Free The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery

buses, walk to the entrances to train stations. The impossible apartment buildings rise behind them like an army of giants. The concrete’s streaked with stains and every corner seems to be chipped. The tiles glued to the outside walls are coming off, the geometric designs, the modernist blocks of color put on them for decoration. All those clean, simple lines are getting more crooked every year, as if the buildings were sending a message, that the dream that all could be equal and all could be planned couldn’t last. You can’t make people all move in the same direction for long, no matter what you give them for a reward, no matter how bad the punishment is. It’s one of the beautiful and maddening things about us, isn’t it? The simple shapes are a crime against nature, an unstable state. The broken pieces lying on the ground are the natural outcome, the bodies at rest.
    Then the SUV they’re riding in breaks free and they’re on a giant metal bridge crossing over the Dneiper, and the city spreads out all around them. The factories and refineries stick out over the low rooftops. More apartment blocks on the horizon. The river and its islands curve underneath them and away, far to the north. For Curly, it’s all a little too much to handle for a minute. You are going to Kiev? his aunt in Parma said, when he told him what he was doing. So many emotions rolling around in her voice. A surface concern, because they all knew that the fourth wave of immigration had to have started for a reason. What are you going over there for, when most people seem to be leaving? But a much deeper, stronger current of something else, the pull of the mother country, even though nobody in the family has been back to Ukraine for a hundred years. Say hello to the place for us. Tell everyone we’re all right, at least for now. Curly wishes now that he’d talked to his aunt more when he had the chance. I’m back, I’ve come back. Is it like you heard?
    Because the center of Kiev is something to see. I mean, Curly and Petey are from Cleveland; they know what big buildings look like. They’re just not used to seeing so many people out. The giant expanse of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square, is mobbed in the morning, people weaving in and out of each other’s way, dodging the orange and brown electric trolleys that crackle along their sagging wires. In the afternoons, they’re lounging on the steps of the plaza in front of the Hotel Ukraina, though they’re not sleeping; they’re waiting for the nighttime, when the long strip of walkways and benches and trees along Khreshchatyk Street is just packed with people in skinny jeans and jackets, screwing around, chasing each other. The girls are so cool it’s almost impossible. They put on sweaters and jackets with very short skirts and long stockings, and put their arms around lucky boys, kissing, kissing again, still kissing. The Americans have never seen so many people kissing in public, for so long, while the guitarist in a busking surf band revs up a battery-powered amp and, fifty yards down the street, a bunch of thin blond kids break-dance on cardboard boxes like they did in New York ten years ago. The underground passages to get under intersections, or to the metro, are lined with dozens of tiny kiosks lit by naked bulbs, and there are people selling watches, alarm clocks, clothing, flowers, fried dough, sandwiches. A man in an old army uniform encrusted with medals, his hair gelled into a shape you don’t see in nature, plays a harp and belts out folk songs. Another couple does duets for voice and accordion; he’s on one side of the hallway, she’s on the other, and they’re staring into each other’s eyes as they perform. A young man plays Depeche Mode songs on an acoustic guitar in front of the entrance to the metro. All those voices echo off the bricks and tile, a mash of Russian and Ukrainian—the