In the Red Read Online Free PDF Page A

that the shit country was his . Not hers, though she had been born there.
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    That evening, the men stayed in the suite to do business with some guests, sending Irina and Elena out onto the strip to entertain themselves. The sky was growing dimmer, but there was no drop in the staggering heat. In this heat, a breeze did not alleviate the air’s weight but only made it worse. How could a desert evening feel so smothering? Maybe it was the excess of bodies holding down the heat over the asphalt, the blast of the freeway-like traffic. The rows of glinting cars ticking with impatience at every traffic light made crossing the street a menacing proposition. It made Irina want to hold Elena’s hand, as if she were a defenseless child. Was this nightmarish cacophony of light and sound the first Elena was seeing of America? Irina had never been assaulted by anything like it.
    Rolling walkways conveyed clusters of sweaty tourists from the bustling sidewalk into giant hotel-casino complexes, each themed after a caricature of some time and place. Renaissance Italy. Ancient Egypt. Paris. New York. The circus. The strip’s microcosm throbbed in the night. If money corrupted the world, then this was the world that corrupted money. Irina pointed out a cluster of stylized skyscrapers to Elena and attempted an observation in slow, careful English: “This one is supposed to look like New York. See the tiny Empire State Building? It has a whole amusement park in there. With a roller coaster.”
    Elena gave Irina a drowning look. Irina made a sine curve in the air with her finger. “A roller coaster,” she said. “A ride for fun. Do you want to go in and ride it?”
    Elena shook her head. “I do not like high up,” she said.
    â€œHow about we go in this one?” Irina asked, pointing to an enormous fairy-tale castle with turrets topped with colors as bright as children’s blocks. Elena nodded and they wended their way in. The wall of climate control that hit them upon entering made Irina gasp. Elena shivered. She was wearing a lot less than she had at the wedding: after the ceremony she’d changed into a frilly red tube top and a flouncy skirt that barely covered her entire rump.
    â€œHow do you feel when people look at you?” Irina asked, gesturing up and down the girl’s scant outfit. Irina’s uncertainty that she was being understood gave her a strange type of freedom to say whatever was on her mind. Elena did not take offense at the question; she merely shrugged.
    The slot machines rang merrily. There were suits of armor propped up in the corners, and staff in skimpy costumes meant to suggest medieval clothes moving through the aisles with underwater slowness. The whole place had the feel of being submerged. Hermetic climate, no visible exits, aquarium lighting. The department stores Irina frequented back home were much like this, and they had the same basic purpose. This was the same thing on a grander scale, a monumental mall. Surely, then, it was only the scale that was sinister, that suffused the place with faint alarm. The two girls walked absently through the maze.
    Suddenly they were standing before a large, spotlessly clean bas-relief of perfect ancient Egyptians in vibrant color. They must have been conveyed from one casino to the next through some suspended passageway they had no memory of crossing. Now the waiters were wearing white loin wraps and lamé accoutrements, their eyes jarringly stark in their kohl outlines, complete with little fish tails at the temples. “Want to gamble?” Irina asked.
    The Russian looked at her with intense focus. “What means ‘gamble’?”
    Irina took a quarter out of her wallet, parked the two of them in front of one humming slot machine among the din of them, put the quarter in, and pulled the lever. The three displays whirred and clicked into place one by one. Two pairs of cherries and some kind of