Silently, Karen passed him a photo just as another garbage truck rumbled down the highway, and now the pier was shaking in earnest, seagulls taking flight around them. The waiters bowed to them in farewell and began to make their way to the safety of the oil-slicked highway, orderly at first, then breaking into a run. But Senderovsky and Karen kept sitting there, looking at the photographs with one hand, cracking open the shells of their mussels with the other, like automatons.
“Guys, we have to get out of here,” Vinod said. He looked down at the photograph. It was the one of the party at Suj’s mansion. He, Senderovsky, and Karen were linked arm in arm, Vinod holding aloft the book review with his best friend’s picture plastered over it. “This hasn’t even happened yet!” Vinod shouted to his friends. “Karen, you can’t have this photo yet. Karen, everything in due time, okay? Karen, I love you! Please, will you do something, please?” Now the pier moved from side to side in great rollicking heaves, and a storm of splinters rose up around them, even as his friends continued to sit there, plucking mussels from their shells and scanning the past.
Fine, Vinod thought. Fine, we’ll all die together then. If this is how it ends, this is how it ends. The wooden slats separated beneath his feet, and he could see the dark river below bathed in a source of light he couldn’t identify, too bright to be the moonlight, not dark enough to be eternity. The bottles of wine slid into the maelstrom, and then the table tipped over and disappeared. He tried to grab Karen’s hand, but he kept missing it, coming up with nothing but photographs of the future, all those familiar faces, all those sinister young smiles.
There was a crack. Then: weightlessness. He never got to feel the river’s embrace.
* * *
—
“So you must be the famous Vinod.” He was standing at the top of the stairs. All that climbing had finally paid off. He had been looking down the stairs surveying the scene in the parlor. Suj was introducing herself and Gender （sweatpants, sweatshirt, sweatband） to Masha, who was huddled with some of her studious-looking med-school friends. But where was Senderovsky? Vinod turned around. The young Ed smiled at him. “My name’s Ed,” he said. “I’m like a very, very distant cousin of Karen’s visiting from Europa. Not the moon, obviously.”
He motioned that they should journey into the room Suj had redecorated to serve as Senderovsky’s library. It was paneled a touch too walnut for its own good and contained many masculine books on its shelves. The municipal worker whom people were calling the deputy mayor was passed out on the floor, hugging one of the legs of the massive Chippendale desk （a true immigrant miscalculation） in the center of the room, while Evelyn, Karen’s younger sister, was cutting lines of narcotic on the equally gargantuan coffee table.
“Where’s Karen?” Vinod asked them.
Evelyn pulled a bra strap that had flirted out of her sundress and Ed formally fixed his ascot. “Who knows?” he said. “Free spirit, my cousin.”
“Is she with one of those Irish boys?”
Evelyn looked up at him. She was prettier than her sister; her eyes always glowed with just the right distribution of anger and innocence. “I’m still alive, you know,” she said. “Not that Karen would care. When I gained a little weight sophomore year she called me Pinot. As in full bodied.”
“Of course she cares.” Vinod got down on one knee and grabbed a dry little hand. “She loves you. She’s been trying to find you. Your father is safe in Florida. And all siblings make fun of each other. I’m the youngest, too, and I was constantly humiliated. My brothers are both more successful than I am, too. They are crorepatis, meaning they are husbands to many crores. A crore is ten million rupees, or about a hundred forty thousand dollars.”
Evelyn offered him a rolled-up dollar bill. “I don’t do that,” Vinod said. “I want to be in control.”
“Big day for Senderovsky,” Ed declared. “He gets his mug in the paper, he gets to meet Masha, he gets to meet me. But what are you going to do, Vinod?”
Vinod leaned against the desk, which contained several open-faced Evelyn Waugh novels, an academic work entitled Spare the Child, and the manuscript in progress of Senderovsky’s second book, the one about the oligarch’s son. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. Sasha’s entering a new social class. I don’t want to be just the friend who makes him feel better whenever he has a setback.”