Short fiction

NYC Jamais Vu

JFK.  Andrei Leonov has come to dread those three letters.  Whenever they leave a passenger's lips, he knows exactly what he will be in for and his back aches pre-emptively.  He can feel the twinges starting already as he watches the young, smartly dressed couple drag heavy suitcases out of their Greenwich Village home and onto the pavement, where they stop and wait.  With a sigh, he opens the door of the yellow Lincoln and hauls himself out.
    At the end of a journey filled with exaggerated neck and back rubbing at every red light, Andrei is relieved to find that the couple are eager to yank their luggage from the depths of the trunk themselves.  He has never been one for subtlety.  As they disappear into the building to join the rest of the jet-setters, Andrei pulls away from the terminal and into a quiet corner of the airport's parking lot.
    He hasn't always dreaded JFK International Airport.  Stepping off the plane, twenty years ago, he could believe every word he'd ever heard about a better life in America.  It seemed the perfect end to a journey that had been so long coming.  Waiting for sponsorship from his uncle in Brooklyn, making the dismal bus trip from the newly-renamed Saint Petersburg to Moscow, shuffling along with the crowds in Sheremetyevo Airport: the whole protracted process of leaving had contracted into a millisecond the very moment the plane touched the ground.  The crowd that poured out of the plane with him was buzzing with the promise of what was to come, and everywhere he looked, he saw signs that he'd made the right choice.
    Andrei retrieves a warm sandwich wrapped in greasy brown paper from the glove compartment.  On it, a yellow post-it note reads 'A Reuben for my Russian bear - Happy Birthday!  Edith xxx.'  The handwriting is in a playful mock-Cyrillic script, all boxy letters and backwards Rs.  Andrei smiles and unwraps his lunch.
    Taking a bite of the glove compartment-heated Reuben, he leans forward, gazing up at the grid of vapour trails slowly carving up the sky as another plane soars overhead.  It seems like everything has been overhead this past month.  The city has shifted, re-positioning itself to hang like some metropolitan sword of Damocles.  Maybe it's like that for everyone in New York.  Perhaps he has finally awoken from a twenty-year daze to see the city as everyone else does.  Andrei would happily occupy himself with this line of thinking for the remainder of his lunch break, yet his musings are cut short.  It is happening again.

*

That first attack had really shaken him, coming out of nowhere.  Emerging from the cramped shade of West 46th Street and into the rush and bustle of Times Square, half his lifetime had seemed to slip away in an instant.  Andrei had frozen, staring into the looming city as if it were about to crash down around him, or crush him like a vice between monoliths of concrete and glass.
    The initial terror of it soon turned to confusion as Andrei gazed up at the myriad billboards that peppered the cityscape.  Very little of this technicolour blanket of adverts was familiar.  Sparks of recognition fired at the sight of old brands – warring Pepsi and Coca Cola ads, Levis – but the rest was a blur of empty signs that left him clutching at half-remembered images.  Then, before he even had time to ask himself what the hell was going on, the world snapped back into place.  Across the road, a billboard for the musical Edith mentioned the other day.  Next to that, an ad for a beer he wouldn't touch if his life depended on it.  Meaning had once more returned to New York.
    His gaze had then wandered to the mirror.  In the back, his passenger, a pale, thirty-something businessman, had pushed himself into a corner, getting as close to the door as possible with little concern for his now-crumpled suit.  He wore the expression that Andrei thought he must have been wearing himself just seconds before.  Then he heard the blaring horns.  Amongst this streaming madness, he had paused, if only for a moment.  A full stop, right in the middle of the once-endless sentence of New York's rigid prose.
    He could remember when New York in its entirety had been foreign to him.  In that amnesiac moment, it was as if he had been pulled back to that time, when the city had been a crushing, rushing place which seemed at once perfectly ordered and wildly labyrinthine.  But that was twenty years ago, when he had seen the city through immigrant eyes.  Back then, he had lost himself in an endless series of angles, but now he navigated them for a living.  Seeing the city like that again was jarring, but he shook it off, putting it down to something he ate, or lack of sleep.

