Only after the cancer metastasizes in his mother, after the old country cleaves the family’s ashen umbilical cord, after his epileptic father dies behind the wheel, does Yuri Demikhov become an alchemist. Not one of mercury mixing or immortality elixirs. He becomes an alchemist in the sense that he believes in transfiguration: the endless, wild capability for change.
The more Yuri reads of erlemier miracles, Jean Joseph Sue’s 1755 skeleton measurement cataloging, the unfolding of the periodic table, the space race, and the 1954 kidney transplant, the more Yuri believes one day, humanity can have and know everything. It’s only a matter of paying the price in raw materials.
New knowledge must come at a steep cost. As above, so below. Yuri is sure someone in a lab somewhere can afford to advance science. One day, nothing will be hidden from them. It will be in an unraveled world, the human body unpeeled from its axis and space-time’s mobius strip saddled, that Yuri will execute the alchemist’s favorite experiment: he will convert near nothing to riches. Company, gold, and happiness all wait for him in the future. The success his ancestors once had, so distant Yuri doesn’t not know what gained nor what lost it, will return.
Yuri folds his hands before a full ashtray and takes in his empty apartment—the hull of an inanimate homunculus more than a home, a family’s artificial collection of bones—and he doesn’t know what had to be paid to secure the secret of atom-splitting. Of head transplants.
He checks the calendar. Friday. One shift today. No shift tomorrow. He pours vodka into his bowl of oats.
For now, Yuri Demikhov keeps patching the holes in the plaster, burning the last box of his mother’s jasmine incense, and clerking at the liquor store. He transfigures what he can with what he has. This is a struggle. Somehow, Yuri’s heaps of nothingness are loath to convert. Maybe the world finds Yuri too wealthy in emptiness to let him fill it.
🦷
It’s sad to be alone on Friday night. Yuri wants to socialize after his shift ends, so he phones Campi. There isn’t much good about the tan French boy beyond his graceful hands and intolerably smug, warm laugh (perhaps his mouth, when he’s not speaking) but Yuri cannot bear seeing family friends this soon after the string of funerals. So Campi it is, with his uninvited entourage of other hook-ups and his arrogance-steeped laugh lines, which always remind Yuri that Campi graduated high school and he did not.
Yuri waits in the phone booth for Campi to pick up. Concrete gnaws at his aching heels; outside, a dandelion sways from a crack in it. Exhaust fumes and the liquor store’s distant neon lights carelessly bathe everything.
Campi answers on the fifth ring.
“I want you to come over,” Yuri says, after he blacks out the first fourth of the conversation. Campi never says anything then, even if he speaks plenty. “Drink with me.”
“Sure, I’ll drink with you.” Campi’s voice drips with infuriating delight. The sound of knowing better. “I’ll bring over a few… bottle cozies too, yeah?”
Yuri grinds his teeth.
“I am serious, Campi. I only want to drink.”
“Alright.”
“Don’t bring any of your stupid friends.”
“Aha! What happened to ‘I only want to drink’? If we’re only drinking then company should be in order. Unless you have something else in mind later.”
“I don’t. But your friends are assholes, Campi,” Yuri spits, “and I do not want them kicking holes in my wall and making me more miserable. I—”
“Fine, fine. I know you’re still angry after that one girl juggled your father’s urn. I am sorry about that, cherie. She’s never visiting again. I no longer speak to her. I promise not to bring any friends over.” Campi speaks softly. His velvet soothes Yuri but makes him uneasy. “See you soon? I’ve missed you.”
Against his better judgment, Yuri forgets Campi’s chronic dishonesty. He thinks of Campi’s uncle buried back in Rouen next to a five-year-old sister, plus the tear-salted paperwork Campi paid to cross the ocean. He shutters his ears to the moneyed privilege in Campi’s voice. Whenever he scrapes away Campi’s Hermes cologne and easy charisma, he finds a slummer. Someone who sees him as a zoo exhibit or hit of sex-shop nitrite.
But Father’s warnings about untrustworthy partners never included men. Yuri weakens.
“See you soon,” he replies, unable to catch the tender curl to his voice before it slips free. Yuri regrets everything when Campi’s grin bombards him through the phone in radium beams of smugness.
