The Goldfinch

I’ll call, I thought. Why not? I was still just drunk enough to think it was a good idea. But the telephone rang and rang. Finally—after two or three tries, and then a bleak half hour or so in front of the television—sick and sweating, my stomach killing me, staring at the Weather Channel, icy road conditions, cold fronts sweeping in over Montana—I decided to call Andy, going into the kitchen so I wouldn’t wake Boris. It was Kitsey who picked up the phone.

“We can’t talk,” she said in a rush when she realized it was me. “We’re late. We’re on the way out to dinner.”

“Where?” I said, blinking. My head still hurt so much I could hardly stand up.

“With the Van Nesses over on Fifth. Friends of Mum’s.”

In the background, I heard indistinct wails from Toddy, Platt roaring: “Get off me!”

“Can I say hi to Andy?” I said, staring fixedly at the kitchen floor.

“No, really, we’re—Mum, I’m coming!” I heard her yell. To me, she said, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“You too,” I said, “tell everybody I said hi,” but she’d already hung up.

xxi.

MY APPREHENSIONS ABOUT BORIS’S father had been eased somewhat since he’d taken my hands and thanked me for looking after Boris. Though Mr. Pavlikovsky (“Mister!” cackled Boris) was a scary-looking guy, all right, I’d come to think he wasn’t quite as awful as he’d seemed. Twice the week after Thanksgiving, we came in after school to find him in the kitchen—mumbled pleasantries, nothing more, as he sat at the table throwing back vodka and blotting his damp forehead with a paper napkin, his fairish hair darkened with some sort of oily hair cream, listening to loud Russian news on his beat-up radio. But then one night we were downstairs with Popper (who I’d walked over from my house) and watching an old Peter Lorre movie called The Beast with Five Fingers when the front door slammed, hard.

Boris slapped his forehead. “Fuck.” Before I realized what he was doing he’d shoved Popper in my arms, seized me by the collar of the shirt, hauled me up, and pushed me in the back.

“What—?”

He flung out a hand—just go. “Dog,” he hissed. “My dad will kill him. Hurry.”

I ran through the kitchen, and—as quietly as I could—slipped out the back door. It was very dark outside. For once in his life, Popper didn’t make a sound. I put him down, knowing he would stick close, and circled around to the living room windows, which were uncurtained.

His dad was walking with a cane, something I hadn’t seen. Leaning on it heavily, he limped into the bright room like a character in a stage play. Boris stood, arms crossed over his scrawny chest, hugging himself.

He and his father were arguing—or, rather, his father was talking to him angrily. Boris stared at the floor. His hair hung in his face, so all I could see of him was the tip of his nose.

Abruptly, tossing his head, Boris said something sharp and turned to leave. Then—so viciously I almost didn’t have time to register it—Boris’s dad snapped out like a snake with the cane and whacked Boris across the back of the shoulders and knocked him to the ground. Before he could get up—he was on his hands and knees—Mr. Pavlikovsky kicked him down, then caught him by the back of the shirt and pulled him, stumbling, to his feet. Ranting and screaming in Russian, he slapped him across the face with his red, beringed hand, backwards and forwards. Then—throwing him staggering out into the middle of the room—he brought up the hooked end of the cane and cracked him square across the face.

Half in shock, I backed away from the window, so disoriented that I tripped and fell over a sack of garbage. Popper—alarmed at the noise—was running back and forth and crying in a high, keening tone. Just as I was clambering up again—panic-stricken, in a crash of cans and beer bottles—the door flew open and a square of yellow light spilled on the concrete. As quickly as I could I scrambled to my feet, snatched up Popper, and ran.

But it was only Boris. He caught up with me, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down the street.

“Jesus,” I said—lagging a little, trying to look back. “What was that?”

Behind us, the front door of Boris’s house flew open. Mr. Pavlikovsky stood silhouetted in the light from the doorway and bracing himself with one hand, shaking his fist and shouting in Russian.

Boris pulled me along. “Come on.” Down the dark street we ran, shoes slapping the asphalt, until at last his father’s voice died away.

“Fuck,” I said, slowing to a walk as we rounded the corner. My heart was pounding and my head swam; Popper was whining and struggling to get down, and I set him on the asphalt to dash in circles around us. “What happened?”

“Ah, nothing,” said Boris, sounding unaccountably cheerful, wiping his nose with a wet snuffling noise. “ ‘Storm in a glass of water’ is how we say it in Polish. He was just pissed.”

I bent over, hands on knees, to catch my breath. “Pissed angry or pissed drunk?”

“Both. Lucky he didn’t see Popchyk, though, or—don’t know what. He thinks animals are for outside. Here,” he said, holding up the vodka bottle, “look what I got! Nicked it on the way out.”

I smelled the blood on him before I saw it. There was a crescent moon—not much, but enough to see by—and when I stood and looked at him head-on, I realized that his nose was pouring and his shirt was dark with it.

“Gosh,” I said, still breathing hard, “are you all right?”

“Let’s go to the playground, catch our breath,” said Boris. His face, I saw, was a mess: swollen eye, and an ugly hook-shaped cut on his forehead that was also pouring blood.

“Boris! We should go home.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Home?”

“My house. Whatever. You look bad.”

He grinned—exposing bloody teeth—and elbowed me in the ribs. “Nyah, I need a drink before I face Xandra. Come on, Potter. Couldn’t you use a wind-me-down? After all that?”

xxii.

AT THE ABANDONED COMMUNITY center, the playground slides gleamed silver in the moonlight. We sat on the side of the empty fountain, our feet dangling in the dry basin, and passed the bottle back and forth until we began to lose track of time.

“That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. The stars were spinning a bit.

Boris—leaning back on his hands, face turned to the sky—was singing to himself in Polish.

Wszystkie dzieci, nawet źle,

pogrążone są we śnie,

a Ty jedna tylko nie.

A-a-a, a-a-a…

“He’s fucking scary,” I said. “Your dad.”

“Yah,” said Boris cheerfully, wiping his mouth on the shoulder of his blood-stained shirt. “He’s killed people. He beat a man to death down the mine once.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, it’s true. In New Guinea it happened. He tried to make it look like loose rocks had fell and killed the man but still we had to leave right after.”

I thought about this. “Your dad’s not, um, very sturdy,” I said. “I mean, I can’t really see—”

“Nyah, not with his fists. With a, what do you call it”—he mimed hitting a surface—“pipe wrench.”

I was silent. There was something in the gesture of Boris bringing down the imaginary wrench that had the ring of truth about it.

Boris—who’d been fumbling to get a cigarette lit—let out a smoky sigh. “Want one?” He passed it to me and lit another for himself, then brushed his jaw with his knuckles. “Ah,” he said, working it back and forth.

“Does it hurt?”

Sleepily he laughed, and punched me in the shoulder. “What do you think, idiot?”

Before long, we were staggering with laughter, blundering around on the gravel on hands and knees. Drunk as I was, my mind felt high and cold and strangely clear. Then at some point—dusty from rolling and scuffling on the ground—we were reeling home in almost total blackness, rows of abandoned houses and the desert night gigantic all around us, bright crackle of stars high above and Popchik trotting along behind us as we weaved side to side, laughing so hard we were gagging and heaving and nearly sick by the side of the road.

He was singing at the top of his lungs, the same tune as before:

A-a-a, a-a-a,

byly sobie kotki dwa.

A-a-a, kotki dwa,

szarobure—

I kicked him. “English!”

“Here, I’ll teach you. A-a-a, a-a-a—”

“Tell me what it means.”

“All right, I will. ‘There once were two small kittens,’ ” sang Boris:

they both were grayish brown.

A-a-a—

“Two small kittens?”

He tried to hit me, and almost fell. “Fuck off! I haven’t got to the good part.” Wiping his mouth with his hand, he threw his head back, and sang:

Oh, sleep, my darling,

And I’ll give you a star from the sky,

All the children are fast asleep

All others, even the bad ones,

All children are sleeping but you.

A-a-a, a-a-a—

There once were two small kittens—

When we got to my house—making way too much noise, shushing each other—the garage was empty: no one home. “Thank God,” said Boris fervently, falling to the concrete to prostrate himself before the Lord.

I caught him by the collar of his shirt. “Get up!”

Inside—under the lights—he was a mess: blood everywhere, eye swollen to a glossy slit. “Hang on,” I said, dropping him in the center of the living room carpet, and wobbled to the bathroom to get something for his cut. But there wasn’t anything except shampoo and a bottle of green perfume that Xandra had won at some giveaway at the Wynn. Drunkenly remembering something my mother had said, that perfume was antiseptic in a pinch, I went back to the living room where Boris was sprawled on the carpet with Popper sniffing anxiously at his bloodstained shirt.

“Here,” I said, pushing the dog aside, dabbing the bloody place on his forehead with a damp cloth. “Hold still.”

Boris twitched away, and growled. “The fuck are you doing?”

“Shut up,” I said, holding the hair back from his eyes.

He muttered something in Russian. I was trying to be careful but I was as drunk as he was, and when I sprayed perfume on the cut, he shrieked and socked me on the mouth.

“What the fuck?” I said, touching my lip, my fingers coming away bloody. “Look what you did to me.”

“Blyad,” he said, coughing and batting the air, “it stinks. What’d you put on me, you whore?”

I started laughing; I couldn’t help it.

“Bastard,” he roared, shoving me so hard I fell. But he was laughing too. He held out a hand to help me up but I kicked it away.

“Fuck off!” I was laughing so hard I could barely get the words out. “You smell like Xandra.”

“Christ, I’m choking. I’ve got to get this off me.”

We stumbled outside—shedding our clothes, hopping one-legged out of our pants as we went—and jumped in the pool: bad idea, I realized in the too-late, toppling-over moment before I hit the water, blind drunk and too wrecked to walk. The cold water slammed into me so hard it almost knocked my breath out.

I clawed to the surface: eyes stinging, chlorine burning my nose. A spray of water hit me in the eyes and I spit it back at him. He was a white blur in the dark, cheeks hollow and black hair plastered on either side of his head. Laughing, we grappled and ducked each other, even though my teeth were chattering and I felt way too drunk and sick to be horsing around in eight feet of water.

Boris dove. A hand clamped my ankle and yanked me under, and I found myself staring into a dark wall of bubbles.

I wrenched; I struggled. It was like in the museum again, trapped in the dark space, no way up or out. I thrashed and twisted, as glubs of panicked breath floated before my eyes: underwater bells, darkness. At last—just as I was about to gulp in a lungful of water—I twisted free and broke to the surface.

Choking for breath, I clung to the edge of the pool and gasped. When my vision cleared, I saw Boris—coughing, cursing—plunging towards the steps. Breathless with anger, I half-swam, half hopped up behind him and hooked a foot around his ankle so that he fell face-forward with a smack.

“Asshole,” I sputtered, when he floundered to the surface. He was trying to talk but I struck a sheet of water in his face, and then another, and wound my fingers in his hair and pushed him under. “You miserable shit,” I screamed when he surfaced, heaving, water streaming down his face. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” I had both hands on his shoulders and was about to dive on top of him—push him down, hold him for a good long time—when he reached around and clasped my arm, and I saw that he was white and trembling.

“Stop,” he said, gasping—and then I realized how unfocused and strange his eyes were.

“Hey,” I said, “are you okay?” But he was coughing too hard to answer. His nose was bleeding again, blood gushing dark between his fingers. I helped him up, and together we collapsed on the pool steps—half in, half out of the water, too exhausted even to climb all the way out.

xxiii.

BRIGHT SUN WOKE ME. We were in my bed: wet hair, half-dressed and shivering in the air-conditioned cold, with Popper snoring between us. The sheets were damp and reeking of chlorine; I had a shattering headache and an ugly metallic taste in my mouth like I’d been sucking on a handful of pocket change.

I lay very still, feeling I might vomit if I moved my head even a quarter of an inch, then—very carefully—sat up.

“Boris?” I said, rubbing my cheek with the flat of my hand. Brown streaks of dried blood were smeared on the pillowcase. “You awake?”

“Oh God,” groaned Boris, dead-pale and sticky with sweat, rolling on his stomach to clutch at the mattress. He was naked except for his Sid Vicious bracelets and what looked like a pair of my underwear. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“Not here.” I kicked him. “Up.”

Muttering, he stumbled off. I could hear him puking in my bathroom. The sound made me sick, but also a bit hysterical. I rolled over and laughed into my pillow. When he stumbled back in, clasping his head, I was shocked at his black eye, the blood caked at his nostrils and the scabbed cut on his forehead.

“Christ,” I said, “that looks bad. You need stitches.”

“You know what?” said Boris, throwing himself stomach-down on the mattress.

“What?”

“We’re late for fucking school!”

We rolled on our backs and roared with laughter. As weak and nauseated as I felt, I thought I would never be able to stop.

Boris flopped over, groping with one arm for something on the floor. In an instant his head popped back up. “Ah! What’s this?”

I sat up and reached eagerly for the glass of water, or what I thought was water, and—when he shoved it under my nose—gagged on the smell.

Boris howled. Quick as a flash he was on top of me: all sharp bones and clammy flesh, reeking of sweat and sick and something else, raw and dirty, like stagnant pond water. Sharply he pinched my cheek, tipping the glass of vodka over my face. “Time for your medicine! Now, now,” he said, as I knocked the glass flying and hit him in the mouth, a glancing blow that didn’t quite connect. Popper was barking with excitement. Boris got me in a chokehold, grabbed my dirty shirt from the day before, and tried to stuff it in my mouth, but I was too quick for him and flipped him off the bed so that his head knocked against the wall. “Ow, fuck,” he said, rubbing his face sleepily with his open palm and chuckling.

Uncertainly I stood, in a prickle of cold sweat, and made my way into the bathroom, where in a violent rush or two—hand braced against the wall—I emptied my stomach into the toilet bowl. From the next room I could hear him laughing.

“Two fingers down the pipe,” he called in to me, and then something I missed, in a fresh shudder of nausea.

When it was over, I spat once or twice, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The bathroom was a wreck: shower dripping, door hanging open, sopping towels and blood-stained wash cloths wadded on the floor. Still shivering with sick, I drank from my hands at the sink and splashed some water on my face. My bare-chested reflection was hunched and pale, and I had a fat lip from where Boris had socked me the night before.

Boris was still on the floor, lying bonelessly with his head propped against the wall. When I came back in, he cracked his good eye open and chortled at the sight of me. “All better?”

“Fuck you! Don’t fucking talk to me.”

“Serves you right. Didn’t I tell you not to faff around with that glass?”

“Me?”

“You don’t remember, do you?” He touched his tongue to his upper lip to see if his mouth had started bleeding again. When his shirt was off you could see all the spaces between his ribs, marks from old beatings and the heat flush high on his chest. “That glass on the floor, very bad idea. Unlucky! I told you not to leave it there! Huge jinx on us!”

“You didn’t have to pour it on my head,” I said, fumbling for my specs and reaching for the first pair of pants I saw from the communal heap of dirty laundry on the floor.

Boris pinched the bridge of his nose, and laughed. “Was just trying to help you. A little booze will make you feel better.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot.”

“It’s true. If you can keep it down. Will make your headache go like magic. My dad is not helpful person but this is one very helpful thing he has told me. Nice cold beer is the best, if you have it.”

“Say, c’mere,” I said. I was standing by the window, looking down at the pool.

“Eh?”

“Come look. I want you to see this.”

“Just tell me,” muttered Boris, from the floor. “I don’t want to get up.”

“You’d better.” Downstairs it looked like a murder scene. A line of blood drips wound across the paving stones to the pool. Shoes, jeans, bloodsoaked shirt, were riotously flung and tossed. One of Boris’s busted-up boots lay at the bottom of the deep end. Worse: a greasy scum of vomit floated in the shallow water by the steps.

xxiv.

LATER, AFTER A FEW half-hearted passes with the pool vacuum, we were sitting on the kitchen counter smoking my dad’s Viceroys and talking. It was almost noon—too late to even think about going to school. Boris—ragged and unhinged-looking, his shirt hanging off the shoulder on one side, slamming the cabinets, complaining bitterly because there was no tea—had made some hideous coffee in the Russian way, by boiling grounds in a pan on the stove.

“No, no,” he said, when he saw I’d poured myself a normal sized cup. “Very strong, very small amount.”

I tasted it, made a face.

He dipped a finger in it, and licked it off. “Biscuit would be nice.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Bread and butter?” he said hopefully.

I eased down from the counter—as gently as I could, because my head hurt—and searched around until I found a drawer with sugar envelopes and packaged tortilla chips that Xandra had brought home from the buffet at the bar.

“Crazy,” I said, looking at his face.

“What?”

“That your dad did that.”

“Is nothing,” mumbled Boris, turning his head sideways so he could wedge the whole corn chip in. “He broke one of my ribs once.”

After a long pause, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said: “A broken rib’s not that serious.”

“No, but it hurt. This one,” he said, pulling up his shirt and pointing it out to me.

“I thought he was going to kill you.”

He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Ah, I provoked him on purpose. Answered back. So you could get Popchik out of there. Look, is fine,” he said, condescendingly, when I kept on looking at him. “Last night he was frothing at mouth but he’ll be sorry when he sees me.”

“Maybe you ought to stay here for a while.”

Boris leaned back on his hands and gave me a dismissive smile. “Is nothing to be fussed about. He gets depressed sometimes, is all.”

“Hah.” In the old Johnnie Walker Black days—vomit on his dress shirts, angry co-workers calling our house—my dad (in tears sometimes) had blamed his rages on “depression.”

Boris laughed, with what seemed like genuine amusement. “And what? You don’t get sad yourself sometimes?”

“He should be in jail for doing that.”

“Oh, please.” Boris had gotten bored with his bad coffee and had ventured to the fridge for a beer. “My father—bad temper, sure, but he loves me. He could have left me with a neighbor when he left Ukraine. That’s what happened to my friends Maks and Seryozha—Maks ended up on the street. Besides, I should be in jail myself, if you want to think that way.”

“Sorry?”

“I tried to kill him one time. Serious!” he said, when he saw the way I was looking at him. “I did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, is true,” he said resignedly. “I feel bad about it. Our last winter in Ukraine, I tricked him to walk outside—he was so drunk, he did it. Then I locked the door. Thought sure he would die in the snow. Glad he didn’t, eh?” he said, with a shout of laughter. “Then I’d be stuck in Ukraine, my God. Eating from garbage cans. Sleeping in railway station.”

“What happened?”

“Dunno. It wasn’t late at night enough. Someone saw him and picked him up in a car—some woman, I’d guess, who knows? Anyway he went out drinking more, made it home a few days later—lucky for me, didn’t remember what happened! Instead he brought me a soccer ball and said he was drinking only beer from then on. That lasted one month maybe.”

I rubbed my eye behind my glasses. “What are you going to tell them at school?”

