“Why are you torturing yourself?” Kirill had asked him once, when he was paying for yet another session at the Internet Kebab. “Move on, bratishka. He confessed.”
Vladimir had confessed to all three murders. That was true. But Ilya reminded himself, just as he had reminded Kirill, that Berlozhniki was a gulag town, a place born of forced and false confessions.
He typed Lana’s name into the search box. Her wall was filled with new posts too. Sympathy posts. There were images of bouquets, of Jesus crying, of hearts broken, bleeding, weeping. There were notes too—I miss you. I love you. You’re somewhere better now. All of it was the virtual equivalent of the flowers and cards and stuffed animals that had been left in the grove where she’d been killed, but Ilya was looking for something different. Some shift in tone, some strange specificity. That was the shape that clues took. He scrolled down and read for a half hour, until he reached posts that he knew by heart. There was nothing strange; in fact it was all so clichéd that it felt anonymous, even the posts from the people who’d known Lana best. You were too good for this world, her mother had written. We’ll never forget you. But it felt to Ilya that they already had.
Ilya clicked on the photos tab and scrolled through Lana’s pictures. He started at the beginning, when she’d first created her account. In the first photo she was twelve or thirteen, in a teal sweatshirt with Madonna on it. Her hair was curled, glitter nestled in the creases of her eyelids, and her face was rounder than Ilya remembered. There were pictures of her sipping from a carton of milk in the school cafeteria, sticking out a tongue to catch a snowflake, onstage in a leotard at the House of Culture. Halfway through the pictures, the pink streak in her hair made its debut. Her makeup got heavier, her shirts lower cut. A cigarette appeared between her fingers and stayed, even as the background changed. There was Lana smoking in a dim apartment with green walls. Lana smoking in a swing on the primary school playground. Lana smoking in a nest of bedding wearing a black bikini and a too-big baseball cap. Then came the picture from the Tower, which was not a tower at all, but the old gulag barracks, where kids went to do nothing good. There they all were: Lana, Aksinya, Vladimir, and Ilya made almost life-size by the Masons’ enormous monitor. Ilya and Vladimir were in the middle, and Aksinya and Lana flanked them. Aksinya was kissing Vladimir’s cheek, and Lana was kissing Ilya’s cheek. Lana’s fist was thrust out, flicking off the camera. Somehow the other photos had a doomed quality to them that reminded Ilya of the faded portraits of miners at the museum on the square, but this one was the worst to look at because Lana seemed so alive. Simply, defiantly alive, like she might tip forward, tumble out of the monitor, and start to dance. Like she had no idea what was coming.
Ilya hunched closer to the screen. The flash had been kind to Vladimir. It had erased the shadows under his eyes, the sore on his lip, the blackheads that speckled his nose. There were the thin, bright slips of his eyes. His mouth was open—what had he been saying?—and there were his teeth, the front two crossing at the bottom the way Babushka crossed her ankles when she sat. It was not the face of a murderer. A punk, sure. An idiot. An addict. But not a murderer.
Ilya opened a new email and typed Vladimir’s address.
I know you didn’t do it, he wrote.
Each blink of the cursor was a tiny jab of expectation. That’s it? it seemed to say. That’s all? Ilya clicked send. He’d sent Vladimir this same message dozens of times now. He knew it was a lost cause, a kopek in a well—Vladimir would probably never be allowed to check email again—but what else could he do?
Ilya pushed the chair back from the desk. Out the glass doors, through the gaps in the deck supports, he could sense more than see the pool’s glow, as though there were a crack in the earth issuing cool light. He closed his eyes. The Masons’ dinner noises had faded into the murmur of the TV. It was still early, but his body felt thick with tiredness. It was the time difference and the exhaustion of hearing nothing but English. It was looking at his brother’s face.
Upstairs, the phone rang once, twice. Probably Terry, the American exchange coordinator, Ilya thought, telling the Masons to get him on the first plane out of Baton Rouge. Fine. He would go home. He imagined his mother, three days from now, turning at the sound of the apartment door. She’d have that look of fear that had become the new set of her face, and then the look would loosen into disappointment at the waste of him, home again. She would not have the energy even to yell, and at the thought of that, his eyes filled and he pressed the heels of his palms into them to keep from crying.
For as long as he could remember, he had been meant to leave Berlozhniki. He had wanted to leave. Now he wanted that old desire. He wanted to be that old self, the Ilya who would be upstairs with the Masons right now, sitting on the couch, speaking textbook English. He was the good kid, the perfect student, the big brain. How had this happened? he wondered, and of course the answer was right in front of him, in a thousand pixels: Vladimir. If it weren’t for Vladimir, he could take all of this—America—as his due, but instead here he was, alone in a dark room, and he couldn’t even feel properly sorry for himself because of course Vladimir was alone too, and somewhere way worse than this.
There were footsteps on the stairs, a wooden creak. Ilya wiped at his cheeks and stood. It would be Papa Cam, his face a study in apologetic firmness. “Ilya, I’m sorry,” he’d say, “but you’re going to have to go home.” But the footsteps grew fainter rather than closer. They were outside, Ilya realized, and then there was Papa Cam in silhouette, gripping a long net. He paced the length of the pool, fishing for that one leaf.
Ilya pulled the shredded plastic wrap off his duffel and unpacked. All of his clothes fit in the dresser’s top drawer. His tape player and Michael & Stephanie tapes were still in the pink plastic bag, buried beneath Vladimir’s sweatshirt. He’d found the bag the week before he left. It had been the only thing in Vladimir’s room at the Tower, its presence a mystery, a minor miracle. As Ilya pulled out the sweatshirt, it released a vinegary tang. He recognized the smell—Vladimir on his worst days, Vladimir sleeping it off—just as it dissipated, anesthetized by whatever industrial-strength cleaning agent Mama Jamie used to make the basement smell like a very clean toilet. All of the tapes were there. He had listened to them so many times that the cardboard covers had gone white and furry at the edges. The titles had worn off the spines. He stacked them in a neat row on top of the dresser along with the tape player and his book of idioms. In the bathroom, he scrubbed his face and underarms, pulled on his sweatpants, washed his underwear and undershirt in the sink and hung them over the shower rod to dry.
He wanted to listen to Michael and Stephanie as he always had at home, to let their soft, insistent repetitions fade into white noise, and so he plucked a tape from the top of the stack and climbed into bed. The sheets were perfectly smooth. Up the hill the pool lights went out, and the basement walls went black. In the dark the bugs sounded more aggressive, like they were planning an invasion. Babushka said that before the refinery, in the summer, the bugs in Berlozhniki were the loudest in Russia, and, by implication, the whole world. She said this like it was a point of pride, like the bugs could stand in for a town orchestra or opera, but after the refinery was built they went quiet.
Ilya slipped the Delta headphones over his ears and pressed play. He could feel his eyes closing in anticipation of their voices—it was the only moment of pure pleasure he’d had that day—but their voices did not come. He pressed the button again. Still nothing. He flipped the player over and popped open the battery compartment. It was empty. All four 286s stolen by some thug in Leshukonskoye who’d spent all his earnings on beer and couldn’t afford batteries for his TV remote. So instead of Michael and Stephanie, Ilya rapped the words to “Dark City” softly, hoping that might soothe him. It was one of Kolyan’s hits, an ode to gangster life that Vladimir had sung so often that sometimes it became the soundtrack to Ilya’s dreams.