Jacob's Ladder

34 Yurik in America

(1991–2000)

The surface of life had changed dramatically. At home in Moscow, Yurik had hardly noticed the way the days passed. They went by evenly, and movement through them was mechanical, automatic. He woke up, washed, had breakfast, went to school, came home from school, grabbed his guitar; and then life was all about music: everyday discoveries; intense, endless enjoyment. But here in America, there was a new home, full of small alien sounds, clean rain pattering outside the window; Martha, with her eternal smile plastered on her face; the silent Vitya; and English, which he knew almost solely from Beatles songs. The world of old habits collapsed, and new ones—the defense of the psyche against unfamiliar agitations—had not yet been formed.

Yurik’s first days on Long Island coincided with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Martha had planned to take Yurik to see the sights in the city, but she fell ill and had to cancel it. When Yurik tried to pick up his guitar and play, he couldn’t concentrate—something stopped him. Vitya spent these Christmas holidays in the university lab. At the end of December, the university purchased a NeXT computer, the recent brainchild of Steve Jobs; he had been fired by that time from Apple and had started a new company that produced these new NeXTs with a new operating system, which laid the foundation for the future Mac OS X. Vitya couldn’t tear himself away from this new toy. He invited Yurik to have a look. It was the first computer that Yurik had ever seen “in person.” Vitya stroked the case and praised the black cube the way a dog lover praises the points of his favorite canine. He admired its power, its memory capacity, and the high-resolution graphics.

Yurik asked questions, and Vitya answered. When Vitya answered, Yurik asked him to repeat what he had said. And he grasped it. Four hours passed like a single minute. As they sat talking in the empty laboratory, Yurik began to understand that music wasn’t the only interesting thing in life. They would have sat there all night, but Martha called to say that she was expecting them home for dinner. They went home under a fine rain when it was already dark, silent, each of them lost in his own thoughts. Vitya was thinking about the wonderful possibilities for modeling cell processes that the new computer offered, Yurik about how great it would be to unite music with this remarkable machine. He wasn’t the first one this idea had occurred to, but he didn’t realize it yet. Yurik had no idea that in a few years the computer would become an indispensable part of any musical process, from studying to recording to performing.

Vitya was a lousy communicator. He offered his thoughts, but there were gaps and lacunae, and he left out the important details that he considered self-evident. Yurik understood him, though, and knew how to negotiate his way through the holes in the conversation. He immediately grasped that Vitya’s expertise lay in his ability to make the intelligent machine solve a problem that an ordinary person could also solve but would require far more time to do.

This was the beginning of the nineties, and the first experiments in the fascinating interdependence of the human and the machine, formerly a subject of science fiction, were now becoming a part of daily life. Programmers foresaw that the artificial brains created by humans could surpass the intellects of their creators, that the speed of calculation could engender a new kind and quality of intelligence.

Vitya had acquired a new audience for his ideas in Yurik; but Vitya did not become a new listener to Yurik’s music. Their relationship did evolve, however. From the age of five, Yurik had been connected to his father through chess. Now, some ten years later, chess had been replaced by the computer.

On January 4, Martha took Yurik to enroll in the music department of a high school that specialized in the arts. Yurik had an interview about his knowledge of music. Since his English left something to be desired, they assigned him to an ESL class with a group of other foreign students. There were only four required courses: ESL (which, after two months, Yurik was calling “English for Slow-Wits,” and he was transferred to the regular class), mathematics, the U.S. Constitution, and a vague catchall subject they called “science.”

Of the many music courses on offer, Yurik chose four: music theory, classical and jazz guitar, and the foundation course in piano. There was also a course called Choir, which was mandatory for everyone who studied music.

The first day of school made a deep impression on Yurik. The four morning hours were devoted to analyzing a recent Christmas performance. The general choir of the school had sung a part of Händel’s Messiah, and now the choir director, dissatisfied with the performance that the audience had raved about, was voicing his criticisms.

“Open to No. 22: ‘Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,’” the teacher’s voice boomed out.

Yurik opened a homemade book of music and text. He found No. 22. All of them had these books. The teacher, waving his hand, looked more like a basketball player than a musician. His hands were like enormous shovels, and his arms flailed as if he were battling with enemy air.

To Yurik’s ear, the choir sounded marvelous. There was no accompaniment, and groups of voices worked like different instruments. Yurik listened to them almost in a trance. He knew that the instrument could sound like a human voice, but that the voice could sound like an instrument—Yurik had never heard anything like it! The singing awoke a storm of feelings in him, an astonishing chaos he couldn’t make sense of, but he felt on the verge of tears. Every now and then, the teacher stopped the singing with a gesture and explained to them where and how they had bungled it. It was remarkable, but Yurik understood him. The focus of his interests helped him in understanding a foreign language.

Fortune smiled on Yurik. He would finally have teachers who interested him in the subject, and he was able to escape from the dead end he had been stuck in at home. He understood that he was in the right place at the right time.

The best teacher of all was the one who taught music theory. He played strange Japanese music on the koto, an ancient Japanese instrument that had no definite number of notes per octave—not seven, not twelve, but as many as one wished. Instead of a scale, there was infinity … It simply boggled the mind.

His first jazz-guitar teacher, on the other hand, turned out to be a dry old curmudgeon, cut from a completely different cloth. A fat black man, a Southerner, with a bald pate and a rich ring of hair circling it, he didn’t even listen when Yurik played. He just pointed his finger at Yurik and said, “Practice scales!” This is what he told everyone, but the lessons in technique were individual, and Yurik didn’t know that Mr. Kingsley taught everyone by the same method: he demanded that a student play 120 scales over two octaves in the course of ten minutes, and if the student made the slightest mistake he had to do it all over. The stress was such that Yurik even had a nosebleed during the second lesson. Kingsley wouldn’t allow the students to play anything else. And he didn’t let anyone talk, either. Much later, Yurik summed up this maniacal method by saying that there was not the slightest drop of joy in Kingsley’s approach to music, only finger gymnastics. But Yurik already understood that if music brought no joy to the musician it wouldn’t bring joy to anyone else, either.

The piano teacher was a charming elderly Frenchwoman. Watching her small wrinkled hands fluttering over the keys, Yurik experienced professional envy. Whereas the pianist uses the same mechanism of movement for both hands, a more complex coordination is required of the guitarist: the left and the right hands must live different lives, but stay in perfect sync. And, of course, the main advantage of the piano is that it allows one to introduce several voices simultaneously, and opens a whole universe of sounds that the guitar can’t reproduce. In addition, there is an enormous amount of music literature for the piano—more than for any other instrument.

The classes in classical guitar, which he didn’t like, expanded his abilities. The teacher, Emilio Gallardo, who happened to have the same name as, or was a relative of, the famous Spanish classical guitarist, showed his plucking technique on an excellent Antonio Sanchez instrument. Yurik began playing without a pick, and resorted to it only in special circumstances or when he broke a fingernail. Plucking the strings with his nails produced a completely different quality of sound. At the same time, Emilio Gallardo taught him how to treat his nails properly—how to grow them out and file them in a straight line, with the file held at a forty-five-degree angle to the nail. This was how the childhood trauma of nail cutting, the occasion of constant struggles with his mama, was resolved.

