If there's one point to this story whatsoever, it's that I wasn't born a thug. I had hoped, too, that I wouldn't have to die one.

But if there are two points to this story, it's that we don't really get what we want.

I migrated to Florida, which seemed as far from California as I could really get. Police investigations of the apartment would reveal information about a man who didn't exist. My fingerprints were on no records, and I had no identification to speak of. Anyone who knew the girl would say she hung out with a guy called Eddie. And Eddies were everywhere.

My road to Miami was paved with stolen cash and long bus rides. As far as I could go at any one time, and always into the East. And eventually, I arrived with another new city to lose myself in. Miami in the eighties was a city of neon. It had a pulse. I could feel it throbbing, like I'd pressed my finger to the vein of the night itself. The air was like a drug trip, the sky like a palette, and every dawn and every dusk someone swapped out all the colours. I was ashamed at how beautiful I found it – but not classically beautiful, like a Renaissance gallery or the Colosseum of Rome. It was beautiful like watching the world die. I imagine I'd have had a similar sensation, looking at Miami, as I would have had watching a star collapse. Miami was the great self-harm scar of humanity, cut open to bleed all over again every night.

And this is how I came to be where I am. My system of ethics had collapsed. I mugged people, still, for more money than I could ever need and blew it on drugs. If it looked like they'd cause a problem, I'd kill them. Go to their apartments. Take everything they had. There was so much crime in Miami at this time that no-one could have ever established a pattern. I could have been one person or a hundred. High on pills, I wasn't even sure myself.

I fell in with a group. Kids like myself, sans the Russian heritage. We fell into hedonism hand-in-hand. Drank together. Got high together. Fucked together. The nights were long and the police were nowhere and when I was with them I could forget the shit I had to do to sustain it all. Then the next day I'd hold up a corner shop or mug a dealer, and that'd pay for the evening. It was cyclical. I was propping up the bare minimum. I melted in front of mirrors: bass thumped through bare-brick walls while I snorted through a bleeding nose and I looked at my reflection in the fluorescent light and I kept on staring because there was no-one there. I felt if I touched the glass I'd fall through. I think, at some point, I must have done just that.

I fell in with one of them. A boy named Josh. Kind of a pretty boy, with big eyes and a soft jaw. He and I were the only ones who dated in our group, though not by daylight. I must have had a type, because he reminded me of the girl from California: he was sweet, and trusting, and didn't ask me about where I'd been or what I'd done. But he wasn't ambitious like her. He believed his life was as good as it was likely to get, and he was happy with it – or at the very least complacent. And for my part, I was happy with him, for a time. We shoot up together, pulling each other's tourniquets tight. When we were high we'd fuck and then we'd sleep it all off and wake up feeling like car crash victims and laugh that off too. But it was always a little sad. Every time I'd laugh a little bit weaker and he'd smile a little bit less. A fragment of the experience had crumbled away while we weren't looking and eventually we were holding a pile of dust. He didn't share my perspective, though.

"I don't know if this is enough," I said to him on one particularly bleak night. He squeezed my hand, and then pulled my face up to look at his.

"We have everything," he said, kissing me. "We have everything there is."

He was placid, but he wasn't passive. The killings that made everyone else so scared made him angry. He hated being made to feel like a victim, and it was from his lips that I first heard the name '50 Blessings'.

"They're nationalists," I said, trying to talk him down. "They don't want what's best for you or us, they just want... fucking genetic purity, and shit like that."

"But they're the only ones doing anything, Ed. Am I supposed to just wait to be picked off by the fucking Russian Mafia? In Miami?! That's no way to live, and you fucking know it." It was hard to argue, especially when everything he said hurt me as much as it did. He was the only one to whom I'd ever considered telling the truth. Before, I'd felt almost ready to stop being Eddie Loman and start being me again, but every time 50 Blessings was mentioned it just hammered another nail into the coffin of my former self. He was unshakeable, and I was worried about what measures his zeal would drive him to.

It wasn't until after a couple of years that I met the Mafia, by the way. I'd managed to avoid them but I guess my luck ran out. They were tall, stocky men in immaculate white suits and blue shirts, all with heads shaved like an order of monks. They blocked my path as I left the house one morning. I was the only person awake, the others sleeping in a pile like a mass grave and I doubted any of them could have helped me anyway.

