“Sorry?”
“First she thinks about Ivan. Then she thinks about Leonid. But always about men.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Weird.”
Ivan and I were supposed to act out a scene in Novosibirsk, a scene I had read and thought about, but suddenly I couldn’t remember at all what I was supposed to say. Furthermore, I couldn’t look it up because I had forgotten my book. I stood, filled with dread, remembering only that there was bad news for Nina.
“Ivan, stand here and wait for Sonya,” said Irina. “Not like that—with your back turned. Sonya, approach Ivan. No, not like at a funeral—you’re in a hurry. Like this.” Ivan stood facing the window and Irina hastened toward him, looking first preoccupied and then delighted: “Ivan!”
I was horrified. I didn’t remember any meeting between Nina and Ivan. How could I have forgotten about something like that?
Irina turned to me. “Now it’s your turn, Sonya.”
I, too, crossed the room and tried to look delighted. “Ivan!” I said.
Ivan turned. His expression looked totally blank. “Good day,” he said.
“Ivan?” I said. “Is it really you?”
“I’m Ivan, yes. Have we met?”
“What do you mean, have we met? I thought we were friends.”
“Sonya,” said Irina reproachfully. “Did you do the homework?”
“I really did,” I said. “But somehow I forgot what happens now.”
She sighed. “Read it now and remind yourself. Quickly!”
Ivan handed me the book. As I read, it came back to me that this wasn’t the right Ivan—it was another Ivan with almost the same name. What a stupid detail to put into the story, I thought.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Ivan Bazhanov. But you’re another Ivan.”
“Yes, I’m Ivan Boyarsky,” said Ivan. “We don’t know each other.”
“I made a mistake,” I said. “Sorry. I have to go.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bring you in a tractor.”
“Thank you,” I said. “People in Siberia are so kind.”
? ? ?
I really didn’t want to go to Constructed Worlds, and then I saw a Red Cross sign and remembered how Svetlana had donated blood, and thought that if I did it too, I might miss part of class. I followed the signs to the mezzanine of the languages building, which had been divided into cubicles with blue plastic screens.
“Please sit still while I draw some blood,” a nurse said in a toneless voice, standing up and walking toward me. She leaned in close, brushing against my hair, and I heard a snipping sound. “This is the new thing,” she said. “To draw blood from the ear.” The nurse showed me a blurry purple mimeographed map of the world and asked if I had been to any of the highlighted regions in the past two years. It wasn’t a big map—all of Turkey was the size of a grape. The bottom part was highlighted.
“Is that like the whole south of Turkey?” I asked. The nurse said it was only southeastern Anatolia. I said I had been to south-central Anatolia. She said that wasn’t medically important. Then she asked whether I had had intercourse with a man who had had sex with another man since 1977, or accepted drugs or money in exchange for sex, or given drugs or money in exchange for sex. “Let me stop you right there,” I said. She looked at me expectantly. “I mean, I haven’t had sex with anyone,” I said.
She looked at me harder, over the edge of her glasses. “Have you had sex with anyone who had sex in exchange for drugs or money?”
Downstairs, blinds had been drawn over the plate-glass windows. I lay on a table. There was an index card taped to the ceiling: Trivia Question: Does the earth spin clockwise or counterclockwise, from the perspective of the North Pole?
“Good veins,” the nurse remarked.
“Oh, thanks,” I said.
The pulse in my arm grew slower, my hands got cold. I thought about the mimeographed map, the map of Anatolia, and which way the Earth spun. I figured it out eventually because of the song where “beauty and the beast” rhymed with “rising in the east.” A white kitelike shape approached. “Some people are just a little slow,” a voice said.
Time seemed to grow soft and gooey. The boy at the next table, who had come after me, was led away. He had already filled up his bag of blood. See, heart? Do you see? Can you learn? What can you learn? I found myself thinking about Nina, who always thought about men, and then I thought about thinking about Ivan and felt my pulse speed up. Maybe I could accelerate the process that way.
“Is this your first time?” a woman asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I could tell.” I hadn’t felt the needle when it was in my arm but I felt it when they took it out.
? ? ?
Linda was late to our second meeting. I sat in the child-sized chair and looked out the cracked window at the dumpster, which now had a sofa in it. When my legs got cramped, I got up and inspected the spider plant and threw the dead leaves into the wastebasket. Then I started pacing through the three rooms used by the adult education program: up through the dark hall, back through the two interconnected classrooms and the lobby. I repeated the circuit again and again, like a nagging thought.
After forty minutes, Linda showed up. We went into the smaller classroom and sat at the picnic table. She slumped into a chair as if she hadn’t sat down in days. I asked what was new in the fraction book. She flipped through the pages with her silvery purple talons and handed it to me open to a lesson about turning “compound fractions” like 2? into “top-heavy fractions” like 5/2.
I knew I shouldn’t draw three pies. I thought about how wonderful it would be to be eating pie. I tried to think of the easiest way to memorize how to do the exercises. “This isn’t too bad,” I said. “You just multiply the bottom number by the left-hand number. Then just add the top number and you’re done!”
There was a long silence. “I’ve got so much more important shit to be worrying about,” Linda said. “You have no idea.”
“I guess the GED is also important?” I said.
She stared at me. “Who are you? What you do all day? Is this your job?”
“I . . . I’m a student,” I said. The program director had specifically told us never to mention that we went to Harvard, and to deny it if we were asked outright; but he hadn’t said who we were supposed to say that we were.
“A student?” She looked amazed. “You study this shit?”
“Well, not this shit exactly. I study different things. But at one point I studied fractions, yeah.”
She shook her head. “You see what I’m saying? I’m just too busy for this.”
“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “But isn’t it sort of a choice? If you don’t want to come here, you don’t have to. But if you do want to come, we have to learn fractions.”
“A choice?” She snorted. “Nobody’s making any choices around here. The regular teacher said I have to come.”
She asked where Ethan was. Ethan was her other tutor. I told her that he came on Tuesdays. She asked why he couldn’t come on Fridays. I said that was how it was.