air hose down his throat. A pretty blonde nurse named Rose Copeland attended him.
Dozens of surgeries followed: surgeries to cut away the charred flesh and scrub the ash and dirt out of what remained. Surgeries to slice healthy skin off the uninjured half of his body and graft it over the open wounds.
They gave him drugs. Cocktails and pills and mainlines dripped directly into the vein. None of them could dull the agony of the exposed nerves. He screamed alone in the hospital because there was no one left to visit him. He refused to see his treacherous twin, and his father was dead, murdered by Sebastian Gallo.
His only solace was the blonde nurse who stayed long after her shifts ended to hold his hand—the good hand, the one that wasn’t burned.
He suffered in that hospital for months.
Then he returned home to his father’s empty house. The nurse came with him, to inject him with morphine at night and change the dressings on his healing wounds.
She read to him. It was the only thing that could distract him from the pain. He had never been much of a scholar before. The nurse introduced him to Hemingway and Hawthorne, Tolstoy and Tolkien. She gave him dozens of the books that lined our shelves when I was young, when our house was bright and clean.
Now you could never find those shelves through the stacks of books leaned up against every wall of this house. He has no discernment for literature anymore. He’ll buy any book and never even read it: thrillers and mysteries, romance and science fiction. Textbooks, biographies, memoirs. The desire to read has been subsumed in the desire to hoard.
I don’t think he leaves the house at all, except to bring in the groceries delivered to the front step.
But he has to visit the Bolshoi Theater tonight, and he’s demanded that I accompany him.
For the second time today, I shower the scent of this filthy house off my skin. Then I dress carefully in my nicest suit. It’s a little too tight in the chest and shoulders. I put on muscle this year at school.
The suit is black, as is my father’s. He looks like a priest with his simple cleric collar and his monochromatic shirt.
I’m glad to see that he remembers how to dress, at least. He’s washed and combed his hair, on the side where it still grows. Shaved that half of his face, too. Trimmed his nails and scented his wrists with cologne.
When I stand on his left, I see a man who looks keen, intelligent, austere.
When he turns to the right, I see madness. Crackled, bubbled flesh. A withered arm and claw-like hand. And one blind, staring eye with no lid.
“Are you ready?” The left side of his mouth says.
I nod.
I’ve called a car to take us to the theater. As my father descends our front steps, he pauses on the sidewalk, wincing in the glare of the street lamps. I don’t think he could have tolerated full sunlight. The unblemished side of his body is pale as talcum.
He stoops to enter the car, leaning on his walking stick.
I follow after him, taking a deep lungful of the town car’s leather interior, and the pleasant scent of scotch from the open bar. So much better than the musk of the house.
I want to clean our house, but I think my father might kill me if I try. He goes into a rage if I touch anything, even the food in the fridge. Everything has to stay exactly where he put it. Only he can see the order in his jumbled system.
I don’t have to tell the driver the address of the theater. Everyone knows the Bolshoi—it’s featured on the hundred-ruble note. The neoclassical pillars are as familiar to Russians as the Lincoln Memorial is to Americans from their penny.
The Bolshoi is our Phoenix. Four times destroyed by fire and once by a bomb, we’ve rebuilt it every time. Its last renovation symbolizes something rather less inspiring—classic Russian graft. The billion-dollar taxpayer bill was sixteen times the estimated price, and the lead contractor was paid three times over for the same work.
State construction projects are how the oligarchs funnel public money into their pockets. Politicians, businessmen, and Bratva are one and the same in Russia.
Ballet tickets are sold in bulk to mafia dealers, who provide them to the public at double the face value. We have our hand in every pocket. No commerce can be done without