“I know I look like shit,” she said. “But it’s because I’m actually not drinking now and my body’s, like, really not reacting well to that.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“About which part?”

“Any of it,” I said. “You look like you should be in a fucking hospital.”

“Can I put my bag down?” she said.

“What am I going to do, kick you out?” I said it like I was furious with her, though I wasn’t. I was trying to wake her up, maybe, or keep myself from falling back into the old dream. She sloughed off her bag and sat down gently in one of the chairs, crossing her legs like she was waiting to be served tea. She stared at the sweating glass of whiskey on the coffee table.

“I’m working on a lot of things,” she said. “I think, maybe, we need to exercise some collective willpower.”

“What’s going on with your show?” I said. “What are you doing with yourself?”

“Everything,” she said evenly. “Is on. Hold.”

She was still fixated on the whiskey. I carried it into the bathroom, drank down half of it, and poured the rest in the sink. The ice bunched around the drain and I knew, obviously, that it was just a symbolic gesture. But so was a peace treaty, right? So was a funeral.

I set the empty glass on the coffee table and sat down in the wooden chair across from my sister.

“How about something to eat?” I said.

She rolled her eyes, a slow, glitchy process, and shuddered.

“Give me a second,” she said.

I leaned back in my chair. There was no rush. I mean, it wasn’t like I had any food.

Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

They had finished reading War and Peace, and now they were celebrating their triumph at a Russian supper club in Brighton Beach. There were twelve of them seated at the long table (“Just like what’s-his-name, minus what’s-his-name,” Kyla said brightly), and, well, Derek assumed that at least half of them had probably finished War and Peace. Or, fine: he imagined it was safe to say that, on the whole, the table had at least started reading War and Peace.

Derek had made it to within a hundred pages of the end, though he had admittedly skimmed a little down the stretch. He knew that Pierre and Natasha got together, which had begun to seem structurally inevitable at some point—in approximately ten thousand pages there were only about five characters—though it was somewhat psychologically improbable. He also wasn’t totally clear on what a samovar was.