And then what?
* * *
—
Vinod and his area rug walked down the steep green path to the meadow, the same meadow Senderovsky had recommended to the Actor as a place for quiet reading. （“I can think of nothing better.”） The grass was tall, unmowed, and Vinod tamped it down with his hands, some atavistic memory of the Oval Maidan, straw-colored, anemic grass beneath his feet, the crack of a cricket bat, men and boys yelling to one another, excitement not meant for his sharing. Maybe there had been a picnic basket, a pretty aunt with a mole containing one whisker, oily pakoras and dhoklas warm to the touch. Lately these pushy self-proclaiming memories were asserting themselves without end, but how to tell which were real? The mind at his age resembled the watery stew the Parsis used to make out of goat brain at the Cafe Military down in Churchgate, the overhead fans spreading the aromas of the musky nonveg food, whipping through the memory of the first beer ever to have touched his lips, fat pubescent cousin Gautama cheering him on to two decades of heavy drinking.
He made a little area for himself and beheld his surroundings. The meadow ran a good ten meters beneath the rest of the property, and the strange midday mist was settling in along with Vinod. When he glanced up, the great cedar porch, the stucco main house （so close to the stucco of his second youth in Jackson Heights）， the stationary satellites of the bungalows, all this reared itself up before him as if it had just appeared out of nowhere, summoned by a madman out of Gogol or Cervantes. And now Vinod marveled at the scope of Senderovsky’s project, the great happy waste of it all, an undertaking so vast it couldn’t help but summon the words “bankruptcy court.” Unlike his friends, Senderovsky did not have siblings or a traditional immigrant nuclear family; each bungalow served as a correction to his parents’ and forebearers’ panda-like lack of ardor.
The mist seeped into Vinod’s lungs （plural）， and then it ran in great lazy torrents against the housing project above, shrouding and unshrouding the great Californian expanse of the cedar porch （the place mats had already been washed and set out for dinner） and the bungalows with their slightly pitched roofs, so that, in the words of American magicians, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”
The tree frogs had started up once more with a greater urgency than ever, but no one other than a party of starlings sheltering in place within a dead elm could pinpoint the source of their agitation, a storm on its way from Canada. Alone in the mist, Vinod tried to read the Russian play as he saw lights spring on and falter off in the houses above, like a code, the rooster on the weather vane over Karen’s double-sized bungalow spinning about manically, but finally pointing his beak away from Newfoundland. Vinod would be lying to himself right now if he said that he did not want her caress here amid the cold and the damp. He still loved all of her, even the gracelessness of her hungry, perennially dissatisfied immigrant soul, even the cruelty of her turns of phrase and the foulness of her triple-espresso breath. But he had to think like a character in a Chekhov play, forever taunted by desires but trapped in a life much too small to accommodate the entirety of a human being. That was why Chekhov was eternally beloved. There were no dashing personages in his works galloping toward an end point like the Actor’s renown or Karen’s algorithm, only vanishing horizons, only overgrown meadows from which one could look above and try to discern misted landscapes.
He opened the book, but was overtaken by fear. None of this could be real. Again, he remembered the bridge crossing the river just yesterday, the rest of the continent behind him, the purple mountains a little too perfect for their own good. And just now he had had a delightful conversation with the Actor, one of the most admired cultural workers on the planet. And the next however many weeks or months would be spent a stone’s throw away from Karen, whom he had not properly seen in at least as many years, certainly not since Tr?? Emotions was sold to the pudgy-faced chairman of a happy-go-lucky Japanese bank.
So what was really happening to him?
A drowning death was how he had heard it described. Young people drowning in their hospital beds. Drowning in their lung fluids, drowning in themselves. He touched his mouth and his throat, feeling for the ventilator tube, but all he came up with was his own dry lips and Adam’s apple, hard and hanging. （But what if his hands were restrained?） He jumped up wearily and boxed at the mist. Mist! It was almost too easy a metaphor for the drugs probably coursing through his body, keeping him soft and docile and successfully intubated.