“The word ‘people’ is unpleasant to me … I love concrete people, enlightened people who live conscious lives and do not simply sit there and vegetate.”—Vladimir Sorokin
There comes a point when you get so sick of yourself, of your fits and spirals, the mistakes you’re too old now to be making, that the only way forward is to become somebody else. That’s where Brin’s at that fourth week in February, too soon into the new year for everything to feel as fixed and stale as it does. She’s got this plan, though, to do something so uncharacteristic. She figures if she can do that, do the most un-Brin thing imaginable, it’ll act as a system restart, a kind of self-detonation. Obliterate the old her, basically, to make way for the new.
Which is why she agrees to meet Paul in the alley behind Greeley Brewing Company, thirty-eight miles from her apartment, a full hour before sunrise. It’s release day for Something Something Triple IPA. That’s not just Brin’s shorthand for it, either, but what it’s actually, officially, called: a beer so epic it doesn’t matter if its name shows up on search engines or not. That’s what Paul calls it: a beer so epic. Paul says the ones who want to find it, will.
Looks like they found it, thousands of them, because by the time Brin arrives, the line’s wrapped around the corner and stretching down one, two, three, she loses count of how many blocks. Paul waves manically a few people from the very end, his posture inhumanly straight in his lime-green camping chair. He clears the stack of board games off the matching chair across from his on the congested sidewalk, and gestures for Brin to sit down, get comfortable. It’s gonna be a while.
At least six hours, he explained when he invited her, if last year’s wait time is any indication. In the open cold, no pop-up tents or patio heaters.
Longer, if the staff don’t keep it moving or if customers try to sneak more than the two growlers their wristbands allow. Colder, if that front from Vancouver sweeps through.
He said it like a challenge, one Brin accepted. She’s getting something out of this, after all: an act of extreme and, more important, extremely-unlike-her spontaneity. System-restarting spontaneity. Up-for-anything, down-for-anything, free-and-easy Brin? Come on through.
At the end of the line, she zips her coat up to her chin and smiles grimly. Drops a deck of cards and a pack of HotHands—last-minute panic purchases from the gas station on her drive in—on top of Paul’s ancient-looking game of Scrabble.
What Paul’s getting out of this, besides the rationed beer, she can’t say. Presumably the world’s longest, most boring second date.
***
Later, he’ll tell Brin it was a test of patience, part of his dating methodology: that the second through fifth dates should test, discretely, for some key characteristic he’s looking for in a wife. He once took a woman to Buffalo Wild Wings to make sure she wasn’t too fussy to eat with her hands. Another time, he brought a date to a great-uncle’s funeral, to see if she could “hang.”
Then there’s the line on Something Something’s release day. A test that Brin, obviously, fails.
“What a douche canoe,” Margaret says after. “Should’ve known when he asked you out the first time. Valentine’s Day, really? To not have a date himself is one thing, but to assume you don’t is another.”
“But I didn’t.”
“That’s completely beside the point.”
Brin’s sister is only in her first year of law school, but she was born a pit bull, and she’s been foaming at the mouth, yanking at the chain in the direction of Brin’s enemies, since their playground days. She once gave a kid a black eye for calling Brin a communist, even though the kid was in third grade and Brin was in second and none of them, least of all little Margaret, knew what a communist was.
Brin’s pouring boiling water into a bowl of oatmeal, already mentally committed to a weeklong diet of hot foods. She figures it’ll take at least that long for her to regain circulation to her internal organs.
She made it two below-freezing hours outside of Greeley Brewing Company.
Paul’s probably still in line.
“It’s actually xenophobic for him to make you stand in a line that long.” Margaret’s leaning against the kitchen counter, tapping the corner of her Pop-Tart against the Formica for emphasis, closing-argument style.
Margaret thinks everything’s xenophobic, and she doesn’t use a plate nearly as often as Brin would like.
“He didn’t make me do anything,” Brin says. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
But she does know, because it comes up at least every other time her family gets together: how core it is to the Russian experience, waiting in those interminably long lines. Lines for bread, milk, sausage, sugar, shoes. Lines for books, for life-saving medicines, for your monthly allowance of coffee or tea. For decades, bananas were so hard to come by that people joked they must be an invention of children’s movies.
Get Brin and Margaret’s parents drinking, and they’ll start waxing nostalgic about the peculiar taste of Soviet champagne, often the only booze on the shelves back when, and the ration coupons they used to buy soap on the verge of the USSR’s dissolution. How during widespread shortages, when the country was at its most isolated, people would hurriedly join any line they saw forming, hoping for baby formula or imported trainers, but knowing that, whatever it was, if there was a line for it, it must be worthwhile.
And the American stuff? Nothing made them more desperate. A pair of Levi’s cost a month’s salary. When the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990, the line was 38,000 customers long.
“You could wait five hours for a block of tasteless cheese and still not get it,” their father would say, waving his fork over the table at family dinner, instantly rendering that restaurant’s twelve-dollar chili mac a senseless luxury.
“Five hours?” their mother would hmph. “Could be your whole life!”
Brin’s always assumed there was a message tucked away in all of this, for her and Margaret and the rest of their generation. Those who carry within them the deadly famines of the 1920s and ’30s, the siege of Leningrad during World War II, when for two and a half years Hitler’s army tried to starve out the city by cutting off its food supply, every railway an ablated vein, and grandmothers making bread with offal, with wood shavings, with cat food; and now, looking at those pictures, listening to those stories, you’ll learn all you’ll ever care to know about how the body devours itself when it has no other option.
And every long line, every shortage since.
Brin’s always assumed there’s a message, a point. But whether it’s that she should get accustomed to waiting or shouldn’t tolerate it, should prepare for scarcity as a way of honoring her ancestors’ suffering or live in excess as a kind of revenge… that she’s never quite figured out.
It does explain, though, why, two hours into that beer line with Paul—by all appearances a special event, chipper local film crews emerging with the sun—Brin starts to feel woozy, all of a sudden too aware of the blood behind her eyes. Her bones feel stuck with iron filings. Too heavy for Paul’s camping chair, the concrete sidewalk beneath it, this moment, the earth. The air smells musty and corrosive. She sneezes, and when she sneezes her body jingles like a bell.
It’s not till later that Paul will tell Brin patient women make good mothers. Technically, he’ll be the one to break things off with her.
For now, this false-still morning, this fourth week in February, he just rummages through his backpack, surfaces with something, hands it to her, pats her on the knee. “Here you go,” he says. “You’re just cold.”
Or maybe it was: “Tired.”
Could’ve been: “Hungry.”
But Brin swears, in the seconds before she stands up, knocks the camping chair onto its side, and fully, decisively bails, she sees something out there, grinning at her from the front of the line. With its too-long teeth, its ice-blue eyes. The people closest to it are fuzzy and distorted. Their figures warp so they appear first to be stooped over, then bent far enough backward for their spines to snap.
That thing. It’s raspy-edged and siphoning all color from the world around it.
It’s as near to the front as she can see, which isn’t very.
Kristina Ten’s stories appear in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Split Lip, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the *McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, and has been a finalist for the Locus Award and the WSFA Small Press Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Born in Moscow, she has lived most of her life in the U.S., in the company of mischievous dogs, melodramatic plants, and bookshelves full of fairy tales. Find her at kristinaten.com.
JMWW 