A song rose up behind the mountain in his dream. He recognized it immediately. It was the lullaby his mother sang them every night. As the cranes crossed the ocean their wings grew wet and heavy and they sank. Then the mountain splintered into shards. He sat up, eyes green against the blinding dark.

The song persisted. His mother was here—wherever here was. A cave of sorts. He was sitting on a floor of rocks. As his eyes adjusted, he began making out shapes. Grisha curled beside him. A spider tripped through her hair. He put a finger in its path, then shook it off. It scrambled up a rock and slipped into a crevice. Beyond her, in a narrow passage, a group of people gathered around a fire-barrel. Somewhere among them sat the singer who was not his mother—though the song was true.

Waves of whispers enveloped him as he squatted, rubbing his sockets, longing for toothpaste. His mouth tasted like he’d been chewing mud. He looked at his hands: gloves of mud. Feet, too, caked.

How you feeling, young sir, asked a muffled voice.

Remarkably, it spoke his language. As Sasha’s eyes adjusted—like peering through a tumbler of cola—he made the figure leaning on the rock wrapped in a patchwork serape, hand to forehead and knees near his chin, was that of a clean-shaven old man with a stubborn, creased face and ropey gray hair falling loosely around his shoulders. He seemed an expansion of the stone he leaned on. An ember burned in his fist.

Sasha shivered.

Where are we, he croaked. He dimly remembered screaming before falling asleep.

The tunnels.

Below the house?

He recalled racing through the woods and the mud trying to escape Crispino and whoever else pursued them. When Grisha fell, he stopped to lift her. That, and a smell of pine needles.

Further in, the fire flickered. Men, women, and children assembled around the odor of roasting meat.

Take your time, said the man, poking a finger into his pipe bowl. Need a few days to adjust. Would you like this blanket?

Sasha shivered again but made no move.

The old man’s long nose, curled like the stem of his pipe, nearly touched his lip. His brows bridged his nose. A cloud rose from his mouth.

Have you ever looked at your palm, he asked.

Had he? Sasha wondered. Couldn’t recall.

Here’s your chance, the old man said as though he were offering him the opportunity of a lifetime. Look closely. You’re ten? Twelve? Twenty? I’m a poor judge of age. Everyone under a hundred looks the same to me.

Sasha studied his palms. Mud-gloves.

How old are you? he asked.

Sixty, seventy, a hundred and seventy. Don’t know, sighed the old man. My parents were taken by God the night I was born. Who was there to count the days? I was passed from relative to relative before finally being sold to a stranger. Since then, I’ve had many masters. For years I resisted my fate. I raged. Organized. And where did it lead me? Here. Now I’m content to serve. I tell you this to help you along. I understand your position, you see. Am with you in your fury. You understand? Heart and soul. But I also know what can be done and what can’t. Limits freed me.

Sasha took in the stranger’s words.

From a distance near the fire shouts arose. The old man turned his head.

It’s starting.

What?

What men do when trapped.

They listened as screams rose and fell until, the air thick with smoke and the smells of frying meat, a fight broke out.

The old man ignored it.

These things are predictable—and therefore uninteresting, he shrugged. Not that repetition itself is boring. Not inevitably. Each dawn feels new. Wind carries news in the folds of its currents. But this, he gestured at the brawlers, shows only the absence of sense, discipline, hope.

Grisha cried out in her sleep. She struggled awake slowly, mouth opening in a series of fishy yawns. Sasha turned from the stranger to her, ready to soothe. When she decided she was alive, and awake, she opened her eyes and said to Sasha:

I want to go home.

You’re right to hold that wish, child, the stranger intervened. Never lose it. You have gone out into the world you make new with your passage. Now, patience.

She looked from him to Sasha and back.

The fruits of recklessness fall early and rot. Think it through, children. Make your plans accord with heaven’s will, and life will open in ways you’d never expect.

Oh, shut it, old booger.

The new voice startled Sasha. A slim man sleeved in a shiny silver suit over a Megadeath t-shirt strolled out of the shadows. He had a long neck and a rubbery gait like his knees had springs that had been over-stretched. His hair was close-cropped and prickly-looking as a crown of thorns. A soul patch clung to his lower lip like a giant tic. He wore a conspicuous blue crotch-mitt.

That prophetic shit, again? When you gonna cut that crap?

He snorted so you could hear the snot at the back of his throat.

The old man stood up. He was shorter and stouter than his long face and fingers suggested.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, punk.

Yeah, yeah. Just what does a blind man see?

The kid thrust forward his large hand and waved it up and down before the old man’s face.

How many fingers?

The digits flexed like for a piano.

You the kid who nailed Crispino? Good one. Lucky King’s all business or that crazy motherfucker would have clipped your ear last night. No doubt. Old man wouldn’t let him.

What you listening to a blind man for, he asked.

If he was blind, why did he turn his head to the fire, Sasha wondered.

What are we doing here? Sasha asked.

Labor force, baby. No mystery. Hired hands.

The man wriggled his fingers.

We in jail?

This? You have never been in jail, kid, that I know. This is Paradise Island compared to jail. We got rooms, upstairs, in the sunlight, man. Just right now, it’s risky. Cops on the prowl. Bad moment.

He shook his head, thrusting his proud hands into the pockets of a suit that glistened like lizard skin in the far-flung firelight.

No jails needed, man. King’s our friend. Pays cash. Brings doctors. Hides us from the cops. Work’s not too hard. Brother, you’re in heaven and don’t know it. Kiss the rocks you’re here. Soon’s the heat’s off, up we go.

Why are those guys fighting? Sasha asked about the struggle around the fire.

Nobody likes it down here. Been three days—came down right before the raids began. Old man always gets word early. Besides, it’s rainy and shit, there’s nothing to do, and the humidity sucks.

Why don’t you escape?

The kid’s low snorting creeped him out.

What show going in your head? Escape where? Escape why? This is what we ran to. We ‘scaped to be here. Leave for what? Home? You remember home? If the King wanted to screw us, all it’d take is a phone call. Cops all, Where your papers and shit. Not the point, man. Point’s finding a way for some serious long term financial planning in these admittedly inauspicious conditions, if you know what I mean.

Which Sasha did not.

Stop it, roared the old man. They’re just kids! Don’t listen to him. Scam scam scam. Next he’ll tell you he’ll protect you, make sure nobody bothers you. All you do is give him the cash the King gives you. But you try getting it back from him. I’ve seen it more than once. Sells protection when the only one you need protecting from is him. Ignore him, son. He’ll leave.

One day, old man…

Why not now? See what an old man knows.

A loose-skinned arm shot out, grabbing Gumby by the neck, pinching hard enough for his screams to incite cries of concern from the crowd around the fire where the fighting had stopped, leaving a restive group trolling for action.

Nothing’s going on, the old man shouted as he hurled Gumby to the ground.

Okay, we’re done here. Take off. Don’t come back. Now on, they’re with me.

The younger man dusted himself off and limped away, scowling.

Where was I, the old man coughed. Always men like that around, he said. Situation breeds them like swamp lice. Don’t worry. Come on. My daughter will get us something to eat.

Grisha and Sasha found themselves surrounded by people who remembered their home. Several even knew his father, though not well, as he worked for the King only a few hours a week, on a project no one would talk about.

Poor wee one, a grandmother with a spud of a nose and the moustache of a lifetime said to Grisha.

Grisha glared.

About his parents Sasha received different reports: Forget it, they’re lost, maybe forever, some said. Not true, others countered, it depends on the courts, how clogged the system is. Could take years. Grow old in jail.

And the kids?

Again, opinions varied. Everyone had different stories, distinct lessons. Sometimes children were placed with relatives. If they didn’t have any, they might be returned to their own country for sorting. Or they might be swallowed by the system: detention centers, group homes, adoption—sometimes by monsters. Kids themselves had no say.

Better stay with us, said a man whose own two children, Grisha’s age, wrapped their arms around his legs.

Whatever happened, Sasha would decide his own fate—but he said nothing.

After supper, Lassa, the old man’s daughter—a sturdy woman in her thirties with a thick square nose, bushy brows, and a warm, direct manner—led them to a low-ceilinged corridor with rows of bunk beds.

This is our corner. You’ll be safe here. These two are empty.

Be all right, Grisha, Sasha whispered.

But Grisha the Silent looked unconvinced. So many strangers were suddenly intruding on her life and she couldn’t stop them: she was an animal plucked from its nest and thrust into the limelight of a popular zoo.

Sasha sighed a brotherly sigh. He leaned over Grisha, clamped his hand on top of the curly hair trembling to her shoulders, and mumbled what he believed were adult-sounding assurances. She peered at him with one eye. Sing me that song, she pleaded. As if on cue, a few bunks off, the voice that woke him earlier resumed—doubtless lulling her own brood with the melancholy anthem whose soporific power soon wafted Grisha to safety.

Sasha, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep. Staring at the ceiling, he noticed a lizard—a salamander, he guessed, though he’d never seen one here before—scrambling along the damp rocks as though hunting an exit. He worried about Crispino. Would he want an eye for an eye? And what if he went after Grisha again? They weren’t safe here. He couldn’t see himself working for the King, or living under Margaret’s supervision.

The salamander had slipped into a crack.

Strange thoughts filled his head. Who am I, he wondered. I just woke up here. I thought because I was alive, everything would follow but that’s not how things work. They expect things of me. Why? Who are they? Where did they come from? What makes them think it’s their world and I should pay attention, any attention at all, to what they want? Sometimes I think I’m a god sunk in stone, trapped inside rock, yet I am aware, I am a drop of light buried in the heart of an immovable mass. There’s a flurry of birds in my head, I have their names, who taught me crow, sparrow, finch, Baltimore oriole? What should I be able to do? Let things fly. Fly myself, a little. No, I know who I am.

But could a salamander really walk through fire?

He was like the salamander, alone and unafraid.

He stared at his palm again. He’d washed the mud off earlier. This is me, he thought. I am this hand, these eyes. I am inside myself yet I am not the self I live inside of. Maybe I really am god. Maybe I can make more things happen than I imagine.

These big thoughts intrigued him. He didn’t recall having them before.

Finally, he sat up. Around him rose the snores of some two dozen souls. Although they were from his homeland, he didn’t feel any more at ease with them than with strangers. Beyond the bunk area, near the fire, he saw the old man still awake, smoking his pipe.

You’re wondering what you should do, the old man said when he approached. Sit here. He tapped a rock to his right.

How did the blind man recognize him? How did he know what he was thinking?

It isn’t hard to read minds, the old man replied to Sasha’s unspoken question. Everything is there for us to see, if we know how to look.

Thought you said you learned limits.

I have. They’re not what you expect. Here, the old man said, blowing a balloon of smoke into the air. Look!

As the silvery cloud drifted upward Sasha saw a toy-sized green-haired woman swimming in the swirling fumes. When he recognized her, he narrowed his eyes and glanced at the old man. He shifted restlessly from foot to foot and restrained his impulse to reach over and grab the hovering bubble. It was his mermaid-mother.

The things in our heart are clearest of all, once you know the art, murmured the old man. Don’t worry, she won’t lose her power just because I’ve seen her. Truth is, I barely make her out myself—you see her far more clearly, I assure you. She’ll help you again, as she has before. Keep helping you until you find her.

Sasha watched the cloud drift higher and slowly dissolve until all that remained was his own longing swelling within him and threatening to spill out—too soon, Sasha knew. He didn’t understand enough yet. He was only beginning to see who he was and what he had to do.

In school I studied science, the old man said as though by way of an explanation. Loved chemistry. Long, long ago.

Can you teach me?

You can teach yourself.

How?

You’re learning already.

The old man bent over, picked up a stick and blew on its tip, igniting a gold flame fine as the nib of a fountain pen. He began drawing shapes on the rock at his feet. Soon shimmering circles and triangles of fire flickered in the air.

The tree of life, at your service, he said. Don’t worry about your mother and father. They’ll survive. They worry about you, but we’ll send them some dreams, shall we? Keep your strength for what you can do.

He blew on the dancing fire.

The script of flames rose higher and higher. Sweat beaded Sasha’s face and he shielded his eyes as the flames rose, rumbling, and he watched in terror as the old man’s eyebrows caught fire and then the flames raced along his cape and down to his feet and soon they’d embraced him top to toe and the old man stood there with his arms out and his feet wide apart like a burning scarecrow until his lips began to melt and Sasha opened his eyes and felt the hard bunk under him and saw the salamander fretting along the ceiling with his clothes soaked in sweat and the tips of his hair brittle and singed.

Others were already awake, drinking coffee and laughing as though the battle royale from the night before never happened.

Sasha peered into the bunk below. When he saw her bed empty, he fell to his feet and was startled by her smiling face standing before him, beside another girl her age. The two were holding hands and giggling. It looked like they’d been braiding each other’s hair.

You were screaming, Grisha said. We came to make sure.

Grisha had found a friend her age just as he resolved they needed to push on. Would he have to kidnap her?

He saw the others shuffling away, down the tunnel.

The old man, apparently unharmed, sat in the same spot against the rock. He alone wasn’t rushing off.

Make your move, he mumbled into his beard.

Where are they going, Sasha asked.

King said it’s safe for night shift. They’re going to work.

Sasha grabbed a roll from a tray near the fire and hurried after them.

Grisha, he called.

