Entry 18

THE GLASS MYSTERY

I won’t be able to read these words in the morning. Numerous shots of vodka have done little to steady my hand, although my thoughts have been pleasantly seduced. A dinner party with the leader of Russia, my favorite liquor induced fantasy, is begging for center stage on the outskirts of consciousness. I toy with it, placing the imaginary call to my housekeeper who’ll run over to Dorogomilovsky Market with the list of ingredients for the first course.

I’ve never imagined blood could spray so far or so fast from a swiftly opened throat. How would I know? I’m a desk jockey at the Embassy, an outside hire, not part of the official Foreign Service.

My friend says only men can cook meat properly, so I’ve invited him to the party to handle the roast. I saw the suckling pig he’d killed last New Year’s and curled at the bottom of a red plastic bucket. Such a tender tableau, it looked as if it slept rather than marinated. Later that evening, I warmed my hands over a make-shift barbeque haphazardly thrown together in the middle of a snow-covered parking lot. Toward midnight, our party continued upstairs in the kitchen of a spa abandoned after the Fall. I savored a bite of the crisp roasted skin of the butchered animal before heading downstairs to the sauna and the algae covered ice cold pool.

The rosettes in the snow surrounding the woman’s body attested to the amazing projectile strength of blood. Perfectly formed rosebuds as succulently red as the beads on the rosary I bought in Paris the year before.