“I’ll bring a bottle of 80 proof,” Campi vows, then hangs up.
Yuri, his stomach sinking, decides to lock his apartment after he changes. He will set up several folding chairs in the nearby drinking alley. Just in case.
🦷
Campi brings a bottle of 70 proof and two Czech men with him to the evening-stained alley. Yuri does not know them. He never does. The men are broad and young, their bodies straining against their rugby team t-shirts. They speak loudly to eclipse the rattling of beer cases hooked around their knuckles. Yuri’s slight drunkenness makes it difficult to tell them apart. He thinks of William Burke and William Hare and an egg splitting in a bell jar womb to create fraternal twins.
Campi relaxes into a camping chair, above it all. Nothing vexes him: not the broken glass carpeting the alley’s creases, nor the sickly grass overtaking a sunken bit of pavement, nor Yuri. He meets Yuri’s hurt glare without shame.
“You said you wouldn’t bring friends,” Yuri says.
“They aren’t friends,” Campi says. “I just met them.”
Yuri mutters oaths into his bottle.
“You set up the alley and locked your apartment.” Campi’s intolerable smile splits his face. “You seemed ready for us.”
“You are lucky I don’t burke you.”
“The fuck does that mean?” one rugby boy says, two beers stacked in one of his large hands. The other boy opens Campi’s bottle. Spent bullet shells and firecracker chitin clatter about their boots.
“Don’t worry about it,” Campi says. “My friend Yuri here is eclectic. He studies all sorts of strange words and concepts the modern world has left behind.”
“Casse-toi!” Yuri takes a deep pull from his bottle.
“You are a history major then,” the second boy says. “Cold. Er, cool.”
Campi smirks. Yuri keeps drinking to staunch the embarrassment he feels for both of them. He vows not to speak of alchemy tonight.
🦷
Half in a bottle in, he speaks of alchemy.
“It is considered a pseudoscience now,” Yuri says, “but back then, nobody knew that. They thought, uh, they thought they were pursuing something real. Which they were, but those real things were chemistry and, uh, spiritual. Spirituality. It is like how forensic science started. We know that Lombroso is wrong, that we cannot find born criminals by measuring heads, but back then there was a whole school of that, yes? Before we got on track. Alchemy is sort of like that.”
“Your friend is tripping balls,” the first rugby boy says.
Campi shrugs. The depleted 70 proof bottle swings in his grip. He flushes in contentment even as he kicks at Yuri’s shin.
“Enough lecturing. I heard you were tattooed at a coworker's house, Yuri,” he says. “Let’s see it. Show us your tits, professor.”
Yuri knocks back another drink before he seizes the bottom of his wife-beater. He yanks it upwards. The second rugby boy crushes a sixth can of beer against his skull, drops it into the pile of debris at their feet, and squints at his chest.
“Are those teeth?”
“Yah,” Yuri says. “For my dog Artem.”
“Your first tattoo, and you choose to get an old chien’s teeth line poked onto you on someone's kitchen table.” Campi shakes his head. “You are amazing, Yuri.”
“It’s cool,” the first rugby boy says.
His dim approval keeps Yuri from sinking his own teeth into Campi. Artem, grouchy and blind, stayed at Mother’s bedside until she passed. The death of the elder Demikhovs euthanized Yuri’s mutt before the carpet truck did. The truck simply euthanized the body. Still, Yuri—who, at thirteen, struck a tweaking neighbor for beating Artem, then received a broken fibula for it—almost attacked the truck driver.
Yuri has so few plain, precious things left.
“Thanks,” he says.
Campi scoff-laughs into his bottle.
Awareness tempers Yuri’s rage. Campi, though he knows much about ivory towers, knows little of mundane loves. His indulgence never ceases. Everything centers around chrysopoeia with him. Campi surrounds himself with lead boys and parents’ allowances, then puts his tongue to work turning them to gold for himself.
Yuri isn’t stupid. He knows he’s one of those lead boys. Maybe one that was never transmuted. Campi has never dated him, after all. Campi will never claim a man who cannot make it to med school. Yuri wishes only for his parents’ sake that he did. He is half certain the Demikhov that gained fame went to medical school. That is a separate, other uncompleted circle.
