Free A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman Page A

down.”
    “No— Century . You’re not trying.”
    “I am eighty years old, and my wife died yesterday. Do you understand that, or you’re alreadyon with your life? S like a Russian S?”
    “No. Yes. C. Like a Russian S.”
    “Then?”
    “E. Same in both. Then a backward Ee — N. Then a T—same in both. Then that horseshoe.”
    “What horseshoe?”
    “Just draw a horseshoe.”
    “Open side down?”
    “No, up.”
    “I had horses. One was called Beetle, and one was called Boy.”
    “Next is an R. An English R. Like our ya but backward.”
    “Ya backward . . .” Grandfather repeated dejectedly. “I need Berta.”
    “She speaks even less English than you,” Slava said. “Come on, you can do it. Ya backward. And then—this is the last one—a Y. Same in both.”
    On the other end of the line, Grandfather studied the paper. “Sancher,” he read.
    In the preceding years, Slava had tried to propose to his superiors at Century stories of the kind he saw in the magazine every week. He prayed and broke bread with five young evangelical men from Ohio who had come to New York to test their faith in the most depraved place they could think of. He jumped on a trampoline with a runaway to the Big Apple Circus who was a Ph.D. in semiotics and was writing a semiotics of the tightrope. One Saturday, Slava clawed ninety-one dollars from the cold, dead fingers of his bank account and took a Peter Pan bus to the Massachusetts town where the fourth synagogue built in America was going to become the first Staples in town. A town baker who had stayed kosher even though too few Jews remained to notice—he was wise to persist; soon non-Jews would be buying more kosher products than Jews, another story Slava would try to give Century —had appeared at the grand opening to protest. (“Destroying a heritage?” his placard said in wandering Sharpie. “Come to Staples! That Was Easy. ™”) The baker gave Slava another lead: an underground international bidding war for Hitler’s personal map of Europe by a Belgian industrialist with neo-Nazi proclivities and the British Orthodox Jew (a third cousin of the baker) who wished to procure it first so he could destroy it.
    None of it had worked, Slava did not understand why. Had his submissions been received? Slava inquired with the IT department, but his e-mail appeared to be working; Mr. Grayson was managing to get through with brainless new assignments with no difficulty. Archibald Dyson (the senior editor) probably never opened Slava’s e-mails in the first place. Slava could write Arch that he had humped his wife outside a liquor mart on Tuesday afternoon and Arch would never know. Arch thought he was spam.
    An image of Slava’s grandfather spun out of the screen of Slava’s desktop one hopeless afternoon: I have beaten a man eyeless for saying “kike” out loud. I put enough goys in my pocket to get your mother into Belarus State. We left only with what we could carry and now your parents have a Nissan Altima and a Ford Taurus. So, lift your ass from your ergonomic work chair and put this Dyson’s nose directly into whatever it is that you do, with a little two-finger pinch at the base of the neck if that helps. We have seen your kind, Mr. Archibald, and we have seen worse, so why don’t you give this a read.
    Slava did it, minus the pinch of the neck and plus a bout of diarrhea nervosa, but this did not have the result intended by Grandfather-genie.
    Slava pressed forward. On a weekend, feeling war-roomish, he bought a wipe board and wrote out on its left side the previous issue’s table of contents. To the right of each entry, he assigned the story a category:
Profile of eccentric personage
Interview with famous person
Story of a stunt action
International report
Highlight of social issue
Memoir of picayune childhood experience
    Famous people and international reports he could do nothing about—he didn’t know any famous people, and he didn’t have the money to