Days passed without incident and Andrei had all but forgotten the moment of madness in Times Square when it struck again, before he'd even left the garage.  Suddenly the wheel, the dashboard, the low horizon of the yellow hood, even the feel of the seat had seemed foreign.  In a split second, Andrei felt like he was catching a glimpse of some other life, but the feeling passed almost as quickly as it came.
    It couldn't have been a panic attack.  He used to know a guy who had those.  He'd been driving taxis much longer than Andrei, then all of a sudden, bam, the guy couldn't breathe when he got into a cab.  It got so bad that he quit and moved south with his family.
    For a short while, he had entertained the idea that the problem could be psychosomatic.  After all, as his fortieth birthday marched ever closer, he had found his mind wandering to memories of his father's death.  Nobody ever explained the cause to him, despite the fact he had been a teenager at the time; old enough, he thought, to deal with the cold facts of it.  It could be that they didn't know, or didn't want to know.  Either way, the question mark hovering over the event had been playing on his mind.  It didn't help that his father had been forty when it happened.  Perhaps all those ominous thoughts about some vague, inherited, four-decade expiration date were merely conspiring to become symptoms.  This was not a conclusion that sat well with Andrei, but he couldn't deny the possibility, and so he resolved to distract himself: grab a fare, plot a course, turn the wheel and think of nothing more.
    Things changed when it hit him for a third time, as he dropped off an old woman and her granddaughter at the Guggenheim Museum.  It was a strange building at the best of times, like some huge futuristic kitchen appliance, but in his rewound mind it was utterly alien.  Even the lettering over the entrance was meaningless.  It was as if his brain was desperately rifling though empty files looking for an image to compare it to, frantically trying to provide him with some sense of place, but coming up with nothing.  Once more, the sound of impatient traffic shook him into the present.  It was only then that he really allowed himself to worry.  However, Andrei was a communal worrier, completely unable to wring a conclusion out of his fears by himself.  As such, he turned to his wife, Edith, for answers.

Edith was from an Irish family in Gerritsen Beach.  Andrei had first met her by chance in one of his old haunts.  Her sister had been dating a Ukrainian baker and Edith was often their third wheel, trailing after them around Brighton Beach bars.  One night, they bumped into each other and ended up spending half the night perched at the bar, with him trying to teach her Russian phrases, while she made bad attempts at mimicking his accent.  They had been married for fifteen years, while her sister and the baker didn't last twelve months.  Edith still found endless amusement in inflicting her cartoonish Russian accent on Andrei.
    'It sounds like jamais vu,' she said.
    'What's that?'
    'Oh you know, it's the opposite of deja vu.  Like when stuff you should recognise seems weird.'
    Years ago, when money wasn't as tight and the economy had yet to take a nosedive, Andrei had bought Edith a laptop for Christmas.  Since then, she had become a student of Wikipedia, staying up late, glued to the screen.  She had also picked up the habit of assuming all the obscure bits and pieces she had picked up online were common knowledge.  Andrei had had to sit through countless explanations of stuff he really should, apparently, be aware of already.  Perhaps perversely, as with most of Edith's habits, he found it endearing.
    Edith took his problem straight to the internet, which in turn led them straight to page after page of scary diagnoses.  They laughed and agreed it was probably something he'd eaten.  Only later, before switching off the lights, did they exchange concerned glances.

Every piece of furniture, every plant pot and every medical journal-stuffed shelf in the doctor's office aspired to make the room seem like that of a highly educated and very important man.  He sat with his elbows on his mahogany desk, hands clasped as though deep in thought.  Andrei tried his best not to think about how much this was going to end up costing him as he described the events of the preceding two weeks.
    The attacks had been becoming more regular.  Last week, the deli on West 38th Street looked wrong for a moment, like a mirage or a movie set, despite the fact he'd driven past the place countless times, even eaten there on occasion.  Once or twice, it had seemed particularly intense, and in those moments Andrei had felt like a trespasser, like he should get out of there right away.
    The doctor leaned back in his chair.  'The most common cause of this kind of temporary lapse in memory is stress.  Have you been under any stress lately, Mr. Leonov?'
    No.  Stress had never been a problem for Andrei.  He would see drivers wailing and cursing at the New York traffic every single day, but the sea of motors did little to faze him.  Even New York's most stressful day had not affected him to any great extent.  Travelling south on Hudson to Battery Park, he had stopped with the rest of the traffic as black plumes rose above the skyline.  His fare left the cab, wandering aimlessly down the street while Andrei remained fixed in position, hands firmly on the wheel, watching it all through the windscreen.  He thought about it sometimes, sure, but there were no lasting mental scars, no trauma.  The world keeps turning and everyone needs a cab.
    'Well, there are tests we can do.  Cognitive assessment, memory, that kind of thing.  If nothing comes of that, we can try a scan.'
    Andrei's wallet felt lighter as he left the doctor's office.  Edith had seen the finance issue for what it was the moment it he had brought it up, and her response had been to insist he agree to anything the doctor suggested and stop making excuses.  Andrei supposed she was right.  His father had been the type to avoid the doctor, after all.

