Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER ELEVEN

On Ilya’s third day at Leffie High, a sexting ring run by a student who posted under the alias Madame Grandedoix was discovered, and the school’s collective attention shifted from Ilya to the Madame and didn’t look back. Ilya’s days settled into a pattern. He spent mornings and evenings online, compiling a list from the White Pages of all the Gabe Thompsons in America and checking the Vecherniye Berlozhniki site for news about Vladimir. He looked for news of other murders too, though he knew that the police would find a way of distancing any new murder from the ones for which Vladimir had been arrested just as they had initially insisted that the three murders were unrelated.

Days were devoted to school, and fortunately school in Leffie did not require much more from him than attendance. His science and math classes were remedial; home economics and gym were ridiculous. The English teacher was young and starry-eyed and obsessed with Chekhov, and he seemed willing to forgive any and all mistakes that Ilya made. Principal Gibbons had been right: American History was the hardest class. They were beginning the year with the Revolution, which was the driest revolution Ilya had ever heard of, mostly because it was discussed in such self-congratulatory terms, as though Americans had invented the concept of democracy. The Boston Tea Party. The Continental Congress. Dozens of noblemen in pastel coats and tights. Ilya did not care. Plus Mr. Shilling spoke in a soft drone, like his voice couldn’t possibly project through the thicket of his beard, let alone inspire interest. It didn’t help that Sadie was in the class. It was impossible to concentrate with her there, her skin lit by the projector’s glow, J.T. constantly whispering in her ear.

Each afternoon, while Sadie was at track practice, Ilya trekked through a patch of woods that neighbored Leffie High to Bojangles’, used his snack money from the Masons to buy a chicken-and-biscuit meal, and brought it back to the front office. He shared it with Miss Janet and then did his homework while she updated her online dating profiles.

The drives home with Sadie were the high point of his day. In the mornings, she was sleepy-eyed and slow to talk. She clutched a thermos of coffee between her thighs, scanned the radio with one hand, and rarely gave the road her full attention. But in the afternoons she seemed more relaxed, expansive. In the afternoons, she asked him questions—not about Russia, not about spies, or the KGB, or Putin, or vodka, which were the kinds of questions he got daily—these were simple questions about him.

“What do you like to do? For fun, I mean?” she asked one afternoon that first week, when they were driving home in a drizzle. The windshield wipers flicked across the glass, and the car had the damp, stuffy smell that his winter coat used to get when he left it on the radiator to dry.

Ilya thought of Michael and Stephanie. He knew that listening to them would not be anyone else’s idea of fun and that his dependence on them was definitely strange and probably unhealthy. Still, it was the closest thing to a hobby that he had. “I listen to tapes,” he said.

“Like music? Like Radiohead?” she said.

“Sort of,” he said, making a mental note to find a way to listen to Radiohead. “Do you know Kolyan?” he said.

She shook her head.

“He’s a rapper. From Russia. Very cool. He has white hair—like yours—and he wears these contacts that make his whole eye white, and he has these tattooed fangs.”

“Mama Jamie would love him,” she said. Most Americans spoke with this upward lilt, as though every utterance were a question, but Sadie had this deadpan sarcasm that reminded him of home.

“What do you do for fun?” he said.

“I draw.”

He nodded. “I saw you drawing in history.”

“My secret’s out,” she said.

“What do you draw?”

“Portraits,” she said. “You want to see?”

He nodded, and at the next stop sign she pulled a tiny red notebook out of her backpack. A pencil stub, well chewed, was jammed in the silver spiral. Ilya flipped open the cover. Papa Cam looked out at him from the first page with a sleepy innocence, a vulnerability that Ilya saw, now, from the way she’d drawn his eyes, was the essence of him. There was a half-finished sketch of Mama Jamie next, and then a finished one, and they were both of just her face, but still there was this energy to her, this thrust of optimism to her expression that was just right.

“These are good,” Ilya said. “The best I can do is a man with a line for his body and a circle for his head.”

“A stick man,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said. He flipped the page again, and there was Marilee, her face a study in scrutiny.

“She hated it,” Sadie said.

“But it’s her. She looks like she’s about to correct you,” he said, and Sadie laughed.