“Tell us more about alchemy.” The second rugby boy burps after his command. Totters on his chair. Campi’s chuckle bleeds into a sigh.
“If you get Yuri going,” he says, almost fondly, “we’ll be here all night.”
“It’s a lot of equations.” Yuri ignores Campi. “Alchemy and chemistry have a lot of balancing equations. Medicine does too. Medicine, chemistry, alchemy—they all overlap.”
“Fucking hell,” the first rugby boy says.
“Donc tu comprends.” Campi smiles.
“Okay,” the second rugby boy says. “So you’re thinking about… math.”
“Sort of. I am thinking about costs,” Yuri slurs. He waves. “Prices. To get knowledge, someone must give up something equal in return. But how much does ultimate knowledge cost? Can anyone even pay the toll? Like, uh, what someone would pay to see how cancer spreads, or ah, how to transplant a head. Those must cost trillions of something besides dollars. What is it? How do people afford it? Someone’s got to. There are labs all over the world.”
Muffled sniggering breaks his speech. The rugby boys are laughing.
Yuri’s vodka-saturated body burns hot at mockery. He flies up, staggers forward. His fists clip the fingernail moon. The alley walls lean inwards. Yuri misses one rugby boy by a mile. His fist snags a garbage can. It flies over in a shower of tin. His knuckles tear open. Yuri shouts. The rugby boys laugh harder. Yuri almost combusts in fury before Campi catches his shoulders.
“No need for that, yeah?” Campi says. He spins Yuri towards a chair. “We’re not laughing at your philosophy, Yuri. We’re just all drunk. Lighten up.”
Yuri scowls. The palms that caressed him in the dark before now traitorously press him on a seat his drunkenness shackles him to, and his tongue knots itself into silence.
Teeth scalp a bottle. The cap falls onto a carpet of old bullet shells. The conversation moves on. Yuri seethes as his scrapes scab over. The evening turns to shots, communal cigarettes, and the tender sadism of men smashing folding chairs on each other’s backs. Yuri cannot marvel at the sensuality of these playful abuses. The echoes of metal slapping flesh, of groans and popping knees, ligaments rearranging and bruises sprouting, all remind Yuri that bodies are mechanisms someone else knows perfectly somehow. Just not him.
The men drink until morning.
🦷
When Campi’s boys grow restless at three a.m., they pack up. One leaves with a cigarette half in his lips. The other trollishly drags a garbage bag of beer cans behind him in an attempt to avoid littering. The drunken cadence of their voices matches their staggering. They are here then gone: a duo of resurrectionists who will have no bodies to pick up in the morning other than their own.
Campi, of course, follows them. Even as Yuri begs him not to.
“Stay,” Yuri slurs, leaning onto Campi’s shoulder. He’s near blacking out. He has the spins. “Please.”
Campi steers Yuri back like an unruly dance partner.
“Mon cher, you know I can’t. It would be rude to let the rugby players grope their way home.”
“Which one are you going to bed with? Which one have you already gone with? I need you more than he does.”
Campi’s smile echoes the curved moon above. “If I said a name it’d mean nothing to you. Could you even tell them apart? I didn’t think you’d be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous of that.” Yuri trembles, a sack of meat and swirling thoughts and overflowing membranes. What Campi imagines is far more romantic than the truth. “I don’t want to be alone. Do not leave me in this dog-fucked alley, Campi. Not even ghosts visit me here. I’m lonely. I’m scared.”
Campi hesitates. The glib comment Yuri thinks must be on his lips fades away. Though his features are a smear, Yuri detects what he hopes is humanity in the smudged glimmer of the eyes, the ladder of laugh lines. A palm touches his neck. The rugby boys’ voices fall in the distance.
“There are better ways to cope than drink,” Campi murmurs. “I’ve used them. I…can’t help you where you are, Yuri.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
The scent of expensive cologne perforates the vodka miasma. Campi’s touch sears him. Yuri’s broken pride grinds at his spine.
“You worry me with all your alchemy talk.” Campi strokes his earlobe. “You don’t think you can magick back all your lost money and family, do you?”
“I don’t want to bring them back.” Yuri’s chest aches. “I just, fuck, I wish no one had gone to start with. I want to go forward. When we live in a finished world I can do that. Alchemy’s stupid terms make more sense than what’s happened, you know?”
