May 21, 2017.
October 3, 2018.
The day his father and mother died, respectively.
And only four days after his mother died, Karen’s had as well. An orphan and a near orphan, the two of them mostly on their own now. But would Senderovsky, for all his familial books and protestations, ever be anything other than his parents’ son?
“Vinod,” Dee prompted him with the Aryan blaze of her eyes.
Vinod turned to Senderovsky: “I saw your life and I didn’t want that.”
“Not want that?” Senderovsky said. “What was there not to want? I went from strength to strength for twenty years. I was unstoppable. We’re boys from Queens. We’re supposed to just sit back and let the world decide for us?”
“Just the same, I did not want it.”
“And look at you now,” Senderovsky said.
“Love Is Letting Go of Fear is about your parents’ courtship in India,” Dee said to Vinod, “but it asks the same question Senderovsky’s books ask of his parents. How did they turn out the way they did? How much was history and how much was them?”
Vinod now saw what was lying on the glass table in front of him, next to the pitcher of water and the vase of fake flowers. He opened the Teva box. Inside, he saw the manuscript. Hotel Solitaire by Vinod Mehta. He picked up the first handful of pages and got up, then walked over to the podium. “Wait a second, wait a second,” Senderovsky said. “We’re supposed to be in a conversation right now. He can’t just start reading from his shoebox! Wait a second.”
But Vinod began to read, and with each solemn word, with each descriptor of time and place, he felt his parents absence alongside him, the television set blaring in front of him with 1980s color, the pleather sticking to his shins, but the kitchen behind him empty of their tired voices, their anxiety humming like a cut nerve. It wasn’t about history in the end, his novel, it was about them clinging to each other as the tidal wave of time rushed in and then slowly let out. It was about the elegant seething of the wave against the sand as it retreated back to where it came from.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said to him from the chair Dee had just been occupying. She was dressed down in a sweatshirt that read MEDITATE and looked like she had just popped in off the street on the way to the laundromat. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, honey. But our time is up.” She turned to the audience. “Won’t you please give these two old friends a round of applause?”
The lights came on with a snap of an ugly circuit; they rose in heat and intensity until they crowded out everything before them, until everything was coated in 1980s nuclear movie light （The Day After, Threads, Testament）。 The light continued to envelop Vinod, and now he could hear something like rotor blades turning, churning, his papers flying off the table and into the audience. What was he to do? What were his instructions? From first grade on, he had always had instructions. He couldn’t just stand there and be enveloped in light. That’s not why his parents brought him to this country, to be bathed in lumens. But then the audience and the stage and the light itself disappeared and Vinod was—
* * *
—
Lying in bed next to her. The bed was soaked with their sweat and Karen was sponging a pearly burst of semen off her thigh with one of the threadbare towels Senderovsky’s mother bought for him off a Ukrainian idling in a van. “Goddamn,” Karen said. “You really should get an air conditioner.”
He knew the reply to that. “Soon as they’re on sale in September.”
“I never know which one of you is cheaper: you or Sasha. Speaking of, I think he’s waiting outside for us to finish. Like a dog.”
Vinod cupped her breast, examined it in the gray city light of the 1990s. Yellow pollution, harbor skies, and, in his hand, those thin bright blue veins descending to the purple terminus of her softening nipple with its severe dimple-like indentation. “Wait,” he breathed. “Just a little more time together.”
“We don’t want a pissy Russian on our hands. And it’s not every day Florent sets up dinner on the pier for us.”
“What? What’s happening?” She was snapping on the neon T-shirt she got at the Stereolab concert, drawing her legs into one of his boxers and then a velvety miniskirt. Vinod got up. Out the window, the railway trestles of what would one day become a tourist park were rotting away like a distinctly American version of the Roman ruins, and the stench of blood and tallow from the meat-packers teased his nostrils. An Anglepoise lamp sat like a mantis on the desk he shared with Senderovsky, next to stacks of papers that were the respective manuscripts of their first （and in Vinod’s case, last） books. The rectangular bulk of a Macintosh Colour Classic Pro originally intended for the Australasia market hummed industrially, its floppy-disk drive warbling dementedly to itself. Vinod remembered his father and Senderovsky’s mother arguing over its price deep into the night—“Gujarati or Jew, who will win?” Vinod had whispered to his friend as they nervously drank beers in the back room, each hoping their parent would end on a gracious note, would give up the last fifty dollars that had formed a bloody wedge between them. Finally, at three in the morning, Mr. Mehta had reared up like a python and shouted at the Russian woman, “It’s because of your son that Vinod is staying in the city! Such universities he was accepted to. And he throws it all away for a city college.”