“Look, Karen!” Vinod shouted. “Fireflies!” The meadow where he daily sat cross-legged with his reading material and contemplated unreality was now phosphorous with insects.
“You know, I have fond memories of fireflies, too,” Senderovsky said. As Vinod expected, he began to speak of summers he had spent in Crimea.
Vinod snuggled up to Karen the way she had to Senderovsky in the triumphant photograph. “Give me a kiss,” he said. “The fireflies are out. It’s the snogging hour.”
She pushed him away gently, trying not to breathe in his direction. “They’ll still be here in a week,” she said. To her eye, the nostalgia-invoking insects had a programmed quality. They were almost too perfectly randomized in their flashes, a hypnotic algorithm built to confuse the present with the past.
“You don’t want to kiss me?” He spoke through the gravel of his accent, trying to sound romantic and filmi.
“I got to be careful,” she said through her mask. She mentioned her deprogramming work with the Actor a few days ago. “He looked so sickly. I think he had the runs. Isn’t that a symptom?”
“Okay, then don’t kiss me,” Vinod said.
“I got to look out for you,” Karen said. She rubbed her left eye. She had been rubbing her eye for the past two days. It was as if a small insect had made a home beneath its lower eyelid and refused to be evicted.
“Why? I’m not an invalid.”
“You guys,” Senderovsky said. Ever since the Actor had returned, only to flee again, God knows where （he had left his Lancia behind）， the atmosphere of the estate had changed. The goodwill and truces of the colonists were subject to inspection and revision. Maybe that’s why they were out on the porch in the nighttime, trying to calm their passions.
When the lights were out and Karen had stilled the many devices around her, Vinod walked over to the couch in the living room where she had self-quarantined and draped his arms around her sleeping form. She snored mightily within his embrace, more than he remembered from their youthful sleepovers, but he found her sputtering mouth and kissed her. She slapped him away in her dream and, with a teenager’s harrumph, turned to face the coarse hump of the couch. She rubbed her stricken eye against its fabric and moaned miserably. He bent down and took in the smell of her hair and her still-fluoride breath. His once-battered lungs filled with her and he went back to their bed slightly satiated, but lonely still.
What if there was more to Senderovsky’s literary debutante party than he actually remembered? What if he was too old for his memory to cooperate with him, to understand what all those glossy photographs really meant? Surely, they weren’t as simple as the camera-ready smiles posterity insisted were real. What if, over and over, he had been made a fool?
There was a piece of paper resting on her side of the bed, the excerpt of a lesson Karen had been teaching Nat, spelling out in Hangul and English the most important of Korean phrases: “My head hurts, eyes hurt, mouth hurts, legs hurt, there is too little, there is too much, I don’t like it.”
5
Vinod sat in the middle of his meadow on his Brazilian area rug reading A Hero of Our Time. This particular edition of the nineteenth-century Russian novel began with a mishmash of an introduction by Senderovsky, mostly about how he wished for a literary future without handsome heroes. Flocks of birds had taken up residence in the elms above the gentle reader and they would chatter away for hours, but then suddenly stop as if someone had said something embarrassing.
Over the past week, Karen had developed—if that’s the word—pink eye, and now as a precaution, she lived on the couch away from the other colonists, including her boyfriend. It drove Vinod mad. If she was to isolate from him, then at least she should take the inner chamber of the bungalow, and he could serve her faithfully with food and drink and sleep on the couch himself. And, besides, as far as the virus went, didn’t pink eye affect mostly children? And besides, she hadn’t lost her sense of taste or smell like most affected people; she could still appreciate the plates of Ed’s cooking Masha dropped off at the front door. And besides, she should stop scratching her eye; he would keep replenishing her cold compresses if she only let him. And besides, her assistant had already summoned for the steroid drops with the aid of Masha’s scrip.
Today the pink eye had worsened, and Karen had entered a state of terror matched only by a sudden glue-like feeling of fatigue, as if she couldn’t separate her fingers from one another or separate her lower and upper rows of teeth, much less reach up to poke out her eye. （And that’s what she urgently needed to do, to scoop out her very vision like what’s-his-face, that motherfucking Greek king.） To hell with Vinod’s “And besides.” She had exposed herself to the Actor, who, dumb thoughtless idiot that he was, had brought his secret sharer into the colony. Why had she listened to Vinod and helped the Actor? Why had Senderovsky allowed him to return in the first place? Why hadn’t Masha put an end to all this? Maybe she still hoarded feelings for him in the old-fashioned sequined purse she called her heart.