Miscellany

Yegor Ivanov saw a different grown man cry every month in his line of work. Threaten his daughter: cry. Confiscate his gambling revenue: cry. Shoot him in the knee: cry. Have Eli Morrow carve his eyes out: cry, or at least they usually sounded like they’d be crying if their eyes still worked. Crying was healthful. Manly. It displayed the admirable capacity to comprehend the hopelessness of one’s current situation, and usually preceded capitulation to Yegor’s demands.

He’d never seen Eli Morrow cry.

Eli was in his (Yegor’s) house, sitting at his (Yegor’s) kitchen island, his face in his hands, snotting into one of his (Yegor’s) dishtowels, an over-turned bottle of lager spilled on the counter before him. Eli was, in general, delusionally optimistic. It could be an asset or a liability.

“Eli, my friend,” Yegor said gently, cautiously, ready to duck behind the refrigerator in case Eli flung a knife at him. “What is your trouble?”

“Esa hija de puta, la doctora, me dijo que en menos que diez años voy a morir,” Eli replied. Yegor caught “puta,” which was one of the only Spanish words he knew; he was still in the dark but increasingly alarmed. Eli, for whatever reason, was obsessed with concealing his Mexican roots from Yegor’s people. He hoped Eli hadn’t murdered the housekeeper before breaking into his house. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair, Yegor! I don’t do none of that shit!”

“I don’t understand,” Yegor said, still from twenty feet away. Was Eli drunk? There was only one beer on the counter, and it looked like most of it had been spilled. He couldn’t be drunk. He usually ran on so much cocaine and amphetamines you couldn’t knock him out with a gram of heroin. “Please. My friend. Tell me.”

“I,” Eli announced, raising one arm dramatically into the air, “have a virus.”

Eli thought he was drunk. Or he was play-acting at being drunk.

“Is it serious?”

“I’m dying.”

“That is terrible.”

“I’ve got to take pills! Pills, for my fucking liver!” Eli howled, and sobbed into Yegor’s dishtowel.

Liver. Was that AIDS? Did Yegor need to burn his dishtowels? No, liver was alcoholism. Was there a virus that attacked the liver? There was, wasn’t there. The junkies were always dying of something, and if it wasn’t AIDS, it was the other one.

“How long do you have?”

“Ten years!”

Yegor raised an eyebrow. Ten years? Ten years, a war could start and end. Ten years, you could marry and divorce three women and father ten sons. Ten years and Yegor himself might be dead. “You could die in ten years for many things, my friend,” he said.

Eli threw a knife at him.