A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,42
the southern mountains.
“You saved Alu’s life,” the brother said, setting the cigarette between his delicate lips, moisturized nightly with aloe balm. “For that I owe you a favor. A small one, because of my six brothers, I like Alu the least.”
She handed him a list limited to easily procurable medical supplies: absorbent compress dressings, adhesive bandages, antiseptic ointment, breathing barriers, latex gloves, gauze rolls, thermometers, scissors, scalpels, aspirin, antibiotics, surgical saw blades, and painkillers. “It’s basic stuff. Any medical distributor will have it. You can find most of it in an average first-aid kit. I just need a lot of it.”
“Alu spoke highly of you,” the brother lamented. “I should have known you would be a bore. Anything else?”
“I thought I only had one favor?”
“Let me tell you a story,” the brother said, holding his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. “When I was a child I had a pet turtle, whom I named after Alu because they shared a certain—how can I put it—bestial idiocy. Once I went to Grozny with my father and five of my brothers for the funeral of my father’s uncle, and we left so quickly I hadn’t the time to provide food for Alu the Turtle. My brother, Alu the Idiot, had a fever and stayed home with my mother. In a moment so taxing on that little intellect that steam surely shot from his ears, Alu the Idiot remembered to feed my turtle. He caught grubs and crickets, likely tasting them before he gave them to my beloved crustacean. Since then Alu the Idiot has grown into a Gibraltar-sized hemorrhoid, but when he was a child he used the one good idea this life has allotted him to feed my turtle, and because of it, you get a second favor.”
“Turtles aren’t crustaceans,” she said.
“Excuse me, half crustacean.”
“They’re full-blooded reptiles.”
The brother gaped at her. “You should hear yourself. You sound ridiculous.”
“A turtle is one hundred percent reptile,” she said. “I imagine even Alu knows that.”
“Don’t insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is crustacean on its mother’s side.”
“Explain that to me,” she said, shifting in the seat as the car spun in circles.
“A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.”
“I hope your biology teacher was sent to the gulag,” she said. She caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. The driver had grown up in a mountain hamlet where more people believed in trolls than in automobiles. The first war had catapulted him from the back of a mule to the inside of a Mercedes, and he would look back at that war as the one stroke of good fortune in a life otherwise riddled with disappointments.
“I can’t believe you’re allowed to operate on people with such an incomplete understanding of nature,” the brother said.
“Any other animals come about this way?”
The brother pursed his lips. “A whale.”
“Let me guess. A fish fucks a hippo?”
“Close, an elephant,” the brother said, laughing.
“Of course,” Sonja said. “How could I forget about the herds of elephants roaming the open ocean.”
“I would never dishonor my mother, but someone less noble might suggest that Alu is half monkey. So shall I include Darwin as your second favor?”
She wrote several titles on the list and passed it back.
“My god,” he said. “You’re worse than I could have ever imagined. No wonder you and Alu got on famously. Modes of Modern Psychological Inquiry. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment. From Victim to Survivor: Overcoming Rape. This is what you want? I was thinking cocaine and a prostitute or something.”
“Do I look like someone in need of a prostitute?”
The brother was all grins. “I’ve never met someone in greater need,” he said.
“Can you get them or not?”
“We’ll see. Guns, drugs, uranium, whores, hostages, no problem. But I’ve never been asked to find books or medical supplies. These will be a challenge.”
The Mercedes drove in dizzying circles. She wanted out of this spinning, nauseating contraption. What was wrong with Alu, anyway? Compared to this ridiculous man, who spoke as if he lived in a genie’s lamp, Alu was a model citizen. But what could she do? Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.
“Can you get them or not?”
“Don’t insult me,” he said. “I can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”
“Then thank you.”
“That’s it? Nothing else? Once you leave this car you’ll never see me again.”
Could she ask for it? Transport to Georgia? A plane ticket from Tbilisi to London? A visa stamp in