He cracked the beer open. “Eh?”

“Well, I mean.” The bruise on his face was the color of raw meat. “People are going to ask.”

He grinned and elbowed me. “I’ll tell ’em you did it,” he said.

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious.”

“Boris, it’s not funny.”

“Oh, come on. Football, skateboard.” His black hair fell in his face like a shadow and he tossed it back. “You don’t want them to take me away, do you?”

“Right,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause.

“Because Poland.” He passed me the beer. “I think is what it would be. For deportation. Although Poland—” he laughed, a startling bark—“better than Ukraine, my God!”

“They can’t send you back there, can they?”

He frowned at his hands, which were dirty, nails rimmed with dried blood. “No,” he said fiercely. “Because I’ll kill myself first.”

“Oh, boo hoo hoo.” Boris was always threatening to kill himself for one reason and another.

“I mean it! I’ll die first! I’d rather be dead.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Yes I would! The winter—you don’t know what it’s like. Even the air is bad. All gray concrete, and the wind—”

“Well, it must be summer there sometime.”

“Ah, God.” He reached for my cigarette, took a sharp drag, blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Mosquitoes. Stinking mud. Everything smells like mould. I was so starving-to-death and lonely—I mean, sometimes I was so hungry, serious, I would walk on the river bank and think of drowning myself.”

My head hurt. Boris’s clothes (my clothes, actually) tumbled in the dryer. Outside, the sun shone bright and mean.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, taking the cigarette back, “but I could use some real food.”

“What shall we do then?”

“We should have gone to school.”

“Hmpf.” Boris made it plain that he only went to school because I went, and because there was nothing else to do.

“No—I mean it. We should have gone. There’s pizza today.”

Boris winced, with genuine regret. “Fuck it.” That was the other thing about school; at least they fed us. “Too late now.”

xxv.

SOMETIMES, IN THE NIGHT, I woke up wailing. The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark way out. I had to go the dark way, because the bright way was hot and flickering with fire. But the dark way was where the bodies were.

Happily, Boris never seemed annoyed or even very startled when I woke him, as if he came from a world where there was nothing so unusual in a nocturnal howl of pain. Sometimes he’d gather up Popchik—snoring at the foot of our bed—and deposit him in a limp sleepy heap on my chest. And weighed down like that—the warmth of both of them around me—I lay counting to myself in Spanish or trying to remember all the words I knew in Russian (swear words, mostly) until I went back to sleep.

When I’d first come to Vegas, I’d tried to make myself feel better by imagining that my mother was still alive and going about her routine back in New York—chatting with the doormen, picking up coffee and a muffin at the diner, waiting on the platform by the news stand for the 6 train. But that hadn’t worked for long. Now, when I buried my face in a strange pillow that didn’t smell at all like her, or home, I thought of the Barbours’ apartment on Park Avenue, or, sometimes, Hobie’s townhouse in the Village.

I’m sorry your father sold your mother’s things. If you had told me, I might have bought some of them and kept them for you. When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.

Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare—are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there’s something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it’s as if you’ve gone away to sea on a ship—out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.

This letter arrived tucked in an old hardcover edition of Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry, which I read and re-read. I kept the letter in the book, where it became creased and dirty from repeated re-reading.

Boris was the only person I’d told, in Vegas, how my mother had died—information that to his credit he’d accepted with aplomb; his own life had been so erratic and violent that he didn’t seem all that shocked by the story. He’d seen big explosions, out in his father’s mines around Batu Hijau and other places I’d never heard of, and—without knowing the particulars—was able to venture a fairly accurate guess as to the type of explosives employed. As talkative as he was, he also had a secretive streak and I trusted him not to tell anyone without having to ask. Maybe because he himself was motherless and had formed close bonds to people like Bami, his father’s “lieutenant” Evgeny, and Judy the barkeep’s wife in Karmeywallag—he didn’t seem to think my attachment to Hobie was peculiar at all. “People promise to write, and they don’t,” he said, when we were in the kitchen looking at Hobie’s latest letter. “But this fellow writes you all the time.”

“Yeah, he’s nice.” I’d given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening so different from my father’s, but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company.

Boris stuck his finger in the open jar of peanut butter on the table between us, and licked it off. He had grown to love peanut butter, which (like marshmallow fluff, another favorite) was unavailable in Russia. “Old poofter?” he asked.

I was taken aback. “No,” I said swiftly; and then: “I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Boris, offering me the jar. “I’ve known some sweet old poofters.”

“I don’t think he is,” I said, uncertainly.

Boris shrugged. “Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”

xxvi.

BORIS HAD GROWN TO like my father, and vice versa. He understood, better than I did, how my father made his living; and although he knew, without being told, to stay away from my dad when he was losing, he also understood that my father was in need of something I was unwilling to give: namely, an audience in the flush of winning, when he was pacing around jacked up and punchy in the kitchen and wanting someone to listen to his stories and praise him about how well he’d done. When we heard him down there jumped-up and high on the downdraft of a win—bumping around jubilantly, making lots of noise—Boris would put down his book and head downstairs, where patiently he stood listening to my dad’s boring, card-by-card replay of his evening at the baccarat table, which often segued into excruciating (to me) stories of related triumphs, all the way back to my dad’s college days and blighted acting career.

“You didn’t tell me that your dad had been in movies!” said Boris, returning upstairs with a cup of now-cold tea.

“He wasn’t in many. Like, two.”

“But I mean. That one—that was a really big movie—that police movie, you know, the one about policemen taking bribes. What was the name of it?”

“He didn’t have a very big part. He was in it for like one second. He played a lawyer who got shot on the street.”

Boris shrugged. “Who cares? Still is interesting. If he ever went to Ukraine people would treat him like a star.”

“He can go then, and take Xandra with him.”

Boris’s enthusiasm for what he called “intellectual talks” found an appreciative outlet in my father, as well. Uninterested in politics myself, and even less interested in my father’s views on them, I was unwilling to engage in the kind of pointless argument on world events that I knew my father enjoyed. But Boris—drunk or sober—was glad to oblige. Often, in these talks, my father would wave his arms around and mimic Boris’s accent for entire conversations, in a way that set my teeth on edge. But Boris himself didn’t appear to notice or mind. Sometimes, when he went down to put the kettle on, and didn’t return, I found them arguing happily in the kitchen like a pair of actors in a stage production, about the dissolution of the Soviet Union or whatever.

“Ah, Potter!” he said, coming upstairs. “Your dad. Such a nice guy!”

I removed the earbuds of my iPod. “If you say so.”

“I mean it,” said Boris, flopping down on the floor. “He’s so talkative and intelligent! And he loves you.”

“I don’t see where you get that.”

“Come on! He wants to make things right with you, but doesn’t know how. He wishes it was you down there having discussions with him and not me.”

“He said that to you?”

“No. Is true, though! I know it.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Boris looked at me shrewdly. “Why do you hate him so much?”

“I don’t hate him.”

“He broke your mother’s heart,” said Boris decisively. “When he left her. But you need to forgive him. All that’s in the past now.”

I stared. Was this what my dad went around telling people?

“That’s bullshit,” I said, sitting up, throwing my comic book aside. “My mother—” how could I explain it?—“you don’t understand, he was an asshole to us, we were glad when he left. I mean, I know you think he’s such a great guy and everything—”

“And why is he so terrible? Because he saw other women?” said Boris—holding out his hands, palms up. “It happens. He has his life. What is that to do with you?”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Man,” I said, “he’s got you snowed.” It never failed to amaze me how my dad could charm strangers and reel them in. They lent him money, recommended him for promotions, introduced him to important people, invited him to use their vacation homes, fell completely under his spell—and then it would all go to pieces somehow and he would move on to someone else.

Boris looped his arms around his knees and leaned his head back against the wall. “All right, Potter,” he said agreeably. “Your enemy—my enemy. If you hate him, I hate him too. But—” he put his head to the side—“here I am. Staying in his house. What should I do? Should I talk, be friendly and nice? Or disrespect him?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, don’t believe everything he tells you.”

Boris chuckled. “I don’t believe everything that anybody tells me,” he said, kicking my foot companionably. “Not even you.”

xxvii.

AS FOND AS MY dad was of Boris, I was constantly trying to divert his attention from the fact that Boris had basically moved into the house with us—which wasn’t that difficult, as between the gambling and the drugs my dad was so distracted that he might not have noticed if I’d brought a bobcat to live in the upstairs bedroom. Xandra was a bit tougher to negotiate, more prone to complain about the expense, despite the supply of stolen snack food Boris contributed to the household. When she was at home he stayed upstairs and out of the way, frowning over The Idiot in Russian and listening to music on my portable speakers. I brought him beers and food from downstairs and learned to make his tea the way he liked it: boiling hot, with three sugars.

By then it was almost Christmas though you wouldn’t have known it from the weather: cool at night, but bright and warm during the day. When the wind blew, the umbrella by the pool snapped with a gunshot sound. There were lightning flashes at night, but no rain; and sometimes the sand picked up and flew in little whirlwinds which spun this way and that in the street.

I was depressed about the holidays, although Boris took them in stride. “It’s for little children, all that,” he said scornfully, leaning back on his elbows on my bed. “Tree, toys. We’ll have our own praznyky on Christmas Eve. What do you think?”

“Praznyky?”

“You know. A sort of holiday party. Not a proper Holy Supper, just a nice dinner. Cook something special—maybe invite your father and Xandra. You think they might want to eat something with us?”

Much to my surprise, my father—and even Xandra—seemed delighted by the idea (my father, I think, mainly because he enjoyed the word praznyky, and enjoyed making Boris say it aloud). On the twenty-third, Boris and I went shopping, with actual money my father had given us (which was fortunate, since our usual supermarket was too crowded with holiday shoppers for carefree shoplifting) and came home with potatoes; a chicken; a series of unappetizing ingredients (sauerkraut, mushrooms, peas, sour cream) for some Polish holiday dish that Boris claimed he knew how to make; pumpernickel rolls (Boris insisted on black bread; white was all wrong for the meal, he said); a pound of butter; pickles; and some Christmas candy.

Boris had said that we would eat with the appearance of the first star in the sky—the Bethlehem star. But we were not used to cooking for anybody but ourselves and as a consequence were running late. On Christmas Eve, at about eight p.m., the sauerkraut dish was made and the chicken (which we’d figured how to cook from the package instructions) had about ten minutes before it came out of the oven when my dad—whistling “Deck the Halls”—came up and rapped jauntily on a kitchen cabinet to get our attention.

“Come on, boys!” he said. His face was flushed and shiny and his voice very quick, with a strained, staccato quality I knew all too well. He had on one of his sharp old Dolce and Gabbana suits from New York but without a tie, the shirt loose and unbuttoned at the neck. “Go comb your hair and spruce up a bit. I’m taking us all out. Do you have anything better to wear, Theo? Surely you must.”

“But—” I stared at him in frustration. This was just like my dad, breezing in and changing the plan at the last moment.

“Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can’t it? Sure it can.” He was talking a mile a minute. “You can put the other thing back in the fridge too. We’ll have it tomorrow for Christmas lunch—will it still be praznyky? Is praznyky only on Christmas Eve? Am I confused about that? Well, okay, that’s when we’ll have ours—Christmas Day. New tradition. Leftovers are better anyway. Listen, this’ll be fantastic. Boris—” he was already shepherding Boris out of the kitchen—“what size shirt do you wear, comrade? You don’t know? Some of these old Brooks Brothers shirts of mine, I really ought to give the whole lot to you, great shirts, don’t get me wrong, they’ll probably come down to your knees but they’re a little too tight in the collar for me and if you roll up the sleeves they’ll look just fine.…”

xxviii.

THOUGH I’D BEEN IN Las Vegas almost half a year it was only my fourth or fifth time on the Strip—and Boris (who was content enough in our little orbit between school, shopping plaza, and home) had scarcely been into Vegas proper at all. We stared in amazement at the waterfalls of neon, electricity blazing and pulsing and cascading down in bubbles all around us, Boris’s upturned face glowing red and then gold in the crazy drench of lights.

Inside the Venetian, gondoliers propelled themselves down a real canal, with real, chemical-smelling water, as costumed opera singers sang Stille Nacht and Ave Maria under artificial skies. Boris and I trailed along uneasily, feeling shabby, scuffing our shoes, too stunned to take it all in. My dad had made reservations for us at a fancy, oak-panelled Italian restaurant—the outpost of its more famous sister restaurant in New York. “Order what you like, everyone,” he said, pulling out Xandra’s chair for her. “My treat. Go wild.”

We took him at his word. We ate asparagus flan with shallot vinaigrette; smoked salmon; smoked sable carpaccio; perciatelli with cardoons and black truffles; crispy black bass with saffron and fava beans; barbecued skirt steak; braised short ribs; and panna cotta, pumpkin cake, and fig ice cream for dessert. It was by leaps and fathoms the best meal I’d eaten in months, or maybe ever; and Boris—who’d eaten two orders of the sable all by himself—was ecstatic. “Ah, marvelous,” he said, for the fifteenth time, practically purring, as the pretty young waitress brought out an extra plate of candies and biscotti with the coffee. “Thank you! Thank you Mr. Potter, Xandra,” he said again. “Is delicious.”

My dad—who hadn’t eaten all that much compared to us (Xandra hadn’t either)—pushed his plate aside. The hair at his temples was damp and his face was so bright and red he was practically glowing. “Thank the little Chinese guy in the Cubs cap who kept betting the bank in the salon this afternoon,” he said. “My God. It was like we couldn’t lose.” In the car, he’d already shown us his windfall: the fat roll of hundreds, wrapped up with a rubber band. “The cards just kept coming and kept coming. Mercury in retrograde and the moon was high! I mean—it was magic. You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the light? There’s this fantastic dealer here, Diego, I love Diego—I mean, it’s crazy, he looks just like Diego Rivera the painter only in a sharp-ass fucking tuxedo. Did I tell you about Diego already? Been out here forty years, ever since the old Flamingo days. Big, stout, grand-looking guy. Mexican, you know. Fast slippery hands and big rings—” he waggled his fingers—“ba-ca-RRRAT! God, I love these old-school Mexicans in the baccarat room, they’re so fucking stylish. Musty old elegant fellows, carry their weight well, you know? Anyway, we were at Diego’s table, me and the little Chinese guy, he was a trip too, horn-rimmed glasses and not a word of English, you know, just ‘San Bin! San Bin!’ drinking this crazy ginseng tea they all drink, tastes like dust but I love the smell, like the smell of luck, and it was incredible, we were on such a run, good God, all these Chinese women lined up behind us, we were hitting every hand—Do you think,” he said to Xandra, “it would be okay if I took them back into the baccarat salon to meet Diego? I’m sure they’d get a huge kick out of Diego. I wonder if he’s still on shift. What do you think?”

“He won’t be there.” Xandra looked good—bright-eyed and sparkly—in a velvet minidress and jewelled sandals, and redder lipstick than she usually wore. “Not now.”

“Sometimes, holidays, he works a double shift.”

“Oh, they don’t want to go back there. It’s a hike. It’ll take half an hour to get there through the casino floor and back.”

“Yeah, but I know he’d like to meet my kids.”

“Yeah, probably so,” Xandra said agreeably, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass. The tiny gold dove on her necklace glistened at the base of her throat. “He’s a nice guy. But Larry, I mean it, I know you don’t take me seriously but if you start getting too chummy with the dealers some day you’re going to go down there and have security on your ass.”

My father laughed. “God!” he said jubilantly, slapping the table, so loudly that I flinched. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Diego really was helping at the table today. I mean, maybe he was. Telepathic baccarat! Get your Soviet researchers working on that,” he said to Boris. “That’ll straighten out your economic system over there.”

Boris—mildly—cleared his throat and lifted his water glass. “Sorry, may I say something?”

“Is it speechmaking time? Were we meant to prepare toasts?”

“I thank you all for your company. And I wish us all health, and happiness, and that we all shall live until the next Christmas.”

In the surprised silence that followed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair, and laughed. “Merry Christmas!” he roared, producing from his pocket a jewelry box which he slid over to Xandra, and two stacks of twenties (Five hundred dollars! Each!) which he tossed across the table to Boris and me. And though in the clockless, temperature-controlled casino night, words like day and Christmas were fairly meaningless constructs, happiness, amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn’t seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea.

Chapter 6.

Wind, Sand and Stars

i.

OVER THE NEXT YEAR, I was so preoccupied in trying to block New York and my old life out of my mind that I hardly noticed the time pass. Days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare: hungover mornings on the school bus and our backs raw and pink from falling asleep by the pool, the gasoline reek of vodka and Popper’s constant smell of wet dog and chlorine, Boris teaching me to count, ask directions, offer a drink in Russian, just as patiently as he’d taught me to swear. Yes, please, I’d like that. Thank you, you are very kind. Govorite li vy po angliyskiy? Do you speak English? Ya nemnogo govoryu po-russki. I do speak Russian, a little.

Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. Sometimes, just before sundown, just as the blue of the sky began darkening to violet, we had these wild, electric-lined, Maxfield Parrish clouds rolling out gold and white into the desert like Divine Revelation leading the Mormons west. Govorite medlenno, I said, speak slowly, and Povtorite, pozhaluysta. Repeat, please. But we were so attuned to each other that we didn’t need to talk at all if we didn’t want to; we knew how to tip each other over in hysterics with an arch of the eyebrow or quirk of the mouth. Nights, we ate crosslegged on the floor, leaving greasy fingerprints on our schoolbooks. Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs—vitamin deficiency, said the nurse at school, who gave us each a painful shot in the ass and a colorful jar of children’s chewables. (“My bottom hurts,” said Boris, rubbing his rear end and cursing the metal seats on the school bus.) I was freckled head to toe from all the swimming we did; my hair (longer then than it’s ever been again) got light streaks from the pool chemicals and basically I felt good, though I still had a heaviness in my chest that never went away and my teeth were rotting out in the back from all the candy we ate. Apart from that, I was fine. And so the time passed happily enough; but then—shortly after my fifteenth birthday—Boris met a girl named Kotku; and everything changed.

The name Kotku (Ukrainian variant: Kotyku) makes her sound more interesting than she was; but it wasn’t her real name, only a pet name (“Kitty cat,” in Polish) that Boris had given her. Her last name was Hutchins; her given name was actually something like Kylie or Keiley or Kaylee; and she’d lived in Clark County, Nevada her whole life. Though she went to our school and was only a grade ahead of us, she was a lot older—older than me by three whole years. Boris, apparently, had had his eye on her for a while, but I hadn’t been aware of her until the afternoon he threw himself on the foot of my bed and said: “I’m in love.”

“Oh yeah? With who?”

“This chick from Civics. That I bought some weed from. I mean, she’s eighteen, too, can you believe it? God, she’s beautiful.”

“You have weed?”