After his torments under Mr. Kingsley, Yurik transferred to another class with another jazz-guitar teacher, James Lovesky. Their tastes were more similar. Every day opened new possibilities, but he needed more theory. Before, Yurik had played the guitar as if it were something like a wind instrument; now he began to understand polyphony. It was in the jazz-guitar class that he acquired his musical literacy, and began writing his first arrangements of jazz standards. This turned out to be the most interesting aspect of study for him.

Yurik attended the school for a year and a half. He played in the school jazz band, and was definitely considered to be a cool cat. He himself didn’t doubt this. He considered his former infatuation with the Beatles to be just a phase he’d had to go through—though a necessary one, and he still cherished the memory of his first musical love. Now he played what the great jazz guitarists played—Wes Montgomery, Charlie Byrd, George Benson. He imitated them, biting the inside of his lip, tense and focused. Among his numerous new musical influences, Django Reinhardt, a Belgian Gypsy with two fingers missing on his left hand, occupied a special place. He was simply beyond comprehension, the way a creature from another planet is beyond comprehension. There could never be another like him.

In the first year of his American life, Yurik discovered New York on his own, and fell in love with the city. It was the capital of his music, and the musical life of the street in the Big Apple captivated him most of all. It was the city of a dream come true. When he got there, he was ready to follow the first street musician he came across, as he had used to follow cats through the neighborhood in childhood.

Every Sunday, he wandered through the city, either with other classmates or on his own. When he grew bolder, he began to take his guitar with him and join up with musicians playing in the subway, or in the squares. Sometimes they chased him off; sometimes they let him play with them. But from that moment on, he never parted with his guitar. Wherever he went, the guitar went with him.

His relations with Martha were strong and positive, although she was often very worried about him, especially the first night when he failed to return from the city, staying overnight with a group of musicians and smoking weed with them. These all-nighters became more and more frequent. New York was so hospitable, so friendly … Long Island now seemed to him to be claustrophobic, like a village where nothing ever happened. This was not the case, of course—it had its own jazz festivals, its own in-crowds. But nothing could compare to New York.

Somehow or other, he managed to graduate from high school. He never learned to read Shakespeare in English, but his “home schooling” with Nora, her reading aloud, and the constant theater talk, in which Shakespeare received a lion’s share of attention, gave him a strong enough background so he could get passing grades. The math teacher, who occasionally had to wake Yurik up during class, was irritated by his somnolence; but she knew that the math problems, which his classmates sweated over, he could solve better than they, even in his head, and more quickly. They taught math better in Russia; or maybe Vitya’s genes had something to do with it … He had very good grades in his music subjects, and Martha, who had no ear for music, was excessively proud of his achievements and dreamed that he would continue his studies, perhaps at a first-rate music school, like Berklee.

At the end of his second year, Yurik had asked James, his favorite music teacher, “What would you do if you were me?”

“I would lock myself in my room for five years and play. You don’t need to do anything else.”

This suggestion was very much to Yurik’s liking. The only thing that didn’t appeal to him was the locked room. The city, which was everything but a locked room, beckoned to him. Life was lived to the hilt there, on every street corner. He wanted to learn by engaging in life, playfully.

Nora flew over for his high-school graduation ceremony. The plane landed early in the morning. She dropped her big suitcase off at Marina Chipkovskaya’s and went directly to Long Island.

Yurik was glad to see his mother, but he greeted her as though he had just said goodbye to her yesterday, and not a whole year and a half ago. He immediately grabbed his guitar to show her what he had learned during that time, and played for four hours straight.

After the trans-Atlantic flight, Nora was a bit groggy and disoriented. She hadn’t slept in two days. At first she was very happy about Yurik’s music; then she started nodding off, and ended up in a strange state between sleeping and waking. In her head, some sort of light show was set in motion: northern lights of blue and acid-green, a hideous scarlet and orange, and she slipped into some parallel musical space, where dangers lurked, and from which she couldn’t escape.

She stayed overnight at Vitya and Martha’s house, in the living room. Martha was kind and welcoming toward her. It seemed that her adoration of Vitya extended to Nora as well—amazing. Out of the corner of her eye, Nora noticed how Vitya squeezed Martha’s wrist affectionately, how he pulled the chair out for her when they were sitting down to dinner. Apparently, he had learned to see other people. Was it actually possible that a person who had taken a purely expedient view of other people his whole life had finally matured when he was in his forties? Could his love for a plain woman, no longer young, actually bring this about? It was also remarkable that Vitya never even asked about what was going on in Russia. Granted, what was happening there had no bearing on his professional activity, and he didn’t perceive any difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as he didn’t perceive so much else.

The next morning, Nora and Yurik went to New York together. Yurik showed his mother around town, taking her to the musically hip spots that upstanding citizens and prosperous folk weren’t even aware existed. He took her to the Lower East Side, to all his favorite places. Nora, who had explored the city quite thoroughly on her previous visit, with Tengiz, marveled at how multifaceted it was—it seemed to contain a whole host of disparate cities, independent and aloof from one another, but blending seamlessly into a larger whole. On one end of the street, you saw well-heeled, manicured people in business suits rushing to and fro; at the other end, brash, down-and-out tramps and dangerous-looking fellows in ripped undershirts were hanging out on the street corner.

They had not gone two steps before they ran into a black musician, who was snacking on a hot dog, sitting among a collection of pots and pans arranged around him, some of them standing on the ground, others hanging. Yurik greeted him with a warm handshake and clapped him on the back, and they exchanged a few words.

“My mother,” Yurik said, pushing Nora toward the man. He held out his hand to her. For a plump hand, it was unexpectedly lively and mobile, like a small animal. The musician finished eating his hot dog and struck the hanging pot, which resounded with a surprisingly low sound. This was the overture. He let the sound fade out, then began tapping with his fingers, beating with his fists, and slapping with his palms, and in this way played his improvised drums.

“They call him ‘Pots and Pans,’” Yurik said proudly. “A local genius. The only one of his kind in the world.”

The City as Theater, Nora thought, still not having managed to explore all the little squares that deserved attention, its cozy, secluded stages and wings, utility rooms and workshops. Yurik did not just show her his favorite places, but revealed to her at the same time how the city accepted him as one of its own children, one of the multitude of players, dancers, the dissolute, the merrymakers. Nora didn’t fully understand at that time the degree to which this atmosphere of freedom and flight was fed by the fumes of marijuana, hashish, and other intoxicating substances. And heroin would never have occurred to her.

Yurik invited Nora to his favorite hangouts—Performance Space 122 and Collective Unconscious. There were almost no people around when they stopped by at Collective Unconscious, only empty Coca-Cola bottles, bags, old bicycle parts, a dirty mattress, a sleeping bag, and a broken umbrella that represented the eponymous “collective unconscious” of the club. This was the very epicenter of lowlife revels and mad freedom, a place where people sang, drank, played, and shot up, all through the late evenings and into the night. She began feeling uncomfortable. They went around to several other, similar places. Yurik knew a few people, whom he greeted. He clearly felt proud of his connection to this underground world. Several fellows were sound asleep, wrapped up in sleeping bags. One old man, obviously drunk, woke up and crawled out of a pile of rags, asking for money. A human wreck.

