than Los Angeles, but that’s a vague word in my brain.
But I do know there are some shops below us. Based on my closet, I do like shopping.
And I may not have a credit card, which is something else I have to ask Vasily about, but I did just see stacks of twenties and hundreds.
The twenties are less suspicious, so I grab five of them— and then five more because I get this feeling that LA is expensive— shove my feet into sandals that feel a size too big, and walk out the front door.
I’m expecting a hallway, some neighbors, maybe some signs.
Instead, there’s a single door at the end of a hallway no more than ten feet away, clearly leading to a stairwell, and an elevator in front of me.
It opens immediately when I hit the button, and when I step inside, I’m unsettled by the fact that there are only two options on it, one to Floor 37 and the other to the basement.
Yeah, I really don’t like that. And I’m not walking down a billion stairs, so I resign myself to my captivity and return to the condo.
The door’s locked.
Crud.
With a sigh, I go back to the elevator and select the 37th floor.
I know if I go to the basement, I can just go up the stairs to the ground floor.
It’s possible it is the ground floor, we’re just on uneven ground and so they put the parking deck on the half-underground level.
But I get bad juju from the elevator, so I’d rather the shorter ride.
On the 37th floor, the elevator opens directly into an office. Huh.
It’s gigantic, way too much space. Like, only one corner of it looks used at all, and then the rest of it has a bit of filler furniture.
The wall of windows has a couple of chairs with a table in between them, but they look awkward to sit in.
And since it’s ninety degrees off from our apartment and faces another building just as tall as this one, I don’t know why Vasily would want to sit here.
There’s a bar on one wall that looks too perfectly arranged to get frequently used.
There are bookshelves, but none of the books are in English.
There’s an absolutely gigantic Turkish rug, heavily accented in deep reds, that takes up most of the floor and lends the room its only color.
And then there’s Vasily’s large but unassuming desk.
Notably, there’s no Vasily at it.
I assume he does spend a lot of time here, though, and since I can’t learn anything about myself, I figure I may as well learn more about him.
More pills, and they look authentic enough, but they’re not in orange pill bottles. Someone went out of their way to transfer them into black ceramic jars so as to not disturb the aesthetic. Did Vasily do that? Did I?
There’s a syringe in the drawer, too, which freaks me out and has me seriously concerned that my husband not only has medical issues but also a drug problem, but then I find more syringes in a mini fridge. This time, the box they’re in clearly states that it’s for migraines.
Oh, poor thing. Migraines are awful, or so my brain insists without any evidence to back it up.
I find two cell phones, both charged and turned on. Locked, of course, and cleared of messages. I try my face and fingerprint on both, but neither phone unlocks. Bummer. Also, why does he keep so many phones? I don’t like that.
I don’t like the seven additional guns I find either. It makes me queasy to hold them, so I doubt I’m a gun person.
More confusing, the guns all have this quality about them I can only describe as Frankensteined.
They don’t match. They’re half metal, half plastic, like a real gun and a kids’ toy were hobbled together, like the gun in Vasily’s bug-out bag.
I get this urge to test one to see if it works, and that intrusive thought is enough to have me setting them all on the desk in a row and then pushing them as far as I can, to the very edge of the desk, before sitting back down in his chair, where I can’t reach them.
I go into the narrow drawer that runs below the top of the desk, a tray I’d expect to be filled with pens and note pads and paperclips, although those all feel like office supplies of a bygone era. So it comes as no surprise that it’s mostly empty.
Except for a box of condoms, and that makes my heart sink.
We’re married. I have to assume we’ve been married a long time.
I spent some time examining that tattoo as best as I could in the mirror; I know enough about tattoos to know that the blurring of the edges is a sign of age.
So why does he have condoms in his office?
Wouldn’t we be past the phase of fooling around in his office?
I know our marriage isn’t perfect. Literally nothing that’s happened since he picked me up— heck, nothing since I woke up in a kitted-out box truck on the wrong side of the country with amnesia— has made me think our marriage is going great.
And the fact that he hasn’t made any time for me or even answered basic questions is enough for me to worry that our marriage is nothing more than a piece of paper. But this?
This hurts.
And suddenly, I’m not feeling the motivation to go out in the world. Suddenly, the only thing I want to do is confront my husband.