Playfully, he lunged and caught me by the shoulder; he knew just where I was weakest, the spot under the blade where he could dig his fingers and make me yelp. But I was in no mood and hit him, hard.

“Ow! Fuck!” said Boris, rolling away, rubbing his jaw with his fingertips. “Why’d you do that?”

“Hope it hurts,” I said. “Where’s that weed?”

We didn’t talk any more about Boris’s love interest, at least not that day, but then a few days later when I came out of math I saw him looming over this girl by the lockers. While Boris wasn’t especially tall for his age, the girl was tiny, despite how much older than us she seemed: flat-chested, scrawny-hipped, with high cheekbones and a shiny forehead and a sharp, shiny, triangle-shaped face. Pierced nose. Black tank top. Chipped black fingernail polish; streaked orange-and-black hair; flat, bright, chlorine-blue eyes, outlined hard, in black pencil. Definitely she was cute—hot, even; but the glance she slid over me was anxiety-provoking, something about her of a bitchy fast-food clerk or maybe a mean babysitter.

“So what do you think?” said Boris eagerly when he caught up with me after school.

I shrugged. “She’s cute. I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well Boris, I mean, she looks like she’s, like, twenty-five.”

“I know! It’s great!” he said, looking dazed. “Eighteen years! Legal adult! She can buy booze no problem! Also she’s lived here her whole life, so she knows what places don’t check age.”

ii.

HADLEY, THE TALKATIVE LETTER-JACKET girl who sat by me in American history, wrinkled her nose when I asked about Boris’s older woman. “Her?” she said. “Total slut.” Hadley’s big sister, Jan, was in the same grade with Kyla or Kayleigh or whatever her name was. “And her mother, I heard, is a straight-up hooker. Your friend better be careful he doesn’t get some disease.”

“Well,” I said, surprised at her vehemence, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. Hadley, an army brat, was on the swim team and sang in the school choir; she had a normal family with three siblings, a Weimaraner named Gretchen that she’d brought over from Germany, and a dad who yelled if she was out past her curfew.

“I’m not kidding,” said Hadley. “She’ll make out with other girls’ boyfriends—she’ll make out with other girls—she’ll make out with anybody. Also I think she does pot.”

“Oh,” I said. None of these factors, in my view, were necessarily reasons to dislike Kylie or whatever, especially since Boris and I had wholeheartedly taken to smoking pot ourselves in the past months. But what did bother me—a lot—was how Kotku (I’ll continue to call her by the name Boris gave her, since I can’t now remember her real name) had stepped in overnight and virtually assumed ownership of Boris.

First he was busy on Friday night. Then it was the whole weekend—not just the night, but the day too. Pretty soon, it was Kotku this and Kotku that, and the next thing I knew, Popper and I were eating dinner and watching movies by ourselves.

“Isn’t she amazing?” Boris asked me again, after the first time he brought her over to my house—a highly unsuccessful evening, which had consisted of the three of us getting so stoned we could barely move, and then the two of them rolling around on the sofa downstairs while I sat on the floor with my back to them and tried to concentrate on a rerun of The Outer Limits. “What do you think?”

“Well, I mean—” What did he want me to say? “She likes you. Sure.”

He shifted, restlessly. We were outside by the pool, though it was too windy and cool to swim. “No, really! What do you think about her? Tell the truth, Potter,” he said, when I hesitated.

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully, and then—when he still sat looking at me: “Honestly? I don’t know, Boris. She seems kind of desperate.”

“Yes? Is that bad?”

His tone was genuinely curious—not angry, not sarcastic. “Well,” I said, taken aback. “Maybe not.”

Boris—cheeks pink with vodka—put his hand on his heart. “I love her, Potter. I mean it. This is the truest thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”

I was so embarrassed I had to look away.

“Little skinny witch!” He sighed, happily. “In my arms, she’s so bony and light! Like air.” Boris, mysteriously, seemed to adore Kotku for many of the reasons I found her disturbing: her slinky alley-cat body, her scrawny, needy adultness. “And so brave and wise, such a big heart! All I want is to look out for her and keep her safe from that Mike guy. You know?”

Quietly, I poured myself another vodka, though I really didn’t need one. The Kotku business was all doubly perplexing because—as Boris himself had informed me, with an unmistakable note of pride—Kotku already had a boyfriend: a twenty-six-year-old guy named Mike McNatt who owned a motorcycle and worked for a pool cleaning service. “Excellent,” I said, when Boris had broken this news earlier. “We ought to get him out here to help with the vacuuming.” I was sick and tired of looking after the swimming pool (a job that had fallen largely to me), especially since Xandra never brought home enough chemicals or the right kind.

Boris wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It’s serious, Potter. I think she’s scared of him. She wants to break up with him but she’s afraid. She’s trying to talk him into going to a military recruiter.”

“You’d better be careful that guy doesn’t come after you.”

“Me!” He snorted. “It’s her I’m worried about! She’s so tiny! Eighty-one pounds!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Kotku claimed to be a “borderline anorexic” and could always get Boris worked up by saying she hadn’t eaten anything all day.

Boris cuffed me on the side of the head. “You sit too much around here on your own,” he said, sitting down beside me and putting his feet in the pool. “Come to Kotku’s tonight. Bring someone.”

“Such as—?”

Boris shrugged. “What about hot little blondie with the boy’s haircut, from your history class? The swimmer?”

“Hadley?” I shook my head. “No way.”

“Yes! You should! Because she is hot! And she would totally go!”

“Believe me, not a good idea.”

“I’ll ask her for you! Come on. She’s friendly to you, and always talks. Shall we call her?”

“No! It’s not that—stop,” I said, grabbing his sleeve as he started to get up.

“No guts!”

“Boris.” He was heading indoors to the phone. “Don’t. I mean it. She won’t come.”

“And why?”

The taunting edge in his voice annoyed me. “Honestly? Because—” I started to say Because Kotku is a ho which was only the obvious truth but instead I said: “Look, Hadley’s on Honor Roll and stuff. She’s not going to want to go hang out at Kotku’s.”

“What?” said Boris—spinning back, outraged. “That whore. What’d she say?”

“Nothing. It’s just—”

“Yes she did!” He was charging back to the pool now. “You’d better tell me.”

“Come on. It’s nothing. Chill out, Boris,” I said, when I saw how angry he was. “Kotku’s tons older. They’re not even in the same grade.”

“That snub-nosed bitch. What did Kotku ever do to her?”

“Chill out.” My eye landed on the vodka bottle, illumined by a clean white sunbeam like a light saber. He’d had way too much to drink, and the last thing I wanted was a fight. But I was too drunk myself to think of any funny or easy way to get him off the subject.

iii.

LOTS OF OTHER, BETTER girls our own age liked Boris—most notably Saffi Caspersen, who was Danish, spoke English with a high-toned British accent, had a minor role in a Cirque du Soleil production, and was by leaps and bounds the most beautiful girl in our year. Saffi was in Honors English with us (where she’d had some interesting things to say about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) and though she had a reputation for being standoffish, she liked Boris. Anyone could see it. She laughed when he made jokes, acted goofy in his study group, and I’d seen her talking enthusiastically to him in the hall—Boris talking back just as enthusiastically, in his gesticulating Russian mode. Yet—mysteriously—he didn’t seem attracted to her at all.

“But why not?” I asked him. “She’s the best-looking girl in our class.” I’d always thought that Danes were large and blonde, but Saffi was smallish and brunette, with a fairy-tale quality that was accentuated by her glittery stage makeup in the professional photo I’d seen.

“Good looking yes. But she is not very hot.”

“Boris, she is smoking hot. Are you crazy?”

“Ah, she works too hard,” said Boris, dropping down beside me with a beer in one hand, reaching for my cigarette with the other. “Too straight. All the time studying or rehearsing or something. Kotku—” he blew out a cloud of smoke, handed the cigarette back to me—“she’s like us.”

I was silent. How had I gone from AP everything to being lumped in with a derelict like Kotku?

Boris nudged me. “I think you like her yourself. Saffi.”

“No, not really.”

“You do. Ask her out.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have the nerve. At my old school, where foreigners and exchange students tended to stand politely at the margins, someone like Saffi might have been more accessible but in Vegas she was much too popular, too surrounded by people—and there was also the biggish problem of what to ask her to do. In New York it would have been easy enough; I could have taken her ice skating, asked her to a movie or the planetarium. But I could scarcely see Saffi Caspersen sniffing glue or drinking beer from paper bags at the playground or doing any of the things that Boris and I did together.

iv.

I STILL SAW HIM—just not as much. More and more he spent nights with Kotku and her mother at the Double R Apartments—a transient hotel really, a broken down motor court from the 1950s, on the highway between the airport and the Strip, where guys who looked like illegal immigrants stood around the courtyard by the empty swimming pool and argued over motorcycle parts. (“Double R?” said Hadley. “You know what that stands for, right? ‘Rats and Roaches.’ ”) Kotku, mercifully, didn’t accompany Boris to my house all that much, but even when she wasn’t around he talked about her constantly. Kotku had cool taste in music and had made him a mix CD with a bunch of smoking hot hip-hop that I really had to listen to. Kotku liked her pizza with green peppers and olives only. Kotku really really wanted an electronic keyboard—also a Siamese kitten, or maybe a ferret, but wasn’t allowed to have pets at the Double R. “Serious, you need to spend more time with her, Potter,” he said, bumping my shoulder with his. “You’ll like her.”

“Oh come on,” I said, thinking of the smirky way she behaved around me—laughing at the wrong time, in a nasty way, always commanding me to go to the fridge to fetch her beers.

“No! She likes you! She does! I mean, she thinks of you more as a little brother. That’s what she said.”

“She never says a word to me.”

“That’s because you don’t talk to her.”

“Are you guys screwing?”

Boris made an impatient noise, the sound he made when things didn’t go his way.

“Dirty mind,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes, and then: “What? What do you think? Do you want me to make you a map?”

“Draw you a map.”

“Eh?”

“That’s the phrase. ‘Do you want me to draw you a map.’ ”

Boris rolled his eyes. Waving his hands around, he started in again about how intelligent Kotku was, how “crazy smart,” how wise she was and how much life she had lived and how unfair I was to judge her and look down on her without bothering to get to know her; but while I sat half listening to him talk, and half watching an old noir movie on television (Fallen Angel, Dana Andrews), I couldn’t help thinking about how he’d met Kotku in what was essentially Remedial Civics, the section for students who weren’t smart enough (even in our extremely non-demanding school) to pass without extra help. Boris—good at mathematics without trying and better in languages than anyone I’d ever met—had been forced into Civics for Dummies because he was a foreigner: a school requirement which he greatly resented. (“Because why? Am I likely to be someday voting for Congress?”) But Kotku—eighteen! born and raised in Clark County! American citizen, straight off of Cops!—had no such excuse.

Over and over, I caught myself in mean-spirited thoughts like this, which I did my best to shake. What did I care? Yes, Kotku was a bitch; yes, she was too dumb to pass regular Civics and wore cheap hoop earrings from the drugstore that were always getting caught in things, and yes, even though she was only eighty-one pounds or whatever she still scared the hell out of me, like she might kick me to death with her pointy-toed boots if she got mad enough. (“She a little fighta nigga,” Boris himself had said boastfully at one point as he hopped around throwing out gang signs, or what he thought were gang signs, and regaling me with a story of how Kotku had pulled out a bloody chunk of some girl’s hair—this was another thing about Kotku, she was always getting in scary girl fights, mostly with other white trash girls like herself but occasionally with the real gangsta girls, who were Latina and black.) But who cared what crappy girl Boris liked? Weren’t we still friends? Best friends? Brothers practically?

Then again: there was not exactly a word for Boris and me. Until Kotku came along, I had never thought too much about it. It was just about drowsy air-conditioned afternoons, lazy and drunk, blinds closed against the glare, empty sugar packets and dried-up orange peels strewn on the carpet, “Dear Prudence” from the White Album (which Boris adored) or else the same mournful old Radiohead over and over:

For a minute

I lost myself, I lost myself…

The glue we sniffed came on with a dark, mechanical roar, like the windy rush of propellers: engines on! We fell back on the bed into darkness, like sky divers tumbling backwards out of a plane, although—that high, that far gone—you had to be careful with the bag over your face or else you were picking dried blobs of glue out of your hair and off the end of your nose when you came to. Exhausted sleep, spine to spine, in dirty sheets that smelled of cigarette ash and dog, Popchik belly-up and snoring, subliminal whispers in the air blowing from the wall vents if you listened hard enough. Whole months passed where the wind never stopped, blown sand rattling against the windows, the surface of the swimming pool wrinkled and sinister-looking. Strong tea in the mornings, stolen chocolate. Boris yanking my hair by the handful and kicking me in the ribs. Wake up, Potter. Rise and shine.

I told myself I didn’t miss him, but I did. I got stoned alone, watched Adult Access and the Playboy channel, read Grapes of Wrath and The House of the Seven Gables which seemed as if they had to be tied for the most boring book ever written, and for what felt like thousands of hours—time enough to learn Danish or play the guitar if I’d been trying—fooled around in the street with a fucked-up skateboard Boris and I had found in one of the foreclosed houses down the block. I went to swim-team parties with Hadley—no-drinking parties, with parents present—and, on the weekends, attended parents-away parties of kids I barely knew, Xanax bars and Jägermeister shots, riding home on the hissing CAT bus at two a.m. so fucked up that I had to hold the seat in front of me to keep from falling out in the aisle. After school, if I was bored, it was easy enough to go hang out with one of the big lackadaisical stoner crowds who floated around between Del Taco and the kiddie arcades on the Strip.

But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris—budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages—who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped. Even when he took things without asking, as he all too frequently did—little things were always disappearing, DVDs and school supplies from my locker, more than once I’d caught him going through my pockets for money—his own possessions meant so little to him that somehow it wasn’t stealing; whenever he came into cash himself, he split it with me down the middle and anything that belonged to him, he gave me gladly if I asked for it (and sometimes when I didn’t, as when Mr. Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter, which I’d admired in passing, turned up in the outside pocket of my backpack).

The funny thing: I’d worried, if anything, that Boris was the one who was a little too affectionate, if affectionate is the right word. The first time he’d turned in bed and draped an arm over my waist, I lay there half-asleep for a moment, not knowing what to do: staring at my old socks on the floor, empty beer bottles, my paperbacked copy of The Red Badge of Courage. At last—embarrassed—I faked a yawn and tried to roll away, but instead he sighed and pulled me closer, with a sleepy, snuggling motion.

Ssh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me.

It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear. I was aware I couldn’t explain it without making it sound like more than it was. On nights when I woke strangled with fear there he was, catching me when I started up terrified from the bed, pulling me back down in the covers beside him, muttering in nonsense Polish, his voice throaty and strange with sleep. We’d drowse off in each other’s arms, listening to music from my iPod (Thelonious Monk, the Velvet Underground, music my mother had liked) and sometimes wake clutching each other like castaways or much younger children.

And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet—fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn’t have the wrong idea. But the moment had never come. Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in the fact.

I hated how much I missed him. There was a lot of drinking going on at my house, on Xandra’s end anyway, a lot of slammed doors (“Well, if it wasn’t me, it had to be you,” I heard her yelling); and without Boris there (they were both more constrained with Boris in the house) it was harder. Part of the problem was that Xandra’s hours at the bar had changed—schedules at her work had been moved; she was under a lot of stress, people she’d worked with were gone, or on different shifts; on Wednesdays and Mondays when I got up for school, I often found her just in from work, sitting alone in front of her favorite morning show too wired to sleep and swigging Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle.

“Big old exhausted me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile, when she saw me on the stairs.

“You should go for a swim. That’ll make you sleepy.”

“No thanks, I think I’ll just hang out here with my Pepto. What a product. This is definitely some bubble-gum flavored awesomeness.”

As for my dad: he was spending a lot more time at home—hanging out with me, which I enjoyed, though his mood swings wore me out. It was football season; he had a bounce in his step. After checking his BlackBerry he high-fived me and danced around the living room: “Am I a genius or what? What?” He consulted spread breakdowns, matchup reports, and—occasionally—a paperbacked book called Scorpio: Your Sports Year in Forecast. “Always looking for an edge,” he said, when I found him running down the tables and punching out numbers on the calculator like he was figuring out his income tax. “You only have to hit fifty-three, fifty-four percent to grind out a good living on this stuff—see, baccarat is strictly for entertainment, there’s no skill to it, I set myself limits and never go over, but you can really make money at the sports book if you’re disciplined about it. You have to approach it like an investor. Not like a fan, not even like a gambler because the secret is, the better team usually wins the game and the linemaker is good at setting the number. Your linemaker has got limitations, though, as to public opinion. What he’s predicting is not who’s going to win but who the general public thinks is going to win. So that margin, between sentimental favorite and actual fact—fuck, see that receiver in the end zone, another big one for Pittsburgh right there, we need them to score now like we need a hole in the head—anyway, like I was saying, if I really sit down and do my homework as opposed to Joe Beefburger who picks his team by looking five minutes at the sports page? Who’s got the advantage? See, I’m not one of these saps that gets all starry-eyed about the Giants rain or shine—shit, your mother could have told you that. Scorpio is about control—that’s me. I’m competitive. Want to win at any price. That’s where my acting came from, back when I acted. Sun in Scorpio, Leo rising. All in my chart. Now you’re a Cancer, hermit crab, all secretive and up in your shell, completely different MO. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just how it is. Anyway, whatever, I always take my lead from my defensive-offensive lines, but all the same it never hurts to pay attention to these transits and solar-arc progressions on game day—”

“Did Xandra get you interested in all this?”

“Xandra? Half the sports book in Vegas has an astrologer on speed dial. Anyway, like I was saying, all other things equal, do the planets make a difference? Yes. I would definitely have to say yes. It’s like, is a player having a good day, is he having a bad day, is he out of sorts, whatever. Honestly it helps to have that edge when you’re getting a little, how do I put it, ha ha, stretched, although—” he showed me the fat wad of what looked like hundreds, wrapped with a rubber band—“this has been a really amazing year for me. Fifty-three percent, a thousand plays a year. That’s the magic spot.”

Sundays were what he called major-ticket days. When I got up, I found him downstairs in a crackle of strewn newspapers, zinging around bright and restless like it was Christmas morning, opening and shutting cabinets, talking to the sports ticker on his BlackBerry and crunching on corn chips straight from the bag. If I came down and watched with him for even a little while when the big games were on sometimes he’d give me what he called “a piece—” twenty bucks, fifty, if he won. “To get you interested,” he explained, leaning forward on the sofa, rubbing his hands anxiously. “See—what we need is for the Colts to get wiped off the map during this first half of the game. Devastated. And with the Cowboys and the Niners we need the score to go over thirty in the second half—yes!” he shouted, jumping up exhilarated with raised fist. “Fumble! Redskins got the ball. We’re in business!”

