Ch. 3!
The appetizer of caramelized papaya had been okay, Jonathan thought. He recorded the name of the dish into his small black notebook and scribbled next to it, “exquisite.” Yeah. That sounded good.
Taking absent-minded sips of unsweetened carrot juice, Jonathan surveyed the narrow room with its acid green and melon red walls, dim-lighting, and eclectic clientele. He was sitting at a table for two near the bar, but it was different from any other one he’d ever been dragged to, in that everyone was drinking tall glasses of iced tea and shots of grass juice in lieu of alcohol. Somebody sat down in front of him. “Hey,” said a deep and rich and raspy voice. Broken stained glass. “Long time, no see.”
Jonathan looked up, shocked, into green eyes heavily outlined with Kohl. “Stephanie?”
“You know, I always thought I’d run into you at one of these places. I think I remember you telling me that you were a vegetarian.”
“I … I might have.” The full effect of Stephanie’s presence hadn’t quite sunken in. “What have you been doing?” He added quickly, in an effort to make some semi-ordinary conversation.
“I graduated from film school, and just started making a documentary about the abuse of mimes. You?”
“Um … I’ve just been, well …” His grating phone ring emanated from his (well, Alex’s, actually, since they’d switched that morning in a fit of Alex’s panic when he’d worried about professional presentation) suitcase. “Excuse me for a moment.” Stephanie eyed the suitcase with great interest as Jonathan pulled out his black brick of a cell phone out from it.
“Hello?”
“Greetings. I just exited the interview … where are you?”
“Um, I’m at a restaurant …” Jonathan looked up nervously at Stephanie, who looked remarkably like the girl from Pulp Fiction with her elbow resting on the table like that and her cat-like eyes watching him intently. “How did it go?”
“I must inform you in your presence. Which restaurant?”
“Uh, ‘Pristine Palate.’ It’s on Manhattan Avenue. But you might not want to - ” Only the beeping tone heard his warning. He’d hung up.
… Wonderful.
“Who was that?” Stephanie asked with innocence Jonathan suspected to be false.
“Someone who’s staying with me. He just got interviewed for a job at the … at the United Nations, actually.”
“Politician?”
Jonathan laughed. “No, far from it. He’s pretty honest.”
“Honest? What else?”
“Why do you want to know?” Jonathan asked, eyebrows knitted in worry.
“Isn’t a person allowed to be curious?” She puckered her purple lips around her unpolished copper mug, throwing Jonathan a look that ranged somewhere between amused and accusatory.
“Sorry.” Jonathan crossed his arms, unsure to whether he wanted desperately for Alex to walk in the door right then or desperately for him to pass up this restaurant for one that offered things of a more sausage-y nature. “This is his suitcase, actually. Well, his grandfather’s, really. He just brought it over with him.”
“Over? From where?”
“Ukraine.” He looked down at the menu for something to order next. He’d asked the owner which dishes were best representative of the restaurant as a whole and he’d said either the stuffed avocado or the curried tofu. But he couldn’t really pay any attention to it.
“It seems as thought his young man is always drawing a crowd of intriguing individuals.” Jonathan froze, not quite knowing what she was referring to. She sipped her tea elegantly (Jonathan noticed that she extended her smallest finger to make for a more delicate grip), still fixing him with that intent stare.
“I … I wouldn’t say a crowd, exactly.”
“Oh?”
“No. I’m usually on my own with things.” He hadn’t meant to express his isolation quite so blatantly, but whenever he spoke to Stephanie it was as though pages of the journal he didn’t keep kept falling out of his mouth.
“Aren’t we all?” asked the Cleopatra across the table, but it was more of a statement than the fed-up rhetorical question he’d expected. “It’s conducive to personal growth and all that, but you can’t be alone all the time. If one keeps a plant in a dark room, it doesn’t matter how much water one gives it; it wilts without sunlight. Humans are dependant on more than one thing.”
He paused for a moment before responding. “I don’t like … being dependent. Even though I am, and on so many things.”
“Are you saying you’re a materialist?”
“Not exactly. More just … dependant on the comfort things can provide.”
“Physical or emotional?”
“Both.”
Hmm.” It wasn’t the “hmm” of a psychoanalyst, or even the “hmm” of a parent. Jonathan imagined it perhaps to be the sound of introspection. Or maybe just contentment with the tea she was drinking.
“You know, I stopped collecting things after I came back,” he added like an afterthought. “But I still feel the same.”
