Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER SEVEN

That first morning in America, Ilya took the longest shower of his life in hot water that seemed as though it would never go cold. He used the toiletries that Mama Jamie had bought him—the toothbrush and toothpaste and deodorant—and then carefully returned each to its cardboard box.

“I do speak English,” he whispered to his reflection in the mirror. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting his inflection just right.

When he was sure that they were awake, he climbed the stairs. They were all at the kitchen table except Sadie. Molly was wearing a miniature ball gown and crown and had an arm plunged into an enormous box of cereal.

“I ate every marshmallow,” she was saying. “Every single one.”

Marilee was staring at the TV, transfixed by a cartoon of what seemed to be Jesus lugging his cross through an unpleasant throng. Papa Cam was in a bathrobe. Hair stuck up from the back of his head, and at the sight of this vulnerability, Ilya wanted to slink back down into the basement, but he thought of Sadie saying that they would forgive him. Mama Jamie turned in her chair and saw him. Her face had been shellacked with makeup. She’d been up for hours, waiting for him, he realized, as she said, “He’s awake!”

Ilya took a step toward them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in English.

Papa Cam set a forkful of eggs down on his plate, and the eggs quivered in this way that made Ilya want to vomit.

“I do speak English,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was in grief. My brother died.” The Masons looked at each other across the length of the table. “I’m sorry,” Ilya said again.

“No,” Mama Jamie said, “you poor thing. Please don’t apologize. I’m so sorry about your brother. We had no idea.” She stood and opened her arms, and Ilya crossed the bit of carpet between them and hugged her. With her arms around him, she breathed deeply, as though her own calm might somehow osmose into Ilya, and Ilya felt each of her exhalations as a hot rush on his shoulder.

“What happened?” she said, when she released him. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“He was sick,” Ilya said. He thought of Vladimir in the clinic. He had not been sick exactly, but he certainly hadn’t been well. And if he was convicted he might as well be dead.

“Was it cancer?” Marilee whispered.

Ilya looked at her. Her eyes were huge. “No,” he said.

Next to her, Molly began to cry, and Mama Jamie scooped her up.

“Will his brother go to Heaven?” Molly managed. “If they’re not Christian, will his brother get to go to Heaven?”

“He’ll go to his own Heaven,” Mama Jamie said, and Ilya saw Vladimir with a needle in his arm.

“Amen,” Papa Cam said, and Ilya had no idea what the word meant. Papa Cam looked at him. Ilya expected to see mistrust in his eyes, but they were wet and shining with what looked to Ilya like a mix of pity and pride.

In the cartoon, Jesus had fallen under the weight of the cross, and the show ended with a preview of next week’s episode: the crucifixion. Mama Jamie fixed Ilya a plate and told him that they’d be leaving for church in a half hour. She had to go upstairs to wake Sadie, and when Sadie finally came down, her eyes were small and sleepy.

“Ilya found his voice,” Mama Jamie said. “The first miracle of the day.”

“How many are you expecting?”

“More than you, it seems.”

Sadie lifted the carafe of coffee up and sloshed it to gauge its fullness. “This is a miracle,” she said, emptying it into a mug.

“You know I don’t like you drinking that,” Mama Jamie said.

Sadie slurped it.

“You shouldn’t even need it. Lord knows you’re not waking up early,” Papa Cam said. “You don’t drink coffee, do you, Ilya?”

“I drink tea,” Ilya said. Sadie had changed into a pair of leggings that had a sheen to them and were printed with the galaxy. The Milky Way curved around her thighs, and the hubris of this was not lost on him. “Very strong tea,” he said. “It’s stronger than coffee.”

“I’m sure it is,” Mama Jamie said.

Sadie looked at him over the rim of her mug. Her feet were clean now, and if the dog hadn’t been leaning against her shins, panting, he’d have believed that her standing out in the yard in the middle of the night had been a dream.

“I met your dog last night,” he said, and he was not imagining Sadie’s sudden attention, the way her head swiveled toward him.

“Dolly,” Marilee said. “She’s an idiot. Sometimes she walks into walls.”

“Did she bug you?” Mama Jamie said.

“Bug me?”

“Wake you up?”

“No, she didn’t wake me,” he said. He looked at Sadie. She was looking at her feet, cheeks flushed, and he felt a stab of guilt for having said anything. “Do you know how to say ‘idiot’ in Russian?” he said to Marilee.

“I don’t know how to say anything in Russian,” Marilee said.

