Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“Where?”

“Dunno. Do you want to come?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seeing—?” I said carefully.

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

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

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

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

xvi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Um, that’s right.”

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

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

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

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