Learning to Swear in America by Katie Kennedy Page B

one of them. Just this week I gave a girl a doughnut!
    Yuri retreated to his office.
    So there were extra seats in the cafeteria, and people who needed seats. And it was rude for me to sit down, but it wasn’t rude that no one invited me to sit . He blew air out sharply. America should come with a manual. Or is that what the Statue of Liberty is holding?
    When the call for sunset came, Yuri intended to stay in his office, but eventually wandered to the back of the herd of scientists watching in silence as another day slipped away. The need to gather, to look at the orange-streaked sky, was something primitive. This must be what it was like to have a migratory route. Like birds, or turtles. He spoke to no one and kept his eyes down as they ripped off another piece of duct tape. There were thirteen strips left. Yuri watched until the last streaks ofcolor had darkened almost to black, then caught his ride back to the hotel.

    The housekeeper had made his bed and put out fresh towels. He opened the middle dresser drawer and lifted the ice bucket. The mouse blinked up at him, sitting by a pile of its own feces.
    “I’m sorry, Myshka.”
    He lowered his hand down beside it and dropped a half-dried scrap of cheese from his lunch sandwich into his open palm. The mouse walked onto his hand, its tiny claws scratching. He gave it a moment to eat, then gently closed his fingers and lowered the mouse into his pocket.
    He took the stairs to the hotel’s back entrance and slipped out into the night, pushing through the line of scrubby trees and brush between the hotel lot and parking for the restaurant next door. He strode quickly over to the next street, away from the highway, and glanced over his shoulder. He was alone in a strange city.
    He started walking.

CHAPTER 8
SOLVING FOR THE UNKNOWN X
    The night enfolded him, took him in as its own. He stepped through shadow, trying to look purposeful. To attract no attention. No one had said he couldn’t leave the hotel, and he knew some of the Americans ate dinner at a restaurant in town. But he was pretty sure that people who watched your computer expected to know where to find you.
    He passed a mini mall with a laundromat at the end, saw clothes rotating in dryers, the centrifugal forces keeping them in orbit, fabric moons with no planet. A solar system with no sun. Bored-looking people were reading magazines, and a grizzle-chinned man stood by himself, watching his clothes circling. Yuri wondered if he’d ever become a pathetic old man with nothing to do but watch his clothes dry. Then it occurred to him that he was watching the man watch his clothes spin, and that was surely worse.
    He cut through the parking lot of a body shop, closed for the night, and a gray cat concealed behind a garbage can streaked away from him, heading for a stand of some spiky desert plant at the lot edge. He stroked the mouse in his pocket. Cars roared by, lights bouncing, radios blasting sound waves that lengthened in their wakes. In some sector there would be crime. Good to avoid that, but it would be easier if he knew where the bad sections were.
    A city, and yet nothing like Moscow, with an aorta of river flowing out of its curled, ancient heart. His home was a huge place now, gone to flab, larger than its ancestral heart could support. The onion domes of the old churches were dwarfed by the stone monstrosities Stalin had built. Moscow was bigger than New York and could be very dangerous, yet he was comfortable in its metro lines, on its diesel-clouded streets.
    This hot, dry city felt wrong. The weight of speaking only English for days now, of signs written in the Latin alphabet, was oppressive. It occurred to him that if they didn’t stop the asteroid, he would die here. In a city, but alone. The hairs on his neck rose. He looked over his shoulder at the sky, half expecting to see the 1019. He imagined he could hear its soundless scream as it hurtled through the night.
    He walked for an hour, looking