Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Who lives in the penthouse?” Ilya asked.

“The penthouse?”

Ilya nodded.

“It’s been empty for a decade. Fetisov owns it. I go up a couple times a year to make sure the heat works and the pipes haven’t frozen. But he’s here occasionally with the new pipeline project.” Dmitri ran a hand lightly down the elevator panel. “Almost all of them are empty. They built them for the bigwigs, but then the bigwigs didn’t want to live here. They’d rather live anywhere else—fly in, fly out, not even spend the night if they can help it. So they’ve got no one who can afford the apartments, and they had to start cutting the prices. Ours is a perk of the job. But as you can see, the job never ends.”

“Of course,” Ilya said.

The elevator let them out in a garage. Somehow Ilya had not expected Dmitri to drive a patrol car, but there it was: the siren, the blue stripe, the MILITSIYA across the hood. There was not a flake of snow on it, the door was barely cold to the touch, and this was a marvel to Ilya.

“Maria is going to miss you, you know. She cares for you,” Dmitri said, as they pulled out of the garage. “She thinks of you like family, which means you’re family to me too.”

Ilya nodded. He knew that he should say something more—that he cared for Maria Mikhailovna too, or that he wouldn’t forget her—but he’d let the silence go too long.

“You want me to turn on the lights and sirens?”

“No,” Ilya said with a smile.

“I figured you were too old for that.”

On the corner of Ulitsa Tsentralnaya and Ulitsa Lenina, Dmitri hit the endless traffic light, the krasny beskonechnyy, which seemed to never be green, no matter what direction you were coming from. Dmitri groaned, and Ilya looked out the window and saw two figures sitting on a bench. Their shoulders were dusted in snow. They were looking down at their laps. Bare fingers flashing above their knees. They were gloveless, rolling cigarettes, and Ilya recognized the motion of Vladimir’s hands before he recognized his face. On his lap was the little pouch that their mother had given him eons ago to hold pencils and pens and erasers and that he had only ever used for tobacco. A lighter sparked in his hands, and in the glow, Ilya saw that it was Sergey sitting next to him. Vladimir lit his own cigarette, as straight and even as a factory-made. It bobbed between his lips as he said something to Sergey that Ilya couldn’t hear. The heat was blasting in the car and the windows were up, and Dmitri said, “You want to know a secret?”

Ilya nodded, his eyes on Vladimir.

“They programmed this light to be red for double the usual time. So people would run it and the traffic cops could pad their pockets, but of course here I am, waiting and waiting.” He went on complaining, saying that they had all spent lifetimes waiting at lights like this even though there weren’t any other cars in sight.

On the bench, Vladimir lit Sergey’s cigarette. Their hands cupped around the lighter. Their heads dipped toward each other. Their noses might have touched. There was ease there and symmetry. They stayed that way for only a moment, but it was a long moment for Ilya. He had always believed that some cord, some twine of genes and history and proximity, held him to his brother and held his brother to him, but he could feel the cord—or his belief in it—slacken as he watched them. He had the sense that he wasn’t looking out a window but at a screen, at a character whose fate he was invested in but powerless to change. And he had this feeling that he’d been getting more and more recently, that each time he saw Vladimir might be the last.

Sergey looked up at the car, smoke rolling up over his cheeks. He elbowed Vladimir. Vladimir stuffed the pouch in his pocket, and they both stood. Two shadow shapes cut out of the snow. Ilya thought they would walk away, but instead they headed toward the car, and Ilya could feel Dmitri stiffen beside him.

“Look at these two,” he murmured.

Vladimir and Sergey cut across the street a few meters in front of the car, moving slowly, like they thought that might make them look innocent. Dmitri’s headlights caught the stripes on the track pants that Vladimir wore day in and day out. Then the traffic light turned green. Sergey didn’t notice, but Vladimir stopped and looked toward the car. He can’t see me, Ilya thought, the headlights are too bright, but Vladimir squinted and stared.

Ilya saw him mouth, “Ilyusha?” and he hoped that Dmitri had not understood.

“Is this fucker really going to test me?” Dmitri said. He dug his palm into the horn and blasted it. Sergey was past the car, but he stopped now too. Sergey, who was always ready for a fight, looked back at them, his face wild with anger. Then he raised a hand and lifted his middle finger and jabbed it in the air.

“Run!” Sergey yelled just as the car jolted forward.

The tires shimmied on the ice—Dmitri had pressed hard on the gas—and the tail twisted out so that the car was almost sideways in the street. Dmitri cursed. Vladimir and Sergey were moving now, running sloppily, but gaining distance nonetheless. They were half a block away. Sergey tripped once, caught himself on one hand, and was up again. And then Dmitri righted the car and gassed it, more gently this time, so that it glided smoothly over the snow, gaining on Sergey and Vladimir until the bumper was only a few meters from their feet. The bottoms of Vladimir’s shoes—ancient sneakers, with no treads—rose like shadows in the headlights. His boots were at home, by the door, under the picture of their father in the red plastic frame that Babushka liked to touch each time she left the apartment, but of course Vladimir wasn’t wearing them. Ilya shut his eyes. He was sure that Vladimir would fall, that he would hear the thump, thump of his body under the tires.

“Urody,” Dmitri said, which was the word for freaks, but also for babies born with something wrong, for black sheep, for imbeciles. Dmitri’s face was thrust forward over the steering wheel. His tongue moved over his lips. “Fucking urody.”

They were almost at the corner, the turnoff to the kommunalkas, and as Vladimir ran into the intersection, sinking ankle-deep into the crisscrossing mounds of snow left by the plows, Ilya managed to say, “Here. Right here. This is my turn.” As though Dmitri were just driving him home.

Dmitri glanced over at him, and then he twisted the wheel right, and the back tires shot out from under them again. Ilya could hear him breathing through his mouth, as though he too had been running. Then he started to laugh.

“Can you believe them?” he said. “They were too high to even think of running out of the road.”

The kommunalkas were ahead of them, a cluster of darkness blocking the refinery’s light.

“Like ants, right? Too stupid to break the line,” Dmitri said.

Ilya didn’t say anything. Dmitri could easily turn the car around—Vladimir was still only a minute away, probably standing in the middle of the street, rehearsing the story with Sergey between jagged breaths. And Dmitri had power over Ilya too, over his whole future, over America, and Ilya thought that if he could just hold himself incredibly still and silent, he could protect it all.

“Not a word of this to Masha,” Dmitri said. “You hear me?”

Ilya nodded.

“She’s a pacifist,” he said. “She’s meant for a better world. That’s why I love her.”

Ilya nodded again.

“Listen,” Dmitri said, as he pulled up to Ilya’s building. His hand was on Ilya’s thigh again. “Those two will be fine. Maybe even better for this. Maybe I scared them sober, right?”

Ilya could feel his leg shaking. He knew that Dmitri could feel it too. This wouldn’t be over, he wouldn’t be released, until he said something. So he smiled at Dmitri and managed to thank him for dinner and the ride home, and then he got out of the car and watched Dmitri drive over the bridge and down the road until his lights merged with the refinery’s.