The attacks had continued to increase in frequency since the first meeting with the doctor.  They weren't really attacks any more, though.  They were no longer a nightmare rush, but more of a visiting oddity, albeit one whose strangeness lingered long after the event had passed.  The sense of unfamiliarity that washed over everything had started to cling to all it touched, settling like an obfuscating dust, and Andrei had started to question whether he really knew these places if they could be rendered so unrecognisable to him in the blink of an eye.  Worse still, he had started to wonder about those places as yet untouched by his memory timewarps.  In his twenty years in New York, how much of the city had he really seen?
    Andrei was proud of the map he had drawn in his head over the years.  New York was a maze of numbered streets.  It was the world's most daunting crossword puzzle, but it was one that he had solved.  After all, a taxi driver isn't much use to anyone if he doesn't know the city in which he operates, and Andrei knew the streets better than most.  Was it just the streets, though?
    There was Brighton Beach, of course.  He'd been drawn there along with so many of those with whom he'd come over on the flight from Moscow.  But to count it as evidence of his familiarity with the city seemed almost like cheating.  The place was custom designed for Andrei, filled as it was with people like him, the language and the food of what was once home.
    But was there anywhere else?  With his busy day shift in the cab, he'd seen every corner of the city, from the tourist magnets to the little-known local hotspots, but he couldn't recall setting foot in many of them.  He'd driven through every kind of neighbourhood imaginable, but he'd walked so few of New York's streets.  With the lingering haze of his memory failures sticking to more and more of the city, Andrei had begun to imagine the map he believed so indelibly etched on his mind slowly filling with holes.  Yet he also found himself wondering just how complete that map had been in the first place.   

'I know we have been over this before, but are you absolutely sure that it can't be stress related?'
    Andrei did not appreciate the doctor's change in tone since his first appointment.  Gone was the air of thoughtful concern and now it seemed as though, with the test results in hand, the doctor had suddenly become a prosecutor.  Maybe he thought Andrei was trying to scam his way out of work.  Maybe he was simply annoyed by the lack of results.  Andrei didn't care any more.  After giving it a lot of thought, he had decided that something must have broken, shaken loose inside him.  The doctor's words had done nothing to dissuade him of this.  As far as he was concerned, it would either fix itself or he'd have to learn to live with it, and either option was better than emptying out more of their savings.
    He also started to blame the job.  He'd become acutely aware of the fact that it was only in the taxi cab that he was hit with this temporary amnesia.  If it was something he would eventually get over, then it would be madness to give up the day shift.  If not?  He hadn't a clue.  Even back in Saint Petersburg, he'd been a driver, delivering fresh meat to restaurants.  Driving was all he'd ever done, all he knew.  The thought of searching for a new career and perhaps ending up with a job that wasn't behind a wheel filled him with dread.
    Even if he stuck with it, he was becoming concerned that he'd make a mistake that would lose him the shift.  This concern seemed more and more valid, as Andrei was finding himself increasingly distracted, his thoughts running away with him, returning to memories of Saint Petersburg.  Wherever the fog of jamais vu fell, Russian ghosts would fill the gap: buildings, half-remembered, springing up to take the place of those whose meaning had been erased.  A mixture of classical pillars and cold soviet slabs was slowly taking over New York.  A fading memory, twenty years out of date, was replacing the city that everyone knew but him.
    Not long ago, he had spoken to Edith about taking a vacation in Russia, reconnecting with his roots.  Nothing had come of it.  Perhaps if he had gone, none of this would have happened.  Maybe his mind would have been satisfied with seeing the place once more, and would never have tried rewinding itself for a glimpse of home.  Yet he couldn't help but wonder: if he were to return to Saint Petersburg with the eyes of a New Yorker, would that city devour him too?