What, she said petulantly, frowning and rolling her eyes at her friend. Older brothers were a bother.

Come here.

No.

Her new friend, hand on hip, glared at Sasha through a pair of pink-rimmed glasses. How dare he disrupt their new intimacy?

Come children, cried Lassa, who Sasha guessed was the girl’s mother.

When Sasha repeated her name, Grisha registered his tone. She separated from her girlfriend, who squealed and stamped her foot in protest, and went back to him.

Brother and sister looked at each other and clasped hands.

She was his baby Jesus, and he was god the father, with obligations.

People climbed stairs out.

They emerged inside a large, well-lit warehouse the size of a WalMart. Everywhere there were trees, flowers, bushes: weeping cherries, rows of lavender, dendrobriums, phalaenopsis, vari-colored pansies, mottled impatiens, hibiscus, forsythia about to bud. Paradise in plastic tubs.

Flat-bed trucks and fork lifts zipped recklessly up and down the aisles to the sonic whip of hip-hop while traffic controllers in orange suits tried imposing order on the churning hive.

Emerging at the end of the line, Sasha scanned the place. There! Inside a glass booth suspended above the floor, studying the new arrivals, was the King. Beside him stood Crispino, eye bandaged.

On impulse Sasha waved. When their three eyes met, he knew he couldn’t stay.

Let’s go, Grisha, he said.

They looked at the people they’d once been surrounded by back home rushing off to work among the abundant, artificially grown plants in a strange country cursed with perennially foul weather, bone-breaking winters and short sultry summers, that was now his home.

Head bowed, the pair moved casually toward the well-marked exit.

35

The car pulled to the side of the road, window down.

Where you kids going? The smiling woman shouted out the window.

Sasha squinted. The sun had finally reemerged, and it was too much too quickly. Everyone was sun drunk. Fears of a catastrophe on a biblical scale, forty days and forty nights of it, were suspended. The light cancelled all grievances. Once more, the world promised. So it had felt to Sasha and Grisha when they awoke in the forest. He’d noticed a mushroom beside her chin and he wondered if it were poison. Their clothes were still wet when the facts of their situation returned like a sullen cloud.

Sasha studied the young woman’s face. Her skin was pale and freckled, her brows and hair the red of blood oranges. But her smile looked like a way of life.

This is a bad stretch of road. You shouldn’t be walking here, even in daylight.

When neither replied, she added: A boy was killed here last week.

I’m hungry, Grisha announced over Sasha’s shoulder.

You’re shivering! The young woman’s voice rose.

Sasha hadn’t noticed it himself. They’d slept under a thicket but wet clothes seemed the least of their worries.

The woman pulled her car over, crunching gravel in the narrow breakdown lane. At that moment a large truck appeared around the turn, and though she left him wide berth, the driver’s horn bellowed.

See, she said, approaching the children. Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed with concern as she tried to read some sense into what she was seeing.

Sasha too frowned. What must they look like—mud-caked, grass-matted, uncombed? They were no longer merely runaways. He, Sasha, was a wanted man, a criminal. For all he knew, cops were scouring the area. Not to mention the King and Crispino. How many children fitting their description—one five foot boy and a girl four and a half—could there be on the roads? The most powerful police force on earth was after him. But he’d already made up his mind they would never catch up.

The woman wore faded jeans and a rust-colored corduroy jacket with padded shoulders.

Don’t worry, she said, I won’t hurt you.

The woods where they spent the night lined one side of the road. He remembered the deer he’d seen on first opening his eyes as the sun rose. Woodpecker at the oak, chipmunk in bluebells, flies round his head. Had he dreamed the giant ant with Crispino’s face?

They had to get as far as possible from the green houses.

I’m hungry, Grisha repeated.

I have an apple in the car, the woman said.

No thank you, Sasha shook his head emphatically.

I wasn’t talking to you, said the woman. Is she your sister? Stay here, I’ll get it.

Grisha nodded. Oh, look, a bunny, she cried, pointing at a clear patch in the woods across the street.

Where? Sasha asked, without looking in her direction.

There, Grisha emphasized as the young woman returned.

As his sister bit into the green apple Sasha said:

Do you live here?

No, the woman answered. Wind rifled the long brown hair scattered loose over her shoulders. Her nails were chewed to the cuticles.

Are you lost? She asked.

Sasha shook his head.

Good. Where you going?

He hesitated before saying softly: New York.

New York! That’s two hundred miles from here. You planning to walk? You are, aren’t you?

Sasha nodded. Two hundred miles didn’t seem far. His school was two miles from his house. New York was just fifty roundtrips to school. They could do that.

You were?

He nodded again.

Grisha finished the apple and tossed the core into the woods.

Thank you, she said.

Another truck blew by.

After it passed, the woman said:

How about a lift part of the way? I’m going to New Haven. Do you know New Haven?

Sasha shook his head no.

It’s on the way. It will save you a few days walking, she laughed.

When he scowled, she quickly added:

I’m not laughing at you, I’m sorry. You’re a brave boy. Are your parents in New York?

The concern in her voice touched him but he knew better than to say anything. He looked at Grisha, then he said:

All right. We’ll go.

But that was all he’d tell her.

Is someone expecting you? Tell me. I could get in trouble picking you up. Kidnapping.

My uncle, he said, tapping his wrist. Rain had erased the number completely.

Tell me in the car. Hungry? MacDonald’s up the road. We can stop there.

Excuse the mess, she said, sweeping magazines and papers from the back seat. She shoved some of them into a bag. Others she just pushed to the floor.

My name is Katia, she said, leaning on the door.

I’m Sasha.

Where you from?

NB.

NB! Don’t sound it. And before that? Not the talkative type, eh? Murder your nanny, did you? Running away from home? I did, once. Three blocks later Father pulled up with Ralph—our lab—in the front seat. Maybe I should just take you to the cops!

You said MacDonald’s, Sasha insisted.

I didn’t need another mystery this morning, she threw her hands out at the windshield.

Like she was already remembering how different her life had been in the minutes before she saw them walking alongside the road.

Sasha stared straight ahead. The complexities just kept multiplying. Yet he knew where he needed to get to. He would focus on that.

She stepped away from the back door and opened the front.

Get in, Grisha, Sasha said.

Where was she? He looked around.

There, the woman said, pointing across the road.

She’d wandered into the woods from which they’d recently emerged.

What are you doing? He shouted.

There’s a bunny, she said over her shoulder.

Let’s go, Sasha said.

Grisha looked sorrowfully at the woods, then dropped her head and stepped into the street.

Wait, said the woman. I know who you are. I know exactly.

From around the corner another truck appeared, the shark’s grill barreling forward at an unholy pace.

Grisha! Sasha screamed. He began to run. But it was too late. The truck, carrying a dozen BMWs on two tiers of ramps, flattened her against its grill and roared on.

Did she, in that final second, remember their house in the mountains, the chickens chasing the dog in the yard, the red and green birds laughing in the trees, the goat that ate at the table with the family, Mira the cat, Jess, their mother and father hiking with them to the lip of the volcano that had watched over her family for generations?

36

Who knows how much time passed before Sasha heard the woman screaming, or where he himself disappeared to in the minutes after the accident. He went somewhere he’d never been before, the space inside him opening like a cleft in the sea where he saw the old man weaving a circle of fire, arms raised and shouting his name, shouting and shouting gale-force until he stepped through the flames like a salamander and stood in the center of the conflagration looking out at the burning world feeding on itself, consuming everything it created, all fuel for its own continuance unto the end of time. A redwing blackbird dove from the tree into the bushes.

Oh my god, oh my god, he said.

No. This didn’t happen. This didn’t happen.

But it had.

What were his parents thinking at this moment? This very moment, because only it mattered, moment of accounts, preordained at the birth of time, every last hair numbered, that little they could count on, the moment they weren’t where their children needed them?

Overhead an eagle blotted the sun with its wings. If it clapped them together, it would crush the earth. If it rose any higher, it would burn. The creak of branches grew so loud it hurt both Sasha and Katia like a fingernail ice-skating across a blackboard in their skulls.

A siren startled them out of their daze. Lights blazing, the Crown Vic roared past. They had to leave. The sky had fallen, and it had buried them.

Having no alternative, the sun shone.

Sasha woke to what sounded like a woman screaming down the hall. He leaned on an elbow and listened. The voice sounded like his mother’s.

The bed was still rocking. He crawled to the edge, gripping the sheets tightly.

Another scream. This time the cry sounded nearer.

Then all was still again. A razor of light slashed under the door.

He rolled over on his back and looked up at the painted sky across the ceiling. Shadows of the boat’s carved stern sailed over the walls. The lapping of the waves lulled him. He reaffirmed his decision to let nothing scare him. He was learning that he could decide a thing, then carry it forward. He didn’t need to be dragged down by events. Just two days ago he was wondering if Jess would ever let him kiss her; worrying how to outwit Yuill, a kid at school with bad teeth and one lazy eye who called him boat boy—how did he know Sasha had come over by boat? Sometimes Yuill’s friends joined in, and the day threatened to dissolve to nightmare for Sasha, until he learned how to put his mind elsewhere. Sometimes the elsewhere he put his mind was on no less a force than God himself, about whom he’d heard so much from his mother, who’d promised him that God would always protect him. The family had gone to church every Sunday since getting off the boat. Even his father joined them when he could. It was the only time he saw most of the other people who’d also been on the boat. The priest waved the incense burner whose smoke was like the mist on morning waters, and when he spoke about the baby Jesus Sasha thought of Grisha as a baby, weak and entirely dependant, and he thought of the stories about the animals surrounding Jesus and remembered the cows, goats, and chickens in the yard when his sister was born, and somehow it came to him that maybe his sister was also Jesus, he wasn’t sure how this was possible, it was just a feeling, but the feeling possessed him. Thinking that Grisha might be Jesus made him braver. His sister was Jesus and he was her protector. God’s guardian. He felt a surge in his chest and a brightening behind his eyes, as though there were a secret room inside him that opened on another dimension entirely, one he couldn’t see with his senses, which he nevertheless knew was there.

Then he heard the scream again.

Sasha rolled over and dropped to the floor. He he’d fallen asleep in his clothes. He bent to feel his sneakers. Wet. He groped the packet in his sock rubbing at his ankle and almost pulled it out, then decided to leave it. Finally, Sasha rose and brushed himself off as though he’d been sleeping in straw.

In his dream a dog had torn Grisha apart while he stood there, unable to move. He’d watched the dog devour her brain from the bowl of her skull, then lick it clean with its long tongue. Was this the fate of all gods?

The soft light in the hall welcomed him even as another round of screams echoed down the hall. He walked confidently in their direction. A floral pattern ran along the baseboard. He liked the way the rug felt under his feet. He picked his nose and rubbed his finger on the crotch of his pants. Without thinking, he put a booger on his tongue. It tasted salty and slimey, like the tail of a snail. When the scream came again it sounded very near and he stopped. The sound was liquid, harsh, and passionate: an exhalation of wonder, desperation, urgency, and the flavor of reprieve. What might he find? A man beating a woman? A couple making love? He’d seen both—not only his parents, because they’d lived in a tiny house with no secrets, but also aunts, uncles, and neighbors. When he was Grisha’s age, he’d stand at a neighbor’s window and watch Mr. Binet move up and down on the Mrs.

A yelp, followed by a volley of gasps, echoed from behind the next door. His hand was on the knob, he was about to turn it when he was seized by doubt. What if he found Nivea and Rector or the King and Margaret—or devils and spirits? What would they say to each other?

The room was empty. Not a stick of furniture. He turned on the light. The white paint on the walls was yellowing. No shades or curtains. He recalled Nivea saying her grandfather left most of the rooms unfurnished.

The house was still again, as though, after tossing and turning much of the night, it had finally found its desired position and fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep.

He would call his uncle in the morning.

Calmed yet disappointed, the boy wandered back to their room. He paused and looked up and down the hall. Then he yawned. He opened the door and walked in.

31

He was about to collapse on the bed when he noticed Grisha wasn’t there.

The covers lay clumped at the foot of the bed. He backtracked to the door, turned on the lights, and scanned the room. Her shoes were gone.

The fist of god himself rabbit-punched him in the chest. Grisha was all he had left. She was his charge. How could he have left her alone?

What if the screams were Grisha’s? But she’d been lying there when he left—hadn’t she? Hadn’t he pinched her sixth toe or nudged the heap of covers he assumed was her?

No, he thought. No, no, no. He sank down on the bed. Now his sister was gone. Taken. By whom? Where to? Why? The universe was playing hide and seek with him, taking everything so he could—look for them? Or learn to be without them? Alone. He didn’t want to be alone, wasn’t ready for it, not yet. Maybe some day, when he was as old as the King. He wanted his sister back. Immediately.

He wrestled on his damp sneakers.

He bit the inside of his mouth as a small voice chanted: You’ve lost Jesus, you’ve lost Jesus! He’d find her if he had to tear down the entire house, even if he had to crack open the earth and shake the devil by his horns. Alone, unarmed, and afraid, Sasha stepped back into the hall.

32

A faint sound of someone singing drifted through the static of the never-ending rain.

He ran down the stairs. In the window he saw the greenhouse they’d entered that morning glowed in the dark, ablaze with light. He hurried out.

His feet sank deep into the mud and he had to struggle to pull them up, one by one. A sneaker came off and he felt the cool clay sucking at his sock.

