Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ilya woke in one of the folding chairs with Vladimir’s jacket draped over his chest. Lana was gone, and Aksinya and Vladimir were intertwined in the lump of blankets. All Ilya could see of them was the point of an elbow, the coil of Aksinya’s ponytail, and a stray foot, the sock a holed disgrace. The room was hazy. It was dark enough that it could have been early morning, that there could still have been time for him to flag down a bus headed for town, to sprint from the square to the school, to slide into his desk so quickly that its legs shrieked against the linoleum. Maria Mikhailovna would be angry, furious, but she’d forgive him when his scores came back. She’d still drive him to the airport in Leshukonskoye as they had planned. He’d still get to go to America. For a minute he let himself lie there and believe that that was what would happen. Then he got up and lifted a corner of the rug that had been hung over the window.

The sun was ridiculously high. It was almost noon. Ten, at least. The snow was electric with light, and the sight of it made blood surge at his temples. A car flashed by on its way north to the refinery. Dmitri Malikov, he thought, no doubt looking at the Tower with the same scorn that had surfaced when he talked about it. He could hear the grind of a lumber saw in the woods somewhere, and the noise drilled into his head until he could feel it in his teeth.

Behind him, someone sighed. Ilya froze, terrified that Lana had reappeared. He had no idea what to say to her. They had only kissed, but it occurred to him that he might be the sort of boy a girl regrets kissing in the morning. When he turned, Vladimir was up, pulling on his jeans with a hand against the wall. He had always been skinny, wolfish, the sort that babushkas live to feed, but there was something wrong with him now. He looked like the photos of the camp prisoners that Daniil Chernyshev showed anyone who was unlucky enough to end up in his apartment. For a dumb moment, Ilya thought, He’s sick, then Vladimir turned, put a finger to his lips, and tipped his head toward the door. Ilya stepped over Aksinya. Sleep had drained the drugs from her face, and she looked peaceful again.

Outside, the daylight was torture. Ilya could feel his brain constricting from its brightness. “Where’d Lana go?” he asked, as they trudged across the prison yard.

“You want to get back on that horse, huh? I don’t blame you. She’s got that X factor. Je ne sais quoi. Every time she opens her mouth, I’m like, please don’t talk, but still there’s something about her. I couldn’t send you to America a virgin, could I?”

“America,” Ilya said. “Right.”

Vladimir stopped, and Ilya was afraid that something in his voice had given him away, but Vladimir knelt in the snow and yanked at the laces of his boot, which were snarled in an icy knot. When he stood, he pointed toward a telephone pole, one of dozens strung along the road.

“They found that woman over there,” he said.

“Yulia Podtochina?”

“I don’t know her name,” Vladimir said, with a world of impatience in his voice. “The dead one.”

“Oh,” Ilya said, and the day before he would have been fascinated, he would have corrected Vladimir, asked him which dead woman, but he was thinking of the boards. Of Maria Mikhailovna. He wanted to know the time with a sudden urgency, needed to know exactly how long it had been since she’d sat at her desk with the pale green booklet in front of her, how long since she’d ripped it in two, put on her coat, locked her classroom, and walked home. He knew that he’d made his decision the night before, when Vladimir passed him the bottle of Imperia, or when Lana wrapped his arms around her, or when he’d danced with all of them, but in those moments he’d convinced himself there was still this chance that he could make it. The chance had grown dimmer and dimmer as he slept, like a dying star, and for some reason it was crucial to him that he know how far he was from that moment when it had disappeared entirely.

“What time is it?” he said. They were almost to the telephone pole, to the mound of plowed snow that shouldered the road. It was January, and the mound was at its tallest, shoulder-high and streaked with dirt and oil.

“You got somewhere to be?”

“Nah,” Ilya said.

“Good. Let’s go to the Internet Kebab. We’ll let the girls sleep it off. Maybe hit up Dolls. You can get back to studying tomorrow.”

Once they’d made it to the snow heap, Vladimir fished his watch out from within his jacket. “It’s almost twelve,” he said.

It was completely over then. He was three hours late. He had never been three hours late for anything. He had missed fewer than three days of school in his entire life. Next to him, Vladimir was breathing hard, and Ilya could smell the tang of his breath. Then Vladimir put his hands on his knees and vomited into the snow. Nothing much came out, and Ilya winced at the thought of his ribs—the cage of them—heaving. They stood with their backs to the heap, waiting for a bus, Ilya thought, but when one came, and he began to scramble up, Vladimir stopped him.

