Brainfire Read online

  He heard his name being paged on the intercom. It surprised him: Professor Andreyev. He remembered where he was, a building in the center of a wasteland, a snowy wilderness. He went to the nearest telephone.

  It was the Physician.

  “How is she?” Andreyev asked.

  “What do you expect me to say?” The Physician’s voice was harsh; for that reason Andreyev thought of his childhood and how the crying of rooks would awaken him on summer mornings—barking birds, he had thought then, winged dogs whose noises rolled and rolled through the trees around the house in Kaluga.

  “You can’t go on exhausting her,” the Physician said. “I can’t let you—”

  Andreyev said, “It’s not my decision, you know. Do you think I have a say in what happens to her? You’re being naïve if you think I can stop all this with a wave of my hand—”

  The Physician, calmer now, said, “She’s seventy years of age, Professor. Does that put you in the picture?”

  And then the line was dead. Andreyev held the receiver a moment, and when he set it back he noticed the initials PVS carved into the white wall above the instrument. They had been cut deep and they looked to him like fresh wounds.

  “I don’t think we can do anything else,” Katya said.

  Andreyev looked once more at Hua Tse-Ling, then at the window of the room they were in—at the black glass against which, with increasing violence, the wind drove crystals of snow.

  4.

  Hua Tse-Ling—thirty-six years of age, according to his ID papers—was taken from the hospital and had his hands tied behind his back by his executioners—six infantrymen and a sergeant. The Colonel, the KGB man, and the Politician watched the proceedings in a neutral way. What did the death of one miserable Chinaman matter, the latter had asked, laughing, when you had more than eight hundred million of the bastards to worry about?

  Hua was led to the wire fence around the compound—pushed rather than led, his limbs stiff, his head held at a forward angle.

  The KGB man said, “What do you make of this experiment, Colonel?”

  The Colonel drew up the collar of his coat and shivered. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting?” The KGB man lifted one hand and, in a gesture that was in part intimate, in part intimidating, prodded the Colonel’s chest. “You’re sitting on a fence, friend.”

  The Colonel shrugged, a gesture of uncertainty. “I’m only a soldier. An observer. I’m not qualified to say.”

  The Politician, who had no interest in this conversation, watched the condemned man move to the fence. He dropped his flask, which sank into the soft new snow. He went down on his hands and knees to dig for it. When he found it he had difficulty getting to his feet, perpetrating a comedy of errors in the snow—fumbling, slipping, sinking. The KGB man gripped him by the elbow and helped him to stand.

  Hua Tse-Ling was being roped to the wire fence; his face, from a distance of several hundred yards, suggested the smooth surface of a balloon, totally without feature. He had not been blindfolded, a generosity, an etiquette of assassination that in the circumstances would have been absurd.

  The guns popped like last year’s fireworks and what might have been a noise of reverberating viciousness was muffled by the falling snow; and the echoes, such as there were, were sucked away beyond the wire fence and the clump of trees in the distance. Hua Tse-Ling hung against the wire, his face tilted to one side in that unlikely loose way of death.

  “Well,” said the KGB man. “End of experiment.”

  “Or the beginning,” said the Colonel.

  Pale smoke from the rifles was beginning to disintegrate in the wind and the snow as if nature, in one of her many conspiracies, were secretly erasing the traces of death.

  2

  1.

  She could hear the Physician’s voice coming to her through the drift of consciousness, meaningless clusters of words: soon warm everything well warm don’t worry don’t. And she was aware of motion, of the wheels of a locomotive running over rails. Clackclacketyclack. But wherever was she going? And what was the Physician, Domareski, trying to tell her? Her eyelids were heavy, half-moons of some dense metal. She couldn’t look, she couldn’t get her eyes open. Aaron, she thought—where is Aaron? He had to be in the garden, walking between the pines, the baby held in his strong arms. She wanted to call his name but knew there wouldn’t be an answer. Why wouldn’t he answer her? Aaron, beloved Aaron. Soon the pain will be gone be gone gone—Something sharp entered her arm and, even with her eyes closed, she could see the glint of Domareski’s needle. A slight incision: no more pain.