"Look at this one, he's up early. Early bird, huh?" One chided me, jabbing me lightly with a crowbar so that I staggered back. I said nothing. "Where you going so early, birdie? Maybe you go back inside, go back to sleep." My hand was on the door handle, and I thought 'why shouldn't I just go back inside?' I had nothing to do with them and it wasn't me they were here for. But then again, I didn't imagine they were worried about collateral damage when they did whatever they had in mind. I had to do something. Let them know I wasn't an enemy.

"I'm getting out of here before you torch the place is what I'm doing," I said quickly in Russian. A few eyes widened; my disguise must have been pretty good after all. "Are you going to stop me or let me go?"

The first of them didn't like being talked back to, because he wasn't sneering anymore when he said "No, we're not. Maybe we don't like the look of you coming out of here. Maybe you've been in America for too long, got friendly with the locals. Maybe you burn this house down. Then we let you go." I stared at him unblinkingly as someone swung a jerry can and a lighter into my hands. Panic ran through my body. This had been my home for so long I'd forgotten anything else, and its inhabitants were my friends. I could warn them, but what then? They'd panic, try to flee, and we'd all be clubbed to death as we fled like some kind of ironic reanactment of the squatters in California. But they might as well have been asking me to drench myself in kerosene and swallow fire.

I settled on a compromise. Blood would have to be spilled, there was no way around that, but some could be spared. Or just two. I sighed through my teeth, and responded to the leader. "No problem at all." I disappeared through the door with the gasoline and closed it firmly behind me.

Josh was halfway to falling out of our bed when I shook him awake.

"The fuck, Ed? Is the sun even up?"

"We have to go. Now. Right the fuck now, get dressed and grab what you can and get out of the window."

"Funny guy," he murmured, eyes closed.

"I'm not fucking kidding. Grab your shit and get out the back. The Mafia are here."

He bolted upright like I'd tased him in the spine. "They're fucking what?" Trying to scramble to his feet, he hissed, "get a club, we'll fuck them up, come on!"

I held him down by the chest, and only then did he see the jerry can. "There's too many of them. I have to burn this place down or they'll kill you and me and everyone else. I can't explain more, please, just-" I choked on my words. At this point, I was waiting for this nightmare hallucination to disappear. But it didn't. "Just go, I'll meet you later but you have to go."

"What are you... you're burning it down? You're gonna do their fucking work for them?"

"If you want us to survive this? Yeah. I am."

"Ed, this is too far. Just drop it and come with me."

"They'll burn it down anyway. Then they'll find us and prove their point. This is the only way any of us get out alive."

"You can't do this!" He cried as loud as he dared, exasperated. The betrayal in his eyes must have been part of this schizophrenic delusion I was experiencing. I couldn't fathom it any other way.

"I can't not do it! Now get the fuck out of here!"

Josh was about to argue but I turned away, and that must have done it for him. He threw a shirt on as I doused our possessions in noxious splashes of gasoline, soaking everything. By the time I was done with the room, he was gone. I'd hoped he'd wake the others, but they were still there by the time I was finished. I tried not to think about them scrabbling for scalding-hot door handles as smoke poured through cracks in the doors while I was sparking the lighter.

When I emerged, it was accompanied by a billowing cloud of smoke, which I promptly shut the door on. I reached for the leader's crowbar and he let me take it, evidently quite shocked. I jammed it between the bottom of the door and the frame. It wasn't going to open easily. Under my breath, I muttered an apology to the still-sleeping occupants of the party, before turning to the circle of gangsters. "Can I go now?"

One of them leaned in to their leader and muttered something I didn't quite catch, and the other nodded contemplatively. "Change of plans, I am afraid. You will be coming to the van. Perhaps there is more you can be doing for us."

An hour later, I found myself in the grandest building I'd ever seen in my life. Marble columns lined the entrance hall, and in what I can only assume was the office, two fountains adorned a glass floor. I was sat opposite an eccentric group of people: chief amongst them was an imposing man with thick, long black hair and an expression that left him looking like he was constantly trying to hold in vomit. Next to him stood a tall, eccentrically dressed woman with her hand resting on a Japanese sword. Her hair was tied up in a tight, almost vertical ponytail, like blood from a nicked artery. On his right could have been his doppelgänger: a younger version of himself, wearing the uniform white suit rolled up to the elbows and eyeing me with the same pained expression. His ponytail was more like a slashed vein; loose, flowing. I felt like I'd stumbled into a dream, but the gun on the table kept me from objecting.

