The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil

bandannas unfurled like flags, a cavalry coming on in a dust-billowing stampede. Between the two, there was the desk, the couch.
    Yarik sat down on it. Tall as he was, it sucked him in. He sank so low that he felt like he was in his first day of first form, six years old and sitting at his tiny desk before the teacher’s full-size one, until he realized he wasn’t that low at all; the man’s desk was just that tall. The billionaire went behind it now. He lay his forearms on top. He smacked his hands down flat. The revolvers in their wood hands shook. “So,” the billionaire said, “show me what you’ve got.”
    Yarik sat with his hard hat in his lap. “Sir—”
    “Baz,” the man said.
    “Sir, it was—”
    “Bazarov.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Boris Romanovich Bazarov.”
    “Yes, sir, I know.”
    “So why don’t you call me Baz?”
    “Baz?” Yarik said.
    “Baz,” the man said. “Baz, Baz.” He grinned, waited.
    For a second, Yarik dug with his tongue at one of the candy-jammed grooves in his teeth. Then he said, “Baz—”
    “Yes?”
    “I only wanted to say . . .”
    The oligarch nodded. “I’m listening.”
    “It was your driver who brought me here.”
    Bazarov nodded again. “And?”
    Through the closed door, Yarik could hear high heels clacking towards the room, louder and louder on the hardwood floor.
    “You were thinking,” Bazarov said, as he stood up, “about viewing platforms.” He came around to the front of the desk. “A tramline going”—with his index finger, he made a squiggly sign in the air between them—“along the underside of the glass.” He was facing Yarik, his back to the desk, and without looking away he reached behind him, pushed back the gun stand, put his hands on the desktop, and, with one quick shove, popped himself up. He sat there, legs dangling. He opened his hands, turned his palms upward, held them hovering above his knees. “And?”
    Yarik could still feel the way his words had dried up in his throat that day on the top of the glass when the man had begun to moo. He could still hear the sound, see the gleam in the billionaire’s eye, the look on the man’s face that said got you! and how much fun! at the same time.
    “You were thinking,” Bazarov said again. “You were telling me your thoughts. And I interrupted you. Rudely and even, perhaps, even a little ridiculously, I admit, a little bit of foolishness, I interrupted you, I’m sorry. I apologize. You were thinking.” He motioned for Yarik to resume his thoughts.
    Yarik could feel the gloves he’d shoved in his coverall pockets bulging against his hips. “We were just thinking.”
    “ You were thinking.”
    “My brother and I were just—”
    “ You were just.”
    “Sir?”
    “Baz.”
    “Baz?”
    “Did I bring your brother here? If I wanted to know what your brother was thinking, I would have sent two cars.”
    Yarik tried to imagine Dima there, next to him, the two of them getting through this the way they had always gotten through everything together, but he could only see his brother entranced by the paintings, or still stuck in the memory of passing The Dachas, and he knew he would have had to do all the talking on his own anyway. It struck him then that this man, this Bazarov, this Baz , must drive by The Dachas every day. And must dismiss them the way he had brushed aside Dima, as if he, too, could be stored away behind the blur of dark pines. Yarik could see that —his brother like their father that way, capable of making a choice that would land him living in there—and it chilled him. He leaned forward as best he could in the couch. He tried to straighten his back. He said, “But it was my brother’s idea.”
    Bazarov let his hands fall to his knees.
    “We were thinking of it together,” Yarik told him.
    The man looked down and, one after the other, flipped the picture frames around so their photographs were turned to Yarik.
    “He loves working on the Oranzheria,” Yarik