“Give him a dollar, Mama.” Nora gave it to him.

Yurik led Nora through town along a sinuous, meandering route. Although she had a map, she didn’t want to refer to it, and she only approximately understood which way they were going. In this city, more than all others she was familiar with, there was an invisible compass pointing one toward the north, or toward the south … But they were in fact headed east, to the East River.

On Avenue A between East Seventh Street and St. Mark’s Place, Yurik ducked into a place that was little more than a hole in the wall.

“Now we’re going to have falafel. The cheapest in the whole city—a dollar twenty-five,” he said. “All the Russians in town come here. The falafel is excellent. Akhmed the Cripple runs it.”

Akhmed proffered Nora the thin dough pocket with its steaming-hot filling. She took a nibble and thought: If I were eighteen years old, I’d get stranded here for the rest of my life. I don’t think I’d ever want to leave. It’s a dangerous place, though. It’s as though the sirens sing and call out, but don’t devour you all at once; they suck you up gradually. But for now the shadow of danger only added to the charm of the place. Like a huge elephant, the city showed the inquisitive spectator first one side, then the other: now the tail, now the trunk.

Then Yurik took Nora to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. At this late-afternoon hour, there were still not many visitors. The walls were plastered with photographs of famous people, of whom Nora could recognize only Che Guevara. For the first time in his life, Yurik turned out to be better informed than she was. “Look! It’s Allen Ginsberg.” Under the photograph (his face was unprepossessing, to put it mildly) was a quote from the poet, in white letters on a black background: “The most integrated place on the planet.”

Well put, but impossible to translate into Russian. An integrated place … But you could make sense of it—it was a place where people were equal, there was no segregation, freedom of expression was pushed to its utmost limits; a place where boundaries and limits of all kinds were suspended. Nora’s literary imagination immediately started roaming to all the celebrated fin-de-siècle cafés she had read about: Les Deux Magots and the Café de la Rotonde in Paris; The Stray Dog in a Petersburg cellar; Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. All of those places were the forebears, three generations removed, of this contemporary magnet for artists and literati; but this place was redolent not of Decadence or Futurism, not of Dada, but of social protest, revolution, and terrorism. Here was the modern-day, and even slightly dated, avant-garde. It was the front line of progress, of breaking with convention. There was music, and poetry, and performance, and none of it had anything to do with mainstream culture, with commerce. They were playing the music of some fantastic opera singer, and Nora stopped to listen. Yurik was quick to tell her that it was a countertenor. Such high male voices had been popular in Italy, and music was composed especially for the castrati. Now these voices were popular again. Yurik explained all of this, then said brightly, “You weren’t aware of this before?”

“Yes, I knew about it, of course. But I had never heard it.”

My word, Yurik. What an amazing place! she mused. Then she thought: I need to get him enrolled in some school or program as soon as possible. He could easily get stuck here for good.

She herself was completely enamored with it: a Rastafarian with a mass of intricate dreadlocks, and a parrot sitting on his shoulder; an anorexic-looking girl, bound up from head to foot like an Egyptian mummy. There was also a guitarist whom Yurik recognized. He almost fainted: “Mama, do you know who that is? It’s John McLaughlin!”

The group sitting at the table next to theirs seemed to be playing cards. In fact, it wasn’t a card game at all. A well-known fortune-teller was reading the tarot. In one dark corner of the room, a six-foot-five strikingly white person in an orange cape was sitting in the lotus position. An albino.

They walked to Bleecker Street. Nora was tired. The day was fast turning into evening. At the entrance to the subway, Nora went to buy a ticket. Yurik glanced into the cashier’s window and struck up an animated conversation with an elderly black man in a subway employee’s uniform. Nora couldn’t understand a word of their conversation. She walked away. The cashier opened up a side door and walked out of his little cage, pumped Yurik’s hand, and clapped him on the back. Yurik told Nora that this aging fellow was a marvelous guitarist, an erstwhile hippie, who had taken on a steady job when the years started to overtake him. Everyone called him Gnome Poem. Yurik couldn’t remember his real name.

They agreed that Nora would return to Marina’s house in northern Manhattan by herself, and that he would hang out here for a while. He said he’d come back around eleven. He showed up at three. Marina had already gone to bed, and Nora was sitting in the kitchen, worrying about what she should do in these circumstances. Go looking for him? But where? Call him? Whom could she call? And, generally speaking, what should she do now, tomorrow, in a year?

Nora didn’t make it to Long Island the following year. By this time, Yurik had left Long Island completely and put down roots in New York. It was a soft landing, however. Martha kept trying to persuade him to continue his studies, but Yurik considered that life in New York offered a better education than anything he could get at a university. By the middle of the summer, he had become so much at home in the Big Apple that it was no more possible to lure him away than it was to lure a worm out of the hard flesh of the sweet fruit. A few months later, he already knew dozens of other guitarists and drummers and horn players who had burrowed into the heart of the Apple, and they were all on a first-name basis with one another.

When he went to Long Island to take a bath and get clean underwear, Martha would lend him a few twenties and fifties. In the evening, sitting at the computer, Vitya showed his son new programs, marveling slightly at his slowness. Then they called Nora. The calls were expensive. Yurik couldn’t allow himself such luxuries, and Nora could never find him at home when she called. Her strong and enduring connection with her son, which she had once feared might be a problem in itself, became more and more attenuated, and finally threatened to disappear altogether.

Vitya had never taken much interest in Yurik, and had no idea how he made a living. Martha took the burden of these trivial matters in life onto her own shoulders—she paid all the bills, bought all the food and clothing. Vitya had only the vaguest notions of what it took to get by in life.

In the first year after Yurik graduated from high school, Martha began to pay for his expenses as well, but she felt that what she was doing wasn’t right. She came from a poor Irish family, and though she was Catholic, her views on life were completely Protestant. At the end of the first year of Yurik’s semi-independent existence, she forced herself to tell him that she was not going to provide for him anymore. Yurik thought about getting a job.

An opportunity came his way through Ari, an Israeli friend of his who had been on an extended vacation in the United States after finishing his military service in the Israeli army. Ari had been born in Russia, and his family still spoke Russian at home, so he was happy for the chance to be able to chat with Yurik in their mother tongue.

The main topic of discussion was the army. Yurik, who had left Russia at the insistence of his mother to avoid military service, did not try to conceal this fact of his biography. To Ari’s mind, this was immoral. Yurik considered military service itself to be immoral. He was well aware of the vagaries of Russian politics, and understood that, after Afghanistan, there had been other conflicts—Ossetia-Ingushetia and in Georgia-Abkhazia—not without the involvement of Russia. Now there was turmoil in Chechnya, too. All of this smacked of war, which his mother feared. Yurik didn’t want to kill or to be killed. He wanted to play the guitar. Yurik’s story about the Russian fellow who had hanged himself after serving in Afghanistan didn’t make an impression on Ari. Ari’s experience had been different: he adored the army.

