“Think of Dostoyevsky’s approach to human suffering—the moral problems imposed by politics and religion,” the little English teacher lectured to us. For some reason, Elliot Barlow wanted Zasha to know there was little joy in Russian literature. It would later emerge that the snowshoer saw Zasha as a somber character in a Russian novel—“grave but brave,” Mr. Barlow called her. The snowshoer saw Zasha as a noble servant, loyally performing her duties to a couple of doomed aristocrats. Dr. Dave’s parents were suicidal, Zasha told us.

“They’re going to kill themselves—they just need to work up to it, but they’ll get there,” Zasha said. “There’s a gas stove—I’m always sniffing around for gas—but it’s easier to take pills,” Dave’s family servant told us. “They never leave the apartment. I do all their shopping. Their pharmacy delivers. Their only kid died in a plague—I would kill myself, in their situation,” Zasha said. Either Damaged Don reacted strangely to the word plague, or he dropped to his knees in the snow for no reason. “Speaking of human suffering, we should put this poor guy in the car—the car is running and the heat is on,” the limo driver told us. “I’m an American—I’ve never read a Russian novel,” Zasha wanted the snowshoer to know.

“Start with Turgenev,” the little English teacher told her. The Damaged Man stopped singing when we lifted him off his knees.

“I’m writin’ a plague song,” Don said to Zasha. Elliot and I had heard about Don’s plague song. He’d been writing it since the start of the AIDS epidemic; it was still the 1980s, and AIDS had a ways to go. We didn’t know what was holding up Don’s plague song, but we weren’t eager for Don to finish writing it; we were hoping we would never have to hear it.

“I hope you’ll sing one of your songs to me,” Zasha said to Don, as we followed the limo driver to the car. The snowshoer had put just one of the ski hats back on the Damaged Man. Don didn’t have a lot of walking to do; he wouldn’t need two ski hats. The keys to the little Barlows’ apartment—not to mention the little English teacher’s written instructions regarding which key opened which door—were in Don’s guitar case. If you wanted anything to be safe in Don’s hands, you had to put it with his guitar and his songwriting. Naturally, we’d taken Zasha aside just to be sure she understood where she was taking Don. Zasha looked like a contemporary character in a New York novel, I was thinking; there was nothing recognizably Russian, or of the nineteenth century, about her. Of course I said nothing, not wanting to provoke the pretty Mr. Barlow’s passion for the gloom in Russian literature.