Still Here, page 10
His evaluations were getting increasingly critical, and Sergey found he was reacting to them with more and more pain. He knew them all by heart, he couldn’t help it. They seemed to attack everything about him from his technical skills to his character, merging in his mind into sickening poems of judgment.
Lacks skills, spirit, drive.
Lacks goals.
Lacks control.
Fails to aspire.
Fails to evolve.
Fails to progress.
Apparently, he was failing not just professionally but on some basic human level.
He imagined that people were displeased with him everywhere. He would get embarrassed if it took him more than two seconds to produce his credit card to a cashier; he would be mortified if somebody asked him for directions and he didn’t know the answer. When he ordered in restaurants, he imagined that waiters made fun of his imperfect English. He constantly saw dissatisfaction in Vica’s eyes, more dissatisfaction that she actually felt, and far more than she meant to express. Even Eric….Didn’t he look annoyed when Sergey failed to assemble his toy robot? Didn’t he sound sarcastic when he said “Yeah, Dad, the instructions must be wrong.” Until just a couple of years ago, his son used to sit at the top of the living room stairs waiting eagerly for Sergey to come home from work. “Daddy’s here!” he would yell when Sergey opened the door. He would slide down the stairs and jump into Sergey’s arms. When Eric was born, Sergey had been hoping that his boy would grow up to be somebody who could understand him, become his true friend. There were moments when Sergey still hoped that was possible. Most of the time, though, he would look at Eric and imagine his son judging him as a father, listing his failures, mocking his weaknesses. He couldn’t understand why these evaluations plagued him to such a degree. Perhaps it was a personality flaw that he couldn’t “react to criticism in a more constructive way.”
In his youth, he was accustomed to being admired, adored, praised, showered with applause, starting when he was four or five. Every single time his parents hosted a party, his father would bring little Sergey into the room and ask him to sing. And Sergey didn’t disappoint. His musical ear might not have been perfect, but he had a strong, ringing voice and plenty of confidence. His father encouraged him to forgo stupid children’s songs and go straight for romances and even arias from famous operas. His biggest hits were “La donna è mobile” and Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin. He didn’t understand any of the words, but it didn’t matter. He took enormous, almost sensual pleasure in producing the sounds, in the musical reverberations that seemed to run down his body. And there were adoring stares all around. Smiles of delight, murmurs of appreciation. This was how Sergey’s addiction to praise started. He’d stopped singing for an audience when he hit puberty, but he’d had ample gratification from other sources throughout his entire life, up until the last few years. Excellent grades in school and college, becoming the youngest person with a Ph.D. he knew, acceptance to an American business school, great friends, the love of intelligent, discerning Regina, the admiration of Regina’s brilliant mother. Regina’s mother used to give him English lessons. Lots of people of his generation dreamed of emigrating, so English lessons were essential. Regina and her mother lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment crowded with antique furniture and paintings. And books, so many books—old, new, foreign, neatly typed manuscripts, disheveled hand-written drafts. The apartment looked unlike any other place Sergey had ever seen. It seemed to radiate waves of a bookish culture that inspired awe and admiration. Regina’s mother was a large woman with a horsey face. She wore pants and had a man’s haircut. Regina looked a lot like her except that she wore her hair in a long braid and was very shy. Regina’s mother conducted the lessons in their sunny kitchen, and there was always a plate of crumbly cookies on the table. English had always intimidated Sergey, and Regina’s mother often insisted that he take a break and eat a cookie. As he ate, she would ask Sergey questions about his dreams, about books, about his general opinion of life. He loved answering her questions, and it took him a while to notice that they were talking in English. Regina’s mother was amazing. More than once Sergey caught himself wishing that his mother, Mira, was more like her. Sometimes, as he studied, Regina would often appear in the kitchen and sit on the edge of the windowsill, her long braid hanging over her left shoulder and her very long legs stretching all the way to the kitchen table. “I love this boy!” Regina’s mother would say, addressing Regina but looking at Sergey. “He’s read everything!” And Regina would smile and flip her braid. When Sergey and Regina started to date, everybody thought they were a perfect match. Except that he wasn’t in love with her. He had never been in love with her, but he didn’t know that until he met Vica. Vadik brought Vica to Regina’s place so that he could impress her with his cool Muscovite friends. Vica walked in, took off her enormous fur hat, and looked around the apartment with her hungry, disapproving eyes. Her short reddish hair was damp with sweat and her upturned nose was glistening. She took in every object one by one. The antique furniture. The paintings. The china. Regina. Sergey. And he was gone. He started on a rant about some stupid scientific concept that interested him at the time (he couldn’t remember what it was now) and he couldn’t stop. Vica listened to his words with such fervent attention! She would lean forward and nod, and even gasp when he said something especially striking. Sergey had never experienced that before. Regina listened to him with interest, but her interest was patient rather than passionate. He went on for a crazy long time, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. It was getting embarrassing, and he was afraid that Regina, or Vadik, or especially Vica would think that something was wrong with him.
