Something wrong with Rozanov

DenDerty — Sad

Boston, January 2018

"Well then," the woman in the rectangular video call window smiled welcomingly, yet calmly. "I’m glad you returned, Ilya." This was their second session. Galina Molchalina was considered a renowned psychiatrist in Moscow. Medical ethics forbade advertising such things, but Ilya was aware that her clientele included show business celebrities, top managers of major Russian enterprises, and government bigwigs from the highest echelons. Or so they said. Her track record was impressive: a diploma with honors from Sechenov University, graduate and doctoral studies at Moscow State University, teaching and consulting at the Serbsky Institute — specifically with a focus on criminalistics and pre-trial examination. This item in her biography interested Ilya the most; it reminded him somewhat of the plot ofThe Silence of the Lambs. Her undeniable professional coolness seemed to challenge him. "How was your week?" Galina asked, holding a delicate pause. Ilya was in no rush to answer. On the one hand, he didn’t share the joy regarding his return to therapy; on the other, silence was a way to drag things out until the end of the call. "Fine. Generally." Galina remained silent, looking expectantly straight into the camera. Ilya realized that, unlike him, she was looking at the lens rather than her own reflection on the monitor. This made her gaze feel uncomfortably close, as if there weren’t thousands of kilometers between them. It was unsettling, and Ilya caught himself averting his eyes. "Yeah, not much to tell, really. Had a game against New Jersey, we crushed them, as usual. Bruised my shoulder." "No serious consequences?" "No, everything’s fine." Galina nodded and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of her nose. The third long pause began — their entire conversation basically consisted of such pauses. It was infuriating. Ilya knew that a therapist was generally supposed to draw the client into dialogue, ask leading and clarifying questions, but Galina didn’t do that. "Maybe you’d rather tell me howyou’redoing?" Ilya leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. The pose was imposing enough to count as an attempt to humiliate her slightly. "I’m doing quite well, Ilya," she replied with a deathly calm face. Then she fell silent. "It seems that your last name suits your style of work perfectly. It is Molchalina, isn’t it?" Ilya was aware he was being rude. (Translator's Note: Molchalina comes from the root 'molchat' - to be silent.) "That is correct. What else can you say about my style of work?" "I don’t know." "You give up quickly." Ah, so that’s how it is, Ilya thought, and his lips slowly stretched into a smile. Several more minutes of deathly silence followed—tension-filled, or so it seemed to Ilya. This pleased him a little. "Ilya, please remind me, why did you come to me?" Galina picked up a pen and wrote something in her planner. "Someone very close to me forced me." "Forced you?" Ilya sighed heavily and pushed himself further away from the table. This was starting to get annoying. "Let’s just say we made a deal." "I can assume you value this person very highly if you agreed to start therapy on their initiative." The idea of therapy had indeed originated with Shane, and Ilya struggled to imagine the effort it took him to find a suitable doctor. The list of requirements was massive: Canadian and American doctors seemed too soft and fragile to Ilya, so the doctor had to be Russian-speaking and living in Russia, with the best possible education, an impeccable