Our Country Friends(36)
The patient, Lara, spoke in the same breathless torrent of words Nat used when she was overstimulated, monologuing, as it were, about the day she had spent on her favorite social media platform. There Lara had learned, as several of Masha’s patients had learned that morning, about the microchip that was inserted deep into the nasal passage during testing for the virus at the behest of the liberal Hungarian-born billionaire they referred to with maximal spite as “Dzhordzh Tsoris.” The virus, it was now conclusively proved, was engineered by the evil ex-Magyar in a lab as part of an attempt to take over the world through this snotty microchip and return it to the Marxist masters of their youth. Masha sometimes scrolled through her patients’ feeds, a heady free-for-all of paid-for racism such as An Honest History of Black People and the Democrat Party, conspiracy mongering along the lines of “If you get headaches while wearing a mask check this video out,” and Vladimir Horowitz in coattails playing Schubert at Carnegie Hall. That all three things could coexist in such proximity could be dubbed “the Soviet Ashkenazi Paradox,” and any attempts to bring up the fact that the anti-Tsoris propaganda often focused on the detail that the billionaire was every bit as Jewish as most of her patients (some of the “articles” they posted had Tsoris styled in a yarmulke and payes) would have no effect. Her job, as she saw it, was to provide a comforting presence; her soft freckled face alone calmed these overexcited immigrants, along with a steady run of anti-anxiety medications and serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which she passed off as “sleeping aids” to her rabidly anti-psychiatric patients. The very fact that they would even talk to her—a terapevt, as she called herself to her patients, implying any kind of therapist, such as a physical one—under the auspices of a Jewish not-for-profit was testament to her skill. “I’m here to listen to you,” she would begin each session, using the formal pronoun.
As Masha watched Lara, an aquatic blue to her manic eyes, rage about Tsoris’s plan to nasally control and bemask her, her own mind was elsewhere, on her daughter and her unwanted guests. There was a tub of homemade egg salad in the refrigerator and bread with high fiber content, but would they figure out how to make sandwiches from these two staples? Senderovsky claimed they would. And then there was the endless daily playlist of Nat’s own therapists and virtual classes (well, not today, it was Saturday, though Masha continued to work) and voluminous yet easy homework focusing on interpersonal skills and the joy of loving everyone, which both bored her child and highlighted the underdeveloped range of her emotions. It was an odd delight to see Nat and Karen running up the hill at a full gallop—an adult friend still counted as a friend, no?—but she worried the child would exhaust Karen with her repetitive interests, chiefly the boy band, and her occasional flashes of temper and need for order and control.
“If you’re still having trouble sleeping,” Masha said to Lara, “sleeping” being a standin for “functioning,” “I might increase your dosage to twenty milligrams. Many of my patients take that dosage with great results.”
“I don’t care if I live or I die,” Lara said, which in Russian was equivalent to “I’m doing fine, thank you so much for asking.”
“Although I know Tsoris would want me dead,” she added.
“Well, that’s one good reason to keep living,” Masha said.
Lara smiled, her ceramic government-provided teeth glowing in the smudgy lens of her daughter’s outmoded laptop, the daily conversation with Masha the highlight of her quarantined day. Lara lived alone, her husband first pickled and now fully dead, but Masha thought she saw a child’s tapka, or household slipper, briefly reflected in the armoire, caught in the action of scampering past and slapping down the apartment’s brief hallway on the way to the living room television set or the cabbage-stocked refrigerator or the precisely mowed central yard between the redbrick towers, where various ethnicities used to clump together like wet socks coming out of the washing machine. This was a mirage, of course; the child did not exist, only the framed picture of her sister next to the monitor forever receiving a law award she never particularly wanted, gray sullen Jewish eyes, her head bent tiredly toward her older sister, in the same way Russian bungalow colony Senderovsky would try to slot his head in the crook of her neck while they were sitting in their bathing suits by the colony’s tiny aboveground pool, a torrent of feeling flowing one way between them.
Fuuuuu-uuuuu-uuuuu-uuuuu-h!
She must have misheard the yowl in her reverie. But, no, there it was again. A resident bobcat (or was it “mountain lion”)? A beast torn asunder by another? No. She heard words now. Ugly words. “One minute please, Lara Zacharovna,” Masha addressed her patient using her patronymic. (“Nu, nu, do as you must,” her patient replied, as if her entire existence was but an endless series of pushbacks and rejections.) Masha ran through the living room with its silent Steinway and cheerless pastel sofas, through the kitchen with its beast of a chef’s stove, its farm sink and professional espresso maker, and out onto the gallery connecting the main house to the porch, where—
Where she found the most perplexing sight of her life.
* * *
—
The Actor was naked, his dark head lathered in an iridescent plume of shampoo or conditioner, which flowed ceaselessly from his curls, as if he were a vanilla fountain. “What the fucking fuck?” he shouted through the slits of his soap-covered eyes. And then upon sensing someone’s approach, “Help me! Fucking help me already!”