Still Here, page 17
Vica rubbed his back. While she was doing that she noticed that Eric’s glasses were dirty. She gasped and yanked them off, scratching his ear in the process. “Mom!” he protested.
“Hey! You should have cleaned them before we left,” Vica said.
She could just see how these stains on the lenses would jeopardize Eric’s chances at the test. Misread equation, misinterpreted sentence, blurry expression, fatal mistake. And there was nothing to clean the glasses with. Nothing. Nothing at all. Vica unbuttoned her coat, breathed on the lenses, then wiped them with the hem of her sweater. Eric turned away, embarrassed but resigned. “Here,” she said, setting the glasses back on his face. “Thanks,” Eric said, but she thought she caught a note of sarcasm. When they were just outside of the door, she opened his backpack and did a quick check: pencils, papers, all in place. Pink slip squeezed in his hand.
“Don’t drop the slip.”
“Mom, I won’t!”
Okay, he probably wouldn’t drop the slip. But then another horrible thought slashed through Vica’s mind. Last year, when she took him out of school on Staten Island to take a test for another school for the gifted and talented (although not quite as gifted and talented as children admitted to the Castle), Eric decided to venture to the bathroom in the middle of the exam. He couldn’t find it and then, once he found it, he couldn’t poop right away because he was too nervous, and by the time he got back, they were already collecting the tests. He left twenty answers blank. Twenty answers blank!
Vica reached out and tapped the Susan Sontag in front of her on the shoulder.
“Do you know if they let the kids go to the bathroom?”
“Excuse me?” Susan Sontag said.
Yes, Vica knew that she spoke with an accent, but it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t like you couldn’t understand her. Susan Sontag’s daughter (her huge ears half hidden behind her pigtails) answered for her.
“They don’t! Once you hand in your pink slip, that’s it, you can’t go anywhere! And there are no windows in the school. Not a single one! Look, not a single one!”
Susan Sontag shushed her daughter and glared at Vica as if she had just said something completely inappropriate, had brought up a subject that should never be brought up in front of children, like sex, death, or financial troubles.
“Make sure you use the bathroom before they take your pink slip,” Vica said to Eric.
“Mom, please!”
He was already in, talking to a guard and showing her his pink slip, when Vica noticed that she’d forgotten to zip his backpack. It was too late for her to squeeze through the crowd of children and zip it, and even too late to yell her son’s name. There he went, with the backpack gaping like a hippo’s maw. Seeing Eric among strangers, separated from her, made Vica look at him through the eyes of a stranger, which never failed to overwhelm her with disappointment. He was not a lovely child. He was awkward. Slouchy. Pale skin sprinkled with large freckles, dull eyes, droopy cheeks. Fat. Not obese, no, and not exactly fat yet, but getting there. Soft, squashy. Helplessly soft.
Vica raised her hand to wave to her son, but he didn’t turn to look. He followed the guard and disappeared into the depths of the Castle.
“What are you feeding him? He looks awful!” Vica’s oldest sister had exclaimed after she saw Eric on Skype. Their mother often said the same thing. “Let him be,” Vica’s father said, but when did they ever listen to him.
Guilt mixed with anger balled up somewhere in Vica’s stomach. It was her own fault. It was the general unhappiness of their family, her constant fights with Sergey, the never-ending tension, and now the separation that made Eric fat, that made him slump in front of the TV with junk food instead of doing sports. It was his sick relationship with Sergey’s mother, who kept overfeeding and overpraising her grandson. Mira was a tiny, fussy, heavily made up, not very smart woman. They had arranged for her to move to the United States after Sergey’s father died. Vica was hoping that Mira would sell her apartment in Moscow, but she left it to her spinster sister instead. “Maechka is so sick, she wouldn’t have survived on her pension.” She herself came penniless. Sergey and Vica made sure she was getting benefits, found her state-sponsored housing in Brooklyn. But Mira wasn’t adjusting to her new life that well. She was a clingy mother and a clingier grandmother. She and Eric had some sort of crazy romance going. He badly needed to be admired and she badly needed to be needed. Once Vica overheard the following exchange:
“Now, who is the smartest? Who is the handsomest?”
