A stray dog with a limp walked by. It stopped, sniffed and lifted a leg to piss on the side of a trash can. Stalin hurled an empty bottle at the animal, smiling fiendishly when the dog yelped upon being struck. Stalin arose and walked slowly out of the alley, finding himself on a slanted street over-looking a gray, white-capped bay that bore a strong resemblance to Vladivostok. But it was not Vladivostok. The place seemed a bit too clean for that. Where were the industrial smokestacks and the great Russian ships and submarines? As he thought about those great sea-going vessels of the Russian Army, a smile once again crept over his face. Nothing made Stalin so happy as thinking of the military might of the Motherland. Ah, yes. I wonder how the new Kiev Class subs are coming along, he thought to himself. We'll have sea dominance yet. Yes we will.

There were gulls overhead, squawking and hovering effortlessly on the gelid air rolling in from the sea. At the bottom of the slope, a large fish sign blinked on and off in red neon. The place appeared to be a market. People milled about the various stalls picking at goods. It overlooked the water. Stalin went down to investigate. He heard English.

His English was broken, but satisfactory. Thank goodness he'd taken those lessons from that lovely Georgian girl, Natasha was her name. Yes, Natasha. Sweet, full-lipped, wide-hipped Natasha, who gave new meaning to the term foreign tongue. Too bad he had to have her shot. You never knew who you could trust. Yes, Krapov had recommended the lessons before Yalta. A good idea, too, he'd have to hand it to Krapov. He never would've been able to deal with Roosevelt and Churchill without it. He remembered now the way their faces lit up in surprise when he expressed his predatory sentiments over the Baltics with the simple words: "They're mine, now piss off." Not a bad bunch those two. Roosevelt, he was a milquetoast when it came to Vodka, but damn if Churchill couldn't put it away. Would've made a good Russian, that Churchill, Stalin thought. He was a sneaky bastard, you were never quite sure what he was up to. The Americans, however, they were easy to understand, gave it all away in their eyes. It's all in the eyes. America is still too young of a country, Stalin thought. It takes centuries for a country to mature. America is just a child.

Stalin walked among the stalls in the market place, and a feeling of awe slowly came over him. There seemed to be no end to the things being sold there. What incredible abundance. He had never seen so much fresh meat and produce. The fish were stacked on ice like corded wood, there were undulating hills of ground beef, and chickens lined up like infantrymen by the dozens in a foggy window. He suddenly felt very hungry. His stomach jumped and twisted within him like some feral beast. What was this place where so much was available? Why were they speaking English? Was it some kind of dacha market for the Politburo elite? And why hadn't he been told about it. Someone was going to pay for keeping him in the dark. Perhaps it was time for a complete purge, a spring cleaning as it were, just to start fresh.

He approached a fruit stand festooned with dangling bunches of bananas, pyramids of pears, towers of tomatoes, mountains of musk melons. His eyes grew large and slimy, like mollusks. He pointed to some apples, stacked with such care he almost didn't want to disturb them. He rubbed his hands together, his tongue moving over his brown teeth like a snake.

"Fruit," he said hoarsely.

"That's an apple buddy." said the fat man at the stand. His shirt said I like Spooted Owls - fried. "Just a buck and a half a pound. How many can I get for ya?"

"Fruit," Stalin said again, staring the apples. The man squinted hard at him, rolls of fat eclipsing his cow-like eyes.

"You're not from around here, are ya fella? You do have money, don't you?" Stalin looked at the man suspiciously, suddenly hating him. How he wished he had his trusty Rikov pistol strapped to his waist like the old days, when a leader had to be wary every moment of his life, awake or asleep.

"Here ya go, fella," said the fruitseller, handing him an apple. "I know how hard it is to be an immigrant in this goddamned country. My family came over on the boat, too. From Glasgow back in the turn of the century. Dad was a fruit seller like me. Sixty-five years of selling fruit from a goddamned cart. It's tough going, but keep pushing. That's what it takes. Hard work. That's what capitalism is all...hey, where ya going?"

Stalin took the apple, stuffed it quickly into the pocket of his coat and hurried off beneath the cold drizzle that fell against his cheeks like needles of ice from the sky. Stupid pig! Stalin thought. Who is he to tell me about capitalism? Blasphemy to talk like that. He'd have that man put to death instantly. How can you run a society with people speaking like that? Damn this place, Stalin thought, finally realizing that this was most definitely not the Soviet Union, and most likely was that horrible horrible place: America. How did I land in this godforsaken land of heathens and capitalist swine? Where is Pistoff, his trusty personal secretary? The man to whom no order is too base or horrific to carry out, no duty too dirty. Stalin bit into the apple, surprised by its sweetness. He closed his eyes and let the pulp remain on his tongue for a moment before swallowing, the juices dancing on his tastebuds, trickling down his throat like some kind of magic elixir.