“Perhaps you just need to part the metaphorical sea,” said Stephanie, giving him a warmly wicked smile. “Escape from whatever’s been holding you back.”
“Holding me back …” His mind ran through the possibilities, looking back up at Stephanie with wide eyes. “From what?”
“If I need to tell you, then the situation’s hopeless. But if you’re the same person I met all those years ago, you’ve got a sense of purpose. A forceful will. So you’ll try, right?”
“I can’t … unleash plagues or anything like that.”
“No. And the forty years of wandering the desert’s no cakewalk, either. But it’s better than being slave to it.”
He was waiting for her to offer him a red pill and a blue pill when she suddenly lost her omnipotent intonation and simply said, “So, tell me about him.”
Her sudden curiosity shot Jonathan down from his own personal sky of possibilities he’d just been soaring speculatively over. “Who?”
“Who else? The guy from the Ukraine. Or is it just Ukraine?”’
Jonathan wisely ignored her second question.
“He’s very … unique. The world should be glad there’s only one person like him running around.”
She smiled a little, but didn’t push the subject. “So, what were you doing there?”
“Searching. Searching for someone.”
“Any success?”
“No. And yes. It’s a long story. She’s gone now.” Jonathan hoped the short spurts of sentences intertwined coherently.
“Hey … is that him, perchance? You know, your room-mate?” She pointed to the front of the room, where Alex was surveying the restaurant as though it were a foreign planet. And to him, it probably seemed like one. This was a different side of America, one Jonathan was quite confident wouldn’t appeal to his visitor nearly as much as “Saturday Night Fever.” He spotted them, and walked over cautiously.
"Alex, this is … Stephanie.” She extended one of her manicured hands for him to shake.
“It is a pleasure to meet you,” answered Alex, and although Jonathan was grateful that he hadn’t given her the greeting he himself had received upon first meeting his translator (“It would not be nice to beat you”), it frustrated him that Alex had quite obviously no idea who she was.
“I met Stephanie on a school trip,” he intoned, and it appeared as though Alex had gotten the message.
“Ah, is this so.” The waiter set the curried tofu in front of Jonathan, and he and Alex took a very sudden interest in it. Jonathan picked up his chopsticks, looking up at Stephanie with concern. She excused herself and left, but not after kissing Jonathan on the cheek. He watched her leave, frazzled.
“So that was her?”
Jonathan nodded, chasing the tofu around his plate.
“Did she remember?"
“I don’t now … probably,” he replied miserably. “Anyway. What happened with you?”
“I answered truthfully to all their questions. I showed them my résumé, and the letters you and my English professor at University wrote to recommend me.”
“And …?"
“They said they would inform in five days. Five days! What will I do until then?”
Jonathan didn’t respond.
“I am eating humble pie for what occurred. I should have been aware that my English was not first-rate enough for this.”
“Don’t say that … you’ll find something. We’ll find something.”
Alex smiled a little, still obviously distraught, but comforted by the promise.
“Where can a person acquire vodka in this vicinity?”
“You drink that with lunch?” Jonathan asked, incredulous and slightly amused.
“We are always drinking vodka in the totally awesome former Soviet Republics. Especially in times of distress and doubt.”
“Okay … well, I don’t think they’ll have any here.”
“Why not?”
“This place is vegetarian. Like me; how I don’t eat meat. Most vegetarians don’t drink either. It’s a lifestyle.”
“What does it mean, lifestyle?”
“A way of living.”
“There is no way of living without neither meat nor vodka.”
“I’m doing okay with it,” Jonathan said, a little defensively.
“This is arguable.”
“I just don’t like meat! Or … vodka.”
“You do not drink the beer?”
“No.”
“Whiskey?”
“No.”
“Wine?”
“No.”
“And what about the rum?”
“No! Especially not that.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I just don’t see the appeal.”
“The appeal? The appeal of what?”
“Of the stuff itself or its effect … or after-effect,” he added with a grimace.
“Perhaps you merely cannot retain your alcohol,” suggested Alex.
“I can hold it just fine.”
“I will bet that you are becoming drunk with merely one glass.”
“That’s not the issue. I just don’t like the way it tastes.”
Alex laughed, stating that he understood.
“You can have some grass juice, though,” suggested Jonathan.
“They are capable of manufacturing juice from that?” he asked, horrified. “No thank you!”
“It’s really good for you.”
“I do not care! It is a disgusting notion, to manufacture a drink from the lawn.”
