The babble of conversation came to his ears almost immediately, and then paused. Facing him from the kitchen table when he looked in were Meg, Sol, and an unfamiliar grey fox, his fur a salt-and-pepper mix except for russet patches around the sides of his face up to the base of his ears. Alexei had met grey foxes in the States before—never in Siberia—but he had never met one who wore a white starched collared shirt and a black cape fastened around his neck with a golden brooch, nor one who had apparently darkened the fur around his eyes to give himself a hollow, spectral appearance.
It was not really the thing Alexei wanted to see, and he might have turned around and run back out of the apartment if the fox hadn’t immediately stood up and extended a very real black and white paw with orange highlights in the fur, and said, “You must be the other roommate. I’m Athos.”
“Of course,” Alexei said, willing his tail to uncurl from around his leg. He grasped the other fox’s paw; he had a soft grip and Alexei immediately thought, “Weak,” and hated himself for that. “I am Alexei.”
“From Siberia, right?” Athos had a soft, understated manner, and though his precise East Coast voice was not hard to hear, it was a notch lower than Sol’s or Meg’s, which was disconcerting in the apartment. Nobody other than the three of them and Sol’s parents had ever been inside. A window was open, so the noises of cars and the construction crew starting up outside intruded more than they normally did.
Alexei nodded. “One year ago,” he said, to indicate the amount of time since he’d left. Again he felt the flicker of disbelief that one short year could encompass so much change.
“You know,” Athos said, sitting down, “I’ve always wanted to go to Siberia. There’s such a rich tradition there, and all kinds of unexplained phenomena. I mean, starting with Rasputin and Tunguska, but so many things less famous than that.”
Alexei knew something of the Tunguska explosion, variously rumored to be an alien attack, a natural fission bomb, a black hole, and an asteroid, which had struck a remote part of Siberia over a hundred years ago. It was now widely presumed to be either a small asteroid or part of a comet. “Yes,” he said, dazed, wondering how he could be having a conversation like this when his head was throbbing and his ear was bleeding. Could none of them see what was happening? “It is a large country.”
“I’m mostly intrigued by the ghost of the revolutionary who is said to wander the streets of Moskva at night. Did you ever see him?”
“No.” Alexei shook his head. “I spent very little time in Moskva. If you will excuse me…”
“There was a ghost in his town, though,” Sol said. “Some great-grandmother or something.”
Everyone turned to look expectantly at Alexei. He weighed his response. “It was not a real ghost,” he said. “It was wind and old house and rumors and fear.”
He walked to the bathroom and took an analgesic from the medicine cabinet, and then after some thought he took a second one. A glass of water washed them down. He wondered how long it would take for his head to stop hurting.
“You okay?” Sol called from outside the bathroom.
“Fine,” Alexei said irritably. He wished people would stop asking him that when he clearly wasn’t. He examined the wound in his ear, which had opened again, and put another bandage on it.
“How was your date?”
Mike’s words about Sol and Kendall came to his mind. “Not so good,” he said, and then, before Sol could ask any questions, “When are you going to see Mitch again?”
“Oh, um.” Sol leaned against the wall outside the door. “I don’t know. We were going to get together this weekend, but Kendall wants to take me to this foreign movie that’s playing downtown that he thinks I’ll really like. Hey, maybe you and Mike can come along too.”
“I didn’t think you liked Mike.” Alexei applied a small metal clip around his ear to hold the bandage in place.
“If you’re going to date him, I guess I should give it a try.” Sol shifted his weight. “I guess not all sheep are like Carcy. I just see him whenever I look at Mike. I know, that’s not fair.”
“I would rather go with you and Mitch,” Alexei said. “Mitch likes movies, yes?”
“Yeah, but…” Sol sighed. “I’m going away at the end of the summer, y’know. Anyway, Kendall doesn’t hold the fight against you. He’d be okay with it.”
“I think you are wrong about that,” Alexei said, staring at himself in the mirror. He tried to keep his ears up, but they kept sliding downward, his whiskers drooping. When he tried to summon the conviction and power Konstantin had shown him, he merely looked desperate. “I think he dislikes me very much.”
“He said he didn’t.”
“Of course,” Alexei said. “But why do you think he now wants to date you instead of Mike?”