He flipped the page again. The next drawing was of him. In history, in that moment when he’d frozen at the front of the class. He glanced over at Sadie, but she was watching the road, fiddling with the windshield wipers. Ilya looked at his face. The lift of his eyebrows and gauntness of his cheeks suggested fear, and he had been afraid, he remembered, but there was also this kinetic quality to his eyes, as though somehow she’d been able to bottle all their infinitesimal movements.

“Do you like it?” she said. “I don’t mind if you don’t. No one ever likes their own portrait.”

He ran a hand over the page, could feel the dips and divots where she’d pressed hard with her pencil. It was him, but it looked like Vladimir too, and no one had ever seen Vladimir in him before. “I do,” he said.

It took Aksinya a week to write back and say that she had no fucking clue why the police had taken Gabe Thompson, that the police were not exactly forthcoming, especially not with her. A few days later, Ilya completed his list of all the Gabe Thompsons in America. There were close to a thousand. A hundred in California alone. They all had addresses, and most had phone numbers as well. Ilya imagined himself calling Gabe, or stealing the Masons’ car and arriving at his door. What would happen when Gabe opened it? Of course he wouldn’t confess outright, but surely Ilya would be able to tell something from his reaction. Seeing Ilya wouldn’t mean much to him if the police had booted him out of town for drinking or drugs, but if he’d committed the murders, Ilya and his Russian accent would mean everything.

Ilya had already found a database of Mormon churches online and that night he began the slow process of cross-referencing the addresses and towns with churches within sixty miles. An hour drive would be the limit, even for a zealot like Gabe, Ilya guessed. If there was no church within sixty miles, he crossed that Gabe off the list. He tried to go through ten Gabes a night, tried to make incremental progress the way he used to with his book of American idioms, and once he’d finished doing this and making his usual checks of VKontakte and the Vecherniye Berlozhniki, he’d email Vladimir.

I know you didn’t do it, he’d write. The same thing every night, and when that started to feel rote, he began to add things about his day: that he’d played American football in gym, that they ate their fries with ketchup here, that American girls never wore high heels to school, that Mama Jamie had a crush on Sting, that Papa Cam drank beer that had purposely had the alcohol removed. Vladimir would not be allowed to check email, Ilya knew, and so before long these emails took on the tone of a diary. He told Vladimir about Sadie, about how in moments it seemed that she liked him but in other moments it seemed that she was completely indifferent to his presence—to everyone’s presence. He told Vladimir about J.T., about how he was preternaturally developed and looked exactly like Sergey Fedorov in his prime, and how the fuck, he wrote, am I supposed to compete with that? He told Vladimir about the sexting ring, about Pastor Kyle and the way he sometimes made the pulpit seem like a strip pole. He attached the picture of himself that Papa Cam had taken on that first morning of school, looking terrible. It’s hard to sleep here, he wrote, and what he meant was, it’s hard to sleep without you.

Listening to Michael and Stephanie would have helped, but Ilya kept thinking of all the nights when he’d lain in bed and listened to them instead of Vladimir, when Vladimir and his stories had seemed unimportant, an interruption. So Ilya didn’t ask the Masons for new batteries, and the tapes gathered dust on the dresser. When he did finally fall asleep, his dreams were horrible. There was Babushka washing the blood off Vladimir. There was the doctor touching Ilya’s leg just where he’d cut Vladimir’s. He dreamt of the Tower too. Of Lana’s hair—those pink streaks—and the way they’d snaked around his face when she kissed him. He saw the grove where she’d been killed, with the crosses nailed into the molting birch bark and the flowers that someone had planted inside an old tire. There was Vladimir, opening up his pencil case and pulling out their mother’s silver sugar spoon and holding a lighter under it. There was the stove in the Tower, the flames burning a strange blue, and next to it, Vladimir and Aksinya were fucking, both so high that they’d forgotten shame, and Ilya would wake up sure that he was still there, that he’d never left. Sometimes, in the heights of his nostrils, there was this acid burn as though somehow he’d actually breathed the Tower’s air. But bad as the dreams were, he craved them, craved sleep, because they gave him Vladimir. Vladimir’s face bent over the spoon. Vladimir’s face bent over Aksinya’s. Vladimir’s face bent over his, saying, “This is not for you, bratishka.”

