TUBE

11:09

The moment Olesya bent over to pick up TUBE, it vanished.

She looked and felt about the floor: nothing.

She folded up her bunk and inspected the storage bin. It contained her old backpack and her tattered dance bag.

She folded up Natasha's bunk. In the bin sat the two new suitcases her parents brought her from Bulgaria. Made from real leather, not like Olesya's cheap junk.

No TUBE.

"Shit," she muttered, folding the bunks back down. She stood still for some time, then got dressed, wiped her face with a towel, and sat by the window.

"There is no TUBE," she said. "You lost it, remember?"

She did, only too well.

Olesya pressed her cheek to the cold glass, thinking about her father, , the way she remembered him before he was killed.

He worked as a car attendant and had a weakness for all things foreign. He knew a passenger who routinely smuggled in goods from America. Papa helped him hide them, and one day the passenger gave him a gift—for his little daughter. At least this was Mama's version of the story. How true it was, Olesya didn't know, but the toy train Papa presented to her on her fifth birthday was true enough.

"This is a very special toy, Olesya," he said. "Every child's envy. In the Soviet Union we don't have toys like that."

Olesya didn't understand the word envy, but she was too afraid to ask. When Papa got excited, his eyes bulged out, and it was best to keep quiet.

"Feel the quality." He grabbed her hand and slid it over the smooth metal body. "Feel it. It's from America. It's called TUBE: Trans-Urban Blitz Express." He pointed to the letters stamped on the side. The engine was painted red, and it had a big headlamp like a mean blind eye.

Papa pressed it into her hand. "Say TUBE."

"TUBE."

"Trans-Urban—"

"Trans-Urban . . ."

"—Blitz Express."

". . . Blitz Express," Olesya dutifully repeated, taking care to pronounce it exactly as he said.

Papa smiled. "That's my girl. Want to play with it?"

Six years later he was killed in an accident.

It was an unusually cold winter, and his own train had stopped a few kilometers from Simferopol. He was hacking the ice off the wheels of the last car. The official explanation was that he didn't hear the freight train until it was too late. It slammed into the car, telescoped through it, and killed Papa and twelve more unfortunate passengers.

The real version? Who knew. They were never told.

A month after Papa's funeral, Mama collected all his things and threw them in the trash. And in August of that same year, Baba Zina—Papa's mother—died from a heart attack. Mama and Olesya took a train to Simferopol, and from there a taxi to Alupka.

At her funeral, people were saying that Baba Zina died from grief. Olesya asked Uncle Shurik how one could die from grief. He told her Baba Zina never felt grief once in her life. As her son, he knew it. People were just afraid to say what she really died from.

"What's that?" Olesya asked.

"Meanness," he said.

Three days later they returned to Moscow, and TUBE was missing.

Olesya peeled her cheek away from the glass and looked down at her hands.

The terror she felt when she saw Dima's penis as TUBE had already started to fade. She was good at forgetting. She'd forget this too. She'd talk to Natasha to distract herself. Better yet, she'd ask her how she did it. How did she sleep with all those men and have them run after her like dogs, tongues lolling out? And what an orgasm felt like anyway. How could she come ten times in a row?

"If I come, maybe Dima will love me. He doesn't love me right now. He doesn't even want me."

The train started slowing. The engineer announced a five-minute stop at Tula station.

Olesya put on her coat, grabbed her hat, and went out to go look for Natasha.