Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER FIVE

From down in the basement, Ilya could hear the Masons eating dinner. The clink of dishes. Chairs scraping, water running, the occasional shriek of Marilee or Molly. He had yawned enough times during Mama Jamie’s tour of the basement—the “rec room,” she called it—that she had relented and allowed him to skip dinner and whatever other orientation activities she had planned.

The basement had a set of glass doors that framed a dark patch of earth under the deck where a few bikes were slumped in a pile. A ping-pong table stretched across half the room. The net had given up in the middle, the paddles peeled at the edges, and Ilya was comforted by these tiny signs of neglect. Over the bed, there was an enormous poster of a beach with footprints near the surf. The sky had been enhanced till it looked radioactive. The water was the color of Freon. It had something to do with Jesus, but Ilya wasn’t sure what exactly. He had his own bathroom. “Feel free to flush the t.p.,” Mama Jamie had said, and she’d ripped a few squares off the roll and flushed them herself to prove the power of American plumbing. Then she’d opened a shallow cabinet over the sink to reveal a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo, each in its own bright packaging. Ilya wished that he didn’t need them—if he had left under different circumstances, his mom would have packed them—but he did.

In a little nook by the glass doors was a desk with a computer. The monitor was off, the screen the gray of a dead tooth, but still Ilya’s stomach lifted and flipped when he saw it. He wanted news of Vladimir. He wanted, so badly, just to see Vladimir’s face. As soon as Mama Jamie had retreated up the basement stairs, he pressed the button on the hard drive. For a long second there was nothing, and he thought it must be broken, aged out by the sleeker model in the den, but then the computer exhaled softly. Something inside began to spin. A weak green light flicked on, and the screen came to life. The background loaded: Papa Cam, Mama Jamie, and the girls on a beach. They were all in turquoise shirts and white shorts. Sadie’s hair was a darker blond—her natural color, Ilya guessed—and now that he could stare at her unabashedly, he saw that there was something strange about one of her eyes. One pupil was slightly jagged, as though it had suffered a tiny explosion. Then the applications popped up. One covered Sadie’s face, and Ilya pulled the mouse over to the internet browser and clicked.

First he checked his email, hoping for some sort of good news, but of course there was nothing but spam—ads for penis enlargements and hot American pussy and cheap flights to Lake Baikal. He couldn’t log in to VKontakte without converting the keyboard to Cyrillic, and so he spent half an hour Googling keyboard conversions, and another half hour in the bowels of the computer settings, until, finally, the Roman letters on the keyboard called up his old, familiar alphabet. Then he logged in, typed Vladimir’s name in the search box, and waited for his profile to load.

He’d last checked Vladimir’s profile the day before Maria Mikhailovna drove him to the airport, and there were dozens of new posts since then:

Rot in Hell.

Even GOD won’t forgive you.

I hope you get raped up the ass every day for the rest of your miserable life. That will = what you deserve.

Ilya forced himself to read each one, to wait until the sting had faded, and then to read it again. He moved slowly, deliberately, sounding out each word in the same way he did with his lists of English vocabulary. Pyotr Vladimirov, who lived two floors below them, had written Genesis 3 without any additional explanation, and Pasha Tretiak, who had skated with Vladimir the one year he’d been on the School #17 team, had written I always knew you were a sick fuck.

One person had posted a picture of Vladimir superimposed over a picture of the devil—horns, tail, and all. Another had posted a picture of Olga Nadiova, the second girl killed, and written, Why?

Russians murdering Russians—this is capitalism, one man had written, and a political debate had unspooled in a dozen more posts.

You are why the death penalty exists.

If only Stalin were alive to deal with you.

They were the same things that people had spat at him and his mother and Babushka in the bathroom line; the same things that people had spray-painted on their apartment door.

“Why are you torturing yourself?” Kirill had asked him once, when he was paying for yet another session at the Internet Kebab. “Move on, bratishka. He confessed.”

Vladimir had confessed to all three murders. That was true. But Ilya reminded himself, just as he had reminded Kirill, that Berlozhniki was a gulag town, a place born of forced and false confessions.

