The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.

We walk to a cathedral on the corner of the street, and when we turn the corner, many young people are on line behind a velvet rope to enter it. My clothing is not as sexy as anyone else’s and they will see that I do not belong here, and my body vibrates even though it is not very cold, but I am glad I am with Dan and especially Jefferson, who does look like he belongs, even though he is the shortest man on line.

When Mr. Schrub was next to me, he said on the cellular, “John, I’m going to have to go—I’m with an employee,” which was both stimulating, because I always enjoy when anyone mentions that I’m a Schrub employee, especially Mr. Schrub himself, but also disappointing, because he didn’t refer to me by name.

Her plan had been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.

She was angry that now she had to be the mother with the gay son, the minister’s wife with the gay son—always she would carry the burden of Simon with her, the shame of having birthed something that could not be happy in this world, like the shame of mothers with retarded children, the burden of having to love something society feared, something repulsive to the world.

Still the beeping carried on, the room wearing thin now, and she could make out no particular person. The image came to her of her abdomen as prey, ants to jelly on the counter, jelly on the knife, and she thought about Abraham and Isaac, about Abraham tying Isaac to the table, and she wondered how long it took him, and did he tie Isaac carefully. She thought she would try to get up, but she couldn’t, she was bound, or her muscles were, and she said, or thought she said, I don’t want to die, as if to ask God Himself to hold the scalpel.

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

When a ten-second spray of gunfire flooded the sky, Havaa couldn’t have imagined it was directed at eight villagers deemed too dangerous to be transported to the Landfill. Lying on the mossy topsoil for hours, she thought of her father’s defeat the previous afternoon. She knew that Russian soldiers could destroy a village, but she hadn’t known her father could lose a chess match.

There is the night, the last night, the next night. The belt around your ankle, the two taps of the syringe, the blood into the barrel, the plunger pushing in. There is the woman named Anzhela but called Natasha. The woman named Nadya but called Natasha. The woman named Natasha, called Natasha.

At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him—i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.

A major difference between the trumpet and the sax has to do with adaptability. In the right hands, the saxophone—baritone, tenor, alto, or soprano—becomes an extension of the person playing it; the trumpet remains the trumpet.

For a child there is nothing like such talk among adults, even if the child is not listening or consciously aware of hearing it. What are important are not so much the words as the tide of sound on which they reach the ear: the low, whiskey-and tobacco-tinged voices of the men; the knowing tones of the women—sounds that tell a small boy, as he plays on the floor with plastic soldiers, that while he may not understand the workings of the world, he is in the care of people who do.

I told him about the nucleotides, the genetic test, the prognosis. I told him that atrophying of basal ganglia starts years before symptoms present, and that right now—in this car, in this moment—parts of my brain were dying, parts that I didn’t know I needed, but parts that I would never, never be able to get back. I told him that there wasn’t an emotion or an impulse or a stumble that I could completely trust; I told him that one day—if I let it—everything I did and said and thought would be nothing more than the entropic implosion of a condemned building or a dying star.

The wedding was in October at a downtown wedding palace, and Aleksandr showed up uninvited just in time to watch Elizabeta walk down the aisle to the national anthem. For the rest of his life, Aleksandr would grimace whenever he heard the song. Other people would notice and remark on how genuinely Alexsandr must have loathed the regime. But it wasn’t the regime that came to mind for him when he heard the song—not Stalin’s twenty million dead or men falling down in the skull-white gulag or Misha’s piss-soaked psychiatric prison. It was Elizabeta walking down the aisle toward a Party official, his face smooth and expectant in the wan, faintly buzzing light.

A decade passed in slow motion, then faster and faster. When Aleksandr looked back, it returned in snatches, on repeat, hiccupping and distorted sometimes, like a scratched record. There were some good times, of this he was sure—some nice nights with Nina, especially at the beginning, though in memory it became difficult to ascertain how many of the nights were actually nice. Was it one night or two or a half dozen or a dozen? Or was it typical, was it usual, for them to slow-dance in front of that enormous picture window, with St. Petersburg cracked open before them, backlit by the moon, shining with all the grandeur of ancient Rome?