Asher ✓

12 | settle

AUGUST 16, 2009 / ASTORIA, QUEENS

On his second day in America, Asher woke up on a pile of hoodies and towels. He and his father had to fashion a makeshift bed for the night with the things in their suitcases.

And Asher could only feel amazed and intrigued by the city he lived in, but there was a downside to his travels. New York was ten hours behind his hometown, Denhvoy Alvorod. Falling asleep last night hadn't been a problem at all, because Asher had been on the verge of collapsing the second Marv the taxi driver revved away. One might imagine the frustration he felt at having to sleep on the floor, but Asher had learnt not to complain about his life.

New York summers, he noted that morning, were much, much warmer than Russian summers. And New York smelt weird — Asher noticed the odour of fumes and pollution faintly at the airport, but not so much in Astoria, Queens. But it, as he remembered, was foul compared to crisp leaves and the sharp tang of ice.

The school year started in two weeks, and Asher solemnly realised, as he and Vasily were walking back from a breakfast at a local diner, the rest of his summer break would probably be spent unpacking their belongings and rearranging their new home.

Not often did he use his imperfecta as an excuse to avoid manual labour — his father never forced him to work because of it, anyway — but Asher was already preparing an alibi as to why he just simply couldn't help bring the bed frames and couches into the house.

As understanding as he was, Vasily wouldn't buy it. Asher knew that as soon as the idea of making excuses had formed in his head, because though his disease was still very much active — one could tell by the way his back hunched and the slightly blue tinge of his sclera that was only visible on a clear day — he hadn't broken a bone for years. Whether it was intentional or not, Asher had become more careful, and stronger.

After all these years, Vasily still vividly remembered what Asher's first paediatrician had told him and his wife on the day they found out about osteogenesis imperfecta.

"Luckily for you, type I imperfecta usually sees most of the broken bones before puberty. I'd say once your son is fifteen, he'll have a fairly normal life."

His immediate reaction was nostalgia at how fast the time flew.

His second was hope. 

Asher's fourteenth birthday was in six months — surely, he could make it to fifteen without any more trouble, and have a normal life from then on? It was, without much doubt, Vasily Delrov's greatest wish for his son. A future without the constant shadowy tinge of check-ups, shattering diagnoses and declining opportunities.

A delivery truck with a company name written in bold English rolled noisily to a stop, in a flurry of exhaust at ten past eleven. The logo of an anthropomorphic cartoon cottage on the truck's side overlooked the goings-on outside the new Delrov house as the two company workers, Vasily Delrov and his son shifted the exact same furniture they used had in Russia into the suburban two-storey.

Two hours into the workload — Asher hadn't gone through with his plans of lying, because his conscience always held up against bad temptations — he needed to sleep. Desperately.

His stiff legs felt it, his drooping eyelids and sagging shoulders felt it. It was bedtime, for sure. Asher needed to only look up at the sky, cyan blue and speckled with clouds, gloriously picturesque in the light of a golden afternoon, to learn that New York disagreed with him, spectacularly.

Unfurling the roots of their tiny family tree — it was more of a family ficus, actually — into Astoria was a new kind of torture, when he had to wake up and fall asleep ten hours later. When he had to forget how right his old furniture looked back home, and accustom to seeing the tables and couches against green walls instead of white.

During the entire process, Aria Turnick was nothing short of a life-saver. She had packed up and sent boxes of the clothing they had to leave behind, family photos, desks, lamps, hair dryers — everything else they owned — via airmail and ship. While it only added to the pile of things they had to move, reposition and polish, the pair appreciated that someone was looking over them — the way Ekaterina would have.

Asher hadn't seen his maternal cousin for a month, when both sides of his family joined to farewell them. Aria was twenty-six at the time, and settling into a long (but boring) career of market analysis. Many a time, Aria had told Asher that the only reason she ended up in a high-rise building with shiny windows on the outside and dull walls on the inside was for the money.

"If you can help it," she advised, "don't end up like me. Find something you like and get so good at doing it that people will have to pay you to watch." It was solid wisdom, Asher agreed, but much easier said than done.

Especially when a lot of the things he'd like to try might shatter him.

Finally, on the last day of summer, the Delrovs could proudly proclaim that they had unpacked everything, and they had a home once again. It was late that afternoon, with amber rays of sunlight raining over his pale skin, that Asher had the honour of opening the taped cardboard box with his mother's things inside. Aria had nestled everything amidst protective layers of bubble wrap.

Why can't humans be bubble-wrapped? Why must everyone be so vulnerable to breaking? Asher ruminated, peeling back the layers with shaking hands.

His hands shook randomly, even when he was completely at ease. Nothing helped stop it, so Asher just adjusted to never having a fully steady writing hand. Giorgi Polzin — the specialist he regularly checked up with, back in Russia — had told him it was because he was, physically, weaker than most others. And sometimes, his body just couldn't deal with the stress it was under.

But the trembling of his slim fingers hardly mattered to Asher, as he set eyes on the trinkets and trifles that he hadn't seen for years. His mother's university graduation certificates and doctorates were tacked to the wall by the staircase — this house had no fireplace mantle to display Ekaterina Delrov's academic brilliance on — and the Mensa acceptance certificate was put on a bookshelf that had yet to be filled with books neither Vasily or Asher owned.

Most likely, Aria would send over more of Ekaterina's belongings in intervals. She read with a dedicated passion, and Asher was nearly certain that he'd soon have her philosophy and poetry books sent over. Followed by science journals, Ekaterina's vast classic novel collection and her school textbooks, with her angular handwriting filling in the answers for Asher. They'd occupy the spaces of the bookshelf, just like they had back home.

Oddly enough, a folder of limb designs and bionics research was also in the box. Asher had become wonderfully intrigued by his mother's work when he was ten; bionics and prosthesis. The shame was that all his questions for her were directed to a gravestone, and so he received no answer.

Sure, there were the findings of others on the internet. Those didn't quite compare to the handwritten notes that his mother would have shown him, or maybe the office he could have visited.

Some of her notes had also been sent — Asher secretly hoped for a letter from her, impossibly specific and relevant to his current situation even though Ekaterina would have had no idea her son and husband would move to America — but were just measurements and ratios, with the odd handwritten note. They were just big numbers that Asher wanted to, but didn't yet, understand.

Meticulously, Asher put his mother's things away throughout the house. All Ekaterina's books made a colourful addition to the bookshelf, but still left it almost naked.

It was a two-bedroom house, so Asher kept his mother's designs in the bottom drawer of his writing desk. Maybe one day, after he'd graduated university with his own doctorates, possibly had his own kids, and hopefully retained his hearing, he could look at them again without feeling that stabbing ache in his heart.