But it was confusing, because it was the Cowboys who had fumbled. I’d thought the Cowboys were supposed to win by at least fifteen. His mid-game switches in loyalty were too abrupt for me to follow and I often embarrassed myself by cheering for the wrong team; yet as we surged randomly between games, between spreads, I enjoyed his delirium and the daylong binge of greasy food, accepted the twenties and fifties he tossed at me as if they’d fallen from the sky. Other times—cresting and then tanking on some hoarse wave of enthusiasm—a vague unease took hold of him which as far as I could tell had nothing very much to do with how his games were going and he paced back and forth for no reason I could discern, hands folded atop his head, staring at the set with the air of a man unhinged by business failure: talking to the coaches, the players, asking what the hell was wrong with them, what the hell was happening. Sometimes he followed me into the kitchen, with an oddly supplicant demeanor. “I’m getting killed in there,” he said, humorously, leaning on the counter, his bearing comical, something in his hunched posture suggesting a bank robber doubled over from a gunshot wound.

Lines x. Lines y. Yards run, cover the spread. On game day, until five o’clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom—autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day—but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn’t shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east.

The panic that overtook me then was hard to explain. Those game days broke up with a swiftness, a sense of losing blood almost, that reminded me of watching the apartment in New York being boxed up and carted away: groundlessness and flux, nothing to hang on to. Upstairs, with the door of my room shut, I turned all the lights on, smoked weed if I had it, listened to music on my portable speakers—previously unlistened-to music like Shostakovich, and Erik Satie, that I’d put on my iPod for my mother and then never got around to taking off—and I looked at library books: art books, mostly, because they reminded me of her.

The Masterworks of Dutch Painting. Delft: The Golden Age. Drawings by Rembrandt, His Anonymous Pupils and Followers. From looking on the computer at school, I’d seen that there was a book about Carel Fabritius (a tiny book, only a hundred pages) but they didn’t have it at the school library and our computer time at school was so closely monitored that I was too paranoid to do any research on line—especially after a thoughtlessly clicked link (Het Puttertje, The Goldfinch, 1654) had taken me to a scarily official-looking site called Missing Art Database that required me to sign in with my name and address. I’d been so freaked out at the unexpected sight of the words Interpol and Missing that I’d panicked and shut down the computer entirely, something we weren’t supposed to do. “What have you just done?” demanded Mr. Ostrow the librarian before I was able to get it back up again. He reached over my shoulder and began typing in the password.

“I—” In spite of myself, I was relieved that I hadn’t been looking at porn once he began surfing back through the history. I’d meant to buy myself a cheap laptop with the five hundred bucks my dad had given me for Christmas, but somehow that money had gotten away from me—Missing Art, I told myself; no reason to panic over that word missing, destroyed art was missing art, wasn’t it? Even though I hadn’t put down a name, it worried me that I’d tried to check out the database from my school’s IP address. For all I knew, the investigators who’d been to see me had kept track, and knew that I was in Vegas; the connection, though small, was real.

The painting was hidden, quite cleverly as I thought, in a clean cotton pillowcase duct-taped to the back of my headboard. I’d learned, from Hobie, how carefully old things had to be handled (sometimes he used white cotton gloves for particularly delicate objects) and I never touched it with my bare hands, only by the edges. I never took it out except when Dad and Xandra weren’t there and I knew they wouldn’t be back for a while—though even when I couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was a sense of expansion, a waft and a lifting; and at some strange point, when I’d looked at it long enough, eyes dry from the refrigerated desert air, all space appeared to vanish between me and it so that when I looked up it was the painting and not me that was real.

1622–1654. Son of a schoolteacher. Fewer than a dozen works accurately attributed to him. According to van Bleyswijck, the city historian of Delft, Fabritius was in his studio painting the sexton of Delft’s Oude Kerk when, at half past ten in the morning, the explosion of the powder magazine took place. The body of the painter Fabritius had been pulled from the wreckage of his studio by neighboring burghers, “with great sorrow,” the books said, “and no little effort.” What held me fast in these brief library-book accounts was the element of chance: random disasters, mine and his, converging on the same unseen point, the big bang as my father called it, not with any kind of sarcasm or dismissiveness but instead a respectful acknowledgment for the powers of fortune that governed his own life. You could study the connections for years and never work it out—it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

Upstairs, the tap water from the bathroom sink was too chlorinated to drink. Nights, a dry wind blew trash and beer cans down the street. Moisture and humidity, Hobie had told me, were the worst things in the world for antiques; on the tall-case clock he’d been repairing when I left, he’d showed me how the wood had been rotted out underneath from the damp (“someone sluicing stone floors with a bucket, you see how soft this wood is, how worn away?”)

Time warp: a way of seeing things twice, or more than twice. Just as my dad’s rituals, his betting systems, all his oracles and magic were predicated on a field awareness of unseen patterns, so too the explosion in Delft was part of a complex of events that ricocheted into the present. The multiple outcomes could make you dizzy. “The money’s not important,” said my dad. “All money represents is the energy of the thing, you know? It’s how you track it. The flow of chance.” Steadily the goldfinch gazed at me, with shiny, changeless eyes. The wooden panel was tiny, “only slightly larger than an A-4 sheet of paper” as one of my art books had pointed out, although all that dates-and-dimensions stuff, the dead textbook info, was as irrelevant in its way as the sports-page stats when the Packers were up by two in the fourth quarter and a thin icy snow had begun to fall on the field. The painting, the magic and aliveness of it, was like that odd airy moment of the snow falling, greenish light and flakes whirling in the cameras, where you no longer cared about the game, who won or lost, but just wanted to drink in that speechless windswept moment. When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

v.

THE GOOD THING: I was pleased at how nice my dad was being. He’d been taking me out to dinners—nice dinners, at white-tablecloth restaurants, just the two of us—at least once a week. Sometimes he invited Boris to come, invitations Boris always jumped to accept—the lure of a good meal was powerful enough to override even the gravitational tug of Kotku—but strangely, I found myself enjoying it more when it was just my dad and me.

“You know,” he said, at one of these dinners when we were lingering late over dessert—talking about school, about all sorts of things (this new, involved dad! where had he come from?)—“you know, I really have enjoyed getting to know you since you’ve been out here, Theo.”

“Well, uh, yeah, me too,” I said, embarrassed but also meaning it.

“I mean—” my dad ran a hand through his hair—“thanks for giving me a second chance, kiddo. Because I made a huge mistake. I never should have let my relationship with your mother get in the way of my relationship with you. No, no,” he said, raising his hand, “I’m not blaming anything on your mom, I’m way past that. It’s just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—” he laughed, sadly—“there wasn’t much room for three.”

“Well—” My mother and I tiptoeing around the apartment, whispering, trying to avoid him. Secrets, laughter. “I mean, I just—”

“No, no, I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean. Me feeling alienated, bummed-out, drinking a lot. And I never should have let that happen. I missed, like, some really important years in your life. I’m the one that has to live with that.”

“Um—” I felt so bad I didn’t know what to say.

“Not trying to put you on the spot, pal. Just saying I’m glad that we’re friends now.”

“Well yeah,” I said, staring into my scraped-clean crème brûlée plate, “me too.”

“And, I mean—I want to make it up to you. See, I’m doing so well on the sports book this year—” my dad took a sip of his coffee—“I want to open you a savings account. You know, just put a little something aside. Because, you know, I really didn’t do right by you as far as your mom, you know, and all those months that I was gone.”

“Dad,” I said, disconcerted. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, but I want to! You have a Social Security number, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’ve already got ten thousand set aside. That’s a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I’ll open an account in your name, okay?”

vi.

APART FROM SCHOOL, I’D hardly seen Boris, except for a Saturday afternoon trip when my dad had taken us in to the Carnegie Deli at the Mirage for sable and bialys. But then, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, he came thumping upstairs when I wasn’t expecting him and said: “Your dad has been having a bad run, did you know that?”

I put down Silas Marner, which we were reading for school. “What?”

“Well, he’s been playing at two hundred dollar tables—two hundred dollars a pop,” he said. “You can lose a thousand in five minutes, easy.”

“A thousand dollars is nothing for him,” I said; and then, when Boris did not reply: “How much did he say he lost?”

“Didn’t say,” said Boris. “But a lot.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just bullshitting you?”

Boris laughed. “Could be,” he said, sitting on the bed and leaning back on his elbows. “You don’t know anything about it?”

“Well—” As far as I knew, my father had cleaned up when the Bills had won the week before. “I don’t see how he can be doing too bad. He’s been taking me to Bouchon and places like that.”

“Yes, but maybe is good reason for that,” said Boris sagely.

“Reason? What reason?”

Boris seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.

“Well, who knows,” he said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sharp drag. “Your dad—he’s part Russian.”

“Right,” I said, reaching for the cigarette myself. I’d often heard Boris and my father, in their arm-waving “intellectual talks,” discussing the many celebrated gamblers in Russian history: Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, other names I didn’t know.

“Well—very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great—keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.” He was wearing a discarded dress shirt of my father’s, washed nearly transparent and so big that it billowed on him like some item of Arab or Hindu costume. “Only, your dad, sometimes is hard to tell between joking and serious.” Then, watching me carefully: “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“He knows we talk. That’s why he told me. He wouldn’t tell me if he didn’t want you to know.”

“Yeah.” I was fairly sure this wasn’t the case. My dad was the kind of guy who in the right mood would happily discuss his personal life with his boss’s wife or some other inappropriate person.

“He’d tell you himself,” said Boris, “if he thought you wanted to know.”

“Look. Like you said—” My dad had a taste for masochism, the overblown gesture; on our Sundays together, he loved to exaggerate his misfortunes, groaning and staggering, complaining loudly of being ‘wiped out’ or ‘destroyed’ after a lost game even as he’d won half a dozen others and was totting up the profits on the calculator. “Sometimes he lays it on a bit thick.”

“Well, yes, is true,” said Boris sensibly. He took the cigarette back, inhaled, and then, companionably, passed it to me. “You can have the rest.”

“No, thanks.”

There was a bit of a silence, during which we could hear the television crowd roar of my dad’s football game. Then Boris leaned back on his elbows again and said: “What is there to eat downstairs?”

“Not a motherfucking thing.”

“There was leftover Chinese, I thought.”

“Not any more. Somebody ate it.”

“Shit. Maybe I’ll go to Kotku’s, her mom has frozen pizzas. You want to come?”

“No, thanks.”

Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. “Suit yourself, yo,” he said, in his “gangsta” voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the “yo”) as he got up and roll-walked out. “Nigga gotz to eat.”

vii.

THE PECULIAR THING ABOUT Boris and Kotku was how rapidly their relationship had taken on a punchy, irritable quality. They still made out constantly, and could hardly keep their hands off each other, but the minute they opened their mouths it was like listening to people who had been married fifteen years. They bickered over small sums of money, like who had paid for their food-court lunches last; and their conversations, when I could overhear them, went something like this:

Boris: “What! I was trying to be nice!”

Kotku: “Well, it wasn’t very nice.”

Boris, running to catch up with her: “I mean it, Kotyku! Honest! Was only trying to be nice!”

Kotku: [pouting]

Boris, trying unsuccessfully to kiss her: “What did I do? What’s the matter? Why do you think I’m not nice any more?”

Kotku: [silence]

The problem of Mike the pool man—Boris’s romantic rival—had been solved by Mike’s extremely convenient decision to join the Coast Guard. Kotku, apparently, still spent hours on the phone with him every week, which for whatever reason didn’t trouble Boris (“She’s only trying to support him, see”). But it was disturbing how jealous he was of her at school. He knew her schedule by heart and the second our classes were over he raced to find her, as if he suspected her of two-timing him during Spanish for the Workplace or whatever. One day after school, when Popper and I were by ourselves at home, he telephoned me to ask: “Do you know some guy named Tyler Olowska?”

“No.”

“He’s in your American History class.”

“Sorry. It’s a big class.”

“Well, look. Can you find out about him? Where he lives maybe?”

“Where he lives? Is this about Kotku?”

All of a sudden—surprising me greatly—the doorbell rang: four stately chimes. In all my time in Las Vegas no one had ever rung the doorbell of our house, not even once. Boris, on the other end, had heard it too. “What is that?” he said. The dog was running in circles and barking his head off.

“Someone at the door.”

“The door?” On our deserted street—no neighbors, no garbage pickup, no streetlights even—this was a major event. “Who do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. Let me call you back.”

I grabbed up Popchyk—who was practically hysterical—and (as he wriggled and shrieked in my arms, struggling to get down) managed to get the door open with one hand.

“Wouldja look at that,” a pleasant, Jersey-accented voice said. “What a cute little fella.”

I found myself blinking up in the late afternoon glare at a very tall, very very tanned, very thin man, of indeterminate age. He looked partly like a rodeo guy and partly like a fucked-up lounge entertainer. His gold-rimmed aviators were tinted purple at the top; he was wearing a white sports jacket over a red cowboy shirt with pearl snaps, and black jeans, but the main thing I noticed was his hair: part toupee, part transplanted or sprayed-on, with a texture like fiberglass insulation and a dark brown color like shoe polish in the tin.

“Go on, put him down!” he said, nodding at Popper, who was still struggling to get away. His voice was deep, and his manner calm and friendly; except for the accent he was the perfect Texan, boots and all. “Let him run around! I don’t mind. I love dogs.”

When I let Popchyk loose, he stooped to pat his head, in a posture reminiscent of a lanky cowboy by the campfire. As odd as the stranger looked, with the hair and all, I couldn’t help but admire how easy and comfortable he seemed in his skin.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Cute little fella. Yes you are!” His tanned cheeks had a wrinkled, dried-apple quality, creased with tiny lines. “Have three of my own at home. Mini pennys.”

“Excuse me?”

He stood; when he smiled at me, he displayed even, dazzlingly white teeth.

“Miniature pinschers,” he said. “Neurotic little bastards, chew the house to pieces when I’m gone, but I love them. What’s your name, kid?”

“Theodore Decker,” I said, wondering who he was.

Again he smiled; his eyes behind the semi-dark aviators were small and twinkly. “Hey! Another New Yorker! I can hear it in your voice, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“A Manhattan boy, that would be my guess. Correct?”

“Right,” I said, wondering exactly what it was in my voice that he’d heard. No one had ever guessed I was from Manhattan just from hearing me talk.

“Well, hey—I’m from Canarsie. Born and bred. Always nice to meet another guy from back East. I’m Naaman Silver.” He held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Silver.”

“Mister!” He laughed fondly. “I love a polite kid. They don’t make many like you any more. You Jewish, Theodore?”

“No, sir,” I said, and then wished I’d said yes.

“Well, tell you what. Anybody from New York, in my book they’re an honorary Jew. That’s how I look at it. You ever been to Canarsie?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it used to be a fantastic community back in the day, though now—” He shrugged. “My family, they were there for four generations. My grandfather Saul ran one of the first kosher restaurants in America, see. Big, famous place. Closed when I was a kid, though. And then my mother moved us over to Jersey after my father died so we could be closer to my uncle Harry and his family.” He put his hand on his thin hip and looked at me. “Your dad here, Theo?”

“No.”

“No?” He looked past me, into the house. “That’s a shame. Know when he’ll be back?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Sir. I like that. You’re a good kid. Tell you what, you remind me of myself at your age. Fresh from yeshiva—” he held up his hands, gold bracelets on the tanned, hairy wrists—“and these hands? White, like milk. Like yours.”

“Um”—I was still standing awkwardly in the door—“would you like to come in?” I wasn’t sure if I should invite a stranger in the house, except I was lonely and bored. “You can wait if you want. But I’m not sure when he’ll be home.”

Again, he smiled. “No thanks. I have a bunch of other stops to make. But I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna be straight with you, because you’re a nice kid. I got five points on your dad. You know what that means?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, bless you. You don’t need to know, and I hope you never do know. But let me just say it aint a good business policy.” He put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Believe it or not, Theodore, I got people skills. I don’t like to come to a man’s home and deal with his child, like I’m doing with you now. That’s not right. Normally I would go to your dad’s place of work and we would have our little sit-down there. Except he’s kind of a hard man to run down, as maybe you already know.”

In the house I could hear the telephone ringing: Boris, I was fairly sure. “Maybe you better go answer that,” said Mr. Silver pleasantly.

“No, that’s okay.”

“Go ahead. I think maybe you should. I’ll be waiting right here.”

Feeling increasingly disturbed I went back in and answered the telephone. As predicted, it was Boris. “Who was that?” he said. “Not Kotku, was it?”

“No. Look—”

“I think she went home with that Tyler Olowska guy. I got this funny feeling. Well, maybe she didn’t go home home with him. But they left school together—she was talking to him in the parking lot. See, she has her last class with him, woodwork skills or whatever—”

“Boris, I’m sorry, I really can’t talk now, I’ll call you back, okay?”

“I’m taking your word for it that wasn’t your dad in there on the horn,” said Mr. Silver when I returned to the door. I looked past him, to the white Cadillac parked by the curb. There were two men in the car—a driver, and another man in the front seat. “That wasn’t your dad, right?”

“No sir.”

“You would tell me if it was, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

I was silent, not knowing what to say.

“Doesn’t matter, Theodore.” Again, he stooped to scratch Popper behind the ears. “I’ll run him down sooner or later. You’ll be sure to remember what I told him? And that I stopped by?”

“Yes sir.”

He pointed a long finger at me. “What’s my name again?”

“Mr. Silver.”

“Mr. Silver. That’s right. Just checking.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“Tell him I said gambling’s for tourists,” he said. “Not locals.” Lightly, lightly, with his thin brown hand, he touched me on the top of the head. “God bless.”

viii.

WHEN BORIS SHOWED UP at the door around half an hour later, I tried to tell him about the visit from Mr. Silver, but though he listened, a little, mainly he was furious at Kotku for flirting with some other boy, this Tyler Olowska or whatever, a rich stoner kid a year older than us who was on the golf team. “Fuck her,” he said throatily while we were sitting on the floor downstairs at my house smoking Kotku’s pot. “She’s not answering her phone. I know she’s with him now, I know it.”

“Come on.” As worried as I was about Mr. Silver, I was even more sick of talking about Kotku. “He was probably just buying some weed.”

“Yah, but is more to it, I know. She never wants me to stay over with her any more, have you noticed that? Always has stuff to do now. She’s not even wearing the necklace I bought her.”

My glasses were lopsided and I pushed them back up on the bridge of my nose. Boris hadn’t even bought the stupid necklace but shoplifted it at the mall, snatching it and running out while I (upstanding citizen, in school blazer) occupied the salesgirl’s attention with dumb but polite questions about what Dad and I ought to get Mom for her birthday. “Huh,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.

Boris scowled, his brow like a thundercloud. “She’s a whore. Other day? Was pretending to cry in class—trying to make this Olowska bastard feel sorry for her. What a cunt.”

