Come follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow me.
Whither shall I follow, follow, follow?
Whither shall I follow?
Follow thee! To the redwood, to the redwood, to the redwood,
Redwood tree!
He opened the window, softly so as not to wake her, and leaned out into the rain to sing with his stiff but competent voice. Wither shall I follow, follow, follow…？ He leaned into the question mark with every verse, even the final one that deserved an exclamation instead. He felt himself getting hoarse as the rain pelted him, as the air congealed into mist. He wanted to be onstage, singing, crying, giving. It was what he was meant to do. You are a responsibility onto this world.
At four in the morning, he was still awake downstairs, staring at the photograph of Masha and Senderovsky sitting on a haystack, him with crooked teeth, her with her dimpled chin, as if announcing their future together. To the redwood, to the redwood, to the redwood, / Redwood tree? His phone beeped from within the pocket of his robe. His team on the West Coast was also awake. He read through messages full of desperate, capitalized letters. There was a video now, apparently. As in: YOU HAVE TO WATCH THE VIDEO! And: THIS ISN’T YOU, RIGHT? And: WE MAY HAVE TO PIVOT FROM “JUST FRIENDS” STRATEGY. But it was him. Him and her, on a run-down stage surrounded by grass. The footage was mostly dark and grainy, grass green with occasional flashes of violet and blue, but every once in a while the scene would be illuminated by high beams sweeping past the curve of the road so that one could catch the rhythm of him pushing into her from the side with pneumatic fervor. The videographer kept crawling closer and closer through the navel-high grass of the abandoned camp to the stage, capturing him and her in pixels. There was no audio.
Nat always woke up early and entertained herself until the adults were roused. From the window of the Petersburg Bungalow she saw a familiar figure carrying a duffel bag toward the garage. She couldn’t find her sandals right away so she put on her mother’s tapki and shuffled out in those great flapping enclosures. The little red Lancia was pulling out of its bay slowly and under cover of fog. “Wait!” Nat screamed. “Wait!” She tripped on a tapka and slid onto the gravel, skinning her knee. The little turtle of a car continued to roll slowly down the driveway past the tree stumps of violent storms past, then, with the pointless flare of a turn signal echoing down the gray empty street, made a left toward the state road.
Nat looked at her skinned knee, raw and bloody, more exposed and frightening than actually pulsing with pain, and before she could account for what had loosened inside her, began weeping quietly and without theatrics, tears gathering on her chin and then dropping with the heavy thud of monsoon rain pellets onto her polka-dot frock. When she was done crying, she sat in the gravel drained of the will to move, waiting for a grown-up to come and take her home.
Act Four
The Death of Alexander Borisovich
1
Razgar leta. Senderovsky’s two favorite Russian words. The height of summer. Or, to be literal, “the summer’s burn.” A perfect crop circle had been torched into the landowner’s bald spot—he loved the sun so much he did not see why one needed to be “protected” from it—and Masha tended to it daily like a farmhand with a truculent animal. “Nu, vot,” she would say （“Well, now you’ve done it”）， rubbing a combination of creams into his red scalp and sighing contentedly.
Nat looked at this newfound public intimacy between her parents with her usual anxious eyes. It wasn’t just them. After the Actor had left, everyone behaved differently, more kindly, less self-consciously, as if this was just any other summer but with blue surgical masks and spent bottles of hand sanitizer littering the side of the road. But without the Actor, the uniqueness was gone, the initial feeling that her parents weren’t really her parents, that she had been granted the permission to choose her own destiny, that this Jin-level famous personage had called her “lovely” and that maybe she was. While her ties to Karen-emo （and Uncle Vinod） remained, she was now unmistakenly also part of that small unit of Levin-Senderovskys that blundered through the world with their strange diets and reminiscences. She loved them, too, even when what passed for their love felt like a tether around the sun-bronzed stalk of her neck. She felt it her duty to make them happier even if some of her own happiness was lost in the exchange.
* * *
—
As the mercury reached for the tip of the thermometer, the nation celebrated its own birthday with an unrelenting sense of shock. The corpses were stacking up in other parts of the country. The refrigerated trucks were heading south and west. It was becoming apparent that the country’s president might never willingly surrender his power, and Karen’s assistant began proceedings for her to regain her Korean citizenship.