“I told you,” Sol said. “He didn’t realize you were interested in Mike, and—hang on. You think he’s only interested in me to get back at you?”
Alexei didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. Sol’s muzzle appeared at the door, ears flat. He lowered his voice. “You’re wrong about that,” the wolf said. “He likes me. He just thought we were a couple.”
“I am sure that is what he told you,” Alexei said. “He attacked me and bit my ear.”
“You shoved him.” Sol frowned. “What’d you do, make it worse? Did Mike hit you?”
“No!” The fox glared. “For God’s sake.”
“Then what—”
Alexei closed his eyes and shook his head. “It is not important,” he said, and turned, pushing past Sol to walk through the living room.
“Hey,” Meg said, but he ignored her. In the bedroom, the window had been propped open by the fan sitting in it, though the fan was off. Alexei turned it on and stood in front of its breeze, eyes closed, and then retreated to the bed. He sat cross-legged, drew his tail around himself and folded his paws in his lap.
A moment later, Sol came in, ears still flat, tail wrapped tightly around his hip. “Hey,” he said. “First of all, you don’t know Kendall. You just don’t like him because—well, I don’t really know why.”
“He puts me down,” Alexei said in a low voice. “He is sneaky and does not want people to know he does it, but I notice.”
“Well, that’s easy, isn’t it? Like a ghost only you can see.”
Alexei jerked upright. “What?”
The wolf pointed a black finger at him. “I’m just asking you to give him a chance.”
“Sol,” Alexei said, almost in a whisper, “when your ghost struck Carcy…did you see him?”
“What?” Sol’s bright green eyes blinked, and his ears came back up halfway.
“Did you smell him? Was it real?”
“I—I think—” Sol frowned. “Don’t change the subject.”
“I am sorry,” Alexei said. “I—I wanted to know…”
And something in his expression must have tipped off Sol, because the wolf stared at him, and Alexei could not look away from those eyes. “Are you seeing a ghost? Are you seeing Niki? Is that why you haven’t brought my picture back? Are you talking to him?”
“No,” Alexei said, weakly. His head pounded.
“Christ,” Sol said, green eyes burning. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t tell me. What are you talking about? Did he talk about me?”
“No!” Alexei got up. “I am not talking to him! I would tell you. But I knew you would be like this.” He stood, rising on the balls of his feet, but his nose still was not quite level with Sol’s.
“He was my friend—I was him for a while. Are you having those dreams? Are you dreaming you’re him?”
“I am not dreaming about Niki.” Alexei tried to keep his voice under control, but it was getting away from him, wavering, rising in volume.
“Then what is going on?” Sol, eyes narrowed, clearly didn’t believe him.
Alexei wasn’t sure he could blame Sol. He must look a mess right now. He wondered if Sol could see his headache pulsing in his eyes, maybe as a twitching of the fur on his muzzle whenever he winced. If he told Sol about Konstantin, then Sol might be able to help him—but no, another part of him said, Sol only cared about Niki. He wasn’t even asking why Alexei looked so bad, hadn’t said,
Are you okay?
Well, okay, he had said that, but then he’d immediately started asking about a double date with Kendall. He was angry at Alexei for dating Mike, for not liking Kendall, for maybe talking to Niki.
The room felt even more stuffy than usual. Sol’s scent was thick in the humid warmth as the wolf leaned closer and said, “Well? What’s going on?”
It reminded Alexei of his father, without the smell of alcohol on his breath. “I am dreaming about Niki’s father,” he said, fast, to get it over with. “That is all.”
He turned to sit back on his bed, but Sol grabbed his shoulder. “His
father?
”
Alexei twisted out of the grip and pushed Sol away from him. “Yes!” he yelled. “His father, Konstantin.”
Trembling, he waited for Sol’s response, waited for the wolf to ask how it was going, to express sympathy, to ask whether Konstantin was coming into the real world and if that was why Alexei had asked about it, and he would say,
Yes, yes, yes
, and Sol would put arms around him and say that they would figure this out. Athos would come in and help them exorcise the ghost—once he’d helped Cat, of course—and Alexei would get Sol’s picture back and everything would work out.
He watched Sol’s eyes flicker and narrow as his forehead creased. The wolf’s ears lay back. “But you were
trying
to talk to Niki, weren’t you?”