He typed Lana’s name into the search box. Her wall was filled with new posts too. Sympathy posts. There were images of bouquets, of Jesus crying, of hearts broken, bleeding, weeping. There were notes too—I miss you. I love you. You’re somewhere better now. All of it was the virtual equivalent of the flowers and cards and stuffed animals that had been left in the grove where she’d been killed, but Ilya was looking for something different. Some shift in tone, some strange specificity. That was the shape that clues took. He scrolled down and read for a half hour, until he reached posts that he knew by heart. There was nothing strange; in fact it was all so clichéd that it felt anonymous, even the posts from the people who’d known Lana best. You were too good for this world, her mother had written. We’ll never forget you. But it felt to Ilya that they already had.

Ilya clicked on the photos tab and scrolled through Lana’s pictures. He started at the beginning, when she’d first created her account. In the first photo she was twelve or thirteen, in a teal sweatshirt with Madonna on it. Her hair was curled, glitter nestled in the creases of her eyelids, and her face was rounder than Ilya remembered. There were pictures of her sipping from a carton of milk in the school cafeteria, sticking out a tongue to catch a snowflake, onstage in a leotard at the House of Culture. Halfway through the pictures, the pink streak in her hair made its debut. Her makeup got heavier, her shirts lower cut. A cigarette appeared between her fingers and stayed, even as the background changed. There was Lana smoking in a dim apartment with green walls. Lana smoking in a swing on the primary school playground. Lana smoking in a nest of bedding wearing a black bikini and a too-big baseball cap. Then came the picture from the Tower, which was not a tower at all, but the old gulag barracks, where kids went to do nothing good. There they all were: Lana, Aksinya, Vladimir, and Ilya made almost life-size by the Masons’ enormous monitor. Ilya and Vladimir were in the middle, and Aksinya and Lana flanked them. Aksinya was kissing Vladimir’s cheek, and Lana was kissing Ilya’s cheek. Lana’s fist was thrust out, flicking off the camera. Somehow the other photos had a doomed quality to them that reminded Ilya of the faded portraits of miners at the museum on the square, but this one was the worst to look at because Lana seemed so alive. Simply, defiantly alive, like she might tip forward, tumble out of the monitor, and start to dance. Like she had no idea what was coming.

Ilya hunched closer to the screen. The flash had been kind to Vladimir. It had erased the shadows under his eyes, the sore on his lip, the blackheads that speckled his nose. There were the thin, bright slips of his eyes. His mouth was open—what had he been saying?—and there were his teeth, the front two crossing at the bottom the way Babushka crossed her ankles when she sat. It was not the face of a murderer. A punk, sure. An idiot. An addict. But not a murderer.

Ilya opened a new email and typed Vladimir’s address.

I know you didn’t do it, he wrote.

Each blink of the cursor was a tiny jab of expectation. That’s it? it seemed to say. That’s all? Ilya clicked send. He’d sent Vladimir this same message dozens of times now. He knew it was a lost cause, a kopek in a well—Vladimir would probably never be allowed to check email again—but what else could he do?

Ilya pushed the chair back from the desk. Out the glass doors, through the gaps in the deck supports, he could sense more than see the pool’s glow, as though there were a crack in the earth issuing cool light. He closed his eyes. The Masons’ dinner noises had faded into the murmur of the TV. It was still early, but his body felt thick with tiredness. It was the time difference and the exhaustion of hearing nothing but English. It was looking at his brother’s face.

Upstairs, the phone rang once, twice. Probably Terry, the American exchange coordinator, Ilya thought, telling the Masons to get him on the first plane out of Baton Rouge. Fine. He would go home. He imagined his mother, three days from now, turning at the sound of the apartment door. She’d have that look of fear that had become the new set of her face, and then the look would loosen into disappointment at the waste of him, home again. She would not have the energy even to yell, and at the thought of that, his eyes filled and he pressed the heels of his palms into them to keep from crying.

