Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Better, right?” she said.

He nodded, and she pressed her hands against his thigh. He guessed she was aiming for his crotch, and it didn’t really matter that she’d missed. His dick prickled and warmed, this feeling of gathering tension that surged as she repositioned her hand and began to rub him. He was shorter than her, and when he tried to kiss her, his lips didn’t meet hers. They landed on her jaw instead, and so he kissed that. He kissed her shoulder, where her bra strap edged out from under her shirt. It was see-through, like a thin strip of plastic wrap, something he would have wondered about at any other time, but she took her hands off of his crotch long enough to direct his lips to hers. She tasted like vodka, or maybe that was him, and he couldn’t tell if the swimming, spinning feeling in his head was from kissing, from the way her tongue was dipping into his mouth, or whether he was drunker than he’d thought.

She swayed a little, giggled, her lips vibrating against his.

“Let’s lie down,” she said, lowering herself onto her knees, with her hands still on him. Together they slumped down onto the blankets like some sort of clumsy, lame beast. And just as he thought how glad he was that the blankets were there, that they didn’t have to lie on broken glass, he realized that Vladimir and Aksinya had planned this, that Aksinya had made this bed of blankets for just this purpose. The thought terrified him, and he twisted, looking for the door. Lana pressed her lips into his ear. “You’re going to America, huh?” she whispered. “Hot shot. Big hot shot.”

She tried to pull his sweater up over his head, but it caught on his ears long enough for him to say, “It’s too cold,” and pull it back down.

“You don’t want to show up a virgin, do you?” she said. Behind her, people walked past the doorway. Just smeared silhouettes. One paused, a dark shadow that seemed to take them in.

“Let’s shut the door,” he said, but there was no door in the frame.

“We burned it,” she said. Then she saw his face, saw that he was imagining a bonfire, girls dancing, things sacrificed. She pointed to the stove in the corner. “There,” she said, laughing.

She leaned in and sucked at his earlobe, flicked her tongue against it.

“Lana,” he said. “I don’t feel good.”

“How about now?” she said, as she grappled with his jeans, searching for the zipper, and his dick swelled at the prospect of escape.

“Stop,” he whispered. “OK. Stop.”

She let her hands drop. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. He couldn’t see much of her face, just light and dark, dips and curves.

She considered him for a moment and said, “Fine, let’s stop, but you’ve got to tell your brother we fucked.”

He nodded, and she kissed him again, but more lightly this time, like he was something very fragile. “You know, you’re cute,” she said. “You don’t have to be so nervous.” She kissed him one more time. “That was just for you. On the house,” she said. “I might see you there, you know.”

“Where?”

“America,” she said, and Ilya was trying to parse the implication of this as someone began shouting in the corridor.

“It’s Sergey,” Ilya said.

“Fucking Sergey the drama queen,” Lana said. She smoothed out her shirt and tucked the one bra strap back under the fabric. “Stay here,” she said, and disappeared into the corridor.

He followed her as far as the doorway. It was dark, but he could still see figures huddled a few doors down, and as his eyes adjusted, he picked out Vladimir and Sergey and Lana and Aksinya, and someone else lying on the floor at their feet. It was one of the guys Ilya had seen wrestling earlier, only he wasn’t smiling now. His jaw was slack and there was blood trickling out of his nose. Then Sergey said, “Pizdun,” and kicked the guy. The guy groaned, and Sergey kicked him again.

Aksinya put a hand on Sergey’s arm. “He’s not going to pay if you knock him out,” she said, sounding more tired than alarmed.

Ilya took a few steps toward them, and something sharp and metal tripped him. He caught himself with his hands, and felt glass and rocks dig into his palms. The group turned at the noise.

“Ilyusha?” Vladimir said.

Ilya was silent for a second, like that might make him invisible, and then Vladimir said, “Give me a minute,” as though he were finishing up in the bathroom or jamming the last blini in his mouth before they left for school.

“Tomorrow, you hear me?” Sergey said to the guy on the ground.

Ilya turned back into the room. He held his hands out by the stove and brushed the grit off them. He wanted a glass of water, badly, or at least a handful of snow, but the idea of finding his way outside was dizzying, so instead he took another drink from the vodka bottle.

When Vladimir came back, a cigarette glowed in his mouth. Lana and Aksinya were with him. Sergey had gone to meet his girlfriend.

“So,” Vladimir said, toeing the nest of blankets on the ground.

“Don’t be nosy,” Lana said. Ilya was quiet, and Lana reached out, took his hand, and swung it in hers. “It was good,” she said softly, and from the way she said it, he could tell that she meant it, at least a little.

“Of course he was fucking good,” Vladimir said. His words came out thick. He needed the doorjamb to stand. “He tell you about America?”

“ You told me about America,” she said, but Vladimir went on. His eyes stretched past them, past Lana who was wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, past the smoking stove and Sylvester Stallone and the walls and wind.

“He’s gonna be a fucking mobster. You think this is big-time?” he said, swooping his cigarette through the air in a gesture that could have meant the room, the Tower, or the whole of Russia. “Selling teenths and handling a whore or two? Ilya. Ilya’s gonna go to America. There are Russians galore there, managing shit. Then he’s gonna—”

“Come back and run this whole machine.” Lana and Aksinya said it just as Vladimir did, and Vladimir pointed at them.

“Exactly,” he said. A long tail of ash dropped off his cigarette. Ilya stared at Vladimir. He’d said this—all this gangster America shit—before. He’d said it enough for Lana and Aksinya to memorize it. It was ridiculous, of course, but still this sweet sort of warmth grew in Ilya’s belly.

Ilya reached for Vladimir’s cigarette and took a puff. “You and me. We’ll run shit,” he said.

Lana looked over at him, as though he’d only just now come into focus, or just now slid out of it. She licked at her lips, and he could feel them, damp and pillowy against his own. “Why the fuck would you come back?” she said.

“He comes back,” Vladimir yelled, “for his brother!”

“Enough already,” Aksinya said.

“Are you getting antsy?” Vladimir said. He hooked a finger through one of Aksinya’s belt loops, pulled her close, and looked over her head to Ilya.

“Ilyusha, I think the ladies are ready for the next phase of the evening.”

They all sat on the blankets, and so Ilya did the same. Vladimir pulled his pencil case out of his backpack, and then, out of the case, came their mother’s silver spoon. Vladimir’s eyes met Ilya’s for a second, and then Vladimir stuck the spoon in his mouth, smiled around it, and dug a vial and a bottle of what looked like eye drops from the case.

After the robbery, Timofey had gone to the two pawnshops in town and found Dedushka’s medals and their mother’s rings and the samovar, and he had presented them to Babushka as though they were precious samizdat, The Gulag Archipelago or The White Book hand copied, and Babushka had acted as though it were the loss of the things that had broken her heart, as though it could be mended by their return. Timofey hadn’t been able to find the vouchers or the spoon, and Ilya hadn’t ever told him about the Michael & Stephanie tapes or the player. As Vladimir shook a mound of powder into the spoon’s dip, Ilya wondered whether he’d sold them too, whether some other kid was listening to Michael and Stephanie right at that moment. Vladimir squeezed a few drops from the bottle on top of the powder and the powder let out a weak hiss as it turned liquid. Aksinya was sitting next to him, and she held a lighter under the spoon. She and Lana and Vladimir all watched the liquid, and Ilya watched them and wondered whether their concentration had ever been so complete. Their faces looked like the faces of the men who’d first made fire and had stared at it with a hunger and happiness they couldn’t hide.