On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Andrei dreamt that the last twenty years had never happened.  When he awoke, it was in his old shoebox apartment building with its cold rooms and peeling wallpaper.  When he drove the delivery van, it was the same route every day.  When he stayed up late drinking with his friends, there was no talk of a better life in a distant foreign land.  Time had touched neither Saint Petersburg nor his life.  And yet he was content.  The city, the people, the frozen air: it was like seeing a dear friend after years apart.  He was home.
    When he truly awoke, Andrei realised two things.  Firstly, that he was still a middle-aged man living in New York.  Secondly, that he had beaten the alarm by ten minutes.  He lay in bed, staring at the white ceiling until the clock's familiar ringing filled the air.

*

Andrei drops the Reuben, spilling corned beef and Russian dressing down the side of the seat.  Greasy brown paper drifts to his feet while the post-it note pirouettes through the air and sticks lazily to the dashboard.  His hands instinctively leap for the wheel.  He could drive away.  It's not the delivery van, but it can't be that different.  Where would he drive to, though?  And, for that matter, where is he?  There's no use in panicking, he's not going anywhere until he gets his bearings anyway.  Andrei releases the wheel, sits back and rubs his eyes.
    Before he can even begin to make sense of his situation, a roar from above jolts him from his seat.  He scrambles for the door handle, bursting out of the car and staggering onto the concrete expanse of the parking lot.  Finding his feet, he looks back at the yellow cab.  He's seen these before, in pictures of America, in movies.  What was he doing inside one, and in the driver's seat, no less?  Searching for the source of the noise, he looks to the sprawling structure across the road and, as he does so, a memory floats back: the view through an aeroplane window.  Moscow from above, sliding away, disappearing.
    The streets are full to bursting, the pavement even more so: an obstacle course of people and their luggage.  The air is awash with chatter, accents of all kinds.  Andrei can barely hear himself think, but that memory is still holding on, finding a foothold.  He's going the right way.  Keep walking.  Yellow cabs are everywhere, lining the road, filling every available space.  A man sticks his head out of a driver-side window and waves.  He knows Andrei's name.  Ignore him.  Terminal three.  He has to find terminal three.  A flicker of recognition ignites at the sight of the glass doors and he makes a bolt for them.

*

Distracted as she is by a small queue of would-be passengers, it takes a while for the woman at the terminal three information desk to notice the wild-eyed man shambling towards her.  Out of breath, he lurches into the desk with a thud and the queue backs away in unison.  It's only her second week here, but she dealt with plenty of drunks and crazies when she waitressed in her college days.  She can handle this guy.  Even so, she casts a glance towards the nearest security guard, who is in turn eyeing up this strange new threat.  Meanwhile, the man fumbles in his pockets, sending loose change, mint wrappers and fluff raining to the ground until, pockets empty, he brandishes a wallet, the contents of which he shakes out onto the desk.  He pushes this pile of cards and bills, topped with a small photo of a woman with a kindly face, towards the receptionist and stares at her.  For a second, she is reminded of her father in the home, and of the pleading look he would give her as she left.  He leans in.
    'Отправь меня обратно в Ленинград,' he says.  She can smell the horseradish on his breath.
    'I don't understand,' she replies, with the tone and raised volume reserved for dealing with the foreign or partially deaf.
    The queue is becoming restless now.  'Wait your turn,' yells one old man, while a girl in a baseball cap agrees with a loud 'yeah!'  In the middle of the line, a young, smartly dressed couple shuffle uncomfortably with their luggage.  The security guard begins his approach.
    None of this fazes the man, though.  His mind is set on the task at hand.  He creases his brow and takes a moment before trying again.  As he speaks, it appears to the receptionist as if he is trying to physically drag the words out from somewhere deep inside him.
    'Leningrad,' he says.  'Send me back.'

Peter Dorey