I was one of the guys who pulled the big crates of rocks on sleds across the frozen gulf of Finland in the first ten years of the 1700s. It was a great disaster every day pulling those bricks to the places men had taken picks to the ice. We pushed the rocks through and watched them pour into the murky blue water and scatter not believing that they were building anything. Not thinking a foundation was being made. This was how St. Petersburg was built. Like scattering stones into murky water, watching them go nowhere, watching them slowly drift down and disappear. A great man’s bad dream.

I knew that I died because I lost my mind and couldn’t find it, for a moment. I was pushing the crate along the ice and suddenly I was dragging nothing. I was far away, I was on the ice directly in front of the city, the ship yard there, thinking I was still alive, not knowing for how long I had walked, not knowing where my crate of stones was, feeling so light. For a moment not knowing who I was and in that moment thinking that this all, the world, was part of me. And seeing, knowing, immediately, that there was nothing over the horizon but nothing. So I grabbed myself back, back from under the ice, felt that weight return as it did. I decided to walk around and see St. Petersburg.

But, there was a place I left sometime ago. When I was nineteen. When the Russians came along with their books of numbers saying they’d pay every man who could lift a box of tools over their head to come and build their city. And along that long train of walkers, crossing the world, me and the men of my town would get letters that there was nothing left. The place had crumbled. There was no one to do any of the work. All bought and sold. Sometimes these days I turn and see everyone, like me, dead, out on the great Neva Baltic blue ice. Everyone who died here was walking back home. All those dead workers from Finland going home to nowhere.

Summer came. My figure dimmed but I wasn’t done walking. On a Friday there was a flood. Everyone waited on the tops of their homes for the water to dip. People cooked and caught fish from rooftops. Kids swam catching disease and adults rowed around in boats catching the kids like fish. In the better districts you would see the noble ladies  and their powdered boys and girls sitting stiffly up on the roofs, their husbands off at war, and I could sit next to them and look at their chalky faces and finally try and see if they had real skin. Their husbands, when they were home, stood watchfully, talking incoherently, trying to keep their whig from flying off their head in the wind. His idea wouldn’t work. Sometimes I stood on rich homes, next to a temporarily husbandless woman, in my furs and working boots, all gray from fading, and I would bring my chin up. I would feel doubly there like I didn’t belong. Sometimes people’s minds would float into mine. I kept them out because it seemed wrong to see what other people were thinking, but that day I read the minds of many women. It made me feel sad. Them pretty much thinking the same things I did, boiled down.

When the flood had gone away there was a fire – everything had dried out. People crowded around the flaming building. Every man in the city paid to grab a hatchet and cut the fire out of the wood. I sat up on the building in question. It was night, growing cold. People shouted in the street below, but I was alone up here. And there the Tzar himself climbed up, forty, usually first to these things, with his hatchet and his left side of his face twitching. He would say under his breath, “Burn, Burn, Burn. Go ahead and burn.” It felt like he was talking to someone he was sleeping with. He was chopping the wood apart like the wood was a war itself. Good, fast strikes. Any worker would appreciate the form. His mustache and slightly baby-like face, his body muscular, his actions always all similar to a whipping motion. Peter, he chops, chops, and chops. I watched this man a few days a month, he was a tyrant, and scourge, a man, and when he died, I was certain he’d be sitting here too, or somewhere, thinking the same things I was, that, look! There was nowhere on the horizon to go! That once faded, everything was lost. The more memories let in, the more you die. Here we go, I would think, every time I slipped away, disappointedly, time to become one with everything – there ain’t nothing funny about that.

He turned to me and said, “Would you get out of the way?”