For as long as he could remember, he had been meant to leave Berlozhniki. He had wanted to leave. Now he wanted that old desire. He wanted to be that old self, the Ilya who would be upstairs with the Masons right now, sitting on the couch, speaking textbook English. He was the good kid, the perfect student, the big brain. How had this happened? he wondered, and of course the answer was right in front of him, in a thousand pixels: Vladimir. If it weren’t for Vladimir, he could take all of this—America—as his due, but instead here he was, alone in a dark room, and he couldn’t even feel properly sorry for himself because of course Vladimir was alone too, and somewhere way worse than this.

There were footsteps on the stairs, a wooden creak. Ilya wiped at his cheeks and stood. It would be Papa Cam, his face a study in apologetic firmness. “Ilya, I’m sorry,” he’d say, “but you’re going to have to go home.” But the footsteps grew fainter rather than closer. They were outside, Ilya realized, and then there was Papa Cam in silhouette, gripping a long net. He paced the length of the pool, fishing for that one leaf.

Ilya pulled the shredded plastic wrap off his duffel and unpacked. All of his clothes fit in the dresser’s top drawer. His tape player and Michael & Stephanie tapes were still in the pink plastic bag, buried beneath Vladimir’s sweatshirt. He’d found the bag the week before he left. It had been the only thing in Vladimir’s room at the Tower, its presence a mystery, a minor miracle. As Ilya pulled out the sweatshirt, it released a vinegary tang. He recognized the smell—Vladimir on his worst days, Vladimir sleeping it off—just as it dissipated, anesthetized by whatever industrial-strength cleaning agent Mama Jamie used to make the basement smell like a very clean toilet. All of the tapes were there. He had listened to them so many times that the cardboard covers had gone white and furry at the edges. The titles had worn off the spines. He stacked them in a neat row on top of the dresser along with the tape player and his book of idioms. In the bathroom, he scrubbed his face and underarms, pulled on his sweatpants, washed his underwear and undershirt in the sink and hung them over the shower rod to dry.

He wanted to listen to Michael and Stephanie as he always had at home, to let their soft, insistent repetitions fade into white noise, and so he plucked a tape from the top of the stack and climbed into bed. The sheets were perfectly smooth. Up the hill the pool lights went out, and the basement walls went black. In the dark the bugs sounded more aggressive, like they were planning an invasion. Babushka said that before the refinery, in the summer, the bugs in Berlozhniki were the loudest in Russia, and, by implication, the whole world. She said this like it was a point of pride, like the bugs could stand in for a town orchestra or opera, but after the refinery was built they went quiet.

Ilya slipped the Delta headphones over his ears and pressed play. He could feel his eyes closing in anticipation of their voices—it was the only moment of pure pleasure he’d had that day—but their voices did not come. He pressed the button again. Still nothing. He flipped the player over and popped open the battery compartment. It was empty. All four 286s stolen by some thug in Leshukonskoye who’d spent all his earnings on beer and couldn’t afford batteries for his TV remote. So instead of Michael and Stephanie, Ilya rapped the words to “Dark City” softly, hoping that might soothe him. It was one of Kolyan’s hits, an ode to gangster life that Vladimir had sung so often that sometimes it became the soundtrack to Ilya’s dreams.

He was halfway asleep, giving in, too tired to dream, he hoped, but when he slept, he did dream. Of Vladimir in their kitchen. Naked, water dripping from his chin, his penis like a slug against his thigh, dried blood turning red as Babushka washed him. In the dream Vladimir’s leg was just as it had been—the skin the color of onions cooked in grease, a long, thin chasm where his flesh parted to show bone. His lips were the turquoise of the Masons’ pool. He was smiling, saying something sly, something about love that Ilya couldn’t quite understand.

Ilya woke with a scream balled in his throat. His pulse jerked in his neck. He washed his face in the sink and went upstairs. The house was filled with the mechanical noises that at home would have been familiar and would have amounted to silence. The clock on the microwave read 2:07. He opened the fridge and stared at the jugs of juice, the tubs of lettuce and sticks of butter. Everything was in a weird container. The butter was too yellow, the lettuce too white. Ilya poured a glass of water from the tap, and it stank of iron and tasted of salt.

