Twenty-Nine Cozy Bears

03

"Looking inside and outside the Great Wall, there is nothing but vastness; the river up and down suddenly stops flowing." ———— "Qinyuan Spring·Snow"

Moscow, Russia

It has been an hour of waiting. The man has waited before. He and Alek positioned themselves in the lobby at first, where the man realizes that he has never spent anytime. It was a place of transit, an area to transverse through at an impatient speed. Impatient because by the time he reaches this point in the journey each morning, his mind is already fully invested in continuing his work, and now he is too physically close to relax. Desire has manifested into obsession, and obsession allows no other to block the way.

The truth of the moment was that he possessed a deep love for his job here. Even with the grueling training, and live fire rounds whizzing past his skull as he crawled in mud under razor wire, pushing himself to focus, to remain present — alert and unaided by medication or mental escape, to take it all raw and gamey. None of that cast a shadow on his gratitude for simply being here.

He can remember screaming. Many times. Opportunities to encounter pain in its instructive forms were constantly at hand and available to raise the bar for any examination. The man expected nothing less from the year of training claiming to be for Spetsnaz. Whether it was the full flavor or only what he needed to give him the skills to survive the rare moments he might be in striking distance of the enemy, he didn't know. But he wore the uniform. The salute of his subordinates contained the proper respect.

He could recall screaming. He could recall the sight of his injuries. He could remember being afraid, a forging fear that altered his view of the world. Yes. But he could not recall or conjure up the pain. It felt as though it was cut out, edited from his memory.

Laughter, he mused, appeared to be crying when you couldn't hear the wailing. Perhaps there was a correlation.

And there was nothing about that training that felt ... lite. It would be a shame if he found out that the training was not the full blood and colors Spetsnaz training.

If on some fated afternoon he overheard — perhaps as he passed by the office of his superior — that because they were computer geeks, they were not forced to endure the full weight of becoming Spetsnaz... it would not feel good. However, if he did, he would not volunteer to finish it up or go through that again. No. He would pretend not to hear. Why would he be eaves-dropping around his superior's office door in the first place? It was not polite. What a shameful way for a Spetsnaz to act.

"An hour." Alek said this with the tone of candid fact. An nuance of expression which did not ask for or offer further information. Everyone present understood the context and target. It did not lend anything to subtlety. Like the rhetorical question. A rhetorical trivia.

"Where were you two years ago?" the man asked. They didn't share much of their previous lives together. None of their team did. He could not recall this being a directive or even a suggestion. No taint of taboo existed about their lives before this, their past. The topics simply did not have a place in their day to day lives. But for some reason, at this mile mark, and within this unexpected pause of the world's turning, the question had value.

"Prague." The answer came after some thought, and again as a rhetoric point, but then a whisper of nostalgia loosened his brow. "He came for me."

"Yes?" the man asked, feeling an unexpected amount of interest. "To Prague?"

"This was during the war, of course." Alek nodded to himself after he said this, as if agreeing that he did exist back then. That he had a past. "I had taken to living in a dance club downtown. I ate and slept and worked from one of the tables. There were many warrants for me to answer for here in Moscow, and in Petersburg where I am from. I had arranged to move from Prague to Norway, and further to Iceland after a stay of two years in Oslo."

Leaning back Alek's eyes were searching the past which surrounded him, and ran his fingers through his short cut hair. His uniform was perfect, his ribbons glaring. Had they really done so much in so short a time?

Alek's smile caught him off guard, bursting through far enough to expose white teeth of dubious alignment. "He came into the club. His guards came too but they remained at a distance. I didn't notice him until he had sat down in the chair across the table from me. I glanced up, expecting someone else. It took three heart beats for my brain to kick me. It was surreal. Surreal because it was at that time when they had those public commercials on the TV, the one where he leans forward to the camera and says, "I will come for you."

"Like the hare I looked for an exit, but he says, 'you think you can make it to the door?"

The man pictures this scene with the music beats hammering some up-beat techno track, spewing optimism out at the dance floor lights at overwhelming decibel levels. But of course you would still hear the leader. His diction was perfect.

Alek describes the pitch. The offer. It is —allowing for environment and atmosphere — the same offer he was given.

The man listens and then asked, "And you accepted?"

"Of course not. I'm Russian. I told his oligarch ass to go fuck himself. Then, after his men beat the hell out of me — which of course was due and proper — then, I accepted his offer."

Alek is smiling. He is watching the scene unfold in his mind theater as he remembers it, with tender eyes. What he might have done in Oslo or Iceland is of no consequence. It would have been a lower life to conform to. Existence at half-life speed, no matter how much cocaine or how many hacks. Or how many systems crashed. It would have been unbearable if in that other life he had been given a glimpse of what he said 'fuck off' too.

The use to reach for power, now power has secured them.

The man understands and nods his head. He suspected that all of them, their full unit came from similar circumstances Each of them having negotiated a similar undertaking.

"You?" Alek asked.

It was reasonable to ask. Form and circumstance were appeased. "Prison," he offered. Just the one word.

"No shit?" Alek asks, leaning forward, his interest obviously peaked and his question spoken with candid openness.

The man could take off his shirt and provide details from the ink carved into his skin, but those details would no longer impress. What he had pinned to his chest made those marks of rank and purpose, dim. A child's game he once played with very dangerous men, long ago. His designation patch on his shoulder made Bratva sound almost provincial. "No shit," he replied.

The memories trickle in. Strange but the details of his life, the fallen shell of himself, that he had become, were all he could think about back then, in his prison cell. Five or six lines of mockery ad self-hate cycling over and over. He went from superhero like skills and power, to a terrorized rape bait prospect in a community of angry, self-hating men. And it was only the first couple of months of his ten year sentence.

"I had been skewered. Ran through with the angry spear of justice. Then, he came to visit. I too had several moments of wonder — mostly about how far this hole was going to take me down."

"So now you are pardoned," Alek said.

"So now I am pardoned."

"And your thoughts now?" Alek asked.

"I never want to leave."