“Don’t you want to go?” Ilya said.

“Use your head,” Vladimir said. “Mama’s out.”

Their mother’s shift ended at twelve. She’d most likely gotten the 11:47 bus, which usually ran late enough for her to catch it, but sometimes, if the 11:47 was on time, she had to wait for the 12:17. They sat down, and the bus passed them in a wet whoosh that made Ilya’s ears pop. They waited until their asses were numb and the bus was long, long gone, and Ilya wondered how many times Vladimir had done this and whether it was for their mother’s sake or for his own and whether he’d ever climbed the snowbank at just the wrong time and looked up to see her looking down at him. It was fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, before they heard the hiss of another bus. Ilya stood, too fast, and his head spun a bit, and he thought he might vomit like Vladimir had. This time it was not a bus, though. It was a black SUV, cutting down the road so fast that it seemed almost to fly.

“Did you see that?” Ilya said. It had been going fast enough to miss.

“Fyodor Fetisov. Here to count his billions,” Vladimir said, and Ilya couldn’t tell if he was bitter or just tired.

They chanced the 12:47 bus, and it was empty except for a few neftyaniki in their coveralls, who were electric with Fetisov’s visit. The bus driver was not. He took their rubles, then said, “If either of you vomits on this bus, you’re not getting off until it’s clean.”

“Fair enough,” Vladimir said, and they sank into their seats. Vladimir seemed to fall instantly asleep. His shoulder bobbed against Ilya’s once they hit the potholed roads in town. Ilya’s hangover grew with the motion of the bus until his headache seemed to eclipse all rational thought, to give him the attention span of a gnat. He couldn’t focus on the boards, on the possibility that Maria Mikhailovna had gone straight to his apartment and that his mother and Babushka were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him in a fury usually reserved for Vladimir. He couldn’t really think of anything without a sharp, frontal lobe pain that forced him to shift his attention, and with this realization came an understanding of Vladimir and how he lived his life, sloughing through the hangovers so he could get to the highs. Dolls tonight, and what tomorrow?

Ilya shut his eyes, not really expecting to sleep, and when he opened them again, they were stopped on the square, right by the traffic light where Ilya had seen Vladimir and Sergey the night Dmitri drove him home. The bus was empty, the driver standing on the curb smoking a cigarette and drinking something out of a paper bag.

“Sweet dreams?” the driver said, as they clambered off.

Vladimir snorted, gripped the waistband of his jeans, and loped down the block toward the Internet Kebab, and Ilya followed him.

Vladimir shouldered open the door. “Hey pervert,” he said to Kirill as Kirill poured water on the grill. It hissed, and a cloud of steam plumed around them. The monitors had all been set to the same screensaver—a tennis ball bouncing in eternal blackness—and they were all somehow in sync. A dozen balls hit the lower right corner, then drifted toward the middle of a dozen screens. “Ilyusha, can you spot me?” Vladimir said.

Ilya had a thousand in his wallet—name-day money that he’d planned to exchange for dollars in Leshukonskoye. He had imagined that transaction for months—the gray-green of actual dollars in his wallet—but there was a triumph in this too: handing the thousand over to Kirill, paying for his brother, two lamb combos, two Fantas, and a computer for fifteen minutes.

Vladimir trawled VKontakte—his “business,” Ilya guessed—while Ilya inhaled his shwarma. His stomach felt instantly better, like its gravity had been restored, and his hangover ebbed to a general fuzziness.

Aksinya, with her car, had beaten them to a computer. Her sister had one, Vladimir explained. It was a gift from a client, and in return, Aksinya’s sister had to send him naked pictures every night. Aksinya had posted a photo of all of them to Vladimir’s wall. Their faces were whitewashed and bright as snow, their eyes as shiny and black as a bird’s. Lana’s fist, her middle finger, took up much of the foreground, but he could see his own fingers on her waist. Aksinya had tagged herself and Vladimir, and as Vladimir scrolled the mouse across the picture, Ilya saw that he’d been tagged too.

“What bitches,” Vladimir said, his voice full of affection. Vladimir clicked to the next photo—he’d been tagged in a few more from other nights: dark rooms, white faces, cigarettes, the flash hugging the curves of a bottle. Vladimir sopped the last bits of lamb juice off his plate with a hunk of pita.