Sometimes he managed to sleep through the dreams, to wake up with his pillow reeking of sweat and the light slanting through the deck supports onto that pile of abandoned bicycles. But most nights the dreams would wake him, and he would get out of bed and let his forehead cool against the sliding glass doors until he felt tired enough to try for sleep again.

He was standing like that one night, his forehead slick against the glass, when he saw the shadow of someone climbing down the deck stairs. The silhouette of calves and bare feet. Then Sadie walked past the pool, sat on the alligator wall, and lifted a knee to tie one shoe and then the other.

Ilya opened the basement door. He meant to say her name, but when she didn’t turn at the sound of the door, he stayed quiet. She slid off the wall and into the neighboring lot, and it wasn’t until he was at the wall, his hand on the bricks where she’d sat, that he realized he was going to follow her. She was a hundred meters away now, small enough to fit in his palm. He jogged after her, the sawgrass stinging his ankles, giving him the shallow, cross-woven cuts that Sadie’s ankles had had that first night in America. He tried to be quiet and keep a safe distance. He thought of Jackie Chan, who always stepped toe to heel, and Jean-Claude Van Damme and the way that, despite his bulk, he moved with such stealth.

At the end of Dumaine Drive, a house had been abandoned half built. Tarps were draped in place of walls, the slick plastic shuddering in the dark like an organ, like something that shouldn’t be exposed to air. Sadie stopped in the shadow of the house and pulled something out of her pocket. Ilya had assumed that she was going to meet J.T., but as she gripped whatever it was, it occurred to him that it could be drugs. A syringe or a pipe. He waited to see her creep into the half-built house. He thought of Lana high in the Tower. The way her lips had parted, the pink bud of her tongue between them, and how his dick had pulsed at the sight of it. He’d felt a weird sort of power looking at her, an awareness that he could touch her, that he could reach out and hook the hair back behind her ear, that he could go further, even, open her mouth a little wider and push his tongue deep inside it, and he’d wondered if all boys—all men—came upon these sudden pricks of violence in their fantasies. Maybe he was only different from the man who’d killed Yulia and Olga and Lana by a degree, and by the fact that he’d felt powerless, not powerful, knowing that the white puffs of her breath might simply stop. He could already see Sadie’s face the same way, and he could feel the same mix of lust and fear and helplessness gathering in him, and he began to walk down the slope of the lot. He didn’t know what he’d do, even as the distance between them collapsed, and then whatever she’d pulled from her pocket began to glow. Ilya stopped. It was a phone or an iPod. Her thumb twitched over the screen, and she pulled loose a tangle of headphones, stuck one in each ear, and kept walking.

Ilya gulped the hot, wet air, and let her gain some distance. She took Dumaine Drive to its end, cutting the corner it made with Route 21, and he followed her: past the old fireworks stand where a giant red rocket leaned on one haunch; past a plantation house that floated, gray-blue, down a dirt road; past the hot sauce plant that even at this hour made the air burn, made Ilya’s nostrils sting and his eyes water.

She walked the white line religiously, like a child might. Tankers rushed by at steady intervals—the time between them the time it took to fill them—and as each approached, she stepped onto the shoulder and froze and the hair twisted up off her head like pale snakes rising up out of a basket. None of the truckers honked. She and he were too small; it was too dark for them to be anything but an aftersight, something to make the truckers rub their eyes and wonder.

They were headed south. It was the only direction Ilya knew in Leffie because the refinery was at the town’s southern edge, and its light grew brighter and brighter as they walked, and even though he knew the light’s source, even though it was the one thing here that was completely familiar, his brain kept tripping on the fact, telling him that it was morning already and that they should turn around before Papa Cam and Mama Jamie woke up and found them gone.

Soon it was so bright that if she turned, she’d see him. Plain as day, he thought, which was an expression Mama Jamie used that he was still trying to figure out. Sadie did stop every once in a while to change the song on her iPod, but she didn’t turn. Then the refinery was right before them. The moonscape of it looked just the same as it had in Berlozhniki, and a memory caught Ilya: his mother holding him at their apartment window, telling him what each constellation of lights was—the high, flashing signal lights; the cluster of the cooling tower; the bright pool of the parking lot; the dim scatter of the administrative buildings; and the fires of the stacks, which from afar looked like crowns.

