The Mountain Shadow

‘Madame Zhou paid a visit to the alley under this building, and warned me to stay away from Kavita. Do you really think it’s safe to be going away with her?’

‘What do you want from me?’ she snapped, all fire and furious pride.

‘What I want is to be the closest thing to you, Karla. It’s a sin for you to use that against me. Stop playing games with me. Tell me to leave you alone, or tell me to love you, with everything I’ve got.’

She was stung. I hadn’t seen it often: a reaction in her face or her body that she couldn’t hide.

‘I told you before about trusting me, and how it might get harder to do.’

‘Karla, don’t go.’

‘I’m staying with Kavita,’ she said, turning away from me. ‘Don’t wait up.’

She walked away. I watched her to the stairs, and then raced through my apartment to catch a glimpse of her as she walked to the taxi stand at Metro cinema.

Oleg came to stand beside me. She got in a taxi, and she was gone.

‘You’ve got it bad, bro,’ Oleg said sympathetically. ‘Your vodka is shit, by the way, but your rum is okay. Drink up.’

‘I gotta get clean, first,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave the shower ready for you. Make yourself at home.’

He cast a glance around him at the sparse room, the wooden floors gleaming like the lid on a lacquered coffin.

‘Okay,’ he said.

I stood in the shower, turning it on in bursts, fits and starts. The water in our building was carried in trucks, and pumped upwards into gravity feed tanks on the roof. Everyone in the building shared those tanks.

Trying not to waste water, I shut the shower off from time to time, leaning against the wall until everything that had happened with Concannon came back so hard that I shuddered, retching, and turned on the healing water again.

In the world we created for ourselves, it’s a lie to be a man, and a lie to be a woman. A woman is always more than any idea imposed on her, and a man is always more than any duty imposed on him. Men empathise, and women lead armies. Men raise infants, and women explore the exosphere. We’re not one thing or the other: we’re very interesting versions of each other. And men, too, cry in the shower, sometimes.

It took me a while to scrub the emotion from my face. Afterwards, while Oleg showered, I cleaned my gun as meditation, and stashed it in a hidden shelf beside my bed.

‘Your soap is shit,’ Oleg said, drying himself off. ‘I’ll get you some R-soap. It will scrape the barnacles off you.’

‘I’m relatively barnacle-free,’ I said, offering him the bottle. ‘And I like my soap.’

He offered me the bottle back, and I drank and offered it back, and he drank and offered it again, and I drank it back.

‘That’s my T-shirt,’ I noticed, mid-swappery.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s so nice to put on something clean. I lived in the last one through a geological age.’

‘Keep it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another one, where that one came from.’

‘I saw that. And two pairs of jeans. You travel light, man. If I borrow a pair of yours, do you mind if I roll the bottoms up? I really like that look.’

‘Roll them up to the Urals, Oleg. But turn down the smiling. If we get any drinkier than this, it’ll start to freak me out.’

‘Got it, man. Smiling less. We R-people are nothing if not adaptive. Do you have music?’

‘I’m a writer,’ I said, passing back the bottle. ‘Of course I have music.’

I had a CD system, wired into aftermarket Bollywood speakers. I liked the way they blended everything I played into the same sound-ocean, the same whale of signals from some not entirely air-breathing place.

‘Your system is shit,’ he said.

‘You’re a critical motherfucker, Oleg.’

‘Actually, I’m just making mental notes, you know, of things I get for you that are better than shit.’

‘Whaddaya wanna hear, Oleg?’

‘Got any Clash?’

I played Combat Rock, and he jumped up to grab his guitar.

‘Cut to the last track, “Death Is a Star”,’ he said. ‘I know how to play that. Let’s play it together.’

We strummed Russian–Australian–Indian acoustic together, jamming with the faraway Clash in a hotel room in Bombay. We played the song again and again until we got the timing just right, and laughed like kids when we did. And the strings reopened the cuts on my fingers, and blood from the fight with Concannon stained the body of my guitar.

We got too drunk to play, and we were just beginning to stop caring about that, or anything else, when I found a messenger in my room. He was dressed in the khaki uniform of a messenger, and was holding a message in his hand.

‘Where did you come from?’ I asked, swaying to keep him in focus.

‘From outside, sir,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s alright then. What can I do for you?’

‘I have a message for you, sir.’

‘I don’t like messages.’

‘But it’s my job, sir.’

‘You’ve got a point. How much do I owe you?’