Reminds me of this time, said Rommel.

The following story was told in Russian, as it was lived, translated to English for the sake of the reader, Russian being a stupid-ass language.

Siberia wasn't so bad a place as Solzhenitsyn made it out. Yeah, it was cold and bleak, but so is Indiana and nobody writes thousands of pages decrying forced labor camps there. Shit, that's all a steel mill is.

Though it was on by the party, rock music remained popular, especially in the out of reach places, of which there are plenty in a country that fucking big. So the security guards were over in the gatehouse practicing these badass post-new wave originals that preceded Nirvana by at least five years, but exceeded in quality and innovation anything Kurt Cobain ever produced.

So they didn't even notice me walk in. To their credit, there's not a lot of pedestrian traffic in Siberia. It's not something they were alert for.

Anyway, I made it inside, and the guys in the gatehouse are piping their stuff through the damn intercom. The whole place is rocking out to this proto-grunge riff. The singer had a rich, raspy voice that managed to make Russian a language worth singing. The soldiers are dancing around and head-bobbing, and the lab techs and scientists are thrashing and spinning, their faded white lab coats spreading out around them like when you step on a plastic Dixie cup and the cylinder splits into four even pieces still anchored to the base.

And not a damn one of them notices me just stride on into their top-secret facility.

Now remember, this is back in the day when there was no real morality issue with killin' a commie. They were all a bunch of red, baby-eating bastards as far as anybody was concerned. So I just started shooting, picking them off in the middle of their dancing. I started with the scientists, to give the guards a fighting chance, but it didn't matter. Everybody was dead but me and the guys in the gatehouse, still pumping out indie rock masterpieces to a suddenly unenthusiastic crowd.

I'm heading toward the back of the lab, and out of a side office steps this big blond Aryan-looking fucker with a flattop. Fucking Ivan Drago straight out of Rocky IV, and he looks around at his dead comrades and then back to me, and I swear to god he says, “I must break you” [said in thickly accented English]. I busted out laughing, which got this guy pissed off even more.

One listener asked in Finnish (the closest language geographically to Russian that he spoke), “Did you fight him?”

I shot him.

I mean, it wasn't as quick as that. Surrounded by nukes in various stages of completion, staring down this hulking stereotype of the enemy, lost in a swirling sea of metaphor, there's things that need be said. And the musical accompaniment crackled from the old intercom speaker the whole time.

I said to him, “The test of any great civilization is the cultivation of the means of undoing itself, followed immediately by the discovery of how to control it.” I pointed at the plutonium in the corner. “This shit is unchecked.”

He replied, “It's the brink. Everything great reaches that status by virtue of challenging the breaking point. Heroes are men that push past it. Heroes are usually dead.”

And I said, “I'm no hero.”

He said, “Maybe.”

Then I shot him. The Russians as a people never had a strong grasp on the nuclear predicament. The government-controlled media misled them. They never felt the pall of fear. But we weren't scared of death. We were scared of being forgotten, reduced to generalities of how life was before the war, before nuclear winter, before the short lives of deformed babies. Our era remembered as the dark ages all over again.

Anyway. I finished the job, and got the hell out of town. Next day, the Berlin Wall fell.

“What was the job?” somebody asked, this time in Ukrainian.

I stole the Russian Spirit, in a jar at the back of the lab.

“In a jar?” in Korean.

I mean, it was a nice jar.

He pointed to the mantelpiece above his fireplace. Next to the 1978 Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role sat a simple jar more suited for vegetables than the will of a people. Everybody stared at it, and it became less simple.

They all admitted the jar was very nice.

-----

Next: something glass