Chapter 15 The Payphone
The Payphone
Getting sleep did not ease the dread tearing through me. If anything, it made things worse.
Once I sobered up, everything came crashing down all at once. Elit… all those people, dead. The bullet holes. Misha’s story, which couldn’t have been true, because it meant Vitali murdered someone. Murdered.
I shuddered as sour bile jumped up my throat and settled on my tongue. He still came to the party. And moody or not, he listened to music, he played cards, and he gave me his leather jacket. Hours after crushing a man’s head with his back tire.
Elena warned me, because she already knew. How long, I couldn’t tell. But surely it had to be after Dmitri and Lyosha, or she would have thrown me off the balcony before she let me leave with him.
Vitali wasn’t even ‘Vitali.’ He was a killer—they were all killers. Killers sat at our dinner table. They ate Olivier salad and dressed herring. They refilled their glasses with Mama’s lingonberry mors. They joked with Maxim, and asked what his favorite videogame was.
I let those people into the house. I allowed them around Mama and my little brother.
It was my fault.
* * *
I went about my days in a thick fog of thoughts I didn’t want to face.
I went to work, I came home, I cared for Mama and helped Maxim with his homework. I did it again and again, and every day I prayed Vitali wouldn’t call.
I waited until one of the militia men was walking to the bus stop before I left the Administrative Building. I glanced over my shoulder with every step I took. Roman was out there; I had no doubts about that, but as long as I didn’t see him, I could pretend he wasn’t.
I got paranoid enough to think the staircase in my apartment building smelled of imported Marlboro cigarettes.
When everyone else went to bed, I cried hugging Papa’s half-finished bottle of vodka. It was empty now; it had been empty for days. The two under my bed were empty too, but that was okay because I checked that they were sealed when I bought them.
Daily, Mama asked me what happened. She asked if Vitali and I had an argument.
I couldn’t come up with a good lie, so I said nothing, which only prompted hours of unsolicited advice about ‘men are men, and they are different than us and we should forgive them no matter what.’ An archaic concept (I dearly hoped) from when she was growing up.
Now, she thought he’d been unfaithful. I didn’t confirm or deny it, because anything I said would follow me into the future when I had to decide what to do.
Elena called and we spoke about mundane things. Neither of us spoke of what happened.
She went back to the hospital. They were so short-staffed, so no one asked questions. The flu was devastating the city and the lines were long enough that people collapsed before they ever got to the doors. She even worked doubles because so many of them were children.
We kept Maxim out of school, and Mama and I had to take over his education. It wasn’t going well, because I couldn’t hide how little of my day was spent sober. Mama found out. Then, she yelled. Then, she cried. And then she stopped talking to me.
And then she got sick.
It was late January, and access to medicine was nonexistent. The stores were empty—I had nothing to treat her fever. Elena scraped up all she could from the hospital, but it wasn’t enough.
I confined Mama to her room, and Maxim moved to the living room which was fine with him because he got to watch TV whenever he wanted.
My body, mind, and will to do anything but haunt the apartment were gone, so I let him.
I wasn’t going to work anymore, and the bottles under the bed were piling up.
I didn’t need to be sober to cook food, which was running out anyway. Money didn’t matter. The shelves were empty.
I didn’t need to be sober to press a few buttons on the brand new washing machine.
I didn’t need to be sober to cry, hidden under my three blankets, unmoving, because then I could pretend I wasn’t there at all.
Maxim wasn’t getting his lessons, and he wasn’t doing homework anymore. I didn’t even notice.
It was a Tuesday when things got worse.
I woke up with my head pounding, like I had every day for weeks. The gray morning light pressed against the curtains, so it must have been after nine o’clock.
Despite my blankets, the cold had penetrated my bones and they ached no less than my temples. I shivered, and when I breathed, it came in clouds of thick vapor.
I prayed I wasn’t sick, pulling every sweater I owned over my head. What would happen to Mama… what would happen to Maxim? We had no one to call. Mama’s friends were trapped in their homes just like we were, Elena had her own problems, and our neighbors were no better off.
Three pairs of socks fit on my feet, and I shuffled out of my room. Maxim slept under a pile of winter coats pulled out of the hallway closet. My baby brother didn’t even try to wake me when he got cold.
I wiped away the tears (God, do not let him see me blubbering), and shook him awake.
“Go to my room,” I said. “Take the blankets.”
“I want to play the Sega…” he murmured sleepily, but with just enough pitch to his voice to let me know he would whine if I said no. If I had anything left inside me, I might have urged him to get dressed and brush his teeth. Instead, I brought the blankets out for him.
I’d wake Mama when I had breakfast ready.
Millet was all I had to make kasha, but we still had some butter, so it wouldn’t be completely bland.
Mentally taking inventory of the tea and coffee we still had in the house, I held the kettle in the sink. I needed the coffee, and I could make Mama something mild in case she wanted to go back to sleep.
God save me, my head was pounding.
