7
“So,” she said. “Let’s have the talk.” They were lying in each other’s arms, Dee still in her blue gauze mask, a single candle flickering against the walls, alternating between romantic and scary.
“Let me guess. You want me to have a career so that when you introduce me at parties you can say, ‘My husband Edward works for an NGO.’？”
“No, bobo,” she said, taking off her mask, but letting it hang from one ear. “I’m never getting married. But don’t you think it’s time for us to leave? I mean the place is a shambles. It was fun when we all got together for dinner at the same table, but now that we’re all quarantined? And why do you still have to cook for everyone like you’re our chef or something?” She recalled the Actor calling Ed their master chef. “And it’s definitely safer in the city. I mean three people have been infected already. Vinod’s still contagious.”
Ed slotted his head into the crook of her neck. He sighed. “I feel like we owe them something. Maybe not ‘we.’ I owe Vinod.”
“On the Japanese show, as soon as two people couple up, they leave the house.”
Ed picked up the snifter on his bedside table, one of his last bits of foppery, and took a drag of the eighteen year he had bought the other day to celebrate their three-week anniversary. He gave her a sip, too, eyeing the pale condensation she left on the glass.
“I hung out with Karen earlier,” Dee said. “She gave us permission to leave. She said there wasn’t much more we could do for him.”
A pair of beams could be seen approaching through the window that faced the front lawn. They slowly grew in color, a dull white, then a tawny yellow, then a soupy orange, like the flash of a hydrogen bomb several Pacific atolls away. The sound of disturbed gravel that usually accompanied such high beams was missing; the intruder had bypassed the handyman’s plywood fence and was now headed straight through the sea of grass. Dee jumped out of bed and moved the hams of her small pale posterior next to Ed’s by the window. They stood there, naked, watching.
* * *
—
Nat’s hearing was sensitive and she was a poor sleeper besides, a true Levin-Senderovsky. The strange whispery combination of truck tires floating over grass woke her up immediately and she scrambled to the window. Around the bungalow colony, motion sensors were throwing on the lights as the black pickup truck approached, a shadow among shadows.
The past two weeks had been difficult for Nat. It felt like Mommy was out to get her ever since Uncle Vin had gotten sick. Just the other day she had said to Nat: “You can knock it off right now with that tone, or else!” Mommy never said American things like that.
Nat had a recurring dream, which was perhaps too neatly explained by her own biography. She was born into a void, no parents were present at her birth, just a woman wearing a surgical mask beneath which was sheathed a long scary snout like a fox’s, and then solitary Nat spent the entirety of her life （short as it was） journeying to find Mommy. On every continent, she would meet kids in their native garb who would make fun of her and tell her she was a weirdo for not having a mother or any true friends and that she should just go to her Quiet Mat and stay there. The dream always had a happy ending: Mommy was found, order restored, and a plate of glowing blini with marmalade served on their dining room table back in the city. But the next day the inexplicable would continue to fuel her nightmares, like when she overheard Mommy saying the other day to Karen-emo: “What if there’s a putsch? What if the military takes over? What if we have to leave the country?” And Aunt Karen had said, “I have people who can get us out to Korea on a minute’s notice. Don’t worry. We’ll be okay.” Nat figured out the spelling of “putsch” and found out that it meant “a violent attempt to overthrow the government.” So in addition to Uncle Vinod being sick and everyone eating Uncle Ed’s dinners alone in their bungalows or on the porch with their heads in their hands, there was the possibility of violent and overthrow.
And now a dark truck was headed for the bungalows, running roughshod over the blue-green lawn, and Nat flung her window open and shouted, “Watch out, Steve! Steve! They’re headed right for your winter palace!”
All of the colonists minus Vinod were outside now, their clothes hastily thrown on. Ed, armed with a heavy flashlight, had a vigilante air about him as did Senderovsky in his dressing gown, his fists tightened by atavistic memories of pogroms past.