“Ee-d-ee-o-t,” he said slowly, thinking of the shopkeeper at the bookstore on Ulitsa Snezhnaya and the way he’d flicked his tongue with the “t” as though he were spitting on the sidewalk. “Or ‘durashka’ if you want it to be a little nicer.”

“Durashka,” Marilee repeated, and her pronunciation wasn’t as terrible as he’d been expecting.

“What a wonderful word,” Mama Jamie said. “Durashka. We should call her that.”

“That wouldn’t be very charitable,” Papa Cam said.

“She wouldn’t even know the difference,” Marilee said. “It’s not like she ever responds to her name.”

The dog let her body sink to the ground as though too weary to defend herself.

“Poor Durashka,” Papa Cam said, and his pronunciation was terrible.

“Ilya,” Molly said, “what was your brother’s name? The one who died.”

Ilya was quiet for a moment. Sadie looked at him, her face softer than he’d yet seen it. Somehow telling them Vladimir’s name felt more like tempting fate than telling them that he’d died, as though, if given his name, fate might find a way to make the lie true. “Vladimir,” he said, finally, and his voice was almost a whisper.

The Masons’ church, Star Pilgrim, seemed to have been designed in defiance of the central Louisiana weather. The two walls of glass acted like a magnifying glass, taking the morning sun’s light and focusing it into something capable of burning. Even before the service began, the congregation’s faces dripped. Ilya’s balls chafed in his jeans, and he tried to locate a bathroom where he could air them out, but Mama Jamie herded the girls and him into a pew at the back of the church.

“Is it always so hot?” he asked. He was between Sadie and Marilee, and he let the question float out into the viscous air.

“This isn’t even that bad,” Sadie said.

“Sometimes it’s hotter, but if they turn the air too loud we can’t hear the sermon,” Marilee said, just as music began to blare over the loudspeakers and a tall, slab-jawed man strode to the pulpit.

On the way to Star Pilgrim, Papa Cam and Mama Jamie had explained to Ilya that their church was nondenominational. “We believe in Jesus and all, but we don’t follow the rules of some of your more orthodox religions,” Papa Cam had said, and from that—and from the fact that the girls and Mama Jamie were shawlless and showing a considerable amount of skin—Ilya gathered that their religion was some sort of watered-down version of Christianity. But nothing could have prepared him for a Star Pilgrim service. The pastor looked like a porn star. His teeth were opalescent; his shoulders strained at the seams of his shirt, which gleamed like sealskin. He stayed behind the pulpit for only a millisecond and then, as though the music were rippling through his spine, he began to shimmy back and forth across the stage and up and down the aisle. Above him, a giant projector beamed a rainbow of light that hit the concrete wall and burst into images of mountain streams and sunsets and cuddling baby animals, the same sorts of images that had been posted on Lana’s wall. Three colored spotlights swung to the beat of the music, and an overserious man with a video camera darted among the pews. “He’s streaming,” Marilee said when she saw Ilya staring. “When we’re sick we watch Pastor Kyle from home.”

Pastor Kyle’s sermon was a mishmash of sound bites. He seemed more concerned with volume than with content. His voice was a power hose, blasting the congregation’s brains. Serve. Jesus. Amen. Spread. The. Word. Of. God. Amen.

Pain began to prickle Ilya’s temples. He could feel the sun scorching the back of his neck. Sweat trickled down his spine and into the gully between his buttocks, a sensation that could not have been less celestial, but then Ilya had never been much of a believer. Babushka was the only person in his family to have faith. Under communism, the church in Berlozhniki had been repurposed as the Museum of Atheism, and Babushka had not dared attend the covert services that other women held in their apartments, but after perestroika she made up for lost time. She’d spent the bulk of Ilya’s life at the Church of the Ascension, with its dank nave and incense and the faded, golden ikony that braver families had hidden under their floorboards and in their mattresses. There had been one icon—a chipped, barely distinguishable Virgin Mary—which Babushka said had simply appeared at the church without being painted, and was a miracle. Ilya’s mother always said that she didn’t have time to believe in miracles, but that God could feel free to convince her.

Ilya had never had faith in anything except that knowledge could be gained. Numbers in a column added up to something. If you stared at a word, if you sounded out the letters and visualized its meaning, it could be learned. And there was Vladimir. Vladimir, who could not be counted on for anything, who was untrustworthy in a million little ways, but who had still managed to inspire Ilya’s faith.

