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There was violence and the stillness that followed.
Andrey Daddano was born amid screams and a metronome from the clockwork behind him. Always behind him. The warmth of a bullet and the coldness that proceeded always felt like inevitabilities. There was no recollection of when anger had set itself so deeply inside of his gut that he wished to carve it out himself, burn it until flames fed flames and he was pulled apart from his core. There was a cathedral he would go to when his gun became too heavy to hold, when he developed new weaknesses that he had to kill before they took root too.
Today, it was bathed in the golden sunlight of a crisp winter. In his youth, he would trace the silhouettes of the stained glass figures into his palms, marvelling at the ways the reds and oranges caught the sunlight and cast it onto the floors. There was no time for that now. He was dying soon. He would soon meet with Goncharov on the bridge, they would look down over to see the river below them, and then he would die. It was an inevitability, a vignette from a storybook he’d been carving into his palm ever since Joe had died. He hadn’t touched his stopwatch since then. He didn’t need to keep track of the minutes; they would catch up to him all the same.
Now though, he would pray. The words did not come as naturally as they did when he sat at the dinner table with his father, and they ignored the heart that beat under their floorboards and kept their house alive. When they would read James 3, ‘The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.’ and his father would remind him what would happen if he said too much. Andrey was familiar with the feeling of fire by then, and he would not be loose with his tongue until a fateful slip-up with a man who knew almost as much about running as he did. When he introduced himself as ‘Felix’, lit a cigarette, and for the first time years after the defining moment, refused to repent for a weakness that had rooted itself around the anger in his gut. But the words did come, eventually. There was neither repentance nor an apology in his utterance, only a goodbye whispered to a man who was already dead and to a God who had sliced his life up into moments since he was a child and whose absence taught him the importance of never betraying your hand until the chips fell.
Before he was aware of himself, Andrey had made his way out of the streets and down the cobbled streets of the town; like an actor walking out from behind the wings to take his final bow, he proceeded forward with even footing.
Perhaps if he was braver or more of a coward, one or the other, he could have avoided this conclusion. His father would have never shown his hand so foolishly. He had an anger that burned away weakness in a way that self-contained his destruction and didn’t tear him open from the inside out. A coward would have died alongside Joe, would have met violence with lesser violence and paid for it with his life. His father would have won the match of chess; Andrey should have realized there was no point in playing to lose and tipped his king over the moment he found out he was moving second. He couldn’t have done either, even though his life depended on it. Being the one who commanded his fate was but a pipe dream, so Andrey would participate and pretend. God’s perfect soldier, a killer who bastardized all of His virtues and wouldn’t give his victims time to pray. Playing his part to perfection was as close as he would ever get to autonomy, but when eyes met heated eyes across a densely populated room or when an almost melodic voice whispered morbid prophecies into his year through the phone of a telephone booth, he would question why he of all men was cast into this role.
He was silent about his anger, presented it as a masculine sort of charisma, exchanged barbs that were hostile yet witty, and most of the time, when he pulled the trigger, it came as easy as breathing. He wasn’t like Goncharov, who fell into this life, or like Katya, who was born into established waters. Andrey was never afforded the luxury of normalcy and would never know how far out he was able to wade before he lost his footing because of the drop-off. It wasn’t a trial by fire; his indoctrination wasn’t a trial at all.
The people passing him by on the bridge didn’t give him a second glance. He was never obsessed with deadlines in the way that they were, but he went from place to place, all the same, making it to his marks on time enough to not get him cut from the cast. It would be cliche to arrive late to your last performance, but the watch he gave Goncharov ran three minutes late for a reason. He looked out at the water below him, the clocktower ticking faithfully at his back. There was no need to worry about the time it displayed. The bells knew.
In another life, he would have liked to be a mathematician or an artist. There was a beauty in formulas that he was never really able to explore, a whole well of ideas he had entertained during car trips and discarded by the time his feet met the ground again. Goncharov arrived minutes after their unwanted yet assured company. He looked beautiful in blue. Their actions reached their inevitable conclusion.
The waves drowned the fire in his gut, leaving only the thing that grew around it and the uneven spaces between its roots. Tears blurred his eyes, and his mouth tasted like iron. Goncharov held him close to his chest in spite of the danger, and he was saying something about how it wasn’t supposed to be like this. When Andrey was dead, he would curse his name. He knew it wasn’t love that was his unbecoming, but that thing that beat under the floorboards of his childhood home and kept it alive, the thing that beat in his chest and fed the anger until it destroyed him in the same way it destroyed his father.
Maybe there were no brave men. Maybe there were only men who were cowards who refused to run and cowards who couldn’t stop. Maybe they were just both too much of one and not enough of the other.
Maybe there were no cowards. Maybe there were just those with winning hands and those with losing hands who all had to answer to an indifferent dealer.
Andrey Daddano died amid cursing and a metronome from the clockwork behind him. The warmth of a bullet and the coldness that proceeded were always inevitabilities. But as life became a bleary smudge of a thing that you’d step around on a walk, as the fire in his gut was snuffed out, he couldn’t make himself regret that one concession to weakness he had made for a man who had given him a fake name and a spark to light his cigarette. The fire was gone, but the roots, however awkward, still remained.
Even now, that the minutes had caught up to him, he would not repent. Not for anything. He didn’t hate the vignette they made; in another life, he would have loved to paint it.