A saga
of love, friendship, life, drugs, and opportunities almost lost on
an ex-KGB company man who leads a seemingly decent immigrant’s life
of quiet desperation in New York.
“The less
people know about you, the longer you live” is the motto of Arkady
Prikol — the antihero of this quirky, existential thriller — an
aging Russian-Jewish émigré living an uneventful life on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. Uneventful until the day he gets a phone
call from a man who calls himself Timur. The man who has been dead
for 20 years.
Once upon a
time Arkady and Timur were best friends and co-workers at a
top-secret place called Lab 52, where they designed and tested
psychotropic drugs. But soon Arkady and Timur’s camaraderie ran
into something greater than all the LSD in their lab. Her name was
Lisa. Such triangles don’t end well. Arkady keeps replaying in his
mind bittersweet scenes of love, sex, and tenderness, and gradually
comes to realize that their torrid romance was not what it seemed.
As Lisa broke out of the romantic mold the two friends have tried
hard to keep her in, she showed her true colors, and they learned
what happens when poetry mixes with political dissent in a Russian
girl’s heart.
With his old
life trying to catch up with him, Arkady goes on a lam, running
from one hideout to another — from the Dominican barrio to a
Moldavian bordello in Riverdale and finally to a top-security Mafia
“sanctuary” in Brooklyn. As he runs, he keeps searching for the
clues to his caller’s true identity, forced to dig into his
long-dead past where he suddenly discovers a slim possibility of a
future.