When Vica and Vadik left, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He didn’t think he would see her again, because Vadik never kept his girlfriends for a long time, which was probably for the best, and yet he kept fantasizing about her. Then a week later he saw her in Lenin’s library by pure chance. She had come to research her paper on Pavlov. He sat next to her in the reading room while she studied, then they went to get ice cream and ended up walking around Moscow for hours. By the end of the night, it became impossible to imagine that they wouldn’t be together.
Vica broke up with Vadik right away, and Sergey was relieved to know that Vadik wasn’t too mad at him. If anything he seemed amused. “You and a girl like Vica, huh! Good luck!” He seemed to gloat a little bit too, because Sergey’s remarkably uncomplicated love life was becoming bumpy just like his.
The hardest part of it was telling Regina. It was the thought of disappointing her mother that horrified him the most. For some reason Sergey imagined that the breakup scene would involve all three of them. They would be sitting in the kitchen, just like they had during English lessons, their cups on the table with a dirty spoon, a half-eaten cookie, a crust of bread. And then Sergey would deliver his news and disrupt the harmony. He imagined that Regina would run out of the kitchen in tears, but her mother would stay. She wouldn’t say anything, she’d just stare at Sergey for a very long time. Vadik unwittingly spared him from that. He had no idea that Sergey hadn’t yet told Regina when he talked to her. She called Sergey right after to say that he disgusted her and that she never wanted to see him again. “Disgusted”—that was what she said, and the word bothered him for a long time after that. But he was with Vica, and he felt that no amount of pain or guilt could ruin his happiness. It was like this: He would wake up in the morning, go out onto the street to get to work or to the university, and find the world saturated with Vica. The trees, the sidewalks, the honking cars, the heavy buses were all somehow about Vica. The image of her seemed to bounce off every single thing and go straight to Sergey, making him impatient to see her. He’d never wanted anyone as much as he wanted Vica, nor had anybody wanted him as much as she did. She kept telling him how she loved his taste, how she missed his smell, how he could have her anytime, anytime at all—“even if I’m asleep, you can just wake me up. I won’t get mad, I promise. Always, anytime!” She was greedy and loud, but she was also fragile—something that very few people saw in her. She had this capacity to feel more intensely than other people he knew—both joy and grief. There was something raw about the way Vica experienced the world, something that always moved him, and he had always felt the need to protect her, to hug her, to shield her from the pain of living.
Hug her! Sergey thought with bitterness now. It had been a long time since Vica let him touch her. In the past couple of weeks, there were days when she wouldn’t even look at him.
