water-resistant coating. She purchased it and her Patagonia Capalene underwear, her Dana Design Glacier backpack, her Limmer hiking boots, her Helly Hansen rain pants, and her EMS Traverse sleeping bag at Paragon on Eighteenth and Broadway a few weeks after they booked their flight on Kazair. She can’t remember what the jacket had set her back specifically, but remembers quite well the $1,200 dent the excursion bashed into her checking account. She feigns recollection. “Fifty dollars?”
Viktor eyes her suspiciously, a Grand Inquisitor of sportswear. “I ask another American about her coat. Same color. Patagonia. She tells that she pay three hundred dollars.”
“It was on sale,” Jayne says quietly, then stops to wait for Douglas.
Viktor smirks as he fishes the half-smoked cigarette from his breast pocket. As he lights up the remnant, he remembers his schoolboy days as group leader of his Oktyabryata youth group, back when he wore his bright red Young Pioneer scarf nightly to bed, still glowing from the
A
he’d received in Scientific Communism for his critique of bourgeois individualism at School Number 3. This was before he knew of such things as Patagonia jackets. Before, as a private in the Signal Corps stationed near Kandahar, he went out on patrol as a demonstrably Soviet soldier and returned equipped with the battlefield tackle of half the planet’s nations. After scavenging the bodies of dead
mujahideen
, his platoon’s medics threw away their Soviet-made syringes, rendered magically sterile by a thin paper wrapping, and stocked up on Japanese disposable syringes whose plungers never clogged. Their Soviet plasma containers, half-liter glass bottles that shattered constantly, were exchanged for captured Italian-made polyethylene liter blood bags so rupture-resistant one could stomp on them in field boots to no effect. Their Soviet flak jackets were so heavy many soldiers could barely lift them. Upon seizing their first American flak jacket, Viktor’s mystified platoon found that this vestment, which lacked a single metal part, could not be penetrated at point-blank range with a Makarov pistol. He did not know, then, that when the war began the
muj
were armed only with cheap Maxim rifles you could not fire for long without scorching your guide hand. He did not know of the CIA and ISI airlifts and border sanctuaries the
muj
were then making use of. His schoolboy critique of bourgeois individualism did not foresee such contingencies any more than the Americans who would one day pay him to safeguard their leisure. But he feels little pleasure in having shamed the woman over her jacket. He lied to her about knowing its true price. He has several such jackets at home, which he wears only around the cafés of Almaty for the status their indiscreet labels supply.
“Hey,” Douglas says, as he falls in beside Jayne.
“Hey,” Jayne returns.
Douglas’s mouth goes tight, his mustache of sweat sparkling. “Are we there yet?”
She motions toward his foot. “How’s that ankle?”
“Okay. It just hurts. That’s good, though, right? When it stops hurting is when you’re in trouble.”
A small, toothless smile. “That’s frostbite.”
“Well. The good news then is that I don’t have frostbite.”
Jayne digs into her jacket’s marsupial pocket and removes a cling-wrapped piece of crumbly halvah. She holds it out to Douglas, who shakes his head. Jayne takes a bite, several hundred sesame seeds instantly installing themselves between her teeth. She looks across the steppe, a sweep of land so huge and empty she wonders if a place can be haunted by an
absence
of ghosts. She has never seen a sky so big. So big, in fact, it makes her own pathetic smallness somehow gigantic—as though to contemplate one’s place in the nothingness of the universe can only set free some stoned homunculus of monomania.
“Walking here,” she tells Douglas suddenly, “I can’t get something out of my mind. It just repeats
Viktor eyes her suspiciously, a Grand Inquisitor of sportswear. “I ask another American about her coat. Same color. Patagonia. She tells that she pay three hundred dollars.”
“It was on sale,” Jayne says quietly, then stops to wait for Douglas.
Viktor smirks as he fishes the half-smoked cigarette from his breast pocket. As he lights up the remnant, he remembers his schoolboy days as group leader of his Oktyabryata youth group, back when he wore his bright red Young Pioneer scarf nightly to bed, still glowing from the
A
he’d received in Scientific Communism for his critique of bourgeois individualism at School Number 3. This was before he knew of such things as Patagonia jackets. Before, as a private in the Signal Corps stationed near Kandahar, he went out on patrol as a demonstrably Soviet soldier and returned equipped with the battlefield tackle of half the planet’s nations. After scavenging the bodies of dead
mujahideen
, his platoon’s medics threw away their Soviet-made syringes, rendered magically sterile by a thin paper wrapping, and stocked up on Japanese disposable syringes whose plungers never clogged. Their Soviet plasma containers, half-liter glass bottles that shattered constantly, were exchanged for captured Italian-made polyethylene liter blood bags so rupture-resistant one could stomp on them in field boots to no effect. Their Soviet flak jackets were so heavy many soldiers could barely lift them. Upon seizing their first American flak jacket, Viktor’s mystified platoon found that this vestment, which lacked a single metal part, could not be penetrated at point-blank range with a Makarov pistol. He did not know, then, that when the war began the
muj
were armed only with cheap Maxim rifles you could not fire for long without scorching your guide hand. He did not know of the CIA and ISI airlifts and border sanctuaries the
muj
were then making use of. His schoolboy critique of bourgeois individualism did not foresee such contingencies any more than the Americans who would one day pay him to safeguard their leisure. But he feels little pleasure in having shamed the woman over her jacket. He lied to her about knowing its true price. He has several such jackets at home, which he wears only around the cafés of Almaty for the status their indiscreet labels supply.
“Hey,” Douglas says, as he falls in beside Jayne.
“Hey,” Jayne returns.
Douglas’s mouth goes tight, his mustache of sweat sparkling. “Are we there yet?”
She motions toward his foot. “How’s that ankle?”
“Okay. It just hurts. That’s good, though, right? When it stops hurting is when you’re in trouble.”
A small, toothless smile. “That’s frostbite.”
“Well. The good news then is that I don’t have frostbite.”
Jayne digs into her jacket’s marsupial pocket and removes a cling-wrapped piece of crumbly halvah. She holds it out to Douglas, who shakes his head. Jayne takes a bite, several hundred sesame seeds instantly installing themselves between her teeth. She looks across the steppe, a sweep of land so huge and empty she wonders if a place can be haunted by an
absence
of ghosts. She has never seen a sky so big. So big, in fact, it makes her own pathetic smallness somehow gigantic—as though to contemplate one’s place in the nothingness of the universe can only set free some stoned homunculus of monomania.
“Walking here,” she tells Douglas suddenly, “I can’t get something out of my mind. It just repeats
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