“Dr. Goldstein?” he asked timidly.

I blinked at him like an owl. It took me a few seconds to realize who he was. I swallowed the last piece of toast, and it scraped down my dry throat like sandpaper.

He looked unrealistically good. Wavy Arabian hair, clear Russian skin, an attractive little nose that didn’t betray either of his pedigrees while hinting at both. A strong chin and eyes the color of fresh igneous rock. Paranormally clear-faced and attractive, like he had just walked out of Madame Tussaud’s.

“Uh,” I replied. I was still processing.

“It’s Sergei, doctor,” he said.

I got my act together. My big, dumb blinks turned into recognition.

“Sergei,” I echoed. “Sergei.”

He looked at me like he was expecting to expect something. I had to deliver.

“Sergei!” I said, as if the name had just come to me, as if I hadn’t been enraptured in a gut-churning flashback since the second I saw him. “Sergei Pavlov!”

He grinned broadly. His teeth were perfectly round, like rocks. I winced.

“It’s great to see you, Dr. Goldstein,” he replied.

“You can call me Gabriel, Sergei,” I said, smiling back without his finesse or his commitment. “Don’t make me feel old.”

“Gabriel,” he repeated, almost to himself.

“How have you been, Sergei?” I asked, realizing that I was starting to attract glances from the patrons. “Have a seat.”

He sat down, still smiling a little, like pop stars always smile a little. I knew that the wave of pleasantries I had been riding was about to drown me.

I was alone with Sergei Pavlov and I stared at my toast, which didn’t even look like food anymore.

“How long has it  been?” he asked. His smile had faded a little. “It must have been at least ten years.”

“Closer to fifteen,” I replied. It had been fifteen years, ten months, three weeks and six days. I might as well have had a big red streak across all the calendars I’d used since the last time I’d seen him.

“God, fifteen years,” he said. Most people would have at least faked being lost in reverie; he was staring at me, his smile fading incrementally.

“I remember when that was still half my life,” I said, to fill space.

“That’s 1994, right?” he said, and the last remains of his smile faded like water evaporating off a pan. “Kinsey College, class of 1994,”

“Yeah,” I breathed.

Kinsey College, class of 1994.

The last night of the first half of the last year of residence on our pastoral little mountain in Vermont, we decided to go sledding. It was the end of fall term, the last night before we left for winter break. Tomorrow we would all leave each other, in a sense forever: when we got back we would all be plugging away at our theses, sleeping in the Theatre Arts building every night or shutting ourselves in our rooms to complete our chapbook trilogies, too overworked to speak to each other very often, and then we’d graduate and it wouldn’t be worth keeping up with each other anymore.

We were drunk. I’m not sure if it was the alcohol or if it’s the elapsed time, but some of the faces have blurred and faded over the years – I can’t remember the name of the little American Studies girl who tagged along with us, for example. I remember the important people, though – me, my then-girlfriend Anna, and Sergei.

Sergei was ugly. He had greasy, Saudi hair and blotchy Chechen skin, a nose that was bulbous like Kruschev’s and hooked like the Ayatollah’s. His raspy beard crept nervously over his chin and his eyes darted anxiously around like he was a rodent. But he wore his ugliness like a kind of trademark – acknowledged it and made it part of his charisma, something interesting and unique, like his slight echo of an accent. It was alluring.
There were others I can remember on the sled, besides Anna and Sergei and me. A few of our friends who had been on our floors freshman year; some of Sergei’s friends from the Muslim Students Union; a few miscellaneous people like the American Studies girl.

We all knew this was the end, and we had decided to milk every last spurt of childhood out of our lives. Our heads whirling with cocktails that we didn’t know how to make, we tore Anna’s old toboggan out of the basement and ran it across the Verd towards the edge of campus.
Llewellyn’s Slant used to be where the school population sat to watch our pathetic Division III football games, but since they had built the new Athletics Complex in the middle of my sophomore year, it had gotten overgrown with grass and fallen into disuse – except, of course, by sledders. It was called the Slant instead of the Hill because it didn’t seem organic like a hill – it just seemed like a place where a big knife had cut through the ground. It was a straight forty-five degree angle, covered with grass and snow.

At the bottom, under the grass, was a thin layer of bumpy rocks like eggs. I had found the fossil of a trilobite on one of these rocks once. I still have it in a box somewhere. The rocks ranged from fingernail- to fist-sized. When it was an impromptu set of bleachers, the hill required blankets and pillows because the rocks made it too uncomfortable.
We piled onto the toboggan; there could have been more than ten of us, now that I think of it. Sergei went first, collapsed onto it in one of his patently-awkward pratfalls, and the rest of us piled up on top of him.
I was on top of the American Studies girl, I remember. She smiled up at me, and it felt correct somehow to have her there. Her neck brushed my wrist. I realized I should feel guilty or at least disloyal to Anna, but I didn’t. I had a moment to dimly wonder why, in that little second, when we all breathed out and stared at the glow of the moon on the snow, the outrageous number of stars overhead, and the warm lights from the dorms across the Verd. The echoed, bestial woops of other parties just like ours hit our ears and we all just lay there for a moment until Anna, giggling, pushed the toboggan into motion and hopped onto my back.

