“No!” he tried to shout.
“Shhh.” They lowered him onto the toilet.
“No, no, no, no, no.” Every sound his body made was foreign, in need of translation.
* * *
—
On the covered porch, Masha and Senderovsky sat on one side of the dining table, Karen and her bandaged eye on the other, prosecutors facing the defendant. But, more accurately, Masha was the prosecutor, and Senderovsky should have been in the dock with Karen. Only her illness kept them on opposite sides of the table, although Karen claimed that with the steroid eye drops she was now on the mend, the rest of her symptoms abating. If only the same could be said of their friend.
Senderovsky, in his face mask, was but a pair of wet roving eyes, skirting the cedar of his porch, the couch where so many intimate candlelit postdinners had taken place with his best friends （just last week, just last week!）， and the accursed community of fireflies beyond. Now both his wife and Karen wore face shields like two members of a welders’ convention.
Eventually his gaze settled on the dark and empty Lullaby Cottage and he remembered the first conversation they had had upon his friend’s arrival. Vinod had asked for his Teva-boxed novel, and Sasha had told him that he sounded valedictory. He wanted to shout to both women, “He came here to die!”
“Some friends,” Masha was saying. “Some caretakers. You took every step imaginable toward getting him sick. You claim you three are the family you’ve never had, but you two are exactly like the families you come from.”
Karen was unused to being attacked like this. She had an assistant to her assistant who was on the lookout for hurt in her online mentions. She had had her lifetime of being talked down to and called names and watching fingers of all colors pull ugly approximations of her beautiful eyes. But now she was being accused of—what? Murdering the man she loved? Murdering her best friend?
“Vinod told me I had to fix him!” Karen shouted, referring to the Actor. “He said it was my duty. I had to do it for Ed and Dee, too. That’s what he said, Masha, I swear to God. I had opened all the windows. We were mostly sitting apart on the couch.”
“So after a lifetime of not listening to Vinod, of being the older sister, you chose this moment to honor his wishes. And you”—she turned to her husband—“allowed him back in. You really thought he would make a show with you? A show about an oligarch’s son with a bad circumcision? Who on earth would watch that?”
“So we’re the only ones to blame?” Karen said. “You could have stopped Sasha from letting him back in. It’s your property, too.”
This went on for a while, until snot bubbles began forming beneath Karen’s face shield. Senderovsky could not understand his wife’s anger at them. What had happened had happened. There was no pleading with memory for a do-over. They were living in exceptional times. It was Genesis in reverse, the species fading out one by one, the sky closing up above. And now someone had to pay. And now the goat would be sacrificed so that others could be cleansed. And now Vinod would pass from corporeal presence to the sad embellished memory of a historical time, to the ripple of a Fuji flash in Karen’s photographic archive.
But Senderovsky would be fine with such a fate for himself. He did not explicitly want to die, but was ready to die. He was ready for the owner of the black pickup, that white-armed red-capped brute, to ascend the cedar stairs, to point the massive weapon at him and him alone, and to let loose the full vigor of his armament into the softness of his chest. Let his story culminate on this stupid fancy porch, to the Sahel Sounds on the red radio, to the cries of the mysterious yellow-shouldered bird. He killed his best friend, the newspaper’s obituary might say in lieu of a rundown of his own rundown career. Sasha Senderovsky: a liar, a Teva-box thief, owner and proprietor of the Dacha of Doom.
Right before sitting down with his wife and friend, Sasha had seen the first rumors of the Actor’s reappearance in and disappearance from his estate float through his social channels （had the state trooper squealed?）， where he was personally tagged and all but accused of kidnapping and worse. He had parked his car sideways at the end of his driveway in a protective measure （as if the Actor’s fans couldn’t just drive around the gravel and proceed over the inviting grass） and had instructed the handyman to construct an ad hoc fence.
Face-shield Karen was now sifting through Vinod’s documents with her white-gloved hands beneath the porch’s yellow lights. “I’m having my lawyer look through all of this,” she was saying. “But my guess is Vinod can do what he wants. Unless we declare him mentally incompetent or something.” She looked at Masha.