Chapter 19 Control #2
“It’s just that,” I insisted, “I grew up with the idea that it had to be forever. The person had to be forever. A home, kids, maybe a little orange cat.” I tried to conjure thoughts that a decent girl would think. One raised on morals and good grades. And not thoughts of the hard, thick…
“You don’t have to explain yourself. There is nothing that needs explaining.”
“And yet I was supposed to tell you? Why would I tell you?”
“Logistics.”
“Logistics?”
Logistics. If I could get redder, they would have to create a brand new word to describe the shade. Dark Cherry No4 had nothing on me.
“Do you still feel this way?” he asked.
I could only ‘huh’ at him as my eyes snapped up from his crotch.
“The ‘forever.’ You said you grew up with the idea. You didn’t say ‘I believe that…’ So, do you still feel this way?”
All business.
“I think it’s a bit naive to feel anything is forever in this world,” I said.
“The state of humanity is an awful thing. It wasn’t like this when my mama and papa were growing up.
Not like this when they met. And, with everything so different, why should it be ‘forever?’ Things keep getting worse. People die.”
“It is not that I don’t appreciate philosophy,” he said, “but you know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
I rolled my lip between my teeth. “Nothing is forever.”
Maybe Elena had the right idea about it all.
He tapped the steering wheel impatiently, searching for context. “What idea did Elena have?”
Oh crap I said it out loud.
“Oh.” My brows furrowed, and I tried to recall the words and not just the gist of it. Regrettably, I’d already opened my mouth, and I wasn’t a good enough of a liar to cover it up. “Elena said that as long as you call them lovers, you can wear whatever you want.”
He hmm’d. The worst possible person to sit on the other end of this conversation hmm’d.
The skinny, bare trees already disappeared, the landscape around us becoming vast white fields crowned by the city’s horizon. Getting late.
“Is that what this is to you? Am I your lover?”
“That sounds so terrible,” I said, and rubbed my horribly irritated eyes. The heaters were pointed directly at me after a day going blind in the snowfields. “No—you’re not. Not like Elena. I don’t want you thinking that I’m just… you know.”
“Using me for money.”
“Right.”
“I’d give it to you.”
I tilted my head, and our eyes met, because of course he had to be looking at me. “What?”
“I’d give it to you. If you were with me for the money, I’d give it all to you. What does it matter?”
“Because then it’s not love.”
“You said ‘forever,’ you didn’t say love—and ‘lover’ in this context is a client. Do you want forever or do you want love?”
I hesitated because the thought was stupid and too romantic to fit into a whole sentence. So instead, I made it fit into a word.
“Both.”
“Ah. What if I gave you that, then?”
I laughed and rested my cheek against the crook of my arm. “No one can guarantee forever.”
“Recent events lead me to believe I’ll never die.”
Jokes, and yet a note in his voice made it hard to look at him, so I kept staring out the window.
“I’ll give it all to you, Kotik,” he said, shrugging, as if telling me to order anything on the menu at a fast food restaurant.
“I’ll give you money, love, and forever.
But you have an attitude, and it makes it hard for you to accept gifts.
So we have to work on that first. You are lucky I am a patient man. ”
I laughed again, but it was just my buffer from his words. My blood was still hot, and it was hard to remember all the things of which I needed to be wary. But Vitali was all of them, wasn’t he? Precisely because it was so easy to forget myself when I was with him. He made things… easy.
“I’m serious,” he said.
“Right.”
“Why don’t you think I’m being serious?”
I sighed. “Because, Vitali. This,” I waved a hand uncertainly, “all this, it’s not real life.”
“It’s a lot of people’s real life. What’s not real about it?”
I needed to stop, and I knew it, but there was a damned skip between my brain and my mouth. “Real people don’t ride in cars and shoot at each other. They don’t hang around prostitutes and drop off bundles of heroin to their neighborhood chewing gum kiosks.”
“Interesting,” Vitali said, slowly rubbing his chin. “What do real people do?”
“They—” I wasn’t prepared to have this part questioned.
What did real people do? They suffered. They suffered just like everyone around me for as long as I knew.
Real people rejoiced, they wept, they shared what they had with their neighbors, and they lived a life never knowing someone like Sergei sat in a dark room and neatly arranged the pieces of everything that was wrong with the world.
“They find ‘fake’ people and make them lovers,” he helped helpfully.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
“If you’re going to argue—argue. Don’t pretend you didn’t have an opinion to begin with. When you say ‘real people’ you mean Mama. I understand.”
“I don’t mean Mama. I wouldn’t want to be my mama.”
“That’s not what I said. I said you see her as ‘real’ because she has instilled this expectation within you from birth.
This thing she wanted for you so badly, she made sure you grew up believing it.
The way she sees the world for you is ‘real,’ and anything you’re doing outside of that is make-believe. ”
“It’s not just how she sees it, it’s how it is.”
He chuckled, his casual composure infuriating, probably because he was getting to me.
“You think Mama doesn’t know where the money comes from?” he asked.
“I mean, she suspects…”
“Kotik, don’t disrespect your mama. You only have the one.
She knows who the ‘real people’ are. I guarantee you she has lived to see humanity commit worse crimes than either you or I.
She also knows what it used to be like when she was growing up with her parents’ ideals.
Everyone wants the ‘forever’ for their kids.
” Pause, then a quiet, “Almost everyone…”
I folded my hands in my lap, and to my surprise, his hand was still there.
“So?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Do you think you can live in this ‘fake’ world?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth, but I didn’t feel good about it because his momentary silence held its breath.
“It’s hard for me. I’ve seen more in the past…
God, two months, than I have in my entire life.
I had never seen a person die and then, well, you know.
I was right in the middle of it all. I could have died, and the last thing I’d hear was some club song about taking a stranger home. ”
“Mmm.”
“I can’t give you an answer,” I said. “And I don’t think it matters, because I don’t have a choice. It doesn’t matter if I think I can, because I have to.”
“There is always a trade-off. A sacrifice to create something beautiful.”
I smiled, because I knew he was smiling without having to look up. “Can’t dance without bruised feet, now can I?”
“You can. But it won’t be as good.”
I nodded. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t trying to convince me. And he didn’t try to reassure me that I did have a choice. Maybe it was more honest that way.
“So what, then?” I asked.
“So you say ‘thank you, Vitali, for buying me things I want to wear and being so handsome.’”
I laughed. “Thank you, Vitali.”
“And ‘thank you, Vitali, for showing me how to use a gun so I can fend off drug-prostitutes.’”
“Thank you, Vitali.”
“And ‘thank you, Vitali, for giving me four orgasms, even though I had you at gunpoint.’”
I was cackling, and I couldn’t inhale fast enough to fill my lungs.
He patted me on the leg. “It’s alright, Kotik. Enough for now, but I’ll have to remember later how much I liked hearing you say ‘thank you.’”