Babayaga

The taxi sped along rue de Rome. Will looked down at his lover’s face. Even with the deep, sunken circles under her eyes she was unimaginably beautiful to him. He took her hand in his; it was ice cold. He remembered how his mother would complain about her cold hands throughout Detroit’s long, mean winters and how she would soak them in a sink filled with hot water at the end of each day. For some reason, that memory reminded him of the time when he was first living in Chicago, right out of college. He had a client who worked in the fashion industry selling chiffon ladies’ gloves to department stores, and one day, over a long lunch, they arrived at a discussion about how women were always complaining about the coldness of their extremities. Will remembered arguing that evolution must have centered the blood in the middle of a woman’s body, there where the warm womb and waiting eggs lay, nature’s primary interest being in protecting whatever came next as opposed to ensuring the comfort and happiness of what existed now. The client, a flat-nosed former pugilist from the South Side who only worked in fashion because his mother had founded the company, insisted that nature had designed women’s hands with poor circulation to keep them weak and unable to fight off the men who wanted to seize them, assault them, and, as the client bluntly put it, “pump them full of their dark demon seed.” They were both cynical theories, the second one especially brutal. Looking out the taxi window, Will wondered how many human truths were that horrible.

As the shuttered Parisian storefronts sped by, his thoughts returned to the day, such a carnival of unexpected scenes, the course of events skidding beyond the realm of his reasoning, and in the end it was pretty hard to recall all the details (what movie had they seen?). The one thing he did remember was that he had begun that morning waking up next to Zoya for the very first time. He clearly remembered kissing her sleeping cheek as he had departed for work. He thought about the feeling that had hummed about in his bones as he had walked to the office that morning, as if the arrangement of spinning molecules that defined his body had momentarily unbonded and, in some harmonious anatomic Busby Berkeley choreography, magnetically rearranged themselves into some new, minutely heavier, more substantial element, literally harmonizing him with the universe. Perhaps that was what love really was. Maybe that was why it felt so real, because, like the ultraviolet light or the mysterious, invisible radiation waves vibrating in the air, love actually existed. But only in small and undetectable quantities, impossible to synthetically mimic, composed of only the most thin, fragile actuality that would absolutely vanish if you tried to contain, catch, or even observe it, like those awkward and inscrutable physics conundrums he had never been able to comprehend in his Popular Science magazines. If that’s what love is, decided Will, then he now possessed it. He rubbed Zoya’s hands, hoping to give them some warmth.

His thoughts suddenly stopped meandering as the car turned the corner and he saw, down his block, a dark figure step into the light for a moment before disappearing back into the shadows. “Continuez dans cette rue,” he told the cabbie. “N’arrêtez pas.” The driver nodded in the rearview mirror. As they passed by the spot where he had seen the man, Will peered into the darkness. There, thought Will, was Brandon’s boy, Mike Mitchell, hanging on the edge of a courtyard doorway, sheltered from the light, dutifully awaiting Will’s arrival. Will looked out the rear window of the cab up into his apartment, where he spotted a light on. Mitchell’s partner, White, was probably waiting there, maybe with Brandon. They must have gotten impatient with Will’s stalling, done a bit of arithmetic together, and were now searching his place. Either that or they were waiting to ask some very pointed questions.

Will thought quickly, racking his brains about what he could do. He had no leverage, no answers, and he didn’t have any connections to call who could get Brandon and his goons off his back. He realized there was only one person he knew who could manage his way past Brandon. Reluctantly, he gave the cabdriver Oliver’s address.

Ten minutes later Will was holding up a sagging Zoya and ringing the doorbell.

“Hullo?” said a sleepy voice.

“Sorry to disturb you, Oliver. It’s me, Will. I’m afraid I need a little help. I have a—”

The buzzer cut him off midsentence and he took Zoya inside. Fortunately the elevator was working, so he dragged her in, pulled the metal gate across tight, and pushed the button for the third floor. When they arrived, Oliver was standing at the open door, wearing a blue bathrobe. When he saw Zoya, his face dropped. “My lord, what happened to her?”