“Okay, okay, Grandma. I guess I am.”
It was creepy, Vica thought, but they both looked so pleased with each other. They would spend hours talking. Mira would tell him all about her life in Russia, about his genius grandfather, and about Sergey as a little boy. Eric shared some of the facts with Vica. “Did you know that Dad used to be really good at picking berries? They would go into the woods and he would fill his little basket in minutes. Grandma says I would be really good too.”
What hurt Vica the most about this was that Eric didn’t have any connection with her side of the family. Her mother was very much involved in bringing up Vica’s sister’s kids; she considered them her real grandchildren, and Eric was nothing but a stranger whose first language was English and couldn’t speak her language very well. Vica would prep him and make him rehearse some Russian phrases before their monthly Skype calls, but Eric would invariably stutter and mix up his words. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!” Vica’s mother would say. “Better go play and put your mom back on.”
Other parents from the line were dispersing in all directions. Outer Boroughs were heading to nearby cafés, Susan Sontags were walking west, to their beautiful apartments just across the park. The time was now 8:35. She had to pick Eric up at 12:30. She’d taken the whole day off work, so she had all that time to herself. She was free to do what she wanted. Vica’s plan was to have breakfast at Café Sabarsky. She had heard Eden mention that they had “hands down the best coffee in the city.” Vadik said that it was a bit pricey but a truly elegant setting. She walked to Neue Galerie, entered the museum, and stopped at the door of Café Sabarsky and peeked in. The dark wood interior was both cozy and grand. Vica loved marble tabletops and chairs with a dent in it for your butt. She took the dent as a special sign of luxury. At this hour, the café was almost empty; an old man was sitting at a table by the window with a deliciously fresh newspaper spread above his coffee cup. She would take a table by the window too. She would just order a cup of coffee and a bread basket. She would butter one of the rolls, put it on her plate, take a selfie of herself enjoying “the best coffee in the city” in “a truly elegant setting,” and post it on Facebook. Let them see! Let them see that she was perfectly fine about her separation, happy, in a good place. She wasn’t sure who “they” were, however. Her sisters? They didn’t really use Facebook, preferring the Russian social media site VKontakte. Her coworkers? Yeah, why not? Regina and Vadik? Definitely! Sergey himself? Sergey had never been a fan of social media—what an irony that he was so obsessed with that app!—but if he ever happened to browse and see her photo, Vica wanted to make sure that it would send the right message. Vica was about to enter the café when her eyes fell on the menu clipped to the door. Seven dollars for coffee. Eight dollars for a bread basket with jam. That would be eighteen dollars with tax and more than twenty dollars with tip. She could afford it, but twenty dollars for bread and coffee! When she could buy a bagel from a breakfast cart for just a dollar! No, that was ridiculous. Vica turned to leave, then hesitated. What about her Facebook photo? Vica, smiling, relaxed, sipping her seven-dollar coffee as if it were perfectly natural? No, she decided, it wasn’t worth it. She wouldn’t be able to drink that coffee without constantly running the price through her head. So the picture would come out as anything but natural.
Vica walked back to Madison, went into a deli, and stood in line for a bagel and a sour-tasting coffee in a paper cup. There was a man a few feet away, standing with his back to Vica, perusing the yogurts on a shelf. Short, wiry, dark hair. Sergey! Vica thought for a second. Then the man turned, revealing that he was not.
It was only nine. Vica sat down at the one of the rickety plastic tables, reached into her bag, and pulled out a book she’d recently bought at Barnes & Noble. It was called Mobile Apps for Dummies.
She opened the book to the marked page:
Step 1. Define the Goal of Your App. Before you go into details, you must clearly define the purpose and mission of your app. What is it going to do? What is its core appeal? What concrete problem is it going to solve, or what part of life is it going to make better?
