“Okay,” Senderovsky said. But, to paraphrase a last line of a famous author, he did not move. Instead of the soft brown beams of his daughter’s eyes, he saw the truck’s lights at the end of the driveway, bathing him in their malevolent illumination.
* * *
—
People were dying in the city. Some more than others. The virus had roamed the earth but had chosen to settle down there, just as the parents of Masha, Senderovsky, Karen, and Vinod had chosen it four decades ago as a place to escape the nighttime reverberations of Stalin and Hitler, of partition and Partition, of the pain that radiated not in distant memory but cracked outright from their own fathers’ hands.
Catching a signal in the main house, the bungalow colonists learned of what was happening a hundred and twenty miles down the river, and they felt many things, but mostly they felt guilt. It was so unconscionably lovely where they were. The weather remained fickle, but even its fickleness was something to behold. A fine layer of snow after a heatstroke day. （“You’re gonna be okay, flowers,” Nat sang anxiously to the daffodils she and Karen had planted by the main house, in full view of Masha’s office.） A heatstroke day interrupted by a new sprinkling of snow, which rested like bits of wet sugar on Nat’s tongue. Even the nightly windstorms, which continued trashing Senderovsky’s lawn with comical consistency, were in their own way breathtaking, the trees—now sprouting their first leaves—swaying in long measures like midnight dancers.
Guilt. Because they were safe here in their own community, and after two weeks of Masha-imposed semi-quarantine they no longer needed to maintain distance from one another, with the exception of Senderovsky, whose cough only worsened by the day. “I don’t have it,” he would announce every night at dinner, their one communal meal, after suffering a consumptive fit, his eyes wet with tears. “Acid reflux,” he would add as the Actor made a show of moving away from him and toward Masha, whose knee now received him, warm and ready beneath the table.
Guilt because there was sumptuous food （everyone but Senderovsky put on weight, even Vinod）， educated and intriguing company, and, for some, the first tendrils of love. No one was more affected by the stark difference between town and country than Vinod. There were, he realized, a series of refrigerated trucks parked behind his local hospital in Queens, collecting the forklifted bodies of the dead. He wrote, guiltily, to his fellow workers at his uncle’s restaurant. Whenever they would write back, he would be happy they responded. But upon reading their messages he would put down his phone and look out the window and watch the ricks of hay being prepared in the adjacent meadows while the mating monarchs migrated north feasting on milkweed in a sweep of black and orange. Why was he here and why were his co-workers there? Because his parents had documents? Because educated Indians were in the grand order of things prioritized over uneducated Mexicans? Even as he had objectively failed by the standards of his family, first as an adjunct in the merry field of “writing and rhetoric” and then as a common worker, he found himself here, at the estate of a fellow classmate at an elite high school, sheltering in place, sheltering in space.
He had come here to dissolve—his words, not ours—but it was the city that was dissolving behind him. If she wasn’t here, if she didn’t make him happy every day with her predictable banter and nosiness, with her unexpected love for Senderovsky’s little girl, he told himself he would leave for Elmhurst at once.
But he stayed. They all did. Even as the indolence of the country life made them slower, softer, wobblier on their feet. The only exception, yet again, was Senderovsky, whose anxiety gurgled in the same acidic bath as his reflux. He couldn’t sleep and not just because his cough kept him awake. （Masha wore earplugs now.） He considered summoning a police car to investigate the black pickup truck, but he worried the arrival of the state troopers would scare Masha and the colonists. He kept his fear to himself, along with the memory of the oversize elm branch that might have killed him that night and the kindly force that rolled him to safety. For how much longer would he stay lucky? When he tried to breathe after coughing, he could hear the grind of his lungs and esophagus like the gears of a rusted superannuated clock. Each morning he smelled his own armpits, because the virus was said to affect one’s sense of smell. The familiar barnyard odors were there, but when he looked into the mirror he could not locate the gaze of his eyes, only their hollows. Who was sitting behind the wheel of the truck ready to assault his colony? Who had taken Vinod’s novel? Who had figured out the truth?