Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Read Free Page A

any train station bathroom. I’ll tell you that for sure.”
    “I’m going to be sick,” he lied. He didn’t know what he was doing. In his mind a vague plan was struggling to take shape. His muscles stiffened one by one and a cold tingle swept up his limbs to his throat. He clenched his jaw against the idea of Dr. Nicholson’s instruments and imagined himself taller and broad shouldered, strong. He imagined himself so big that his mother couldn’t drag him anywhere. “I’m going to be sick,” he said again.
    She sighed. She lightened her grip on his arm. They started walking again, eastward. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. She paused and asked someone about a bathroom. “Inside by the ticket booths,” a man said.
    “Didn’t you go before we left?”
    Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. “I guess not.” They turned right. Forty-eight, forty-nine, through heavy doors that pushed in both directions, into a heat wave of bodies standing sweating in lines, foreign voices, more announcement bells, a puddle, and down six steps, then around a landing and down seven more. Fifty-six, fifty-seven, to the right. He could find his way back to the kiosk alone. Seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six. They stopped. He could take a breath in the bathroom and calm himself, break free of her and find his way back to the kiosk and to Drezna and the tomato fields and the Shurins. He could do that. She could go see Dr. Nicholson without him.
    They had neared the bathrooms: The smell of waste seeped through the air. “We’ll have to wait for help,” his mother said. She was breathing heavy with disgust. It was an area where no one would choose to stand around.
    “I can do it alone.”
    “No.”
    He shuffled and squirmed. “I’m sick, Mama. I’m sick.”
    “Excuse me.” She reached out to a man passing by. No response. They waited. “Excuse me,” she said again to another. “My son needs to go to the bathroom.” No response. He must have walked away.
    “I can do it myself.”
    “I said no.”
    “ Excuse me .” This time her voice was urgent. And she must have gotten someone’s attention, for it turned soft again. “My son here needs to go to the bathroom. Be kind, would you take him in for me? He’s blind, see.”
    “Well, hello.” The man smelled of yesterday’s cabbage soup.
    His mother drove a finger into his back. “Hello,” he said.
    “Well, let’s go then.”
    His face was hot. He took the man’s arm, which felt frail under his textured suit jacket.
    “You can do everything yourself, right?” the man asked in a low voice as they walked through the door and deeper into the stench.
    “Yes. Of course.” The floor was wet and slippery.
    “How did it happen, may I ask?”
    “What?”
    “The eyes.”
    Hundred seven. Eight. Nine, right on nine. The room was quiet except for a faucet dripping somewhere.
    “Don’t like to talk about it?”
    Anton said nothing. He didn’t know how it had happened. He was born to this.
    “That’s all right. Here you go.” The man took Anton’s hand and placed it against the cool porcelain of the urinal. “Don’t touch it too much, but here it is right in front of you. Is that all right?”
    If there were another door he could slip out of, if he could make himself small, unnoticeable, he could slip away from this old man and his cabbage smell and count his way right back to the kiosk. One hundred nine steps was nothing; it was half the distance from Oleg’s house to the river. And he could ask someone for help if he got lost. He could do it. He could slap his bills down for the lady in the kiosk and say Pentxaus with authority, without fear or hesitation of any kind. He would walk away a man, like any normal man, with the magazine tucked into his pants under his shirt. He would catch the next train to Drezna and be back in time for lunch with Oleg and Grandma Shurin. And she’d be sorry, his mother. She would worry and worry. She would think twice