Standing outside the greenhouse, Sasha watched the King with his back to him, waving his arms as though fighting off invisible demons. He squinted to see if Grisha was there but the rain blinded him, so he hurled open the door and found himself, dripping wet, inside the greenhouse where a half-familiar aria filled the air.

When the door slammed the King, startled, froze, his arms hanging in mid-air. His face appeared distorted, as though he had been interrupted in the middle of reciting some voluptuous verse.

Where’s Grisha, Sasha demanded without waiting to be recognized.

What is it, boy, the King asked.

Where’s my sister?

His chest seemed to push out several inches, his fingers opened and closed like gills. He sniffled. A chill ran through him. This rain. He was catching a cold.

Your sister? I’ve no idea. By the time I returned from my chat with the trufflers, the house looked empty. Margaret’s rehearsal ran late. I don’t believe she’s back yet, he chuckled. Nivea and Rector went off somewhere. Fucking their tiny brains out, I expect. As they should, at their age. I had no idea where you were. Thought maybe you’d wandered off. People come and go here all the time. That would have been the best thing—if you two just disappeared. My job’s making sure the spice doth flow.

He stopped and raised his arms, gesturing at the crowded air. Listen, he said. I listen and I understand. Do you?

They stood there while the tenor finished his song.

After a brief silence, the King said:

God knows why I bother.

He looked around at the plants.

Oh they look beautiful all right. Everyone says so. People tell you, they’re so beautiful, your flowers. What do they know? In fact, they’re monsters. They want everything from you. Temperature just so, special foods, not just water, costly nutrients. They need to be moved, turned to the sun, under grow lamps. You can’t imagine the trouble we go to. Who am I, the Sun King, that I’m expected to bring light to the darkness? People, they walk up and down these rows feeling good, romantic. The smells. The colors. They see nothing. They know nothing. But I do. For me, it’s different. Sometimes I come here like this, late at night. When the plants are loudest. I walk here utterly inside their world—but then, it’s all their world, isn’t it, and they know it—everything, the grass, the trees, the earth and sky exist for them, what is the sun but their servant? We think it’s for us, but they know better. We’re nothing to them. They make the air we breathe. They dreamed us. And I hate them.

Rain pounded the glass.

Sasha looked at the rows and rows of plants.

Well, the King said. That’s just how it is.

I am going to keep you here, I think.

He watched Sasha’s face but the boy kept his head down.

Here you’ll be safe. Protected. Bastards out there looking for you by now. Your mother will have told someone. Social services will have sent somebody back. Judges will be screaming at Social Services for not getting back in time, letting you go missing. Need to keep an eye on you. Don’t want them getting their hands on you, those well-meaning, cruel people. Shove you in a house with strangers who get money caring for other people’s children. Sick people, usually. Wouldn’t want them raising you. You’d grow sicker and sicker. Your bones would break through your skin. No, no, we’ll keep you away from them. My name is Walter, by the way. Call me Walt.

King. Walt. Sasha didn’t understand Americans yet. In the last year he’d met thousands—in school, traveling, walking through the streets of this city along the sea, gulls scolding and swooping everywhere, blitzing this sad fish town for the holocausts visited on the world by these puny, pig-eating cannibals.

The King paced and muttered and waved his hands.

If this is biology, how can we hope to rise above it, since that would mean transcending ourselves? He asked. How can you go beyond who you are without that changing the definition of you in the first place?

If you could go higher you wouldn’t be you, thought Sasha, you would be that higher thing.

But if you could be that higher thing, didn’t that mean you were that thing and not the little being that toggled and whipped and tumbled and stuttered around in this big place outside your head? What if he really was big, as he sometimes imagined himself, a giant, a billion times bigger than a whale? If so, then he had not a thing to fear. He could handle the man, yes, yes, yes he could.

You look worried, said the King. No need. I’m not going to hold you prisoner here. I believe in open spaces, man freely roaming the range. Farther. Moon’s a rest stop, a place to piss. There are other dimensions out there. That’s what we’re aiming at.

Walt looked at Sasha.

Your father did a little work for me.

He used a pocket handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow.

Men like the King knew things Sasha didn’t even realize existed; they had possibilities open to them Sasha couldn’t imagine. His world was small and terribly tight. But, if the King was mad, what good did his knowledge do him?

Finally Sasha asked again:

Where’s Grisha?

My house has many rooms, the King replied, his lower lip drooping. My guess, she’s in one of them. Probably just where you left her.

33

He didn’t bother closing the kitchen door behind him. Let it flood. He raced up the stairs.

She was sitting up on the boat bed, trembling.

Beside her, breathless, rubbing both palms over eyes and forehead stood Crispino, skull glistening in the light. His jacket pooled on the floor, his black t-shirt clung to his ribs.

Look who decided to crawl back, Crispino hissed, darting his tongue out and running it over his lips.

Did Crispino think Sasha was Red Riding Hood? Sasha kept his gaze on Grisha, who momentarily stopped crying and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

Don’t worry, Grisha, he said. He winked.

That’s not the advice I’d give, Crispino sounded offended. You’re in my world now.

Sasha didn’t take his eyes off his sister, who pressed arms tight against her sides. She hadn’t responded, so he winked again. Her curls were askew on her head. Her nostrils quivered. She wasn’t going to let this creep scare her anymore. She hooked her fingers in the corners of her mouth and pulled back.

Fucking brats, Crispino spat.

Sasha’s thoughts honed to a point. Everything slowed: his breath, the rocking of the boat, the way his sister’s eyelid trembled. At this pace, it would take years to cross the room. He stepped forward deliberately, until he reached the foot of the bed. He longed to put his hand on Grisha’s shoulder but he held back, his mind circling targets. Then, in one swift motion he folded his knees, leaned forward, and grabbed the packet from his sock with his left hand. With his right, he pulled out the paring knife he’d packed away earlier, and hurled it at Crispino’s face. The blade sailed true, piercing the eyeball. Liquid spurted from the socket. Sasha didn’t stay to watch. He grabbed his sister off the bed, and ran with her for the stairs.

By the time he reached the kitchen he was breathing hard. The girl was heavier than she looked. He opened the cellar door, and deposited Grisha near the wall of wines while he heaved open the bulkhead. Then he signaled her to go first, down into the tunnels.

Go, he said.

They ran. They have run. They will run. So it feels, though it’s only been a day. Their footsteps echo in Sasha’s ears steady as the rain in the world above, the drums of time and motion and dream. They advance down the narrow passage with its flickering lights, some bulbs burned out, and they recede in his mind even as they run, and he feels time running through them, he doesn’t understand but he knows stones make walls they can’t pass through, so they move across the space allowed and call it freedom, and they can’t stop. No, he won’t have it; he won’t allow it, no, not forever; he must run now but he won’t run forever. One day he’ll stop and wonder why he ran. Who gave the order? Grisha’s sobbing knots him; he must protect her, his life has no other meaning now. She is his meaning: why he is here; why he will stay.

He’s worried he’s made a wrong turn because where’s the stairway leading to the greenhouse, so he tries a different route, another tunnel, and they run, though he’s winded, and limping a little and then something leaps out in front of them, it’s a huge white rabbit, and then another, and another, and then there are four rabbits running ahead when the tube of light flares out with a hiss and they are racing in darkness and he’s hearing sounds, shouts and moans, like the screams he heard earlier only he’s beyond fear, he needs to keep moving until they find the stairs. The cries—as though someone were slowly torturing a flock of owls—grow nearer, there’s another passage to the right where it’s all coming from. They stop. They look, but what they see is hard to understand and in truth they can’t see clearly, to see a thing you need the words to name it and they don’t know what it is: they see a barred cell crowded with people, men, women, and children in rags, shredded jeans and dirty shifts and torn jackets with pockets flapping down. The men have beards. The women’s breasts are exposed. Dozens of children clutch the legs of the adults like monkeys. When they see Sasha and Grisha, they stop crying. A man caresses the bar, up and down, up and down, with an open palm. A child glances nervously from its mother to the two visitors. Then, softly at first, and gradually louder, they begin to wail as one: Open the door, Open the door.

What look like parachutes tangled in the trees turn out to be people webbed to the branches. He stares at a naked woman, her arms and legs pulled tight, twined to the spread arms of a tree whose clustered blue flowers half-cover her face. As he stares at her, she opens her eyes and looks directly at him. She seems to want to say something but a stopper, an inflated binky like the kind his sister until recently sucked on, fills her mouth. She tries twisting her neck side to side but it too seems held in place though he can’t see by what.

Sasha isn’t sure what he’s seeing is real, it can’t be, no more than the mermaid, and he yanks Grisha’s hand. They turn away. They run.

The moment they stepped into the kitchen Margaret yelped:

Nivea!

When the young woman smoking a cigarette at the window whirled around, Sasha observed that she looked nothing like her cheetah mother: black hair, full lips pierced with a silver stud. Only her eyes shared the older woman’s dark intensity, defused by the brightly colored bangles dancing up and down her wrist.

Mother and daughter embraced stiffly.

Then the young woman asked:

Who’s this?

Margaret acted as though she hadn’t heard her.

How long are you staying, dear?

Monday, mom.

I thought Rector was coming.

He had work to finish. He’ll come later.

That’s nice. Now why don’t you three get acquainted? I have to prepare for tonight. Wish you wouldn’t smoke, dear.

When the door closed, the young woman hissed: Thank god. Fucking gorgon. My mother.

The children stayed silent.

Nivea pouted.

Who are you? What are you staring it? I know. I look like a slut! It’s the eyes. My real mother was Vietnamese. I’m adopted. Didn’t they tell you? What did they tell you?

Sasha shifted on his feet. He looked at the ground, then at his sister, then at this new madwoman.

I’m Sasha. They took our mother.

Nivea combed her fingers through her flat black hair.

What? Who? Why’d they take her?

She was the first person to ask that question.

I don’t know. The police did it.

Will she come back?

Sasha shrugged.

They took our father too.

At that Grisha began to cry. Sasha stepped away. She was embarrassing him before this new pretty lady.

I’m sorry, little girl, Nivea said with a surprising sweetness that made Grisha want to reach up and slap her.

Nivea meanwhile leaned over and stroked Grisha’s curls.

What’s your name?

When his sister didn’t respond, Sasha spoke for her.

It’s Grisha.

Don’t be afraid. Girsha?

Grisha, Sasha corrected her.

Grisha! Nivea smiled broadly, with the same reflexive insanity Sasha noted in her mother. Adoptive mother.

Your sister’s sensitive. You know what Oscar Wilde said: Losing one parent, that is truly a tragedy; but losing two, that smacks of carelessness. I act, you know.

She giggled. Then her mouth dropped, her eyes went flat. She shook her head.

I’m so so sorry, that can’t be funny to you. God! I’m so inappropriate.

She took a deep breath.

How old are you, little Grisha?

Grisha stared at the floor.

She refused to speak to this idiot.

Nivea turned to Sasha.

I’m being a twit. You’ve landed in a madhouse. Run away. Don’t worry. I’ll help. Just here for the weekend, though. If things get bad, we’ll escape. We’ll go back to Connecticut.

Are you near the park? Sasha asked hopefully.

What park is that? Plenty of parks near me.

In New York.

Oh, Central Park. No, this isn’t near Central Park. You’ve been to Central Park! Look, I bet you’re scared. I don’t exactly understand what happened to your parents, and it’s none of my business. And I have no idea what you’re doing in my parents’ house. But can I tell you something?

She crouched down.

Sasha was almost as bewildered by her as he’d been by the police or her mother.

It’s not all bad to lose them. I’ll tell you, sometimes I wish I could lose mine. They’re not even mine. I’m adopted. I told you that. And they’re crazy. Told you that too. Don’t know why I’m getting nervous. Running from them most of my life. They pull me back. You know: ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in?’ Doesn’t matter. Just watch, Mother will serve lamb for lunch. Knows I’m a vegetarian and always serves meat when I’m here.

She stooped eyelevel to Grisha.

Grisha turned toward the refrigerator.

My god, she took you there, didn’t she? Topper’s freak show. I mean the people. Animals have souls.

Sasha nodded.

Did I tell you I’m in Othello? My mother’s Cleopatra, and I’m Desdemona the same month. Crazy, no? Not competitive in the least. Plus I have a terrible memory. One minute to the next, nothing sticks.

It dawned on Sasha that absolutely no one grasped their predicament. The other people barely registered it. Grisha and he were invisible. The invisible children. Everyone was lost in the sprawling crawlspaces of their own lives. Busy. Behind. Racing. Lost. Everyone was lost.

23

Sasha needed a plan. Money. Make it, steal it, but get it. He kept seeing his neighbor Mrs. Halliday’s arm shutting the door as he and his sister followed Piper Crispino. Not even Jess tried to help.

You’re a pretty glum pair, you know.

She clapped her hand to her mouth. Pretty girl. Very pretty.

Sorry, I can’t stop, can I? I just can’t help myself. Always happens to me here. Like I’m ten again. Your age, I bet.

We’re hungry, Sasha interrupted.

Mother promised lunch. Took you to Topper’s. Now we’re in the kitchen and she’s gone. Flaked. Totally. What she’s on this month, I wonder.

Okay, what do you want? Nivea, hand on a boney hip, asked—to their abiding gratitude.