“Before the army, I was just a piece of meat—an idiot with a guitar, and a source of shame for my family. After three years in the army, I became a real professional. I specialized as a radio operator, and I learned Arabic. The army teaches you how to survive, which is also a kind of science. The main thing was that I learned how to learn. I can teach you, too. I’ll teach you how to be a furniture mover. Don’t laugh—it’s kind of like science, too. Not everyone can do it.”

Yurik accepted the offer immediately.

The next day, Ari took him to a small moving company. The person who ran the operation was a Russian Jew with an Israeli passport and a checkered past. Around him revolved a motley assortment of people from all ends of the earth—losers, pariahs, and eccentrics of every stripe. The first crew he worked with was Israeli, and they taught him the tricks of the trade. They worked in a group of four: Ari, two more former Israeli soldiers, and Yurik. It turned out that a pack mule’s endurance was more important than brute strength in this profession, and good mind-body coordination was more necessary than broad shoulders. He worked with this crew for three weeks, until it disintegrated because Ari and his friends went back to Israel. Then Yurik started working with a new crew: two Sherpas and another newbie, a towering African American hulk.

Both Sherpas—Apa and Pema—came up to about Yurik’s chin, but their strength and stamina were the stuff of legend. Though they were unsociable at first, after a few days working together, watching Yurik toiling alongside them and trying to keep up, they grew very friendly and warm toward him. On the first day, the hulk cast disparaging glances at the Sherpas, but after three hours of work, he lay down next to the wall and didn’t budge. Yurik and the Sherpas worked another ten hours before calling it a day, and the black giant never came back to work.

Yurik lived in an abandoned house. Alice, an aging alcoholic with a past in the theater, was the temporary landlady and self-appointed manager. She “enrolled” acceptable candidates and kicked out the ne’er-do-wells. She quelled conflicts, enforced sanitary norms, and negotiated with the municipal authorities, so that they would tolerate the existence of this illegal homeless shelter. She protected Yurik. He had lived under her roof for three years when the municipal authorities cleared the squat. Someone bought the building, and it was scheduled for restoration. Alice was offered a job with the municipality; she became an official.

Yurik also climbed up a notch on the social ladder: he rented an apartment. He and a friend, a thievish guitarist from Peru, split the monthly rent of three hundred dollars for a room in an apartment in which four other seekers after the American experience were living: an Arab girl who had run away from home, two Poles who were working in construction, and a Hindu preacher of some obscure offshoot of the religion. The Arab girl and one of the Poles inhabited the largest room, the Hindu and the other Pole lived in the middle-sized room, and Yurik and the Peruvian were in the smallest room.

Half a year later, the Peruvian underwent a miraculous change. To the bitter disappointment of the Hindu, he converted to Christianity. He stopped stealing, considered himself henceforth to be saved, and believed that in the coming months the Lord would summon everyone who had been saved, including himself, and that they would be ushered into the blessed beyond. He called himself a “born-again,” sang hymns, and wrangled with the Hindu in the kitchen, until he set out for California, to meet even more blessed people.

Now Yurik was the sole inhabitant of the room. The bighearted Martha agreed to sponsor him, forking out the $150 a month that the Peruvian would no longer be contributing. His departure was very timely, because Yurik had found a girlfriend, one Laura Smith, and all his previous casual loves paled in comparison with her. Laura, who was just finishing high school, was the proverbial black sheep of an upstanding American family. They saw each other every day. She liked having a Russian guitarist for a boyfriend, and she went with him to all his gigs, whether in the subway, at clubs, or on street corners—wherever one of the two bands that invited him as a replacement was performing. Laura also had a dream of doing something creative. She wanted to be a belly dancer. She practiced her art constantly: at school, at home, in the subway, and on the street. A small girl, she undulated as she walked, swaying her boyish hips to and fro. She danced and danced …

Yurik’s room became their love nest. And a messier room the world had never seen. It was a jumble of dirty socks strewn about the floor, sheet music, CDs, cigarette butts, paper plates, and half-filled cans of Coke. An old Hammond organ, left behind by former tenants, stood in the hallway, blocking half the entrance and leaving only a narrow space to squeeze through.

This was the room where the young couple broadened their knowledge of the world, from time to time ingesting substances that took them to other spaces and realities. But when Laura finished high school, and showed her parents the report card with grades that would never get her admitted into a decent college, she announced to Yurik that he had no prospects, and danced off forever. After leaving Yurik and giving him his first broken heart, she went to California. Then she flew off to the places where fearless and brainless enthusiasts of dangerous journeys fly to.

Yurik, his injury still fresh in his mind, wrote three songs, which the leader of a well-known band liked so much he added them to the band’s new repertoire. For the first time, Yurik knew what it felt like to be a real songwriter. And he understood that new music arises from new experiences and sensations and troubles. That’s what I was missing, he thought.

Since he had arrived, he had felt like a part of this city. Music, his music, rang out from every corner, from every nook and cranny. When he went to Long Island to visit Martha and Vitya, which he did rather infrequently, he began missing the city while he was still on the commuter train. The Moscow of his childhood was so remote to him that thinking about it was like looking at a picture through the wrong end of the binoculars. Only Nora’s visits reminded him of his pre-American existence.

Nora came for Parents’ Weekend, as they called her yearly visits to New York. This visit disrupted Yurik’s plans for acquiring new experiences. One week after his stint at the moving company, instead of the new experiences he desired, he was refreshing his old ones: he was walking through the city with Nora, showing her his favorite back streets and alleys. Nora was walking next to a completely grown-up man, handsome and tall, but not at all like the young people, students and actors, with whom she interacted at home. How was he different? In his absolute casualness, his lack of inhibition, his disarming childishness, and a kind of relaxed freedom.

No, Nora thought, trying to reason with herself. It’s just that our life together has ended, and he is going his own way. His own way. I can’t get him back. Why should I want to? And who am I to talk? I went off on my own at fifteen.

Nora had spent the evening before that with Martha and Vitya. The women understood that Yurik was having a hard time; Vitya nodded absently. They made the decision to encourage Yurik to study somewhere, study something. Nora didn’t know whether she had any influence over him anymore; she didn’t know what was happening to him. Was this just the way he was growing up, or was he becoming American?

In January, Nora had called him from Moscow to wish him a happy birthday. After a short pause, he said, “Mama, I’ll never be a teenager anymore. It’s sad.”

They talked and walked, walked and talked. They were walking through Chelsea, perhaps the most stable and enduring part of town, the area most impervious to the ravages of time. The old mansions of the English inhabitants, symmetrical buildings with drop-down fire escapes, shabby walls, broken sidewalks.

“Here is an old Irish bar where they sell Guinness. Here’s the hotel where everyone who was anyone stayed—Jimi Hendrix lived here, and all the major American writers, who were every bit as good as Dickens,” Yurik said proudly, as though he himself were the owner of the hotel. Nora glanced into the entrance to the yard, where a single desiccated tree was standing. An old bench. It seemed as though the old man from the story “The Last Leaf” could have lived here, and in that apartment on the upper floor Jim and Della Dillingham, the main characters of the story “The Gift of the Magi,” might have lived. Nora had so loved these stories as a child that she immediately recognized settings from O. Henry’s stories. Nora stopped. Hell’s Kitchen, the Garment District, the Meatpacking District—it was all here somewhere.

