Empty Jar

He stared at the tiger — “They’re just such beautiful animals,” he says — and then the shots rang out. Blake watched a patch of fur, like a leaf of paper caught in the wind, blow clean off the tiger’s back. One moment that patch of fur was there, thick and orange, and then it was gone, grabbed by the coming storm and scattered across the grass like seeds. Now his headlights caught a flash of the tiger’s disrobed spine instead, a thick column of white stripped down to its core. Blake saw the architecture of a tiger in the instant before it collapsed. “I just never seen anything like it in my life,” he says.

Even the smartest and most active of Russia’s current twentysomethings matured into a world of total political apathy, where any kind of enthusiasm for the business of governance was seen as either extremely naïve or cynical. Many sublimated whatever civic urges they had into the so-called theory of small deeds.

We’re polar bears on an ice floe. Our habitat is disappearing.

This little world can end a thousand ways. Quickly, with a slipped disk or a herniated anything, and you’ll spend your days on disability, giving depositions to lawyers who advertise on the back of the Yellow Pages. It could be snatched away by cold metal hands — right now somebody is thinking up a way to get robots to do this job. It would work, probably. But I don’t think the soda would taste as sweet, you know?