Oleg Ogumurov

A waxing autumn moon rose on a clear evening in Tacoma. Oleg Ogumurov walked on sidewalks through side-neighborhoods, upright and poised, submerging nervousness under a rigorous military stiffness. He caught glimpses of Puget Sound winking in the setting sunlight, and clouds of vapor hanging over lumber mills. Dogs barked through chainlink fences, cats on porches observed the world through slitted eyes, and distant traffic stirred a burr of noise like the sea inside a shell. Leaves were beginning to turn on trees, and caught the slanting sun with flickering brilliance.
Oleg reached his destination on Fife Street and drew a deep breath. He squared his broad shoulders in front of a small white house with blue trim. An apple tree stood in the yard, its thin branches bowed by ripe golden fruits. He walked toward the front door, patting his hair, clothes, and mustache to make sure they were in order. An enormous black, white and yellow spider shifted in its broad web that stretched between the apple tree and a wiry ornamental next to the house. As an afterthought, Oleg reached up to his face and pulled a long sliver of bone out of his septum, putting it in his pocket and ringing the doorbell.
There was no immediate response, and he tried to wait patiently, but such a reservoir was not in him, and he rang the bell again. This time the door opened before he’d even let his arm fall, and he found himself staring into two dim, sleep-crinkled eyes in a face as round and pale as a moon of soap. The little mouth was a kiss of hostility, nestled above a series of chins. The body was bell-shaped, and so draped in layers of sweatclothes that its sex was intederminate.
“Yes?” The word was laden with poisonous irritation.
“I’m here to see Karen,” said the visitor.
“Who’re you?”
“Oleg Ogumurov.”
“You’re the astronaut.” The moon-faced person was clearly not impressed. “Karen ain’t here.”
“What?” Some of Oleg’s cool demeanor slipped. “She said she would be here.”
“She dinint come home last night.”
“Do you think she’s allright?”
“Huh!” snorted the person in the doorway. “She spends most nights at Hank’s these days.”
“Hank.” Oleg tried the name out on his tongue and found it distasteful. “Listen, I have come a very long way to see her. Is there any way to get a hold of her?”
“You can call her cell phone, but I’m just her roommate, and I got other things to worry about. I’ll tell her you stopped by.” The door closed, and that was that. He stood on the porch for a few moments, fingering his mustache and wiggling his toes inside his shoes. Then he turned and walked away from the house. On his way past the apple tree, he pulled one of the fruits off a low branch and tossed it from hand to hand as he looked up and down the street. Neither direction lent him purpose. He absently bit into the apple, then immediately spat it out. He looked at the white crater his teeth had left in the fruit. There were brown, mushy tubes excavated through the apple’s flesh where caterpillars had burrowed toward the seeds in the core.
Flinging the apple away, he turned right and walked down the street. It was slightly downhill and he was ready for any path that offered possible diminishment of resistance. He spied the gibbous moon between the treetops, lit though they were by the fading sun. He looked up at the sky-dome, perfectly clear and metallic blue, and wondered if this was the last sunset he would ever see.
Oleg Ogumurov had no family to speak of, and his few friends would all see him tomorrow. He had craved one last connection with this special person, whom he did not even know that well. She was, however, the only one who made his emotional compass spin in a tender direction. Gaiety and cleverness illuminated her, a life-pulse that made the world thrum in her vicinity. She had been drawn to Oleg’s warmth and charm, his easy familiarity with literature and language, his passion for mythology and beer and hockey. But she had sensed the stranger in him, that which made him foreign even to other Russians, foreign even to himself, and she was too practical not to form boundaries and barriers between their hearts. Better to find some known quantity, some Hank who could be predicted and counted-on, than to walk too close to the abyssal vortices that turned the axes of Oleg’s life-vehicle. And yet, there was an electricity between Karen and Oleg that energized both of them, so she had allowed him to stay in contact through the years. Tonight, his last night on Earth for an unknown span of time, Oleg had wanted nothing more than to bask in that shared glow, to relish smiles and laughs and eye contact, and to have one special person to say goodbye to.
He was tempted to ask himself questions about her, to theorize and agonize about where she was and why she had chosen not to see him, but an ingrained Slavic stoicism met those thoughts with cold iron, and he walked mechanically toward the traffic-noise. Soon he was at a busy cross-street, and from the corner he spied a public house called Magoo’s. There were still plenty of beers to be savored on this planet, and several hours left to him to do so.