Run! Do Not Look Back!

Moscow never cared about me. It put up with me the way it puts up with its weather. The poor, the strange, the forgotten, all of us just there, like we didn't count. Summer in Moscow shows off. The nights drag, the heat sits on your chest, and everybody laughs on terraces like they've been told to. Autumn is different. Autumn stops pretending. The air gets sharp and honest, and you can feel the city admitting that nothing lasts. If I ever leave this place, it will be in autumn. I've decided that already. Winter isn't romantic. Winter stays too long. It creeps through my coat, my socks, my skin, and everyone hurries past with their eyes on their shoes, like looking at me might be catching. Tonight, the snow won't stop. My heater died again this morning. I stood in my studio in Lyublino with my breath showing in front of my face, watching the paint peel off the wall like old skin. I filled a pot with water, set it on the two-ring stove, and sat beside it with my hands wrapped around the sides. It took twenty minutes to get warm. I waited the whole time. My roommate banged on the door. I don't know why he did that, maybe I was breathing too loud. That's the thing about being poor in this city. You don't get to be quiet about it. The woman at the shop counts my change twice. The man on the bus moves his bag to the other side. And you learn, without anyone teaching you, to hold your elbows in, speak low, and say sorry to people who bump into you. I'm Maksim Popov. I'm twenty-four. I'm an orphan. Please don't feel sorry for me. I doubt my parents felt sorry when they set our house on fire with themselves inside, back when I was in middle school. I work nights at a bar in Patriarch Ponds. I got the job on my knees, no diploma, no relaive, nobody to hand me the sweet buns of nepotism. I wash glasses that cost more than my rent. I pour drinks that cost more than I make in a month. I'm good at it. Smile a little I tell myself, say nothing. Pour. Clean. Smile. Last week, a woman with diamonds on her fingers watched me slide her glass across the bar and laughed. "You know, you'd be a beautiful boy if you ever stood up straight." I'd been standing up straight. I looked down at my shoes and said sorry. I still don't know what she saw. If you want to know what I look like, don't ask me. Ask the mirror behind the bottles, the long one, tilted so the bartender can watch the whole room. It shows a thin man in a white shirt washed so many times it has gone soft. Dark hair that always falls over his forehead, no matter how often he pushes it back. Gray-green eyes, tired, with lashes too long to ever be considered masculine. Cheekbones sharp enough to cut, but only because there's nothing else on them. Pale hands. Thin wrists. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms corded with the veins of a person who carries too many crates. I don't see anything in it. I see someone who needs to breathe, eat and sleep more. But the mirror knows something I don't, because three people have caught me in it tonight, glancing back, and then looked away quickly like they'd been caught stealing. It's the only place I'm not invisible. Even there, nobody sees me. They only see something they are ashamed to place, and they go back to their drinks. That's where Leonid saw me. It was a Tuesday. The snow had scared everyone home. One couple was arguing in whispers by the window, and a drunk man slept on the corner table with his cheek on his arm. I was holding a rocks glass up to the light, picking at a water spot with my thumb, when I smelled him. Oud. Warm, dark, expensive. And under it, something like smoke from a fire that went out hours ago. The air changed. I can't explain it better than that. The bar felt smaller. In the mirror, I watched the door open. A man came in out of the snow like it had been waiting for him. Tall. A long black coat, cut so perfectly it looked poured over his shoulders, with snowflakes melting on the wool. Hair like ebony, pushed back as if he'd dragged a hand through it on the drive over. A neatly trimmed goatee and moustache framed a mouth that looked like it didn't smile without a reason. A thin scar split his left eyebrow in two. And his eyes were heavy-lidded and sleepy, half closed, as though the world bored him much. He didn't walk like a customer. He walked like the floor belonged to him and he was letting us stand on it. He sat down at the bar, exactly in front of me, and I turned around so fast I nearly dropped the glass. Up close, his eyes weren't black like I'd thought. They were brown, dark and warm, with the faintest edge of red at the center, like the last coal in a fire. He wasn't handsome like the men on billboards. He was worse. He looked like someone who got what he wanted without using his voice. I realized I was staring at his mouth. I pulled my eyes up fast. His lips moved. "Whiskey. Straight." His voice was dee, low and slow. My hands were already moving, from bottle, glass, pour, slide. The whiskey sloshed. My fingers weren't quite steady. I hoped he didn't see. He looked at the drink. Then he looked at me. And I forgot what I was doing. I have been looked at by a lot of people. Drunks who wanted a story. Rich men who wanted me to nod. Cruel men who wanted something worse. I know every kind of look. I can tell what someone wants from me in a second. This one didn't want anything. It just stayed. Steady. Calm. Like he was reading me slowly and wasn't bored by the page. My throat went dry. My ears got hot. I turned away and picked up a cloth so I'd have something to do with my hands. I wiped the same glass for almost three minutes. I counted. He drank slowly. No phone. No glancing around. He sat there with his whiskey and the snow melting off his coat, lost in something far from this bar. When the glass was empty, he lifted two fingers, and I poured again. And again. By the fourth, I knew the small things from him, the soft clink when he set the glass down, the long breath he let out after each swallow, the way the scar in his eyebrow turned white when he frowned at nothing. I knew he never once looked at the door. We didn't talk. Nobody in the room did. The silence was heavy, like the air right before it snows, when you can feel the sky making up its mind. At one point, I set down a coaster. I felt his eyes move to my hands. I looked up, and he was still looking. He didn't glance away like people do when you catch them. He just held it, unashamed, until my heart was beating so loud I thought it would give me away. I looked at his mouth. I don't know why. A mistake? I just did. He noticed. I saw it in the corner of his eye. When he stood, my stomach dropped. He paid in cash, tipped just enough, buttoned his coat with slow fingers, and looked at me one last time. "Thank you," he said. And he smiled. Not with his mouth. With his eyes. It went down my spine like a finger dragged along an electrocuted wire. The door opened to a wall of white wind. It closed. And then it was just me, a glass I'd stopped cleaning, and a faint trace of oud in the air. I didn't move for a long time. Something in me that I had buried years ago turned over and opened one eye. I've been invisible my whole life. I know exactly how it feels when someone looks through you. I had never learned how it feels when someone looks at you and doesn't let go. It haunts me, even now. And it is only the beginning.