I was born under a black veil of fear and sadness on a day when an explosion in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, destroyed thousands of kilometers of forest with no explanation why. The affected area of Siberia was nowhere near the bed where my mother had given birth to me that very same morning and subsequently died later in the afternoon, yet distance hadn’t stopped people from worrying about the Tunguska event and being wary of the mystery surrounding it. My father had greater concerns than the explosion and my mother’s death, for he was scared that, like a bird on a windowsill, I was bad luck, a human omen of death. With time, my dad accepted the common theory that the Tunguska event was caused by the airburst of a meteorite and also came to terms with the fact that my mother’s death was due to the hemorrhage the midwife had diagnosed, but his revelations came too late. His suspicions regarding the evil that might reside deep inside me had become ingrained, and I still wondered if I was the catalyst for the events simply by being born. Perhaps that’s why America and her dreams never appealed to me: I was more accustomed to nightmares.

Still, one facet of American life had managed to endear itself to me from the start—baseball. I was eight years old when my father took me to my first Cubs game at Weeghman Park. Vlad’s mafia hadn’t found its legs yet, so my dad had picked up work as a day laborer whenever he could find an opening. Though he didn’t have two nickels to rub together, he’d somehow scored two tickets to the September 4, 1916, doubleheader. While I had thought it would be a given that he’d take Igor or my uncle Grygoriy, I was shocked when he chose to bring me. We had never done anything just the two of us before. It was also the first time my father looked at me with benevolence in his marble-blue eyes. It wasn’t as though Taros Mikhailov was known for his warmth, but he had always been exceptionally cold to the son who killed his wife.

“You like it, don’t you, Viktor?” he asked, beaming with pride as I sat in the stands, happily eating peanuts. It was as if I had decisively given my old man faith that I could acclimate to the strange country I’d hated so vocally as soon as I had set foot on her soil.

“Yes,” I confirmed, nodding eagerly to add emphasis to my reply. While I enjoyed the excursion, knowing my interest in the game pleased my father inspired me to like it even more.

“You see the pitcher,” he said, gesturing to the big man on the mound. “His name is Mordecai ‘Three Finger’ Brown. Do you know how he got his nickname?”