  She was a young girl, eyes clear, hair gold. She was a young girl and Aaron was her husband—but why was she panicked, thinking about him now? There were shadows, shadows within shadows, as if whatever feeble light fell was made to pass through barricade after barricade, obstacles. It was the panic, thinking of her husband, wondering where she was moving and why: it came down to fear. And even Domareski’s voice—relax I’m with you nothing bad can happen to you now—even that soothing voice she so trusted did not diminish her feelings. Why would a young girl be traveling on a railroad? And why was Domareski afraid too?

  Something in his voice. Something she caught. It was a thing he was trying to conceal in the deeps of his mind: a darkly moving fish sliding through murk and silt. But she caught it. Relax relax relax no more fear no pain. She could hear him sigh, she could hear the clasp of his bag close: click. The sound of his feet on the floor. Then he touched her, his fingers cold upon the back of her hand. Don’t leave me alone, she thought. Don’t leave me. She felt the tips of his fingers between her knuckles. Then the pain was gone and when she opened her eyes, conscious at first of some blistering white light in the compartment, she gazed down at her hands—claws, knuckles distorted by arthritis, flesh tight and polished with age: the hands suggested pebbles misshapen by tides, smoothed by the comings and goings of oceans. No. They aren’t my hands. How could they be? She was a young girl. Sixteen, seventeen. How old? How old? These could not be her hands.

  She turned her face away from Domareski. There was a white window, windblown snow. The train—but she couldn’t remember stepping onto the train, or being carried; visions, dreams, remembered fragments of motion. Who could ever be sure?

  “Relax,” Domareski said. He was standing over her. He held his black bag under his arm, clutched to his side.

  “I want to see Aaron,” she said. It was not her own voice, it hadn’t come out the way she had wanted it; it was deeper, old, infirm.

  Aaron. She saw a hand rise in the air and watched it flutter slightly—a bulbous hand, gnarled—and then it fell to her side again, as if she were ashamed of it. The young girl, the old love: they were things trapped in photographs, ancient daguerreotypes, deceits. None of it had ever happened. There hadn’t ever been an Aaron, a child.

  She turned her head to look at the Physician. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. He was trying to tell her that. She could hear the words.

  “Did you ask about my visa?” she said.

  “Yes—”

  She looked toward the window. Dark smoke, blown from the front of the train, whipped through the swirling snow. The visa, he was trying to tell her: I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t try to sit up. Later. Not now.”

  “What about the visa?” she said.

  “I promise,” he said. “It’s a matter of clarifying things with Comrade Sememko, that’s all.”

  She shut her eyes, thinking it strange that Domareski’s medication caused her to feel an absence of herself—as if the physical body no longer existed and you became a creature composed entirely of mind and nothing else. It’s a matter of clarifying things with Comrade Sememko. But the Physician was lying to her again. She opened her eyes, thinking of how the snowy light hurt her, and looked at him. But he was busy, pretending to be busy, with the clasp of his bag.

  “People don’t always need to do what th
ey’re told,” she said. “Don’t you understand that? There’s a point you reach when …”

  “Yes.” He opened the bag, looked inside, snapped it shut. “You should sleep now. Please.”

  Sleep? What good to her was sleep? It was a kind of dying, losing your hold on things, slipping and sliding down a slope at the foot of which there lay darkness. She didn’t want that dark; she wanted light, remembrance, rooms filled with sun and warmth, a memory of seeing Aaron walk through the pines with the baby in his arms. But why now did these seem like the memories of another person?