I shrugged—no argument from me on that point—and passed him the reefer.

“She only likes him because he has money. His family has two Mercedes. E class.”

“That’s an old lady car.”

“Nonsense. In Russia, is what mobsters drive. And—” he took a deep hit, holding it in, waving his hands, eyes watering, wait, wait, this is the best part, hold on, get this, would you?—“you know what he calls her?”

“Kotku?” Boris was so insistent about calling her Kotku that people at school—teachers, even—had begun calling her Kotku as well.

“That’s right!” said Boris, outraged, smoke erupting from his mouth. “My name! The kliytchka I gave her. And, other day in the hallway? I saw him ruffle her on the head.”

There were a couple of half-melted peppermints from my dad’s pocket on the coffee table, along with some receipts and change, and I unwrapped one and put it in my mouth. I was as high as a paratrooper and the sweetness tingled all through me, like fire. “Ruffled her?” I said, the candy clicking loudly against my teeth. “Come again?”

“Like this,” he said, making a tousling motion with his hand as he took one last hit off the joint and stubbed it out. “Don’t know the word.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, rolling my head back against the couch. “Say, you ought to try one of these peppermints. They taste really great.”

Boris scrubbed a hand down his face, then shook his head like a dog throwing off water. “Wow,” he said, running both hands through his tangled-up hair.

“Yeah. Me too,” I said, after a vibrating pause. My thoughts were stretched-out and viscid, slow to wade to the surface.

“What?”

“I’m fucked up.”

“Oh yeah?” He laughed. “How fucked up?”

“Pretty far up there, pal.” The peppermint on my tongue felt intense and huge, the size of a boulder, like I could hardly talk with it in my mouth.

A peaceful silence followed. It was about five thirty in the afternoon but the light was still pure and stark. Some white shirts of mine were hanging outside by the pool and they were dazzling, billowing and flapping like sails. I closed my eyes, red burning through my eyelids, sinking back into the (suddenly very comfortable) couch as if it were a rocking boat, and thought about the Hart Crane we’d been reading in English. Brooklyn Bridge. How had I never read that poem back in New York? And how had I never paid attention to the bridge when I saw it practically every day? Seagulls and dizzying drops. I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights…

“I could strangle her,” Boris said abruptly.

“What?” I said, startled, having heard only the word strangle and Boris’s unmistakably ugly tone.

“Scrawny fucking bint. She makes me so mad.” Boris nudged me with his shoulder. “Come on, Potter. Wouldn’t you like to wipe that smirk off her face?”

“Well…” I said, after a dazed pause; clearly this was a trick question. “What’s a bint?”

“Same as a cunt, basically.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, who does she.”

“Right.”

There followed a long and weird enough silence that I thought about getting up and putting some music on, although I couldn’t decide what. Anything upbeat seemed wrong and the last thing I wanted to do was put on something dark or angsty that would get him stirred up.

“Um,” I said, after what I hoped was a decently long pause, “The War of the Worlds comes on in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll give her War of the Worlds,” said Boris darkly. He stood up.

“Where are you going?” I said. “To the Double R?”

Boris scowled. “Go ahead, laugh,” he said bitterly, elbowing on his gray sovietskoye raincoat. “It’s going to be the Three Rs for your dad if he doesn’t pay the money he owes that guy.”

“Three Rs?”

“Revolver, roadside, or roof,” said Boris, with a black, Slavic-sounding chuckle.

ix.

WAS THAT A MOVIE or something? I wondered. Three Rs? Where had he come up with that? Though I’d done a fairly good job of putting the afternoon’s events out of my mind, Boris had thoroughly freaked me out with his parting comment and I sat downstairs rigidly for an hour or so with War of the Worlds on but the sound off, listening to the crash of the icemaker and the rattle of wind in the patio umbrella. Popper, who had picked up on my mood, was just as keyed-up as I was and kept barking sharply and hopping off the sofa to check out noises around the house—so that when, not long after dark, a car did actually turn into the driveway, he dashed to the door and set up a racket that scared me half to death.

But it was only my father. He looked rumpled and glazed, and not in a very good mood.

“Dad?” I was still high enough that my voice came out sounding way too blown and odd.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at me.

“There was a guy here. A Mr. Silver.”

“Oh, yeah?” said my dad, casually enough. But he was standing very still with his hand on the banister.

“He said he was trying to get in touch with you.”

“When was this?” he said, coming into the room.

“About four this afternoon, I guess.”

“Was Xandra here?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

He lay a hand on my shoulder, and seemed to think for a minute. “Well,” he said, “I’d appreciate if you didn’t say anything about it.”

The end of Boris’s joint was, I realized, still in the ashtray. He saw me looking at it, and picked it up and sniffed it.

“Thought I smelled something,” he said, dropping it in his jacket pocket. “You reek a bit, Theo. Where have you boys been getting this?”

“Is everything okay?”

My dad’s eyes looked a bit red and unfocused. “Sure it is,” he said. “I’m just going to go upstairs and make a few calls.” He gave off a strong odor of stale tobacco smoke and the ginseng tea he always drank, a habit he’d picked up from the Chinese businessmen in the baccarat salon: it gave his sweat a sharp, foreign smell. As I watched him walk up the steps to the landing, I saw him retrieve the joint-end from his jacket pocket and run it under his nose again, ruminatively.

x.

ONCE I WAS UPSTAIRS in my room, with the door locked, and Popper still edgy and pacing stiffly around—my thoughts went to the painting. I had been proud of myself for the pillowcase-behind-the-headboard idea, but now I realized how stupid it was to have the painting in the house at all—not that I had any options unless I wanted to hide it in the dumpster a few houses down (which had never been emptied the whole time I’d lived in Vegas) or over in one of the abandoned houses across the street. Boris’s house was no safer than mine, and there was no one else I knew well enough or trusted. The only other place was school, also a bad idea, but though I knew there had to be a better choice I couldn’t think of it. Every so often they had random locker inspections at school and now—connected as I was, through Boris, to Kotku—I was possibly the sort of dirtbag they might randomly inspect. Still, even if someone found it in my locker—whether the principal, or Mr. Detmars the scary basketball coach, or even the Rent-a-Cops from the security firm whom they brought in to scare the students from time to time—still, it would be better than having it found by Dad or Mr. Silver.

The painting, inside the pillowcase, was wrapped in several layers of taped drawing paper—good paper, archival paper, that I’d taken from the art room at school—with an inner, double layer of clean white cotton dishcloth to protect the surface from the acids in the paper (not that there were any). But I’d taken the painting out so often to look at it—opening the top flap of the taped edge to slide it out—that the paper was torn and the tape wasn’t even sticky any more. After lying in bed for a few minutes staring at the ceiling, I got up and retrieved the extra-large roll of heavy-duty packing tape left over from our move, and then untaped the pillowcase from behind the headboard.

Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow.

Little bird; yellow bird. Shaking free of my daze I slid it back in the paper-wrapped dishtowel and wrapped it again with two or three (four? five?) of my dad’s old sports pages, then—impulsively, really getting into it in my own stoned, determined way—wound it around and around with tape until not a shred of newsprint was visible and the entire X-tra large roll of tape was gone. Nobody was going to be opening that package on a whim. Even if with a knife, a good one, not just scissors, it would take a good long time to get into it. At last, when I was done—the bundle looked like some weird science-fiction cocoon—I slipped the mummified painting, pillowcase and all, in my book bag, and put it under the covers by my feet. Irritably, with a groan, Popper shifted over to make room. Tiny as he was, and ridiculous-looking, still he was a fierce barker and territorial about his place next to me; and I knew if anyone opened the bedroom door while I was sleeping—even Xandra or my dad, neither of whom he liked much—he would jump up and raise the alarm.

What had started as a reassuring thought was once again morphing into thoughts of strangers and break-ins. The air conditioner was so cold I was shaking; and when I closed my eyes I felt myself lifting up out of my body—floating up fast like an escaped balloon—only to startle with a sharp full-body jerk when I opened my eyes. So I kept my eyes shut and tried to remember what I could of the Hart Crane poem, which wasn’t much, although even isolated words like seagull and traffic and tumult and dawn carried something of its airborne distances, its sweeps from high to low; and just as I was nodding off, I fell into sort of an overpowering sense-memory of the narrow, windy, exhaust-smelling park near our old apartment, by the East River, roar of traffic washing abstractly above as the river swirled with fast, confusing currents and sometimes appeared to flow in two different directions.

xi.

I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH that night and was so exhausted by the time I got to school and stowed the painting in my locker that I didn’t even notice that Kotku (hanging all over Boris, like nothing had happened) was sporting a fat lip. Only when I heard this tough senior guy Eddie Riso say, “Mack truck?” did I see that somebody had smacked her pretty good in the face. She was going around laughing a bit nervously and telling people that she got hit in the mouth by a car door, but in a sort of embarrassed way that (to me, at least) didn’t ring true.

“Did you do that?” I said to Boris, when next I saw him alone (or relatively alone) in English class.

Boris shrugged. “I didn’t want to.”

“What do you mean, you ‘didn’t want to’?”

Boris looked shocked. “She made me!”

“She made you,” I repeated.

“Look, just because you’re jealous of her—”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t give a shit about you and Kotku—I have things of my own to worry about. You can beat her head in for all I care.”

“Oh, God, Potter,” said Boris, suddenly sobered. “Did he come back? That guy?”

“No,” I said, after a brief pause. “Not yet. Well, I mean, fuck it,” I said, when Boris kept on staring at me. “It’s his problem, not mine. He’ll just have to figure something out.”

“How much is he in for?”

“No clue.”

“Can’t you get the money for him?”

“Me?”

Boris looked away. I poked him in the arm. “No, what do you mean, Boris? Can’t I get it for him? What are you talking about?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

“Never mind,” he said quickly, settling back in his chair, and I didn’t have a chance to pursue the conversation because then Spirsetskaya walked into the room, all primed to talk about boring Silas Marner, and that was it.

xii.

THAT NIGHT, MY DAD came home early with bags of carry-out from his favorite Chinese, including an extra order of the spicy dumplings I liked—and he was in such a good mood that it was as if I’d dreamed Mr. Silver and the stuff from the night before.

“So—” I said, and stopped. Xandra, having finished her spring rolls, was rinsing glasses at the sink but there was only so much I felt comfortable saying in front of her.

He smiled his big Dad smile at me, the smile that sometimes made stewardesses bump him up to first class.

“So what?” he said, pushing aside his carton of Szechuan shrimp to reach for a fortune cookie.

“Uh—” Xandra had the water up loud—“Did you get everything straightened out?”

“What,” he said lightly, “you mean with Bobo Silver?”

“Bobo?”

“Listen, I hope you weren’t worried about that. You weren’t, were you?”

“Well—”

“Bobo—” he laughed—“they call him ‘The Mensch.’ He’s actually a nice guy—well, you talked to him yourself—we just had some crossed wires, is all.”

“What does five points mean?”

“Look, it was just a mix-up. I mean,” he said, “these people are characters. They have their own language, their own ways of doing things. But, hey—” he laughed—“this is great—when I met with him over at Caesars, that’s what Bobo calls his ‘office,’ you know, the pool at Caesars—anyway, when I met with him, you know what he kept saying? ‘That’s a good kid you’ve got there, Larry.’ ‘Real little gentleman.’ I mean, I don’t know what you said to him, but I do actually owe you one.”

“Huh,” I said in a neutral voice, helping myself to more rice. But inwardly I was almost drunk at the lift in his mood—the same flood of elation I’d felt as a small child when the silences broke, when his footsteps grew light again and you heard him laughing at something, humming at the shaving mirror.

My dad cracked open his fortune cookie, and laughed. “See here,” he said, balling it up and tossing it over to me. “I wonder who sits around in Chinatown and thinks up these things?”

Aloud, I read it: “ ‘You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!’ ”

“Unusual equipment?” said Xandra, coming up behind to put her arms around his neck. “That sounds kind of dirty.”

“Ah—” my dad turned to kiss her. “A dirty mind. The fountain of youth.”

“Apparently.”

xiii.

“I GAVE you a fat lip that time,” said Boris, who clearly felt guilty about the Kotku business since he’d brought it up out of nowhere in our companionable morning silence on the school bus.

“Yeah, and I knocked your head against the fucking wall.”

“I didn’t mean to!”

“Didn’t mean what?”

“To hit you in the mouth!”

“You meant it with her?”

“In a way, yeah,” he said evasively.

“In a way.”

Boris made an exasperated sound. “I told her I was sorry! Everything is fine with us now, no problem! And besides, what business is it of yours?”

“You brought it up, not me.”

He looked at me for an odd, off-centered moment, then laughed. “Can I tell you something?”

“What?”

He put his head close to mine. “Kotku and me tripped last night,” he said quietly. “Dropped acid together. It was great.”

“Really? Where did you get it?” E was easy enough to find at our school—Boris and I had taken it at least a dozen times, magical speechless nights where we had walked into the desert half-delirious at the stars—but nobody ever had acid.

Boris rubbed his nose. “Ah. Well. Her mom knows this scary old guy named Jimmy that works at a gun shop. He hooked us up with five hits—I don’t know why I bought five, I wish I’d bought six. Anyway I still have some. God it was fantastic.”

“Oh, yeah?” Now that I looked at him more closely, I realized that his pupils were dilated and strange. “Are you still on it?”

“Maybe a little. I only slept like two hours. Anyway we totally made up. It was like—even the flowers on her mom’s bedspread were friendly. And we were made out of the same stuff as the flowers, and we realized how much we loved each other, and needed each other no matter what, and how everything hateful that had happened between us was only out of love.”

“Wow,” I said, in a voice that I guess must have sounded sadder than I’d intended, from the way that Boris brought his eyebrows together and looked at me.

“Well?” I said, when he kept on staring at me. “What is it?”

He blinked and shook his head. “No, I can just see it. This mist of sadness, sort of, around your head. It’s like you’re a soldier or something, a person from history, walking on a battlefield maybe with all these deep feelings…”

“Boris, you’re still completely fried.”

“Not really,” he said dreamily. “I sort of snap in and out of it. But I still see colored sparks coming off things if I look from the corner of my eye just right.”

xiv.

A WEEK OR SO passed, without incident, either with my dad or on the Boris-Kotku front—enough time that I felt safe bringing the pillowcase home. I had noticed, when taking it out of my locker, how unusually bulky (and heavy) it seemed, and when I got it upstairs and out of the pillowcase, I saw why. Clearly I’d been blasted out of my mind when I wrapped and taped it: all those layers of newspaper, wound with a whole extra-large roll of heavy-duty, fiber-reinforced packing tape, had seemed like a prudent caution when I was freaked out and high, but back in my room, in the sober light of afternoon, it looked like it had been bound and wrapped by an insane and/or homeless person—mummified, practically: so much tape on it that it wasn’t even quite square any more; even the corners were round. I got the sharpest kitchen knife I could find and sawed at a corner—cautiously at first, worried that the knife would slip in and damage the painting—and then more energetically. But I’d gotten only partway through a three-inch section and my hands were starting to get tired when I heard Xandra coming in downstairs, and I put it back in the pillowcase and taped it to the back of my headboard again until I knew they were going to be gone for a while.

Boris had promised me that we would do two of the leftover hits of acid as soon as his mind got back to usual, which was how he put it; he still felt a bit spaced-out, he confided, saw moving patterns in the fake wood-grain of his desk at school, and the first few times he’d smoked weed he’d started out-and-out tripping again.

“That sounds kind of intense,” I said.

“No, it’s cool. I can make it stop when I want to. I think we should take it at the playground,” he added. “On Thanksgiving holiday maybe.” The abandoned playground was where we’d gone to take E every time but the first, when Xandra came beating on my bedroom door asking us to help her fix the washing machine, which of course we weren’t able to do, but forty-five minutes of standing around with her in the laundry room during the best part of the roll had been a tremendous bringdown.

“Is it going to be a lot stronger than E?”

“No—well, yes, but is wonderful, trust me. I kept wanting Kotku and me to be outside in the air except was too much that close to the highway, lights, cars—maybe this weekend?”

So that was something to look forward to. But just as I was starting to feel good and even hopeful about things again—ESPN hadn’t been on for a week, which was definitely some kind of record—I found my father waiting for me when I got home from school.

“I need to talk to you, Theo,” he said, the moment I walked in. “Do you have a minute?”

I paused. “Well, okay, sure.” The living room looked almost as if it had been burgled—papers scattered everywhere, even the cushions on the sofa slightly out of place.

He stopped pacing—he was moving a bit stiffly, as if his knee hurt him. “Come over here,” he said, in a friendly voice. “Sit down.”

I sat. My dad exhaled; he sat down across from me and ran a hand through his hair.

“The lawyer,” he said, leaning forward with his clasped hands between his knees and meeting my eye frankly.

I waited.

“Your mom’s lawyer. I mean—I know this is short notice, but I really need you to get on the phone with him for me.”

It was windy; outside, blown sand rattled against the glass doors and the patio awning flapped with a sound like a flag snapping. “What?” I said, after a cautious pause. She’d spoken of seeing a lawyer after he left—about a divorce, I figured—but what had come of it, I didn’t know.

“Well—” My dad took a deep breath; he looked at the ceiling. “Here’s the thing. I guess you’ve noticed I haven’t been betting my sports anymore, right? Well,” he said, “I want to quit. While I’m ahead, so to speak. It’s not—” he paused, and seemed to think—“I mean, quite honestly, I’ve gotten pretty good at this stuff by doing my homework and being disciplined about it. I crunch my numbers. I don’t bet impulsively. And, I mean, like I say, I’ve been doing pretty good. I’ve socked away a lot of money these past months. It’s just—”

“Right,” I said uncertainly, in the silence that followed, wondering what he was getting at.

“I mean, why tempt fate? Because—” hand on heart—“I am an alcoholic. I’m the first to admit that. I can’t drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand’s not enough. Giving up booze was the best thing I ever did. And I mean, with gambling, even with my addictive tendencies and all, it’s always been kind of different, sure I’ve had some scrapes but I’ve never been like some of these guys that, I don’t know, that get so far in that they embezzle money and wreck the family business or whatever. But—” he laughed—“if you don’t want a haircut sooner or later, better stop hanging out at the barber shop right?”

“So?” I said cautiously, after waiting for him to continue.

“So—whew.” My dad ran both hands through his hair; he looked boyish, dazed, incredulous. “Here’s the thing. I’m really wanting to make some big changes right now. Because I have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this great business. Buddy of mine has a restaurant. And, I mean, I think it’s going to be a really great thing for all of us—once in a lifetime thing, actually. You know? Xandra’s having such a hard time at work right now with her boss being such a shit and, I don’t know, I just think this is going to be a lot more sane.”

My dad? A restaurant? “Wow—that’s great,” I said. “Wow.”

