“Dubai!” exclaimed Boris, collapsing forward on all fours—and then, a mushy flow of Russian in which I caught a swear word or two.
“Angliyski! Speak English.”
“Is snowing there?” Shaking my shoulder. “Man says is snowing, crazy man, ty videsh?! Snowing in Dubai! A miracle, Potter! Look!”
“That’s Dublin you ass. Not Dubai.”
“Valí otsyúda! Fuck off!”
Then I must have blacked out (an all-too-typical occurrence when Boris brought a bottle over) because the next I knew, the light was completely different and I was kneeling by the sliding doors with a puddle of puke on the carpet beside me and my forehead pressed to the glass. Boris was fast asleep, face down and snoring happily, one arm dangling off the sofa. Popchik was sleeping too, chin resting contentedly on the back of Boris’s head. I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.
I might have cried, if Boris wasn’t there. Instead, I went in the bathroom and vomited again and then after drinking some water from the tap came back with paper towels and cleaned up the mess I’d made even though my head hurt so much I could barely see. The vomit was an awful orange color from the barbecue chicken wings and hard to get up, it had left a stain, and while I scrubbed at it with dish detergent I tried hard to fasten on comforting thoughts of New York—the Barbours’ apartment with its Chinese porcelains and its friendly doormen, and also the timeless backwater of Hobie’s house, old books and loudly-ticking clocks, old furniture, velvet curtains, everywhere the sediment of the past, quiet rooms where things were calm and made sense. Often at night, when I was overwhelmed with the strangeness of where I was, I lulled myself to sleep by thinking of his workshop, rich smells of beeswax and rosewood shavings, and then the narrow stairs up to the parlor, where dusty sunbeams shone on oriental carpets.
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 a
ll 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 na
ked 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?”