Read The Sunlit Night for Free Online

six months until the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator would have to be inserted over his right ventricle. In this six-month period, while he could still travel, Vassily wanted to see Moscow one more time, face his wife’s family, and demand her whereabouts. Yasha had finally stopped wondering where she could be.
    •    •    •
     
    Senior workshop ended for the day and Sidney and Alexa said, “Got bread?” to Yasha in unison. Yasha made it out of the room and down the stairs without having to look at the ceramic tea mugs they were working on together and had in Sidney’s locker, if he wanted to see. Outside it was still dark, warm, and foggy. He descended calmly into the subway. When he got out onto the elevated platform at Brighton Beach, the air had grown even saltier, and the Friday-ness of the whole planet’s atmosphere lifted him home, slowly, down Oriental Boulevard. Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” poured out of the open door at Yefim’s Barbershop. Yefim was singing along, and Yasha too continued the song’s da-doo s as he walked past. When he finished singing “Mrs. Robinson,” he began to sing “America.” He had learned both off his father’s copy of Bookends , the first album they’d bought in New York.
    Yasha performed the opening hums of “America” with real zest, wildly off pitch, scaring a squirrel who had just found a piece of kebab meat. People liked him. Girls liked him. Girls wanted to show him their tea mugs. Yasha looked out toward the shore of Manhattan Beach and sang, “Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.” The waves were low and steady. Yasha felt a fortune coming to him. He intended to share it, whenever it came—whether it was wealth or a Ducati Streetfighter S—with his father. His father wouldn’t be able to ride the Ducati. His father worried him. Certain mornings, his father stopped kneading, rested his floury hands on the counter, and breathed heavily for a few moments. When it passed, he began kneading again, with a little less force.
    Yasha looked down at his own body as he walked. He wondered if he was still growing. He was tall enough, but he wanted his heart to grow stronger than his father’s. He wanted to get from his heart its full worth: natural instructions for kissing, more courage at the right moments—the reckless blood-pumping that would make him a real American lover. It had been a decade since he’d arrived in Brooklyn, and now he was nearly a legal American adult, but today, for the first time—saluting a dog who’d just peed on a bag of garbage, smelling salt and exhaust on the breeze, scanning the straight course of the avenue beyond him—Yasha felt like a genuine New Yorker.
    When he reached the bakery, his father was sitting just inside the window, chewing a toothpick, holding an envelope and a steel ruler.
    “Just in time,” Vassily said. He stood up, slid the envelope under a large knife, spat his toothpick out, and tucked his shirt into his pants. It was just before three o’clock, and the usual crowd would soon arrive—the delirious cookie children, a few nurses, Mr. Dobson, and the man they called “Dostoyevsky.” Yasha put his books in the back and tied a black half-apron around his waist. His Garfunkely feeling of contentment had worn off a little. He cleaned his glasses and waited for the customers to come. The door opened.
    Dostoyevsky arrived first. He had a beard and a straight nose and hair that looked meticulously combed. He’d come in the past couple Fridays, always wearing leather boots, his jeans rolled up as if to show them off, with a collection of child-sized instruments hanging off his shoulder. Tucked into the miniature guitar case he kept one or another paperback Dostoyevsky novel. He would place his order, and then read aloud while Yasha wrapped the bread. Yasha did nothing to encourage him. Still, the man came every week and read.
    Today’s quotation: “‘He was seldom