“The first tranche from the network is going to be deposited this week,” Senderovsky said. “Though I do owe Ed ten thousand and another twenty to the general and the workmen. Which won’t leave much.”
“It must be scary for you,” she said. “Running out of money.” They were speaking, therapeutically, in English.
“They’ve commissioned the next two episodes already, so we’re in good shape.” What he left unsaid was the fact that if the Actor broke up with Dee, if he began to once again cast a critical eye over the scripts or if he were to drop out completely to distance himself from Senderovsky and his Dacha of Doom, the money would stop at the first tranche. She felt him squeeze her hand and knew he was worried. There were more squeezes to follow, until he finally fell asleep, coughing all the while.
She lay awake for another hour, until someone began to turn the knob of the bungalow’s front door. Masha jerked up. She had made all the residents lock their doors at night after hearing the state trooper describe the defenselessness of their property. She thought of waking her coughing husband but instead ran to the door herself, peeking past the blinds.
It was Nat, beneath a colorful Wanna One umbrella （they were a rival boy band to BTS; Nat couldn’t stand to get the umbrella with her real heroes wet）， still wearing her polka-dot frock. Masha ushered her in. “What happened?” she whispered.
“I wanted to sleep next to you and Daddy,” Nat whispered back. The back of her neck felt sticky to Masha’s touch. Karen had probably failed to bathe her. Masha found herself worried that Karen might wake up in the middle of the night and discover the child was missing. Why was she so concerned with Karen’s feelings all of a sudden? “I wrote Karen-emo a note,” Nat whispered, reading her mother’s mind.
She briskly climbed into bed and found a groove between her parents into which she curled, her arms around her knees. Masha buried her nose into Nat’s dirty hair and began to breathe in all she could. Senderovsky blindly draped an arm around Nat, but without the moonlight streaming through one open window his wife and daughter could not see his dreamland smile. Eventually, Masha did see that his big hand had found her little one, and she begged herself to forget the fact that when the kids pared off at the Kindness Academy before proceeding to lunch or recess （there was a lot of recess）， there would often be no one to hold Nat’s hand but the teacher.
“You should get a health app to monitor Daddy’s cough,” Nat whispered. She had learned a lot about apps from Karen.
“Shhh,” Masha whispered back. “Count backward from ten in any language you like and then you’ll be asleep.”
“Desyat’，” Nat began. “Devyat’， vosem, sem, shest’， pyat’， chetyre, tri, dva, odin.”
“Tak derzhat’，” Senderovsky whispered in his sleep, his father’s rarely tendered praise bright and sweet against his palate.
* * *
—
Karen and Vinod were snoring with abandon, their arms desperately tight around each other, as if the final smokestack of the Titanic was disappearing into the waves behind them. Ed had taken two sleeping pills, first one and then an hour later another, a left hook to the jaw and then a right hook, and was now knocked out on the edge of his bed. A flute was playing dimly in the subbasements of his consciousness, and he floated toward that excellent sound, disembodied.
Dee’s face was buried deep in her pillow and she had to maneuver at times to draw a breath. The sex had helped calm her. He had given his all, and his all was wonderful. She had even bit his lip out of what she could only surmise was passion. They laughed when they realized she had drawn blood, but still kept going. He loves me, the idiot, she had thought. All the mentions on her favorite social channel were wrong. She was worth loving.
He couldn’t sleep. There was the thunder and lightning and the （mostly ornamental） fan turning above him. Apocalypse Now. The second shot of the movie. Willard looking at the rotating fan in the Saigon hotel. They were in the middle of a war, he thought. The bombs were coming down like in that Graham Greene novel about life during the Blitz. He touched himself and brought his fingers up to his nose so that he could smell the both of them. Give me the strength, he thought. But the strength to do what?
He wanted to sing a song he remembered from watching Sesame Street as a kid. （A latchkey kid, he thought with soothing self-pity.） It was an adaptation of a British nursery song, sung as a round by a family of cartoon turtles. He had since heard it performed onstage as a round for four voice parts. He sat by the window and began to mouth the words, first in his natural bass, then mentally switching up to tenor, alto, soprano.