His mother had bought him a phone card at the Internet Kebab—sixty minutes, Kirill had said—and he used it to call her, thinking that her voice, at least, would be like home. Her phone was off, though, and her outgoing message was stiff and cheerful, was not really her at all. Still, he left a message saying that he’d arrived, and that the family seemed nice enough, but before he could say anything more, before he could ask after Vladimir or say that he loved her, the connection ended, and a computerized voice announced that his phone card was empty. Kirill had ripped them off, and the normalcy of this, after all they’d gone through, was like a little gift.

Ilya sat at the table, looking out onto the den and foyer and up to the hallway, which was high and dark and silent. He listened for the Masons’ breathing. He wanted to hear a sigh or snore, something to know that he wasn’t alone. Then behind him, on the deck, there was a noise. A faint scratch, a scuffle. He turned in his chair, but the deck was empty, the window black and blank.

“Think of white paper,” his mother used to tell him when he had nightmares, “paper, just white and empty,” and he tried to, but still his pulse jumped like something trying to escape him. Sweat gathered on his lip. He kept seeing Vladimir half dead in the dream, and then it came to him what Vladimir had said: “Love is like a devil in the corner.” One of Babushka’s sayings. The sort that didn’t actually make any sense when you tried to analyze it, but when you let your mind stay outside of it you understood.

There was the noise again. A louder scratch this time. A wet exhale. Ilya pushed his chair back, and it screeched against the tiles. On the deck, there was this white flash of movement back and forth, back and forth, like a hand waving. A puff of condensation bloomed on the glass. Ilya fought the urge to yell. Then the creature let out a high-pitched yip, the condensation faded, and he saw that it was a dog. It was up on its hind legs with its front paws on the glass. Its tail wagged steadily behind its head. He tried to remember whether the Masons had said anything about owning a dog and could not. At home strays ranged, loping across snowy streets and marking certain alleys as their territory. They could be vicious—many were part wolf—and they were routinely rounded up and shot in the square, but this creature seemed docile. Ilya opened the door a crack, and the dog cocked its head at him. It had white fur that curled in coy tendrils at the base of its ears and an air of indulged expectation that was not unlike Marilee’s and Molly’s.

“Otvali,” Ilya said. And then, thinking the dog might be more apt to obey English, he whispered, “Go away, dog! Go!”

The dog stopped panting for a second, as though it were listening. It let its paws fall from the glass with a thud and wandered down the steps into the yard. It skirted the pool and picked its way across the grass slowly, as though it did not care for getting its paws dirty, and then it stopped by the alligator wall where a figure was standing. Ilya’s insides went heavy and hard, like they were turning to cement. It’s him, he thought, whoever killed those girls, and then the figure stepped out of the gloom, and Ilya saw that it was Sadie. She crossed the yard with the dog at her heels, and climbed up the deck steps toward him. She was barefoot, in the same black T-shirt, but with sweatpants underneath. Her silver sneakers dangled from one hand.

“‘Go away, dog’?’’ she said. She let the dog in, slid past him, glanced up the stairs toward her parents’ bedroom, and clicked the door shut behind her. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “I knew before.”

“Will you tell?” he asked.

“I won’t if you won’t. But you should—for all our sakes—or else they’re going to keep talking to you like you’re deaf.”

“You don’t think they know?” For a moment, Ilya’s stomach burned at the idea that they might. He imagined them explaining to their friends, It turned out he does speak English—he was just pretending not to. He imagined them thinking this strangeness the result of a disturbing Russian childhood or, worse, simply the result of being Russian, and then he remembered another of Babushka’s sayings: embarrassment is a luxury. He remembered his mother on that wooden bench at the police station, the secretaries nakedly staring, looking for something in her that might explain Vladimir.

“They don’t know,” Sadie said. “They’re innocents. Tell them and they’ll forgive you. They love forgiving people.” She said this softly, but with a scorn that made it clear that she did not love forgiving people and that she did not consider herself an innocent.

She walked past him into the kitchen and opened a cabinet that was stuffed with boxes of crisps and crackers and biscuits. “I get hungry at night. All the time. I’m growing. I can feel it happening sometimes—it’s like cramps in my legs.”