“It won’t turn on!” Maxim yelled from the other room, sending a ping of fury through me that he wasn’t mindful of Mama sleeping. But his words stirred a sudden awareness, and I stared dumbly at the kettle in my hands and the still-dry faucet I’d already turned on.
“No…” I whispered. “God… no.. no…”
“KATYA, it won’t turn on!” he bellowed, but I barely heard him.
I dashed to the stove and turned the knob, slapping my palm against the burner. Nothing.
“No!” I squeaked, the pressure behind my eyes nearly rendering me blind.
“KATYA!”
“SHUT UP!” I screamed.
I never screamed at Maxim. I never screamed.
The radiator was ice cold.
They’d turned off the electricity. The water pumps had stopped.
My knees buckled, and I grabbed for the stove to keep steady, but it only slowed my descent onto the linoleum hell where my spirit cracked, then broke.
It was over. It was all over, and no matter how hard I tried, the world was made for me to fail as a daughter. As a sister. Who had trusted me to provide when Papa’s heart failed? Who trusted me with anything at all?
They blacked out the district. It could be hours, days, or weeks. We were normally notified of the shutdowns, giving us time to prepare, but if something at a plant had unexpectedly failed… People died in their apartments this way. They starved, or froze. We would starve.
I pawed for the phone, and then didn’t understand when the receiver was silent. I could only hear Maxim sniveling in the other room.
“Alright,” I told myself. “Alright. Alright—just—just alright.”
I calmly went to my room, calmly pulled the sad remains of a luxury brand vodka from my nightstand (thank God vodka didn’t freeze), and took a long swig (calmly) before I stripped my bed of anything that remained—pillows, sheets, blankets.
Everything. I took it to Maxim, who was sitting on the couch, red-faced and squinty-eyed.
“Go check on Mama,” I said calmly. Calmly. Because I was calm. “If she has a fever, come get me.”
He sniffled, but didn’t argue.
I gave him five minutes while I carefully and meticulously (and calmly) put on lipstick Dark Cherry No4. At the time, it seemed vital that I do.
When his tiny voice confirmed she was awake and didn’t have a fever, I pulled on my boots and, without a word, went out the door.
The staircase was thick with shadows without the lights and small windows only installed on every other landing. Every bone in my body ached as the cold penetrated even my boots (I had to reduce my sock numbers to two). It only got worse outside. At least it wasn’t windy.
There was no part of me that didn’t hurt, aside from the soul I left somewhere far behind me, for safekeeping, because I might need it later so I didn’t get damned to hell. This was the worst day of my life, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock, and I only knew that because my watch was wind-up.
The first payphone I tried wasn’t working, and I should have known that, but by this point, there was no intelligible plan; just keep walking and mind the ice patches (they weren’t patches, they were the entire road and sidewalk and sides of buildings… dark… dark buildings).
The next phone hung knocked off the receiver, and softly swayed because the window plastic in the booth had broken out and the breeze was picking up.
So, I kept walking. There were people on the streets, a lot of them.
Not unusual, but I was still within the district and all of us were simply grim, gray figures moving like ghosts through a graveyard.
And, that’s what it was. A graveyard. Every street, apartment complex, kiosk, and small grocery store with bars over the windows—all dark and dead like headstones.
I walked for an hour and a half before I reached a payphone that worked. I knew it worked because a line thirty people long formed around it, and every voice was angry and indiscriminant of age or gender. There were teenagers, elderly, and young mothers with bound bundles in their arms.
A man finished his call and slammed the receiver, swearing. The man in line behind him shouted and there was almost a brawl.
I waited for an hour, and the line grew.
The elderly man behind me bowed his head, leaning heavily on his trembling cane.
For just a moment, I wondered how far he had walked to get there.
When I took a step forward, he did the same, but so mindfully it took twice as long.
If I were a better person, I would have let him go ahead of me, but at that moment I was not a good person, I was a desperate person, and it took a disaster to show the line between the two is paper thin.
No one gave up their place in line.
When the woman ahead of me finished her call, I stepped up, reciting Misha’s number in my head so I wouldn’t suddenly forget it. I patted my pocket for the call token.
And realized I’d left without it.
I gulped, trying to keep my composure. My breath had soaked the inside of the scarf wrapped all the way to my eyes, and I took another, and another. Someone behind me swore and shouted for me to hurry up.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned, the receiver still in my trembling hand. The elderly man held out a token. He wasn’t looking at me, and he didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even say ‘thank you’ when I took it because my throat was too tight.
The phone rang, and my eyes shut in the deepest prayer I had ever prayed, begging God that Misha would pick up.
“Allo.”
“Misha,” I rasped. “It’s Katya…”
“Ah. Hello.”
“I need help…”
* * *
About Russia
kasha – traditional porridge
mors – a thick fruit drink made with berries
About Blackouts: As the economy collapsed, it was impossible to maintain plants, and if a component failed, importing one could take years.
These were both accidental and scheduled, but the people were warned about the scheduled ones and they lasted from a few hours to several days, and in some cases, weeks.