Our only prenup agreement was to never yell at each other. We’d both been products of broken homes, so we’d decided to always use our inside-voices.
But Tim had been acting strangely for three weeks now, and I’d had it.
“Honey! It’s like I don’t know you anymore!”
He was staring at me, well, through me.
The behavior had all started with the eggs.
My parents had come over for Christmas, and Tim made an omelette on the floor. My architect-husband cracked open three jumbo eggs, grabbed a paintbrush, dolloped it in ketchup then painted the shells with the tomato-yolk sludge.
“Matryoshka, Matryoshka,” he muttered animatedly, like a child.
“Honey, honestly this looks … like … erm … Van Gogh,” I was endorsing his artwork. He sat, fully engrossed.
My father, ever the free-spirit, gawked in approval, “Looks like someone needs an easel for Christmas!”
Tim’s masterpiece, of course, opened the door for another of my mother’s much unwanted, but highly opinionated opinions.
“Honey … ,” vodka in hand, she sucked on her joint and puffed the smoke in my face, “He’s on drugs.”
Spoken like a true psychiatrist. You know, the type who’s been divorced twice and married thrice to the same guy because “he needs health insurance”? My father, a quiet man and perfect complement to my Mom’s mouth, is a proud Facebook gay-rights activist, who definitely needs health insurance as a consequence of his numerous dalliances. Mom, for obvious reasons constantly declares how much she hates social media; “The Russian bots have taken over our brains!”
A staunch Pavlovian disciple, she even blames my father’s sexuality on his refusal to attend a conversion therapy camp for adults. The one time he ever stood up to her. “He could’ve saved our marriage”, she explained, after the second divorce, ” … but he was too caught up with Dmitri.“
I chose to ignore all her personal disasters and focus on Tim.
“Mom, he’s not on drugs, he’s just under a lot of pressure at work.”
He never talked to me about it, but Tim had been under a lot of pressure. A Russian firm had taken over his company and they were working on a new contract to build a prison. I found the plans, with Russian words scribbled all over, in the study. I hadn’t technically been snooping. Honest, but shout out to Google Translate! There were details about sleeping quarters for different hierarchies of prisoners and even warehouses for drones. Tim had been slaving over the plans day and night … and popping Xanax, so I guess technically he was on drugs. But, come on, not like … real drugs.
Today, though, I’d had enough.
And believe me I had tried.
I still hadn’t said anything about him trying to shave our precious Donskoy kitten last Tuesday. The same kitten we had gotten for ‘baby practice’, as Mom called it. “She doesn’t even have hair!” I cried to myself, but I rationalized Tim’s crime with the fact that work was brutal.
I still hadn’t said anything about him putting the car into reverse as I unloaded the shopping from the trunk.
I also totally ignored the fact that he’d been muttering unintelligible phrases in his sleep. I mean, let’s face it … between building a prison, and being overseen by Russians, he might have been having a moral crisis.
But today had been Anya’s wedding.
To be fair, I had told my sister that no one gets married looking like a Bolshoi ballerina, and that ketchup was too cheap of a ‘sauce’ for a wedding; she gave me the lecture about how elitist I had become after college.
“… and you’re an artsy-fartsist!” I retorted (Ketchup’s not a sauce, people. NOT a sauce!).
When the Master of Ceremonies asked Tim to say some good things about the new couple, it should have been me, but I personally didn’t have anything nice to say abut Jeff, Anya’s new husband. He habitually fed her eating disorder and clearly had an undiagnosed ballerina fetish. Anyway, Tim calmly walked up to Anya, who’d remained steadfast in her tutu decision, and hosed a bottle of ketchup at her, yelling, “DOSVEDANYA!”
So you’d understand that, given earlier events, it was perfectly fitting of me to forget my inside-voice.
“Dosvedanya, Tim, Dosvedanya? What even the fuck is that!”
MEANS GOODBYE, he said mechanically.
“Oh, Goodbye? Honey, are you fucking someone else? Please, just tell me.”
In the background Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor filled the gap of Tim’s silence.
“I saw your Amazon Driver application, Honey. Is work stressing you out?”
NO
“Well you’re a fucking architect, why would you apply to be a driver?”
SILENCE
“Honey, please you know you can tell me anything. Are you using again?
GLUPPY
“What?” I burst into tears.
Maybe it had been a mistake when we decided to include the “For better, for worse” part of the marriage vows. This was the fucking worst.
GLUPPY MEANS FOOLISH, AND DOSVEDANYA IS GOODBYE. IN RUSSIAN
“Do you have to learn Russian for work now, Honey?”
NO. I RUSSIAN. He had an accent now, a Russian accent; his English, like my life, was totally broken.
“Tim, Honey … what’s going on?”
TIM IS HUMAN SUBJECT, his accent was more Russian now, his tone robotic.
I lunged forward to shake sense into him, but the impact of his rigid chest sent me crashing back into the cupboard.
“Now … you’ve been … working out,” I gasped for air , “… but not that much!” I tried to reach myself up from the floor. Tim’s eyes were dead.
“Tim …”
I NO TIM
“OK, OK, whoever the fuck you are …”
DIVOC 91 IS LEADER
“Of what?”
GLUPPY, he emphasized, THE REVOLUTION
“OK, OK, I’m learning the Russian now, yeah, I get it, I’m foolish.”
MUST GO NOW
“Tim, where are you going, we need to talk. I love you, Honey.”
LOVE HUMAN WEAKNESS
So remember those alien movies where the aliens come in, and they like take over your loved ones’ bodies, but they don’t catch you, and then you have to find some intergalactic missile, or whatever, and you zap the aliens and get all your family back? This was my alien movie except the now-louder howling of Rachmaninov made it clear no one could save us.
DIVOC 91 SAY YOU JOIN ARMY TOO
“Yeah, for the revolution, right?” My mom had told me once, that agreeing with her patient’s delusions is often therapeutic. So I went along with my husband.
YES. I DRIVER. FOR THE REVOLUTION.
“Ok, Honey. I’m sure you’ll tell me what’s going on later; right now, we’re both tired.”
FIRST YOU MUST GET THIS.
“ What the hell are you doing?”
In his hand, was a vial, with the letters RBC, and a syringe. He was aspirating liquid from the vial.
YOU HUMAN NO MORE
As he closed in on me, I looked at his eyes but Tim was long gone. I fought and kicked and screamed, tried to reason with possible remnants of him, but I kept hitting cold, hard metal.
As he reached over me and plunged the needle into my neck, I finally understood it all – DIVOC 91, the prison, eggy Russian Dolls … everything made sense. I howled with laughter, as the potion set in and I realized that the Facebook trolls had been right all along.
The COVID 19 vaccine I had coaxed my husband into getting had been a Russian Bot Converter after all.
RBC.
DOSVEDANYA
THE ROUGH DRAFT 