“Yeah.” My dad nodded. “It’s really great. The thing is, though, to open a place like this—”

“What kind of restaurant?”

My dad yawned, wiped red eyes. “Oh, you know—just simple American food. Steaks and hamburgers and stuff. Just really simple and well prepared. The thing is, though, for my buddy to get the place open and pay his restaurant taxes—”

“Restaurant taxes?”

“Oh God, yes, you wouldn’t believe the kind of fees they’ve got out here. You’ve got to pay your restaurant taxes, your liquor-license taxes, liability insurance—it’s a huge cash outlay to get a place like this up and running.”

“Well.” I could see where he was going with this. “If you need the money in my savings account—”

My dad looked startled. “What?”

“You know. That account you started for me. If you need the money, that’s fine.”

“Oh yeah.” My dad was silent for a moment. “Thanks. I really appreciate that, pal. But actually—” he had stood up, and was walking around—“the thing is, I actually see a really smart way we can do this. Just a short term solution, in order to get the place up and running, you know. We’ll make it back in a few weeks—I mean, a place like this, the location and all, it’s like having a license to print money. It’s just the initial expense. This town is crazy with the taxes and the fees and so forth. I mean—” he laughed, half-apologetically, “you know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency—”

“Sorry?” I said, after a confused pause.

“I mean, like I was saying, I really need you to make this call for me. Here’s the number.” He had it all written out for me on a sheet of paper—a 212 number, I noticed. “You need to telephone this guy and speak to him yourself. His name is Bracegirdle.”

I looked at the paper, and then at my dad. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to understand. All you have to do is say what I tell you.”

“What does it have to do with me?”

“Look, just do it. Tell him who you are, need to have a word, business matter, blah blah blah—”

“But—” Who was this person? “What do you want me to say?”

My father took a long breath; he was taking care to control his expression, something he was fairly good at.

“He’s a lawyer,” he said, on an out breath. “Your mother’s lawyer. He needs to make arrangements to wire this amount of money—” my eyes popped at the sum he was pointing to, $65,000—“into this account” (dragging his finger to the string of numbers beneath it). “Tell him I’ve decided to send you to a private school. He’ll need your name and Social Security number. That’s it.”

“Private school?” I said, after a disoriented pause.

“Well, you see, it’s for tax reasons.”

“I don’t want to go to private school.”

“Wait—wait—just hear me out. As long as these funds are used for your benefit, in the official sense, we’ve got no problem. And the restaurant is for all our benefit, see. Maybe, in the end, yours most of all. And I mean, I could make the call myself, it’s just that if we angle this the right way we’d be saving like thirty thousand dollars that would go to the government otherwise. Hell, I will send you to a private school if you want. Boarding school. I could send you to Andover with all that extra money. I just don’t want half of it to end up with the IRS, know what I’m saying? Also—I mean, the way this thing is set up, by the time you end up going to college, it’s going to end up costing you money, because with that amount of money in there it means you won’t be eligible for a scholarship. The college financial aid people are going to look right at that account and put you in a different income bracket and take 75 percent of it the first year, poof. This way, at least, you’ll get the full use of it, you see? Right now. When it could actually do some good.”

“But—”

“But—” falsetto voice, lolled tongue, goofy stare. “Oh, come on, Theo,” he said, in his normal voice, when I kept on looking at him. “Swear to God, I don’t have time for this. I need you to make this call ASAP, before the offices close back East. If you need to sign something, tell him to FedEx the papers. Or fax them. We just need to get this done as soon as possible, okay?”

“But why do I need to do it?”

My dad sighed; he rolled his eyes. “Look, don’t give me that, Theo,” he said. “I know you know the score because I’ve seen you checking the mail—yes,” he said over my objections, “yes you do, every day you’re out at that mailbox like a fucking shot.”

I was so baffled by this that I didn’t even know how to reply. “But—” I glanced down at the paper and the figure leaped out again: $65,000.

Without warning, my dad snapped out and whacked me across the face, so hard and fast that for a second I didn’t know what had happened. Then almost before I could blink he hit me again with his fist, cartoon wham, bright crack like a camera flash, this time with his fist. As I wobbled—my knees had gone loose, everything white—he caught me by the throat with a sharp upward thrust and forced me up on tiptoe so I was gasping for breath.

“Look here.” He was shouting in my face—his nose two inches from mine—but Popper was jumping and barking like crazy and the ringing in my ears had climbed to such a pitch it was like he was screaming at me though radio fuzz. “You’re going to call this guy—” rattling the paper in my face—“and say what I fucking tell you. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be because I will make you do this, Theo, no lie, I will break your arm, I will beat the everloving shit out of you if you don’t get on the phone right now. Okay? Okay?” he repeated in the dizzy, ear-buzzing silence. His cigarette breath was sour in my face. He let go my throat; he stepped back. “Do you hear me? Say something.”

I swiped an arm over my face. Tears were streaming down my cheeks but they were automatic, like tap water, no emotion attached to them.

My dad squeezed his eyes shut, then re-opened them; he shook his head. “Look,” he said, in a crisp voice, still breathing hard. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry, I noted, in a clear hard remove of my mind; he sounded like he still wanted to beat the shit out of me. “But, I swear, Theo. Just trust me on this. You have to do this for me.”

Everything was blurred, and I reached up with both hands to straighten my glasses. My breaths were so loud that they were the noisiest things in the room.

My dad, hand on hips, turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Just stop it.”

I said nothing. We stood there for another long moment or two. Popper had stopped barking and was looking between us apprehensively like he was trying to figure out what was going on.

“It’s just… well you know?” Now he was all reasonable again. “I’m sorry, Theo, I swear I am, but I’m really in a bind here, we need this money right now, this minute, we really do.”

He was trying to meet my eyes: his gaze was frank, sensible. “Who is this guy?” I said, looking not at him but at the wall behind his head, my voice for whatever reason coming out scorched-sounding and strange.

“Your mother’s lawyer. How many times do I have to tell you?” He was massaging his knuckles like he’d hurt his hand hitting me. “See, the thing is, Theo—” another sigh—“I mean, I’m sorry, but, I swear, I wouldn’t be so upset if this wasn’t so important. Because I am really, really behind the eight ball here. This is just a temporary thing, you understand—just until the business gets off the ground. Because the whole thing could collapse, just like that—” snapped fingers—“unless I start getting some of these creditors paid off. And the rest of it—I will use to send you to a better school. Private school maybe. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Already, carried away by his own rap, he was dialing the number. He handed me the telephone and—before anyone answered—dashed over and picked up the extension across the room.

“Hello,” I said, to the woman who answered the phone, “um, excuse me,” my voice scratchy and uneven, I still couldn’t quite believe what was happening. “May I speak to Mr., uh…”

My dad stabbed his finger at the paper: Bracegirdle.

“Mr., uh, Bracegirdle,” I said, aloud.

“And who may I say is calling?” Both my voice, and hers, were way too loud due to the fact that my dad was listening on the extension.

“Theodore Decker.”

“Oh, yes,” said the man’s voice when he came on the other end. “Hello! Theodore! How are you?”

“Fine.”

“You sound like you have a cold. Tell me. Do you have a bit of a cold?”

“Er, yes,” I said uncertainly. My dad, across the room, was mouthing the word Laryngitis.

“That’s a shame,” said the echoing voice—so loud that I had to hold the phone slightly away from my ear. “I never think of people catching colds in the sunshine, where you are. At any rate, I’m glad you phoned me—I didn’t have a good way to get in touch with you directly. I know things are probably still very hard. But I hope things are better than they were the last time I saw you.”

I was silent. I’d met this person?

“It was a bad time,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, correctly interpreting my silence.

The velvety, fluent voice struck a chord. “Okay, wow,” I said.

“Snowstorm, remember?”

“Right.” He’d appeared maybe a week after my mother died: oldish man with a full head of white hair—snappily dressed, striped shirt, bow tie. He and Mrs. Barbour had seemed to know each other, or at any rate he had seemed to know her. He’d sat across from me in the armchair nearest the sofa and talked a lot, confusing stuff, although all that really stuck in my mind was the story he’d told of how he met my mother: massive snowstorm, no taxis in sight—when—preceded by a fan of wet snow—an occupied cab had plowed to the corner of Eighty-Fourth and Park. Window rolled down—my mother (“a vision of loveliness!”) going as far as East Fifty-Seventh, was he headed that way?

“She always talked about that storm,” I said. My father—phone to his ear—glanced at me sharply. “When the city was shut down that time.”

He laughed. “What a lovely young lady! I’d come out of a late meeting—elderly trustee up on Park and Ninety-Second, shipping heiress, now dead alas. Anyway, down I came, from the penthouse to the street—lugging my litigation bag, of course—and a foot had fallen. Perfect silence. Kids were pulling sleds down Park Avenue. Anyway, the trains weren’t running above Seventy-Second and there I was, knee deep and trudging, when, whoops! here came a yellow cab with your mother in it! Crunching to a stop. As if she’d been sent by a search party. ‘Hop in, I’ll give you a ride.’ Midtown absolutely deserted… snowflakes whirling down and every light in the city on. And there we were, rolling along at about two miles per hour—we might as well have been in a sleigh—sailing right through the red lights, no point stopping. I remember we talked about Fairfield Porter—there’d just been a show in New York—and then on to Frank O’Hara and Lana Turner and what year they’d finally closed the old Horn and Hardart, the Automat. And then, we discovered that we worked across the street from each other! It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as they say.”

I glanced over at my dad. He had a funny look on his face, lips pressed tight as if he was about to be sick on the carpet.

“We talked a bit about your mother’s estate, if you remember,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Not much. It wasn’t the time. But I had hoped you would come to see me when you were ready to talk. I would have telephoned before you left town if I’d known you were going.”

I looked at my dad; I looked at the paper in my hand. “I want to go to private school,” I blurted.

“Really?” said Mr. Bracegirdle. “I think that may be an excellent idea. Where were you thinking about going? Back east? Or somewhere out there?”

We hadn’t thought this out. I looked at my dad.

“Uh,” I said, “uh,” while my father grimaced at me and waved his hand frantically.

“There may be good boarding schools out west, though I don’t know about them,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “I went to Milton, which was a wonderful experience for me. And my oldest son went there too, for a year anyway, though it wasn’t at all the right place for him—”

As he talked on—from Milton, to Kent, to various boarding schools attended by children of friends and acquaintances—my dad scribbled a note; he threw it at me. Wire me the money, it said. Down payment.

“Um,” I said, not knowing how else to introduce the subject, “did my mother leave me some money?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, seeming to cool slightly at the question, or maybe it was just the awkwardness of the interruption. “She was having some financial troubles toward the end, as I’m sure you’re well aware. But you do have a 529. And she also set up a little UTMA for you right before she died.”

“What is that?” My dad—his eyes on me—was listening very closely.

“Uniform Transfer to Minors. It’s to be used for your education. But it can’t be used for anything else—not while you’re still a minor, anyway.”

“Why can’t it?” I said, after a brief pause, as he had seemed to stress the final point so much.

“Because it’s the law,” he said curtly. “But certainly something can be worked out if you want to go away to school. I know of a client who used part of her eldest son’s 529 for a fancy kindergarten for her youngest. Not that I think twenty thousand dollars a year is a prudent expenditure at that level—the most expensive crayons in Manhattan, surely—! But yes, so you understand, that’s how it works.”

I looked at my dad. “So there’s no way you could, say, wire me sixty-five thousand dollars,” I said. “If I needed it right this minute.”

“No! Absolutely not! So just put that out of your mind.” His manner had changed—clearly he’d revised his opinion of me, no longer my mother’s son and A Good Kid but a grasping little creep. “By the way, may I ask how you happened to arrive at that particular figure?”

“Er—” I glanced at my dad, who had a hand over his eyes. Shit, I thought, and then realized I’d said it out loud.

“Well, no matter,” said Mr. Bracegirdle silkily. “It’s simply not possible.”

“No way?”

“No way, no how.”

“Okay, fine—” I tried hard to think, but my mind was running in two directions at once. “Could you send me part of it, then? Like half?”

“No. It would all have to be arranged directly with the college or school of your choice. In other words, I’m going to need to see bills, and pay bills. There’s a lot of paperwork, as well. And in the unlikely event you decide not to attend college…”

As he talked on, confusingly, about various ins and outs of the funds my mother had set up for me (all of which were fairly restrictive, as far as either my father or me getting our hands immediately on actual, spendable cash) my dad, holding the phone out from his ear, had something very like an expression of horror on his face.

“Well, uh, that’s good to know, thank you sir,” I said, trying hard to wrap up the conversation.

“There are tax advantages of course. Setting it up like this. But what she really wanted was to make sure your father would never be able to touch it.”

“Oh?” I said, uncertainly, in the overly long silence that followed. Something in his tone had made me suspect that he knew my father might be the Lord Vader-ish presence breathing audibly (audibly to me—whether audibly to him I don’t know) on the other line.

“There are other considerations, as well. I mean—” decorous silence—“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but an unauthorized party has twice tried to make a large withdrawal on the account.”

“What?” I said, after a sick pause.

“You see,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, his voice as distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the sea, “I’m the custodian on the account. And about two months after your mother died, someone walked in the bank in Manhattan during business hours and tried to forge my signature on the papers. Well, they know me at the main branch, and they called me right away, but while they were still on the phone with me the man slipped out the door, before the security guard was able to approach and ask for ID. That was, my goodness, nearly two years ago. But then—only last week—did you get the letter I wrote you about this?”

“No,” I said, when at last I realized I needed to say something.

“Well, without going into it too much, there was a peculiar phone call. From someone purporting to be your attorney out there, requesting a transfer of funds. And then—checking into it—we found out that some party with access to your Social Security number had applied for, and received, a rather large line of credit in your name. Do you happen to know anything about that?

“Well, not to worry,” he continued, when I didn’t say anything. “I have a copy of your birth certificate here, and I faxed it to the issuing bank and had the line shut down immediately. And I’ve alerted Equifax and all the credit agencies. Even though you’re a minor, and legally unable to enter into such a contract, you could be responsible for any such debts incurred in your name once you come of age. At any rate, I urge you to be very careful with your Social Security number in future. It’s possible to have a new Social issued, in theory, although the red tape is such a headache that I don’t suggest it…”

I was in a cold sweat when I hung up the telephone—and completely unprepared for the howl that my father let out. I thought he was angry—angry at me—but when he just stood there with the phone still in his hand, I looked at him a little closer and realized he was crying.

It was horrible. I had no idea what to do. He sounded like he’d had boiling water poured over him—like he was turning into a werewolf—like he was being tortured. I left him there and—Popchik hurrying up the stairs ahead of me; clearly he didn’t want any part of this howling, either—went in my room and locked the door and sat on the side of my bed with my head in my hands, wanting aspirin but not wanting to go down to the bathroom to get it, wishing Xandra would hurry up and come home. The screams from downstairs were ungodly, like he was being burned with a blow torch. I got my iPod, tried to find some loud-ish music that wasn’t upsetting (Shostakovich’s Fourth, which though classical actually was a bit upsetting) and lay on my bed with the earbuds in and stared at the ceiling, while Popper stood with his ears up and stared at the closed door, the hairs on his neck erect and bristling.

xv.

“HE TOLD ME YOU had a fortune,” said Boris, later that night at the playground, while we were sitting around waiting for the drugs to work. I slightly wished we had picked another night to take them, but Boris had insisted it would make me feel better.

“You believed I had a fortune, and wouldn’t tell you?” We’d been sitting on the swings for what seemed like forever, waiting for just what I didn’t know.

Boris shrugged. “I don’t know. There are a lot of things you don’t tell me. I would have told you. It’s all right, though.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Though it was very subtle, I’d begun to notice glittering gray kaleidoscope patterns turning sluggishly in the gravel by my foot—dirty ice, diamonds, sparkles of broken glass. “Things are getting scary.”

Boris nudged me. “There’s something I didn’t tell you either, Potter.”

“What?”

“My dad has to leave. For his job. He’s going back to Australia in a few months. Then on, I think, to Russia.”

There was a silence that maybe lasted five seconds, but felt like it lasted an hour. Boris? Gone? Everything seemed frozen, like the planet had stopped.

“Well, I’m not going,” said Boris serenely. His face in the moonlight had taken on an unnerving electrified flicker, like a black-and-white film from the silent era. “Fuck that. I’m running away.”

“Where?”

“Dunno. Do you want to come?”

“Yes,” I said, without thinking, and then: “Is Kotku going?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know.” The filmic quality had become so stage-lit and stark that all semblance of real life had vanished; we’d been neutralized, fictionalized, flattened; my field of vision was bordered by a black rectangle; I could see the subtitles running at the bottom of what he was saying. Then, at almost exactly the same time, the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Oh, God, I thought, running both hands through my hair and feeling way too overwhelmed to explain what I was feeling.

Boris was still talking, and I realized if I didn’t want to be lost forever in this grainy Nosferatu world, sharp shadows and achromatism, it was important to listen to him and not get so hung up on the artificial texture of things.

“… I mean, I guess I understand,” he was saying mournfully, as speckles and raindrops of decay danced all around him. “With her it’s not even running away, she’s of age, you know? But she lived on the street once and didn’t like it.”

“Kotku lived on the street?” I felt an unexpected surge of compassion for her—orchestrated somehow, with a cinematic music swell almost, although the sadness itself was perfectly real.

“Well, I have too, in Ukraine. But I would be with my friends Maks and Seryozha—never more than few days at a time. Sometimes it was good fun. We’d kip in basement of abandoned buildings—drink, take butorphanol, build campfires even. But I always went home when my dad sobered up. With Kotku though, it was different. This one boyfriend of her mother’s—he was doing stuff to her. So she left. Slept in doorways. Begged for change—blew guys for money. Was out of school for a while—she was brave to come back, to try and finish, after what happened. Because, I mean, people say stuff. You know.”

We were silent, contemplating the awfulness of this, me feeling as if I had experienced in these few words the entire weight and sweep of Kotku’s life, and Boris’s.

“I’m sorry I don’t like Kotku!” I said, really meaning it.

“Well, I’m sorry too,” said Boris reasonably. His voice seemed to be going straight to my brain without passing my ears. “But she doesn’t like you either. She thinks you’re spoiled. That you haven’t been through nearly the kind of stuff that she and I have.”

This seemed like a fair criticism. “That seems fair,” I said.

Some weighty and flickering interlude of time seemed to pass: trembling shadows, static, hiss of unseen projector. When I held out my hand and looked at it, it was dust-speckled and bright like a decaying piece of film.

“Wow, I’m seeing it too now,” said Boris, turning to me—a sort of slowed-down, hand-cranked movement, fourteen frames per second. His face was chalk pale and his pupils were dark and huge.

“Seeing—?” I said carefully.