They stopped in front of a house where Yurik’s teacher and friend Mickey lived, or, rather, was dying, of AIDS. He was quite a famous musician, a singer, who experimented in all kinds of ways with his voice. He had performed with all the jazz greats, but his name was connected for the most part with a marginal, noncommercial musical current—a driving mélange of funk and heavy metal. Now and then, one of the jazz masters, someone so great that Yurik had never seen him up close, would invite Mickey to cut a record.

Yurik spent a lot of time at Mickey’s, and brought him the drugs he needed to survive. Now Yurik wondered whether he should tell Nora about this extraordinary fellow, about the tragic history of the gay man who had been banished from home at the age of thirteen; who, from being a homeless street kid, had become the owner of an apartment in one of the most famous buildings in Chelsea, which had been mortgaged, and remortgaged … At one time it had been luxurious, but it had fallen into disrepair and become a shelter for homeless cats and his down-and-out friends. No, it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell her.

They continued walking west and ran into the Hudson. An old pier. Heavy, slow-moving water, boardwalks, abandoned coastal lands, boats lying askew on the shore, seagulls, some warehouses, abandoned factories … Silence. No one else in sight.

“What’s over there?” Nora pointed to the opposite shore.

“That’s Hoboken. It’s in another state. I’ve never been there. They say it’s cool.”

Nora was wondering whether it was time to tell Yurik about the family decision, which was more like an ultimatum, that he needed to study something. When he heard it, he agreed without a second thought—though he did say that what he needed more than anything else was practice, and everything else would follow. They discussed the various possibilities. It ended with an explanation that the point in studying would be to allow him to earn his living not as a furniture mover, but as something for which he needed professional qualifications. Under pressure from the family, he agreed to enter the Sam Ash Music Institute, to train as a sound engineer.

Nora returned home, leaving Martha with money for the first semester’s tuition.

After his mother left, Yurik actually did undertake to change his life. He quit the furniture movers, but he didn’t go far. Using his music connections, he got a job with a music producer, an unsuccessful guitarist of about forty, and started transporting equipment, fine-tuning it, and doing repairs on it. In the fall, he did enroll in the sound-engineering institute, which turned out to be a rather sketchy establishment that prepared its graduates to be, at most, salesclerks in music stores. This is what Yurik reported to Nora, when he quit after a month of “studying.” At the same time, he left the employ of the producer.

Meanwhile, Mickey’s health had taken a turn for the worse. His last partner, a very femme young man from Malaysia with an everlasting smile, with whom Mickey had lived for five years, ran off, but not before withdrawing every last penny from Mickey’s bank account. That was when Mickey asked Yurik to move in with him: “Not forever, Yurik; I won’t be around for much longer.”

Yurik gathered his belongings together and stuffed them into a large plastic garbage bag, grabbed his two guitars, and left his little room behind. He settled down into the dilapidated splendor of Mickey’s house.

Mickey asked him to play, and he did, but on occasion Mickey would stir his gnarly, peeling fingers and repeat: “If you make a mistake, just keep playing until you get it right. Don’t try to fix the mistake, just wait until your mistakes turn into something interesting.” Sometimes he berated Yurik: “Why do you always say ‘I’m going to, I’m trying to, I want to’? It’s a way of doing nothing. Just do it.”

Yurik kept thinking that something like this had happened to him before, music and death entwined, but he couldn’t remember when or where. A captivating tremulousness surrounded Mickey like a cloud. With Mickey, Yurik got pretty well hooked on junk; sometimes he couldn’t tell night from day, and sleep abandoned him altogether.

Throughout the dark, dank winter days, Yurik sat next to the slowly dying man. He dressed his festering feet, fed him, and got hold of the drugs without which Mickey couldn’t have lasted another day. Yurik met with people who had been in debt to Mickey for a long time and pumped them for the money that Mickey was in the habit of lending freely. He became acquainted with dozens of dealers, and rushed around the city to score Mickey’s heroin. The city took care of its sick, and gave away painkillers and sedatives for free, but this didn’t suffice. They suggested that Mickey be admitted to the hospital and then into hospice care, but he refused: he wanted to die in his home. Yurik knew that he’d stay with him till the end. But it didn’t work out that way.

On the first day of spring, when the air was saturated with moisture and the sun couldn’t penetrate the heavy curtain of mist, Yurik was in the so-called Shooting Gallery, where a charming, jovial dealer named Spike had agreed to meet him. The Shooting Gallery was a place where drug addicts could get a fix inconspicuously, off the streets, without getting busted.

He had agreed to meet Spike at two, but it was already four and Spike hadn’t turned up. Yurik started to get anxious. The landlady of the apartment, who was a very young girl, was pallid as death; people paid her for the use of this shelter for drugs. She hadn’t left the house for a long time; she couldn’t even eat anymore. A guy lying on a mattress handed her an ampoule—containing not what she needed, but something similar. Everything unfolded like a slow-motion movie. She spent a long time trying to puncture her arm with her shaking hand, sobbing and gasping, and finally ended up shooting up in a vein in her hand—there were hardly any others left to choose from. A minute later, she slumped over, her eyes rolling back in her head slowly. She had overdosed.

Just then, Spike appeared. He saw the girl lying in a heap and felt her pulse; it registered as only the faintest thread. He picked the girl up, set her on her feet, and ordered Yurik to walk her around the room. He himself ran out to score some cocaine to add to the other stuff he had on him.

Yurik tried to lead her around the room, but she could hardly walk. She dragged her scrawny legs across the dirty floor, like a limp rag doll in his grip. They walked, or shuffled, in this way for twenty minutes, and then for twenty more. Yurik forgot that Mickey was waiting for him. He was consumed by only one thought: was the girl still alive, or was he dragging around a barely living corpse?

Spike came back. Yurik thrust the girl at him, and grabbed the dose for Mickey, saying he couldn’t stay a minute longer—Mickey was waiting.

Yurik never learned whether Spike had been able to bring the girl around. When he got back to Chelsea, Mickey was sleeping peacefully. Yurik didn’t try to wake him. Mickey slept for another hour, then another. When Yurik touched him again, Mickey was not yet cold, but he was no longer alive. His face looked peaceful, his expression a bit mocking, and Yurik, after a moment of panic, felt a surge of calm acceptance, and relief. He grabbed his guitar and started playing, singing the words he still remembered from his youthful Beatlemania.

First he sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” then “She’s Leaving Home.” Suddenly he remembered that he had sung these songs years ago, when his grandmother Amalia died and he was still a boy. How long ago it seemed! It was almost as though this had happened not to him but to someone else. And he felt a deep sense of loss, and mourning.