As Pastor Kyle danced, Ilya turned these things over in his mind. He stood when the Masons stood. He held a hymnal and let Marilee flip to the right pages. The music grew softer, and then Pastor Kyle announced that it was time for testimonials. A woman took the microphone. She was plump with pinkish hair, and in a soft voice she admitted that in times of trial she turned to food rather than God. Then a kid Ilya’s age mumbled that he had played a video game that was somewhat Satanic. A bookish man told the congregation that he had not gotten a much hoped for promotion. His coworker had gotten it instead, and the man had been angry. He was crying as he spoke, his glasses slipping on the damp planes of his cheeks. The hardest thing, he said, was that his anger and his jealousy—a jealousy so intense that it seemed almost sexual—had clouded his relationship with God. When he prayed, he felt like he was yelling under water, his words muffled and choked and inaudible to anyone above the surface.

Pastor Kyle nodded through transgressions large and small, a beatific smile on his lips, a muscle spasming gently in his jaw. When the last testimonial had been aired, he began to preach. He spoke of a direct line to God. No call waiting. No being put on hold. Then, through a transition that Ilya could not follow, he was describing the gates of Heaven, saying how quickly they would open for the righteous. He began dancing again—a sort of slow gyration, his eager hips leading him down the aisle.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” he said. His lips grazed the microphone. He was only a few meters from the Masons’ pew, and then he stopped, and he looked at Ilya. “There are the Cains and the Abels. There are the believers and those that don’t.” He paused and smiled at Ilya as though he and Ilya were in on some joke. “We have someone new with us today, folks. All the way from Mother Russia, will you give it up for Ilya Morozov!”

The congregation began to clap around him. The man with the video camera hovered behind Pastor Kyle, and Ilya could see that the lens was trained on him.

“You’re supposed to stand,” Sadie whispered, and he looked at her, and she read the fear on his face and said, “Just for a second.”

Ilya stood.

“Ilya,” Pastor Kyle said, “is a top student in his town, which, as I understand it, is in the Siberian wilderness. Can you say ‘hello,’ Ilya?”

Pastor Kyle held the microphone out, and Ilya leaned toward it and said, “Hello,” and his voice sounded sullen and small. He cleared his throat, was about to add that Berlozhniki was not in Siberia, when Pastor Kyle whipped the microphone back and said, “Ilya is here today in the good old U-S-of-A thanks to the generosity of EnerCo and the Mason family.” There was another round of clapping. Papa Cam and Mama Jamie nodded, their cheeks pink, and Pastor Kyle waited for the applause to die down before saying, “But Ilya’s family has suffered a tragedy.”

Ilya stiffened. Beside him Papa Cam and Mama Jamie were flushed with attention. Ilya dug his fingers into his palms, tried to stem an anger that he knew was not entirely justified. He had lied, after all, had used their pity to gain their forgiveness, but still he couldn’t believe how quickly they had told Pastor Kyle. Pastor Kyle, who was looking at Ilya like he was one of Jesus’s lost lambs. Pastor Kyle, who, as he opened his mouth to speak, revealed a wad of something pink and bright between his molars. Bubble gum.

“Ilya’s brother died not long ago, folks,” he said. “And I was thinking there might be something we could do to help his family.”

Around him, people were nodding. Someone a few rows behind him said, “Yes!” There was a basket weaving its way along the rows, and the ladies were reaching into their purses, and the men were leaning on one haunch to get to their wallets. Ilya let his hands loosen. He unclenched his gut. Maybe they could help, he thought. They would collect money, and he would send it home to pay for a decent lawyer or to bribe someone to tell them where Vladimir was being held or to cover travel expenses so that his mother could visit him. Ilya could feel the anger leaving him, could feel his face softening as though it were clay, losing its shape in the heat, and then Pastor Kyle said, “What do we do, when a family is in need? What is the thing we can always do to help one another no matter our circumstances?”

“Pray!” Marilee yelled from down the pew.

Pastor Kyle pointed a finger at her and clicked his tongue. “Bingo,” he said.

He turned on his heel and headed back to the pulpit, and when he got there, he bent his head and closed his eyes and made his voice as low and lush as velvet. “Lord,” he said. “We have a brother in need among us. We have a brother who is in pain, who is grieving, who has lost someone he loves, and we ask you to comfort him.”

Pastor Kyle kept saying “brother,” over and over. All around Ilya, heads were bowed. Rows and rows of people, their hair shining in the sun. Ilya could smell sweat distinctly. He could almost feel the force of their prayers, like they were leaving a wake as they sped up to an industrious American heaven where they would be answered with ease. Except the prayers were wrong. Misdirected. And Ilya was sure that they would come plummeting back to Earth in some new and twisted form, and so he closed his eyes and tried to redirect them.

Just give me a clue, he thought. Just something to prove he didn’t do it.

