Ilya sighed and clicked Aksinya’s tag in the picture. The photo was hers. It was the only one that she’d tagged from that night at the Tower, but now, as her profile loaded, he saw that it wasn’t the only one that she’d posted. There were a dozen of the same shot, more or less, and Ilya clicked through them. In the first, Sergey’s finger was on the lens, obscuring Vladimir entirely, but Aksinya looked gaunt and gorgeous, which must have been why she’d posted it. In the second shot, Lana’s eyes were closed and so was Vladimir’s mouth. The third photo was the one they’d all been tagged in, and then, as Ilya clicked to the next and the next, Vladimir’s mouth opened wider. The pictures blurred until they were like a movie—the girls dipping inward to kiss Ilya and Vladimir’s cheeks, their arms extending to flick Sergey off. Vladimir’s lips split. His tongue hit his teeth. Ilya could hear him again, just as clearly as he had at the Masons’ church. “You have competition, Ilyusha,” and as Vladimir said it, his eyes shifted bit by bit by bit until, in the last photo, they were looking to the far left.
Ilya zoomed in on the photo until each of their faces was as big as his palm. He scrolled left, past Vladimir, past himself, past Lana. There were people dancing all around her. The background was a tangle of appendages whose owners were hard to identify, but on the edge of the frame there was someone in the foreground. Someone walking past them, close enough for his shoulder to brush Lana’s. That was who Vladimir was looking at. The person was cut in half. One shoulder, one leg, the shadowy suggestion of hair under a baseball cap. Ilya zoomed in as far as the computer would allow. The pixels fattened and blurred like cells in a petri dish, and then they clarified, cell by cell, until the face resolved into one that Ilya recognized. It was Gabe Thompson, the only American in Berlozhniki. His baseball cap had an orange bear on it, and the hat struck a chord in Ilya’s brain, made his ribs clench his heart like a fist squeezing tight.
He clicked on Lana’s name under the photo, and her profile pictures loaded just as they had the night before. There, just before the photo from the Tower, was the series of Lana lying on a bed in the black bikini, which seemed, on closer inspection, to be a bra. Her hair was wild, her makeup in half-moons under her eyes. She was on her stomach, her breasts squished together so that a seam of cleavage halved the photo. The sight of all that skin tripped some sexual circuit and heat rushed Ilya’s crotch and then he thought, she’s dead, and just as quickly the feeling was gone, replaced by nausea as if he’d drunk sour milk. She was wearing a baseball hat too. It was askew, the brim tilting toward one cheek. The logo was only half visible, but still Ilya could see that it was an orange bear, its fangs bared.
Since the midnineties Berlozhniki had played host to a trickle of tourists, groups of Swedes or Brits decked out in snowsuits so new and stiff that they barely allowed for movement. They’d check in to the Hotel Berlozhniki, which was really more of a hostel, eat at the pizza place on the square, and visit the Museum of Mining, where Babushka would give them a chit for their coats. They’d tour the museum’s three rooms, have a coffee in its café, reclaim their coats, and go gawk at the field of crosses that marked the camp’s dead. After thirty-six hours, two days at most, they’d leave, feeling sober and superior, but Gabe Thompson had been in Berlozhniki for close to two years.
He’d arrived alone, with money, and without, it seemed, any plans to leave, and at first the town had welcomed him. The Cold War was over, after all, and families had him over for supper. This young, blond American in a parka and a too-big suit. The mayor’s wife baked him her famous kulich. He got a monthly discount at the Hotel Berlozhniki, and the pizza place gave him a free pie, took a picture of him eating it, and made a poster of it that said, AUTHENTIC! AMERICA! PIZZA! The businesses on the square spruced themselves up—Anatoly at the Minutka was even spotted mopping—in the hope that Gabe might be the vanguard of a new wave of tourism that would drown Berlozhniki in rubles.
If Gabe seemed at all odd—and he did talk, occasionally, about angels and a golden book buried on a mountaintop—it was attributed to the language barrier. Besides, everyone said, all Americans are eccentric because look what they’d impeached their president over: some funny business with a cigar. Then, one day, Gabe picked a bench on the square, unzipped a duffel bag filled with pamphlets, and began to preach about Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni and a dream mine. Ah ha, people said. Finally they understood. Gabe had been sent to Russia to proselytize. With great disappointment they began to ignore him, to give his bench a wide berth or else to take his pamphlets and use them to kindle their stoves. Anatoly let the Minutka return to its usual filthy state and joked to anyone who would listen about how only in America would people waste time mining dreams.
A year passed, Gabe converted no one, and everyone assumed that he would go back to the bosom of whatever church had sent him, but he stayed. He ran out of pamphlets, and still he stayed. Kids approached his bench on dares and asked him questions about saints in stumbling English, then giggled while he answered. From time to time he brought a bagged Baltika to the bench, and the babushka who cleaned his room at the Hotel Berlozhniki revealed that he had several each evening as well. The women of Berlozhniki found this development especially dispiriting. Their lives were filled with men who lined up at the kiosk for a beer before work, and now it seemed that this problem was not particular to Russia, that all across the whole, wide, enormous world, men were worthless. Some days Gabe didn’t make it out of his hotel. Some days he sat on his bench, drunk, letting snowflakes melt on his cheeks. Sometimes he fell asleep there, and the police would leave him for a little while—everyone agreed that some gentle punishment was necessary—but they would always drag him back to his room before frostbite set in. And then there were the days when he seemed resolved to make a fresh start. His suit was clean and pressed. His face was puffy, but his eyes were clear and hard.
“I need to talk to you about God,” he’d say, and people would shake their heads at him, they would cross the square, and his voice would rise, and he’d yell, “Give me a minute! It’s not too late to be saved!”
Ilya was fascinated by Gabe, the only native English speaker for hundreds of miles, but he’d avoided him just as everyone else had. Though once, when Gabe was sitting on his bench asleep, Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey had seen a dog trot over to him, lift its leg, and piss on Gabe’s shins. They’d stared, transfixed. They were only a few meters away, close enough that Ilya could see an angry red divot in Gabe’s cheek, as though some insect had crawled out of or burrowed into his skin. They were close enough to shoo the dog, Ilya was thinking, just as Gabe’s eyes opened. For a second he looked at Ilya calmly, and then he sensed the dog or felt its piss, and he began to yell. The boys scrambled away—the snow tripping Ilya, Vladimir grabbing his arm—and ran for the Minutka. Once they were safely inside, roaming the aisles under Anatoly’s glare, Vladimir and Sergey started to laugh. They were screamed at, scolded, and cuffed with regularity. Disapproval was like a drug to them, but Ilya was terrified. He’d been able to understand what Gabe was yelling.
“Come on, Ilyusha,” Vladimir had said. “He’s just drunk.”
Vladimir picked up an Alyonka bar and began to examine it as though he might purchase it. At the register, Anatoly’s eyes narrowed. This was a cue to Sergey and Ilya to pocket something while Anatoly’s attention was focused on Vladimir. Sergey slipped some caramels into his coat with his usual finesse, but Ilya did not. Vladimir put the Alyonka bar down. “What’s wrong, Ilya?” he said.