Campi shakes his head even as he kisses Yuri. It tastes of nothing but liquor. Yuri’s skull throbs. He envisions the root of cancer deep in the cells, hooked and hung by the elixir of life; he sees the white lightning of seizures; he sits in the thousand-league pit that swallowed his family in lieu of the currency they could not afford to feed it. He doesn’t know how to reach or describe his visions. Yuri’s rage stems from tenderness. It eats him apart faster than acid.
“I need to talk with you,” Yuri mutters into Campi’s mouth. “Everything feels like a big joke. Please talk with me.”
Campi withdraws.
“Sober up,” he says, “and then we can talk. I don’t think we have much to discuss tonight. Goodnight, my alchemist. Good luck returning to your scholarly heritage.”
“Wait!”
Yuri falls when Campi sets off. Glass bites him. Pavement skins his arms. His knuckles crackle, then gush blood again. Humiliation immolates Yuri. He howls at Campi’s departing back, hurling pathetic fistfuls of gravel, scrabbling in the murk, fighting his boneless body.
“Fuck you! Fuck your not-friends! I’d fucking kill you for this to make sense! You hear me, you shitbitch? I would put your brain in a jar!”
Campi, a tan moonlit mirage, waves from the sidewalk. Yuri is out at sea. Campi is on the beach.
“See you later!” Campi calls.
Yuri crawls into the nearby gutter, cursing, unable to see anything but the churning ground. He collapses after Campi departs. After several kicks, he flips himself onto his side. Yuri does not know whether to retch or cry. He settles for pasting his fingers to the ink fangs on his chest and lying down. As he blacks out, he sees Artem dead in the street. Yuri knows he should’ve asked the truck driver to flatten him too. At least then he would’ve been with a friend.
🦷
That night, Yuri dreams of dogs.
He is sprawled near the gutter where he spit out Campi’s farewell kiss when they come to him. Yuri first thinks the breath on his jaw is his own until it wafts in from the cardinal directions. Humid wind soaks him. A hundred claws click on the pavement with the drumbeat of rain. Yuri awakens. Sits. Dream cataracts soften his vision.
Dogs clog the alley.
Burnt terriers and huskies in space suits float overhead, their sinew turned to ash, their eyes broken yolks. Cinder comet tails trail behind them. Vivisected hounds—and one white poodle—backstroke through the street grass, their chests open like keepsake lids, their hearts and livers throbbing at the sky. Coils of intestines quiver beneath shredded periosteum. Mutts burdened with second heads or abdomens pace the asphalt, dragging trains of stitches, excess forelegs, and offal behind them.
Hundreds of canines converge on Yuri.
He stares in fascination as a husky lopes in his direction. It sits in front of him. A puppy head, floppy-eared and wet-eyed, peers from its throat. The dogs’ lower jaws align together. They do not touch. The puppy’s eyes glimmer in the husky’s shadow. They appear like jewels.
“I don’t know you,” Yuri says.
His words carry the ring of an apology. Yuri doesn’t know why. The dog shakes its heads.
“You do,” the husky says. “Your great, great grandfather knew us too. I’m your classmate.”
Yuri thumbs at his knees.
“I’m no student,” he rasps. “I’m a dropout.”
“You are enrolled in the study of alchemy,” the husky says, “alongside me. I am here to answer your questions.”
Those words trepanate Yuri’s foggy mind. Clarity scorches his thoughts. His trepidation may be anticipation. He isn’t sure. Sulfur rakes his nose. The dogs bay together in a baleful choir. Yuri’s hands shake as they rise. Under this dog-studded sky—Sirius, too, watches, a gold halo about it—he becomes a boy again.
“Tell me what the furthest knowledge costs,” Yuri says.
He knows the outline of it the way a grain knows the beach. He doesn’t want to. The answer lingers in his body like shrapnel: the pain of drinking, a canal of grief reopened and reopened and reopened, the surrendering of a generation, the healed seams of his once-broken leg. Under this magnificent sky, Yuri fears his insignificance.
“Comme tu veux,” the Janus dog says.
The heads speak together. Their lower jaws touch at the peak of every word. The pup’s fangs are needles; the husky’s are nubs. The pup’s esophagus spills down the husky’s chest.