He tried to picture Vladimir the last time he’d seen him—in the clinic with white sheets all around him. But instead he saw Vladimir in the picture from VKontakte. It was as though, in staring at that picture the night before, Ilya had burned it into his retinas, and now his imagination could project it onto his lids at will. Pastor Kyle’s voice began to rise and crest, and then it was as though Ilya were in the picture. He was there again, at the Tower with Vladimir and Aksinya and Lana and Sergey. He could feel the bass coming up through the concrete floor, making his jaw chatter. A smile lifted his cheeks. All around him the pulse of bodies, dancing. The golden whip of a girl’s hair. That chemical prick to the air. The soft hump of someone’s ass hitting his. The slosh of vodka in the bottle as Aksinya took a swig. The crunch of glass under his sneakers. Lana was next to him, his fingers clammy on her waist. Her skin burning hot. Sergey was holding up Aksinya’s phone.

“Not your best angle, Aksinya,” Sergey said, and Aksinya held out her middle finger and flicked him off. Lana flicked him off too, and just as the flash clicked Vladimir said, “You have competition, Ilyusha.” That was why Vladimir’s mouth had been open in the picture, that was what he’d been saying. In the moment, Ilya had thought that he meant Sergey, that Sergey liked Lana, though Sergey had his own girlfriend. In the moment, he’d thought it was a joke because Lana was not his to compete for, but now he could see Vladimir’s eyes, made even more narrow by his sidelong glance. He had not meant Sergey. He had been looking to the side, past Aksinya and Ilya and Lana. He had been looking at someone.

Ilya felt a hand on his wrist. Lana, he thought, but when he opened his eyes it was Sadie. Her nails ragged, the skin around them chewed pink and raw. She kept her hand on his skin for a second, and then she said, “I have to get up there.”

Ilya looked to the aisle. Marilee and Molly and a troop of preteen boys were marching up toward the pulpit, and now Sadie squeezed past him. For a second her foot was between his. Her thigh brushed his. The opening chords of a song were twanging in the heat. At some point, while Ilya’s eyes were closed, Pastor Kyle had moved from the pulpit to an electric keyboard. The kids gathered behind him, and Sadie joined them. Someone handed her a microphone. She looked at Ilya. That one eye was so beautifully broken, like something at the end of a kaleidoscope.

You’ll know it when it happens, Vladimir had told him one night, when he and Aksinya were still a new thing. Vladimir had never been shy about talking about women—he was the sort to sing his love from the rooftops, too cool to be embarrassed. But Ilya had been embarrassed to listen. He had always been more squeamish than Vladimir, and, besides, it hadn’t seemed to him like something he needed to know about, not yet anyway, not like participles and gerunds and contractions. But now he wished that he had listened, had asked, “So you know it when it happens, and then what?”

Up by the pulpit Pastor Kyle’s hands were dancing over the keyboard. Sadie put the microphone to her mouth. He could hear her lips part, and then she began to sing.

“He’s quite something, isn’t he?” Mama Jamie said. They were backing out of their parking spot at Star Pilgrim. Pastor Kyle was standing by the doors to the church waving vigorously. Now that the service had concluded, he chomped openly on his gum.

“Mom has a crush on him,” Marilee said.

Molly giggled.

“I think every mom in there has a crush on him,” Sadie said. She was sitting next to Ilya. Her thigh was an inch from his. It looked like a loaf of toasted bread. Little blond hairs traversed it, catching the sun.

“I’m inspired by him, if that’s what you mean,” Mama Jamie said. “Did you like it, Ilya?”

The service, with its crackling acoustics and spastic light show, had seemed to him like a glossier version of the “karaoke club” that Pasha Kamenev ran in the boiler room of Building 6, the testimonials like the sad stories that Berlozhniki’s half-dozen reformed alcoholics told over and over at their Tuesday meetings in the communal kitchen. Now, with Papa Cam scanning the radio stations and the car’s AC blasting, even that moment when his memory of the Tower had crystallized seemed a bit ridiculous. More heatstroke than divine intervention. Ilya was sure that when he looked at the picture on VKontakte, Vladimir would be looking straight ahead, at no one but him.

“Church in Russia is more serious,” he said, and then, realizing that that sounded like an insult, he said, “It’s more fun here.”

Papa Cam laughed. “Not always,” he said. “I grew up Baptist, and let me tell you that is some serious worshipping.”

“No dancing,” Mama Jamie said. “No drinking. No coffee. No soda.”

“You didn’t have soda?” Molly said, incredulous. “Never, once, not any?!”

Papa Cam shook his head. “I was deprived,” he said.

