“Then tell him that,” Evelyn said. “Stop being such a baby.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Vinod said. “He’s not downstairs. He’s not reconnecting with Masha. That’s what he should be doing.”
“He’s in the guest room,” Ed said. “Waiting for you. You’re the guest.”
Evelyn did a loud snort of the powder on the table, akin to a nasal slurp of noodles. “Ahhh,” she said, her face a full road map of dejection despite the pleasure surging through her twitching septum.
“This won’t end,” Ed said, “until you go to the guest room. And it is high time for this to end, no?”
The hallway was empty, although Vinod could hear someone crying in the bathroom, a young woman’s powerful tears. He approached the guest room upon which a sign had been hastily affixed, KNOCK FIRST. He did not need to knock. The doorknob felt hot to the touch. It was dark inside, so dark. This was before smartphones lit up the night, before everything in our hands trilled and glowed. The guest room was empty except for the four-poster bed （more arriviste shenanigans）。 Outside, Vinod could hear a bus slowly and loudly bend down to accommodate an old woman on her way down to Atlantic Avenue. Vinod knew that sound well, since he had crashed in the guest room on countless occasions, even though he lived only ten blocks away in a cheap studio. The floor beneath Vinod vibrated with the sound of revelers. Gender must have put on the Spice Girls, always a teaching moment for her. He had no choice but to approach the bed.
No choice but to notice the way Karen had—even in the supposed throes of passion, even with all the drugs coursing through her veins—folded her Throwing Muses T-shirt and Juicy Couture skirt as if she were a maid at Senderovsky’s Hotel of People’s Friendship.
He remembered it now. The loud sounds his Russian friend made, punctuated startled sounds （Aaah! Naah!） as if it were a century ago and the czar’s inspectors had burst into his izba. She bounced on him lightly as if trying to knock a faulty knob into place. Her eyes were closed and her progress slow, soundless, resigned to the hard work. Vinod stood there, a ghost, and instead of rage he let the peacefulness pour over him in sunshine waves. So what? People hurt one another, and no one hurt more than family. This was his real family. Not an exaggeration. He had made it up the stairs; he had seen what he had to see. He was now cleared for ascent someplace more beautiful. He had finished the cycle, and now all he had was the breath that rose within him, each inhalation clear, healthy, his own. And when he opened his eyes, Karen stood before him, her silhouette blue and otherworldly, sweat glistening in the triangle between her tummy and breasts. “It’s okay, honey,” she said with her Dentyne breath. “His pen is mightier than his sword.” And when he said nothing, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheeks, three times, Slavic-style. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m doing everything I can to save you.” He looked down at the bed. His friend was gone. And although his hand still felt the heat of her touch, she was gone, too.
* * *
—
He was walking the downtown streets. The signs were familiar, numbered streets, named avenues, but the houses were not. Sometimes he could spot the apartment buildings of yore, but most had been replaced with country farmhouses, severe Federals, quaint eyebrow colonials, the occasional carpenter Gothic. Magnificent front lawns descended from these houses to the empty streets. This can’t be, Vinod thought. How can the city support such low density? Who lives in these houses? A Dutch Colonial crafted entirely out of stucco to withstand the elements caught his eye. It looked like the main house on his best friend’s estate, though without the great covered porch behind it. Could he trespass to its window to take a look?
Vinod walked along the grass in his chappals and no one stopped him. The air of the newly redesigned city was fresh and clean as if country storms had been hired nightly to reinvigorate it with sweetness. Vinod walked up to the house’s modest portico. He peered into the window. The first thing he saw was his own reflection. He was young and handsome, his forehead painted with a tikka from the temple. Within the familiar living room, painted, bald, orange-clad sadhus had gathered around Masha’s Steinway. They were reciting slokas in Sanskrit, using the closed piano lid to beat out a meter. Vinod stood rapt, his mouth dry. The holy men were lost to the Mahabharata, to the part where, if Vinod’s memory served correctly, the snakes of the world were to be marked for sacrifice, though in the end, they continued to live among us—because such was the universe. The fact that he shared a particular branch of knowledge with these saffron ascetics touched Vinod. He wanted to join them now, to add his unsure voice to their surety （Raise your hand if you’re Sure!）。 He wanted to learn a few of the eight-syllable verses and to be lost in their rhythm. At the same time, he worried their malodorous bodies would stain Masha’s piano and make her think less of Indians. Just then, one of the congregants, it was impossible to tell his age beneath his coloring, regarded Vinod with cross-eyed intensity. He did not smile or nod, but his eyes said, Come in.