The entire New York music community came to say goodbye to Mickey. Everyone who was still alive, in any case. AIDS had reaped a rich harvest during those years, and drug addicts and gays were in the front ranks of its victims. Mickey’s mother and sisters came to see the departed—a poor Puerto Rican family that had turned its back on him thirty years before. They showed up hoping that they would inherit something, but there wasn’t anything to inherit. There was no money, and they didn’t know that the apartment belonged almost wholly to the bank. They thought Yurik was Mickey’s partner, but Yurik didn’t care. Even if it had been true, it wouldn’t have damaged his reputation in any way.

It so happened that Yurik got the most valuable inheritance of all from Mickey: his various friends. They were world-famous musicians, and street musicians, famous only on a single street corner or square in the Village, or at a particular subway station; they were DJs, producers, owners of recording studios, and the countless others who drive the wheels of the vast music industry. For the last year of his life, Mickey had seemed to want to vouchsafe all the people who visited him into Yurik’s keeping, and at the funeral, which many of them attended, they greeted him and offered their condolences.

After the funeral, they went to a private club in Chelsea, where they drank and jammed the night away together—greats and nobodies alike. The slightly acrimonious, sardonic Mickey, a fan of folk and world music, would have been pleased. His Puerto Rican kin beat out the backbone of the music with their ridged wooden güiro, an elderly Indian man produced cosmic twangs and trills on the sitar, and a swarthy hunchback, most likely an extraterrestrial, drew forth psychedelic sounds from a wind instrument that resembled a sheaf of pipes, both diminutive and large. Yurik played, too, his own composition, which he had been working on for the entire year. In memory of Mickey.

For it was Mickey, who had lived so easily, so lightly, and had died so painfully, who had instilled in Yurik the consciousness that, in the highest sense, music had no authorship. It was a gift, and an ability to read the divine book, to transpose a universal sound that needed no notation into the language of paltry musical instruments, invented for the convenience and purpose of transmitting supremely important messages—messages that could not be conveyed in any other way … And the best ears, the best hearts and souls of this spiritual dimension called music, listened to Yurik’s song that evening. And heard it.

That day marked another change of direction in Yurik’s life. He received several tempting offers, and chose the one most interesting to him, though least promising from a financial perspective—an almost unknown band that performed funk covers from the seventies.

They rehearsed on 125th Street, on the outskirts of what was then still the “ghetto”—where, at the subway exit, a stream of Columbia University students headed in one direction, and a stream of African Americans headed in the other. The demarcation line was both visible and palpable.

Yurik detested racism, and white racists, but he and another guitarist, a Japanese guy they called Suzuki, agreed to be met at the subway entrance by Abe Carter. In this neighborhood, racism demonstrated its lesser-known reverse side. Abe, their black bass player, was their protector and guide into the interior, a rough neighborhood where Chuche, their singer, and Pete, their drummer, were waiting for them in a dilapidated apartment with boarded-up windows. After the rehearsal, Abe accompanied them back to the subway; there was less chance of their being jumped if they were to cross paths with a local gang.

They rehearsed for three months, almost daily, and at the end of it achieved a truly smooth, tight repertoire, not just a collection of random numbers. Yurik was giddy with delight, and felt like an athlete before the deciding match.

On the evening before a gig that had already been announced, their singer was killed in a street brawl. It was like a plane crashing during takeoff. They spent a week in that wreck of an apartment, never leaving it, saying goodbye to Chuche: they drank, smoked, shot up, played … Yurik was badly shaken. First Mickey, and now Chuche … Death was hovering nearby, as though wanting to get to know him. The drugs these guys used were different, more potent and lethal. On the eighth day after the funeral, when days and nights in the decaying apartment had all blended into a single stream of swirling darkness and bright color, Yurik came to his senses and felt a rush of fear. He grabbed his guitar and went to Long Island—to save his own skin.

They didn’t expect him. Martha was almost reconciled to the fact that the boy had gotten out of hand; but, from an American perspective, he was already grown up. His arrival was inconvenient. Another guest was staying in Yurik’s room: Grisha, visiting from Israel. Yurik collapsed on the leather sofa in the living room, without even bothering to take a shower, and slept for nearly twenty-four hours. Before falling asleep, he managed to tell Martha that his friend had been killed.

“A trauma, yet another trauma,” Martha said to Vitya, reminding him of the previous tragedy of Mickey. Vitya agreed absentmindedly.

Grisha, who had previously been very stout, had slimmed down over the last ten years and recovered his youthful slenderness. He was the father of six children of various ages. “Trauma,” he said, “is an invention of that most unreliable of sciences—psychology. Everything is a matter of biochemistry and life experience.”

Though Martha had worked in administration at the university for many years, she had been trained as a psychologist, and was surprised: why unreliable?

By now, Grisha had the answers to every possible question. “Because it’s not even science! It’s a delusion. There are precise, stable phenomena or systems: biochemistry, which is obvious, and not yet thoroughly understood, and the programmed behavior that corresponds to it. What does trauma have to do with it?” He ended by saying peevishly, “Everyone went crazy over Freud. Some sort of global delusion. Mystification at its worst … The chemistry of life, that’s what it’s all about.”

Yurik was lying facedown. His tired hair, which hadn’t been trimmed for more than two years, spread over the pillow in dank, heavy clumps. The clothes he had shed lay in a pile on the floor and stank. Martha gathered up the smelly heap and took it away to launder it. Before putting the clothes in the washing machine, she turned the pockets inside out. When she found two syringes in the pocket of his jacket, she recoiled in horror.

For two whole days and nights, with just a few short breaks, the conversation between Grisha and Vitya continued. They hadn’t seen each other in three years, and corresponded infrequently; now Grisha was inundating him with what seemed to Vitya to be pure balderdash, in which he saw no meaning or logic. Grisha had played too big a role in his life for Vitya to be able to dismiss him out of hand, however. It was because of Grisha that Vitya had been able to relinquish his world of abstract dimensions and sets and devote himself to more concrete tasks, and he was happy and grateful for this. Now Grisha was the one spewing all kinds of abstract nonsense that was completely beyond the bounds of anything Vitya considered to be science.

“Vitya! There’s one science. There’s only one science in the world. We have to reject all the old thinking and retain only three disciplines: mathematics, biology, and physics. And the name of this new science is biomathics.”

Vitya looked sleepily at the slightly agitated Grisha. What did he mean by biomathics? Why did he want to throw all the sciences overboard?

“Our world is created by God according to a single plan. The first pages of the Torah offer a modern scientific description of the origin of the universe, the earth, plants, animals, and man. It was not only the Torah that the Creator dictated. All life in the universe, on our planet, is the unfolding of a single grand text. We are all merely trying to decode it and read it. And the only purpose of man is to read this message.”

“Grisha, these are just very generalized claims. They have no immediate bearing on human activity. They don’t contain any revelations or discoveries. What’s the main point, the essence of it?” Vitya said, trying to bring his friend back down to earth.

Grisha had already gotten a lot of flak about these very notions from their brethren in the scientific community, which Vitya could not have known. He had come seeking support from his friend, thinking perhaps he could recruit Vitya to his cause. By now Vitya had become the leading expert on the computer modeling of cells. In Grisha’s mind, the two new tables of the covenant were the Text and the Living Computer.