reputation, and, ultimately, a working approach that would allow them to slowly, carefully, yet effectively dissect Ilya down to his molecules, wash every single particle, and sew him back together with microsurgical precision. Shane had built an entire persuasion strategy and started implementing it about six months ago: first gently, through diplomatically calibrated arguments, appealing to the fact that Ilya, according to his observations, had started sleeping worse and would periodically, on the eve of routine matches or throwaway press conferences, suffer panic attacks uncharacteristic of him, which eventually began to be accompanied by brief fainting spells. In the end, Shane found an opened pack of Xanax in Ilya’s possession when he was trying to find his own car keys in Ilya’s backpack. Of course, he would never have done so on purpose: Hollander urgently needed to get to his parents’ place while Ilya was soaking in the bathtub, and he hadn’t wanted to disturb him. That was the last straw and, simultaneously, the cause of their first real conflict. Ilya gave in, largely to never again see Shane that angry. Angryat him. He finally opened his mouth. "You know, I’ve read and watched a lot about all this shrink crap. I know how it works. You’ll ask about my childhood, my family, how I grew up, how I was whipped with a belt for missed pucks, how I smoked, jerked off, and got laid for the first time. We’ll talk about my father. We’ll talk about my mom," Ilya smirked, not hiding his irritation. He didn’t like talking this much, but the words forced their way out of him like bile from his esophagus. "Then you’ll say: ‘Rozanov, you have depression,’ prescribe Prozac, and we’ll part ways — if not forever, then for a long time. So let’s get straight to the point, why waste time?" Galina sat motionless as an owl. Her dark grey eyes fixed on the center of the monitor; it felt as if he were pinned to a glass slide, and she was observing him through a microscope lens. "Were you punished despite your success in hockey?" "Jesus fucking Christ," Ilya almost groaned and dropped his head onto the table with a characteristic dull thud. Another terribly long pause. Ilya was internally counting the minutes until the end of the session; Galina wrote something in her planner again. "If not for yourself, then try at least for the person who cares about you." "You are trying to guilt-trip me, which is tacky at best and incompetent at worst." He had to admit, Shane knew how to care exceptionally well — this ability of his had astounded Ilya, sometimes unpleasantly, from the very beginning. Care, as Shane exhibited it, wasn’t just an action; rather, it was a soft but rapid, very steady and confident force, like light or sound. Like it or not, this force would catch up with you if Shane decided it was necessary. Partly, this lay at the core of one of the fundamental differences between them: Shane’s "must" held a unique creative power; Ilya’s "must" was born of contradiction, a sense of duty, and eternal resistance. I wonder how he is doing there, Ilya thought. January snow was falling slowly, gently stirring the curtain of thick night darkness behind the panoramic window. Just do it. Pull yourself together, take it and do it. Even if just for him. Exclusively and only for him. "I charge you not for time, but for the result. Fortunately or unfortunately, in our case, the result depends largely on you. As an athlete, you should understand this." "Galina," Ilya almost interrupted her, "I didn’t mean to offend you." "Yes, you did," she countered. "But there’s nothing bad about that."

