Free The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil

walls and tilted down to show those kept inside unremitting images— vareniki billowing steam, cucumbers gleaming with oil, personal computers and women’s glossy lips and men in suits smoking cigarettes. She said giant TV screens ceaselessly displayed the outside world—Moscow nightclubs, resorts on the Black Sea—surrounded the village with advertisements and, every now and then, a video of someone’s mother making a plea, a father breaking down in tears. I wouldn’t last a week in there, Yarik had heard others say, I’d want a job within an hour, or work with a smile the rest of my life , or kill myself , or come out cured, or they simply praised the way the city, guided by the Consortium, had kept such unproductive influences out of sight.
    But not Zinaida. Not his gentle-hearted wife. It was part of what he loved about his Zinusha: her certainty that she could do something to help. Once a month she went with a busload of women from her church, brought cans of food, bags of clothes, got off the bus and stayed outside, withstanding the scolding of their friends ( enabling shiftlessness, encouraging sloth ), the sneers of guards ( Why don’t you go in and give them the rest of what your husbands work for! ), while the gates opened (a guard drove the bus inside) and closed again and from behind them there rose the hoots and bellows, the whistles and whoops and jubilating clamor of those who had no work, who refused the work there was.
    After each trip out there his wife came home and cried. It was un-Christian, she would sob into his shoulder, that they should be rounded up and kept inside those walls and made, each minute of every day, to face their decision not to work. As if it was their fault. Surely, she would say, they were too sick, or feebleminded, or emotionally scarred to make that choice; surely, such souls deserved pity, instead. He would nod, his lips against her hair, and think of how in the old system they would have simply been made to work, driven at hard labor beneath a harder hand. He didn’t know which way was worse.
    But, passing by the turnoff to The Dachas, peering out at the tops of the billboards, their bright colors splashed above the dark pines, he knew this: his Zinusha was wrong. It was a choice. It always had been. To roll over in bed and go back to sleep, to stay out drinking one hour more, to steal that first sun-warmed strawberry from some roadside field, to eat half a bowl of kasha and put the rest away for lunch, to scrape it onto the plates of your kids, to get up and leave for work before your wife could notice you’d had no breakfast at all, to accept the way things were, to fight to change them for those around you, to slip quietly to the side—it all led back to some decision. Who is to say which is the right one? In the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes flicked to Yarik. He wondered if he’d spoken it out loud. Of course, he thought, people said which was right all the time, people in power. And some listened to them, and some didn’t, and that was a choice, too. Watching the last glimpses of the billboards through the trees, he felt for the crank on the door, found a button, instead. The window slid open a crack. The rush of air whooshing by the car, the dwindling sounds of the homeless shelter, some loudspeakered lamenting voice. Probably one of the videos of the fathers, Yarik thought. And it struck him then that if his own father had lived he never would have been on a video like that. It would have been his mother on the screen. She would have been the one making the visits, taking the bags of clothes out on the bus like Zina. Because his father would have been inside. That was the choice his father would have made.
    Then the last of The Dachas was buried beneath the rush of air, the hum of the asphalt beneath the tires, the pines whipping by. Yarik slid his window up, took off his gloves, stuffed them inside his hard hat. He turned it over, flat on the brim so it