Free God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell

no hardened cynic she accepted this more or less uncritically, just as she had uncritically accepted the job with the Aral project that her former lover, Andrew, had more or less gift-wrapped for her.
    Once upon a time, the name
Aral Sea
was accurate. Since 1960, however—when Soviet engineers began to divert its twin tributaries to fertilize cotton fields in Turkistan—the Aral had gone from a sea of plenty to a sea of less plenty, to an unfortunate polluted lake, to a poison lake to a shrinking pestilent bog to a certified disaster. That was where it stood when Amanda was named part of a ten-scientist team acting as a stateside academic/scientific codicil to an Aral Sea Basin Relief Project—no longer the Aral Sea at all but the Aral Disaster.
    Of course, she had never actually expected to get to
see
the Aral Sea. Mostly she crunched numbers, calculating the average increase of temperature and decrease of airborne moisture and what that would mean, hypothetically, for the surrounding area’s agriculture. She ran computer simulations that posited what would happen with no Aral Sea at all. She e-mailed her findings to other biologists and tried to forget about the decades of pollution and insecticide and toxins in the Aral’s exposed and wind-blown seabed. She also tried to forget that the sanitized, bloodless, glowing-green numbers on her Hewlett-Packard’s screen told her seventeen thousand kids who in nearly any other part of the world would have been learning multiplication tables and team sports were going to be anemic.
    Her alpha-and-omega trip to the Soviet Union had been to Moscow, in 1987, as Andrew’s guest (he was then working for the ambassador), and she’d bathed in the springy feeling of glasnost. What she saw was not the nation of wicked Lenin, evil Stalin, warty Brezhnev, but Pepsi billboards and gleaming hotels and elegant, jaw-dropping cocktail parties. This was her week in Russia, and she had spoken the language twice (
“Skazhite, pozhaluista,
gde tualet?”
and
“Taksi!”
).
    Of course, everything was different now. For one, Andrew was gone. Aral was worse. The Soviet Union was no more. Along with the tourist-perfect, industry-friendly teardrop-and-puddle nations that had sprouted along Russia’s western flank, a jigsaw of polysyllabic, hostile-sounding nations had metastasized to the south. Central Asia, this was, and the Aral Sea was its fountain of life.
    When Amanda learned that, thanks to her Russian skills, her days of computer simulations and guesswork were over—she was
going
there, as in
next month,
with two other members of the team to survey the Aral Sea basin personally—she called up her old tutor, Vova, and asked him what was Central Asia’s story anyway? Vova said, “Theenk of Ziberia, Amanda, fleeped over.” Had he ever been there, seen it? “Amanda, Amanda,” he said, becoming serious, nearly bitter, his accent suddenly falling away. “The only Russians in Central Asia are the ones whose relatives were exiled there.” She sensed him shaking his head at the boundless naïveté Americans had for places that weren’t America. “Don’t you think they knew what they were doing when they decided to murder the place?”
    She learned more about Central Asia on the plane while gliding over the Ukraine from Ted Whitford, PhD, Marine Biology, UCLA. He too spoke some Russian (he’d spent time in Murmansk while studying the Barents Sea), and they practiced together until he realized she knew more than he did and put a stop to it right then and there. An asshole, Ted was. But he seemed to know a lot about the Aral Sea. (A disarmingly accurate generalization about assholes: They all know a lot, however brittle their knowledge becomes under intimacy’s whitest, hottest lights.) What he told her was specific, real-seeming—more information, at least, than the UN’s ossifyingly dull dossiers were willing to provide. Ted Whitford mentioned cities and local nationals he’d spoken