“You know.” He waved his floodlit, black-and-white hand in the air. “How it’s all flat, like a movie.”

“But you—” It wasn’t just me? He saw it, too?

“Of course,” said Boris, looking less and less like a person every moment, and more like some degraded piece of silver nitrate stock from the 1920s, light shining behind him from some hidden source. “I wish we’d got something color though. Like maybe ‘Mary Poppins.’ ”

When he said this, I began to laugh uncontrollably, so hard I nearly fell off the swing, because I knew then for sure he saw the same thing I did. More than that: we were creating it. Whatever the drug was making us see, we were constructing it together. And, with that realization, the virtual-reality simulator flipped into color. It happened for both of us at the same time, pop! We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were swinging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. For hours, we watched the clouds rearranging themselves into intelligent patterns; rolled in the dirt, believing it was seaweed (!); lay on our backs and sang “Dear Prudence” to the welcoming and appreciative stars. It was a fantastic night—one of the great nights of my life, actually, despite what happened later.

xvi.

BORIS STAYED OVER AT my house, since I lived closer to the playground and he was (in his own favorite term for loadedness) v gavno, which meant “shit-faced” or “in shit” or something of the sort—at any rate, too wrecked to get home on his own in the dark. And this was fortunate, as it meant I wasn’t alone in the house at three thirty the next afternoon when Mr. Silver stopped by.

Though we’d barely slept, and were a little shaky, everything still felt the tiniest bit magical and full of light. We were drinking orange juice and watching cartoons (good idea, as it seemed to extend the hilarious Technicolor mood of the evening) and—bad idea—had just shared our second joint of the afternoon when the doorbell rang. Popchyk—who’d been extremely on edge; he sensed that we were off-key somehow and had been barking at us like we were possessed—went off immediately almost as if he’d expected something of the sort.

In an instant, it all came crashing back. “Holy shit,” I said.

“I’ll go,” said Boris immediately, tucking Popchyk under his arm. Off he bopped, barefoot and shirtless, with an air of complete unconcern. But in what seemed like one second he was back again, looking ashen.

He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. I got up, put on my sneakers and tied them tight (as I’d gotten in the habit of doing before our shoplifting expeditions, in the event I had to flee), and went to the door. There was Mr. Silver again—white sports coat, shoe-polish hair, and all—only this time standing beside him was a large guy with blurred blue tattoos snaked all over his forearms, holding an aluminum baseball bat.

“Well, Theodore!” said Mr. Silver. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “Hiya doing?”

“Fine,” I said, marvelling at how un-stoned I suddenly felt. “And you?”

“Can’t complain. Quite a bruise you got going on there, pal.”

Reflexively, I reached up and touched my cheek. “Uh—”

“Better look after that. Your buddy tells me your Dad’s not home.”

“Um, that’s right.”

“Everything okay with you two? You guys having any problems out here this afternoon?”

“Um, no, not really,” I said. The guy wasn’t brandishing the bat, or being threatening in any way, but still I couldn’t help being fairly aware that he had it.

“Because if you ever do?” said Mr. Silver. “Have problems of any nature? I can take care of them for you like that.”

What was he talking about? I looked past him, out to the street, to his car. Even though the windows were tinted, I could see the other men waiting there.

Mr. Silver sighed. “I’m glad to hear that you don’t have any problems, Theodore. I only wish that I could say the same.”

“Excuse me?”

“Because here’s the thing,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I have a problem. A really big one. With your father.”

Not knowing what to say, I stared at his cowboy boots. They were black crocodile, with a stacked heel, very pointed at the toe and polished to such a high shine that they reminded me of the girly-girl cowboy boots that Lucie Lobo, a way-out stylist in my mother’s office, had always worn.

“You see, here’s the thing,” said Mr. Silver. “I’m holding fifty grand of your dad’s paper. And that is causing some very big problems for me.”

“He’s getting the money together,” I said, awkwardly. “Maybe, I don’t know, if you could just give him a little more time…”

Mr. Silver looked at me. He adjusted his glasses.

“Listen,” he said reasonably. “Your dad wants to risk his shirt on how some morons handle a fucking ball—I mean, pardon my language. But it’s hard for me to have sympathy for a guy like him. Doesn’t honor his obligations, three weeks late on the vig, doesn’t return my phone calls—” he was ticking off the offenses on his fingers—“makes plans to meet me at noon today and then doesn’t show. You know how long I sat and waited for that deadbeat? An hour and a half. Like I don’t got other, better things to do.” He put his head to the side. “It’s guys like your dad keep guys like me and Yurko here in business. Do you think I like coming to your house? Driving all the way out here?”

I had thought this was a rhetorical question—clearly no one in their right mind would like driving all the way out where we lived—but since an outrageous amount of time passed, and still he was staring at me like he actually expected an answer, I finally blinked in discomfort and said: “No.”

“No. That’s right, Theodore. I most certainly do not. We got better things to do, me and Yurko, believe me, than spend all afternoon chasing after a deadbeat like your dad. So do me a favor, please, and tell your father we can settle this like gentlemen the second he sits down and works things out with me.”

“Work things out?”

“He needs to bring me what he owes me.” He was smiling but the gray tint at the top of his aviators gave his eyes a disturbingly hooded look. “And I want you to tell him to do that for me, Theodore. Because next time I have to come out here, believe me, I’m not going to be so nice.”

xvii.

WHEN I CAME BACK into the living room Boris was sitting quietly and staring at cartoons with the sound off, stroking Popper—who, despite his earlier upset, was now fast asleep in his lap.

“Ridiculous,” he said shortly.

He pronounced the word in such a way that it took me a moment to realize what he’d said. “Right,” I said, “I told you he was a freak.”

Boris shook his head and leaned back against the couch. “I don’t mean the old Leonard Cohen-looking guy with the wig.”

“You think that’s a wig?”

He made a face like who cares. “Him too, but I mean the big Russian with the, metal, what do you call it?”

“Baseball bat.”

“That was just for show,” he said disdainfully. “He was just trying to scare you, the prick.”

“How do you know he was Russian?”

He shrugged. “Because I know. No one has tattoos like that in U.S. Russian national, no question. He knew I was Russian too, minute I opened my mouth.”

Some period of time passed before I realized I was sitting there staring into space. Boris lifted Popchyk and put him down on the sofa, so gently he didn’t wake. “You want to get out of here for a while?”

“God,” I said, shaking my head suddenly—the impact of the visit had for whatever reason just hit me, a delayed reaction—“fuck, I wish my dad had been home. You know? I wish that guy would beat his ass. I really do. He deserves it.”

Boris kicked my ankle. His feet were black with dirt and he also had black polish on his toenails, courtesy of Kotku.

“You know what I had to eat yesterday?” he said sociably. “Two Nestlé bars and a Pepsi.” All candy bars, for Boris, were ‘Nestlé bars,’ just as all sodas were ‘Pepsi.’ “And you know what I had to eat today?” He made a zero with thumb and forefinger. “Nul.”

“Me neither. This stuff makes you not hungry.”

“Yah, but I need to eat something. My stomach—” he made a face.

“Do you want to go get pancakes?”

“Yes—something—I don’t care. Do you have money?”

“I’ll look around.”

“Good. I think I have five dollars maybe.”

While Boris was rummaging for shoes and a shirt, I splashed some water on my face, checked out my pupils and the bruise on my jaw, rebuttoned my shirt when I saw it was done up the wrong way, and then went to let Popchik out, throwing his tennis ball to him for a bit, since he hadn’t had a proper walk on the leash and I knew he felt cooped-up. When we came back in, Boris—dressed now—was downstairs; we’d done a quick search of the living room and were laughing and joking around, pooling our quarters and dimes and trying to figure out where we wanted to go and the quickest way to get there when all of a sudden we noticed that Xandra had come in the front door and was standing there with a funny look on her face.

Both of us stopped talking immediately and went about our change-sorting in silence. It wasn’t a time when Xandra normally came home, but her schedule was erratic sometimes and she’d surprised us before. But then, in an uncertain-sounding voice, she said my name.

We stopped with the change. Generally Xandra called me kiddo or hey you or anything but Theo. She was, I noticed, still wearing her uniform from work.

“Your dad’s had a car accident,” she said. It was like she was saying it to Boris instead of me.

“Where?” I said.

“It happened like two hours ago. The hospital called me at work.”

Boris and I looked at each other. “Wow,” I said. “What happened? Did he total the car?”

“His blood alcohol was .39.”

The figure was meaningless to me, though the fact he’d been drinking wasn’t. “Wow,” I said, pocketing my change, and: “When’s he coming home, then?”

She met my eye blankly. “Home?”

“From the hospital.”

Rapidly, she shook her head; looked around for a chair to sit in; and then sat in it. “You don’t understand.” Her face was empty and strange. “He died. He’s dead.”

xviii.

THE NEXT SIX OR seven hours were a daze. Several of Xandra’s friends showed up: her best friend Courtney; Janet from her work; and a couple named Stewart and Lisa who were nicer and way more normal than the usual people Xandra had over to the house. Boris, generously, produced what was left of Kotku’s weed, which was appreciated by all parties present; and someone, thankfully (maybe it was Courtney), ordered out for pizza—how she got Domino’s to deliver all the way out to us, I don’t know, since for over a year Boris and I had wheedled and pleaded and tried every cajolement and excuse we could think of.

While Janet sat with her arm around Xandra, and Lisa patted her head, and Stewart made coffee in the kitchen, and Courtney rolled a joint on the coffee table that was almost as expert as one of Kotku’s, Boris and I hung in the background, stunned. It was hard to believe that my dad could be dead when his cigarettes were still on the kitchen counter and his old white tennis shoes were still by the back door. Apparently—it all came out in the wrong order, I had to piece it together in my mind—my dad had crashed the Lexus on the highway, a little before two in the afternoon, veering off on the wrong side of the road and plowing headlong into a tractor-trailer which had immediately killed him (not the driver of the truck, fortunately, or the passengers in the car that had rear-ended the truck, although the driver of the car had a broken leg). The blood-alcohol news was both surprising, and not—I’d suspected my father might be drinking again, though I hadn’t seen him doing it—but what seemed to baffle Xandra most was not his extreme drunkenness (he’d been virtually unconscious at the wheel) but the location of the accident—outside Vegas, heading west, into the desert. “He would have told me, he would have told me,” she was saying sorrowfully in response to some question or other of Courtney’s, only why, I thought bleakly, sitting on the floor with my hands over my eyes, did she think it was in my father’s nature to tell the truth about anything?

Boris had his arm over my shoulder. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

I knew he was talking about Mr. Silver. “Should I—”

“Where was he going?” Xandra was asking Courtney and Janet, almost aggressively, as if she suspected them of withholding information. “What was he doing all the way over there?” It was strange to see her still in her work uniform, as she usually changed out of it the second she walked in the door.

“He didn’t go meet that guy like he was supposed to,” whispered Boris.

“I know.” Possibly he had intended to go to the sit-down with Mr. Silver. But—as my mother and I had so often, so fatally, known him to do—he had probably stopped in a bar somewhere for a quick belt or two, to steady his nerves as he always said. At that point—who knew what might have been going through his mind? nothing helpful to point out to Xandra under the circumstances, but he’d certainly been known to skip town on his obligations before.

I didn’t cry. Though cold waves of disbelief and panic kept hitting me, it all seemed highly unreal and I kept glancing around for him, struck again and again by the absence of his voice among the others, that easy, well-reasoned, aspirin-commercial voice (four out of five doctors…) that made itself known above all others in a room. Xandra went in and out of being fairly matter-of-fact—wiping her eyes, getting plates for pizza, pouring everybody glasses of the red wine that had appeared from somewhere—and then collapsing in tears again. Popchik alone was happy; it was rare we had so much company in the house and he ran from person to person, undiscouraged by repeated rebuffs. At some bleary point, deep in the evening—Xandra weeping in Courtney’s arms for the twentieth time, oh my God, he’s gone, I can’t believe it—Boris pulled me aside and said: “Potter, I have to go.”

“No, don’t, please.”

“Kotku’s going to be freaked out. Am supposed to be at her mom’s now! She hasn’t seen me for like forty-eight hours.”

“Look, tell her to come over if she wants—tell her what’s happened. It’s going to completely suck if you have to leave right now.”

Xandra had grown sufficiently distracted with guests and grief that Boris was able to go upstairs to make the call in her bedroom—a room usually kept locked, that Boris and I never saw. In about ten minutes he came skimming rapidly down the steps.

“Kotku said to stay,” he said, ducking in to sit beside me. “She told me to say she’s sorry.”

“Wow,” I said, coming close to tears, scrubbing my hand over my face so he wouldn’t see how startled and touched I was.

“Well, I mean, she knows how it is. Her dad died too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, a few years ago. In a motor accident, as well. They weren’t that close—”

“Who died?” said Janet, swaying over us, a frizzy, silk-bloused presence redolent of weed and beauty products. “Somebody else died?”

“No,” I said curtly. I didn’t like Janet—she was the ditz who’d volunteered to take care of Popper and then left him locked up alone with his food dispenser.

“Not you, him,” she said, stepping backwards and focusing her foggy attention on Boris. “Somebody died? That you were close to?”

“Several people, yeah.”

She blinked. “Where are you from?”

“Why?”

“Your voice is so funny. Like British or something—well no. Like a mix of British and Transylvania.”

Boris hooted. “Transylvania?” he said, showing her his fangs. “Do you want me to bite you?”

“Oh, funny boys,” she said vaguely, before bopping Boris on the top of the head with the bottom of her wine glass and wandering off to say goodbye to Stewart and Lisa, who were just leaving.

Xandra, it seemed, had taken a pill. (“Maybe more than one,” said Boris, in my ear.) She appeared on the verge of passing out. Boris—it was shitty of me, but I just wasn’t willing to do it—took her cigarette away from her and stubbed it out, then helped Courtney get her up the stairs and into her room, where she lay face down on the bedspread with the door open.

I stood in the doorway while Boris and Courtney got her shoes off—interested to see, for once, the room that she and my dad always kept locked up. Dirty cups and ashtrays, stacks of Glamour magazine, puffy green bedspread, laptop I never got to use, exercise bike—who knew they had an exercise bike in there?

Xandra’s shoes were off but they’d decided to leave her dressed. “Do you want me to spend the night?” Courtney was asking Boris in a low voice.

Boris, shamelessly, stretched and yawned. His shirt was riding up and his jeans hung so low you could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Nice of you,” he said. “But she is out cold, I think.”

“I don’t mind.” Maybe I was high—I was high—but she was leaning so close to him it looked like she was trying to make out with him or something, which was hilarious.

I must have made some sort of semi-choking or laughter-like noise—since Courtney turned just in time to see my comical gesture to Boris, a thumb jerked at the door—get her out of here!

“Are you okay?” she said coldly, eyeing me up and down. Boris was laughing too but he’d straightened up by the time she turned back to him, his expression all soulful and concerned, which only made me laugh harder.

xix.

XANDRA WAS OUT COLD by the time they all left—asleep so deeply that Boris got a pocket mirror from her purse (which we had rifled, for pills and cash) and held it under her nose to see if she was breathing. There was two hundred and twenty-nine dollars in her wallet, which I didn’t feel all that bad about taking since she still had her credit cards and an uncashed check for two thousand and twenty-five.

“I knew Xandra wasn’t her real name,” I said, tossing him her driver’s license: orange-tinged face, different fluffed-up hair, name Sandra Jaye Terrell, no restrictions. “Wonder what these keys go to?”

Boris—like an old-fashioned movie doctor, fingers on her pulse, sitting by her on the side of the bed—held the mirror up to the light. “Da, da,” he muttered, then something else I didn’t understand.

“Eh?”

“She’s out.” With one finger, he prodded her shoulder, and then leaned over and peered into the nightstand drawer where I was rapidly sorting through a bewilderment of junk: change, chips, lip gloss, coasters, false eyelashes, nail polish remover, tattered paperbacks (Your Erroneous Zones), perfume samples, old cassette tapes, ten years’ expired insurance cards, and a bunch of giveaway matchbooks from a Reno legal office that said REPRESENTING DWI AND ALL DRUG OFFENSES.

“Hey, let me have those,” said Boris, reaching over and pocketing a strip of condoms. “What’s this?” He picked up something that at first glance looked like a Coke can—but, when he shook it, it rattled. He put his ear to it. “Ha!” he said, tossing it to me.

“Good job.” I screwed off the top—it was obviously fake—and dumped the contents out on the top of the nightstand.

“Wow,” I said, after a few moments. Clearly this was where Xandra kept her tip money—partly cash, partly chips. There was a lot of other stuff, too—so much I had a hard time taking it all in—but my eyes had gone straight to the diamond-and-emerald earrings that my mother had found missing, right before my father took off.

“Wow,” I said again, picking one of them up between thumb and forefinger. My mother had worn these earrings for almost every cocktail party or dress-up occasion—the blue-green transparency of the stones, their wicked three a.m. gleam, were as much a part of her as the color of her eyes or the spicy dark smell of her hair.

Boris was cackling. Amidst the cash he’d immediately spotted, and snatched up, a film canister, which he opened with trembling hands. He dipped the end of his little finger in, tasted it. “Bingo,” he said, running the finger along his gums. “Kotku’s going to be pissed she didn’t come over now.”

I held out the earrings to him on my open hands. “Yah, nice,” he said, hardly looking at them. He was tapping out a pile of powder on the nightstand. “You’ll get a couple of thousand dollars for those.”

“These were my mother’s.” My dad had sold most of her jewelry back in New York, including her wedding ring. But now—I saw—Xandra had skimmed some of it for herself, and it made me weirdly sad to see what she’d chosen—not the pearls or the ruby brooch, but inexpensive things from my mother’s teenage days, including her junior-high charm bracelet, ajingle with horseshoes and ballet slippers and four leaf clovers.

Boris straightened up, pinched his nostrils, handed me the rolled-up bill. “You want some?”

“No.”

“Come on. It’ll make you feel better.”

“No, thanks.”

“There must be four or five eight balls here. Maybe more! We can keep one and sell the others.”

“You did that stuff before?” I said doubtfully, eyeing Xandra’s prone body. Even though she was clearly down for the count, I didn’t like having these conversations over her back.

“Yah. Kotku likes it. Expensive, though.” He seemed to blank out for a minute, then blinked his eyes rapidly. “Wow. Come on,” he said, laughing. “Here. Don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I’m too fucked-up as it is,” I said, shuffling through the money.

“Yah, but this will sober you up.”

“Boris, I can’t goof around,” I said, pocketing the earrings and the charm bracelet. “If we’re going, we need to leave now. Before people start showing up.”

“What people?” said Boris skeptically, running his finger back and forth under his nose.

