"I sometimes wonder," Pineapple said, "if you were in a spaceship, say out there by Orion, and you started going faster and faster, till you were going as fast as the light, and you turned your headlights on, would anything happen?"
Fred sipped some brew, wiped his walrus moustache on his hand. "Fast as the light," he said, "you'd be squooshed."
"Okay, but leave that on the side for now. The headlights come on? Yes or no?"
Fred thought it over. "Middle a space, whaddya need headlights for?"
Piney gave up on that one, fell briefly silent. They strolled. Off to one side, slabs of ancient rusted military fence tugged against their stanchions; up ahead, the unnatural shapes of flat-topped earthwork pyramids poked bluntly toward the sky. Piney started in again. "Fred, you think life is interesting?"
"Interesting," said Fred. He scratched his ear. "I dig holes. I drink beer. Interesting is not the first word springs to mind."
"I do," Piney said. "I think life is interesting."
Fred guffawed. "Nothing happens to you, Piney. You sit on your ass and hold a fucking sign."
"What happens, that's not what makes it interesting. What happens, that's really, like, beside the point."
Fred didn't follow up on that, and Pineapple kept strolling, looked up past the fringe of mangroves. Way high up, so high that you could barely see the flashing of its wing lights, a plane was moving south to north; Piney decided it was coming from Peru and going, maybe, to Chicago.
"Fred," he said, "d'you think people's faces change, d'you think they look different, when they're in love or something?"
"Jesus Christ," said Fred.
"Today I saw a woman go into a hotel down on Whitehead Street. She came out a few minutes later and she looked completely different."
"Prob'ly got laid."
"Coupla minutes, Fred. Don't make it crude. She came out, she had a glow."
"Who gives a rat's ass?"
"I thought that was interesting. This is what I'm trying to explain. Not what happens. Things like that. That's what makes life interesting."
Fred polished off his beer, crushed the can and dropped it. "Piney," he said. "Being you, even for a minute—it must be a really odd experience."
The Ukrainian busboy had a pale and doughy face, and he was still wearing the smock he'd worn at work. Originally crisp, almost medical, it was stained now with lobster juice and butter sauce and splotches of wine and smears of vinaigrette. The busboy smelled of detergent and grease, and he couldn't decide on a posture. One moment he was stiff, skinny shoulders back as if trying to look military, and the next he was scrunched and furtive, quailing.
Finally, Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky said to him, "Stay still, Pavel. Are you a Ukrainian or a cockroach?"
The busboy stalled in his squirming. It seemed to take a monumental effort, as if his skin was holding back a platoon of snakes and worms. He cleared his throat, said to the two old Russians who sat while he stood, "I come because I think you like to know. Twice already they are there together. One time lunch, now dinner. Hexpensive, I tell you. And always they are talking, talking, talking."
Cherkassky turned his scooped-out doleful face toward his colleague. They were sitting across from each other on leather settees in Markov's living room. A fire was blazing in the fireplace and they were drinking cognac. It might have been Moscow except it was nearly the tropics. Markov waved his snifter casually, indulgently. He even smiled. "They are young," he said. "They like each other. Of course they talk, talk, talk."
Cherkassky frowned, turned back to the busboy. "And all this talking, talking, talking. They talk of love? Of politics? Of business?"
The busboy flicked up his unspeakable sleeves, interlaced his fingers. "Yes," he said.
Cherkassky spanked the arm of the settee. "Which of these, fool?"
The busboy hitched back his skinny butt, executed an appalling shallow bow. "Always I am clearing, running," he explained. "Salad plates. Butter. Cleaning, someone spills. I only hear a little now, a little later." He stood there fidgeting.
Markov raised a fat hand, gestured him over. He reached into the pocket of his brocade smoking jacket produced a hundred dollar bill. He gave it to the busboy, then motioned him away with a gesture like pushing crumbs.
When he was gone, Cherkassky said, "This worries me, Gennady."
Markov swirled his brandy. "Like everything, Ivan." He paused, then claimed an old friend's prerogative to tease. "Still you are the fretting bureaucrat. Straight from Gogol you are."
The thin man didn't smile. "For a newspaper she works. This I do not like."