Jesus Christ Live in Moscow, 2001

It’s the end of August, blaring hot, and I’m interning at the New Yorker, pulling upwards of ten stories out of my ass per week for less money than I’d make flipping burgers back in Kansas City. My supervisor calls me into his office one day, says he’s got something. August curse. Moscow. Mine if I’ll take it, all expenses paid. I’d have to go this Saturday and write the damn thing because nobody else wants to miss the rest of the summer in New York. I think maybe no one wants to get swept up in something known as the “August curse” but I don’t tell him that. Besides, I’ve got minimal ties and obligations. My mother would only tell me to bring my curlers and make an attempt to meet someone nicer than my current settlement. 

I told this guy from a CUNY grad program I’d go with him to a music thing this weekend at Central Park, I don’t really know what it is. Posters up all around the city, it’s some frat boy band I’ve never heard of. So and so LIVE from Central Park. It fits him. He is a frat boy, essentially. Bryce.

We’ve done movies, breakfasts, tea, a couple of dinners, all on his father’s tab. Only hooked up after the first time, but I’m trying not to take it personally. And he’s fine; we haven’t spoken much outside of our dates, I mean there’s no dreamy phone calls late into the night, but he’s decently sweet and fun, if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m not going to let this one go, though. It’s Moscow. I pawn off my Central Park ticket to some kid who lives above me, a hundred in cash, halfheartedly apologize to Bryce, and then suddenly I’m packing jeans and a puffy coat into the purple duffel bag I’ve had since sixth grade. Watching the plane skid across the runway and jolt itself into the air, I realize, holy shit. There’s no way to go but up…nowhere to go but east.

I get nervous traveling. I’ve been out of the country only twice: Ontario and Venezuela, briefly. Every summer as a kid we’d pack coolers of subs and sodas and drive down to Alabama for a week to see my grandparents. I’d always lose a hairbrush, every single year, and when Nana died and my parents inherited the house they found thirteen of them. I’m better for Moscow–I packed three in case. I pop Dramamine like oxy during the layovers, brush my hair at each, and sleep on the plane. 

The hotel’s sleazy. There’s twelve other writers there, we all somehow seem to find each other congregating in the lobby. All young, practically shaking. A blonde grabs my arm, she goes, “This is my first time out of the states. I didn’t tell my parents.” I only nod.

We pile into two cabs and get dinner at a restaurant just off what I surmise is the main street. It’s dimly lit, men scream over each other at the bar. We opt for a booth but all get drinks. I take a sip and gag, but down it anyway. It’s been a year since I drank like this, with people. Not since graduation. Feels like ages now, but it’s only been a couple of Junes.

We go back in pairs and trios. I’ve never seen people so careful in my life. I’m with the blonde from earlier, Alice, and a redhead who says his name’s James, but everyone keeps calling him Audrey. His last name. I tell them I’m Mary. My mother named me after the virgin birth giver. This is not a fact I particularly love. Audrey sings along to Whitney Houston loudly in the back of the cab and tears fall in rivers down my face. I’m so emotional. It’s the distance, otherwise I have no idea why. 

The first three days pass in a blur, the kind I’d feel as a kid in church camp. Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday fog into each other with games and songs; so it is in Moscow with flickering yellow lamplights and pens clicking against steno pads. The air is normal but not in a boring way, and the people are of interest. We meet nightly to share notes and pieces of prose we wouldn’t know what else to do with. The thing about being a writer is its debilitating. A person wouldn’t guess that, but it is. Some things you can’t just put out there.

I stop one day at a tiny corner stand, one of those little touristy popups, and buy a book of Russian phrases. Wednesday night we pile onto the two beds in Audrey’s room and deliriously laugh at our slice-y pronunciations. It feels good to be here, to be out. It feels like church camp, where disaster is God and we worship through pieces and in faltering Russian and take our holy communion nightly, in the form of red wine and craft beer.

I went to church camp every year as a kid in Alabama. Nana would send me. I cursed God every night, but Thursday when they’d play long, slow songs, we’d all decide that this would be the year we’d give ourselves up for the Lord. Everyone called it the turning point. We would go back to our cabins quiet, solemn; some girls would cry. I’d be back an agnostic by Saturday, like clockwork. It was like a big show, a big old dramatic concert; Father God LIVE in Mobile, Alabama, summerly.

Sometimes I’m curious about those girls, the ones from camp. I wrote to a few for a while, but that kind of thing always falls through. A couple of weeks ago, back in the offices in New York, I looked some of them up. I didn’t find anything on most of them but one works for Citgo and one died in a sorority hazing. I wonder if she went to heaven, if it’s up there. Or I wonder if she’s laughing at all the church camp girls from the ground.