He stopped in front of a cheery store filled with well-dressed people. They were all clutching white paper cups with some kind of steaming brown liquid inside - coffee perhaps - smiling all of them, chatting noisily. Stalin made a note to have the place shut down immediately, the owners sent to the gulag, but then remembered he was in a foreign land. His rules didn't apply. God, if he could just get back to Moscow.

Stalin noticed a small park overlooking the bay, three youth, two boys and a girl, were sitting on a bench. They looked poor, wearing threadbare clothing, hair long and knotted, some of them had shiny pieces of metal suck through their nostrils, lips and other appendages. Stalin needed information. He needed to get back. He put on his friendly Uncle Joe face and approached them. A ship's horn bleated in the distance.

The tallest of the three looked up at him. The lad was a young man in his late teens, perhaps early twenties. He wore a red flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and jeans ripped at the knees. He was smoking.

"Ahhm, you tell me which way to Kremlin?" Stalin asked in a soft, but direct tone.

"What's up dude?" the boy said.

"Kremlin?" Stalin repeated, lifting his eyebrows. Fool, he thought, imagining how the stupid shit's expression would change if he had his eyes pulled out. He smiled, waiting for an answer. He gazed around for some kind of blunt object to bludgeon the boy with should the answer be unsatisfactory.

"Kremlin?" What's that?" the boy asked, his eyes bloodshot, the muscles in his face slack.

"I think that's some new restaurant," said the girl in between gaping, open-mouthed gum chews, like a cud-like chewing animal. The girl wore a black leather jacket decorated with silver studs, and black jeans. "No, wait, it's like, some new Swing club or something. Over on Westlake."

"Don't know it," the boy said.

"Where are you from?" the girl asked, gazing at Stalin below a head of cropped green hair. "You sound foreign." Stalin just smiled, twisting in his fingers a pinch of gray hairs of his bushy mustache. They'd know soon enough where he was from. Yes, this would be the first place to go when he gave the order to destroy America. He had just decided that. All of these idiots and fools blown away entirely. The city would disappear in a great fireball, the people, these stupid kids, turned to cinders in a glorious second, the image of their shadows etched onto the sidewalk and the sides of buildings. So this was it, he thought. The rank and corrupt product of decades of capitalism laid before him like a cancerous sore. Pathetic youth, clueless and without value to the society.

"No wait. It's near the Space Needle," announced the girl, suddenly springing up on her feet and pointing to a strange-looking building looming like a massive rocket in the fog. Stalin gazed at the building, a wave of horror washing over him. It took his breath away. The building rose from the tops of low-lying buildings like some kind of fantastic new ship.

The damn Americans, he thought. Them and their technology. Always trying to move ahead. His intelligence minister had not informed him of this...what did she call it? Space Needle. What kind of thing was it? A transmission tower? Some kind of new rocket, perhaps for carrying men? Could the American's be this far ahead? He dropped the half-eaten apple on the ground and started to run.

"NO WAIT DUDE, THAT'S THE GREMLIN SHE TALKING ABOUT. THE GREMLIN BAR AND GRILLE! SHE MEANT THE GREMLIN IS ON WESTLAKE! Man, what a weird dude." But Stalin heard nothing. He raced through the streets towards the great object, his thick, tight legs churning like the pistons of a Ulynishkov sedan. He raced past a McDonald's, the smell of french fries and Big Macs wafting past his nostrils, but he smelled nothing. He knocked over an old lady moving slowly along the sidewalk with a metal-framed walker, pushing her into the gutter. Get out of my way! he screamed in Russian.

The building seemed to grow before his eyes, soaring into the sky, tickling the belly of a rain-pregnant cloud. As he got nearer, he noticed some kind of car being transported up the middle support to a round, saucer-like structure at the top. Could they be launching it now? Yes, they were going to launch! He had to stop it. He ran faster, his lungs burning like a phosphorous bomb, the muscles in his legs ripping on the bone from lack of use, causing bolts of searing pain to echo through his entire body. A thin white foam was forming on his lips.

