The Idiot - Chapter 1
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Why does M. dislike Allen?
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My family, if I had to give it an adjective, is elastic. 45 years ago, my parents, my little brother, and I came over to this country from the Soviet Union, extending the family across continents. Over the decades, the family, my father really, stretched to absorb spouses, in-laws, even though they spoke a different language, children both biological and adopted, ex-spouses who chose to stick around, and eventually grandchildren. Over those same decades, as in any family, people made bad decisions, said things they hoped no one would remember, got mad at each other, felt grudges, came around, and the family stretched as needed. And then it snapped. Someone did something that bad, that shocking. That person was my cousin Alan.
He and his mother, my father's sister Lena, came to the US from Moscow in 1990, when Alan was 15. They stayed with my parents and brother for almost a year. By the time they arrived, I no longer lived at home, so I didn't have much of a relationship with them. Never really wanted to, because I didn't like my aunt. And as Alan grew up, I realized, even from a distance, that I didn't particularly like him either. Alan is a clown, a blowhard, a pompous ass. He would call himself an entrepreneur. He started his first business in college. He hired students to ghostwrite papers for other, wealthier students. He went to law school and got fired from his first job. He later told me this was because his fine legal mind made the other lawyers insecure.
Then he lived in Russia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, working a series of increasingly shady jobs. In Africa, he was involved with diamonds and worked with an Israeli company that provided security for mining. If someone had set out to write an unlikable international huckster character, they couldn't have laid it on any thicker. Alan married a Zimbabwean woman. Word in the family was that she had been that country's beauty queen. They had two kids. Last I knew, all of them, including my Aunt Lena, were living in Moscow. And then, in the summer of 2019, everyone on the American side of the family got a Facebook message from Alan, informing us that he had arrived in the U.S. with his five-year-old son, who I'm going to call Owe.
Alan wrote they'd come for O to, quote, commence his studies. I repeat, O was five. His wife, he wrote, was still in Russia with their baby daughter. They had separated. Alan added ominously, quote, things are less than amicable. She might make attempts to contact you with requests detrimental to mine and O's interests, unquote. I immediately texted my brother Keith, who was closer to Alan. So our cousin has kidnapped his son and abandoned his daughter? The answer would appear to be maybe, my brother responded. Just a note, this isn't the big shocking thing I was talking about earlier. We were still a few years away from that. I called my dad. He told me that Alan had just shown up at his house on Cape Cod without warning.
His five-year-old son was with him, as was Lena, my dad's sister. I asked my dad if we should do something about the maybe kidnapping? Like, I don't know, contact the FBI? This was the wrong thing to say to a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union. He would never call the authorities on his sister and nephew. What he did do was post a picture of O on Facebook. Perhaps a message in a bottle for O's mom? Sure enough, my father immediately heard from her. Her name is Priscilla. Priscilla wrote to my dad describing the ordeal she was enduring. She said she had gone on a short business trip to Zimbabwe and when she returned, she discovered that Alan had left with their son.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why does M. dislike Allen?
0:00–5:33
2
What shocking event brings Allen back to Cape Cod?
5:33–10:58
3
What suspicions does M. have about Allen's intentions?
10:58–15:28
4
How does M.'s family react to Allen's arrival?
15:28–16:52
5
What evidence suggests a potential kidnapping?
16:52–18:08
6
How does Priscilla describe her ordeal to M.?
18:08–22:36