That summer before I left, the cicadas descended on Road’s End. They’d been hibernating in the ground down by the tree roots since the year I was born, still and deadlike for seventeen long years until mysterious waters inside them began to stir again.

The winter I was twenty-five I met once a week with a professor of Russian named Lawrence Tillbear. This was in Boston, where I was working toward a Ph.D. in European Literature, studying for a qualifying exam in Russian fiction.…