![]() ![]() Previously in Unbound Fiction: "Bienvenue à Dilbrith College, Marie-Claire Tremblay!!," by Simon Fanning (Jul 19, 2000) "Marie-Claire is scheduled to arrive on the three o'clock train. And would Abélard himself not have relinquished his philosophical pursuits in order to accommodate his immaculate Héloïse?" "The Limbo of Infants," by Sandra Riley (Jun 21, 2000) "They like to go to Chi Chi's for cha-jitas, Claire and Tom, when they are off the island on an interstate, looking for a place to stop." "Cicada," by Judy Wilson (May 24, 2000) "These are things my son taught me to care about. Saturday nights he taught me to feel the thrill of the drag strip. 'The trick,' he said, 'is to not blink when the lights go green.'" "Lyris," by Tom Drury (April 20, 2000) "She climbed down the outside of the bridge and stood on a narrow ledge. It was not a far drop to the river; it might even be a pleasant jump in the summer." "Contamination," by Dalia Rosenfeld (March 22, 2000) "Igor spends most of his mornings in a cave, across the street from the park where we used to grill hamburgers and toss Frisbees over each other's heads." "A Catalogue of Change," by Piya Kochhar (February 24, 2000) "In the early morning the girl looks at the lady's palms, which are pink with thin lines. The heart crossed at Jupiter. The mount of Saturn marked by a bursting star." More fiction from Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. |
August 23, 2000
![]() ![]() Get a room in a hotel near the McDonald's and take some hotel stationery from the end-table drawer. Write, Dear Mom & Rick,Shred the letter. In the morning walk from one churchyard to another; follow the winding avenues past pink bell towers, past church after church after church. Walk fast, play it safe, talk to no one, blend in, don't use so much English, don't pull out a map in front of people, don't talk to the girl at the table next to yours. You are incognito, you are escaped. By now Rick has almost certainly hired a private detective to escort you home. This detective could be anywhere -- eating in that café, pretending to sell drugs by that fountain. Caution is paramount. At dusk sit in a quiet churchyard and try a postcard. Dear Mom & Rick,Tear up the postcard. No one wants to get a postcard like that. Buy another Juozo and drink it as quickly as possible. In the morning walk the same streets you walked the day before. Always know where you are, don't get lost, don't stay anywhere for very long, don't fall asleep. Wear shoes sensible for walking. Look for water sin gas; go to the same restaurant twice because they serve chocolate-chip pancakes. Worry about bacteria suspended in ice cubes in your drink. After the fourth or fifth day of this it will become clear that no one will find you, that there is no private detective, that maybe no one is even looking. Go to the park and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes to celebrate. Pet a stray dog. Smile at a businesslady. Stretch your legs. There's an old woman whose job it is to sit below the park in the underground lavatory and sell toilet paper for 80 centae. She takes your money and feeds the loose end of a roll of brown paper through a little slot. Take a foot or two, wrap it around your hand. After some deliberation give her a twenty-dollar bill for a tip. After you've been in Lithuania for six days your funds will get low. Start drinking only in the afternoons. Consider what is proper to write in a letter home. If you are attracted to a nun on the trolley-bus, or a forty-five-year-old woman who is crying as she passes you in the street, or if you think that drinking without getting drunk is a waste of time, or if you want to curse or piss outside or fuck the next hooker you see, or if you buy a Sprite for a little girl because the poverty of this place is breaking your heart -- if you feel these things then it might be best to write them in a diary but never in a letter home. After a week sell your driver's license to a linen salesman for eighty American dollars. Eat at Burger King to celebrate. Buy an airmail letter and write, Dear Mom & Rick,Take that letter to the mailbox, but at the last second turn away and drop it in a trash can. Move to a less expensive hotel. Follow a girl onto a bus because you can see her nipples through her orange tank top. Buy her dinner and kiss her fingers and beg her to go to your room with you. When she refuses get terribly drunk. Get lost on your way back to the hotel and blunder into the woods north of Vilnius where gypsies sleep in tents and make drums from goat skin and wait half their lives for an American like you to wander into their camp. In the morning your wallet will be gone and you will remember very little. Start drinking tap water. Drink a gallon of it. Imagine little microbe families blooming in your intestines. Sell your passport for five hundred dollars cash. Buy a flashlight, climb on a bus heading west, and fall asleep. When you wake you'll be at Plokstine, an abandoned Soviet missile base that looks like a grassy field with four big pitcher's mounds in it. The pitcher's mounds are the roofs of the missile silos. There is no admission fee, no throng of tourists, just a few signs in English and Lithuanian and a single strand of barbed wire. One rusty wire under your sneaker: all that remains of alarms, electric fences, razor cable, Dobermans, search lights, and machine-gun emplacements. Follow the sign to the bunker's entrance, which is a staircase in the middle of the field leading into the depths of the earth or maybe some more terrible place. When you descend notice the electric bulbs screwed into the cracked ceilings, the wet and rusty floors; see the whole place slowly buckling from the weight around and above it. Lie in one of the rotten bunks where off-duty Soviet troops once read comic books, slept, masturbated. Walk past the giant old generators, gutted by scavengers. Stand in the room where they had the button. A sign in English will explain how the control room could be sealed off with enough air and power for three hours. Think about why. Finally descend to a pair of long dripping black corridors and stomp along through rust-puddles until you can shine your light ninety feet down into the echoing cylinders where they kept the nukes. Put your hands on the iron collar around the rim of the hole where the 360 degrees of the compass are painted so soldiers could aim at a number and not a place. Better to aim for 245 than Frankfurt. At dusk you will be miles away, above ground. Stroll near the river; pull tiny flowers from stems you pass. People are around you -- chubby people, drunk people, poor people maybe, but living their lives, walking in the evening and looking at the swallows looping overhead. Watch these different personalities inside their various bodies and think that they are good people, with good brains, 83 percent happy, 17 percent unhappy. Breathe the air and walk down to the river and step across the boulders and see fingerlings rise for the evening hatch; think that you're young and will always be, and take off your clothes and swim. Swim and paddle and splash and flaunt your skin. After dark walk back to your hotel through the crumbling apartment blocks, flick at the gnats by your ear, walk up the steps and buy a liter of Juozo from the desk-girl. Order hot cepelinai, big egg-shaped potato dumplings filled with sausage and covered with cream, and the rain will start, cold loud drops. Eat and drink and watch the drops glide down your window. In the morning is when you will write your letter. Tell them you're sorry. Be sure to mention how kind everybody has been to you.
Join a conversation on fiction in the Arts & Literature conference of Post & Riposte. More fiction from Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Anthony Doerr's first collection of short stories will be published by Scribner in 2002. His fiction is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, DoubleTake, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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