Sasha stared at the spines of the cereal boxes, the bread box, the fridge. One need met at last.

24

They were still shoveling food when the doorbell rang.

Oh God. Rector’s not due until this afternoon. Wait here.

She hurried to the front door. Sasha watched her black boots stomp out.

How are you? He asked Grisha, who gave him a look he didn’t understand.

Nivea returned, eyes like black petals, Sasha thought.

Cops. She was shaking her bangels. Don’t worry. I don’t think they’re looking for you. They want to talk to my old man. Seems like they know him. Asked for the King. She frowned, rolled her eyes, and looked around as though someone might have snuck into the room.

I think they know what he’s up to.

Sasha decided not to ask what that might be.

Want to see?

They’re there? he asked. He assumed she’d sent them away.

When I said I didn’t know where he was, they said they’d wait. Look, she pushed open the door. Sasha peered down the long corridor to the foyer where two men in raincoats with umbrellas dripping beside them stood staring at the ground. One wore the kind of dark blue wool sailor’s cap his father liked; the other was drying his glasses with his tie. A puddle pooled at their feet.

Nice vacation this is turning out to be, Nivea scowled. Come on. If you’re finished eating.

25

She opened the basement door and down they went into the tunnels again. This time Grisha didn’t bother holding on. Sasha concentrated on trying to remember where they turned. He couldn’t rely on anyone. The long fluorescent tubes were like ribbons of moonlight dimly illuminating the stones and shadows. They made a right at the third crossroad. Here the floor below felt like they were walking on soft metal that gave way underfoot. Deeper in, the temperature rose until he was sweating.

Do all green-houses have these tunnels? Sasha asked Nivea, breathing heavily.

This is the underground kingdom, she said. Don’t think there’s another like it in the world. Beats walking in the rain. Here.

They stopped at a set of stairs much like the ones down which they’d come.

Nivea’s cigarette hissed on the moist metal.

I hope he’s here, she said over her shoulder.

26

As they opened the bulkhead, they were greeted by a woman singing Puccini.

The music was punctuated by the bark of an approaching dog.

This greenhouse, Sasha saw immediately, had no plants. In fact, it was set up as a kind of laboratory, with microscopes and test tubes. He’d once studied at a dead bee under a microscope at school. It was like looking at a space monster. In that instance he’d understood that there really was an invisible world alongside the visible one, only it wasn’t really invisible, you just had to know where and how to look, and it made him think that even when his mother prayed there was probably someone around to hear. He hoped someone was hearing him now as he stood in the green house looking at the beakers and tubes and the dog, a giant caramel-colored shepherd, with its teeth barred and tongue flapping, barreling at him.

Dad! Nivea shouted.

The dog leaped onto Nivea and licked her face.

Nivea?

Toby, she stepped back, pushing down the dog, which jumped right back up.

Then Sasha saw the gray-haired, dapper, unshaven King limping toward them, striking the floor with his cane as his wife had with the umbrella.

Down, Toby, he barked at the lapping, wet dog.

Toby crumpled, and gazed despondently at his master.

Nivea walked over and kissed her father on a whiskered cheek. She seemed genuinely pleased. She crossed her arms over her thin chest.

You look nice, the King beamed at his daughter.

Daddy, there are two detectives at the house waiting to see you.

The old man sucked his lips. The muscles in his cheek twitched.

Ah, so? It is time, then. Come, Toby, let us face our fate, he sighed. Your mother’s no longer on the premises, I take it? He struck the ground twice with his cane, as though hoping it might turn into a snake.

Nivea, who’d crossed her arms over her chest, shook her head defensively.

This isn’t serious, is it, Dad?

He smiled.

Of course not. Trufflers, as we used to say. Their job. Truffling. Rector’s not here yet?

He’s coming tonight.

The King nodded.

You’ve taken charge of our young guests, I see. Thank goodness. I was afraid your mother might drown them when she got bored. What are we to do with them, I wonder? Solve that later. Close up here, would you dear, he said softly, moving for the tunnel stairs, Toby shambling behind.

When he was gone, Sasha noticed the dark pines rising around them, sheltering the green house so that it appeared deep in a forest he hadn’t noticed before. He couldn’t even see the house behind them. The steady rain made it seem like time stood still. Then he looked at the tables covered not only by beakers, test tubes, and microscopes, but also with various fragments of computer equipment, as though the place were a repair shop.

No one had said a thing about what would become of him and Grisha. Was the King planning to put them up, or put them down? How did these people operate? Who were they? Why did Crispino bring them here?

27

By the time Nivea led them back to the house, again through the underground tunnels, both the police and the King had disappeared.

I’m sleepy, Grisha said to Sasha.

You guys wanna nap? Let’s find you a nice guest room. Then we’ll figure out what to do with you.

Big house, Sasha said.

Grandfather built it. Said he wanted to feel he could take a vacation without leaving the house, so he put in fifty-two bedrooms. Father says he was trying to keep his much younger wife—my father’s mother—from running away. He was always looking for ways to entertain her. In the back, beyond the woods, there’s an outdoor stadium modeled on the Circus Maximus, can you believe it? Do you even know what that is?

Sasha shook his head.

Doesn’t matter.

She left anyway, Nivea continued. Come on. Follow me. Soon after, he stopped going out of the house altogether. He ended up living in the smallest room in the attic, playing the accordion all night. Most of the other rooms were never furnished.

28

She pushed opened the door and switched on the light. A chandelier hung with hundreds of crystals sprayed the room with light bouncing across every corner and cranny.

The children were again startled by what they saw. A bed shaped like a boat with a sweeping blue silk canopy draped above, and covered in red silk sheets, commanded the center of the room. Hanging from rails on either side were thick red velvet curtains that pooled on the floor. The walls were painted with scenes of palaces along the water and men in boats with faces raised in song and pretty women in big hats, with pigeons swirling in ceruleans skies.

This is the Venetian room. I loved sleeping here when I was little. Like, watch this. She walked to the bed, flipped a switch behind the mahogany headboard and the boat started rocking gently while the room filled with the sound of waves lapping the piers.

With all the rain, I thought this would be nice. Anyway, nobody will bug you. When you wake up, find me. I’ll be around. Rector might be here. Don’t let him scare you. Oh, are those my brothers’ clothes? Margaret likes you. She never touches Randall’s stuff. Eleven years now.

29

After she left, Grisha and Sasha stood there admiring the painted boat, the walls, the princes escorting ladies down radiant streets, and boats in harbors of warm blues and reds, ambers and browns. Slowly, they clambered up onto the soft, thick quilt.

The woman at the door. It was like looking up from a book and seeing a crouching cheetah ready to spring. Her bronze hair was swept off her high forehead like a dune in a storm. Blazing green eyes spaced unevenly apart aside a strong straight nose glared at the world with such ferocity Sasha feared she might suddenly lunge forward and sink her teeth into his neck.

Then he noticed she was still in her nightgown.

The kitchen was the size of Sasha’s apartment. There was a large slab of butcher block in the middle, two silver refrigerators, and not a plant in sight.

Margaret dear, these waifs may be with us a bit. I’ll explain later. Do you think Pet might feed them?

It’s Saturday!

The King nodded.

Ah. Well then, would you? I have something to finish. He lowered his head in defeat.

Remember: Nivea’s home before lunch! She’s bringing her friend, his wife reminded him.

…not Rector!

That fretful boy.

There are stranger children, I suppose, she shrugged.

Sasha turned back and forth between the adults—one in her scarlet night dress revealing the contours of her muscled limbs, and the King, older, in this three-piece suit, and it was not yet dawn.

What unknown worlds bloomed so near where he’d lived the whole last year. He almost forgot his own predicament.

I have rehearsal tonight.

Marked on my calendar, the King nodded.

Get an ipad, she smiled, showing teeth paper-white.

You be the one. I’m just a gardener.

She turned to the children.

Do you eat cereal?

Sasha nodded.

What child doesn’t, she said to herself.

A loud thud echoed through the floor—as though someone was hammering the cellar ceiling with a broom handle. Neither of their hosts acknowledged it.

19

After the King limped out, Margaret focused on her unexpected charges.

But you’re soaked! Poor dears! Take off your coats.

She lurched forward to help Grisha, who drew back.

Her steeliness melted away.

Seeing herself in the refrigerator, she brushed back her hair.

Here, let’s go upstairs and get you into some dry clothes. I should dress too, don’t you think? She giggled. Oh, she said, looking at Grisha, you’re so teeny-tiny! What size are you? What will fit you? Let’s look. Come. Then we’ll eat.

May I make a phone call, Mrs? Sasha asked.

Certainly young man. There’s the phone. But we should get you out of those wet clothes.

Please, Mrs..

She nodded.

Sasha went over the phone and dialed the number which was now a fading smear of blue on his wrist. The phone rang. Soon this will be over, he thought. The phone kept ringing.

No one’s home, said Mrs. King. They’ve gone to work.

Sasha didn’t look up.

Young man.

The phone rang and rang.

Now, she said.

Finally Grisha went over and put her small hand on his wrist. She hooked a finger in his belt loop and pulled him with her.

Mrs. King led them up the wide carpeted stairs at the top of which they turned right, walking what felt like several blocks down a white-walled corridor punctuated by doors with glowing brass knobs, at the end of which they took another turn, pausing before a massive half-open door.

Come in, come in, Mrs. King said, urging them over the threshold.

The children surveyed the room in astonishment. Where did all this come from? They’d been to Toys R Us, but this was more like the shop they saw in New York where they watched a live magician performing tricks for the delight of a dozen kids.

The air was like the inside of a jar that’s been sealed for years, the silence thick and hard. Sasha thought of the church on the hill above the town back home he entered once in the middle of a sunny summer afternoon: the dark, the stillness, the presences hovering just out of reach. He wiped the drops from his forehead.

Margaret stood to the side and crossed her hands over her lap like a tour guide.

Our boy’s room.

He gaped at the rows of stuffed animals and soldiers arrayed on the shelves looking freshly shampooed and polished.

What happened, Sasha asked, breaking a silence that threatened to smash his head like an egg.

The woman turned away.

There was this toy he wanted, she began. He was nine. Then she stopped. After a long pause, she said:

You speak very nice English. What is your name?

Sasha.

Your sister’s shy? What’s yours, sweetie?

Sasha nudged the silent one.

Grisha, she whispered in her smallest voice, followed by a big smile.

What a wonderful name, Margaret smiled back. What kind is it, I wonder? Doesn’t matter. Girsha?

Grisha.

Grisha. I’m not sure if any of these will fit you. But you’ll want to dry off first.

She handed each of the children a thick large towel.

I could just wear this, Grisha thought, rubbing the soft cotton over her cheek.

Margaret had set some clothes out on the bed.

You can dry off in the bathroom over there.

I’ve kept everything. Mothers do that. (Not our mother, thought Sasha—she’d left everything behind, even us).

The children looked at each other.

Sasha admired the nice blue pants and the blue t-shirt and the blue sweater she’d laid out. Grisha fingered a pair of black jeans—the boy had once been smaller than her—though the black sweatshirt was more like a dress. But it felt good to be dry.

Why don’t you go wash. There’s the bathroom. Then come down to the kitchen. I have to get ready. Cook’s off. And Nivea is coming home. You’ll come shopping with me. We’ll make a nice lunch together?

Her eyes glistened while her lips drew back in a wide and artificial smile.

They took turns in the bathroom. While Grisha washed, Sasha walked around the room, opening drawers with clothes precisely folded and tucked. He paused to inspect a male doll dressed like a marine.

It felt good to be out of the wet clothes. He hoped this strange lady would now offer them a delicious breakfast. But when they stepped into the hall, Sasha was disoriented: a left, then a right in this house of infinite corridors.

20

The kitchen was empty. He eyed the stove, the stocked shelves, the glistening toaster. He stared longingly at the jams and the boxes of cereal like books on a shelf.

A side door flew open and there she stood, in a glistening silver rain coat and matching hat.

I’ve been waiting. Her eyes pulsed light like the blow-torch roaring in her brain.

Car’s running. Come on. No time. Hurry, put on your slickers.

She clapped her hands.

Grisha’s eyes veiled. Seemed early for shopping.

Pancake mix and the syrup he loved his mother served. Sasha handed his sister her wet coat.

Margaret’s black Tahoe was the size of their school bus. He pushed Grisha forward into the back seat, then clambered in beside her.

He looked at Margaret’s red nails capping fingers poking through her leather driving gloves. She clicked her tongue.

By the time the children were belted she was halfway down the street.

They seemed in the middle of nowhere. The land was flat and largely treeless: a boulder in a field bulbous as the King’s nose, a red trailer on its side in the mud. Couldn’t tell what direction they’d come from or where Crispino walked. Another house came into view far back from the street.

Margaret sped through lashing rain, spawning waves in all directions.

At the end of a long empty street stood a warehouse fronted by a weeping willow starting to bud.

Topper: Fresh Meat! read the sign on the pastel flesh-colored building.

She glanced slyly at her charges.

Nivea’s spoiled, she said. Here.

Before they stepped out she handed him a giant paisley umbrella.

21

Inside, below the warehouse’s high ceilings, rose the odor of animal shit.

It looked like a country fair. In pens across the giant warehouse: chickens, goats, lamas, horses, turkeys, geese, pheasants, pigeons, bulls, cows, gophers, even squirrels. In a corner stood a glass case with snakes.