“Go back to the other picture. The one with Lana,” Ilya said.

“You want to see that one again, huh?”

Ilya nodded. It wasn’t Lana that he wanted to see, though. He looked so happy in the photo that he barely recognized himself. His smile, like it might break his face in two. When had he last smiled like that? he wondered. Or was this the only time?

“Don’t fall in love, Ilyusha.”

“Why not?” he said, but he was thinking that it wasn’t Lana he was in love with. It was himself, there, in a picture with Vladimir.

“Because you’re leaving, for starters.”

Kirill called out the one-minute warning, and Vladimir logged in to his email. He didn’t have anything except a one-liner from Aksinya saying, “Dolls tonight?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“To Dolls?”

“No. To America.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to go? Are you afraid you’re going to get homesick? You’re going to miss all this snow while you’re lounging on the beach?”

America is not one big beach, Ilya was tempted to say, because he knew that in Vladimir’s mind the whole country was Miami Vice—girls in string bikinis and men in pastel suits.

“You going to miss sleeping with me every night?”

I already do, Ilya thought.

Vladimir pulled on his coat, and Ilya followed him out the door. The sky was purple with the last of the sun’s light, and it had begun to snow.

“You going to miss getting five hours of sun and having a waste of space for a brother?”

“The boards were this morning,” Ilya said.

He didn’t see Vladimir’s hand until it had already hit him. Then there was a flash of pain in his cheekbone and a deep throb in one eye. It had been something between a slap and a punch, sloppily executed. Ilya’s eye began to sting and drip, and he pressed a hand to it.

“I thought you knew,” Ilya said, and this was true. Somehow he’d thought that Vladimir had known; he’d thought that, in his way, Vladimir was asking him to stay.

“I knew? Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t even know what day of the week it is.”

“Saturday,” Ilya said.

“Shut up,” Vladimir said. Ilya looked up, ready for Vladimir to berate him or to hit him again, but Vladimir’s eyes were slim and far away. He sucked his lip between his teeth and began chewing on it feverishly. It was a look of determination, a look as rare as a rainbow for Vladimir.

“It’s only a year,” Ilya said. “The America thing. It’s not like—”

“Only a year. Fuck you. Do you know what people would do for one year there?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ilya said, something Vladimir had said to him millions of times, and he tried to sound as casual as Vladimir always did, but of course he sounded as stung as he was: he had missed the boards for Vladimir. It was a penance of a kind, a way of making up for how happy he had been to leave.

“Shut up, Ilya.”

Ilya’s other eye began to sting, and he shut them both. If Vladimir could tell that he was crying, he didn’t show it. When he spoke again, his voice was tough, each word hammered out like a nail hit perfectly: “Listen to me. Do not tell anyone else that you didn’t show. Not a fucking soul. Do you hear me?” Vladimir’s eyes were darting across Ilya’s face, and sweat pearled above his lip. “I will kill you if you fuck this up,” he said, and then in a voice that was almost a laugh, “Ilyusha the smart one. Ilyusha the big brilliant brain.” His hands were clenching and unclenching, and it wasn’t just from anger. It was time. Vladimir needed a hit. Angry as he was, he was only half here now, and the stupidity of it all hit Ilya. He could stay here, he could go to America. Either way he would lose Vladimir.

Ilya stopped crying. He could feel the skin tightening on his cheeks. “I don’t know why you give a shit,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you. You’re going to be at the Tower no matter what, right? In that—” he searched for a word that would encompass the decrepitude of Vladimir’s room there, but Vladimir spoke before he found one.

“But I could have had you there,” he said. He smiled. It was this strange, jerky little lift of his lips that was in no way happy. “I’m going to fix this. I’m going to see Maria Mikhailovna and fix it,” he said, and he walked away, past the kiosk, which was lit up like a beacon, past Gabe Thompson’s bench, which was covered in new snow.

Vladimir was almost at the corner. He was limping. Just a little, one shoulder dipping down lower than the other. Had he been limping all day? Ilya wasn’t sure. Who cares, Ilya thought, but he did. Vladimir was only a block away. Ilya’s face still hurt; he could feel his eye starting to swell. He was angry—at Vladimir, at himself—but still he had to resist the same old temptation to follow Vladimir, to catch up.