The growl in his voice, the accusation—more hurtful because it was true—and the collapse of Alexei’s fantasy all squeezed the fox’s chest tightly. He fought to draw in a breath, clenched his paws into fists, and willed himself not to let the pressure behind his eyes escape.
“Weren’t you?” Sol demanded again.
There was no way for Alexei to escape the conversation, save one. He turned quickly and half-walked, half-ran to the bedroom door.
“Hey!” Sol said behind him, but Alexei didn’t stop. He strode past Meg and Athos, who turned to look at him in surprise, and flipped the lock on the front door, then yanked it open and slammed it behind him. Indistinct words filtered through the door of the apartment, and Alexei fled.
Chapter 27
Nobody came after him, all the way to the front of the building and out, down the front stoop and under the streetlights. This time he did not pause at the sidewalk, but turned left and walked down along the road, under the hazy orange glow.
A block away, he turned back to look at his apartment building. It sat silent and still. Nobody had appeared at the front door, nobody hurried down the walk after him. He’d been a fool. Sol didn’t care about him, not if Mitch or Kendall were around for him to date, not as long as Niki remained his. Meg had her vampire fox. Mike…who knew what Mike would think about him after this night. Even Konstantin, who had promised to watch him, had abandoned him.
He turned, tail swinging loosely behind him, and stalked on down the road. Between the game the previous night and all the walking tonight, he was starting to tire, but he pushed himself on through the night.
Again, he avoided Riverwalk. He could have asked Liza for a place to stay, but he feared what Konstantin—or Alexei himself—might do now if he were in her house, surrounded by her scent. So he followed the same path back that he’d taken from the transit center, through the decrepit buildings and closed office parks. Not many people were out walking this street, and they observed the same unspoken contract that Alexei did: they looked up, acknowledged each other, and went back to their solitary walks. One group of young otters in denim jackets, laughing and pushing each other, came close enough to him that he could smell the whiskey on their breath. He ran through scenarios in his head, how they would pick on him, start by following him and escalate to shoving, and to stop it, he would punch the nearest one and then threaten the others until they ran off.
It scared him to think of that, and when he thought further, he doubted his ability to go through with it, notwithstanding the fight with Kendall (which he had won, he reminded himself). So he just shoved his paws into the pockets of his pants and moved to the side, and the otters barely noticed him.
With his ears back and his head down, he walked all the way back to the transit center, and there he stopped. Memory stirred, lifting his ears to what passed for a night breeze in this humid city. Only one bus idled out back; otherwise the hum of the electric lights remained unbroken. But in the shelter of the overhang out in front of the transit center, four people lay huddled in blankets.
Here was a place he could spend the night so he didn’t have to go back to the apartment, didn’t have to face accusations and questions. Not tonight. Alexei walked up and then, through the glass doors, saw three more people lying across seats inside the station. He glanced again at the people outside and was about to go in when a sound stopped him.
The closest person to him, a big cat who was either a lioness or a puma—wrapped in her blanket, it was hard to tell, and the smells of the busses and the rank odors from the blanket drowned out any identifying scent—lay with her eyes open, looking at him. But Alexei got the feeling that she wasn’t actually seeing him. The sound she’d made had been a word, but he didn’t understand it. It might have been a name, or it might have been a foreign language.
As he watched, she lifted a paw and reached out to a point a foot to his left, and moaned the word again. “Jio,” she said in a low voice that made his fur prickle. “Don’t, Jio. Not now.”
His paw closed around the door handle, but he couldn’t make himself pull it open. He stared in fascination at the lioness. She spoke again. “I’m sorry, Jio. You don’t have to. I can fix it.”
Was this what the deer would have seen in the alley if she’d arrived five minutes earlier? Alexei wanted to help the lioness, but he could not escape the vision of himself lying on the ground, pleading with empty air. He pulled the door open and fled into the transit center.
Bright fluorescent light dazzled him from the ceiling and reflected off the chilly tile. The air, cool and chemical from processing, was enough of a relief from the outside air that he just stood and panted, letting it flow over his tongue.
