Wakefield Read Online Free

over. She drapes herself on Zamyatin’s lap. On cue, the two tourists down their martinis and stand up to leave.
    â€œWhat about the tour?” pleads the Russian.
    â€œMaybe some other time.” Their teeth gleam.
    â€œBye-bye, be sure to see everything,” mocks Mitch, waving the end of a braided pigtail.
    â€œMitchka,” Zamyatin intones, “don’t be jealous. I will tell you a story about Russian men. For ten years before the end of communism, Russian men were becoming impotent. My friend at the Psychology Institute in Moscow studied the problem. He discovered that the future made them so nervous they couldn’t perform. Only true love could make them men again.”
    â€œThe future?” Mitch wiggles herself into a position of greater comfort. “I’m going to go back to school. I’m making good money now, but what about when I’m old? I’m thinking of studying nursing. Or Web design. Ivan, what did you do before you were a taxi driver?”
    â€œI was an Arctic architect. Did you know that buildings in the tundra sink as much as five meters every year, so every year the second floor becomes the first floor? Eventually, the top floor becomes the first floor and everyone lives under the ground.”
    â€œDidn’t Dostoevsky write something about that?” Wakefield feels the need to say, even though he knows it’s lame. He’s annoyed by the lovebirds.
    â€œSad profession, architecture,” Zamyatin sighs. “Churches, sad. Big buildings, very sad. Official buildings, sad, sad. Wolves don’t need architecture. Nature makes caves for them. Animals don’t build anything, except for birds and rodents, and they make nests from whatever they can find.”
    â€œYeah, it’s like my apartment,” says Mitch. “I find things and I take them home, but I’ll have to move soon because there is hardly any room for me anymore.” She whips her head around. One of her pigtails smacks Wakefield on the neck, the other gets tangled in the Russian’s beard. “Sorry.” She yanks her pigtail out of the scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and jumps to her feet.
    â€œI’ve got to go wash up and get high,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m in hot pursuit of the better person I know I am when I’m high. Be right back.”
    â€œPlease don’t wash,” Ivan calls after her.
    â€œThat’ll be on your tombstone,” says Wakefield.
    â€œYou’re a tombstone,” says Zamyatin. “A ten-story one and sinking rapidly.”
    The ten-story tombstone reminds Wakefield of something from the past, and he laughs. “Do you remember the Swede?”
    â€œDo I? I can still see that red beard up in the air every time I take a leak. Everybody talked to him, you know. They confessed to him, like he was a freaky priest!”
    Wakefield had met Zamyatin in the Arctic circle, at the research station at Outpost Mountain, where he’d been sent to write a story for National Cartographic about the international team that spent six months there studying the feasibility of living and building on ice. Zamyatin was one of two Russian architects, the fun one. The other one was a tormented teetotaler who never spoke. Happily, Zamyatin made up for it by filling the endless Arctic twilight with extravagant stories. At the onset of winter one of the team members, a Swedish meteorologist, died suddenly of a heart attack. Only a week earlier his body might have been transported by air to Anchorage, but the winter storms had already started and no planes could fly. At first they kept the dead Swede just outside one of the tents, wrapped in plastic, but the wind tore the plastic away and nearly made off with the body. Then they slid the body into a sleeping bag, secured it with nylon ropes, and staked them to the ice. The wind tore the sleeping bag and all the covers thereafter, so the first man to make his