Well-dressed women, blond as Margaret, huddled around the animals. A contest of blondness. Inside the pens, dark wiry men in blood-spattered overalls danced around the animals. Every few minutes a woman pointed to a turkey or a lamb a man then scooped up and carried through a door at the back of the warehouse. Minutes later, the woman joined him, as though for a tryst.

Margaret struck the floor with her majestic umbrella. Sasha and Grisha followed in her wake. Sasha too sounded the ground.

At the pen Margaret pointed to a lamb. The man in the cage swept it into his arms like a child.

Now you’re going to see something.

She smiled and twitched and her shoulders shook as though something had just crawled through her body.

Near the back door they noticed a pen apart from the others. In it were a dozen yapping small dogs of a breed Sasha didn’t recognize, with short legs and pug noses, prancing on their hind quarters and squeezing their faces through slats.

Margaret didn’t glance in their direction.

The Chinese love them, she shrugged.

Before passing through the door a small brown man handed them a set of headphones.

Put these on, Margaret smiled. The noise gets quite awful.

Grisha watched Sasha adjust his as they walked through the door where they were greeted by a roar and a howling that cut clear through the pads and incised themselves on Sasha’s brain. Sasha’s eyes seemed to recoil as he scanned the room. It was crowded with tables on which sheered animals were held down while half a dozen butchers moved from one to another, grunting as they cut. The geysers of blood reminded Sasha of his grandmother cutting off chicken heads in the kitchen.

He looked up at Margaret. Her cheeks reddened and her chest heaved as though her heart were about to burst.

Rain pinged the ribbed tin roof of Luther’s Garage and nippled the artificial pond in front of the nursing home where six nervous geese swam, necks pivoting warily. Rain streamed from the awning of a bodega and pooled in craters before the prosthetics supply store where he stared at flesh-colored arms, fists knuckling glass. Sasha thought he knew the city but, in the rain-soaked pre-dawn dark, he didn’t recognize the streets down which Crispino led them, ever farther from the sea. He glanced at Grisha, who replied with a black stare and a sneeze, her face framed by a floppy pink plastic hat tasseled with drops. My little pink chiclet. His own yellow slicker had a hole at the base of the neck. I am being watered, maybe I’ll grow faster, he told himself.

His vision blurred, eyes half-closed, he kept thinking of what he’d seen: his neighbor Mrs. Halliday’s hand on the door pulling it shut as they walked down the stairs. She’d seen them; she’d heard what happened upstairs; and she closed the door. Had Jess been watching too?

They’d been walking for over an hour while the city stirred around them. A Coca Cola truck rocked down the street. Two men, one white one black, fishing poles aimed skyward, strolled toward the harbor. A van stalled at the top of a hill, then rolled back and sank from sight. He imagined it dropping off the boardwalk and into the sea to be colonized by lobsters. Two gulls jabbed at a fish flopping wildly in the gutter. Had the dam broken? Maybe the sewers were backing up.

Soon their feet were soaked. They kept walking.

Gradually the houses grew sparser, surrendering to trees and long stretches of flattened, uncut grass and mud. Here the earth looked vulnerable, wounded. A parish of black birds circled above, harried by winds.

Pelted by tiny wet fists, the pilgrims kept their faces down.

Finally Crispino stopped before a high black iron gate, a wrought rose crowning the top, its petals painted bright red which, even in the gray light of this never-ending rain, glowed.

Beyond it, in the distance, Sasha saw a huge white house, gabled, turreted, chimneyed. Having spent so much of the last year in crawlspaces and cramped quarters, the boy was vulnerable and the house—monumental, out of scale, positively Egyptian—fired his fancy. Was it a war-lord’s haven, the country pad of a retired soccer star, a rapper’s folly? It belonged in a film. Hundreds of windows stared coolly in his direction.

In the field behind the house stood several long glass structures like picture frames folded over.

What’s those?

My uncle’s green houses. Got a garden center on the highway. This is where they grow the shit.

Green houses, Sasha murmured.

You never seen a green house? Crispino snickered, opening his cell phone.

The boy shook his head. A house for plants.

Biggest in the state. They call him the King of Green.

He looked at Sasha.

We call him King.

Sasha shuddered.

Rain bled down their cheeks. Snapping shut the phone, Crispino hissed: Fart never answers.

Let’s go.

Sasha stared, unmoving. He stroked Grisha’s wet hat. His heart pounded and his mind was a circus of thoughts tumbling and leaping over each other: How should I feel when they sweep my mother and father up and drag them off like they were murderers or thieves?

He squeezed Grisha’s hand.

16

They ploughed through puddles, shoes mud-caked, sucked downward, straight for one of the buildings out back. Crispino opened the door. Inside, rain hammered the glass like bullets. The king was under siege. But the smells: a candy factory in a hot shower.

Grisha screamed at what looked like a small dry green octopus clinging to a branch near her face.

What’s that, Sasha asked Crispino, dropping his hand to his sister’s shoulder again.

From behind boomed an old man’s voice.

A tilandsia, boy.

Hey King, Crispino said, whirling around. I tried calling. He smiled weakly.

A tall thin man in round gold glasses, with a borealis of white hair capping a long head, emerged from behind a screen of giant emerald ferns, leaning heavily on a plain umbrella-handled cane. He wore a close-fitting three-piece gray suit, with a bright red bow tie perched under his neck. His left foot dragged. Brown eyes loomed under the specs he prodded with a finger crumbed in soil.

Sasha sensed Crispino’s uneasiness.

At five a.m.? Who’s this? He gazed sternly at Sasha:

You know what a tilandsia is, son? It’s an epiphyte.

The man crouched, cane under chin, until he and Sasha were eye-level. His forehead wrinkled like garlic.

You know what an epiphyte is? I ask you again.

Sasha said nothing. The man’s breath smelled of apples. All the English he learned in this last year and he found the one word Sasha didn’t know.

Lives on air. Imagine. Just breathe, and you’re done.

The King rose, took a deep breath, and tapped the fingertips of his right hand against his chest.

Oh how I wish I could live on air!

Sasha felt a kind of sucking pain behind his knees. The things the man was saying he could imagine. What he couldn’t imagine was being in the position he was in forever. Lost. In charge of his sister. Hungry. What was forever, anyway? One minute and then another and then another. That’s all, just minutes strung together stretching so far he couldn’t see the end, that’s all forever was.

He breathed in the sweet exhalations of roses and orchids and thousands of flowers which had grown wild back home and whose names he never bothered to learn. Maybe he was an epiphyte. If so, he was free. He shook his head and took a step back.

If he could just call his uncle. He pulled up his sleeve. The number on his wrist had bled in the rain till it was barely legible.

What’s up, C? Why’d you bring ‘em here?

Cops got their folks. Got nowhere to go. They’re Ghad’s kids.

Ghad? The old man spoke his father’s name.

He looked at Grisha, who kept her head down.

You know I don’t need any more worries. Simplify, simplify.

Crispino nodded. Then he thrust forward his arm and opened his fist. Sasha couldn’t see what it held but he watched as the King’s eyes widened behind the thick gold specs.

I see, he nodded, shaking his head. He reached over and scooped whatever it was Crispino held with his own long fingers.

This was in the apartment?

Crispino nodded.

I see, he repeated, shaking his head, and slipping the item into his pants’ pocket.

You children wait here.

He and Crispino walked off down the alley between the long rows of plants whose names Sasha later learned: ficuses, rubber plants, elephant ears, caladiums of many colors. Cattaleyas, dendrobriums, phalaenopsis. Mother-in-law’s tongue, pansies, roses of course. Begonias; geraniums; Asiatics….

17

Grisha shook her head, chin drawn to her collarbone. Her small dark eyes, a spangle of light concentrated on the bottom lip of the iris like a spec of dew, locked on the King like a squirrel tracking a benefactor tossing it peanuts, aware that the same person could abruptly hoist a stone and crack its skull.

She needed to pee. She looked around the greenhouse. No sign of a bathroom. Just flowers, like home. But needing to pee will steal the joy from a bowl of ice cream. Should she do it in her pants? Warm pee ran down her leg and puddled on the floor but nobody noticed.

When Crispino and the King returned, the old man scraped his sparse hair with a dirty fingernail and said to his nephew:

Well you’ve got problems of your own, and I don’t mean to piss in a pot that’s already overflowing.

This is crazy, Sasha thought. He stepped forward and looked straight up into the King’s gaunt face:

They took my mother, he said defiantly. Where is she? When will she be back?

He glared at the King as though he were at fault.

The old man felt a twitch in his cheek. An awareness of culpability seemed to engulf him, as though he were behind all the myriad crimes of the adult world. He felt himself sinking under the weight of past sins. Ghad had been his employee, after all.

My father used to work for you?

The boy read his mind.

The King took out a pocket watch attached to a gold chain linked to a vest button—another thing Sasha had never seen before, except perhaps in the movies—the list of firsts awaiting him was so long he decided to cease cataloguing. Then the King looked around the green house.

Yes, he said, eying an orchid, Ghad worked for me.

(So this was the old one…) What did he do? Did he water plants?

This and that. Yes, plants, sometimes.

Sometimes wasn’t enough. He’d have to wait for the right words to come to him. Sasha bit his lip.

Then he noticed the butterflies bobbing between the flowers: yellow, speckled chocolate, zebra, various greens, rubies with black stars, their jerky movements making them look like wind-up toys.

Your father….He stopped.

May I make a phone-call, sir? Sasha asked.

Who to?

My uncle in New York, Sasha held his ground. His hat dripped.

Your uncle! He looked at Crispino and didn’t answer.

Let’s go to the house.

They walked toward the other end of the building where Sasha noticed a bulkhead swelling from the floor. Along the rim lay a mashed blue petal like a sliver of lapis.

At the press of a button on one of the aluminum supports, the door opened and they descended down half a dozen stairs, their concrete tanned and mossy with time. A narrow tunnel lit by dim fluorescent tubes and lined with damp fieldstone stretched before him. The King bowed his head to keep from hitting the ceiling. Grisha again clutched Sasha’s hand.

Damn rain, murmured the King. Watch the puddles.

The air smelled like wet sand.

They passed two crossroads with tunnels going off in either direction before reaching a set of stairs they climbed up into a brightly lit basement lined with wine racks.

The King brushed himself off. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Then he stepped onto a straw mat and wiped his feet.

Wipe your feet, children. I’m taking you upstairs to meet Margaret.

He recognized the intruder at once. It was Crispino, who lived on the next block. In a leather jacket studded with rain-beads, head shaved, he looked like a shadow in a white mask. Eyes roved the apartment. Sasha, who could hear Crispino’s thick breathing, tried holding very still.

Even though he was supposed to be a friend of Sasha’s parents, Crispino scared him. He came around often while his father was at work and his mother between jobs. He wore the same black pants and t-shirt in the cold and the heat and the rain. Sasha wondered if he was carrying the switchblade he flaunted when his mother wasn’t around. He let Sasha hold it, let him savor the click of the blade as it fell into place. Then he took it from him and flicked it at the floor where it lodged. He pulled it out and flipped it down a few times and each time it landed point first.

Don’t think it’s easy, he said to Sasha, handing him the knife.

Sasha landed it five out of five times, after which Crispino folded up the knife and put it away.

But the guy was a pain in the ass. He liked pushing his face right into yours, breath like steak tips had been marinating under his tongue for days.

They got ‘em, eh?

Asshole, Sasha thought. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.

Don’t be a punk. Crispino hoisted his right hand over his shoulder as though preparing to slap Sasha.

What you toying with that for?

Sasha forgot he held the paring knife in his hand.

I should play Sasha, Crispino said.

What?

In the movie.

Movie?

You have a story, kid. Now they’ve got your mom and pops. There’s guys with cameras all over the place.

What?

Look, man.

Sasha went over to the window.

Careful.

Sasha pushed the curtain to the side a little and peered out.

13

For once Crispino wasn’t bullshitting. The frenzied flicker of police lights made a carnival of night. He recognized the logo of a local television station on one of the trucks. Men with cameras stalked the courtyard trailed by wobbly umbrellas.

They’ll be here any minute.

What?

Human interest stories. Abandoned kids. You behind.

Behind what?

Crispino pinched thumb and forefinger together and flicked his wrist back and forth as though exercising a pool cue.

Eight ball, baby. As in: kids the federales didn’t sweep into their net. Hey, maybe you want to be on TV. But don’t you be holding that knife. Show your pretty face, somebody will want to adopt you. Or your cute little sister. Where is she? Oh baby Grisha! sang the creepy falsetto.

Shit, Sasha muttered, hurrying back into the kitchen, Crispino on his heels.

Sasha remembered the open window. Grisha wasn’t likely to use it, but these were tough times. People acted accordingly.

His sister was hunkered down near the cat, chattering away. When he came in she looked up.

Mira brought us a present.

A present?

Grisha pointed to the motionless mouse on the floor.

At that moment Crispino stepped forward.

You expect to deal with what’s goin’ down on your own? I can help you cats….

He looked at Grisha and blinked.

Back off, Crispino.

Crispino laughed.

Back off? You think I back off?

What you want with us anyway, man? Sasha asked.

Like I said, Crispino replied—but he had already turned his back and was heading for the bedroom—I can help.

Sasha followed.

What you doing?

