It’s true about me, Mr. Kral. Masha pinged me from the deep, but I was drowning in a sublet near Waukegan Harbor. Drowning with distinction when the signal came, though I’m sure that’s no consolation. The day after your daughter disembarked, in the wee morning hours, I swept through the landlord Bobby’s apartment to empty the wastebaskets. A hazardous attempt at kindness, what with her towering form and lashing, smoke-worn voice, nevermind the brutal cane she kept handy. To be fair, a terrible palsy now kept the woman woefully subdued, hugging her deeper and deeper into that stained recliner, so it was not very brave in the end. Child’s play compared to a cold journey to the bottom of Lake Michigan, past channel cats and torpedo muskellunge, nothing but the walls of a personal submarine for protection (a fine gift, sir, the S.S. Masha Kralovna—first rate). By the time I returned to the safety of my back bedroom and bespattered corner mirror, the transmission box was indeed blinking red. Your daughter was trying to reach me. And I defaulted.
For a moment I did consider answering like I’d promised, but for the new crop of blebs on my upper trapezius. Strange as that might sound, coming from someone who until recent days you weren’t aware of at all, what do I have to gain by pretense at this point? The financier retires to their study with three fingers of Macallan and a cigarillo, I to my mirror with 1.75 liters of Popov and a stainless steel extractor. Restorative work that would have to wait, say I did respond and it was what Masha always said it would be. Then duty would have required me to at least share the news with Bobby, it being so big for the world. Slink back into that woman’s room to wake her and, worse, show her what difference Masha’s discovery actually made? A tame brown bear would have trouble dragging her across that shag area rug to the street-facing window. Anyway all she’d see was the same patches of melty snow dotting the ryegrass along our forgotten stretch of Sheridan Road. Guts I don’t have, sir. The truth is that Masha saw more in me than there is. But I should have acknowledged. She was alone down there and only I knew.
It’s worse. When she pinged the next morning, I visited Marcelo at the corner store.
“What if I told you that aliens exist,” I said. “That I have proof?”
“They cure hemorrhoids, Enzo man? Damn,” is how he replied as I put a handle of my mainstay on the counter, having decided to waterboard my yellow belly with post-Soviet Russian swill, followed by a tenner.
“My Masha has made a momentous discovery,” I said.
“My ass,” replied Marcelo. “Here?” As for the outstanding balance, he said next time.
On my way home, the wind blew dry and cold off the lake something miserable in the unexpected sunshine. Ever come see this place? She never mentioned any visit. You can barely look at the water on days like that. Straight inside to the mason jar of blue barbicide next to the mirror. Therapeutic interface, you understand. Maybe psychiatric is the word. By the time portions of Comrade Popov’s dismembered form washed up in my distended gut, I’d scoured the epidermis for every last imperfection, ignoring the pings now sounding one after the other. It’s what Masha and I last discussed before she left: the brilliant revelations hiding in these cultivated pustules, little worlds that burst forth in breeches so strong that they splatter my reflection. One is never enough, but the more I seek and neutralize them, the faster they multiply. Must be the oil on my hands that they feed on, developing in silence on the shoulders and upper arm, those creases beneath the fibrofatty tissue on either side of the nose. I press hard for the pain and reward. The truth is all here in our terrestrial form, I said to Masha. Here. Somewhere in that twisted treatise was a plea.
Don’t go. I will let you down.
Agree, she finally said. Which is why I must.
Answer, I was saying to myself, just as I tweezed a three-millimeter hair that came out like a redwood sliver. Root sheath, shaft, primordial papilla: space worms living in miniscule spaces within us. This increased my confidence in assessing what’s ready and what’s not, so I rinsed the extractor in disinfectant before assaulting a candidate on my nose. I pressed and prodded, squeezed and poked. Nothing. Soon a swelling redness developed, one I knew would remain for days. Taunting me. Appealing to the eyes and nerves. Reminding me that open roads are not always taken without real, physical consequence.
That I am an apostate and a coward.
This incessant self-rebuke went on for hours, as did the pings. Hellish omens. The next morning, I didn’t have to enter Bobby’s room to find her dead. I knew it the second I awoke. House-energy shift. Unseen cosmic vibrations telling me that I was alone, even more so than before. So now I had two things hanging around my neck: Masha’s whereabouts and Bobby’s corpse. Three if you count the conflagration gaining steam on the tip of my nose. Stay, and I risked worsening the whole scenario with my absent valor. Go, and I could at least present you with a viable mark. Come take it, Mr. Kral. I won’t skulk or sneak.
Regrettably, drunkenly, I ignored Bobby’s lifeless mass as I rifled through her possessions looking for cash, which I found in the form of the rent payment I’d handed over the week previous—that you paid, Mr. Kral, to my surprise. Masha had offered cover because I was disastrously short, but never told me where it came from. There was your name and address on an envelope containing more than enough tender to board a southbound Amtrak with a gallon of requisite provisions. Before leaving, I made one last sweep of my room in the morning light. The receiver still blinked repeatedly as I pulled it off the wall and stuffed it into my pack. On the way out, I caught sight of my swelling beak. The redness had grown in diameter and intensity, with bruising near the edges. I drank the dregs.
“Christ,” said Marcelo. He pointed at my sniffer. I looked around.
“Prepare yourself, Marcelo.”
“For?”
At the precipice, I stopped to point at the sky. Pings in quick succession, in quick succession—it was easier to believe that Masha had made good on her promise to make history. On the sidewalk, I conjured moving forms that I didn’t recognize. I waited for the quivering silence vacuum that precedes mass panic, kidding myself with how sure I was that it was coming.
So sure that from my seat on the train, staring at how the wintry blue water of the lake peaked through the leafless branches along the static treeline, I was surprised that no behemoth craft loomed beneath the cloud cover. Not a single reptilian creature came leaping through the wood in a confused and defensive frenzy. As the train departed, I plugged the receiver into a wall outlet, hoping that Masha was still in range. My nose throbbed. When the signal indicator turned green, I clicked twice before unplugging the machine and forgetting it under the seat. I drank.
Halfway to Chicago and all the way in the can, I hallucinated the collective human epiphany, someone looking up from their phone, a middle-aged commuter in a long coat saying lookit here, Bill, you won’t believe it. Awareness spread from person to person in an awestruck murmur, that phenomenon of being at one tiny birthplace of a new reality, and I told them all that it was Masha who braved the deep in her tiny freshwater vessel with the one little window. It was Masha Kralovna who drew the line between us and the world’s past. I wrapped myself in the love she deserved, before truth and reality reasserted themselves: I’d teased an urgent distress call, nothing more.
As we passed into the outer hood of Ogilvie Transit Center, I used the cover of shadow to slip into the lavatory. In the dim light I could see that the monstrosity on the tip of my nose had come to a head white enough that something, anything, would happen if I forced it hard enough. I positioned my fingers, pushed them together, and felt my body rejoice with a generous release of noxious fluid.
“A submarine,” I heard one of the conductors say as I stepped onto the platform. “North Beach by the crib.” But I kept walking the tight transfer for the southbound Saluki. I’m halfway to Biloxi by now, Mr. Kral, which is where you’ll find your pound of flesh. As fine a place as any to hide from what they discovered on the shore among the debris.