Eight #2
word. Instead, he began writing something on the chalkboard. When he was finished, he turned back around, dusted off his hands,
and stepped to the side, allowing the class to read what he had written.
WHO KILLED MIKHAIL GORBACHEV?
Julian frowned, bewildered. He glanced around the room and found that his classmates looked equally puzzled. Professor Narendra
said nothing, arms crossed over his chest.
“Well?” he asked, after several excruciating moments had passed. “Surely you’ve all heard plenty on this subject before.”
Of course they had. Julian had never taken a history or government class that failed to cover it.
Gorbachev had been a promising Soviet reformer who was expected to take over as general secretary of the Communist Party upon the death of the ailing current secretary, Chernenko.
His leadership promised an easing of tensions between Russia and the West, and, in 1984, already making good on his promise, Gorbachev had traveled to London to meet with Margaret Thatcher.
“I like Mr. Gorbachev,” Thatcher had remarked. “We can do business together.” And then, as they stepped outside Downing Street
for a joint press conference, a shot rang out from the crowd. The bullet spattered Gorbachev’s brains on the pavement.
The shooter was never apprehended and, in the years and decades that followed, it did not become clear who the assassin had
been. Had Gorbachev been killed by an anti-communist radical? Or had he been taken out by his own countrymen, the Soviet old
guard, who did not want to make peace with the West? Julian had always suspected that the CIA and MI6 knew the truth, even
if they never revealed it to the public.
Gorbachev’s assassination was always emphasized as a major historical moment. In the early ’80s, with the ascension of a new
class of Soviet politicians, there had been some hope that the frozen conflict between Russia and the West might be thawing.
But those dreams died with Gorbachev. Another round of proxy battles and regime changes exploded, and the gyre of the Cold
War turned on.
Tentatively, a boy in the back of the class raised his hand.
“Gorbachev was assassinated by a rogue MI6 agent,” he said. “They viewed him as a danger to the West.”
Professor Narendra remained silent. Another boy raised his hand.
“No,” the second boy said. “Andropov and Gromyko ordered his assassination. They wanted to keep the Iron Curtain intact.”
A chorus of murmurs rose from the rest of the class, back-and-forth whispers as each student claimed a side. Even as their voices grew louder, the arguments more contentious, Julian didn’t say a word. After a few more moments of his classmates’ quarreling, he raised his hand.
Professor Narendra inclined his chin. “Yes, Mr. Joyce-Young?”
At the sound of Julian’s name, his classmates suddenly went quiet. Julian grimaced, but persevered.
“It doesn’t matter who killed him,” he said. “Whatever trust there might have been was always doomed to fall apart. The assassin
just sped up the inevitable. For the West to prosper, the Soviet Union would have to fall, and vice versa . . . a zero-sum
game.”
A slow smile came across Professor Narendra’s face.
“Precisely,” he said. “In international relations theory, we refer to this concept as a security dilemma. States are inclined to distrust each other because any loss of power is another’s gain. And with each iteration of this
game, the distrust grows. Cooperation is impossible in an anarchic system.”
Professor Narendra wrote the word anarchy on the board. The students hurriedly pulled out their tablets and began to take notes.
“That the world is an anarchic system is one of the basic principles of IR theory,” Professor Narendra said. “Among the others
is the principle that the state is the fundamental unit of analysis. Domestic events are irrelevant to interstate relations.
Think of each state as a black box.”
The students scrawled away furiously. Julian watched and waited.
“We will operate under these assumptions as we proceed through the course curriculum,” Professor Narendra went on. “And these
are the rules by which our strategy simulations run.”
Finally. Julian sat up in his seat.
“These simulations form the core of the strategy discipline. We will undertake a new one every week. The class will be divided into factions—some real, some fictitious—and fight for control of the globe. Through these simulations, you will learn how to predict the course of war, and, eventually, how to steer it.”
The class was silent. Some students furrowed their brows anxiously; others looked eager.
“Today,” said Professor Narendra, “I will merely introduce you to the simulation technology. Please welcome Valeran’s number-one
student, Klaudia Shimonova, to help me in this demonstration.”
All around the room there were gasps, and even scattered applause. The classroom door opened and Klaudia stepped in. Seeing
her made Julian’s stomach hollow and his heart pound in his chest.
But as she crossed the room to where Professor Narendra stood, she didn’t even spare him a glance. She didn’t look anywhere
but straight ahead, face as impassive and gaze as cold as ever.
Julian couldn’t pay much attention to the demonstration, which involved the same projector machine he had seen in the practice
room, and strange silver disks that needed to be placed on Klaudia’s temples. He could only focus on Klaudia herself: the
shifting of her gray eyes, somehow both deep and clear as ice, the parting of her lips, outlined in that same careful red,
the way her dark hair bounced around her shoulders as she moved. She wasn’t what anyone would call pretty—it seemed too fragile and insubstantial a word—but something about her demanded his focus.
The other students seemed to agree. They stared at her in rapt attention, as if a goddess had deigned to walk among them.
Even at his very best, at his most charming and eloquent, at rallies filled solely with his own supporters, Julian had never
been given half that reverence. Yet Klaudia seemed utterly indifferent to it all. And when Professor Narendra dismissed her,
she left the classroom without looking back.
All that adoration wasted on someone too unfeeling to appreciate it. Julian slid down in his seat, stomach churning.
At the end of the day, Julian returned to his dorm room, exhausted. It was not physical exhaustion—his muscles didn’t ache
the way they did after a lacrosse game—but rather a sort of cerebral fatigue. His mind was crammed with realist principles
and Hobbesian philosophy. Dr. Iver had been right. He did miss studying for Latin exams with Landon, the two of them sprawled out together on the lawn, Julian’s head resting on Landon’s
thigh.
Collapsing onto his bed, Julian pulled out his tablet. Mikhail was gone, off with Jane most likely, giving him some much-needed
privacy. He unlocked the tablet and tapped to the ranking board.
Julian scrolled until he found his own name: at the very bottom, tied with someone named Giselle Buckley, who had evidently
enrolled only a day before he had. He scrolled back up to the top and stared at the first names.
Klaudia Shimonova
Carter Egan
Matteo Alemu Sorensen
Mikhail Karchenko
The gap between Mikhail and the fifth-ranked student was vast enough to prove that there were only four real contenders. Four
people between him and number one, between the relief of a weekend furlough, between a reason to write to his mother with
good news and to make his father look him in the eye again. All throughout the day he had been stealing glances at his fellow
students, trying to gauge his place among them.
How many had been elected mayor of a major city at age eighteen, the youngest in the country’s history?
His name had helped, of course, and so had the endless well of money, but that couldn’t account for everything.
He had beaten out six other Democrats to nab the party nomination.
He had defeated his Republican opponent in a landslide.
He could do it again; he could defy the odds. He could win. Julian began to imagine the letter he would write, black ink against a clean white page. Dear Mom and Dad . . .
The letter came together in his mind with a satisfaction that warmed Julian to his core. He took out the books he had gathered
from the library and spread them across his desk, preparing for the long hours of studying that lay ahead.
But that was when another thought occurred to him—a postscript to the letter.
Don’t worry, he would write. It’s not like before. I’m not like him. I’m coming back.
His mother would cry, and his father would burn the note, the hearth in their parlor lighting up like a funeral pyre.