Postchurch, the Masons had planned an entire day of back-to-school shopping at a mall in Alexandria. The girls each got new outfits, new sneakers, new notebooks. Pencil cases and key chains and a calculator for Marilee that cost over a hundred dollars. Papa Cam hefted the growing collection of bags from store to store like a pack mule. In the Walmart, Mama Jamie sent Ilya and Papa Cam on a mission to get undershirts and underwear and socks, and Ilya wondered if she’d seen his drying on the shower rod down in the basement.

The options were paralyzing: sleeveless, V-neck, ribbed, briefs, boxers, each in their own plastic satchel. Mountains of them, drifts of them, the fabric as gleaming white as snow. So many that Ilya found himself staring at them blankly. Papa Cam threw a pack of boxers and short-sleeved shirts into their cart.

“Never hurts to stick with the basics,” he said.

“Stick with the basics,” Ilya repeated, just the way he used to with Michael and Stephanie when he wanted to commit something they’d said to memory.

“Quick study,” Papa Cam said. “Do you know that one?”

Ilya shook his head. “Quick study,” he said.

“Exactly.” Papa Cam smiled.

On the way home they stopped at a place called Red’s that served sandwiches as long as Ilya’s forearm. They ate at picnic tables overlooking a stagnant stream with shit-colored water. The sandwiches, Ilya learned, were called “po’ boys” and the stream was called a “bayou,” and the gray-green vines cloaking the trees were “Spanish moss.” Ilya’s English was not as perfect as Maria Mikhailovna had believed or as he had hoped. There were constant hiccups in the conversation—moments when the Masons’ eyes flicked up slightly, as though they were searching their brains for his meaning—and he was so much slower than he wanted to be. English, as the Masons spoke it, was a rapid-fire slurry of slang and abbreviations and interruptions. If he gave it his full attention, he could catch enough of what they said to cobble together an understanding, but he kept thinking about Vladimir’s eyes in that picture and he’d lose the thread of the conversation, and then, by the time he uttered a word aloud, whatever he said seemed clunky and irrelevant. He would flush, embarrassed, and his eyes would find Sadie. Sadie, poking at her sandwich with a fork; Sadie, pulling apart the strands from a stray clump of moss and braiding them back together; Sadie, with her face half hidden behind a curtain of hair. She seemed separate from her family. Self-contained. He thought of her room—the empty walls, the spartan bed—and was not sure what to make of her. He thought of her standing in the dark by the pool. Sometimes she looked at him too, and if there wasn’t necessarily affection there, there was at least a measure of curiosity. And she had touched his arm at Star Pilgrim. She had sat next to him in the car. Small things, sure, but taken together they began to add up.

By the time they got home that night, Ilya’s head throbbed with the effort of understanding. His tongue was so exhausted that it had become a presence in his mouth. But still, when the Masons said “Good night,” he was able to answer. “Sleep tight.” It was an expression that had long confused him, but from their smiles he could see that that, at least, he had gotten right.

In the months between Vladimir’s arrest and his own departure, Ilya had tried to ask himself the sorts of questions that the police would have been asking had Vladimir not confessed. The questions that they should have been asking even though he had confessed. Three women were dead: Olga Nadiova, Yulia Podtochina, and Lana. In the movies, there was always one thing that connected the victims and that inevitably led to the killer, but Lana and Yulia and Olga were connected in a million messy ways. They were all women, all lower class, all somewhat attractive. They all liked to party. Olga and Lana had lived in the kommunalkas. Yulia and Olga had been seen together at Dolls, a club named after some infamous Moscow hot spot that no one had ever seen. Yulia had worked at the refinery, and so had Lana’s dad, a welder whose cheeks were flecked with scars from flying sparks.

Of the three, Lana was the only one Ilya had actually known, and so he’d asked himself over and over whether there was anyone who had wanted her dead. He tried to imagine Lana at school, before she’d dropped out like Vladimir and Sergey and Aksinya. He tried to picture her in the hallway, tried to remember where her locker had been, which table she’d eaten at in the cafeteria, and who had sat next to her, but she’d been in a different grade, and Ilya had always been studying. Studying so much that he might as well have existed in a different world. He barely knew who her friends were, let alone her enemies.

One afternoon, desperate for information, he’d gone to see Aksinya at her sister’s apartment. She’d answered the door in her coat, just home from somewhere, her eyes shiny with exhaustion or tears or drugs or all three.

“Ilyusha,” she’d said, “Lana was like sugar. Simple, sweet. People made fun of her, but you couldn’t not like her.”

“But was there anyone who liked her too much?”

