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In hindsight it had been much easier when you were fucking.
Most mornings you would find him awake already and puffing a cigarette on the balcony. And you would make some banal observation like, That’s bad for you. And he would say something like, So’s feeding yourself to the death machine but you don’t see me nagging you about that, do you. And then you would probably fuck again, which left you feeling as hollow as the look on his face.
You appreciated that he never tried to give you money afterward, which made it slightly less awkward. Though he did sometimes take you to McDonald’s under the auspices that he, personally, had an insatiable craving for McDonald’s, which you could never quite believe. It was strange to see him with black coat and black turtleneck tapping about under the fluorescent lighting with his cane and matte glasses that looked so perfectly rectangular he could have been a cyborg from one of those superhero movies, barely-concealed disdain oozing from every pore.
It had been three months since that ended—which is to say, three months since the revelation about Vasilissa came that should not have been news at all. Three months since the single disbelieving bark of laughter, the cratered look of incredulity that crystallized into something brittle and razorous. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Of course it was a shock to you as well—somehow you never thought of him as having a mother, could not imagine him a child scampering about some neighborhood. But you understood that it was different for him, cut him inwardly in a way that no words could fix. He wouldn’t even look at you, just hung his head in the cold light over his kitchen counter: Get out.
So you did.
It was cowardice for certain but you had not spoken since then. Whenever you thought of it a surge of vague shame and a desire to forget welled up thick in your throat. You kept hearing his voice. Get out. You dreamt it too, awoke in a sweat and feeling ill, Yelena peering over you. What’s the matter?
You decided that you had delayed far too long, working dead-end jobs well past your eighteenth birthday and seeking out men like him for god-knows-what. That was how you’d met, after all, in one of those bars with sticky floors that turned the other cheek to a sketchy ID. Now it was only a month until your nineteenth and you had made up your mind to turn in the enlistment papers. It was only a matter of calling your recruiter.
So it surprised you when his number blinked up again on your phone:
hey want to go for some mcdonalds
You stared at the text for several minutes. You considered deleting it, blocking the number, and never thinking about this again.
Instead, you thumbed in a reply, feeling inane.
Sure, when?
It was a McDonald’s a few miles out of town, the same place you had gone before. When you arrived Dimitri was already sitting at a table, picking at some wilted fries. Across from him was a burger and a too-vibrant beverage that you assumed were meant for you.
“Hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of ordering for you,” he said a little absently, sitting in an unnatural position and picking some invisible lint out of his hair. “They had this limited-time drink with—protein? Right.”
“Sure,” you said. “Thanks.”
There was a silence.
“So how’s this going to go, Al?”
“What?”
“I mean,” he said, “the part where I convince you not to join the death machine. What’s it gonna take? Want me to get on my knees and beg?”
You wanted to sigh, and also to hit him, just a little. Instead you did neither of those things but looked out the window. It was a rare rainy day and droplets traced senseless lines down the condensation that accreted there.
“Nothing,” you said. “I’ve made up my mind.”
“Bullshit.” He pointed a fry at you. “You’re fucking eighteen.”
As though that stopped you, you wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Look,” he said finally. As usual his face was mostly expressionless and it was useless trying to make out any hint of emotion behind the glasses. “I’m… sorry.”
You let out a breath that you didn’t know you’d been holding.
“It’s fine. Really.”
Dimitri bolted out of his seat—the force of the motion nearly knocking over the fries. He stood there with his arms propped straight on the table, so that you looked up at him; the only way he could ever be taller than you, you thought, and felt a sudden urge to laugh. Behind the counter the waitress glanced at your table and you flashed her a quick smile to assure her that everything was fine.
“No, it is not fine. You,” he continued, “are actually insane if you think that was ‘fine.’ Say that again and I’m walking, now.”
“I mean it, though.” You regarded him calmly. “We didn’t know. Now we do.”
“Well, look who’s a little philosopher. Going to preach to me about epistemology?” You tried to ignore the venom in his voice, understanding that on some level that it was not for you.
Finally he sat back down and buried his face in his hands.
“Jesus.” He gave a bitter chuckle. “Can you just…”
You took a sip of the drink, which tasted like sugary death, and swallowed past the click in your throat.
“You’re a good kid,” he started again. “Do you have the slightest understanding of what happens to good kids in places like that. What you’ll be made to do.”
In fact you had done quite a bit of research and accepted every risk.
“I’m not asking you to sing the bloody Internationale with me, just… think about this. I know you don’t have those kinds of asinine Rambo fantasies. Would it cost you so much,” he said, and for once there was an undertone of real desperation, “to not give them another fucking idiot to turn into mincemeat.”
You thought of Yelena, her patched uniform, your father maudlin after another night of drinking. What did he know about cost?
“Yeah, actually,” you said. “It would.”
He made an inarticulate noise and cradled his face again.
“Thanks for the food, Dimitri.” You stood up, awkwardly sliding out of the booth. “If there’s nothing else, I’m gonna go now.”
“Wait.”
You didn’t know what you expected—for him to run after you, chase you through the rain. Stupid. Instead he took off his glasses and began to clean them, meticulously. Without them his eyes were a hazy grey color that seemed to regard everything and nothing at once. You had seen them a few times in the expected contexts, when he forgot himself sufficiently to allow you to remove them. But never in public.
“I knew a guy once,” he said abruptly.
For a moment it seemed as though he would say nothing more at all. Then he went on.
“Real asshat, really—one of these neoliberal NGO types. You wouldn’t believe the shit he believed. I’m talking Malala, Marjane Satrapi. Hope and change.”
Something was different about the way he spoke. It felt as though every word was being pulled from him, like he was pulling out spools and spools of his own guts. Like he was telling some future he had read in the skies long ago. Something about that wishbone quality kept you rooted to the ground, leaning on the edge of the table.
“So this guy’s a doctor, right. And one day he gets the bright idea to go abroad. Not the AirBNB, vacation-in-Seville kind of abroad, but the kind where you try to help sick people, dying people. People gassed in their own backyards, legs crushed by bombs, gunned down by their own countries.” Dimitri put the glasses back on, mouth a thin line. “And then he died.”
He spoke as though every word stabbed him, violently, through the solar plexus. “Alone. Far from home. Closed casket.”
You were silent. Stupid, but something about the way he said it transfixed you. Never in any of your encounters had he said anything like this.
Then he muttered something else.
You blinked. “Sorry?”
“I said,” he said tonelessly, back to normal, “I’ll pay for your precious college.”
No, you almost said, the instinct to refuse reflexive—but something held you back.
“...do you mean that.”
“Do I sound like I’m joking.”
You considered what vast grief must have hovered in the background of a life, and for how long, to make someone say such things. No, he did not sound like he was joking.
“I’ll think about it,” you said.
And that was how a half-brother you did not know you had until three months ago funded your degree—and you were, perhaps, spared the fate of all good American boys who die far from home, in blood and dust, with neither hands nor conscience clean.