***

Staying at Hollander’s after games in Montreal slowly became a habit, although it had also begun to feel like something illegal and wrong. Shane allocated him half the shelves in his closet, bought him a luxurious bathrobe and warm slippers — Ilya was very glad that Canadians, like Russians, also took off their shoes when entering the house. "If you were American, I wouldn’t get along with you," Ilya muttered, hooking his pants onto a hanger. "The climate just binds us. Snow, mud," Shane replied, barely looking up from his reading. "No, Americans are just animals." "You built a career playing for America," Shane was still focused on the book but sounded displeased. "Do you have no shame?" Ilya chuckled. He liked watching Shane when he didn’t notice. Reading glasses suited him insanely well and made him look a bit like a nerd — the kind Ilya would have threatened to beat up in public, but secretly been friends with at school. "I built a career because I’m a fucking awesome hockey player,radost’ moya." "You’re such an asshole." Insults were Ilya’s standard form of communication: it was customary to spit them at an interlocutor to sting and offend, and it was just as habitual to use them against oneself to remind oneself once again who you really are — after a failed practice or a runny nose that appeared before an important competition. "Asshole," "dickhead," "ass," voiced by Shane, were perceived differently, as something intimate and dear, as if Ilya had been patted on the hair.Alwaysscold me, please, Ilya thought, laying his head on the pillow next to someone else’s shoulder. The orange light of the wall lamp beside the headboard descended to the floor in a fuzzy cone, softly illuminating Shane’s hands, the thick book they held, and the left side of his face. A soothing warmth radiated from his body, like from an iron radiator against which Ilya, in his childhood, would press his hands, frozen after long winter walks. Sleep was pulling his eyes shut; Ilya resisted as best he could — there was much to think about. The last year had turned everything upside down, or right side up — it was hard to say which direction was correct. It’d have been great for the volume of past and upcoming events to be spread over at least a couple of years, because Ilya couldn’t keep up with the changes. Soon would be the first anniversary of his father’s death and the moment Ilya severed ties with his own brother and his native country. Soon the last season with the Boston Raiders would end. Closer to mid-spring, Ilya would move to Ottawa and sign with the Ottawa Centaurs for the next year. They would surely snap him up; they had long been missing a strong captain. He would need to find housing there; an apartment would likely work best. He could get something similar to Shane’s condo — surely Shane had contacts for good real estate agents in Canada. Or rent for now? And the house in Boston? Sell it or keep it for the time being? Perhaps Svetlana could live there if she wanted. They hadn’t talked much lately—called each other a month or a month and a half ago while she was away in Russia. The conversation was short and dry. Ilya was sure it was his fault. You can’t keep a woman near you knowing you can give her nothing. She deserves much more. The past year had taken everything Ilya feared losing from his life. The past remained far behind countless kilometers of distance, hundreds of international flights, myriads of sharp shards of dishes smashed in anger. He could have started breathing deeply, but Ilya was afraid to take the first sip of the unknown free air. He was a cosmonaut sent on a solitary reconnaissance expedition to an unknown planet where no man had gone before. Everything here was conducive to life. Here there was real ground underfoot, not clouds of cosmic gas deceptively resembling solid earth, only the gravity was noticeably stronger — the ribbed soles of his boots pressed into the loose sandy surface. The instruments accurately showed an acceptable presence of oxygen in the air of this strange planet and the absence of harmful impurities capable of dissolving his insides into a thick suspension of blood, tissue, and mucus in seconds. Ilya looked at the needle of the oxygen gauge attached to the tank on his back: the supply of familiar Earth air would last about another half minute. There was nothing else to do. Holding his breath, he pressed a small button located on the temple of his hermetic helmet, and the thick glass visor rose to his forehead with a characteristic whistling sound. There was no more protection, and he had to take the risk. An insistent pulse began to hammer in his temples, growing louder.

Ilya.

From behind the distant desert horizon, the local sun appeared. It was several times closer than our familiar Sun is to Earth, and because of this, it rose above the ground line much faster, blocking out a significant part of the sky. The sun, or whatever one should call it, differed greatly in shade — its color veered into reddish-brown, with flaming tongues at the edges, as if copied from an illustration in a children's encyclopedia about space. It seemed someone called him by name — a metallic, robot-like voice seemed to call out to him from somewhere far away and to the side. Must be auditory hallucinations arising from prolonged isolation. There was still enough breath in his lungs. Ilya. The voice called him again, but now closer to his left ear. Ilya was scared as hell and, through sheer willpower, held back the dangerous, alien atmosphere from entering his lungs. The new Sun hung like a giant burning pancake high above his head, flooding the entire visible surface of the planet with orange light, the brightness of which made him want to squint. A drop of cold sweat rolled from his temple down the cheek of the glass; a pulsating vein swelled on his forehead.So, this is how it all ends, he thought, lifting his face to the unknown luminary above his head. All the blood in his body migrated in a furious stream to his brain: his head was literally bursting with pain from approaching hypoxia, and he took his first, unjustifiably deep and loud gulp of air through his mouth. "Ilya," sharply opening his moist eyes, Ilya saw Shane’s face right in front of him. It was definitely him, and his voice wavered nervously. "You’re suffocating, Ilya, wake up, wake up, please!" Ilya blinked quickly several times to dry the tears that had welled up. The black, bead-like irises in Shane’s eyes darted briskly left and right — Ilya knew what that meant: Hollander was no less scared than he was. Ilya reached out one hand to his face, and with the other covered the gold cross on his chest. "Just a dream. Sleep." His breathing gradually calmed. Shane continued to look at him point-blank, then crawled out from under the blanket — his legs were hit by cold air — and returned to the bed a couple of minutes later with a glass of water, a Xanax pill in his palm, and a very mournful face. Ilya’s second dream that night was much calmer. He dreamt of his mom, and it was a wonderful dream.