He walked across Whitehall Street toward Broad Street. The skyscrapers there formed solid walls and blocked the view, making Sergey feel as if he were at the bottom of a gigantic water well. When they first came to the U.S., Sergey was thrilled by skyscrapers. He would stop in the middle of a street, throw back his head, and stare at the tops of buildings that floated in the sky against light, sluggish clouds. He would stand like that with an aching neck, marveling at how something so amazing, so impossible could exist right here, within reach, constructed by mere humans. But after 9/11 their splendor was suddenly gone; they looked vulnerable, exposed, just like the residents of the city who seemed to lose their confidence overnight. He and Vica were at home when the planes hit the towers. He had no classes that day and Vica had a late shift. They still lived in Brooklyn then. He was sitting in their falling-apart armchair that they had picked up off the sidewalk and hauled four flights up to their apartment. Sitting as if frozen, staring at the TV screen without really seeing the images. While Vica—Vica couldn’t sit still. She was darting back and forth between the TV and the kitchen, where she was cooking something red and messy (borscht? tomato sauce?)—her apron had disgusting red stains all over it. She was constantly on the phone with her mother, screaming at her that she should calm down. Then she got this idea into her head that people buried under the towers were still alive. Their bodies were smashed, but they were still breathing. She took her apron off and threw it to the floor and was crouching by their entrance trying to untangle the shoelaces on her sneakers. She had medical training! She could help! She could! And Sergey had to stand up and walk over to her, then crouch before her, take her by the shoulders, and tell her that there couldn’t be any survivors, that those people were dead. Dead, do you understand this, dead! And there was absolutely nothing either he or Vica could do about it. Then he walked back to the armchair. He needed to process his grief in peace. They had lived through the tumult of the 1990s in Russia and arrived here, in the land of stability and permanence and well-being, where if you played by the rules, a bright future was basically guaranteed. And here they were, with stability blown up just like that. Sergey couldn’t imagine what the future held for them anymore, couldn’t count on everyone playing by the rules. This was probably the only time when he found himself on the same wavelength with Americans. They felt the same thing, they were like him, he was like them. This was his country. Sergey had felt like that for a long time, all the while the trauma of 9/11 had been fresh. Then the grief faded, and he became a stranger again. Now, when Sergey looked at the city, he found it hostile rather than vulnerable, threatening and boring at the same time.
It was eerily quiet at the office. Sergey arrived fifteen minutes early, but most of his colleagues were already at their desks. Their computers were on, but nobody seemed to be working. Their fingers didn’t run across the keyboards, their eyes didn’t move over the pages. They sat staring at their screens as if paralyzed. Sergey felt nauseous with panic. He nodded at Anil and the heavily pregnant Lisi, but Anil looked away and Lisi barely smiled. There was a half-dead helium balloon under Lisi’s desk. A sad relic from her recent baby shower.
His coworkers started to disappear around ten o’clock. Every time Sergey raised his head, there would be another empty desk. And yet he couldn’t catch the act of disappearance itself. Not until it happened to the man who sat in the next cube. His name was Mehdi. He was a thin man in his fifties with large expressive eyes that reminded Sergey of those of a sad cartoon animal. At eleven fifteen a pretty young woman appeared in the narrow space between their two cubicles. She wore a pencil skirt and a thin yellow cardigan that looked so soft and inviting that Sergey longed to touch it. Mehdi tensed but didn’t turn around, as if he thought that ignoring the woman could make her go away. She tapped him on the shoulder. He stood up, moved his chair away, and followed her down the hall, all without raising his eyes. All his things were still in the cubicle: a scarf on the floor, a glass teacup with some tea in it, countless photographs of his family. Dark-haired, white-teethed—a good-looking bunch of people. Sergey was especially taken by a large photo of a young woman that stood right next to Mehdi’s computer. The woman was in her late twenties; she must be Mehdi’s daughter. She wasn’t that beautiful and she wasn’t smiling, but there was something warm in her expression, some unwarranted, undeserved kindness. She was looking away from the camera, but Sergey desperately wanted her to look at him, to see him, to have some of that warmth directed at him. He was still staring at the photo when he felt the tap on his own shoulder. There she was—the woman in the yellow cardigan. Sergey walked after her down the hall, his eyes following the pendulum-like rocking of her buttocks. She led him into the smaller conference room and disappeared. There they were: the grave David, the grave Brian, and a tense middle-aged woman from HR fingering a thick stack of papers. Sergey could barely understand what they were saying, but it didn’t matter, because it was only a few minutes before he was walking toward the exit squeezing those papers in his hands. The woman in the yellow cardigan was nowhere in sight. He no longer deserved her. Instead, there were two bulky security guys who escorted Sergey out of the building.