He reached a large grassy area, some kind of park beneath the ship. It was fenced in, but he could see people inside, milling about in brightly colored rain gear. He had to get inside the compound. He broke towards the fence, hoping it was not electrified. He stopped before the fence and touched it gingerly. No shock. My God, these American idiots! There was not even any barbed wire over the top of the fence. Lax security. If the whole country was like this, for God's sake why didn't he bomb it when he had the chance! His fingers clawed the cold wire, and he began to lift himself over the fence, gripping the cross bar at the top, and swinging one of his huge legs over the top.

"Stop right there!" came a voice. He looked over his shoulder, and saw a man beneath a tree, stepping out from the shadows, with a stick drawn. The man wore a small silver badge. Stalin grinded his teeth, his mind racing, trying to figure out how to dispose of the man before any more guards came.

"Real easy there now, fella. Off the fence. That's right. Real easy." Stalin swung his leg back over and dropped onto the pavement, landing off-balance on one foot. He tumbled melodramatically on the ground, letting out a screech of pain.

"Uh oh. Are you all right there? I told you to get down carefully. Look, you're pretty old, what in the world are you doing sneaking into the amusement...aghh!" The man had come close enough, Stalin sprung up from the ground like a cat and wrapped his fingers around the man's neck. The imbecile fell for the injured leg gag. Soviet soldiers are trained to shoot first and ask questions later. A smile moved like a lizard over Stalin's face as he strangled the man, watching his face go from tomato red to a winey purple. The guard's tongue lolled out from his lips like a fat pink slug.

"Oh my God, stop that! Stop! Police!" a woman's voice shrieked, and Stalin looked up and saw a mother and her young son standing just ten feet away, the woman's eyes engorged with fear. The son merely looked perplexed, almost entertained, as if this scene jived well with the thousands of others similar to it - men killing men - that he'd seen on tv and in films. Damn! Stalin dropped the guard on the ground, giving him a hard kick in the gut before running away. He heard the man's dry gasping voice call out something as he rounded a corner.

The streets were full of cars. One street in particular, extremely wide, at least six lanes in fact, was jammed. There was a long fence alongside the big street so that it was impossible to enter, and he was not about to try and climb another fence. Stalin turned left down a road and headed in a direction he estimated to be west. After just a few blocks he came upon a small lake. Either that or an inlet of some kind from the sea, but there was not the smell of the sea to the place. Not like Vladivostok anyway. Oh, how he missed Russia at that moment. The scent of collective farms, the warm sweet kisses of the Soviet sun, his dacha in Kinovgrad, having his tender flesh kneaded by Marika...Oh sweet Marika how I long for your firm hands, the hands of a field worker, strong and callused, never gentle with him, hard powerful hands grinding into his flesh, the fingers digging into his back like the grumbling nubs of a columbine. Bliss, absolute bliss.

There were planes taking off, boats bobbing everywhere, a pair of men in long, colorful kayaks paddling on the water. Stalin ducked through a wooden door into a dark boathouse, sat back against a moist plank and tried to think his way through his dilemma. There was a beautiful boat moored in the enclosure, a sleek, motor-driven craft with attractive paneling and shiny metal trim. He heard the squawk of gulls and the purr of aircraft engines. A pair of voices came near, and then seemed to stop right outside the boathouse. He listened, understanding only pieces of the conversation.

"So, I would've recommended they go with a T-1, or at least ATM with a LAN backbone, but Tom said he wanted to go with a shared Token Ring at 1.6 meg, which made sense. At least you don't have to deal with network reliability issues and..."

"Yeah, well, keep in mind you'll eventually have to upgrade the whole system. Especially if you're sticking with the old 90 megahertz Pentiums, you're just not going to be able to leverage that kind of bandwidth."

"Hmm. What about cable? I hear they'll have infrastructure links running at 155 meg..." Stalin's eyebrows danced on his forehead like two caterpillars engaged in a complex mating ritual. What were they saying, he wondered. The language was English to be sure, but these terms were completely foreign to his ear. T-1, LAN, Token Ring - what could it all mean? Was it some kind of secret project, a code they were talking about? Stalin saw a wooden oar leaning against the wall nearby. He took it in his hands on an impulse, feeling the need to be holding a weapon of some kind. Suddenly two men entered the boat house. They were medium-sized, they seemed fit and athletic, each was dressed in brightly colored rain gear with a small sewed-on badge that said REI. An intelligence agency, no doubt, a branch of the CIA, perhaps? The men stopped when they saw him, their faces betraying a mixture of surprise and anger.

