Saving Anna Karenina
Part 3
NEW YORK — “IT LOOKS LIKE A PHONE BOOTH,” said Jean Arbis.
Ara Garabedian was showing his time travel machine to the team preparing to receive the traveler from 1877 Russia. Arbis and her partner, Margaret Chapman, would be the volunteer “orientation counselors” for the time traveler. New York Post reporter Pete Schiffers quickly tagged them as a good cop, bad cop duo.
He had arrived at the 79th street apartment with a bit of a hangover from a book launch party the night before. Why the hell were they doing this in an apartment? It was one of those brick high rises near the UN, with factory-style windows, probably from the 20s. The apartment itself was a studio; the bathtub was in the kitchen, and the bed was in the living room, which doubled as Garabedian’s physics lab. There were papers everywhere, books stacked up against the walls all the way into the middle of the room. Small plastic dinosaurs covered several surfaces. The furniture looked like it came from a 1950’s elementary school. There should have been 30 reporters here. Instead, it was just Pete and his photographer. No one seemed to give a shit about time travel in the end. Or maybe they just didn’t believe it.
It was Saturday, and he had to file this story for Sunday’s paper, which meant a quick and dirty job with a good photo spread. Fortunately the photographer was early and had already taken some good shots of the tweedy women and a team of scientists, offset by the bizarre character of Ara Garabedian, a self-declared “Gurdjieff follower.” Pete hadn’t heard of Gurdjieff. Wikipedia described him as a late 20th century Caucasian mystic who traversed the Gobi desert on stilts.
“You see, the signal from 1877 is the strongest,” said Garabedian, pushing a button on a console attached to the booth. A range of lights came up on a horizontal table in the screen, some dim and only filling a third or a sixteenth of the vertical range. The one Garabedian pointed to was brightly lit and almost reached the top of the screen.
“How do you know the dates and the locations these signals are coming from?” asked Pete.
“We know the dates by reading the code within these signals,” he said. “The location — well we only know that by trial and error. We’ve determined that the thrush I brought from this 1876 signal six months ago was a Russian bird, some ornithologists at Columbia examined it.”
The thrush, called Yuri by fans, now lived in a cage inside of the tree-shaped chandelier in the Grand Central food market.
“Yuri paved the way for this,” Garabedian said now. “The bird arrived intact, and it stayed alive. Have you been to see it?” Pete nodded. He actually hadn’t. “I wasn’t expecting that, to tell you the truth,” Ara continued.
“What were you expecting?” said Pete.
“A scramble,” said Ara. “The travel puts heavy pressure on DNA. It’s like turning a blow dryer up a thousand times and pointing it directly at your polymers. So maybe the nose gets skipped — or the brain.” Pete wrote down this quote with a snicker. “But it worked. It worked!” continued Garabedian. “And now we’ve adjusted the receiving capacity to accommodate something bigger.”
“A human, you mean,” said Pete. The scientist nodded.
The Mayor had cancelled his appearance at the last minute; apparently his daughter had fallen off her horse in Los Angeles. Bloomberg was offering “humanitarian parole” to the time traveler, which Pete had only ever heard of in the context of Haitian refugees. Pete lifted his quote from a TV spot the night before.
“We’re excited to offer the myriad opportunities of a life in modern day New York City to a traveler from the past. He or she will receive a package of social benefits for three years. My administration has organized an ace team to assist the individual in orienting to life in this capital of commerce and culture.”
Jean Arbis and the Chapman woman were standing at the big window with another woman, very young, with curly, long brown hair, dressed like she had just come from a kayaking trip. Arbis was dressed in green corduroys, a white turtleneck and a tweed coat. Her salt and pepper hair was cut short. Chapman was wearing high-waisted, unflattering jeans and easy spirit sneakers; her frizzy bob framed an angelic face. The Mayor’s flack told Pete that the couple ran a poetry magazine.