“The bold, far corners of curiosity,” they tell Yuri, “are paid for by unimaginable pain. Dual agonies: the agony of being rent apart for reconfiguration, and the agony of rending and reconfiguring. That is how it has been. That is how it will be.”
The burning dog closest to Mars, the dog lined in ruby, is Laika. Yuri sees her now. His fuzzy vision keeps him from tears. The infinite cathedral above diminishes the magnitude of what the dogs have said. Yuri struggles to hold the huge, horrible truth in his hands. He is being asked to cup a planet.
“That isn’t alchemy,” Yuri says. “That’s barely anatomy. That’s cruelty.”
The tongues of all secondary dog heads boil at their teeth. Intact eyes bulge. Vivisected dogs worm through the grass.
“You can’t suck the universe’s marrow without breaking a bone,” the puppy shrills. Slobber drips from its windpipe in golden strings. “Your great, great granddaddy knew that. Unknown things don’t emerge without applying force. Be peaceful or discover. Pick one.”
Laika, aflame, sails the sky.
“You have the easy part,” the husky says. “Especially with a cheat sheet for cruelty in your blood. The further you fly, the less others’ pain touches you.”
“Do you think I am capable of that? Do you hate me?” The orbit of thrashing dogs sickens Yuri.
“Of course,” the puppy says. “Everyone here hates you. We suffered for your success. I wish terrible, terrible things would happen to you. At least you’ve suffered too.”
Yuri shakes his head. He cannot breathe. His mother’s deathless cells clog his throat, multiplying, becoming a wet bolus. He tremors like his father. Why is violence his only inheritance? Why must he inflict arrogance on others tenfold to learn? He’s sick of being ignorant and cornered. He will not hurt other ignorant, cornered beings to free himself.
“Pay for the cost of knowledge,” the dog heads say, one low, one high.
Canine amalgamations circle Yuri. They form constellations. They are metal, flesh, and starlight at once. Their cries and spilled innards are rich with knowledge: arcane anastomosis, stepping into the celestial, the secret fire of the immune system. None of it is an answer to grief. Yuri weeps.
“No,” he says.
“Why not?” The dogs say. “A Demikhov paid before. Dismemberment does not destroy us. We rot back into the divine.”
“Because it’s wrong!” Yuri points at them. “I have no idea how the hell I ended up here, but this cycle is fucked. My great great grandfather can rot in hell! I’m not getting on this carousel! I refuse!”
“You’re already here, Yuri,” the dogs say. “This is the only way forward.”
“Bullshit. I am sorry for what happened to all of you, and to my family. But you’re fucking insane if you think I’ll hurt others to make our torture seem less pointless. We can be better. I’m gonna turn my shit around without this. Even if I am wrong about that, I don’t care. I’ll lie to myself and believe it too.”
The hightower world Yuri clings to in place of closure begins to crumble. An aching hole opens where the future once was. Yuri’s body screams as he lets it go. He cannot let the son his parents loved and the person Campi flirts with disappear forever. Yuri becomes a rat electrocuted in the bowels of a nuclear plant, a spot of heightened molecules ignorant of what it contributes to. Worse: he is grateful for it.
“Stay ignorant, then,” the dogs say.
Yuri’s vision doubles. Splits. He sees the dog heads overlaid. The husky bleeds into the mutt. They become one. The heart-slippery choice tumbles from Yuri’s fingers. He is a dime falling from a tower.
“Oh, Yuri. You’re stupid,” Artem says. “There’s no solution to living. Why did you need alchemy to learn that?”
Yuri starts to speak when Artem bites him. Yuri howls. He tears his forearm from Artem’s mouth. The holes left in his flesh burn, overflowing with blood; his nerves scream at everything already lost instead of something new being taken. He pants, cradling his wound, unable to strike Artem in return. Artem’s tail wags.
“Keep being gentle,” Artem says.
Then all the dogs wheel away, swimming into the planets once more, their broken bodies and renewed joy coalescing as they reintegrate into everything. Discovery looms. Yuri remains, teeth marks in his wrist, teeth inked on his ribs. He is free, and seven octillion atoms, and more alone than ever before.
🦷
For Vladimir’s dogs.
🐕⚛️