Crispino bent over and studied the mess on the floor.

Clues, baby, looking for clues.

You’re fishing for money.

Crispino rose. Almost two feet taller than Sasha, lean as a whippet, a practiced ruthlessness shadowed his face.

Back off turd. Nothing to do with you. This is your mother’s stuff. And right now you don’t have a mother.

Sasha considered jumping him but what would his sister do with him dead? His fingers tightened and loosened around the small knife. Too small. A strategy was called for. He smiled.

Coins, man. Go get ‘em, bag man.

Crispino leered back.

You an old man, ‘dum, you know that? Adum-de-dummy.

Rolling his eyes, Sasha hurried back to the kitchen.

His sister hadn’t left the cat, now purring arrogantly, blinking as if to say, what is your problem—flaunting its comfort in the face of their disease. Little did he know. He wished his parents had never brought them here. Were work and money that important?

We’ll be leaving soon, he said to his sister, who spoke almost no English. In truth, she hardly spoke at all. He looked around. The yellow walls of the kitchen seemed to sweat. Couldn’t say he’d miss this.

14

It’s not like he was completely surprised. Both his parents talked about the possibility they might be taken. Even his mother. He remembered now. He hadn’t understood everything and was confused by their saying how lucky they were to be in America. Their every move communicated fear. How could it be lucky to be afraid all the time?

He looked at the clock on the wall. Nearly three. Already the darkness was thinning, stretching toward transparency.

He walked to the counter, opened the drawer, put down the paring knife, picked up a brillo pad and a small towel, wrapped the pad with the towel, shoved the knife inside, and tucked the packet into his sock at the ankle. Then he took out a larger knife with a jagged edge and a contoured plastic handle from the drawer. He felt Grisha’s eyes on him.

In the living room Crispino was still sifting through the stuff the cops had scattered.

He thought of all he’d seen since coming here, his friend Travis from school, Jess below, feeding birds on the roof, crazy dancing through the apartment.

You planning to use that, boy? Crispino asked. He he. You one brave kid. I like that. A lot. You just come right on and try.

Sasha stood there, saying nothing. Fucking older people never gave him a break. He thought he could surprise them and never did.

He considered his options. Try himself against Crispino. Or he could just wait to see what happened.

There’s shit here, Crispino said. What made me think your mother had anything anybody wanted, kid? Oh wait, what’s this now?

He bent to pick something off the floor. He turned his back to Sasha and held the object to the light. Then he slipped into his pocket before Sasha could see what it was.

Come on, get Grisha, let’s go.

Where?

Shut your hole and come on.

There was a place in New York. He remembered clearly. A big park in the middle of the city where they’d gone the day after his fever dropped. Their parents had taken them to the zoo where they stared at the monkeys and birds they had in the forests back home and all he could think of was letting them out. They walked for hours in a landscape that was wild and secure although there were plenty of people and cops on horseback and his heart opened and he felt happy after the worried preparations followed by days of darkness in a the crate until their release into this crazy city, and he began running up a low hill, stopping under a tree dripping its branches around him where he whirled and whirled until he fell reeling, dizzy, to the ground. When he got up he felt happy for the first time in a year which, up until that moment, had been filled anxious preparation and travel.

8

It would be harder traveling with his little sister. What if he were to leave her shivering under the blanket until his mother returned or the neighbors finally found the courage to creep out of their rooms and come upstairs to see what had happened? She wouldn’t miss him or his noogies. For a moment he felt sympathy for his younger sister. His shadow fell on her the way the others towered over him.

He took another deep breath. He shut his eyes and, as he often did, he talked to himself. He decided he wasn’t going to let his situation rock him. He’d make the best of things, no matter what. Things didn’t look good now, but that was all right. Things would change. Maybe tomorrow someone would come in and tell him he was the king of the world.

With that in mind, he tugged at the covers and brought his little sister, Grisha, into the light.

9

She blinked at her brother and tried to gauge from his expression the gravity of what had happened.

She sat up slowly. Sasha still hadn’t said a word.

He leaned away as she rose.

Then he stuck out his tongue and pulled back his lips with his index fingers. He shut his eyes and folded his hands under his head like he was pretending to sleep. Then he opened his eyes and rolled them.

She pouted back in return.

Images of what he’d just witnessed raced through Sasha’s mind and he began breathing harder.

But his sister seemed fine.

He would take her with him.

He studied her upturned nose and wet brown eyes. She stared into his blue ones, opening and closing her fists on the blanket. Sometimes they played a game in which they didn’t speak for hours while trying to synchronize their movements and communicating telepathically. Growing up in close quarters, they knew there was but a hair’s breadth between them, only a few layers of skin kept them from merging into one person. He could no more have left her behind than he could have plucked out one of his kidneys or sliced off his shadow.

A clattering in the kitchen caused both to sit up. For minutes they didn’t move. Sasha looked at the clock. Two a.m. was its own world. He didn’t know which noises belonged to it and which to an intruder.

10

His sister’s eyes locked on him so tight he feared they’d draw blood.

Forcing a smile, he turned from the bed.

You wait.

As he stepped through the door something metallic rattled across the floor.

The living room looked like it had been decorated by a tornado. Most of their furniture had been harvested from the streets of a city where people seemed to have too much of everything. A leather chair he helped his father carry up the stairs lay upended, its cushion ripped and the stuffing strewn around the room. Mounds of Kleenex shaken out of the garbage can reminded him his mother was sick. He hoped she’d put a sweater on under her coat when the police took her. His undocumented mother.

One of the lamps had been knocked over, the shattered bulb scattered across the floor. With so many lights out, how could it seem so bright? Maybe it was excitement that lit him from within. He tried to be careful, but he pricked his big toe anyway. Bending over to pluck out the glass, he pressed his finger to the wound, then to his lips.

He hopped over the scattered milky splinters, the coffee grinds and banana peels. Who looked through other people’s garbage? Homeless people and cops.

But hadn’t his father furnished their rooms with what other people had thrown away?

Dishes and pots covered the kitchen floor. What were they looking for? Dwarves in the cupboards? Something his mother took from an office garbage can? Papers she shouldn’t have seen? It was possible. Soon he’d be like the grownups.

Maybe they hadn’t taken his father at work, as he immediately assumed—maybe the noise he’d heard was his father sneaking back. The window was open. A blue silk shirt lay on the floor with the thread leading to a spool that had rolled under the refrigerator.

Then he saw Mirabel, the cat, her long soft shiny orange locks dappled with rain sweeping up in waves sculpted from hair, who adopted them days after their arrival, sitting in the corner, alert, blinking her eyes like an owl, asking him what was with the mess. He shrugged and went to the refrigerator for milk.

At least they hadn’t spilled that out.

He heard his sister in the living room.

Watch out for the glass, he shouted.

11

She didn’t say anything. A minute later she stood in the doorway in her red cotton nightgown rubbing her eye. Seeing the cat, she flared with delight and raced over.

Mira Mira on the floor: who’s the one my heart beats for?

They didn’t speak to each other in English though English is the language in which I tell their story.

She squeezed her against her breast so hard the cat screeched.

She showered Mira with consoling kisses.

There was a loud bang in the other room. They looked at each other. Sasha opened a kitchen drawer and grabbed a paring knife. He walked softly to the door and peered into the living room.

A national security letter is an administrative subpoena issued by the United States federal government to gather information for national security purposes. NSLs typically contain a nondisclosure requirement, frequently called a “gag order“, preventing the recipient of an NSL from disclosing that the FBI had requested the information.

Wikipedia

Outside the sun is shining. It is June 9, 2019. The president has just returned from England where he dined with the Queen, insulted the mayor of London, and tweeted his support for a whack-job with a plummy accent running for prime minister. Meanwhile, for the record, concentration camps have been set up along the Texas/Mexico border.

Nevertheless, coffee gets drunk. I walk the four blocks to Mystic Roasters where I’m stuck behind a young woman who has ordered a mocha soy latte, which makes me want to scream. I do not want my coffee curated; I do not want a heart scribbled in cream crowning a cup of it; in this, as in other matters, I am in the minority. When my turn finally comes, I’ve aged a year. Blood sugar’s fallen precipitously. My voice as I order my pound of Sumatra, ground for espresso, is weak.

*

There are so many things I want to tell you but can’t. The letter about which I can’t speak: I can’t get it out of my mind. How can people send you a letter saying the one thing you can’t do is speak about the letter? I think they’re trying to drive me mad. I think it may be working.

*

How you? Joan texts as I hand the young woman my debit card.

Shitty, I reply.

It will get better. J.

I swear if she uses one more emoji…I know she’s trying to help. Many people are. My friends can tell something is up but nobody seems to know what to do, mainly because I can’t tell them what’s wrong without also getting them in trouble. And this has been going on for two years.

Drink at Harvest? 5?

Brilliant, I reply.

À she texts. I’ve no idea what she means. I hurry back to my apartment to feed the Little : People.

*

On examining my options, and after considering everything—absolutely everything—I’ve decided I have no choice but to end it. Who led me astray? Who pulled me from the righteous path? Who persuaded me it was right to pursue whatever dalliances offered themselves? This ends here. It’s complicated because I’m a little in love with Grisha. Grisha! So diminutive yet so shapely, collectible as a Hummel, delectable as a dollop of cream. I could fall into her and die happy, except, of course, I’d crush her.

*

My name is Andy Divino, and here’s a bit of data: I’m 5’11” and weigh 179 lbs. Some muscle. Some fat. Shoes size: 11; foot-wear of choice: black Reeboks, though I’m tempted by Allbirds. Everybody (and by everybody, I mean Steven Pinker) says Data is key. Do you know me now? No? More?

Hair: dirty blonde, full, thick, on the longish side, parted in the middle. Lips plump. Chin strong enough. Eyes: hazel. I have no tattoos, no obvious marks—unless you yank my pants to see the hernia scar. Does that do it for you?

What if I add I live in a small town north of Boston through which Paul Revere once road? You know he never shouted the British were coming? Dude never even got to Concord, where was fired that shot heard round the world. Brits busted him well shy of there. It was Longfellow pitched the legend. Poets care nothing for data. But Revere did gallop through our town. Did he stay silent because he didn’t care what happened here? Some things we’ll never know.

And that’s not all: Emerson preached in the Unitarian church down the block. History’s our leading product, now manufacturing’s gone Chinese. We peddle the past like it mattered. The way things are going, we won’t have much of future, so we sell what we got.

What if I add that I’m a translator? That I can’t tell you who I work for? Sorry, make that past tense: worked for. These days I collect disability and keep to myself. Except for Joan.

*

Home, I drape my jacket on a chair and hurry to the kitchen. Today the lead story on the radio’s about a billionaire pedophile cops arrested stepping off his private jet after a jaunt to Paris: Dom Perignon, Michelin stars, Pigalle. And, man, the dude’s connected: presidents, nerdy Harvard profs, pudgy royals: people who have everything, except innocence. Which can be bought, it seems. Wonder this ends.

I turn off the radio and turn to feed my charges.

They’re what I’ve sacrificed everything for. The Little : People have been my secret these last two years. They saved me, after all. They saw how lost I was, how desperately I needed someone who understood me. That they recognized my quest for meaning is beyond incredible. My gratitude will last a lifetime. And yet….

That’s part of what makes everything so tough. There’s no explaining this. Not to anyone. This page alone will know why I did what I did and why, today, I live as I do.

I pour two fingers of granola into a tiny trough and rush to the living room. They’re in the terrarium, pressed against the glass, peering up at me. “Morning,” I say. Grisha waves. I set the trough beside her and watch the others rush it. “Thank you,” Adam shouts. “My pleasure,” I reply.

If you got to know The Little : People, you’d love them too. You’d want to do things for them. Everything. You’d want to do everything for them. Soon you’d want to be them.

The Little : People just want to have fun. Took me a while to get this. I used to think they were trying to entertain me, make me laugh. Turns out they were simply keeping themselves amused. It was their nature they expressed: a love of poetry, frivolity, art, romance, and song. They must be the most fun family on the planet.

All six can say the most outrageous things to each other, yet they never take offense. Yesterday Adam told his dad he’d sooner die than grow old like him. The old man roared with laughter!

The young man, Adam, fancies himself a bit of a writer. He’s working on his second novel. It’s the story of Adam and Grisha, which happens to be his sister’s name. In the novel, he and Grisha are portrayed as full-size, normal refugees from some unnamed island whose parents are arrested for being in this country illegally, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. Persecuted by an incredibly creepy character whose name I forget at the moment, they’re trafficked to a man who uses slaves to peddle fentanyl….oh it’s a tangled tale, which tells you something about the kind of imagination those Little : People have.

Their humor and their imagination: it’s why I’m so attentive. Had I not cared for them, who would have? No one, that’s who. They’d have died of inanition. It horrifies me to imagine it: these six lovely, delicate, fragile, tiny beings, who, until recently, lived in a shoe box! Without me, how would they survive? And yet, I know that if things got desperate, they’d only laugh, and hoist a glass. Their high spirits never flag. It’s like they have helium for blood, their hearts the open sky.

How had they managed before I came along? You might well ask. I have no answer. I’ll say no more about it except that faith itself is stranger and even more mysterious than the Little : People.

What I can tell you with absolute certainty is this: one morning, as I was rummaging through my closet, looking for something other than a pair of sneakers, I picked up an old shoebox. As soon as I touched it, I thought I heard a scream. I paused, holding it away from myself.

