Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Lana went first, and when Vladimir filled the needle and held it over her arm, Ilya closed his eyes and thought of blank paper, just as he did before vaccines and after nightmares.

“There,” Vladimir said. Ilya opened his eyes and watched Lana’s shut. Looking at her felt like a violation. Her mouth went ajar and he could see her tongue perched there on her teeth, as though she were about to speak. Vladimir slipped the needle out of her arm, wiped the tip on his jeans, and turned to Aksinya. Aksinya had pulled a hair elastic up her arm and was doing hand curls and squeezing her fist.

“Gotova,” she said. She straightened her arm. There was a vein, fat and gray as a grub, at her elbow, and Vladimir poked the needle into it without a bit of hesitation.

“You always get the ladies high first,” he said. “Common courtesy.”

Aksinya sighed and slumped back so that one of her arms was pressed against Ilya’s. Somewhere in the depths of the Tower he heard a boy yell, “Marco!” It echoed, and then a girl called back, “Polo!”

“You ready for this?” Vladimir said. Vladimir was sucking the last of the liquid into the syringe. Ilya was terrified. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but the girls seemed to be unconscious or close to it—Lana was making a sort of purring sound—and they had presumably done it before. He thought of the rumors at school. How you could die from one hit, how it turned your skin to scales. But Vladimir is here, he thought. Vladimir will take care of me. Ilya pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Vladimir was tapping the syringe.

“Ready,” Ilya said.

Vladimir looked at him. “Are you fucking kidding me, Ilyusha? Finish the vodka, but none of this. OK? This is not for you.”

It was a relief; it was embarrassing. Ilya’s arm was still outstretched, and so he grabbed the bottle and took as big a swallow as he could manage.

“It’s krokodil?”

Vladimir nodded. He was tying himself off with a bandana, his teeth on one end, and Ilya thought—too late—that he should have offered to help. “We don’t really call it that, though. We don’t really call it anything.” There was a warmth to his voice. It was a tone he only used with Ilya, when he told Ilya things about the world, about women, about music, about how to act. He would make a good teacher, Ilya realized, though of course that would never happen.

“What does it make you feel like?”

Vladimir laughed. He ran a finger down the length of his arm, where there was a bruise that stretched from his bicep to his forearm. Ilya couldn’t see any of his veins, but Vladimir stuck the needle in anyhow.

“It’s funny,” he said. He was moving the syringe around, fishing in his flesh for a vein. “Mostly it makes me remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Stuff,” Vladimir said. He pushed the plunger down. “Do you remember the time Papa took us to Leshukonskoye?”

Ilya shook his head, though there was something about it that rang a bell.

“You were little, I guess. I don’t know—four or five, maybe. We were supposed to go visit a friend of his, but there was something wrong with the Lada. It was guzzling petrol, making this thumping sound, and Papa kept joking that he’d kidnapped Stalin and stashed him in the trunk. It took us forever, even to just get to the end of Ulitsa Lenina. We had to stop at every petrol station along the way for gas and to see if there was a mechanic in. Papa would get a beer at each, and so then we were stopping for him to piss every half hour.”

Ilya laughed.

“He was a wonderful drunk, though,” Vladimir said, “which is where I get it.”

“Clearly,” Ilya said.

“You were being a bitch, of course. Complaining about being hungry all the time and carsick, and Papa just turned the music up loud, so we couldn’t hear you or the car thumping, and I remember wondering why he wasn’t worried about how we were going to make it to Leshukonskoye, let alone back home, but he wasn’t. So I didn’t worry about it either,” Vladimir said. “I can count the number of days I spent with him. On one hand.”

Ilya nodded, and Vladimir leaned back so that his head was nestled against Aksinya’s.

“Then the petrol gauge was low again, and we rolled into this station with these bright yellow pumps and a wind chime dangling above the door. Papa went inside to pay. He told us not to move a muscle, and so we didn’t. For ten minutes. Twenty. And then you had to pee, so I took you out and let you pee on the shoulder. It was hot in the car, so we sat outside instead, and wrote our names in the dust on the pumps. And there was this old cat with a goiter on its stomach that dragged in the dirt, and we found sticks and were playing this game where you got a point if you poked its goiter with a stick. Of course the cat got pissed and then it got desperate, and it was running for the road, and you were following it. Fucking toddling along after it, not a care in the world except that you wanted points, you wanted to win, and I can see this truck coming. Flat out. Fast as it can go. You were screaming at the cat, and then you tripped over your stick and fell into the road. And you were just lying there, whining about a scrape on your knee, in the middle of the road, and the truck is basically on you, is honking so loud, and I was so fucking scared, but I ran out there and pulled you to the shoulder and the truck swerved and the cat—splat.”

Vladimir clapped his hands softly.

“No way,” Ilya said.

“Swear to God,” Vladimir said. “Swear on Papa.”

Ilya lifted an eyebrow. Vladimir had lied in their father’s name before and, when called on it, said, “What does he care? He’s dead.”

Vladimir shrugged. “It’s the truth,” he said. “I practically shat my pants. I thought you were toast. I was so scared I made you hide under a blanket in the backseat with me for a full hour, sweating our balls off. And when Papa finally came out, he was even more wonderfully drunk, and he’d bought us slingshots and candy.”

Ilya remembered the slingshots, the smooth birch handles, the cradles made of strips of tire rubber that smelled singed. They were strong enough to shoot a rock from their balcony all the way across the courtyard. “I kept waiting for you to say something about the truck. I wanted to know if he’d be proud of me for saving you or if I’d get in trouble for letting you in the road in the first place, but you didn’t say a word, and he slept it off. We ate the candy, and the next time you had to piss I made you do it in a bottle. Then he woke up and drove us home. Like he’d forgotten all about Leshukonskoye. Like he’d never meant to get there in the first place.”

“That’s what you remember?” Ilya said, because aside from the slingshots the memory didn’t seem to hold much that was good.

“It’s the farthest from home I’ve ever been,” Vladimir said. “Halfway to fucking Leshukonskoye.” His eyes were drooping, and next to him, the girls’ faces had gone pale, like faces under ice.

“But you could remember it anyway,” Ilya said, and he could feel himself getting shrill.

“I know, but it’s more than remembering. It’s like it’s all happening at once. Like I’m there and like I’m holding it at the same time. And then there are the times that aren’t so good.”

“What happens those times?”

Vladimir smiled at Ilya, a melting sort of smile. “This time’s going to be good. Look—” He held his hand out to Ilya and opened his fist as though there were something in it that might explain, but his palm was empty.

They were just taking naps. That’s what Ilya told himself over and over. When he couldn’t convince himself of that, he told himself that they were all having the good high, the remembering kind. And it seemed as though they were. Aksinya laughed twice, said her sister’s name, and then called for someone named Yuri. Once Vladimir started to hum, but Ilya did not know the tune. He watched them for a while, and then he began to look for his tapes. They were in the pink plastic bag in the corner, stuffed underneath a camouflage sweatshirt of Vladimir’s. Ilya counted them. All ten were there. He read each of their titles and ran his finger down their spines. The tape player was in the bag too, and this was a mystery to Ilya. Vladimir could have sold the player in an instant—the pawnshop was filled with more worthless items, with the flotsam of the Soviet years—but he hadn’t. There was a glimmer of decency in this, a tiny promise of restraint, and so Ilya put the tapes and the player back into the bag.