In the Red Read Online Free PDF Page B

are wax,” Irina tried to explain when he told her about the apples. “I mean, they are coated with a patina of wax. To make them look that way.”
    He told her he almost fainted once in the cereal aisle. An entire wall of cardboard boxes screaming at him. Flakes or pellets. Shaped like tiny doughnuts or tiny waffles. Chocolate, neon fruit, peanut butter, marshmallows. Endorsed by athletes, cartoon toucans, ethnically diverse children. Chex, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Froot Loops, Life, Life, Life! He started to breathe fast. How many different kinds of crunchy sweetened grain could one civilization need? How was it possible to pick one out of such a lineup? Was this glut not a harbinger of retribution, disaster? He put his hand on his chest to slow his heart. He looked into the crazed eyes of a cartoon squirrel. He needed some air. He walked briskly outside.
    â€œWhat I had forgotten,” he said with ironic amusement, “was that in August in Las Vegas there is no air. The oven heat punched my chest and I gasped. Like a woman who had just been grabbed by an unseen hand in the dark, I gasped and I reached for something to steady myself. A signpost. Scorching hot in the desert sun. At that moment I could have sworn I heard a little hiss like a drop of oil in the fire. I pulled my hand away and started to laugh. I doubled over and laughed and all the housewives who were loading their cars blasting air conditioners; they must have thought I was barking mad. Irina, I was barking mad.”
    He was smiling as if this was all very funny, but there was still something in his eyes that made her want to hold him. His vulnerability distressed her a thousand times more than her own.
    â€œBut I got their nice white teeth, see? No more peasant teeth for me,” Andrei said nearly in a whisper. She hadn’t known until then that he had caps. She’d never thought of questioning someone’s teeth before. She was about to say something when he asked her how old she was when Ceauşescu was shot.
    Irina tried to think of the answer to this unexpected question. But it wasn’t a number he wanted from her.
    He was from the country she had been born in but couldn’t remember. She had been born in the place he had run away from, and raised in the place he had run to. Both places he hated and loved. Was the thing he reached for inside her the same thing she reached for inside him?
    Andrei answered his own question. “Oh, you must have been only a little slip of a thing. Probably you did not yet speak. Or if you spoke, what you spoke was not English. There is a video of it, you know. But it made me feel, what do you call it? It made me feel shortchanged. You hold out your hand waiting for more, and more does not come. We were cheated. We did not get to watch the bullets go in. We did not get to see them bleeding out. I would have liked to see.”
    What could she do then except kiss him? It was always the best thing to do when she had no answer. When there was no answer, the only thing to do was revert to skin.

Nouă
    T he televised grain of the image is faded into the yellow range. Everyone’s skin is rendered in a raw orange. This is the revolution. This is the trial. Stern men in military uniforms sit at tables in a barren room in a schoolhouse. Their mouths are set into hard, narrow lines. It must be the camera that fails to capture the glee in their eyes—the promise of blood. But then again, the camera glances over a man in a suit fussily looking at his fingernails, as if he is, after all, indifferent to the promise of blood.
    The dictator and his wife sit to be judged in their own little corner, behind an institutional table from which a teacher not long ago asked the children to recite multiplication tables, pledge allegiance to the party. Today the glorious leader and his consort have the dim hollow faces of doomed animals. Like horses with broken legs, about to be shot.