"Our boys here tell me you know your way around an arson, son," barked the seated man so suddenly I almost jumped. His voice was authoritative, and everything he said was snapped out like he was cutting planks with his tongue.

"He's a fucking junkie. Look at him, father. I bet he doesn't even know how he got here. Are we gonna recruit anyone with an accent and a book of fucking matches now?" This came from the man's right. I noticed now that this son of his had red fingerless gloves with the Soviet hammer and sickle on them. His knuckles were bruised and scarred.

"Quiet!" barked his father, never taking his eyes off me. They were pinned open. The whole time I sat there, I don't remember seeing him blink once. "What's your name?"

I told him. My real name, that is.

"You've had it rough, haven't you?" I was on the verge of nodding, before considering that this was a trap. Thankfully, he spared me the difficulty of deciding. "Of course you have. Every fucking Russian in America has had it rough, that's why were here. That's why I'm here, and that's why you're here, isn't it?" Again, his rhetorical question nearly tricked me. I had yet to say a word other than my name.

"Has he even killed anyone before?" This came from his son, who was evidently not a fan of me. His father didn't interrupt him this time, though, and waited a second before saying, "have you?"

"I've killed plenty of people."

"With your hands?"

"Sometimes."

"Americans?"

"Yes."

"Russians?"

"No."

He leaned back, considering me. This was not as relaxed a gesture as I make it sound. He was hunched forward aggressively, his expression still pained and still on the edge of something, so sitting back for him seemed to be a case of reverting to what other other people would consider a fairly upright position. After a while, I became aware that no-one was talking at all, and that I should probably say something.

"Look," I said as inoffensively as possible. That's not saying much; I was terrified, but increasingly irate at what I felt was a considerable waste of my time. "I don't know what kind of operation you're running here. And you might recall I didn't exactly seek you out." I was interrupted here by the woman sliding her hand from the pommel of her sword to the grip.

"Careful," she said quietly. I continued.

"I don't know what you're doing, and I don't know what you want with me. I've done far too much myself to go squealing to the Miami PD if that's what you're worried about. So if that solves anything, I'd really like to be going."

If he'd listened to anything I said, he wasn't interested in responding to it. "What would you say it is we do here?"

I shrugged. "You kill Americans?"

"Very astute. That doesn't make a lot of money by itself, though. What do you think pays for... all this?" He swept his arm around in a small arc, inviting me to look at the furnishing.

"Drug pushing. Arms dealing. Extortion."

"Three for three, well done. One more question. Why do you think we're doing this?" This caught me off guard. Criminals didn't tend to have underlying objectives, as far as I was aware, and it certainly seemed like the money was considerable enough to warrant a motivation all on its own. "I don't normally ask recruits that one, but I'm eager to see if you can guess. Or perhaps infer it, if you've been paying attention."

I did think I could piece some things together. There was definitely something nationalist about it: the uniforms, the hammer and sickle on those gloves, the chattering in Russian.

"Because you hate America, and you want them to be scared. You want to finish what the war started."

He smiled. "Got it in one. I have an offer for you now. You can refuse it – though I wouldn't recommend you do – and I won't ask again. But I'd rather you take it. I'm good to my men, and I'll see you paid well and satisfied. But I know it's about more than money for you, and that's what we can give you: purpose. Nationality. The chance to be Russian again. When was the last time you gave anyone your birth name, before today?"

I thought about it. "Years ago. More than a decade. I'm not sure."

"Too long. What did you say you'd been calling yourself?"

"Eddie."

"That's not you, is it?" His question was sympathetic, but not pitying.

"No."

"Work for me. You'll do well amongst us, you'll never answer to another American for as long as you live, and no-one will ever call you Eddie again."

He'd already made it clear I didn't have a choice. But I think in that moment, it wouldn't have mattered if I did.

He extended his open hand across the table, his eyes never leaving mine.

It was a long time before I saw Josh again after that.