Aksinya shook her head. “Too much? She slept around. She wanted a boyfriend, but nobody was knocking down her door.”

“Slept around?”

“Is that a big shock? She hooked up with you, right? So, yeah, she was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“What about Sergey?” Ilya asked.

“For sure when we were younger. But not for a while I don’t think.”

Aksinya was beautiful enough to leave Berlozhniki—that was what people said about her—and Ilya had always wondered whether Vladimir loved her beauty more or her potential for flight, but since Vladimir’s arrest there was this weariness to her. As though she weren’t still young, as though she hadn’t been young for a long, long time. She wouldn’t ever leave. Ilya could see it: she’d marry some midlevel apparatchik, move into an apartment a little better than this one. She’d have kids and love them, but at night, she’d dream of Vladimir and the way that when he held her his laughter had shaken her body, had felt like it was coming out of her own mouth. Then she would wake up.

“And what about Vladimir?” Ilya asked, his brother’s name like a lump in his throat.

“Don’t say his name like that,” she’d said.

“Like what?” he said.

“Like you-know-what,” she said. “He didn’t kill anybody. And he didn’t sleep with my best fucking friend.”

She’d shut the door then. It was the same thin plywood as his own door. He could have knocked again—she would have opened it—but he hadn’t had any other questions to ask.

Now, in the Masons’ basement, he logged back in to VKontakte. It had been ten hours since the church service at Star Pilgrim, and he was sure that he had imagined Vladimir’s sidelong look in the picture, just as he’d imagined the heat of Lana’s skin against his palm. As he typed in Vladimir’s name, there was this leadenness to his lungs, the anticipation of a dead end. This was real life, he reminded himself, not a movie, not a telenovela where the murders were committed and solved within an episode. The image loaded, and there was Vladimir’s mouth. It was open. He had been saying something—Ilya had been right about that—but his eyes were looking straight at the camera.

Ilya sighed and clicked Aksinya’s tag in the picture. The photo was hers. It was the only one that she’d tagged from that night at the Tower, but now, as her profile loaded, he saw that it wasn’t the only one that she’d posted. There were a dozen of the same shot, more or less, and Ilya clicked through them. In the first, Sergey’s finger was on the lens, obscuring Vladimir entirely, but Aksinya looked gaunt and gorgeous, which must have been why she’d posted it. In the second shot, Lana’s eyes were closed and so was Vladimir’s mouth. The third photo was the one they’d all been tagged in, and then, as Ilya clicked to the next and the next, Vladimir’s mouth opened wider. The pictures blurred until they were like a movie—the girls dipping inward to kiss Ilya and Vladimir’s cheeks, their arms extending to flick Sergey off. Vladimir’s lips split. His tongue hit his teeth. Ilya could hear him again, just as clearly as he had at the Masons’ church. “You have competition, Ilyusha,” and as Vladimir said it, his eyes shifted bit by bit by bit until, in the last photo, they were looking to the far left.

Ilya zoomed in on the photo until each of their faces was as big as his palm. He scrolled left, past Vladimir, past himself, past Lana. There were people dancing all around her. The background was a tangle of appendages whose owners were hard to identify, but on the edge of the frame there was someone in the foreground. Someone walking past them, close enough for his shoulder to brush Lana’s. That was who Vladimir was looking at. The person was cut in half. One shoulder, one leg, the shadowy suggestion of hair under a baseball cap. Ilya zoomed in as far as the computer would allow. The pixels fattened and blurred like cells in a petri dish, and then they clarified, cell by cell, until the face resolved into one that Ilya recognized. It was Gabe Thompson, the only American in Berlozhniki. His baseball cap had an orange bear on it, and the hat struck a chord in Ilya’s brain, made his ribs clench his heart like a fist squeezing tight.

He clicked on Lana’s name under the photo, and her profile pictures loaded just as they had the night before. There, just before the photo from the Tower, was the series of Lana lying on a bed in the black bikini, which seemed, on closer inspection, to be a bra. Her hair was wild, her makeup in half-moons under her eyes. She was on her stomach, her breasts squished together so that a seam of cleavage halved the photo. The sight of all that skin tripped some sexual circuit and heat rushed Ilya’s crotch and then he thought, she’s dead, and just as quickly the feeling was gone, replaced by nausea as if he’d drunk sour milk. She was wearing a baseball hat too. It was askew, the brim tilting toward one cheek. The logo was only half visible, but still Ilya could see that it was an orange bear, its fangs bared.

