A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

There was the hand-carved chess set on a round side-table; when moved, the squat white king wobbled from side to side, like a man just sober enough to stand, and Dokka had named his majesty Boris Yeltsin.

since fire doesn’t distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur’an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.

She zipped her puffy jacket over a sweatshirt that in Manchester, England, had warmed the shoulders of five brothers before the sixth, a staunchly philanthropic six-year-old, had given it to his school’s Red Cross clothing drive so his mother would have to buy him a new one.

“You shouldn’t rush,” he said. “There are no taste buds in your stomach.” She paused to consider his reasoning, then took another bite. “There’s no hunger in your tongue,” she mumbled between chews.

After twelve love affairs over the course of her seventy-three years, each beginning with a grander gesture, each ending with a more spectacular heartache, Deshi had learned to distrust men of every size and age, from newborns to great-grandfathers, knowing they all had it in them to break a decent woman’s heart.

am driving you all to your graves,” the bus driver announced as he walked down the aisle to collect tickets at a quarter past six in the morning. He leaned back as though balancing an invisible shot glass on his round stomach. “If given the opportunity, I will sell you all to the first bandit, kidnapper, or slave trader we come across. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. I wouldn’t have to drive this bus to that country if you hadn’t purchased these tickets, and for that I will drive over every pothole and divot to make the ride as miserable for you as it will be for me. And no, we will be making no bathroom breaks, and yes, it is because I know the pain a pothole causes a full bladder.”

Hospital No. 6 hired her without requesting an application or résumé. When she provided a list of references in London, Deshi crumpled the paper, tossed it under the desk, and told Sonja that Dr. Wastebasket would dutifully contact each recommender.

Sure, Sonja was a cold, domineering woman, whose glare could wither flowers and cause miscarriages, and Deshi was clearly a lunatic, and though there wasn’t a sliver of compassion between the two of them and the only fate worse than having those two as caretakers was having them as colleagues, it had been a good day.

she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from the lost and found. It had belonged to the daughter of a devout Warsaw Catholic who believed the makers of department-store toys were conspiring to turn his ten-year-old girl into a heathen, and so he had boxed up all but her Nativity figurines and, filled with the spirit of Christian charity, sent them to a heathen country where they could do no harm to the souls of children already beyond salvation. The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline. The girl inspected the doll, distrustful of this vision of humanity.

Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn’t say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving.

“Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”

“You know what you should do,” he said, turning to her. “You should teach the guard downstairs to juggle.” “But he only has one arm.” “But he really wants to learn. He’s embarrassed by his arm so he’ll refuse at first. But you need to be persistent.” “I can be persistent,” she said. “Yeah?” “My father says persistence is a polite way of being annoying.” “You’re good at that, aren’t you?” With a slight smile, she acknowledged her considerable expertise.

“So the perception of professionalism is more important than being professional?” It was an idea he could stand behind.

“Wasn’t it Ronald McDonald who told Gorbachev to tear down the wall?” “You’re thinking of Ronald Reagan.” “English names all sound the same.” “That was fifteen years ago.” “So? Brezhnev was General Secretary for eighteen.” “It doesn’t work like that over there,” she explained. “They have elections every few years. If the president doesn’t win, someone else becomes president.” “That’s ridiculous.” The wind lifted the ash from his cigarette and scattered it across the empty parking lot. “And you can only be president for ten years,” she added. “And then what? You become prime minister for a bit and then run for president again?” “I think you just step down.” “You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?” he asked. She had to be putting him on. “He just stepped down and George Bush became president.” “And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him seizing power?” “No,” she said. “I think they were friends.” “Friends?” he asked. “It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.” “Good point.”

“Juggling is more in your mind than your hand,” she told the one-armed guard. “I died in my sleep, didn’t I? This is Hell, isn’t it?”

“Jesus Christ, hear my plea,” the one-armed guard chanted, in case the infidel god was more receptive.

“My phantom hand is slapping you in the face.” “I can’t feel it,” she said, proudly. “Neither can I,” he said, glumly.

“It’s stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.”

“I remember once, on my birthday, when I was a child, I came into the kitchen and saw a huge wooden box on the table,” Laina said. “I was so happy. I couldn’t imagine what wonderful present lay inside such a big wooden box.” “What was it?” “A casket. My aunt was inside.”

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

He emptied his lungs but his sigh wasn’t finished; it went on emptying him.

I want to be forgotten. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”

He couldn’t kill a loaf of bread with a butter knife.”

His lips were banks unable to seal the stream gushing between them.

“We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.”

The little figures, demarcated by color and bound by rules, made warfare a clean and orderly enterprise.

On chess

Folklore said God had scattered ethnicities across the earth with a saltshaker; the shaker had slipped from his fingers when he reached the Caucasus, and a few grains of every nation had landed in its valleys. Other origin theories: the Chechens had descended from Scythian hordes, from the daughters of Genghis Khan, from a penal colony established by Alexander the Great, from a lost Roman legion.

Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or, as they were known locally, the government.

On the floor each semicircle was a pool of lava, and light-caught dust motes were the remains of children who had stumbled into those incandescent rays.

“You want to get out,” he said. “Who doesn’t?” “I can do well in the West.” “Anyone can do well when they aren’t dodging bullets.”

Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.

“Sweetened condensed milk will rot your mouth but preserve your soul,” advised her father’s aunt Lena, who died in a Grozny nursing home at the age of one hundred and three, having outlived two husbands, six children, three grandchildren, and thirty-two teeth.

Once, after she had renounced her family in a childhood tantrum, her father had said, “Your family isn’t your choice.” Nearly thirty years later, while walking through City Park, she had seen two homeless men wedged into a single sleeping bag, their soot-stained arms wrapped around one another, and finally understood what her father had meant.

She was harder to pin down than the last pickle in the jar.

but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own.

“Latin is a problem with which I have no experience.”

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

His heart had been the acorn. Now it was the oak tree.