a death in the family // petra and otto
It was not raining outside, and he glanced at the clock. 11:47. Then he glanced at the cigarettes on his passenger’s seat, remaining in that moment for more than a few, but it ticked by at long last. The building ahead, rising from the pavement looming monolithic and absolute, witnessed his hesitation passively.
His fingers tapped listless against the wheel. He turned the radio off.
There had been this couple living in the apartment below him. He never met them, but he got to know them pretty well from the beginning. The walls of their building were pockmarked and pale and thin, archaic so that you could hear everything, especially when you didn’t try, and in that way he’d hear the man stepping up the creaking stairs every night past 2 AM and jingle his keys persistently before jogging the door open, quiet, as though a trespassing an ancient tomb; for a few minutes the water pipes running through the walls would hum coldly, then silence. They would hum again around four hours later, when the woman woke, and a few minutes after they grew quiet that distant subterranean door would get jogged open and shut again. If Otto was back to his flat early on Wednesdays, there would usually be an argument of which the particulars weren’t particularly intelligible, as the man’s similarly early arrival home from work, or the bar, seemed to signify their premiere timespan for interaction. These arguments, as inevitable as the sunset, occasionally ended in sex. But only occasionally. A sudden jag of silence, a shrieking heart rate monitor gone dead, was usually that chapter’s conclusion.
He was walking up that first flight of checkered stairs, each step echoing up against the building’s ceiling, when he caught a glimpse of them of them for the first and last time. Maybe seven, eight months after he moved in. Accumulated an interest but not a vested one. They were some type of twisted entertainment, a pair of crooked-hewn wooden dolls with insides made of clockwork, hacking and piecing out their jigsaw existence as if it made some difference, as if the real world didn’t pass by their door every day but they continued on, trapped willfully in their tragic little playhouse existence. When he saw them, real, live, it was almost a strange sensation.
The man looked like the type placed books by the window like potted plants, like someone who belonged in a long-gone past, a cartographer with thin bloodless hands drawing long pale lines. Quiet, unprepossessing, passive, with two bags of groceries and an abstractive kind of scowl. The woman, similarly, was small-framed, with sloping narrow shoulders and sharp long collarbones, plump lips and tired, pretty brown eyes. At that crucial age when a woman begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the sunset colors of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love. At such a moment, the life that seemed to have chosen its course long ago is questioned once again - for the last time, the compass needle of the will hovers between final resignation and that hope of a new experience.
Otto had stopped at the top of the stairwell, a few metres away from where the man stood jingling his keys, and tied his shoes, as if observing some deeply alien species.
The woman had her hand resting on the small of the man’s back, as if protecting him from something. She turned her face up to his while he was looking for the key, and she smiled a little, and rubbed her hand back and forth, movements small and slow.
Otto had been going to involve himself in their wooden lives somehow, ask for a cigarette, a lighter, something insignificant and dull that no one would ever remember but him, but instead he watched while the door was jogged open and the woman’s gaze lingered fondly on her husband before dropping to the ground. Hurry up, she told him. You’re always so damn slow.
He left Yekaterinburg a few months after that, long after the water pipes stopped humming at 6AM and there were no longer any Wednesday fights, because there was no one for the man to fight with. Otto Langdon, who had become Pavel Sarkisov, moved temporarily to Moscow at the behest of some contacts in the Russian military. The very colors of the place, muted aged hues like a slow-forming bruise, blue and black and grey all muddled together, had seeped into his blood: Pavel’s blood, running thin and weak and dark. Pavel was welcome everywhere he went, in that way jovial pricks often were, attractive in the manner they make you feel to be their exclusive priority, that kind of magnetism even mobsters were dimly aware of yet not unsusceptible to; well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself, because he knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of talent and charisma. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box. In that regard, Otto knew how he felt.
He’d missed Beth in Yekaterinburg, but after that, the longing was like a bad cold that hung on for years, despite a conviction that he’d get over it any minute. He didn’t like it, but that was what happened. She came to him in dreams sometime, in a moth-eaten sundress and skin like yellowed wax, the faint odour of wetted ashes and fresh-turned earth. She’d look at him then, compassionate, lifeless, understanding of the solitude and civility of grief. Katelyn was there too, still three years old, with marbles for eyes and lank clumps of dark hair, a nameless faceless child cold in her arms. It was easy to skip the tragedy and hop right to Really Fucking Disturbing.
