Strike That

Vasily’s lungs are minting death sentences faster than Berya could ever, even in the prime of his youth and Soviet Vigour. No hand could flash faster than the tick of the dosimeter in the meat of his body, each snowflake a betrayal of the Socialist Dream. He reeks of the terror of death, rifle-less in front of a Nazi battalion. He blinks horrified against the snow that cascades from the ruins of his future.

“Housing block 11-B, Comrade. Clear it. We have half an hour”

An officer pulls through his cigarette and dismisses him, or loses focus, or dies- who is to say. He can taste the meat of him, cooked and raw. Coursing. Strike that.

Rectangles stacked on their sides and built from hope and concrete. The blast-white painted door has rusted nearly shut in the twenty years of its service, retreating back to the oxides it was smelted from. Blood and cream, boiling. Vasily shoulders it open and Gags at the scent of life. Cabbage. Sweat. Fear. Older than he is. Older than time. His torch flickers on with the third try and plays on grey-green linoleum, chunks of roof, sifting, endless death. A drift of paper and potato skins blown up against a disused elevator door.

The distant sound of helicopter blades calls a forlorn Attention. 35 registered to this block. Four stories. Built for 25. Housing 70, maybe 80. Vasily’s gun can help maybe six. The detritus stirs beneath his black boots and a breath of mortality blows before him. He is dying at 26. He is dead at 26. He never will have been, at 26.

Empty rooms, ransacked by their own caretakers. Dead cats and underwear drawers. How they managed to break the table in leaving, Vasily does not know- the wood is cheap and thin, but the table is by the window. There are no cords thick enough to help explain.

Empty. Empty. Empty. Heeded the warning before courage was summoned to give it. Traitors to the past, thinking impossible thoughts before their authorization. They should all be shot for their own safety. If only Vasily could feel his hands. Red, no, crimson banners and woodblock slogans crunch- he has staggered against a wall and dislodged Lenin, Stalin, Lalin. Forgive me comrade for I am not well, I am healthy. I am strong.

Deeper still, the dust has settled behind him, waiting for his return like a starved panther in the depths of time. It is waiting and ready and it already has him. The table is set for the feast, he needs only to lie down, but cannot. Whose blood streaks his uniform? Bleeding is a capital offense, capitalists must have committed wreckage in his marrow.

Cries of a counter-revolutionary in the distance, toothless and terrified with their distance from Tomorrow. Vasily reloads his pistol incorrectly, bullets rattling onto the ground. There is still one in the chamber, always, waiting for the right dark night to appear and disappear. Vasily is ready to fight the counter-revolutionaries in their hovels, surrounded by blasphemous possessions and cabbage and hope and radish and despair. No matter that the gun is seized, or lost, or dropped- his thumb is pinched in the hammer and rotted off completely. Is rotting. Will rot. The gun is in his hand. It is in his belt. He does not have a gun, there are no guns in the fatherland.

The door is closed in front of him and the power has been out for twenty hours. He is holding the torch in his left hand and the gun is in his right hand. These people are not safe, safe from him, safe from the air or the Americans. They have poisoned the poison poison, perhaps. He spits the metal from his mouth that a spy has planted there and paints calico on apartment 23.

Vasily kicks the door in and knocks gently, slipping sideways into the frame, face against thin cold wood. “Open immediately please, it is not safe.” As loudly as possible, which is quiet, as loud as the stubble on his cheeks abrading old thin paint. For good measure he shoots the doorknobq three times- it is off by the first shot, but counter-revolutionaries are everywhere so he shoots it once on the ground, cockeyed and bleeding, and then tromps over to where it sits spinning and dented and shoots it again through a copy of Pravda. The door is open behind him.

“You must evacuate by the order of the second Socialist convention. This area is being evacuated” Vasily tells the glowing strike that, glowering darkness in front of him. Perhaps the door noticed and evacuated along with his bowels, running more freely than in years. Vasily will not make it to Apartment 25 because Vasily is dying.

“You are in breach of the Orders” he spits into the darkened apartment. Light plays over glittering glass and some blood, a normal amount for an apartment. The traitor is wailing louder- Trotsky has set a beacon for Western bombardment, the cad. It is a pity that Vasily has dropped his gun and also is vomiting into a lukewarm kettle of cabbage and what looks like a half-kilo of salami. Salami has been rationed and anyways should not be so fresh. Strike that.

The bedroom! Last redoubt of the White Russian, looming up from yesterday on ethereal horseback, the head of a peasant woman gripped tightly in dead fingers, hair wrapped knottily like so many ave maria. Vasily knew always that this was how his story ends. His pistol is shooting light as he requests politely for everyone to get the fuck out of here. Maybe he should not have done a shift at the power plant. Strike that.

Uncomprehending terror in a high whistle flutters thinly past. So thin it traces lace networks through his mouldering bones, so old it reaches through the clotting miasma of his mind and pulls him into the room. He ricochets against walls slathered in earnest Tomorrow- caked in it, soft lumps of it on the floor, nestling in the small spaces between the crib and the wall. He is penniless in a bakery, being dragged starving into the night as rack after rack after rack of cake recede from view. The wall and its green glassless window sifting hateful spoor and impossible light. Tinkling fairyfall footsteps mark Vasily’s approach, glass breaking under boots like promises. An eyeless bear winks doubly at him from a corner, patched and resolute.

A red and toothless mouth, face as red and sunburned as Vasily’s (it is night) strike that. Gathering dust already, before her? his? time, fists already balled in the fury of the student revolutionary. Vasily stares at fingernails so small they are insultingly delicate, bourgeois in their intricacy. Pink china from a noblewoman’s finest cabinet. He leans heavily against the rail of the crib and hears it complain nearly on-key with the child counter-revolutionary, if only for a moment. It’s shocking how heavy this torch has become, and how slippery. Light plays dangerously erratically over that terrified face. It is a crime to damage his issued equipment, but Vasily strains at the torch, hauling it to the side before his grip fails. It clatters softly onto the powder-coated mattress.

Vasily remembers distinctly a fuzzy sort of obligation which he can’t remember much at all as he keens strike that the keening cuts through him proton-thin and fizzing. It is somewhere between building Communism and flinching from fire and the sounds coming from the dark savannah. He knows it is something that he must save, or destroy, or save by destroying. He knows that he tastes metal and has tasted it for the rest of his life. He knows that the cab of the truck is no less dusty than the air in his mouth and it is an impossible 25 meters away.

All Vasily does not know, staring into the final failure of all he is and was and knew and hoped and believed in and fought for and died for, is which of his hands holds the torch, and which the gun. Strike that.