“Often they don’t know about deodorant,” the young woman was saying as Pete approached. “We need to teach them how to greet people, and about personal boundaries — that’s often the biggest issue. In our culture we have bigger boundaries than most other cultures. For example, you can’t call someone at two o’clock in the morning, and you don’t tell someone you just met that you love them. They mean it in a friendly way, but here, the term has a different connotation. Safety for the refugee is our first concern.”
“Ladies,” said Pete in the flirtatious tone he used with his aunts. “Do you mind if I get a few quotes for the Post? Pete Schiffers,” he continued, extending his hand.
“Oh!” squeaked Chapman, shaking Pete’s hand. Jean looked at him abruptly, and lowered her gaze to assess him.
“Just a minute please,” she said, and turned back to address the young woman.
“I’ve heard what you have to say. And I’m willing to suspend disbelief as much as the next person. But how do you know that orienting a time-traveler is going to be anything like orienting a Sudanese refugee?”
“We don’t,” said the girl.
Pete interrupted. “And what organization are you with?”
“I’m with Crisis to Refuge ,” she responded.
“May I ask your name?” said Pete.
“Erin,” she said curtly. “Can you just give us a minute?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Pete. “I don’t mean to interrupt.” He left them to their discussion. The Chapman woman was now standing with Ara Garabedian, who was explaining his machine again. Pete needed to get home. He wanted to take a bath, drink a gin and tonic and read the Times. He had hurried out of the house without it earlier.
“How did you and Ms. Arbis get involved in this project?” he asked Chapman.
“Well, that’s an interesting story,” she said, grinning at Ara. “Jean and I are in the same consciousness-raising group as Ara. We’ve known him since — when was it Ara that you moved here from Camden?”
“Eighty-seven,” he said.
“Oh yes, so since the eighties. And when the mayor agreed to support his time travel project, we said we’d love to look after the visitor when she, or he, arrives. It’s so exciting, don’t you think?”
“It is exciting,” said Pete. He signaled to the photographer, Torsten, who came over.
“I’ve got some good shots,” he said.
Pete turned back to Ara and the woman.
“You have a poetry review?” he asked.
“Yes, Sutton Quarterly. Jean is the editor, I just write now and then, and reach out to young poets. Our office is just down the street at 63rd and Lexington.”
“Oh, we didn’t tell you,” said Chapman. “We’ve already rented her, or him, a room!”
“You paid the deposit already?” said Ara.
“Well no, I should say, we found a room. Assuming it’s not a child, assuming the visitor is an adult, she — or he — can live there. It’s in a European house! So the visitor should feel more at home. The landlady lives there with her baby and husband, she’s Italian, and he’s African-American. And they removed the dry wall from the ceilings all throughout the brownstone and stained the ceiling beams, so it looks like a Mediterranean farmhouse. It’s darling.”
“Huh,” said Pete. “Where’s the house?”
“Brooklyn!” chirped Chapman. “All the Europeans want to live there now. It’s actually in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is an historically African-American neighborhood. But the rent is very affordable, and you know, the package of benefits the visitor will be receiving is somewhat below our standard of living.”
“Isn’t that funny?” said Ara. “French people living in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I wonder what they like about it.”
“They’re Italian,” said Chapman.
Torsten was looking done from across the room, and Pete had to let him go and hurry home. He excused himself and the women said goodbye; Garabedian didn’t stop talking to look at him. It wasn’t out of rudeness, just the sort of genius that conserves energy for superior tasks.
In the elevator they planned to file at the end of the day for tomorrow’s paper. The story would probably run on page two next to news of some grisly murder in the South Bronx, or Ivanka Trump’s baby bun. As little as he liked getting up to report on Saturdays, he didn’t mind the trickle of messages he got Sunday night from fans, when every other working stiff was miserably dreading reentering productivity after a degenerate weekend.
This is part 3 of a serialized novella being published each Thursday. It is a speculative sequel to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, in which Anna doesn’t commit suicide. Check in to see where she goes instead. Read part 1 and part 2.
I’m a fiction and non-fiction writer who seeks happy endings to careers of suffering. Connect with me on Twitter. Check out Dreargin’s beautiful illustrations.