“You look completely grown to me,” he said.

“Is that a compliment?” she said, and she gave a quick smile that slid across her face like a snake across a path. Like she was afraid to let it last. “Are you hungry?”

Ilya nodded. “I didn’t eat dinner,” he said.

“Mama Jamie might not forgive that.” She pulled a box out of the cabinet with a picture of little girls in what appeared to be construction hats. “Girl Scout cookies,” she said.

His heart was still thumping away, but his fear was no longer entirely unpleasant. It was exhilarating to talk to her. He’d never actually used his English with a native speaker, and it seemed as though she could understand him, that his words were not as clumsy as they felt on his tongue. And she was beautiful. Her hair was in a big knot on top of her head, and it made her face seem wider, younger. She looked like Snegurochka in the book of fairy tales that Babushka had read to them as kids, in the picture when she first comes out of the forest, when she’s newly, magically made. Even the one shattered pupil seemed more like magic than a mistake.

“What happened to your eye?” he said.

She lifted a hand to it as though she’d forgotten. “Birth defect,” she said. “Sometimes I forget it’s there and I wonder why people are staring at me.”

That was not what people were staring at, Ilya knew, but he liked her modesty.

She took a cookie out and snapped it in two with her front teeth. They were shiny with spit, and Ilya remembered Vladimir’s leg. That wet bit of bone. The skin failing to cover it.

“Do you miss home?” she said. The question was a nice one, but her voice had a strange distance to it, like the idea of missing home was a curiosity. For her, it probably was.

“Yes,” he said.

“The whole no-English thing—did you just feel like messing with us?”

“I wasn’t in the mood,” he said. He could hear how cold his voice sounded, and of course that wasn’t the truth. But how could he explain to her that speaking English felt like cutting the last thread of a fraying rope? It was stupid, he saw now. An empty protest. As useless as the emails he sent Vladimir. What did it matter what he spoke? Russian, English, gibberish. He was still here, and his brother was still there.

She was looking at him with narrowed eyes. She had said something, and he had not heard her.

“What?” he said.

“I said, ‘Don’t you want to be here?’”

A few hours ago, the thought had almost made him cry, and he was afraid that he might, but instead he had the strange sense that he was solidifying, as though he were rejoining his old self, the one for whom this moment—a conversation alone in the middle of the night with an American girl—would have been an insane distillation of desire.

“I did,” he said, “but then my brother—” If he told her the truth—that his brother had been arrested for murder, that his brother had confessed to murder—she would look at him the way everyone in Berlozhniki had started to, as though he were guilty by association, and, of course, she wouldn’t think to ask whether Vladimir had actually done it.

“Your brother?”

“My brother died,” he said, and he was surprised at how easy it was to say, and for a second he found himself thinking how much easier it would be. He fought the urge to cross himself, to knock on wood.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked him in the eye. “But that doesn’t mean you can be an asshole.”

Heat rushed to his face. She took a handful of cookies and pushed the box across the counter toward him. “Church is early tomorrow. You should sleep. And tell them about your brother—they’ll understand.”

She walked past him again, closer this time, and she smelled like cut grass and something acrid too, like oil. The dog followed her, its nails clicking gently against the floorboards. As they started to climb the stairs, he saw that the bottoms of her feet were dirty. The cuffs of her sweats were speckled with bits of grass and her ankles were crisscrossed by thin pink scratches.

“Sadie,” he said.

She stopped halfway up the stairs and looked at him, and the dog did the same. He hadn’t asked her what she’d been doing in the yard. I won’t tell if you won’t, she’d said, and he hadn’t even wondered what she meant.

“What were you doing?” He gestured toward the door.

“The dog had to pee,” she said.

He nodded. It may have been true, but from the look of her pants, she’d been walking outside for a while, and there were her sneakers, dangling from her hand.

“How did you know? That I spoke English?” he said.

She hesitated. “You just have a look. Like you’re listening. Most people don’t have that, even when you’re speaking their language.” She smiled at him, a lasting smile this time, and then she climbed the rest of the stairs, and he watched the flash of her dirty heels as they disappeared into her bedroom.