"Can I help you?" said the taller of the two. Stalin did not reply. "This is private property. I'm going to have to ask you to leave." There was no way he would be able to take on both men, even with the oar. The taller man stepped towards him, and he raised the oar, holding it like a baseball bat.

"Whoa! Hold on there, man. Put it down. This is my boathouse. I'm just asking you to take a hike. Bob, call the police." From the zippered pocket of his coat, the other man removed a small rectangular device, no larger than a wallet, and flipped it open with a quick flick of his wrist. He poked something onto the face of the device and it made a series of barely audible beeping noises, then placed it against his ear. Stalin was fascinated. Was it some kind of telephone? So small, no wires. Incredible! Who were these men? Government agents to be sure, perhaps at this very moment involved in the American takeover of the Soviet Union. Stalin was frightened in the presence of such technology created by the Americans. He had never seen anything like it before. How could they be so far ahead? He felt beaten, frustrated, as if the entire world that he knew had suddenly transmogrified before his eyes. Everything he thought he knew was gone. He put the oar down and gazed helplessly at the men.

"Fine," said the taller man. "Now, if you'd just leave, there won't be any need to get the police involved." Stalin dropped his head, and walked past the men with his arms drooping at his side. The men backed away from him as he passed, wrinkling their noses as if he were some sort of animal. They shut the door behind him.

Stalin thought he might throw up. Never in his life had he had to deal with such impertinence, but here in this foreign land, he was helpless to do much about it. He walked sullenly along the lakeside, watching the cars zoom by and observing the faces that loomed behind the windshields, happy faces most of them, not like the faces of people he remembered from Moscow streets, whose faces were etched with lines of misery and bitterness. One vehicle that passed had three young kids singing at the top of their lungs - awful music, like someone having their thumbs crushed - but you couldn't deny that they were having fun, enjoying life. How strange, too, that anyone could be so full of joy on a day like this, a cold, gray, drizzling day. The kind of day that is perfect for moping.

Up ahead about twenty yards, Stalin watched a man get out of his car, a beautiful Audi coupe, with a sleek, painted body as green and shiny as an Egyptian scarab. The man left the engine running and the door unlocked as he scurried inside a small convenience store. Stalin knew right then that this was his chance, there would be no others. He sprinted towards the car, sliding to a stop on the wet, sandy ground. He opened the door and jumped in, looking over the strange arrangement of components before him. When was the last time he'd driven a car? Still, it seemed simple enough. He heard a loud shout, and looked up to see the man, a six pack of brown beer bottles in his hand and a bag of pretzels in the other, running at him, but Stalin found the gear shift and threw the car into reverse, spinning the steering wheel so that the rear end careened around in a half circle and knocked over a pair of trash cans. The man was pounding on the window with the flat of his hand, feverishly trying the door handle. The bag of pretzels popped and pretzels flew every direction. The man was desperate to get in the car, but Stalin had locked the door. Stalin moved the gear stick to 2nd, unsure what that meant, but hoping it was correct. He stomped on the gas as if on the hand of some lazy vagrant begging for money, and sped off, leaving the man to cover his eyes as the tires kicked up a cloud of gravel into his face. Stalin laughed out loud for the first time in...well, something like 55 years.

He cruised along the edge of the lake, back towards the center of the city, being careful so as not to attract attention to himself, but taking notice of the exhilarating sensations he felt from driving. The car had a pleasing smell, fresh and clean. New. He opened the window and a rush of cool air swept inside, tousling his hair, invigorating him. He noticed the feel of the wheel in his hand, cool and smooth, felt the powerful thrum of the engine roil through his muscles when he gave the car some gas, seeping to his bones. Power. He loved power. There was a telephone sitting in the space between the two front seats, and Stalin considered calling Moscow, but then decided against it. No. There will be time to go back. But for now...

He wanted to get onto that large white road, the one he saw before, the one that seemed to promise swift delivery away from this place. The road meant freedom. He found it again after making a left on a small road alongside the larger one. He drove for less than a mile before spying a sign up ahead said Interstate 90 East. East? How far east? he wondered. Far enough? Well, what difference did it make? He followed the signs along the wide white highway. The wind poured in the window now in a refreshing torrent that not only mussed his hair but cleansed his spirit.

It was at that moment that he realized something very important. He was happy. He had no idea where he was headed, but so what? How long had he just wanted to leave, to break free of it all and just go, to let his spirit glide on the winds of freedom, to bathe in the glory of being alone with his thoughts and ideas.

He knew if he continued east, eventually he'd get to Moscow. That is all that mattered. How far East would he need to go, who could say? How far East? A long, long way.