Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Get more hot water,” Babushka said to Timofey. Timofey nodded, but Babushka had to say, “Now,” before Timofey ran for the kitchen.

“Shut the door, Ilya,” his mother said. “I need you to hold his head up and talk to him. Try to get him awake.”

Ilya sat and pulled Vladimir’s head into his lap. Vladimir’s skin felt like marble too, and somehow this was a comfort to Ilya because the cold was a familiar threat. He’s just cold, he thought. He just stayed out too long in the cold. He rubbed at Vladimir’s cheeks. He said his name over and over, as his mother pulled off Vladimir’s jacket. At the stove, Babushka had both teakettles whistling. She poured them into the enormous roast pan that was reserved for the New Year’s feast and filled them again from the jug of water on the counter. Ilya’s mother unbuttoned Vladimir’s shirt. He was even thinner than he’d been in the Tower, with deep shadows between his ribs. There were scabs at the crook of his arm, marching along the veins all the way to his hands, and their mother must have noticed them, but she just said, “Thank God,” when she saw his chest, the skin intact, the heart fluttering under it.

“Ilya,” she said, “wake him up. And if he vomits again, turn his head. Make sure he doesn’t choke on it.”

Ilya pinched Vladimir’s cheeks and red bloomed on his skin, then faded in an instant. “Wake up!” he yelled. “Wake up, wake up!” He slapped Vladimir, felt his own cheeks burn in apology, but Vladimir’s head just lolled to the side, and his lips parted and let out a gasp of bitter breath.

Timofey was back with two kettles of steaming water, and Babushka pointed to the roast pan and said, “More,” and he poured the water into the pan and ran for more.

Their mother had Vladimir’s shoes off. His socks were filthy, crusted brown with blood. His mother rolled them off, and Ilya could see that the pockets of skin between his toes were oozing. When his mother pulled at Vladimir’s jeans, Vladimir’s eyes flashed open, and for a second, Ilya thought, He’s OK. He’s awake, and he’s OK. But then Vladimir screamed, his body jackknifing, his head smashing into Ilya’s chin. He twisted onto his side and vomited again, and again nothing came out.

Ilya’s mother let out a sound that was something like a sob, though she wasn’t crying. She put her hands on her knees and bowed her head, and he thought that she might give in and call for an ambulance, but after a moment she lifted her head and said, “I need scissors,” and Babushka brought them from her sewing kit.

“OK,” his mother said. “Vova, can you hear me? I’ll be gentle, but we have to get your pants off. We have to get you clean. OK?”

The pain had woken Vladimir, and his eyes were narrowed on a spot on the carpet just past his nose. His face was slick with sweat, and Ilya could see that he did not have it in him to respond, let alone fight her. She began to cut, very slowly, very gently, along the seam of his pants. On one leg, the fabric fell away, but on the other, it stuck to the skin and so she cut even more slowly, millimeter by millimeter. Timofey brought water again, and now the roast pan was full and steaming, and his mother had cut Vladimir’s pants all the way up through the waistband.

“Ilya,” she said, “you need to really hold him now.”

Ilya put his arms around Vladimir’s head, so that his fingers laced under his chin, and Babushka pushed a spoon between his teeth.

“This will hurt, Vova, but I’ll be quick,” their mother said. She had never talked to Vladimir so softly before, had not used his nickname since they were children. Always she said “Vla-di-mir,” the syllables a scale of disappointment.

The spoon clattered in Vladimir’s teeth, and Ilya couldn’t tell if he was nodding or shaking. He groped for Ilya’s hand and found it, and Ilya thought of war movies, of all those glorious deaths in the Great War, when it had seemed so clear who the enemy was and who the hero. Vladimir yanked at his hand, feebly, and spit the spoon out of his mouth. He wanted to say something—and this was like the movies too, Ilya thought, his heart racing. Vladimir had some last words, some assertion of love or apology, something for them.

“Pocket,” he said, his voice sounding full of sand. “Coat pocket.”

“Mama?” Ilya said.

His mother closed her eyes and nodded, and it was from her expression—that calm defeat—that Ilya knew what was in the pocket.

There was a vial and a syringe. The syringe was visibly dirty, the needle crusted with something yellow. The vial had a pathetic amount in it. Less than a teaspoon. Less than a lick, already mixed, with gray sediment at the bottom.

“Do I have to cook it?” Ilya said, thinking of the process he’d witnessed at the Tower, knowing that he couldn’t replicate it, that he hadn’t been watching it with the right sort of desire.

Vladimir shook his head. Ilya wiped down the syringe and sucked the liquid into it. He pressed the plunger down to get the air out because Vladimir had told him a story about a man, three floors down, who had filled his insulin syringe with air and pushed it into his veins in ’98, when the currency crashed.

“Mama,” Ilya said again.

She took the syringe from him, held it out, and started to cry. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t know how to find a vein.”

Vladimir’s eyes were clearer, now that the syringe was in sight, as though he could already feel the drug working. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a vein.”

So she stuck the needle into the bare skin of his thigh, in a spot that looked vaguely blue, and Vladimir leaned back onto Ilya’s lap and opened his mouth, and Ilya put the spoon back between his teeth though his jaw was too slack to hold it. Once she’d pushed the plunger down, his mother handed the syringe to Babushka, and Babushka opened the door to the balcony, disappeared into a gust of cold air, and came back without it.

“The water’s getting cold,” Babushka said.

His mother nodded and gripped the edges of his pants where they were stuck to his skin.

“Ready?” she said.

Ilya nodded and gripped Vladimir’s hand, and Vladimir’s mind was far away, gripping whatever memory it had found, and when their mother ripped the fabric away and bits of his flesh came too, he did not yell or move.

The leg was ruinous. The skin, where it remained, was the color of onions cooked in grease, and below the knee there was a crater where his shin should have been, and in the muck of flesh and blood and pus, there was the clean white flash of bone.

Ilya would remember the horror from this night. In America, he would dream of it, but he would remember this too: how his mother and Babushka had moved in concert, each seeming to find strength right when the other had lost it.

It was his mother who had ripped the fabric off, who threw up at the sight of Vladimir’s leg, but then looked again anyway. It was Babushka who spread a towel under Vladimir and bathed him with the water from the roast pan, which had been their tub when they were babies. Her hand plunged into the water over and over, as endlessly patient as an oil pump dipping into the earth.

“He’ll have to go to the hospital,” she said, when he was clean.

“I know,” his mother said.

Timofey sat at their table with his head in his hands. “It’s gangrene,” he said softly, then, “How the hell did he get gangrene?”

His mother brought her makeup kit from the bedroom and began to dab makeup over the puncture marks on Vladimir’s arms, between his toes, everywhere except the bone-deep sore on his leg. Her fingers shook as she put it on. The makeup was the wrong color—too orange for Vladimir’s skin—and the scabs made his skin look like rocky soil. It was ridiculous, but she couldn’t stop herself and neither Ilya nor Babushka tried to stop her. She was writing her hope out on his skin. Hiding the drugs so that he wouldn’t get arrested, blacklisted, or sent to a narc clinic, which was worse than prison. They dressed Vladimir in a sweater of Timofey’s and a pair of Ilya’s sweats—a respectable outfit for Vladimir—and still the nurse at the hospital took one look at his face and said, “Any idea what he’s on?”