Since the midnineties Berlozhniki had played host to a trickle of tourists, groups of Swedes or Brits decked out in snowsuits so new and stiff that they barely allowed for movement. They’d check in to the Hotel Berlozhniki, which was really more of a hostel, eat at the pizza place on the square, and visit the Museum of Mining, where Babushka would give them a chit for their coats. They’d tour the museum’s three rooms, have a coffee in its café, reclaim their coats, and go gawk at the field of crosses that marked the camp’s dead. After thirty-six hours, two days at most, they’d leave, feeling sober and superior, but Gabe Thompson had been in Berlozhniki for close to two years.

He’d arrived alone, with money, and without, it seemed, any plans to leave, and at first the town had welcomed him. The Cold War was over, after all, and families had him over for supper. This young, blond American in a parka and a too-big suit. The mayor’s wife baked him her famous kulich. He got a monthly discount at the Hotel Berlozhniki, and the pizza place gave him a free pie, took a picture of him eating it, and made a poster of it that said, AUTHENTIC! AMERICA! PIZZA! The businesses on the square spruced themselves up—Anatoly at the Minutka was even spotted mopping—in the hope that Gabe might be the vanguard of a new wave of tourism that would drown Berlozhniki in rubles.

If Gabe seemed at all odd—and he did talk, occasionally, about angels and a golden book buried on a mountaintop—it was attributed to the language barrier. Besides, everyone said, all Americans are eccentric because look what they’d impeached their president over: some funny business with a cigar. Then, one day, Gabe picked a bench on the square, unzipped a duffel bag filled with pamphlets, and began to preach about Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni and a dream mine. Ah ha, people said. Finally they understood. Gabe had been sent to Russia to proselytize. With great disappointment they began to ignore him, to give his bench a wide berth or else to take his pamphlets and use them to kindle their stoves. Anatoly let the Minutka return to its usual filthy state and joked to anyone who would listen about how only in America would people waste time mining dreams.

A year passed, Gabe converted no one, and everyone assumed that he would go back to the bosom of whatever church had sent him, but he stayed. He ran out of pamphlets, and still he stayed. Kids approached his bench on dares and asked him questions about saints in stumbling English, then giggled while he answered. From time to time he brought a bagged Baltika to the bench, and the babushka who cleaned his room at the Hotel Berlozhniki revealed that he had several each evening as well. The women of Berlozhniki found this development especially dispiriting. Their lives were filled with men who lined up at the kiosk for a beer before work, and now it seemed that this problem was not particular to Russia, that all across the whole, wide, enormous world, men were worthless. Some days Gabe didn’t make it out of his hotel. Some days he sat on his bench, drunk, letting snowflakes melt on his cheeks. Sometimes he fell asleep there, and the police would leave him for a little while—everyone agreed that some gentle punishment was necessary—but they would always drag him back to his room before frostbite set in. And then there were the days when he seemed resolved to make a fresh start. His suit was clean and pressed. His face was puffy, but his eyes were clear and hard.

“I need to talk to you about God,” he’d say, and people would shake their heads at him, they would cross the square, and his voice would rise, and he’d yell, “Give me a minute! It’s not too late to be saved!”

Ilya was fascinated by Gabe, the only native English speaker for hundreds of miles, but he’d avoided him just as everyone else had. Though once, when Gabe was sitting on his bench asleep, Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey had seen a dog trot over to him, lift its leg, and piss on Gabe’s shins. They’d stared, transfixed. They were only a few meters away, close enough that Ilya could see an angry red divot in Gabe’s cheek, as though some insect had crawled out of or burrowed into his skin. They were close enough to shoo the dog, Ilya was thinking, just as Gabe’s eyes opened. For a second he looked at Ilya calmly, and then he sensed the dog or felt its piss, and he began to yell. The boys scrambled away—the snow tripping Ilya, Vladimir grabbing his arm—and ran for the Minutka. Once they were safely inside, roaming the aisles under Anatoly’s glare, Vladimir and Sergey started to laugh. They were screamed at, scolded, and cuffed with regularity. Disapproval was like a drug to them, but Ilya was terrified. He’d been able to understand what Gabe was yelling.

“Come on, Ilyusha,” Vladimir had said. “He’s just drunk.”

Vladimir picked up an Alyonka bar and began to examine it as though he might purchase it. At the register, Anatoly’s eyes narrowed. This was a cue to Sergey and Ilya to pocket something while Anatoly’s attention was focused on Vladimir. Sergey slipped some caramels into his coat with his usual finesse, but Ilya did not. Vladimir put the Alyonka bar down. “What’s wrong, Ilya?” he said.

“Are you afraid he’s going to come piss on you? A revenge piss!” Sergey said.

“He said he’d kill us,” Ilya said.