Alice stays in my room, scream singing, sobbingly wasted. She’s asleep before me, and I’m up planning my way through life, how to live like this forever, just be a paid vagabond for the New Yorker. I love Moscow, I love writing, I love a perfect introduction.

Thursday. The heat got turned down somehow and the room is ice cold. There’s a pang in my stomach when I wake and immediately I run to the toilet and throw up, laying my face against the cool tile floor. The sickness comes in waves for an hour, a lifetime. I pray to a God I don’t believe in. I scream without knowing. Alice stumbles in.

“I woke you.” I gag one more time.

“You screamed.”

“Sorry.”

She takes an elastic from the counter and wraps my hair up. Its stringy, limp with sweat. “You’re really sick.”

I nod, “I’m not drunk.”

“I know.”

“I must’ve got something.”

“Yeah.” She turns on the shower for me and leaves. I sit, letting the warm water run down my shivering body. I feel small. I feel heavy. It was a quick affliction. I come out in a towel, feeling nearly healed.

“I’ve got to go.” Alice looks around nervously. I barely know her, but she’s acting like my best friend.

“That’s okay.” I pull on jeans, “I might head out too.”

“You’re sick.”

“I was. But I’m feeling much better.” She gives me a look. “Alice,” I’m digging through my suitcase for a sweater, “You know the news never takes a sick day.”

I’m fine for the rest of the day. I go to a hearing in the square, asking teens what they think of their current political situation. Some try stilted English, some rattle off opinions in their mother tongue into my tape recorder that I’ll translate later. I’ve decided my angle is the youth. There’s nothing safer to write about than the future, and long after I leave Moscow they will still be coming up in it, learning and being and growing, their words living on as tiny hoping prophecies. 

The dinner group is starting to dwindle. It’s been five days, we’ve reached September. People are leaving, each taking their own stories with them. We’re down to seven, nearly half. I don’t drink at dinner, not a single sip. Alice comes up to my room again, not drunk but cautious for my sake. I don’t care, there’s her bed, made up from earlier. I can feel her watching me while I fall asleep. 

She orders breakfast the next morning: scrambled eggs, fried tomatoes. Asks me what I want and I tell her nothing would really be fine but get a look and ultimately order toast with a minimal amount of butter. Once the smell of her eggs hits the room, I’m back hanging my head over the porcelain toilet bowl. I can hear her follow me in.

“You’re sick,” she says blankly, like yesterday. She’s got egg on her breath. I choke.

“It’s the eggs.”

“You didn’t have any eggs.”

“I know.” I groan as she looks me over, pulling my hair into my shirt.

I stand, facing her, almost as if we’re at odds. She puts her hand on my stomach, I brush it quickly off.

She asks me, “When was your last period?”

And that’s when I realize: “Holy shit, I'm eight weeks late.” So suddenly I’m bolting to the pharmacy two blocks down, still in pajamas, with a bad taste in my mouth. I buy three tests, three different brands,  and the man over the counter looks at me curiously as if to ask this foreigner why she is so scared. Why today? Why in Moscow? My thanks come out in a stutter. I run back to the hotel, stomach churning more than this morning. Sick, but in a different sort of way. I pee on the stick. Two lines. I cry tears and drink water. The next box is heavier in my hands. I pee on the stick. Two lines. I cry. I lap water from the metallic spigot, frantically. I pee on the third stick. Lines. I’ve cried all my tears.

Alice comes in, looks at the tests lining the counter. “Well,” her voice is breathy, careful, “It looks like you’re pregnant.”

I remember Bryce, our music date that was going to be tomorrow. I don’t love him. I sigh, pronouncing each syllable–“motherfucker.”

I urge Alice to work. The news doesn’t care if I’m pregnant, I say. It hits me that in a week when we’re all back in the states, she likely won’t either. I practically push her out the door. Go! I want to shout at her, go into the city! Write! I have never wanted to do it more. I shower, letting the cool water stream down my stomach. I feel nothing. I’m supposed to feel breathless and loving, I do not; I know my options.

So I’m walking around Moscow with my cheap airport map, looking for a Planned Parenthood or whatever its Russian equivalent is. I don’t know how I’ll explain this to them in English but my book of Russian phrases doesn’t include, “I fucked a guy after a cheap date at Sardi’s, and now I need an abortion.” My map didn’t think to highlight this sort of place.
It's a church camp from hell, but I’m not praying. I maybe should have, maybe should have thought about it at least, but I didn’t and I won’t. I think about whether or not I’ll tell my mother, and this feels like a moment when I should scream to myself and think, “maybe on my deathbed,” but my mouth comes up dry. Maybe not.