“To fight death” she wrote in her notepad. That was kind of a larger goal. She needed to make it more practical, more plausible.
Vica had never been that interested in Sergey’s idea of re-creating the virtual voice or even the virtual personality of the departed. What she wanted was an app that would allow people to keep some of their online presence after they died. She thought the app should be designed for people who were going to die (which was everybody!) rather than their relatives and friends. They would be able to preprogram the posts, messages, or tweets that would appear after they died. It was more like a virtual will. “Virtual Will”—now, there was a nice name, so much better than Virtual Grave. She had mentioned it to Sergey and he sounded interested. “But where would my algorithm come in, if people will be creating their own messages before they die?” he asked. “They can’t possibly prewrite everything. Some of them have to be automatic!” He took some time to think it over and told her that he loved her idea. He thought it was great that Virtual Grave could work both ways as posthumous restoration and as “prehumous” preparation. He did love it! Yet, he chose to pitch only his part to Bob. He must have thought that her idea was too banal, too practical. It was practical, and that was what was so great about it.
So what would be her app’s plausible goal?
To keep your social media alive after you die.
To keep your online presence after you die.
To control your online presence after you die.
To keep control over your social media after you die.
Vica liked the word control. One of the things that was so scary about dying, falling down, or even falling asleep was the loss of control.
Yes, control was a powerful word, and no, she wasn’t so naive that she thought you could actually keep it. But you could keep some semblance of it. Or at least die thinking that you did.
Now, how exactly would the app work? Would it only allow for the timed premade posts or tweets or photos to appear after you died, or would it also allow you to “react” to the posts of others?
“Posthumous feedback?” she wrote.
It shouldn’t be hard to program the app to give out random likes to the posts of loved ones. A “like” for every second thing posted by your child. Or for every third thing posted by your friends. People were always “liking” random things as it was. But that was easy enough. It would be far more interesting and challenging to program the app so that it made meaningful comments. Would it be possible for it to distinguish a post about something good from a post about something bad? So that it could comment either “Congratulations!” or “That sucks”? But what if it made a mistake? What if a son posted that he lost his job and got “Congratulations!” from his long-dead father? There had to be some neutral comments. “I’m with you,” for example. That would work for almost everything. iPhones already had ready-made quick text options that substituted for genuine emotions. You didn’t have to go to all that trouble and type in “I love you” or “I miss you”; all you had to do for the app was to make those quick responses automatic. So what you needed for Virtual Will was a robotlike program that would be activated after you died to post neutral comments to your loved ones’ posts. It should be compatible to any of your social media platforms. Vica thought about the most common expressions people used in their posts, tweets, and comments. She reached for her phone and opened her Twitter app. Her favorite social media was Facebook, so she never tweeted anything herself, but she enjoyed looking at other people’s tweets, even though she didn’t follow that many of them. Vadik’s tweet was at the top.
Zero retweets. Zero favorites. What did he expect with stupid shit like that? Still, Vica felt sorry for Vadik and marked his tweet as a favorite.
Then there were a couple of funny little tweets from Mindy Kaling, who she loved.
Vica soon forgot about her task and got carried away by the tweets themselves.
There was one from President Obama about climate change. Vica smiled. Not that she particularly cared about politics or the climate, but she got a kick out of the fact that you could follow the president on Twitter.
A tweet from Liliana in radiology. “Another busy day.” Well, yes, Vica thought, this was a weekday, and their job was hard. Why did Liliana feel the need to tweet about that?
Santiago from interventional radiology retweeted a picture of a Japanese dog with a square hairdo. Now that was really funny and cute!
Vica skipped through another ten or twelve tweets until she stumbled on this one from Ethan Grail.
Vica sighed. She felt a surge of pity that was so sharp it burned her throat the way hot coffee did.
Ethan Grail was her favorite patient. He was an actor, a quite famous one, even though Vica had never seen any of his movies. He was only thirty-two years old with a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. Ethan was the source of endless gossip at the hospital. Liliana would show Vica clips from his films on YouTube. Christine claimed that he had just broken up with his costar. Like right before his diagnosis. She’d read it in People magazine. “Poor fucker,” Santiago said.