Whenever Alexei had been here previously, the lobby had been a hum of activity, busses belching exhaust out back, people of all species milling about, queuing at the ticket window, sitting patiently on the chairs. But fewer than half a dozen people occupied the chairs, a large red “CLOSED” sign blocked the ticket window, and only one uniformed person, a coyote in a bus driver’s uniform with a gold hoop in his ear, stood in the lobby. He yawned, waiting for the coffee machine to fill his cup, and when he pulled it free and sipped from it, he closed his eyes and sighed. Then he squared up his shoulders, turned, and noticed Alexei.
“You waiting for the Millenport bus?”
Alexei shook his head. The coyote glanced toward the people on the seats and then back. “Ah, heading out in the morning, huh?”
“Yes.” Alexei swallowed against the dryness in his throat.
“All right.” The coyote raised his cup and walked to the door leading out to the bay where his bus sat idling. “Last call for Millenport!”
Nobody moved. He looked around one last time and then walked out.
Alexei could go to Millenport. He could get on the bus and just go. It was a bigger city, where he’d never been, and perhaps the ghost couldn’t follow him there.
No, that was ridiculous. He shook his head. The ghost might be the only part of his current life that
could
follow him there. And as he had that thought, he looked up at the list of departures and saw…
The board that had a moment ago read, perfectly plainly, “Neely – Penderton – Jack’s Crossing – Whiteside – Millenport,” now bore Siberian letters, spelling out a short message:
You are safe here
.
Alexei stared. His eyes watered, the letters blurred…and when he’d rubbed his eyes clear again, the stolid list of bus stops had returned. His fur prickled, but only lightly. He was too tired to go anywhere else, and the message had been reassuring, if in a creepy kind of way. Well, he would stay here tonight, he could catch the bus to work in the morning, and then…and then he would figure out what to do from there.
He found an unoccupied seat two rows back from a snoring fennec fox, feeling better closer to another fox, and lay back against the plastic rest, his tail hanging down to the floor. He closed his eyes, which did a little to shield him from the brightness, and let the hum of the lights and the soft snores of the fennec lull him.
Sleep came fitfully. He woke once to see through blurry eyes the clock reading nearly 3 am, impenetrable darkness outside the glass doors. He yawned and closed his eyes again. The next time, the clock read just after five, and a small group of a possum, a skunk, and a mouse waited patiently at the ticket window, one standing, the other two sitting on the floor.
Noise woke him again less than an hour later. The line outside the ticket window had added a wolf and another possum, and though the sign at the window still read “CLOSED,” there was a doe behind it arranging some stacks of paper.
Alexei calculated how long it would take him to arrive at work, and when the bus that Sol usually traveled on would arrive here, and decided he had another forty-five minutes. He stumbled to the coffee machine and got a coffee with milk and sugar which proved to be the worst hot drink he had tasted in his life, including the time he and his sister had played tea party with mud when he was five.
He choked it down anyway, and by the time he was ready to walk outside and catch his bus, it had woken him up some. Sol was not on the bus that pulled up first, so Alexei paid his fare and sat staring out the window. When the bus pulled away, it was almost like getting back into his normal routine. If he tried, he could pretend that he was just going to work early.
But even as he pretended, the stiffness in his back and soreness in his leg from sleeping in a plastic chair reminded him of the things that did not submit to pretense. He had not dreamed, but he knew that meant nothing, really. Konstantin might be off exploring other people’s dreams, but he had not given up watching Alexei. Or Alexei hadn’t given up imagining that Konstantin was watching him.
Unlike Sol nor Meg, who hadn’t come after him or even called. Mike hadn’t followed him out of the restaurant. Only Konstantin had pursued him even though he’d gone back on his word. The ghost was his, bound to him, and Alexei found something familiar in those ties. Going out with Mike again would make Konstantin angry; trying to spend time with Liza would make him happy. Konstantin had become more real than most of the other people in Alexei’s life.
He got off the bus and dragged his feet into work, where Vlad looked up from the supervisor’s station and greeted him with a hearty, “Ha! Same clothes as yesterday…you have a good evening or just slept in clothes?”
Alexei smiled automatically and said, “Slept in clothes.”
Vlad had not expected that answer, and Alexei saw his confusion, so he forced a laugh. “Kidding,” he said. “I had a date last night.”
“Oh-ho,” Vlad said. “Hey, Pierre, our fox has love life after all.”
The hutia had just come in. He squinted at Alexei. “Good for him,” he said. “Plenty of vixens up here. Not so many hutia for Pierre.” He gestured to himself.