  She could feel her eyelids close. She could hear Domareski turn from the bed toward the door, the slight noise made as he slid the door open, then shut it behind him. Alone. Clackclacketyclack. A white wilderness. She pressed her hands together, appalled by the way they felt to her. She thought: Don’t. Don’t feel them. They aren’t a part of you.

  She turned on her side, face toward the wall.

  Aaron—but Aaron was dead. She remembered—when? dear God, when had this happened?—she remembered taking a pair of scissors and cutting a wedge of material from a garment, the insignia of widowhood. A tiny triangular space, an absence. Yes. Dead. And you are not a young girl, you are not sixteen, seventeen, whatever, married, married to Aaron, you are an old woman, an old woman twisted by pain and racked by remembrances and scared of—

  hua tse-ling

  a soldier, a young man, hua tse-ling, he had come across the ice in his heavy overcoat

  I made him do it. It was me, she thought. I brought him.

  please please don’t there’s such pain such a blinding pain all that pressure in the skull

  He had been on sentry duty. Bored. Checking his rifle. His feet were cold. She had felt that terrible chill soak through him. Remembering something: thinking of his wife, a pretty young woman in Tapanshang, he had been thinking: the freezing weather, the terrible duty, the warmth of his wife—her name? what was her name? And then—

  I dropped the rifle in the snow and I

  She raised her hands, making slack fists of them, to her eyes. I made him do it. I made him do it. People don’t always need to do what they’re told. But you—you’re a scared old woman with a worthless gift, something that was built into you in your mother’s belly, nothing you can alter or eradicate or even forget.

  Hua.

  She had felt the bullets. That was the worst of it. How she had felt him being bound to the fence and then the guns had gone off and he had died, hanging to the fence like a broken icicle—beyond knowing what was happening to him, beyond caring, beyond any memory of a pretty young woman in Tapanshang. A grief. I brought him, broke his mind, took his mind as if it were nothing more than a stick of frail wood and snapped it and made him cross a river, cross the ice slicks, cross—

  Why couldn’t she cry? She had cried only once over it, only once in all her life. And that was with Aaron. Dear dead Aaron. Some loves—don’t they say some loves are forged in the stars, made in the crucible of the skies? Some loves are fated and impossible to resist? Loving Aaron, and once—why had she told him?—playing a silly game. A silly lover’s game. Making him do something, willing him to do something: and he had no control, none. A deck of playing cards. Aaron sitting at the kitchen table, counting them, separating them into suits, laughing as he did so because he had no understanding of why he was doing it or why he wanted to do it or what any of it meant—except, for her, a silly lover’s game.

  You can make people do things? You can do that?

  What had she seen in his eyes then? Deep down, down in a dark place, what had she seen? Fear? Puzzlement?

  You can make people do things they don’t have any control over?

  Yes. Hua crossing the frozen slicks. Dying against the fence. Yes. Yes.

  What are you? What exactly are you?

  Suspicion. That was what she had seen in his eyes. It isn’t like that, Aaron. It isn’t what you think. Please, my love. It isn’t that way, it’s a game, a game, I was pretending with you, make-believe—

  Clear eyes and gold hair and sixteen and newly married. She stared at her hands. The pain was gone. She was drifting, floating downward, borne on whatever Domareski had injected into her veins. You might even have made me marry you. No. Forget it. It didn’t happen. Don’t you see, Aaron? A trick? A simple little trick? What exactly are you? What exactly?

  2.

  Standing alone in the corridor, watching the endless white waste stretch to an indistinguishable point where earth and horizon met in a seamless juncture, Domareski spent match after match in a futile attempt to light his pipe. He was aware, without turning, of Andreyev emerging from his compartment, approaching him slowly, swaying from side to side with the movement of the train. He had come to hate Andreyev in a way that was curiously impersonal, as if the object of his hatred were a symbol, not a person; and sometimes this intense sense of dislike had a quality to it that was almost tangible. It might have been a stone concealed in the corner of a pocket, a thing he could take out and touch whenever he needed to.

