[ The whole place reeks of perfume and new plastics: clothes, wrapping paper, floor wax, freshly manufactured toys, who knows what else. The twinkling string lights and overhead fluorescent strips glint off the overpolished linoleum floor tiles and people keep hitting his legs with overfull paper shopping bags from parts of the store other than the main thoroughfare, which is equally as wide as an asphalt street and several times more busy, and more than anything he'd just really, really like a drink. Vasiliy does his best to ignore his overwhelming surroundings as he thinks back on the floor map of the store he'd seen as he came in and continues in the direction of the guns and archery counter. Which they have. In an anachronistically upscale Sears.
Somehow he manages to find his way there, albeit after walking through about six or seven stores' worth of completely unrelated families of consumer goods. There's quite a gathering of men (and a few teenage sons) around the C-shaped glass case, about the same density as the gathering of uniformed bodies around any given Moscow bar counter open at 4 AM back in the late thirties, so he just waits his turn to be noticed by the besieged clerk behind the counter, idly eavesdropping as though it will realistically yield any valuable information about his new surroundings: Yeah, Jeanie asked the doctor about it and he said it's fine. Obviously he has some problems with walking but the kid still has the right to grow up like a normal little boy, says a man with an elbow on the counter and an absent son with what he presumes was polio. There's a GI Joe doll in its box sitting upright next to his forearm: America's moveable fighting man, according to the box. Vasiliy watches as the man behind the counter takes a BB gun with a solid wood stock off of the rack on the wall behind him and holds it out for Polio Father to weigh in his hands.
DECORATIONS BOUGHT AT TIFFANY — wildcard
Somehow he manages to find his way there, albeit after walking through about six or seven stores' worth of completely unrelated families of consumer goods. There's quite a gathering of men (and a few teenage sons) around the C-shaped glass case, about the same density as the gathering of uniformed bodies around any given Moscow bar counter open at 4 AM back in the late thirties, so he just waits his turn to be noticed by the besieged clerk behind the counter, idly eavesdropping as though it will realistically yield any valuable information about his new surroundings: Yeah, Jeanie asked the doctor about it and he said it's fine. Obviously he has some problems with walking but the kid still has the right to grow up like a normal little boy, says a man with an elbow on the counter and an absent son with what he presumes was polio. There's a GI Joe doll in its box sitting upright next to his forearm: America's moveable fighting man, according to the box. Vasiliy watches as the man behind the counter takes a BB gun with a solid wood stock off of the rack on the wall behind him and holds it out for Polio Father to weigh in his hands.
Start them young, G.I. Joe... ]