Because some things, when you watched your employer, some high-level gangster, shoot one dealer, then shoot another, or shoot a runner when he fucked accidentally with your order, maybe have you do it yourself a few times because he’s a real motherfucker, it’s hard to grasp at once. A trick as an agent is that you don’t, because it’s really only later, in quiet, in solitude, that faint yet indelible realization dawns: when the ashes are cold, when those others have departed, when one looks around and finds oneself in an entirely different world. That didn’t happen any more, really, he didn’t like it but he wasn’t going to get shaken. Realization didn’t necessarily dawn frequently, because it had already visited so many times.
When he was standing on the subway platform in London, several years older, in the quiet and the solitude, realization didn’t dawn. Pavel, that spiteful, annoying little prick, was finally dead, and Otto Alejandro Langdon was gloriously risen, returning to his family, and that was it. On the subway there was a fat older woman holding a dog on her lap. It was hairless and ugly as hell and stared at him with bulging unblinking eyes like a torpid little fucking corpse. He stared back at it and felt that was really the capstone of the whole assignment. He wanted to fucking murder that stupid dog. It looked like a fucking cat. What was the point of having a dog when it looked a goddamn cat? Wasn’t that the exact opposite reason for getting a dog?
It was late morning by the time he reached his house, well-tended in all its leafy Finchley calm, lit from behind like a halcyon ghostly vision. There was no longer a long row of white asters blooming just in front of the porch, but some blue flower instead, small and dainty with petals shaped like teardrops and hardy long leaves. The door had been repainted brown. Not a flat, not a duplex, but something small and tidy and meaningful that they planned for some five years before any assertion of ownership. It was their personal monument.
She’d cried when he knocked on the door and stood with his bag across his shoulder like the male lead in a summertime drama-romance, returning to his girlfriend after some overseas adventure, only that he wasn’t young and ripped and his wife, in addition to not being his girlfriend, wasn’t exactly up to par with Hollywood starlets with mascara running down her face in oily rivulets. It always had to be girlfriends in those kinds of movies, because marriage, in comparison, was common and banal and lacking all that preliminary excitement of being with that special person; because when you’re with that person all the time, it quickly doesn’t feel so special. But that had never been them, thanks to Beth more than to him, frankly. It was banal sometimes, sure, the customary cram of day-to-day business, reading your toddler the same bedtime book, reheating leftovers once again, but it was that warm, homey kind of banality that suits you so well. And you’ve spent a very long time missing it.
Sure, he told her things. Not everything, not at all, but some things. A few. It definitely violated a great many of MI6 contractual agreements, and his sincerest apologies to them in a certain regard, but the truth was that Beth and Otto Langdon were married, and, as such, they were meant to represent a certain unity. It wouldn’t be a marriage if he kept the most general description of his day from her. No, honey, I didn’t happen to spend the last week in Japan, where I may or may not have killed a man over coffee yesterday morning. And how are you? That’d just be bloody stupid. A dumbshow. So, yeah, he might be bending MI6′s over the table now and then, but that was only because national security was a bag of dicks compared to the wellbeing of the Langdon family. It was nothing personal, and not as though he wasn’t an incredibly adept agent. He wouldn’t have spent five years and eleven months as Pavel Sarkisov if he wasn’t very much skilled at what he did.
The kids had been in Exeter with Beth’s mother, so he didn’t get to see them that night. He left at 11, and when Beth asked why, he almost, almost said work but thought better and said Simon. She understood, because, while Otto had very close to zero friends, Simon was what stood between that and none. They’d worked together for what, three years? Three years, maybe three and a half, sent out on quite a few ops together. Flawless success rate. Had him over a few times for dinner with Beth and little Kate.
So Otto sat in the parking lot for thirty minutes with the engine running, picking at the steering wheel and humming faintly with the shitty Christmas music. Avoiding any realization of any kind at all, because he was just going to glide back into his life seamlessly and without issue and did not want to self-sabotage in the least. A few minutes longer and he braved the chill, walking quickly into the apartment building. He’d shaved off his beard, and felt naked without it. He had the Pavel leather jacket, and the Pavel black pants, but no Pavel beard. Weird.
Standing several flights up outside Simon’s, 0010′s, apartment, it felt good, because that familiarity of seeing a friend who actually had a fucking clue how you were feeling - not that Beth didn’t, because she was amazing. This was just different.
He knocked on the door, and frowned when some fucking tall skinny lady, young, opened it. “Sorry, uh...” Otto blinked and rubbed his eyes, looking past her into the apartment for several long, tired seconds, before focusing back on her. He could be patient, maybe this was that girlfriend he’d been mentioning or something, but this was definitely a 0010 MI6 apartment, currently in use. He’d seen the file at HQ, and in addition to being just plain old fucking tired, he was fucking tired of being dicked around. “Where the hell’s Simon?”