  The train came slowly to a halt.

  “She’s sleeping?” Andreyev asked. Domareski said nothing. Andreyev, sighing, pressed his forehead to the window. “Your animosity is understandable. I just wish it weren’t directed so forcibly at me personally—”

  “Are you going to give me some bullshit about science and progress and the great new frontiers of human understanding, Andreyev?” Domareski turned his face away; he had the uncomfortable feeling that he might yield to the temptation to smother Andreyev in his greatcoat.

  The Scientist smiled. “What do you expect?”

  Domareski said, “A little compassion—”

  “Compassion?”

  The Physician stuffed the useless pipe in his pocket. For a while he said nothing. He was thinking of Mrs. Blum. What else had he thought of lately anyhow? Mrs. Blum—he was watching the needle go into her vein—the delivery of morphine, the brief transportation into dreams, places beyond pain. “You have made me a party to her addiction, Andreyev,” he said. “You understand that?”

  Andreyev looked out at the white fields. “I’ve done that alone? I’m solely responsible for that?”

  Domareski shivered: a column of cold air shifted along the corridor, a touch of ice. “You could have kept this to yourself, Andreyev. You didn’t have to make your damned research available to every inquisitive ass—”

  “I was supposed to keep it secret? Is that what you’re telling me? You live in another world if that’s what you think. I had no choice!”

  Domareski did not speak now; he simply wished for Andreyev to fade away, disintegrate. But the Scientist was holding the sleeve of his overcoat, the knuckles of his hands white and bleached. Dead man’s hands, Domareski thought.

  “Every damn bit of work I do is read by them. Don’t you know that? I can’t breathe without them knowing it! I can’t make a telephone call without them knowing who I’m talking to and what the conversation’s all about! Don’t talk to me about secrecy, Domareski.”

  They were silent. The train had begun to move again, slowly gathering speed. Domareski stared from the window: he hated the landscape, its wretched secrets and silences, its forlornness.

  Andreyev was whispering again. “They control me like they control you, Domareski. Did you ask to be her physician? Did you go out of your way to get the position? The hell you did. They told you, didn’t they? They ordered you.”

  “They,” Domareski said. It was as if his contempt was limitless, unfathomable; a rage he could not encompass in any manageable way. And he was tired besides: he was as drained as Mrs. Blum. He leaned against the cold window and looked at Andreyev, wondering at the forces that could reduce men to spineless coelenterates, to jellyfish.

  “Yes. They,” Andreyev said. “They give us no choices.”

  The Physician could feel the rhythms of the train vibrate beneath his feet; a racketing journey into nowhere through a landscape, a huge white voi
d, that had not been created for habitation.

  “How will they use her?” he asked.

  Andreyev said nothing. He looked down at the floor, almost as if he were attempting to hide an expression of futility, of shame, from Domareski.

  “They’ll find a way,” Domareski said. “I know those bastards will find a way.”

  Andreyev raised his face, looked quickly at the Physician, then averted his eyes and pretended to be interested in the door at the end of the corridor.

  “She’s not an old woman anymore,” Domareski said. “She’s not an old woman who suffers from arthralgia and whose heart happens to be weak. She’s a weapon, Andreyev. She’s a damned weapon.”

  Something to be used, he thought. To be deployed. A force. A force he had himself felt. How to describe it? It was as if the palm of a warm hand had been inserted under his skull and laid upon his cerebrum—yes, it was something like that. And he had heard her say, in a voice that was not a voice, Please don’t leave me, don’t leave—There had been a weird sense of violation, an invasion of his innermost self—a warmth, a light, something that cut through the protection of the cartilaginous case with the proficiency of a laser. There had been astonishment, fear, misunderstanding—this old woman, the shell of whose body had been weakened by age, had reached out to touch him in a way he had never been touched before. And he could not fit this realization into the classifications of chemistry, the definitions of physics, the simple comprehensions of psychology.