“It has the nutrients of two pounds of vegetables.”
“Be reasonable, Jonathan,” Alex said with the air of an irritated schoolteacher.
“Hey,” Jonathan said, holding up a shot glass of the strange extraction from his line of samples. “If you drink this, I’ll go out for vodka with you.” Alex gave him a “Yeah, right” look, but took the small glass anyway, eyeing it with a mouth drawn back in revulsion. He gulped it down it one swift motion, setting the slimy glass back down triumphantly.
“I guess Russians really will drink anything.”
“This is incredibly true. And now you must go with me.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”
“A deal is a deal, Jonfen S. Foer. Finish your not-meat and we will go.”
As Jonathan signed the bill and slipped the carbon copy into his pocket for future reimbursement by the paper, he wondered exactly what he’d gotten himself into.
------
He should have known Alex would choose a place like this, a flashing, cheap pit halfway underground in the grungier part of the city. As soon as he walked in, it filled him with uneasiness and faint fear. It was like another universe, with sparkling neon stars and sparkling neon people who turned to stare, because he was the alien here. Thick smoke seemed to insinuate itself deep inside him, and he was reminded of all those horrifying x-rays of the tar-filled lungs of smokers, so shriveled they hardly even resembled organs. Typical public service announcement propaganda, perhaps, but it was still real, and enough to usually keep him as far away as possible from these types of places. The initially rough stench gradually became cloyingly sweet, and Jonathan reminded himself that one night spent breathing this air wouldn’t kill him.
But the vodka might. It smelled like the stuff used to clean toilets, and he didn’t hesitate to tell Alex.
“That grass shit was much more similar to such a thing.”
“At least it doesn’t kill any brain cells.”
“This is a saying which I learned two days yore: do not be knocking until you have attempted.”
Jonathan’s last excuse had been quite easily deflated. “Okay then.” He raised the glass to the blue light. “To … to Sammy David Junior Junior. May she never hump my leg again.”
“This is demanding a little much, but I commend your toast. To Sammy!”
It was awful, just like he’d expected, leaving a trail of corrosion in his mouth and throat. He needed water to ease that strange acidic burn. Alex said something to the bartender, and another glass was pressed to his lips. He gulped it down, not even bothering to reach up and hold it himself, until the horrible taste left. When it did, he felt sick to both his stomach and his standards.
“That was not even a substantial amount. You must truthfully never drink.”
“Why would I have lied about something like that?”
“I was not intending that you lied, Jonathan,” said Alex, stressing every syllable in that way he did whenever he was trying to explain a concept to him that wasn’t sticking. “Well, perhaps I was, but it does not matter.” The room started to delicately sway, and the slight nausea it caused must have shown, because he was quickly asked if he wanted to leave.
“No, you go do… whatever it is you do at places like this … I’ll just stay here. It’ll be fine.” When he spoke in that straight-forward tone, he almost believed himself.
“You are sure.”
“Yes.”
“You are positive?”
“Yes! Just go.”
Alex recoiled slightly, looking around in several directions, shrugged, and disappeared into the pulsing lights.
Maybe he was right about Jonathan not being able to hold his alcohol. The half-filled glass taunted him with its institutionalized, chemical scent, reminding him of the days he’d spent home, sick. He downed all of it, and before he could even ask for more water to wash away the burning aftertaste, he’d blacked out.
------
Something wet stroked languidly right under his collarbone. Drowsy questions got lost in his mental fog and he stretched back. The feeling resonated strangely in the dark.
“He’s never been a problem”
“Always so quiet”
“Sometimes I don’t know”
”Don’t think he believes”
“I don’t believe in man either”
It trailed downwards. He didn’t know who and he didn’t know why and he didn’t care at all and even if he did …
“Afraid of things”
"Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll forget”
“It is not so unusual, not knowing”
He reached out, just to see if anything was really there, if it wasn’t just a trick of the dark or a nightmarish deception, drunken delusion. Because it was so profoundly sad and wrong and necessary, and he pushed him gently down, further, further, feeling a deep shame, the kind that took years and years to scrape away, but also a curious absence of it. Weird and electrifying. He wondered how Alex could do that, Sasha, Shapka, Perchov, he wondered how anyone could, and once it started he never wanted this to stop Alex’s hands on his legs or his own in Alex’s hair, but it inexplicably did. Alex was breathing into his neck and their eyes met, almost apologetically.