This had sent Vladimir and Sergey into another round of hysterics, and Ilya had forced himself to laugh with them until he realized that Anatoly was no longer watching them. He was looking out the window, the safety of his merchandise forgotten, and Ilya followed his eyes to the sidewalk where Gabe Thompson was standing, staring at them.

“Stop it,” Ilya hissed, and Vladimir and Sergey quieted.

“Just our luck,” Anatoly murmured. “The only American we get is insane.”

Gabe didn’t move. His stare pinned Ilya in place, gave Ilya the sense that his own stillness was ensuring Gabe’s, that if he flinched, Gabe would spring into violent motion. So Ilya resisted the urge to hide behind the enormous case of birch juice to his left. He forced himself to look at Gabe’s eyes, which were puffy and bloodshot and horrible, and then Anatoly picked up the shovel he kept by the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“Shit,” Vladimir whispered.

Gabe took a step toward Anatoly. Anatoly gripped the handle of the shovel and raised it off the ground—a half meter, maybe less. Ilya would have hit Gabe with it. He knew that with certainty, but maybe Anatoly had been born brave, or maybe because he’d outlived Stalin and Beria and communism and had little left to fear, he did not hit Gabe. Instead, he turned and rammed the shovel into the centimeter of snow that had fallen that afternoon. Metal screeched against concrete. It was not enough snow to shovel, but still Anatoly flung the dusting of it into the street, and Gabe turned and walked back across the square.

It had been terrifying—surely Ilya hadn’t imagined that—but could Gabe have killed Lana and the other girls? Ilya wasn’t sure. Gabe was fervent, which was a close cousin to crazy. He was a drunk, probably an addict, possibly, as Anatoly had said, insane. Yet he was in a picture with Lana on the night she’d died. And Lana had posted a sultry picture of herself in Gabe’s hat like it was something to be proud of, like she wanted it to be recognized. At the thought, anger gathered, burning behind his eyes, and then another idea struck him: Berlozhniki was not the sort of place one chose to go; it was the sort of place you were sent. It had been part of the gulag. Prisoners had dug the mine. They had laid the train tracks and built the station and poured the roads that radiated from it. Everyone in Berlozhniki had assumed that Gabe had been sent there by his church on a conversion mission—but what if Gabe had not been sent to do anything, what if he’d been sent because of something he’d already done?

Ilya opened a browser window and typed Gabe’s name into the search engine. He’d never heard the name Gabe before, and so he’d assumed that it was rare, but as the results loaded, he could see that it was not rare enough. There were hundreds of hits. There was an NFL player with the name, a reality TV star, a professor at a school in Ohio. A Gabe Thompson was in the Guinness Book of World Records for toenail length. Another had been in the Summer Olympics that year. Ilya clicked on the image results. He scrolled through page after page. None of the faces were familiar. None of them were him.

Babushka had saved Gabe’s pamphlets. She was a hoarder by nature and too devout to throw out any image of Jesus, even if it was the paraphernalia of a ridiculous offshoot of Christianity. Instead, she’d cut out the sherbet-colored pictures—all of those angels and archangels—and pasted them to the windowpanes in her bedroom. In the summer, when the sun lit them from behind, they looked like stained glass, which had been her hope. CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS was stamped in tiny letters in the corner of each picture, and Ilya remembered sounding out those words and puzzling over the meaning of “Latter-day,” before deciding that it must be a fancy way of saying “tomorrow.” Now he added the church’s name to Gabe’s in his search. Again there were lots of hits. Congregations of clean-cut boys in suits and ties. Ilya scanned the pictures until his eyes blurred, but again none of them were him.

Ilya cleared the search window. In its empty box, the cursor blinked in synchrony, it seemed, with his heart. He typed Gabe’s name again, and this time he added the word “murder.” There were fewer hits this time: a dozen sullen-cheeked men in orange jumpsuits, and Ilya thought of Vladimir. But Vladimir wouldn’t be in orange; in Russia, prisoners wore black.

Upstairs there were footsteps, and Ilya looked at the clock on the computer, thinking that it might be Sadie, that it was the middle of the night and that she was about to sneak out again, as she had the night before. But it was much later—five a.m.—and the sky was lightening. In a few hours, it’d be his first day of school in America. He took one last look at the computer screen, at the violence in each set of eyes, and then he emailed Aksinya.

Did she sleep with Gabe Thompson? he wrote, and then, with a throb of love for Aksinya because she had been Vladimir’s or because she was beautiful but still wouldn’t ever get to leave, he wrote, Please stay away from him. He clicked send and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.