Judging from the clips and the countless photos floating across the Internet, Ethan had been very handsome a mere six months ago. Now he was painfully thin and had the pallor of a dead man, with large eyes that seemed to retreat into his skull farther than would be bearable. No wonder people didn’t recognize him anymore. Ethan would always chat with Vica while she did his sonograms (his therapy made him prone to thromboses, so he needed frequent tests), and he would often sneak across the hall to see her when he came for his weekly radiation treatments.
Her male patients often tried to flirt with her. One man said that she had “the body of Marilyn and the soul of Chekhov.” A lot of men made the same joke that finally there was a woman who could see right through them. Vica usually just smiled back at them, but she couldn’t help but feel disgusted. It was as if she was kneading dough all day, and the dough suddenly decided to flirt with her.
But Ethan Grail was different. She actually enjoyed chatting with him. Not because he was a celebrity, but because there was something morbidly irresistible in the way he liked to flaunt his impending death. Usually, patients were encouraged to view death as if it were a mean but conquerable enemy, something they were expected to fight against rather than accept. Ethan said that Vica was the only one among the hospital’s personnel who didn’t discourage his quips about death, didn’t call his attitude defeatist. He said that he loved her accent. That there was some bluntness, some bitterness, some refreshing lack of optimism in the way she pronounced words.
Both Liliana and Christine thought that Ethan had a crush on Vica. “What if he dies and leaves Vica all his money in his will?” Liliana mused. Vica fantasized about that too. She hated herself for doing it, but she couldn’t help herself.
Vica clicked on Ethan’s name to read his recent tweets in succession.
Shit! Vica thought, pushing back tears. She couldn’t afford to get emotional over a patient. Everybody at work told her so. Some of her colleagues offered tips on fighting back emotions. Christine said that whenever she was about to feel weepy she would try to visualize her bank statement. Liliana thought of sex. Santiago of the recent soccer game’s score. But it was Sergey, who had never worked with dying people, who actually gave her the best advice. This was years ago, when she’d just started working at Bing Ruskin and would often come home sobbing. “Think of it as a movie or a TV show,” he said. “When I was little I used to get really upset over sad scenes in movies. And my dad once told me, ‘Serezha, listen, these are not real people. They will go home and change their clothes after this and go on with their lives. Lassie the dog is not really dead, she’s an actress. She will go home and gnaw on her favorite bone.’ It helped a lot, although it did ruin the magic of storytelling a little bit.”
For the most part Sergey’s protective strategy worked really well. This is not real, Vica would tell herself. This is just a TV series. ER, Grey’s Anatomy, House M.D. The doctors are not real. The patients are not real. That sweet kid who died last month didn’t really die; he was simply killed off by the writers, because some new show offered him a better role. It didn’t work with Ethan though. Possibly because he really was an actor, it was harder for her to imagine him as a pretend actor. Ethan was real and he was going to die for real. Fairly soon too. She had heard that the doctors were giving him only about a year.
The last time Vica had a chat with Ethan was about two weeks ago.
“I know what you want to ask me,” Ethan said.
He was staring at her intently, even aggressively. She had to look away. He couldn’t have guessed that I had been thinking about his money, could he? Vica thought, her spine tensing.
“Go on, ask me. Ask me if I’m scared of dying.”
“Are you scared?”
“Hell, yeah, I’m terrified. I’m not ready. It’s funny, isn’t it, how my docs devote so much effort to prolonging my life and none of it to preparing me for death. Which is coming no matter what! Couldn’t they think of something to make dying just a little bit easier, a little bit less scary?”
Vica had no idea what to say to him. Her heart was breaking, but she was rebelling against having to feel it. She wasn’t Ethan’s girlfriend or his friend. She wasn’t even his shrink or his doctor. She was a mere radiology technician, and she couldn’t afford to feel that strongly about a patient!