We shot down the hill, cackled, screamed and rolled off at the end. It all went by very fast, and afterward there was another moment of exhalation as we lay in the snow at the bottom of the hill, before we heard Sergei’s first, choked moans.

What had happened was this: Sergei’s head had stuck out the back of the toboggan as it went down the hill, and the weight of the mass of alcohol-careless people on top of him had forced it down, through the snow and into the rocks. They had shot up into his head, up his nose, into his mouth and eyes, his face bumping and scraping over them like a can tied to the back of a Just Married car. We had dragged him down the hill for yards and yards. He hadn’t been able to pick his head up to breathe or scream or anything, so we had just stayed there, on top of him, while the hill peeled off his face piece by piece. Now, as we looked up the hill, a broad red streak, illuminated by the moonlight, shone out at us, starting at the top and tapering off at the bottom, a long, accusatory stripe of skin and blood.

Sergei’s face, his ugly, spectacular face, looked like some kind of red-brown fungus, smooth and sinewy. Flaps of loose skin floated on its surface. Parts of his eyelids had gotten torn off and I could see the red-stained whites of his eyes swiveling dimly. Through his ragged lips, I could make out little gaps where the friction of the rocks on the hill had torn out his teeth or bent them around. He slumped on the edge of the toboggan, gasping in a helpless combination of surprise and pain.

I wish the sight of him had sobered us up immediately, like it would have in a movie, but it didn’t; we were just as drunk and incapable as before. None of us knew what to do. We stared at him for a few minutes in dim, confused silence, not really grasping what was going on. One of us might have held his hand. He just moaned.

The first person to talk was Anna. She said, “We have to find his teeth!”

A squad of us set out right away, to comb the bloody streak of snow and pull his teeth out like we were hunting seashells. I wasn’t sure if they could reattach teeth but I did it anyway. I spent an hour sprinting up and down the streak, pulling teeth.

It would have been hard to find them, but the snow was red, so they stuck out. I remember feeling thankful for that. More than anything, I remember feeling thankful for that.

After we found his teeth, sobered up, got him to a hospital and went home to sleep, we tried to forget about him, and how it was our fault. While he was tubed up in a hospital bed, waiting for the best new technology in reconstructive surgery to eradicate all remaining trace of his beautiful imperfection, we were trying to erase him from our minds. It was too hard for all of us to take. None of us visited him. We didn’t see him for months.

When Sergei came back to school, in time to finish his thesis, we had all tricked ourselves into believing that it wasn’t really our fault, what had happened to him. He was almost more of a reminder than a person, now. It wasn’t good to see him. His presence was inconvenient because it meant that we had to remember what we had done.
So we ignored him. It wasn’t awkward, as such. It wasn’t that we couldn’t bear to talk to him, like it was too hard or anything – it was that we didn’t want to. We actively didn’t want anything to do with him. All of us, all of his friends, cut him out of his little circle and set him adrift with his unwieldy prettiness in a deep, carnivorous social ocean, and when we graduated, it was like we had escaped from a prison or something. We were free, we had gotten away from Sergei Pavlov the Martyr of Alcohol and Sledding, and we were never going to see each other again.

Sergei’s big, dark eyes blinked at me. My toast was cold.

“So what are you doing in the city, Sergei?” I asked. There was some kind of tremor in my voice.

“Visiting some people on my way out west,” he replied in monotone. “I got a job offer out there and I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a road trip.”

“I’m flattered that I was on your itinerary,” I said. “What are you doing these days?”

“Zoology,” he said curtly. “Flightless birds. It was good to see you.” He got up and left, and I didn’t say anything.

It had been a guilt trip. He had met me here, in this restaurant, for the sole purpose of reminding me of what I had done.

I couldn’t believe how petty that was, or how right.

When I came home, I checked for the trilobite I had gotten from the Slant. I knew where I had left it, behind some dusty old chemistry textbooks from my senior year. Digging it out of the box, I slid my fingers over its curves, ran them over the little staccato blades of its legs and the smooth globes of its eyes. It was an irreducible nugget of pre-prehistory, about three inches wide and four inches long.

I stood there in the dark, rubbing the trilobite, staring at the textbooks, and then I went to sleep.
I dreamed that I woke up. I walked to the bedroom, with no real urgency but with a definite intention, turned on the light, bent over the toilet and vomited.

A huge, off-white egg forced its way out of my mouth, splashing under the water and bobbing up to the surface shortly after. It was an ostrich egg.

I vomited up another, and another. They swelled my throat up as I retched. They just kept coming, one after the other, until my toilet was full of them. Layers and layers of them.

I couldn’t flush them, and I couldn’t find a plunger. I turned off the light and tried to forget they were there.