“That’s where I am,” she’d said. “There. Tam.” Her finger had moved along the glass, tracing the low line of lights that was the cafeteria.

He wasn’t the sort of child to miss her when she was gone, but still he’d find himself at the window every once in a while, separating lights from the glow. Tam, he’d think. Tam.

As they got closer, Ilya saw that the lights were configured differently here. Then they were close enough that Ilya could see the structures themselves: the cooling tower, and the guard booth with the dark blotch of a face inside it. He could see the motion of the fire that plumed from each stack, could see that it didn’t look like a crown at all because its shape was always shifting.

Just before the refinery gate, Sadie turned onto a street of trailers. Some seemed permanent, with foundations and concrete walks and flowerbeds and swing sets and Christmas lights, though it was only September. Others seemed like they could be hitched to a truck and moved the next day. The refinery fence stretched behind them, higher than their roofs by a story at least. Plastic bags were caught in the fence, and they glowed like jellyfish in the purple-blue glare.

Sadie had slowed down, and Ilya matched her pace. When she stopped completely it was at one of the few trailers with a light on. This trailer had become part of the landscape against its will. A meaty vine enveloped one wall. The cinderblocks that held up each corner had sunk unevenly into the dirt yard, so the trailer listed slightly toward the refinery, as though taking a knee. J.T. would be inside, he thought. Or else it was a neftyanik—a roughneck, they called them here—with muscles and stubble and hands big enough to encircle Sadie’s waist.

There was a path through the dirt yard, shiny as a scar, that led to the door, but Sadie stayed on the sidewalk, her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt, her eyes on the window. Whoever was inside stayed inside. Ilya wasn’t close enough to see into the window, and so he crept past Sadie on the opposite side of the street, trying to keep to the shadows of spindly trees and parked trucks. He hunched next to a car under a portico. Sadie was completely still, standing there in the shadow of the trailer. He wanted to see her expression, to know what this was. A vigil, he found himself thinking, and he could smell the wax on Babushka’s fingers, could hear the crack of her knees that meant she’d spent the day at the church, lighting candles for Dedushka and Papa and Vladimir.

Ilya kept waiting for the door to open or for a car to pull up, but after thirty minutes—or maybe it was longer, maybe it was an hour; the light made it hard to measure time—Sadie left. She walked back the way she’d come, and Ilya crossed the street and stood in the spot where she’d stood and looked in the window just as she had.

A woman was sitting inside on a couch. She looked a little like Yulia Podtochina, with her blond hair and her wide-set eyes. Or maybe it was just her air of hopelessness that reminded him of Yulia. She was braless, her breasts tiny, nipples aggressive and pressing at the thin cotton of a tank top. Her feet were tucked up under her, and she was watching something on TV that made her smile in a wry sort of way, like she’d been in the characters’ shoes, knew just what sorts of problems they were facing, and knew too that they didn’t stand a chance.

Hanging askew behind her head was a poster of a woman standing over a vent, her white dress blowing up to her crotch. A pack of cigarettes rested on the arm of the couch. The woman smoked one, letting the ash get long. She hunched forward, out of Ilya’s view, and for a minute all he could see was the top of her head, and then she reclined again with a pink glass pipe in her hand. She put her lips to it, lit it, took a hit, then another, all the while keeping her attention on the show. Her face relaxed. It lost the wryness and the hopelessness, and, as Ilya watched, the drug animated her. It brought a beauty to her wide mouth, a flush to her cheeks, and glitter to her eyes.

He was about to go when he heard the woman’s voice.

“Come on,” she said, in a croak that gained strength. “Come the fuck on.”

She stood and stepped toward the window, and for a second Ilya thought that she’d seen him and was about to confront him. He stumbled back into the street, just as she reached out and gave the TV a thwack.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, with a tone like she’d wrangled an especially difficult child into submission.

Ilya was back at the Masons’ an hour later. The house was quiet and dark, and he wondered if Sadie was sleeping or awake and thinking of the woman. Who was the woman to her? He thought of the drug and the way it had seemed to bring her to life; he thought of Sadie’s empty room, the black cross over her bed, her nails bitten to nubs, the pages and pages of portraits. He knew that it should not have come as a surprise to him that Sadie had secrets, but his own secrets had made him myopic, made him forget that the world, even America, was a tangle of lives, all twisted and bent.