Once outside, Sergey was assaulted by a burst of wind so strong that it seemed to be attacking him from all directions. What was the point of skyscrapers if they couldn’t even shield people from the weather? Sergey checked the time and started to walk toward the ferry. When he turned onto Pearl Street, he slipped on a piece of a hamburger on the pavement and barely kept his balance.
His phone started to vibrate. Vica. She must’ve sensed that he had been fired. The thought of answering it and talking to her right now made him sick.
He passed an express bus stop. There was just one person waiting there, a sullen-looking man in his sixties wearing a thick sweatshirt with the hood down and work boots splattered with white paint. But then, of course, it was only twelve fifteen, too early for the commuter crowd. Sergey wondered if the guy had gotten laid off as well.
Sergey made it to the ferry just as the glass doors of the terminal were closing. He was completely alone on the left side of the deck. He could see the Verrazano Bridge in the distance, thin and fragile like a spiderweb.
He grabbed the railing and stared straight ahead, imagining himself in charge of the ferry.
Sergey strengthened his grip and steered it forward. The waves were thick but not too unruly. The important thing was to keep the ferry steady. It was a challenging task, trying to make it safely between all those barges and yachts and erratic speedboats. He managed to turn the ferry to the right toward the Statue of Liberty, when he noticed an enormous cruise ship right in front of them surging at full speed. In a split second, Sergey calculated the approximate speed of the cruise ship, its distance, and the angle at which it was going and decided that a collision could be avoided if he could steer his ferry to the left. He turned his head to see what was on the left side. There was a long, slow red barge, but it was far away enough. And the coast guard boat was getting pretty damn close. He should have given the signal to alert the coast guard boat to his intentions. But that was something he couldn’t do. He had no power over signals. Only over the ferry. So he adjusted his grip again and took a very slight turn to the left. And then straight, then to the right again. The cruise ship was rushing right at them. Could it be that he had miscalculated the speed and a collision was inevitable? He felt like closing his eyes, but he knew that he couldn’t. He had to stay in control. Strong grip. Steady course. Stare forward. Ignore the cruise ship. Ignore the boat. Forward through the wind. He made it!
A couple of tourists in yellow rain ponchos over their thick parkas walked on the deck, saw Sergey, and smiled at him. He became aware that he was still gripping the railing. He let go, and walked toward a bench. He had been holding on so hard that his fingers were stiff and white.
Once again the whistle that signaled the ferry’s arrival came too soon. Sergey disembarked, walked to the parking lot, unlocked his car, and climbed in. He started the car, then hesitated. This was Tuesday, the day when Vica worked nights. She would be at home now. Snug in the armchair like a big lazy cat, her feet in warm socks on top of an electric heater. Watching TV. Her first reaction on seeing him would be annoyance at being interrupted. Then the true meaning of his coming home early would dawn on her and her face would take on an expression of woozy disappointment. He could deal with her anger, with her screaming, with her kicking things, but he couldn’t deal with her disappointment. He couldn’t possibly go home yet.
Sergey suddenly had an idea. There was that strange place he’d accidentally discovered a couple of months ago. He’d been driving home from the mall—he’d had to pick up some last-minute supplies for Eric’s school project—and it was late. The usual route was closed due to road repairs, so he had to drive down some unknown, unmarked road. He soon saw that he had lost his way but continued to drive. He found himself on top of a hill overlooking the ocean and the glittering Verrazano. The road was narrow with charming villas on both sides half hidden in their lush gardens. The view reminded Sergey of the Mediterranean villages he and Vica had visited on their European tour five years ago. He had liked it so much that he’d saved the location in his GPS under favorites. He decided to drive there now. He would park the car, walk down the hill, explore the neighboring streets, find out if the place would hold its charm in the daylight. Sergey turned on the GPS, found the coordinates, and pressed Go.
