“We have to go and look,” his father said. “It will be a little different, I think.” He gestured toward the groups of other tourists in the valley, families with little kids climbing all over the hoodoos, everyone holding up their screens for pictures and videos.
“Everywhere is a little different,” Dmitri pointed out. “New Jersey is a little different. You know we have this big house, three floors and an attic. We don’t have any furniture for all the rooms.”
“Your mother will make it nice,” his father said.
“You haven’t even seen it,” Dmitri said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
Then his father had pulled out his screen and showed Dmitri about twenty different pictures of the house, and Main Street in the town, and the school where Dmitri would be going. His father even had a picture of the train station and the train that Ilya would be taking to go to his special ballet school in Manhattan, and a picture of the car that Alexander had talked about buying for his mother, although his mother didn’t have a driver’s license for the United States.
“I know everything,” his father said. “You think I would let you go to New Jersey and not know exactly where you were? I could tell you how to walk from your new house to your new school. I could tell you how to get to the grocery store. I know what is the state tree of New Jersey!”
His father placed his hand on Dmitri’s neck.
“I’ll learn how to play baseball,” Dmitri said. “I’ll become a vegetarian and say that evolution is just a theory.”
“Oh my God, not baseball,” said his father, who had funny stories about the American astronaut who had been on the ISS when his father was commander, and the American was crazy about baseball, which was the most boring sport in the universe, and all the Russians on the station had a joke that if you messed something up, or lost a bet, then your punishment would be to visit the American module and ask that guy what the rules of baseball were.
“But for you,” his father said, shaking him gently by the neck, “I would learn baseball. I would become the world’s biggest fan of baseball.”
Dmitri had felt so guilty about the trusting way his father held him by the neck that he had gotten sentimental.
“I don’t think this Eidolon training method is very good,” he said. “Who are you going to talk to?”
“I will be talking to you,” his father said. “In my head, and when we write to each other. And I will talk to Helen and Yoshi. They’re already my friends.”
The baseball-loving astronaut was also his father’s friend. Dmitri couldn’t imagine being friends with people the way his father was, because that was the kind of friendship you only had when you went through a massive experience together, like a war, or being in space. Even if his father didn’t like Helen and Yoshi, he’d end up being better friends with them than Dmitri was with anybody, except Ilya, and they were brothers, so it wasn’t the same.
“I won’t let anything happen to you that you don’t like,” his father said. “If you have a problem with anything, all you have to do is tell me. And if Ilya has any problems, you can tell me too.”
Dmitri looks over at Ilya now. The speech is taking forever, and everyone is just sitting and listening in silence to the speaker with half-open mouths. Ilya has lapsed into what Dmitri thinks of as Ilya’s “off” mode. It looks okay if you don’t know him—Ilya is still sitting upright in his chair and more or less looking in the direction of Boone Cross—but Dmitri knows that his brother is currently, for all intents and purposes, catatonic. He has to stifle a laugh. Dmitri’s mother, hyperalert to him now, follows his line of vision and rolls her eyes. She leans forward and swats Ilya’s knee. The expression of innocent bewilderment on Ilya’s face is genuine. As far as Ilya is concerned, when he shuts his eyes the whole world goes blind.
Even if Dmitri decided to punish his father by no longer loving him, Ilya would still love their father. So his father would have one good son and one bad son and would his father even notice that Dmitri didn’t love him if Ilya still did?
Yes, to be fair, his father would notice. But his father wouldn’t really be punished. It was no punishment to have your bad kid not love you.
Dmitri takes another quick look at the girl who is the daughter of the American astronaut. All week long she’d been showing off and smiling at everyone like a crazy person and Dmitri had felt sorry for her even though he could see that everybody else thought she was the greatest thing ever. He was happy to let her be the center of attention. Ilya didn’t have to be the center of other people’s attention. When he was “on,” when his eyes were open, he was the center of his own attention. He was so certain of himself he wasn’t even competitive in the normal way. He’d made one comment about Mireille Kane: “You can totally see her tits in that green T-shirt.”
But just now, for some reason, it had almost made Dmitri cry to look at her.
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