Grisha sighed. The crowd, as everyone knows, does not heed prophets. They either mock them or stone them. In Israel above all. Especially in Israel! During recent years, he had expended so much energy wrestling with and trying to master the Text that he thought to be pre-eminent in the world, the Torah, and had come to the conviction that it was only a digest, just commentaries and references to an even more important Text. Grisha found no sympathy for his convictions among his fellow scientists, nor among his religious teachers. Only one mad Kabbalist from Tsfat, the head of a nonexistent school, welcomed Grisha’s ideas. In Vitya, who was not in the mainstream of the scientific establishment, which Grisha viewed as science fiction, Grisha had expected to find a sympathetic listener at the very least. Instead, he encountered only perplexity. But he still didn’t abandon hope.

“The thing is, Vitya, that the primary alphabet of the Text was discovered only in 1953—that was the four-letter code of DNA. Even Watson and Crick didn’t realize they had discovered the ability to read the Divine Text. They had the most convincing argument in favor of the existence of God!” Grisha blushed deeply, raised his gaunt hands in the air like a street preacher, and exclaimed convulsively: “A conclusive argument! The ultimate argument. And they didn’t see it!”

“Wait a minute,” Vitya said, trying to pacify the overwrought Grisha. “Maybe Watson and Crick never needed this concept of a Creator? Actually, I never needed it myself. Not in the least.”

“Vitya! You wait a minute! Do you really not see that our world was created by the One and Only God according to a unified plan?” Grisha blurted out, now even more incensed.

Vitya was sitting in a deep armchair, his knees nearly level with his chin. Yurik, one leg lolling on the floor, slept on the divan next to him, and Grisha circled around in the small space between the coffee table and another armchair, piled high with freshly laundered sheets that Martha hadn’t had time to fold and put away in the cupboard.

“For seven years, I’ve been studying the Torah. I’m standing on the threshold of a discovery. Perhaps I’m one of the very few who are in a position to be able to compare modern discoveries in biology—the Science of Life—with the text of the Torah, which represents a paraphrasing of the genetic code of DNA. Today I’m convinced that many of the claims of the Five Books of Moses allow for direct experimental examination by modern scientific methods.”

“Hold it,” Vitya broke in impatiently. “I usually start from what I know. I can’t follow your logic here. You’re talking about things I know nothing about. I’m completely in the dark here. I’ve never in my life read any religious texts, and I have no desire to. Never have. You probably need to talk to Martha about this; she’s a believer.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” Grisha almost shouted. “This is one of the most important ideas. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, through the evolution of human consciousness, the speculative thought of the ancient philosophers coincides with religious thought. We are at a unique point in the evolutionary history of humanity. It is a new era. All the discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, and science in the highest sense have no authorship!”

His final desperate yelp awakened Yurik, who couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. But the words, sounded by a rather shrill male voice, seemed to be meant for him in particular.

“There is a Divine Text! And human evolution has only one goal, one task—to lead unfinished, incomplete Creation to a state in which man learns how to read it. All the alphabets, all the signs, all the numbers, music notes, et cetera, were invented by us so we might carry out this task.”

Yurik dragged his head off the pillow. The shape of a button was imprinted on his cheek. The first thing he saw was an unfamiliar Jew in a yarmulke, with a graying, turned-up beard and a hand upraised.

Man, I’m tripping, he thought. When he noticed his father sitting behind the seething Jew, with a sullen look on his face, he was reassured. Okay, then, I’m not tripping.

Yurik propped himself up on his elbow, and sat up. The Jew stared at him in surprise. Grisha, who had already spent about twelve hours in this living room, had not noticed Yurik sleeping nearby on the couch.

“My son, Yurik,” Vitya said dryly.

“My God! That’s Nora’s son?”

“Well, partly mine, too.”

“Amazing,” he said. “So you’re here in the States, too? You’re the spitting image of Vitya. No, no, you really look just like Nora. And I’m Grisha Lieber. I went to high school with your parents. Have they told you anything about me?”

Yurik suddenly felt good.

“I liked what you were saying just now about authorship,” he said. “I also think that there’s no real authorship. Music exists somewhere in the heavenly spheres, and a musician’s job is to hear it and write it down. But since I’m a jazz musician, I know how much of the music stays out there, untranscribed, and lives only during the moments of improvisation.”

Grisha was very glad to have received this unexpected moral support.

“Don’t worry, it’s in a secure repository. Everything has been written down. You see, you see, Vitya, your son immediately grasped what I’m talking about! The world is a book that we only learn to read letter by letter. We try, with the help of our alphabets, rudimentary sign systems, to read texts of enormous complexity, which exist beyond the limits of our own consciousness. Take Plato!”

At this point, Vitya, who hadn’t read a word of Plato since the day he was born, lost all patience and shouted: “Martha! How’s the dinner coming along?”

Grisha stopped importuning Vitya; he had found a marvelous listener in Yurik. He laid out his entire theory to him, offering Yurik a whole slew of new information—for the most part, all of it from the high-school curriculum. The school textbooks were dull, however, and the knowledge they contained was completely at odds with the things Yurik was interested in. So, recognizing that he had found an avid listener in Yurik, for three whole days—with breaks only for meals and a bit of shut-eye, right up to the moment he left—Grisha told Yurik, who was stunned by the plethora of information, thrilling things at which he could only marvel.

Beginning with the Law of Correspondences—the universe, the cell, and the atom are all constructed according to the same principle, “As above, so below; as below, so above”—advancing to the rhythmical character of the natural processes, from the rotation of the planets to the respiratory, circulatory, and other rhythms of the human organism, Grisha led him to the notion of informational energy and formulated the First Law of Thermodynamics.

“Let me remind you,” Grisha said, in a voice slightly hoarse from his nonstop monologue, “that Lord Kelvin, in the middle of the last century, expressed the notion that the Creator, when he created the world, endowed it with an inexhaustible store of energy, that this divine gift would exist for all eternity. But he couldn’t be more wrong!”

Skimming through the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Grisha reached the cell theory in its classic form, and, starting with Schleiden and Schwann, solemnly announced that now they had arrived at the most essential matter, about which the originators of this cell theory of all living things had no clue—that the cell was a molecular computer that functioned according to the DNA program created by God the Almighty.

“To be alive means, within the boundaries of the organism, not to increase the entropy throughout the course of the life cycle, in spite of all the possibilities the cell has at its disposal—in particular, reproduction. The cell is an immensely complex system. To understand how it functions, scientists create models that possess the characteristics of the living cell. And it seems that Vitya, your pops, is the world’s foremost expert in this area. He’s a genius, but he doesn’t understand one fundamental thing, as is often the case with geniuses.” Here Grisha again began waving his arms around and berating Vitya, who early that morning had ridden his bicycle to the lab to work—offering his son to Grisha as fodder for his training exercises in proselytizing. But, like a true devotee, Grisha was happy with anyone who would listen. All the more since he had now come to his hobbyhorse. “You know how a computer works, broadly speaking?”

Yurik nodded. “My father has explained the basics to me.”

