Elizaveta passed me the string she’d scavenged from some of the hanging dolls, and I walked toward Jesus. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” I told him, “and I’m sort of hoping you choose the hard way.”

2010

Seated in a Starbucks on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, I was sipping an espresso macchiato and reading the sports section of the LA Times.

It was early December, pleasantly cool. The forecast predicated light showers later in the afternoon. Elizaveta and I were staying at the Sheraton a couple of blocks away. We came to LA to see of all things a twenty-two-foot fiberglass sculpture called Chicken Boy. Elizaveta became obsessed with these so-called Muffler Men after I took her on a road trip along Route 66 a while back. I don’t know what her fascination with them is, but we’ve traveled all over the country so she can snap pictures of herself with them. Some of her favorites so far include Paul Bunyan in Phoenix, The Casino Dude in Montana, The Gemini Giant in Illinois, and The Friendly Green Giant in Minnesota.

Elizaveta entered the United States on a fiancé visa almost ten years ago now. Two days after crossing the border we married in an Elvis-themed wedding chapel in Vegas, and she subsequently applied for a green card. Five years later she was granted citizenship, and all I can say is since then she’s taken to the US with gusto. She asked me to install an American flag atop a pole in the front of our Tucson home, for instance. She knows every storyline and every devious subplot of every soap on daytime television. She’s become the Phoenix Suns number one fan (we have tickets to a Suns-Clippers game at the Staples Center tomorrow evening). And perhaps most telling of all: the bumper sticker on her Audi reads “God Bless America.” Sometimes her enthusiasm for her adopted country was a bit much, but I was happy she was happy.

So, yeah, things were pretty great between us. We rarely spoke about the night we spent on the Island of the Dolls. It was an experience both of us would like to forget, a horror story largely of our own creation in which we allowed our imaginations and fear of the unknown to overwhelm our better reason. Even so, although we might not speak about what happened, I still reflected on it every now and then, and when I did it seemed as though it all occurred only yesterday, and I suspect that’s how it will always be.