Three Wives

I’ve been married three times. That’s—data. Three experiments. Three results. One observer.

With my first wife—Olga—we couldn’t have a child. Just couldn’t—and that was it. Doctors shrugged. Tests—normal. Everything—in place. The form—wouldn’t start. Like an imaginal disc that’s—there, but—won’t wake up. No hormonal signal. No—necessity.

With the second—Sasha—Leo. Nine months. One day before. A form—that started but never completed.

After Leo, Sasha and I were planning to go to Australia. I’d filed for an SOL visa, gathered everything, was ready to go. We never made it. “Got stuck” on Koh Phangan. For eight years. “Got stuck”—in quotes, because a Thai island isn’t a prison. But—for us—it became one. The place where time—stops. Where you can avoid making decisions—because the island—makes them for you. Warm, cheap, beautiful. Why leave? Why change? Why—be born?

Eight years. In a cocoon. Only—without metamorphosis.

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But first—Sashka.

Tall brunette with dark-blue, slightly almond-shaped eyes—mixed race. In her face—two continents met: Russian bone structure and Buryat breadth, and the meeting—was interesting. People who can’t be neatly classified in any database—are rarer than you’d think. Sashka was one of them.

After Leo she couldn’t pull herself together for a long time. First—she looked for someone to blame. The doctors (obviously). Then—curses. Hexes. The evil eye. A person who’s just lost a child needs a culprit. Chaos without a cause—is unbearable. Chaos with a cause—at least has an address.

Then—shamanism. For Sashka it fell on prepared ground: she was half Buryat, on her father’s side, a father she—I think—had never met. Butunaeva. An ancient surname. Sashka said it meant “dark moon” in translation. (Linguists might argue. The Buryat “bütüü”—“closed,” “hidden”—is indeed connected to the dark phase of the moon, the last day of the lunar month. But Sashka didn’t give a damn about linguists. She needed a story. And the story—“dark moon”—was—the right one.)

In Buryatia, shamanism isn’t an exotic curiosity or a museum exhibit. It’s a living practice, woven into everyday life alongside Buddhism, like a second operating system on the same hardware. Dual boot. Sashka—booted from the shamanic one. And dug up—a lot. More than I could appreciate at the time.

She talked about connections between worlds, about thin places, about folds in reality. Yes—folds. The same word. What I’m writing this entire book about—Sashka had been saying years before I started formalizing it. And I—didn’t always listen carefully. Because when you’re a physicist and your wife is talking about shamanism—you nod and think about your own shit. That’s—one of those things you understand in retrospect. When the data’s already collected and the experiment—is over.