“The technical side of things, the hardware, doesn’t concern us here,” Grisha said dismissively. “We’ll be focusing our attention on the organization of the information process itself. What is information exactly? Not long ago, it was considered to be a message that was transmitted from mouth to mouth, in written form, or with the help of some sort of signal, from one person to another. The theory of information was created—the transmission may occur not only from person to person, but from person to machine, from machine to machine. And there is an algorithm, a system of rules, according to which information is deployed for solving problems and tasks on different levels.

“Such algorithmic processes are also present in cells. And it is immaterial how we understand this process—whether as a means of communication between concrete, material objects, or whether we consider that the cell itself utilizes various material objects to realize its existence. The main idea here is that information and matter do not exist independent of one another. The life of a cell is revealed through the operation of its informational system.

“One can compare it to a symphony orchestra, in which a composer, a conductor, musicians, musical instruments, the score, and even the electricity that illuminates the sheet music, all take part. Yes, it’s a good example; as a musician you would be predisposed to understand it. The composer writes the music—the algorithm for playing it—and transcribes it—programs or encodes it—in the form of a score with the help of notes—a special alphabet—for a long-term memory—that is, on paper or in the computer memory. The score contains information about the beginning and end of the musical composition, and about what and how each musical instrument should play at a given moment in time, during the course of performing the work. That’s it!”

Grisha was beaming—with his eyes, his wrinkles, his swarthy pate, and every hair of his scraggly beard.

“That’s it! Do you understand who the composer is here? The Creator! The score is written by Him with the help of the Text, by means of DNA. Because DNA is the alphabet of the Creator. And now please explain to me why your father shies away from this simple truth, like the devil from holy water? It’s so obvious. The Creator created the Law, but He Himself is subordinate to his own law. The universe is intelligent and multitiered. On every tier or level, understanding has its limits. This multitiered nature of things is described in various ways in all religious systems, and it is from this that the inherent intelligibility of the universe derives. If the universe is intelligible, it is possible to model it. Your father, who does computer programming, and does it better than anyone else, refuses to accept the Author of All Scores. It’s incomprehensible! There is only one explanation for this: his work belongs to a higher level, but he himself is still on a lower one. And I can’t force him to break through to the next one. Everyone must accomplish this on his own.”

When Vitya returned home from the lab, Grisha redirected his attention to him. But no dialogue resulted: Grisha ranted and railed, and Vitya grunted occasionally, saying, “Hmm, interesting,” while he ate a microwaved dinner that Martha had prepared for him and sipped Coca-Cola. Grisha’s ardent inspiration made it impossible for him to accept that his friend couldn’t hear what he was saying.

After three days of failure to elicit any sympathy from Vitya, and having exhausted his store of pent-up zeal on Yurik, Grisha flew back to Israel. Yurik saw off the agitated Grisha at JFK, boarded his favorite subway line, the A train, and felt that he had escaped from a bender without any withdrawal pains or other unpleasant consequences purely by means of intellectual exertions, the most powerful of his entire life thus far. He didn’t remember the details of what Grisha had told him, but he was left with a sensation of soaring and flight.

He sat looking out the window of the train—it hadn’t yet plunged underground—and listened to a melody in his head. He managed to remember what Grisha had said, that all music is written in the heavenly spheres.

Yurik transferred to a train going north and stopped near South Ferry. By that time the melody in his head had completely taken shape, with a strange hook at the beginning, then a repetition in which the hook straightened itself out, put out a little shoot, and then another … It could even have been depicted graphically, but it would have been better to play it first. When he emerged from the subway, he sat on the shore, took out his guitar, and played as much of it as he could, from beginning to end. The piece was as elegant and slender as a fish, as light as a bird, absolutely alive.

Toward evening, he arrived at Houston Street, and dropped in on old Tom Drew, the proprietor of a store and workshop that manufactured bar counters and other club furnishings. Tom Drew offered him a job. It was an excellent opportunity. Tom was an old hippie who had long since become a model citizen. His daughter Agnes, who had been born with severe hypothalamus syndrome, had set him on the straight and narrow. The mother abandoned them when the little girl was not yet a year old; from that time on, though still a hippie in his heart of hearts, he had worked like one possessed; he never drank or used drugs, and didn’t even smoke. He was ready to do anything for his now grown daughter, who had turned into an unhappy, tyrannical hellcat. Still, Tom cherished a feeling of tenderness and disguised envy for hippies and musicians—his unfulfilled destiny.

Yurik stayed overnight in the utility room. He dreamed about Grisha, who talked about the Divine, then he turned into Mickey, wearing a stretched-out red T-shirt, cussing a mile a minute in Spanish, which was incomprehensible and for some reason very funny.

Life started rolling along as usual. Yurik moved heavy bar counters around, composed music, played with various bands, listened to world music of every variety, smoked weed, and for a while avoided all hard drugs. He changed jobs, lived here and there, but had managed to reform and become a decent young man before Nora’s next visit. Every time, it was more and more difficult.

The drugs became a habitual and necessary condition of life for him—overdue credit that he would ultimately have to pay back. He understood this very well.

He wasn’t able to keep a single job. He became a dealer, a drug peddler. And he was hooked on the stuff himself—there was already no turning back. Spike, a seasoned worker in the heroin trade, gave him one dose for every ten he delivered to various other addresses. At night, he cruised the city looking for a bonus dose of junk. During the evening, he played music wherever he could, sometimes on the street. Once, in a small square, he heard a busker playing his music. He sat down next to him and listened. The guy wasn’t really any good. Still, it was amazing how the music came to life, independent of him.

Yurik was arrested twice for possession of narcotics. They let him go. The police understood perfectly well how the business was set up—that all the small-fry dealers were victims of a truly pitiless gang of big-time dealers, who reaped money from the deaths of young idiots. The judges were for the most part humane. They had one undeclared rule: they wouldn’t nail a dealer until the third time he was caught. After being detained a second time, Yurik was getting used to the thought that, in his situation, prison wasn’t the worst alternative.

The third time he was caught was at the end of 1999, right before the New Year. They busted him in the evening, he spent the night at the police department, and they took him before the judge the next morning. Everything happened very quickly. In the courtroom, he was with a group of young black men, half of whom Yurik knew by sight; one, a bass player, was someone he had played with about three years before. They were all looking at five or six years behind bars, and Yurik was trying to estimate how old he would be when he got out. He figured he would be at least thirty.

The cases were being handled individually at a rapid clip—ten minutes for each of them. Yurik was saved by the computer. When they typed in his last name, the prior offenses didn’t show up. Dumbfounded by this stroke of luck, Yurik puzzled for a long time over the computer god that had intervened in his fate. Then he understood what had happened: he was saved by the alphabet. Or, rather, the transcription of Russian into English. He bore the surname of his mother, Ossetsky. There were a couple of spelling variants in English: Osetsky, Osezky … At the time of his last arrest, he hadn’t been carrying any ID, and the officer wrote his name down as he’d heard it, not as it was officially spelled. So now they let him go. He left the building and sat down on the steps of the courthouse, without the strength to walk. And where would he go?

With great effort, he made it to Long Island. Martha grew terribly alarmed when she saw him, and called Nora in Moscow. Two weeks later, Nora flew back to New York.