Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,56

arm of the chair was pressed against the front of my thigh. His skin was pale and his chest smooth and I could see my breath under the dim light of the window. I wondered why he wasn’t cold. His hair looked black in the room and the way he said Claire sounded like he was from somewhere else.

“Are you Russian?”

“Yes. Mostly.”

After a few minutes he stood up. We were inches apart. His skin smelled like wood oil. I felt for his wrist and pulled it towards me. He laughed. I held it to the faint light. A red bracelet dangled.

I liked the sound of his voice. The shape of his hip and the way his hairline feathered at the nape of his neck. I liked that he was tall. I liked the combination of being cold and then too hot but never warm and never any one feeling all over. Sometimes I saw people in the doorway, standing shadows. Then later they would be gone, as if they had been looking for something and found it. Other people came in at one point and I bowed out for some of it. I took my turn in the chair staring out the green window and sat like he had, naked from the waist up, to see what it felt like and watched my breath dissolve in the muted light.

I stayed in there until daybreak. He was sleeping when I left. I wandered down the hallway and into another part of the building where there was a landing and a back staircase and down to the main floor. Gray light came through the high windows of the warehouse. There were people everywhere tangled and twisted like a photograph of a crash site. Behind hanging blankets, some lamps were still lit and I heard groans and the movement of bodies.

I found my things and walked down another hallway, constructed of corrugated tin, to a makeshift kitchen where a sink was. A staging room of some sort. Pallets of bottled water were stacked in the corner and towels and first aid kits sat on chairs beside them. I opened a bottle of water and walked out the back door down some rotted steps into a field of beaten yellow weeds. It was much colder than the day before but not raining.

There was a fire pit several yards in front of me and I watched gray ashes, bright as stars, get swept upwards by the wind and fall to the ground, settling on the trampled grass. I took a seat on some cinder blocks near the back steps and looked up into the white sky.

The Russian man I had spent the past few hours with came down the steps and sat beside me. He had a tin can full of water and some pliers. I helped him start a fire in the pit and we set the can in the middle of the flames on a brick. It felt like field camp. The air smelled of snow. There was a tree up against a fence and its limbs raked the sky. When the water was hot and the sides of the can were scorched black, the man took a plastic bag full of coffee and poured it into the water. He smiled like a soldier, the way you would at a stranger you passed. A tiny spider crack, infinitesimal, reminded me again that there was no clean way through this. My scientific training was all about prediction but there is no prediction. I had called in bombs and no one was hurt. I had tied a Buzz Lightyear to a twig and driftwood caskets swirled in eddies. Both were universes and there were millions more, smaller than anything I could imagine.

I kept looking at the sky. Then at the Russian’s black hair, his gray sweater, the poisoned industrial field, trampled and soaked, then back at the white, white sky.

“What do you think about all the bombs?” I asked.

“Manifestation?” he laughed and pulled the coffee out of the fire then set the blackened can down on another brick. “Doesn’t change much. More cute, I think. Meaningless, really.”

He reached into his bag and pulled out a thick porcelain coffee cup. He dipped the cup into the boiled coffee and handed it to me, “The fires will go out. Something else will take its place.”

I drank the coffee. The tree behind him had such fine leaves on it that they seemed to belong to another tree all