Song 20260803-164533
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The diplomat had forgotten his real name by the third embassy, the third language, the third carefully constructed biography. He kept it written on a slip of paper in his shoe, where no one could find it, where even he could forget to look. It amused him to imagine that one day his two sons, long grown and gone, would discover the biography in his shoe, with the name stamped scrawled, illegibly, across the thin sole. He picked up his son at the airport as he was coming back from college: a heavy, hairy young man, tall and wild-looking in his jeans and printed t-shirts, fascinated but not too impressed with the Moscow skyline, the old run-down buildings with the red stars painted above every main entrance. “You look so different. What happened to you?” As they stood and waited, Ilya twirled a car key in his hand, its heavy weight an object lesson in the importance of everything and nothing at all. I told him not to worry. He was he and I was I, nothing more than that.
“Awal Aliyev was too young or too stupid to get the message. The film had not played in Moscow, they had not sent out the word. When the coup failed, he was imprisoned and disappeared. Tamara and her daughter Nadisha did not learn of his death until several years later. By that time, Kaniza, their youngest, had disappeared. She had become the mistress of the new communist head of the rain-making research facility, Dokhtik Tokonovkasov, the head of the Caged Sun Project, the project that would cause a revolution in science, or so Tovarich Gromovamenti had promised. Tokonovka, in his naïve new phase, presented his new lover with a reticulated dormouse, news of the social and family turmoil of the world. The mouse had lost its tail, the dormouse explained, as a result of Kaniza’s neglect. Tokonovka let Kaniza adopt two more, and the three became his. They licked his forehead and slept in his shirt pocket. “I’ve heard about you,” the intensity with which the dormouse licked his forehead seemed to him to communicate. “I read all your letters to the Mother Motherland. And you only scribble, scribble! You don’t care about our world at all. You’re here, writing, just so you don’t feel guilty. Well, you should.” Tokonovkasov saw the error of his ways: he stopped writing as a scientist and found succor — and distraction — in the arms of his lover.
Ilya wove his way among the crowds, a lithe, flickering body dodging and weaving between others. He was laughing and grimacing, indulgently, as he handed over his son to me and made his way in the opposite direction. He was utterly confident that I could take care of everything. We watched the crowds, waiting for Cosmiques to appear. When he was at the embassy, his teaching days lost to foreign politics, plunderings and technologies, Cosmiques had sometimes travelled the other way. The dark windows slipped past. “Cosmonauts,” closer, “Cosmiques.”
His responsibilities had been expanded, elongated, commensurately with the augmentation of his skills and hours. “I would make some part of my own life disappear, rub it out, rub it away, without anyone seeing it, recording it, and so erase all possibility of tracing it back to me,” he had said, as he◆ About the ending