“Believe me, it happens fast. Child services coming in, and like that.” I’d counted the cash—thirteen hundred and twenty-one dollars, plus change; there was much more in chips, close to five thousand dollars’ worth, but might as well leave her those. “Half for you and half for me,” I said, as I began to count the cash into two even piles. “There’s enough here for two tickets. Probably we’re too late to catch the last flight but we should go ahead and take a car to the airport.”

“Now? Tonight?”

I stopped counting and looked at him. “I don’t have anyone out here. Nobody. Nada. They’ll stick me in a home so fast I won’t know what hit me.”

Boris nodded at Xandra’s body—which was very unnerving, as in her face-down mattress splay she looked way too much like a dead person. “What about her?”

“What the fuck?” I said after a brief pause. “What should we do? Wait around until she wakes up and finds out we ripped her off?”

“Dunno,” said Boris, eyeing her doubtfully. “I just feel bad for her.”

“Well, don’t. She doesn’t want me. She’ll call them herself as soon as she realizes she’s stuck with me.”

“Them? I don’t understand who is this them.”

“Boris, I’m a minor.” I could feel my panic rising in an all-too-familiar way—maybe the situation wasn’t literally life or death but it sure felt like it, house filling with smoke, exits closing off. “I don’t know how it works in your country but I don’t have any family, no friends out here—”

“Me! You have me!”

“What are you going to do? Adopt me?” I stood up. “Look, if you’re coming, we need to hurry. Do you have your passport? You’ll need it for the plane.”

Boris put his hands up in his Russianate enough already gesture. “Wait! This is happening way too fast.”

I stopped, halfway out the door. “What the fuck is your problem, Boris?”

“My problem?”

“You wanted to run away! It was you who asked me to go with you! Last night.”

“Where are you going? New York?”

“Where else?”

“I want to go someplace warm,” he said instantly. “California.”

“That’s crazy. Who do we know—”

“California!” he crowed.

“Well—” Though I knew almost nothing about California, it was safe to assume that (apart from the bar of “California Über Alles” he was humming) Boris knew even less. “Where in California? What town?”

“Who cares?”

“It’s a big state.”

“Fantastic! It’ll be fun. We’ll stay high all the time—read books—build camp fires. Sleep on the beach.”

I looked at him for a long unbearable moment. His face was on fire and his mouth was stained blackish from the red wine.

“All right,” I said—knowing full well I was stepping off the edge and into the major mistake of my life, petty theft, the change cup, sidewalk nods and homelessness, the fuck-up from which I would never recover.

He was gleeful. “The beach, then? Yes?”

This was how you went wrong: this fast. “Wherever you want,” I said, pushing the hair out of my eyes. I was dead exhausted. “But we need to go now. Please.”

“What, this minute?”

“Yes. Do you need to go home and get anything?”

“Tonight?”

“I’m not kidding, Boris.” Arguing with him was making the panic rise again. “I can’t just sit around and wait—” The painting was a problem, I wasn’t sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. “Please, come on.”

“Is State Care that bad in America?” said Boris doubtfully. “You make it seem like the cops.”

“Are you coming with me? Yes or no?”

“I need some time. I mean,” he said, following after me, “we can’t leave now! Really—I swear. Wait a little while. Give me a day! One day!”

“Why?”

He seemed nonplussed. “Well, I mean, because—”

“Because—?”

“Because—because I have to see Kotku! And—all kinds of things! Honest, you can’t leave tonight,” he repeated, when I said nothing. “Trust me. You’ll be sorry, I mean it. Come to my house! Wait till the morning to go!”

“I can’t wait,” I said curtly, taking my half of the cash and heading back to my room.

“Potter—” he followed after me.

“Yes?”

“There is something important I have to tell you.”

“Boris,” I said, turning, “what the mother fuck. What is it?” I said, as we stood and stared at each other. “If you have something to say, go on and say it.”

“Am afraid it will make you mad.”

“What is it? What have you done?”

Boris was silent, gnawing the side of his thumb.

“Well, what?”

He looked away. “You need to stay,” he said vaguely. “You’re making a mistake.”

“Forget it,” I snapped, turning away again. “If you don’t want to come with me, don’t come, okay? But I can’t stand around here all night.”

Boris—I thought—might ask what was in the pillowcase, particularly since it was so fat and weirdly shaped after my over-enthusiastic wrapping job. But when I un-taped it from the back of the headboard and put it in my overnight bag (along with my iPod, notebook, charger, Wind, Sand and Stars, some pictures of my mom, my toothbrush, and a change of clothes) he only scowled and said nothing. When I retrieved, from the back of my closet, my school blazer (too small for me, though it had been too big when my mother bought it) he nodded and said: “Good idea, that.”

“What?”

“Makes you look less homeless.”

“It’s November,” I said. I’d only brought one warm sweater from New York; I put it in the bag and zipped it up. “It’s going to be cold.”

Boris leaned insolently against the wall. “What will you do, then? Live on the street, railway station, where?”

“I’ll call my friend I stayed with before.”

“If they wanted you, those people, they’d have adopted you already.”

“They couldn’t! How could they?”

Boris folded his arms. “They didn’t want you, that family. You told me so yourself—lots of times. Also, you never hear from them.”

“That’s not true,” I said, after a brief, confused pause. Only a few months before, Andy had sent me a long-ish (for him) email telling me about some stuff going on at school, a scandal with the tennis coach feeling up girls in our class, though that life was so far away that it was like reading about people I didn’t know.

“Too many children?” said Boris, a bit smugly as it seemed. “Not enough room? Remember that bit? You said the mother and father were glad to see you go.”

“Fuck off.” I was already getting a huge headache. What would I do if Social Services showed up and put me in the back of a car? Who—in Nevada—could I call? Mrs. Spear? The Playa? The fat model-store clerk who sold us model glue without the models?

Boris followed me downstairs, where we were stopped in the middle of the living room by a tortured-looking Popper—who ran directly into our path, then sat and stared at us like he knew exactly what was going on.

“Oh, fuck,” I said, putting down my bag. There was a silence.

“Boris,” I said, “can’t you—”

“No.”

“Can’t Kotku—”

“No.”

“Well, fuck it,” I said, picking him up and tucking him under my arm. “I’m not leaving him here for her to lock up and starve.”

“And where are you going?” said Boris, as I started for the front door.

“Eh?”

“Walking? To the airport?”

“Wait,” I said, putting Popchik down. All at once I felt sick and like I might vomit red wine all over the carpet. “Will they take a dog on the plane?”

“No,” said Boris ruthlessly, spitting out a chewed thumbnail.

He was being an asshole; I wanted to punch him. “Okay then,” I said. “Maybe somebody at the airport will want him. Or, fuck it, I’ll take the train.”

He was about to say something sarcastic, lips pursed in a way I knew well, but then—quite suddenly—his expression faltered; and I turned to see Xandra, wild-eyed, mascara-smeared, swaying on the landing at the top of the stairs.

We looked at her, frozen. After what seemed like a centuries-long pause, she opened her mouth, closed it again, caught the railing to balance herself, and then said, in a rusty voice: “Did Larry leave his keys in the bank vault?”

We gazed horrified for several more moments before we realized she was waiting for a reply. Her hair was like a haystack; she appeared completely disoriented and so unsteady it seemed she might topple down the steps.

“Er, yes,” said Boris loudly. “I mean no.” And then, when she still stood there: “It’s all right. Go back to bed.”

She mumbled something and—uncertain on her feet—staggered off. The two of us stood motionless for some moments. Then—quietly, the back of my neck prickling—I got my bag and slipped out the front door (my last sight of that house, and her, though I didn’t even take a last look round) and Boris and Popchik came out after me. Together, all three of us walked rapidly away from the house and down to the end of the street, Popchik’s toenails clicking on the pavement.

“All right,” said Boris, in the humorous undertone he used when we had a close call at the supermarket. “Okay. Maybe not quite so much out-cold as I thought.”

I was in a cold sweat, and the night air—though chilly—felt good. Off in the west, silent Frankenstein flashes of lightning twisted in the darkness.

“Well, at least she’s not dead, eh?” He chuckled. “I was worried about her. Christ.”

“Let me use your phone,” I said, elbowing on my jacket. “I need to call a car.”

He fished in his pocket, and handed it to me. It was a disposable phone, the one he’d bought to keep tabs on Kotku.

“No, keep it,” he said, holding his hands up when I tried to give it back to him after I’d made my call: Lucky Cab, 777-7777, the number plastered on every shifty-looking bus-stop bench in Vegas. Then he dug out the wad of money—his half of the take from Xandra—and tried to press it on me.

“Forget it,” I said, glancing back anxiously at the house. I was afraid she might wake up again and come out in the street looking for us. “It’s yours.”

“No! You might need it!”

“I don’t want it,” I said, sticking my hands in my pockets to keep him from foisting it on me. “Anyway, you might need it yourself.”

“Come on, Potter! I wish you wouldn’t go this moment.” He gestured down the street, at the rows of empty houses. “If you won’t come to my house—kip over there for a day or two! That brick house has furniture in it, even. I’ll bring you food if you want.”

“Or, hey, I can call Domino’s,” I said, sticking the phone in my jacket pocket. “Since they deliver out here now and everything.”

He winced. “Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not.” And, in truth, I wasn’t—only so disoriented I felt I might wake up and find I’d been sleeping with a book over my face.

Boris, I realized, was looking up at the sky and humming to himself, a line from one of my mother’s Velvet Underground songs: But if you close the door… the night could last forever…

“What about you?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“Eh?” he said, looking at me with a smile.

“What’s up? Will I see you again?”

“Maybe,” he said, in the same cheerful tone I imagined him using with Bami and Judy the barkeep’s wife in Karmeywallag and everyone else in his life he’d ever said goodbye to. “Who knows?”

“Will you meet me in a day or two?”

“Well—”

“Join me later. Take a plane—you have the money. I’ll call you and tell you where I am. Don’t say no.”

“Okay then,” said Boris, in the same cheerful voice. “I won’t say no.” But clearly, from his tone, he was saying no.

I closed my eyes. “Oh God.” I was so tired I was reeling; I had to fight the urge to lie down on the ground, a physical undertow pulling me to the curb. When I opened my eyes, I saw Boris looking at me with concern.

“Look at you,” he said. “Falling over, almost.” He reached in his pocket.

“No, no, no,” I said, stepping back, when I saw what he had in his hand. “No way. Forget it.”

“It’ll make you feel better!”

“That’s what you said about the other stuff.” I wasn’t up for any more seaweed or singing stars. “Really, I don’t want any.”

“But this is different. Completely different. It will sober you up. Clear your head—promise.”

“Right.” A drug that sobered you up and cleared your head didn’t sound like Boris’s style at all, although he did seem a good bit more with-it than me.

“Look at me,” he said reasonably. “Yes.” He knew he had me. “Am I raving? Frothing at mouth? No—only being helpful! Here,” he said, tapping some out on the back of his hand, “come on. Let me feed it to you.”

I half expected it was a trick—that I would pass out on the spot and wake up who knew where, maybe in one of the empty houses across the street. But I was too tired to care, and maybe that would have been okay anyway. I leaned forward and allowed him to press one nostril closed with a fingertip. “There!” he said encouragingly. “Like this. Now, sniff.”

Almost instantly, I did feel better. It was like a miracle. “Wow,” I said, pinching my nose against the sharp, pleasant sting.

“Didn’t I tell you?” He was already tapping out some more. “Here, other nose. Don’t breathe out. Okay, now.”

Everything seemed brighter and clearer, including Boris himself.

“What did I tell you?” He was taking more for himself now. “Aren’t you sorry you don’t listen?”

“You’re going to sell this stuff, god,” I said, looking up at the sky. “Why?”

“It’s worth a lot, actually. Few thousand of dollars.”

“That little bit?”

“Not that little! This is a lot of grams—twenty, maybe more. Could make a fortune if I divide up small and sell to girls like K. T. Bearman.”

“You know K. T. Bearman?” Katie Bearman, who was a year ahead of us, had her own car—a black convertible—and was so far removed from our social scale she might as well have been a movie star.

“Sure. Skye, KT, Jessica, all those girls. Anyway—” he offered me the vial again—“I can buy Kotku that keyboard she wants now. No more money worries.”

We went back and forth a few times until I began to feel much more optimistic about the future and things in general. And as we stood rubbing our noses and jabbering in the street, Popper looking up at us curiously, the wonderfulness of New York seemed right on the tip of my tongue, an evanescence possible to convey. “I mean, it’s great,” I said. The words were spiraling and tumbling out of me. “Really, you have to come. We can go to Brighton Beach—that’s where all the Russians hang out. Well, I’ve never been there. But the train goes there—it’s the last stop on the line. There’s a big Russian community, restaurants with smoked fish and sturgeon roe. My mother and I always talked about going out there to eat one day, this jeweler she worked with told her the good places to go, but we never did. It’s supposed to be great. Also, I mean—I have money for school—you can go to my school. No—you totally can. I have a scholarship. Well, I did. But the guy said as long as the money in my fund was used for education—it could be anybody’s education. Not just mine. There’s more than enough for both of us. Though, I mean, public school, the public schools are good in New York, I know people there, public school’s fine with me.”

I was still babbling when Boris said: “Potter.” Before I could answer him he put both hands on my face and kissed me on the mouth. And while I stood blinking—it was over almost before I knew what had happened—he picked up Popper under the forelegs and kissed him too, in midair, smack on the tip of his nose.

Then he handed him to me. “Your car’s over there,” he said, giving him one last ruffle on the head. And—sure enough—when I turned, a town car was creeping up the other side of the street, surveying the addresses.

We stood looking at each other—me breathing hard, completely stunned.

“Good luck,” said Boris. “I won’t forget you.” Then he patted Popper on the head. “Bye, Popchyk. Look after him, will you?” he said to me.

Later—in the cab, and afterward—I would replay that moment, and marvel that I’d waved and walked away quite so casually. Why hadn’t I grabbed his arm and begged him one last time to get in the car, come on, fuck it Boris, just like skipping school, we’ll be eating breakfast over cornfields when the sun comes up? I knew him well enough to know that if you asked him the right way, at the right moment, he would do almost anything; and in the very act of turning away I knew he would have run after me and hopped in the car laughing if I’d asked one last time.

But I didn’t. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn’t—I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street—which was, of course, I love you.

xx.

I WAS SO TIRED that the drugs didn’t last long, at least not the feel-good part. The cab driver—a transplanted New Yorker from the sound of him—immediately sussed out something was wrong and tried to give me a card for the National Runaway switchboard, which I refused to take. When I asked him to drive me to the train station (not even knowing if there was a train in Vegas—surely there had to be), he shook his head and said: “You know, don’t you, Specs, they don’t take dogs on Amtrak?”

“They don’t?” I said, my heart sinking.

“The plane—maybe, I don’t know.” He was a young-ish guy, a fast talker, baby-faced, slightly overweight, in a T-shirt that said PENN AND TELLER: LIVE AT THE RIO. “You’ll have to have a crate, or something. Maybe the bus is your best bet. But they don’t let kids under a certain age ride without parental permission.”

“I told you! My dad died! His girlfriend is sending me to my family back east.”

“Well, hey, you don’t have anything to worry about then, do you?”

I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the ride. The fact of my father’s death had not yet sunk in, and every now and then, the lights zipping past on the highway brought it back in a sick rush. An accident. At least in New York we hadn’t had to worry about drunk driving—the great fear was that he would fall in front of a car or be stabbed for his wallet, lurching out of some dive bar at three a.m. What would happen to his body? I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in Central Park, though apparently there was a regulation against it; one evening while it was getting dark, I’d walked with Andy to a deserted area on the west side of the Pond and—while Andy kept a lookout—dumped the urn. What had disturbed me far more than the actual scattering of the remains was that the urn had been packed in shredded pieces of porno classifieds: SOAPY ASIAN BABES and WET HOT ORGASMS were two random phrases that had caught my eye as the gray powder, the color of moon rock, caught and spun in the May twilight.

Then there were lights, and the car stopped. “Okay, Specs,” said my driver, turning with his arm along the back seat. We were in the parking lot of the Greyhound station. “What did you say your name was?”

“Theo,” I said, without thinking, and immediately was sorry.

“All right, Theo. J.P.” He reached across the back seat to shake my hand. “You want to take my advice about something?”

“Sure,” I said, quailing a bit. Even with everything else that was going on, and there was quite a lot, I felt incredibly uncomfortable that this guy had probably seen Boris kissing me in the street.

“None of my business, but you’re going to need something to put Fluffy there in.”

“Sorry?”

He nodded at my bag. “Will he fit in that?”

“Umm—”

“You’re probably going to have to check that bag, anyway. It might be too big for you to carry aboard—they’ll stow it underneath. It’s not like the plane.”

“I—” This was too much to think about. “I don’t have anything.”

“Hang on. Let me check in my office back here.” He got up, went around to the trunk, and returned with a large canvas shopping bag from a health food store that said The Greening of America.

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d go in and buy the ticket without Fluffy Boy. Leave him out here with me, just in case, okay?”

My new pal had been right about not riding Greyhound without an Unaccompanied Child form signed by a parent—and there were other restrictions for kids as well. The clerk at the window—a wan Chicana with scraped-back hair—began in a monotone to go down the long baleful list of them. No Transfers. No Journeys of Longer than Five Hours in Duration. Unless the person named on the Unaccompanied Child Form showed up to meet me, with positive identification, I would be released into the custody of Child Protective Services or to local law enforcement officials in the city of my destination.

“But—”

“All children under fifteen. No exceptions.”

“But I’m not under fifteen,” I said, floundering to produce my official-looking state-issued New York ID. “I am fifteen. Look.” Enrique—envisioning perhaps the likelihood of my having to go into what he called The System—had taken me to be photographed for it shortly after my mother died; and though I’d resented it at the time, Big Brother’s far-reaching claw (“Wow, your very own bar code,” Andy had said, looking at it curiously), now I was thankful he’d had the foresight to carry me downtown and register me like a second-hand motor vehicle. Numbly, like a refugee, I waited under the sleazy fluorescents as the clerk looked at the card at a number of different angles and in different lights, at length finding it genuine.

“Fifteen,” she said suspiciously, handing it back to me.

“Right.” I knew I didn’t look my age. There was, I realized, no question of being up-front about Popper since a big sign by the desk said in red letters NO DOGS, CATS, BIRDS, RODENTS, REPTILES, OR OTHER ANIMALS WILL BE TRANSPORTED.

As for the bus itself, I was in luck: there was a 1:45 a.m. with connections to New York departing the station in fifteen minutes. As the machine spat out my ticket with a mechanical smack, I stood in a daze wondering what the hell to do about Popper. Walking outside, I was half-hoping my cab driver had driven off—perhaps having whisked Popper away to some more loving and secure home—but instead I found him drinking a can of Red Bull and talking on his cell phone, Popper nowhere in sight. He got off his call when he saw me standing there. “What do you think?”