They do it in hospitals. Normal ones. Break your arm, have an appendectomy, need an abortion? Make up a congregation in the waiting room, worshiping in heavy breaths to nurses who will come out and call you to your repentance. I hate hospitals, I always have. My eyes glaze over, looking across from me at the beige walls, the older woman knitting with a bandage over her eye. The nurse calls me in, “Mary.”

I’m named after the mother of the Christ. 

It’s barely after one when I’m out. I’m walking myself home, reeling at the blurry cars I see from the sidewalk of the overpass. My stomach is cramping. I lean over the railing and dry heave. So this is what it feels like, I think to myself. I look back on my days in Alabama, at the protestors outside the Planned Parenthood and their khaki shorts and their signs. Nana told me not to look at the building, even drilling your eyes into the brick could put Satan into your head. I wonder how many people I ask would believe this is my one-way-ticket to Hell. But I can justify it, I can think of another Mary who might, too.

The largeness of the hotel seems too musty and foreign and there’s a park a little off the road with a sign I can’t read and a picture of a waterfall. I walk a while, admiring the trees and life that nature seems to be aching to show off, and sit at the edge of some rocks on a bench. I’m a mother, or at least I could’ve been if the circumstances were right. Jesus Christ stirs. An eagle soars above me, and I can feel the water rippling beneath the rocks. I bleed.

I stay in my room for the weekend. I don’t go to dinner, I don’t talk to Alice or say goodbye. I don’t know why. I think momentarily about looking her up, seeing where she’s based, but I can’t bring myself to do it. 

On Monday I’m back in the city as if nothing happened, talking to youth. Young people. I am relieved. I am mourning. My supervisor calls me the next morning to ask about the piece while I pack and I tell him what happened. His voice drops a bit. I can picture him at his desk staring out the window blankly, listening.

“Well shit,” he says eventually. I nod even though he can’t see me.

“I’ve got the piece,” I tell him. I am folding underwear into tiny squares, fitting them between items in my suitcase. I realize I’ve lost every hairbrush I took. Some things stay exactly how they’ve always been.

“Well, that’s good.” There’s tapping, a pen on a desk. “Here, finish the piece and send it, I’ll have Baker edit, okay?

“I can edit.”

“I’ll have Baker edit,” There’s a silence. “You take a few days when you come back. It’s been nice out.”

“Figures.”

“That’s how it always is.”

I’m walking to the bathroom, packing up the unused hot rollers and makeup palettes. He’s still tapping. “Take a few days,” he says again.

“Okay.”

“And meet me on…let’s see, let’s do the eleventh. Outside of 1WTC.”

“I can come to the office.”

He sighs, “It’s been nice out.”

So I spend my last night in Moscow drinking and walking around with the newest slew of journalists. It’s a cycle. We go in, we go out. No one will remember me like I do. I call Bryce and break it off, he doesn’t argue. I don’t tell him. I wonder if I should, but I don’t. I don’t know what he’d think, but I know after this I don’t think I can ever see him again. Moscow was my breakup, my last thought of the fling in a place I’ll be leaving. The plane rides are short and choppy and jolting enough to stop the bleeding. A man sits next to me and rests his hand on my leg and I let him keep it there. He’s not young, but he seems harmless. I guess they probably all would. In my apartment, I do not pack, but I shower and shave, pull my hair from the stiff elastic but run my fingers through it in lieu of a brush that must be lying on some hotel floor. I throw away my clothes and underwear. I don’t have money for more, but there’s something lingering on them that I’d rather move on from. I am happy. There is no room for unwanted goods. 

I meet my supervisor the morning of the eleventh. It is nice out, he was right. The sun is beaming but not blaring. The bench is warm but not burning. The piece was good, he says, and he tells me I should write about my time in Moscow.

“I did that.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “Your time. You know, the…” I look ahead. I can see my reflection on the side of the shiny twin tower. Young. I am so young. “You wouldn’t have to, you know, publish it.” Hands drumming on the table. Lips lingering on the rim of his coffee.

“I know,” I say, even though the thought hadn’t actually crossed my mind. “Personal pieces aren’t really my forte.”

“Hm.”

Silence engulfs us and I think about the possibility of doing it. Not now but someday. Righting Bryce and Alice and my unchosen motherhood. Writing Moscow.

“It’s really low,” My supervisor points to a plane soaring on the skyline. I look, but I don't have to. I can hear it already–life and the roar of the Lord. Earth’s hell with open arms.

Fin.

Abortion Resources

USA: 1-800-772-9100, National Abortion Federation

Canada: 1-877-280-7745, Planned Parenthood