“He comes back,” Vladimir yelled, “for his brother!”
“Enough already,” Aksinya said.
“Are you getting antsy?” Vladimir said. He hooked a finger through one of Aksinya’s belt loops, pulled her close, and looked over her head to Ilya.
“Ilyusha, I think the ladies are ready for the next phase of the evening.”
They all sat on the blankets, and so Ilya did the same. Vladimir pulled his pencil case out of his backpack, and then, out of the case, came their mother’s silver spoon. Vladimir’s eyes met Ilya’s for a second, and then Vladimir stuck the spoon in his mouth, smiled around it, and dug a vial and a bottle of what looked like eye drops from the case.
After the robbery, Timofey had gone to the two pawnshops in town and found Dedushka’s medals and their mother’s rings and the samovar, and he had presented them to Babushka as though they were precious samizdat, The Gulag Archipelago or The White Book hand copied, and Babushka had acted as though it were the loss of the things that had broken her heart, as though it could be mended by their return. Timofey hadn’t been able to find the vouchers or the spoon, and Ilya hadn’t ever told him about the Michael & Stephanie tapes or the player. As Vladimir shook a mound of powder into the spoon’s dip, Ilya wondered whether he’d sold them too, whether some other kid was listening to Michael and Stephanie right at that moment. Vladimir squeezed a few drops from the bottle on top of the powder and the powder let out a weak hiss as it turned liquid. Aksinya was sitting next to him, and she held a lighter under the spoon. She and Lana and Vladimir all watched the liquid, and Ilya watched them and wondered whether their concentration had ever been so complete. Their faces looked like the faces of the men who’d first made fire and had stared at it with a hunger and happiness they couldn’t hide.
Lana went first, and when Vladimir filled the needle and held it over her arm, Ilya closed his eyes and thought of blank paper, just as he did before vaccines and after nightmares.
“There,” Vladimir said. Ilya opened his eyes and watched Lana’s shut. Looking at her felt like a violation. Her mouth went ajar and he could see her tongue perched there on her teeth, as though she were about to speak. Vladimir slipped the needle out of her arm, wiped the tip on his jeans, and turned to Aksinya. Aksinya had pulled a hair elastic up her arm and was doing hand curls and squeezing her fist.
“Gotova,” she said. She straightened her arm. There was a vein, fat and gray as a grub, at her elbow, and Vladimir poked the needle into it without a bit of hesitation.
“You always get the ladies high first,” he said. “Common courtesy.”
Aksinya sighed and slumped back so that one of her arms was pressed against Ilya’s. Somewhere in the depths of the Tower he heard a boy yell, “Marco!” It echoed, and then a girl called back, “Polo!”
“You ready for this?” Vladimir said. Vladimir was sucking the last of the liquid into the syringe. Ilya was terrified. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but the girls seemed to be unconscious or close to it—Lana was making a sort of purring sound—and they had presumably done it before. He thought of the rumors at school. How you could die from one hit, how it turned your skin to scales. But Vladimir is here, he thought. Vladimir will take care of me. Ilya pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Vladimir was tapping the syringe.
“Ready,” Ilya said.
Vladimir looked at him. “Are you fucking kidding me, Ilyusha? Finish the vodka, but none of this. OK? This is not for you.”
It was a relief; it was embarrassing. Ilya’s arm was still outstretched, and so he grabbed the bottle and took as big a swallow as he could manage.
“It’s krokodil?”
Vladimir nodded. He was tying himself off with a bandana, his teeth on one end, and Ilya thought—too late—that he should have offered to help. “We don’t really call it that, though. We don’t really call it anything.” There was a warmth to his voice. It was a tone he only used with Ilya, when he told Ilya things about the world, about women, about music, about how to act. He would make a good teacher, Ilya realized, though of course that would never happen.
“What does it make you feel like?”
Vladimir laughed. He ran a finger down the length of his arm, where there was a bruise that stretched from his bicep to his forearm. Ilya couldn’t see any of his veins, but Vladimir stuck the needle in anyhow.
“It’s funny,” he said. He was moving the syringe around, fishing in his flesh for a vein. “Mostly it makes me remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Stuff,” Vladimir said. He pushed the plunger down. “Do you remember the time Papa took us to Leshukonskoye?”
Ilya shook his head, though there was something about it that rang a bell.
“You were little, I guess. I don’t know—four or five, maybe. We were supposed to go visit a friend of his, but there was something wrong with the Lada. It was guzzling petrol, making this thumping sound, and Papa kept joking that he’d kidnapped Stalin and stashed him in the trunk. It took us forever, even to just get to the end of Ulitsa Lenina. We had to stop at every petrol station along the way for gas and to see if there was a mechanic in. Papa would get a beer at each, and so then we were stopping for him to piss every half hour.”
Ilya laughed.
“He was a wonderful drunk, though,” Vladimir said, “which is where I get it.”
“Clearly,” Ilya said.
“You were being a bitch, of course. Complaining about being hungry all the time and carsick, and Papa just turned the music up loud, so we couldn’t hear you or the car thumping, and I remember wondering why he wasn’t worried about how we were going to make it to Leshukonskoye, let alone back home, but he wasn’t. So I didn’t worry about it either,” Vladimir said. “I can count the number of days I spent with him. On one hand.”
Ilya nodded, and Vladimir leaned back so that his head was nestled against Aksinya’s.
“Then the petrol gauge was low again, and we rolled into this station with these bright yellow pumps and a wind chime dangling above the door. Papa went inside to pay. He told us not to move a muscle, and so we didn’t. For ten minutes. Twenty. And then you had to pee, so I took you out and let you pee on the shoulder. It was hot in the car, so we sat outside instead, and wrote our names in the dust on the pumps. And there was this old cat with a goiter on its stomach that dragged in the dirt, and we found sticks and were playing this game where you got a point if you poked its goiter with a stick. Of course the cat got pissed and then it got desperate, and it was running for the road, and you were following it. Fucking toddling along after it, not a care in the world except that you wanted points, you wanted to win, and I can see this truck coming. Flat out. Fast as it can go. You were screaming at the cat, and then you tripped over your stick and fell into the road. And you were just lying there, whining about a scrape on your knee, in the middle of the road, and the truck is basically on you, is honking so loud, and I was so fucking scared, but I ran out there and pulled you to the shoulder and the truck swerved and the cat—splat.”
Vladimir clapped his hands softly.
“No way,” Ilya said.
“Swear to God,” Vladimir said. “Swear on Papa.”
Ilya lifted an eyebrow. Vladimir had lied in their father’s name before and, when called on it, said, “What does he care? He’s dead.”
Vladimir shrugged. “It’s the truth,” he said. “I practically shat my pants. I thought you were toast. I was so scared I made you hide under a blanket in the backseat with me for a full hour, sweating our balls off. And when Papa finally came out, he was even more wonderfully drunk, and he’d bought us slingshots and candy.”