No, I said to myself, no. A neighbor. The vents. Sound travels in apartments cheap as mine. And, generally, I don’t object to the reminder that I am not alone in the world. Living alone, as I do, or did, or thought I did, either you plunge into social life, haunt bars, concerts, restaurants, the theater, consume culture with all the appetite of the thwarted, or you sink deeper into yourself, into your solitude, your memories and dreams. When you spend too much time alone, the latter often mix in your mind until you can no longer tell the difference: dream or memory?

But these were neither. As I raised the box higher, I again heard voices. Who knows why I didn’t freak or how I managed to calmly set the box down on my bed and lift the lid?

*

Today the President insulted every person of color ever to walk the earth. This raised a fuss on social media; the sweethearts at NPR went bananas, of course; but nothing really happened. Nothing changed. Soon everyone was back to binge-watching The Americans. NPR leaked hints about the forthcoming Downton Abbey flick. Much excitement in the burbs.

Joan texts again to remind me about our drink date. Can’t wait, I text back before returning to trim the dozen bonsai I’ve collected to create a forest. Soon the Little : People will have dark woods to explore. Or, maybe not.

*

Lately my reading focuses on finding a cure for whatever malignancy besets me. This morning I discovered a relevant passage in a book called Under the Covers: PTSD in the 2st Century:

“There a many reasons people keep secrets. For those who habitually suppress information for professional reasons, life may eventually become a series of metaphors. They find themselves unable to say what they mean, either because they would be breaking confidentiality agreements or because they might have to reveal compromising information about a family member. In repressing their feelings they rechannel them into other interests and obsessions. They begin to live at the level of metaphor. As a result, other metaphors, particularly those associated with various religious and spiritual practices, feel real to them. More real than experience itself. This has consequences.”

*

Three generations of the Little : People live with me. At first I didn’t understand about the “:”. I asked for clarification. You mean you have small gastrointestinal systems? No no, Adam explained patiently—clearly he’d covered this ground before—it’s like the punctuation mark. Colon, kin to semi-colon.

Although philosophers have theorized its history, calling it, invidiously, “the green light of punctuation,” I knew, of course, the colon’s reputation as the local skank.

My only regret is that I’m not a scientist with a grant from a foundation. I’m perfectly positioned. Since transferring them from the box to the terrarium, I have glimpsed lives, which are, for many reasons, extraordinary. There are theological truths I’ve understood from watching them, to give you one example. They’re a very religious bunch. Apparently their faith was repressed in their native land, wherever that may be. It’s a subject they don’t like to talk about, and I don’t want to insist. What they believe in seems a little obscure as well. All I know is, it involves lint.

Joke. Just a joke.

Yes, what’s most singular and touching about the Little : People is their unquestioning faith. They believe in God the way most of us expect the sun to rise tomorrow, and the next, in saecula saecularum. Though, of course, the sun doesn’t exactly rise, does it? Never mind. God is not in those kinds of details.

There’s something furious about their faith, something that suggests it’s been tested by fire, something that makes me believe in their belief. Yes, it’s their theology that interests me above all. Because if I believe in them and they believe in a higher order, then, thanks to the distributive property, I too believe. I am a believer. Their presence multiplies me and my faith.

Since moving them to the terrarium, I’ve overheard unforgettable conversations. The generational drama’s poignant. When the old ones kvetchabout their gut, arthritis, or a gout, the youngest chuckle, saying: That’s because you’re getting ready to die, you old fools. Don’t you see it?

The old man has always been a bully—I’ve heard enough to figure that out. He’s from that generation of men some idiot called “the greatest,” even though, or maybe because, they participated in history’s greatest bloodbath. He pushes everyone around and flares up over nothing. But I’ve also heard him speaking to his wife in bed at night, confessing he regrets his temper, adding he can’t help himself. He’s like an old dog who’s been kicked all his life. The endless generation, I call them.

The Little : People never hide from anything. They never mask their disgust with the world. For people who seem to have spent most, if not all, of their existence in a box in my closet, they’re familiar with the grim deeds of our species: our wars, our crimes, our cruelties. Yet their contempt never overshadows their sterling capacity to delight in ordinary things, like the way the shadows from the blinds crawl across the muddy floor of their terrarium (I accidentally spilled part of my coffee into their world the other morning while watching them).

Another worry is what to do when one gets sick. What doctor would know how to treat the Little : People?

Don’t worry, Adam assures me, we never get sick. We’re built to last. We’re durable as rock. Did you know granite was 90% aluminum?

I smile at the uncanny creature with the soft skin and warm brown eyes. They are also a fatally attractive family. This has its dangerous side.

*

Were r u?

On my way!

*

We’re sitting at the Harvest bar: wood’s so glossy, I slick down a cowlick reflected in the counter. I’m sipping on an Appletini. Joan peers longingly into her Pinot Grigio—like she wishes she could dive in and stay. I know how she feels. Then she engulfs the glass with her big, cellist’s hand. Years ago, we lived together. Four years. Never married. It’s why we’re still friends.

I’m tempted to tell her about the letter AND the Little : People—but I think better of it. She knows I’m in some legal doo-doo I can’t talk about. Her gray eyes offer solace. Done deriding politicians who have pushed our world to the brink—the very edge of the path to extinction, a million species doomed—I ask about her family, starting with her sister.

“In remission.”

I go down the list. At one time I was close to these people. When Joan broke up with me, so did they. I hadn’t realized how much I’d counted on them: her father, John Chantilly, was in the coffee business. A preppie, he was polished, he was fun. Lunch was stories about business with ex-Nazis coffee growers. Now of course he’s sources Fair Trade only—though he says behind the scenes the land’s still owned by families whose inner sancta sport the hakenkreuz.

“And your mother?”

Helen was a card. Her schtick was making like she could have been a famous actress if her husband hadn’t stolen her away from Hollywood where she was raised by Christian Scientists. Helen’s studied with shamans from Brazil to Mongolia and reads auras. Sometimes she’d leap up in the middle of a meal to light a torch of sage and pass it over me in a spiritual cleanse.

“Just landed a bit part in a revival of Hair on the North Shore.”

“Singing?”

“No, but she’ll be naked.”

A naked 70-year old grandmother (Joan’s brother has three boys) on stage miles from where Judges Hathorne, Sewell, Sergeant, Saltonstall, and Stoughton doomed Brigid Bishop to be hanged for witchery. All Harvard men, naturally. Count on the best and brightest to do real harm.

Eventually Joan turns the tables.

“How are you spending your time, Sven?”

As I can’t talk about work, or the Little : People, I make up a project, an imaginary translation of an Estonian classic about a man who discovers a colony of tiny beings dwelling in the basement of his house. It is a great and allegorical work, I say—charming, unsettling, and unpredictable.

“That’s just what you need,” she says, “a big project like that. Tell me about the author.”

Which I do, at great length. In this way a civilized evening is passed. Soon it’s time to feed my charges again.

*

If the devil had a lover, he’d sift the tide for starfish cast up from a farther shore and spear them on a grouper’s spine to craft a crown he’d fringe with flame before restoring the tiara to its proper place atop the dark brown mane he longed to handle like a whip while hissing in a whorl: My queen, my whore. My silly, silly queen. Believe me, I know. I had the devil for a lover once, and I admit it was “fun,” until it nearly killed me. Her name was Joan. You’d never it know it now we’re friends, which is all we should ever have been.

*

Reading Adam, I find echoes of my own life. Who among us isn’t from some “elsewhere”? Every family’s an “elsewhereverse,” with its own laws, values, and hierarchies of power—in the form of money, physical intimidation, absence of conscience. And yet, it’s from the strictest clans the fiercest rebels spring.

*

Fuck the letter.

I was recruited. I offered a way in. This will come as no surprise to you. Given my grandfather, I was seen as the perfect candidate for this line of work. Secret work. For a place so deep down, it doesn’t even have an acronym.

It was my skills as a linguist they coveted. No one else had ever made much of my gifts, and I was flattered.

Ten years I gave them. Until I began waking in night sweats. I dreamed I saw them, the faces of the people I’d hurt—they were smiling at me from another shore, from some place better than the deal here. And that’s what I told them. You should thank me, I hissed. Look at you, all light-arrayed, and me here getting heavy and glum, having to keep on.

*

I acknowledge it’s possible my work has taken its toll. Things aren’t making sense in the way they once used to. I wake up sometimes wondering who I am, and why I’m still here. I’ve been told it’s not unusual, in my line of work. This doesn’t cheer me as much as you might think.

*

The Little : People have frequent discussions about sex which sometimes turn into shouting matches between the sexes, who see things differently. In their culture, it’s commonplace to put everything on the table. Of course, how much do I really know about their culture? Like, zilch.

Leonard, the father, said to Adam: “There are things you must understand, son. The prettier the girl, the crazier. Women are at their finest in their mid-thirties. After fifty, every woman is a lesbian.”

At which point the wife, daughter, and grandma all began shrieking.

“Early onset menopause,” noted Leonard dryly. “Ignore them. I have a friend. His wife made him send his penis to reeducation camp. She didn’t want it acting like a dick anymore. On its return, his penis announced it no longer wanted to be a penis. It wanted to be a baseball glove instead. That way it could count on seeing some action. Everybody loves baseball gloves, especially when they’re broken in, the leather worn smooth, blackened, showing suede. You watch out, son. Life’s a slippery slope.”

The women of the tribe huddled in the corner, whispering among themselves.

*

At work I began hearing rumors my sex life was being examined for impurities. Of which apparently there were a few. Quite a few, depending on who was doing the examining. This of course was after I filed my complaint—though I was assured the two matters were not related. My complaint, they insisted, had nothing to do with the subsequent investigation into me. I’d never considered any part of my sexual being impure, but the bosses saw things differently. When the first whispers that I was being investigated reached me, I wasn’t worried. I had my mother to thank. At least about some things she’d given me the confidence of a king.

My sexually compulsive youth was not a strike against me, my mother assured me, so long as it wasn’t over yet. She said it with a poker face during a rare visit. It must have been Christmas. A strange bird, my mother. I wasn’t sure how to read her, so I said: “No worries there, lust undiminished.”

“Phew,” she whistled. “For a minute I was afraid you were buying the bullshit.”

“What bullshit is that?”

“All this talk about men and women, and how we hate sex. I have girlfriends in their eighties who still get it on. With men, or without. There are ways, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. Nothing is as simple and as black and white as we’re inclined to make it. People need privacy and they need secrets. The soul needs the dark as well as the light to grow. If the sun were out 24/7 the earth would be a desert, and there would be no life on the planet. “In hell,” wrote Nietszche, who knew whereof he sprach, “the lights are always on.” One form of torture, as you know, is keeping someone in solitary with the lights on.

*

Today a white man wielding an AK-47 shot and killed more than twenty people in El Paso. Was he aware that he wasn’t playing a video game? Or was he living at the level of metaphor?

Everyone knows what’s wrong with the picture—and so what? Nothing changes. Nothing will change.

*

The state of poetry is a state of justice generated by a state of grace. Nevertheless the leaky toilet needs to be repaired. The bathroom floor has flooded. While waiting for the plumber, I decided to have a cuppa Irish coffee and listen in to the conversation of the Little : People.

It so happens they were engaged in one of their famous intra-generational theological debates. I was shocked to discover the many angry things they had to say about the Protestant religion, against which they hold a grudge because Martin Luther labeled peasants Satan’s spawn. Wealthy princes, with Luther’s backing, seized the properties of the church and were happy to have them. Subsequently they judged property sacred. They never cease to astonish me, these Little : People.

To add to the drama, Grisha has decided to convert to Islam. “Our father doesn’t disrespect you enough?” Adam asked sharply. “Respect this,” Grisha replied, flashing the finger, lips curled in a fishy grimace. “Children, children,” cried Thelma, the mom, over the snoring of the grandparents, who’d have fallen asleep under the little gazebo I built for them from old Poland Springs bottles.

*

Apropos: The Little : People are obsessed with Gogol. I have no idea why. Funny thing, I couldn’t read his fiction until I tried translating it. Until then, his words repelled me. Could it be because our families were neighbors once, centuries ago? Did he avoid me because his name continues to echo around the world, finding admirers in exotic lands where people pass their lives outdoors or working in rice paddies or picking lettuce, tobacco leaves, and copper pipes?

*

Half a million Rohinga have been ethnically cleansed from Myanmar by Buddhists led by a woman with a Nobel Peace Prize. Millions from Syria and Iraq are homeless. A million and a half people in Ukraine have been “displaced”—meaning they now have nowhere to live. Moreover, the rain forest is burning, glaciers are melting, and Greenland isn’t for sale. The problems are starting to mount.

*

To recap: Adam, who sees himself as the scribe of the Little : People, is telling future generations their origin myth. I have a mind to dig deeper, maybe beating out Adam by writing the first complete history of the Little : People, salvage something, anything, from these last several years.

