Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

He had a biology quiz the next day, and so it wasn’t until he’d memorized the steps of photosynthesis that he got into bed and listened to the tape from Gabe’s house. He’d listened to it so many times that it was hard to actually pay attention, and his mind drifted to Sadie, as his mind did more and more recently. That afternoon she’d asked him if he’d want to stay for longer than a year. Her shirt was off—they were in the back of her car in the parking lot behind the defunct fireworks stand—and his hands ran down her ribs, her skin so smooth it made it hard to think, but even if he hadn’t been touching her, he would have nodded, would have said yes.

On the tape, Gabe was saying stained glass and personal effects , and Ilya was saying yes, and kissing her neck and then her chest, and he was slipping down one strap of her bra and then the other, and then Gabe said, Tapes. These tapes for learning English.

Ilya sat up. Only I didn’t think you’d need them , Gabe said, and he was right, of course. Ilya didn’t need them. Why would he need them here, in America? But Ilya had brought them anyway, had brought them though he knew them by heart, because when he’d found them in the Tower it had seemed like a message. When Gabe told Ilya that the nurse had asked him to give them to Ilya, Ilya thought that he’d understood the message: the tapes were Vladimir’s way of apologizing for stealing them in the first place, for everything, or else they were his way of saying good-bye. Vladimir had known that Ilya would want the tapes even in America—Vladimir, who had spent years of his life plucking the headphones off Ilya’s ears so that he could call him a loser or a brainiac or tell him that dinner was ready or ask him if he wanted to go find some cardboard and sled down the concrete ramps under the bridge.

Ilya rewound. Tapes , Gabe said. I didn’t want to be involved . Ilya could imagine the redheaded nurse thrusting them at Gabe, telling him to get them to Vladimir’s brother. Clearly she’d been doing Vladimir a favor—she’d taken the tapes from him instead of giving them straight to the police—but she hadn’t wanted to wait to give them to Ilya and Babushka, who came to the clinic almost daily. The only explanation that Ilya could think of was that she’d gotten scared, as though they were contraband, a pack of Marlboros or three stolen pounds of rye, something that, back in the day, would earn you ten years without the right of correspondence.

Ilya pressed stop. The other tapes were stacked on the dresser. The one on top was the one that Vladimir had left in the player, the first installment of Michael & Stephanie . Ilya’s hands were shaking so much that at first he couldn’t get the tape in, couldn’t get the player closed, and then he finally did, and he pushed play and Michael said, “Unit One: Hello, How Are You?” and Stephanie introduced herself, and Michael did the same, and Ilya forced himself to repeat back everything that they said, to pay attention to each syllable in just the way he had when he was six, sitting on the carpet reading the lips in Vladimir’s movies. Each side was an hour long. He started the third tape at midnight, and soon afterward, Sadie crept down the deck steps. Ilya hit pause and slid the door open.

“Hey,” he whispered.

She froze at the edge of the pool, then squinted down at him in the shadows below the deck.

“You almost gave me a heart attack,” she said, as she picked her way past the rusty bicycles toward him.

He told her what he was thinking, how he kept picturing the plastic bag sitting there in the Tower, how it had seemed alive, almost, the bright pink of it against all that concrete.

“I’ll listen with you,” she said.

“You’re not going to go?” he asked. He thought of her mother on the Bojangles’ parking stump a few days earlier, and wondered what shape she might be in.

Sadie shook her head. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

They lay on his bed, and he pulled the headphones out of the jack, and Michael’s and Stephanie’s voices poured into the basement. He had never listened to them like this—out loud, with another person, in America—and he could sense how shabby they were, how stilted. It felt something like the time his mother had shown up at the school for a talent show, her hairnet forgotten on her head.

Michael and Stephanie were at the train station, buying tickets, checking the time, finding their seats. Sadie was quiet, listening.

“It’s old-fashioned, isn’t it?” he said. “No one says, ‘Is this seat taken?’”

“I like it. They sound like you,” Sadie said.

“I sound like them,” Ilya said.

On the B-side of the third tape, Michael and Stephanie went to the zoo. They fed peanuts to elephants and bread to ducks. Stephanie listed her favorite animals. Giraffe, tiger, lion, snake. She was talking about their habitats, about the savannah, when Ilya fell asleep.

He woke as the sun was coming up over the rim of the alligator wall. Sadie was asleep beside him.

“Did you figure it out?” she said as she woke.

“Not yet,” he said, and she snuck out the sliding doors and back into the house undetected.

That morning he feigned illness in order to keep listening to the tapes, and Mama Jamie was so concerned for his health that she brought him mug after mug of chicken soup, bowls of crackers, and bottles of a liquid called Powerade that looked like antifreeze but that she claimed would keep his electrolytes in balance. Halfway through the tapes, he told her that he needed fresh air, and he moved out onto the patio by the pool. He stationed himself on a beach chair, with the Delta headphones over each ear. The heat had relented, and above him the oak leaves shimmied in a breeze. Clouds chained the sky, and in the brilliance of the day, the idea that a message might be embedded in the tapes, that they might hold anything beyond Michael’s and Stephanie’s clear, vacant voices, seemed ludicrous. But there was planning and effort in the fact that Vladimir had asked the nurse to get the tapes to him, and Vladimir was not a planner, was not one to make an effort.

He was on the A-side of the seventh tape. There was only one tape left plus the tape he’d recorded over, and this was a thought that he was avoiding. What if he’d erased Vladimir’s message with Gabe’s story? It was too horrible an idea to entertain.

Michael was discussing the days of the week as a way of practicing the future tense. On Monday I will drive to the market . On Tuesday I will cook dinner. On Wednesday I will clean the house. On Thursday I will—

There was a thick silence. Before he noticed it, Ilya’s mind had completed the sentence. On Thursday I will get a haircut. He could picture the workbook image that accompanied this statement: Michael smiling while a barber pointed a pair of scissors at his neck. Then there was a muffled sound, a cough, and a faint Russian voice said, “Thank you,” and “Shut the door.”

Ilya sat up and pressed the headphones to his ears, trying to bring the voice closer.

“You want one?” the voice said.

There was no answer but a staccato thwacking.

“Light?” the voice said, then, “Don’t tell your mother.” A few seconds passed, and the voice said, “I’ll begin recording.”

“Da,” another voice said. It sounded like Vladimir, though the word coming from Vladimir was usually a lazy, drawn-out thing, and in this case it was clipped, nervous.

There was a light click, and Ilya thought that that might be it, but the first voice came back, full of bravado, so loud and clear that Ilya dropped his hands from the headphones.

“This is Officer Dmitri Malikov, interviewing the suspect, Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov, at fifteen hundred hours, at the Berlozhniki Medical Clinic. Can you confirm your identity for the record?”