“So you have fun with the vixens.” Vlad’s laugh boomed throughout the small office, and Pierre’s slight wince told Alexei that the hutia had been having some kind of fun the previous night.
“Sometimes. So, pretty vixen?” This was to Alexei.
“Sheep.” Alexei searched for a gender-neutral species, then thought of the deer in the alley. “Blue eyes.”
The lies came more easily than he would have thought. Pierre gave him a comradely punch in the shoulder, and when their other co-workers came in, he made a point to ask them, “Hey, what you notice about the fox?” Alexei squirmed under these observations, but confessed to a fictitious romantic night with a blue-eyed sheep again and again, until he actually felt bad for not being able to make up more details. But he was tired, and his mood vacillated between enjoying the deception and feeling deeply ashamed of it.
At lunch, his co-workers pressed him for more details about his date, and he said vaguely that he’d met her at Playtime and he didn’t want to “kiss and tell,” a phrase he’d heard them use in the past. This provoked laughter, a “he’s got manners, not like you” remark, and a long story about a rabbit from Pierre.
Alexei brooded toward the end of that lunch. Sol and Meg still hadn’t called to ask if he was okay. For all they knew, he could have walked out and been hit by a car. He could be lying in a hospital bleeding to death, or he could already be dead, and they wouldn’t care. Maybe he should look for another place to live.
In fact, if he had to give up his gay lifestyle, living with Sol would get more difficult and that might be a good idea. Liza. His fatigue-blurred mind pulled her image from Wednesday and presented her as a solution—a temporary one, yes; she was gay, but she didn’t have a partner, and maybe she would be sympathetic to his problem. He couldn’t tell her about the ghost, because whether the ghost was real or not (he was real, Alexei was sure, or at least, pretty sure; at least,
right now
he was pretty sure), the story made him sound crazy. But he could tell her that he was having doubts, that he wanted to talk about life. No; he could tell her that he and Sol had had a fight and he was looking for somewhere else to live. That would be better. That was an immediate problem she could help him solve.
So he took out his phone to send her a message, and found it dead. He sat staring at it as though unable to understand how it could be. And then more thoughts filtered in: When might the phone have died? The battery usually lasted a day, but he didn’t know how much longer. Maybe Sol and Meg had called him as early as last night; maybe his phone had been dead when he’d walked out. He put it back in his pocket and sighed. He would have to go back to the apartment where his charger was.
He put that out of his mind for the afternoon and only thought of it when Vlad came over around four and said, “You get here early. You can leave now if you like.”
It might be good to leave early—he could get home before Sol did, and plug his phone in. But all he wanted to do right now was lie down, and he only had one bed in which to do that, and Meg would be home anyway. If he stayed, he would put off the confrontation a little longer. “I will stay,” he said. “One more hour. It is not much.”
“Look at this work ethic!” Vlad bellowed to the rest of the team, who looked up. “He has been laid and still works full day and more!”
“He
got
laid,” Pierre corrected, but the team laughed, and a couple of them told Alexei he could go home, while others said he didn’t get to go home just ’cause he got laid. All in all, it was very friendly, and Alexei would have felt better if he were not starting to feel the effects of the lack of sleep that much more. By the time five o’clock finally rolled around, he could barely keep his tail off the ground as he dragged his feet out the front door. At least he had a bus ride home in which to organize his thoughts.
Or so he’d hoped. As he walked toward the bus stop, he saw an otter waiting there, and at first he took no notice, thinking it was just another person waiting for a bus. Then he saw silver glinting from jewelry in her ears and face, and thought, how odd that another otter would have piercings. And even when she leaned forward and he saw that the black on her face was not just shadow, it wasn’t until she said, “Good, you didn’t get hit by a bus,” that he recognized Meg.
“My phone died,” he said.
She shrugged. “We thought maybe you turned it off.”
He shook his head, leaning against the plastic at the back of the bus shelter. Meg didn’t get up from her seat. She wore a button-down white shirt that he thought probably belonged to Athos, untucked over a pair of black jeans. “Nice shirt,” he said.
“Where did you spend the night? I said homeless shelter. Sol said you probably went to Mike’s place.”
“Bus terminal,” he said, and stifled a yawn. Just the memory of the sterile glow and relentless hum of the fluorescent lights made him sleepy.