The grandfather seems especially well-informed. Occasionally I pluck him out of the terrarium and bring him into the kitchen where, with the help of a thimble of Glenlivet, his tongue loosens, and he spills:

He tells me that the Little : People were once a warlike tribe perpetually embattled, laying siege or besieged for centuries before a kind of exhaustion that resembled peace settled over them. They were ultimately roused from their torpor when a great Teacher came along. The Teacher was no airy-fairy preacher or snake oil salesman. No, he was a true scholar who poured over profit-and-loss statements and based his prophecies on economic sine curves and trends. He traced the evolution of private property to the abolition of serfdom, the rise of the state to the accumulation of capital and the need to protect it. Eventually, he said, the entire country was corrupted by what he called the money sickness. Every aspect of life was fiscalized. Air itself became a luxury.

*

This morning they found the billionaire pedophile hanging in his cell. How this is happened no one knows. No tears are shed. Many gloat. Others complain he escaped justice. Personally, I’m convinced it’s murder. Mercy, what’s become of us?

*

Adam and I often discuss art and literature. He is full of theories. His actual experience of the world has been circumscribed. Yet, though he’s lived his whole life in a shoebox, he’s somehow managed to project himself far beyond his senses. He must be clairvoyant—he looks at us and discovers dimensions in the great world beyond his terrarium, and he dreams, and what he dreams inevitably comes to pass. I approach his every page with trepidation and, of course, a magnifying glass. Who knows what I’ll read? The announcement of my death, perhaps. The birth of a grandchild (not possible). Yet there’s a hint of consolation coursing through all of it. He knows I can’t take much more.

His insights about art are fascinating, original. He’s composed a manifesto, even. He calls it the “The Art of Disillusionment.” He says he admires me because I’m one of the disillusioned. I’ve earned the honorific because of my ability to see him and his tribe. The Little : People don’t appear to just anyone. Adam assures me only a handful of us are so blessed. Because, while The Little : People are everywhere, they don’t readily let on. People are ignorant, and a little stupid. It’s a pity. He and I go back and forth on these theories. I believe art should enchant. I believe it should take us out of ourselves and fill us with it-ness, and visions of alternate worlds.

Turns out Adam knew Susan Sontag. In fact, they were such great friends, he says she used to carry him around in her purse where-ever she went. Apparently she took him with her to Sarajevo. He heard the cellist playing Bach while snipers ripped the city apart. He even claims to have fed her a few ideas, such as the one about the need for an erotics of art. It’s not something I’ve ever properly understood because, Adam tells me, Susan did such a poor job of explaining it. He said he was trying to explain to her how it was that a sentence could act as an aphrodisiac or a hallucinogen, and that taking it apart for hidden meanings missed the point. He quotes Emerson at me: “The art of life consists in skating across surfaces. He who goes below the surface does so at his own risk.” When he says it, I almost fall off my chair.

Adam’s politics are hard to follow. For example, he loves David Brooks. Like, how is it possible that the author of Bobo’s In Paradise speaks so forcefully to him? One of us is playing the other—but who? Adam is imagining a character named Adam who has an affair with his daughter, Katia. But I know for a fact what’s really going on between him and his sister, Grisha. The truth is, I too lust after her. Everyone does. Does the word slattern say anything to you?

*

I don’t delude myself into thinking the Little : People actually need me. They’ve been around forever, after all. They’re old as life itself.

The Little : People will embrace anyone into their ranks—even though almost no one sees them. They’re non-denominational. Everyone who wishes to be one of the Little : People can enlist, so long as you’re not a robber baron or carpetbagger, of course. Because, while they aren’t ideological, the Little : People, if they have any enemies, well, it’s plutocrats who, for some reason, hate them. The Little : People are progressive—LGBT rights had been achieved among them generations ago.

There is nothing not to like about them. They’re the perfect people in a highly imperfect world.

They are born in the air as bacteria and alight in dark, obscure places—such as closets—where they incubate and hatch. They have always been here—as long as we have—and they’re everywhere.

But no longer with me. I can’t afford their friendship any longer. The end times are upon us. I must act accordingly.

Still, Adam’s story about Grisha intrigues!

Now she was gone. His mother. Taken not by illness or the sea but by the Law—as though she, at just under five feet, thin as a cattail, with small ankles, long fingers, and eyes black as bats, threatened anyone. But who was he against the Law? He scratched his head and prodded at the heap below the blankets.

I know you’re not asleep, he said.

The heap shrugged and squirmed out of reach.

5

After the police left with his mother, the apartment grew very still, like someone yanked the heart from a living body.

Wasn’t this just what they had left their country to avoid? Assaults by the “authorities” were what they believed they’d be safe from in America.

In the silence he thought about the noise. Surely the sirens had wakened their neighbors. Surely they would look in on him. Sasha imagined his neighbors appearing any minute to ask what happened. He prepared his story.

The bulb in the ceiling began to blink. Rain pecked the glass.

His sister seemed to be holding her breath. Or maybe she’d died under the covers.

The light went out.

Sometimes he caught her as her face was turning blue. Nice color, he’d say, then he’d tickle her and she’d laugh and start breathing again. This time, he thought, let her burst. Why should she be his responsibility? Where were his mother and father? Why weren’t they here to do their duty? Why was he the adult?

He watched a mouse race across the room for the kitchen, which glowed like someone had pumped fluorescent milk into the air. Though the bulb overhead had flared out, the whole apartment seemed to glow. The police had turned on every light in the place.

His sister’s whimpers resumed. He looked down. He knew her tricks. She wanted attention. He understood that, and how could he deny her? It was as though he saw through the blanket to the shivering dark-haired form beneath.

He took a deep breath, then blew his hair out of his eyes. It was long. He was scheduled for a cut Wednesday. Now what would he do? He didn’t expect his mother had made arrangements. For that matter, had she left any money at all? They would surely need some.

He stared at the trembling blanket. What if no help was coming? It would be easier alone. Alone, he’d find a way of walking the maze, get out somehow, work his way back…to where? Where had he felt safest? Anywhere?

6

It’s not like this was a total surprise, the boy thought, getting out of bed, while his sister burrowed deeper into fictive sleep.

His father tried preparing him. It came back suddenly, like a fist slamming the table. He remembered everything. His father had done just that, slammed his fist on the table to get his attention. Boy, listen to me. Stop squirming. Pay attention, this is important.

His father didn’t flare up easily. Oh, sometimes he yelled at his mother or him (never at his sister)—but not nearly as often as the fathers of the other children Sasha knew. When he did, Sasha remembered. He did it then.

Listen to me. Don’t tell your mother I’m telling you this. She has enough to worry about.

(Really? What? Cooking dinner? Cleaning offices? Didn’t sound too hard, and besides, she liked it. Why worry about such things? But that was what adults did, wasn’t it? Only cooking never worried her. He loved watching his mother mixing flour, kneading the dough for bread, flour pooling on the counter and making little white islands on the floor, the smell of butter sizzling in the pan, pots on the stove bubbling away like a chemistry experiment or a cooking show.)

If something happens to me….

His father’s face was like the map of a town he’d lived in all his life yet hardly knew.

What could happen to you?

His father glared like he was being a wise-guy yet he was asking the most natural question in the world.

We’re not at home anymore…

(…as though things never happened to people at home…earthquakes, hurricanes…everything happened)

…and your mother….

…you mean, if something happened to her? He sat up. All ears.

Yes, boy, yes.

Like what? Now his father had him worried.

This is the world. Things happen. That’s what the world is. The world is the place where things happen.

His father pushed back the sailor’s cap he removed only for sleep.

The boy took this in. This he mulled over.

You listening?

Yes sir. (A little gift to his father, that sir).

Okay. If something happens to us, here’s the phone number for your uncle.

Uncle B?

He heard bottles clanking in the hall.

Uncle B is back home. He doesn’t have a phone. You know that.

Then who?

Uncle C.

I don’t know any Uncle C.

Yes you do. He is your mother’s cousin we stayed with in New York.

New York. When his father said that, a terrible thought raced through Sasha’s head: I hope something happens to you so I can see my uncle in New York. Now he tried to take it back but it was too late. It had already flown out into the universe like a cartoon arrow shot miles into the sky and beyond, into space, and though he was only ten, Sasha knew how dangerous it was to send your thoughts into the universe because you never knew who they might hit. Thoughts sometimes turned hard as rocks. He’d noticed that whenever he got angry with his mother, who winced and flinched under his gaze as though he were stoning her.

His memories of their first nights off the boat were vague. A fever cast everything in a blurry yellow haze as they raced from apartment to apartment in those early weeks before coming here while the past turned a dream.

Put this where you won’t lose it.

His father handed him a slip of paper, licking a finger and pressing it against his upper lip as though feeling for a phantom moustache.

But I lose everything, you know that, the boy said glumly, as though it were a mortal illness.

I know you do, his father whispered.

You always tell me I’d lose my head if it wasn’t sewn on.

Wouldn’t you? Then he added:

I have an idea. I’ll write it on the wall, near your pillow.

Standing up now—the wet smell of the cops still in the air—resting his thin hard feet on the cold floor beside the bed, Sasha leaned over his sister and pushed back a pillow. The number. He picked a marker off the floor. The world tingled with a silvery, jolting energy. He copied it to his wrist.

Sasha felt more vivid than ever. His mother was gone. So was his father.

And he was free.

The apartment felt like a Sunday. But it was Friday. Two in the morning. Therefore, Saturday.

They took his mother at night. His father never returned from work. His sister pretended to sleep through it but he caught her peering out from under the bunched blue sheets beside him. They were still sleeping in the same bed despite their mother’s promises he would soon get his own. He was too old to be sleeping with his sister. Sasha was ten.

Ridiculous girl. Sleeping? Their mother screamed loud enough to wake the sea trolls of Java when the lights came on, and the cops—ten? Twenty? A hundred?—with big oily guns and body armor, kicked open closets and knocked down chairs, making more noise than he ever did messing with Jess from the apartment below.

Rain pummeled the window. It had been raining for days.

2

That Sunday, before the storm began, the family had strolled along the boardwalk and stopped to look at the ocean they’d crossed. They’d seen nothing of it coming over. Stowed in crates like cargo below deck the whole time, they began on one shore, ended on another. Quarantined in their hutches, they slept and woke, pissed and shat in the straw. They weren’t allowed out. Why not? Who’d see them in the middle of the ocean—dolphins? Sasha himself longed to see a dolphin. All animals, from lime-eyed goats to the spiders weaving orbs in the corners of their shanty fast as his mother swept them away, absorbed him. Animals were far more interesting than humans. They were all around us and no one knew a thing about them. What is a fly? People only pretend to know. No, Sasha couldn’t miss this chance to see a dolphin. He’d read about them in a magazine he’d studied at a kiosk in the city while his mother bought cigarettes before going to see the doctor. Neither of his parents could read—and the damned tv was broken!—but he himself devoured the few books in the village school’s meager library. Moreover, his grandfather, noticing the boy’s interest, had given Sasha a sack of books someone had swapped for a basket of sea urchins. The old man had come to believe reading was healthy. He spurred Sasha on by hiding treats—leaves shaped like animals, sprigs of mint, even bills of small denomination—between the pages of texts he himself couldn’t understand. The books must have belonged to a former veterinarian or zoologist because most were about animals -- of land, sea, and air. As a result, Sasha loved everything to do with the creatures of the wild. No one else in the family shared his interest or felt his need to see dolphins, a desire which grew more urgent each day. At last, one night, he snuck out. Tucked in his corner, his father saw him make his move and grabbed for him but Sasha was fast. With the crate open, his father didn’t dare to make a sound.

Sasha scampered up the rollicking stairs to the deck. There he sank to his belly and crawled to the edge of the boat. He peered at pitching waters brushed with moonlight shimmering in a long, widening streak like an iridescent snake unfurling, miles and miles of it, sprouting wings, and he lay there a long time waiting for his dolphin, but none appeared. He struggled to tame his disappointment. The wind wet his face and he rubbed his eyes, and was ready to sneak back when suddenly something extraordinary, a girl with long hair and small breasts leaped out of the water like a fish though he couldn’t say if she had legs or a tail she disappeared so quickly, maybe he dreamed it, no, he was awake, hair clumped from sea spray, blinding him, salt in his mouth, and when he at last pulled shut the crate’s lid and huddled in familiar straw reeking of him—so this is what I smell like he’d thought, —his father glaring, his mother mumbling over her rosary, sister asleep (or pretending, the great pretender she was proving to be) safe and curled in a corner against the wood, clutching the harsh blanket under his chin, eyes tight even as he heard footsteps amid the freight so hot with human cargo, and he began telling them about the girl with the small breasts who in his mind’s eye grew more beautiful each moment until she began to look like his mother in those pictures he’d seen of her when she was his age or a little older, but they merely shook their heads—Oh Sasha, not another story!

3

Red and blue police lights from the courtyard struck the rain-streaked window. Sasha hugged his knees, rocking side to side.

The sea is our mother, his mother said once standing outside his grandfather’s house back in their native land.

No, Sasha thought, remembering the scene he’d just witnessed: helmeted cops with fish-eyed goggles, bulked by thick vests and shoulder pads, looking half-man half-lizard, pinwheels of light and dark flashing off their bodies and weapons. They lurched, herky-jerky, stiff-limbed, monstrous beetles. He watched them grapple with his mother, a tiny woman who resisted their efforts to cuff her, shouting and pushing them away until she crumpled to the ground in a coughing fit while a pair of cyborgs lumbered into the bedroom where he sat open-mouthed. They paid no attention and seemed to be looking for someone else, his father he presumed. And now he was left alone, with Grisha and the sea, which could never be his mother.