Still Here, page 20
Now it felt as if Vadik was getting increasingly disappointed in his company. And there was the question of money. Sergey couldn’t possibly offer him any. You don’t offer money to your best friend when he takes you in. Plus, Vadik knew that Sergey was sending most of his unemployment checks to Vica so that she could pay the mortgage. Sergey did try to buy groceries at least. But Vadik just wouldn’t accept that. His first week at Vadik’s, Sergey went shopping and came back loaded with the food that he usually bought for Vica. Every single item annoyed the hell out of Vadik.
No, he didn’t eat McIntosh apples. And yes, there was a huge difference between organic and nonorganic yogurt. And nobody in his right mind would buy meat loaded with antibiotics and hormones. And Starbucks coffee wasn’t even drinkable!
So, yes, it was clear, Vadik didn’t like his shopping for food. So Sergey stopped doing it. But then there was the issue of toilet paper. Sergey had asked Vadik to buy the ultra-strength kind. The same brand—it wasn’t more expensive, just stronger. And it wasn’t like there was something wrong with Sergey’s ass that it required special treatment; ultra-strong was simply better. Vadik had grudgingly agreed. But the last time he went shopping, Vadik came home with twelve rolls of something called Tenderlicious, some new brand that literally dissolved in your fingers before you even brought it to your ass. “It was on sale” was all the explanation he offered.
And what about those few times when they went out together? Sergey would reach for his wallet, but Vadik would stop him and say that he would pay for the meal. It was as if the sight of Sergey’s scratched credit card embarrassed him. The worst thing was that after the meal Vadik would barely talk to Sergey and hang around the apartment with the sulky expression of somebody who had just been manipulated into doing something he didn’t want to do. Lately, he wore that expression pretty much all the time.
They’d barely watched an hour of The Wolverine when Vadik announced that he was tired and was going to bed. He turned the TV off and left the room without bothering to ask Sergey if he wanted to continue watching.
It was all Vadik’s fault that Sergey didn’t tell him about Sejun. He simply didn’t give him the chance.
Two days later, Sergey called Sejun to ask a few questions about the design for his app. This time he called her from his own Skype account. Sejun told him that she loved the logic and organization of the frames but hated the visual presentation. “A graveyard with tiny ghosts peeking from behind the stones? Seriously?” She found it both creepy and boring, like Walmart Halloween decorations.
This embarrassed Sergey so much that his voice went higher. He tried to explain that he didn’t mean for the ghosts to be in the actual design but thought they were okay for a proto. Sejun seemed to be touched by his embarrassment. She then offered a few simple solutions to make the visuals work and suggested a good website with graphic templates.
The next time Sergey called Sejun he asked her if Virtual Grave was a good name for his app.
She said that it was morbid but biting, and biting was the most important quality for the name. Her use of the word biting stirred Sergey so much that he blushed. She said that when his prototype was ready, she would introduce him to her investor friend.
The calls were becoming more frequent. They would start talking about the app but would inevitably swerve someplace else, someplace personal. Sejun asked Sergey how he’d come up with the idea. He told her about the posthumous letter from his father, how he had sat in the basement reading it over and over again, trying to find some last piece of advice. He saw Sejun remove her glasses and wipe her eyes with the corner of her sleeve.
She told him that her own father never, ever talked to her. He spoke to her, he said things to her, he asked questions, he gave instructions, but they never really “talked,” not when she was a child and not now. It was as if he found the idea of a conversation with his daughter incomprehensible. She said that one of the reasons she decided to move to the United States was to escape this condescending attitude that Asian men displayed to women. She wanted a Western man so that he would treat her as an equal. But here she found that the Western men who wanted to date Asian women were attracted to the idea of their servility.
“But not Vadik though?” Sergey asked. Sejun looked away from the screen. Sergey was afraid that he had made a faux pas. He shouldn’t have mentioned Vadik; he should’ve pretended to have forgotten the fact that Sejun used to be Vadik’s girlfriend.
Then she looked up at Sergey. “No,” she said, “with Vadik it was different.”
He wasn’t misogynistic at all. But he liked her because she was strange to him. Not exotic, but strange. He knew that he would never truly understand her or she him. And that was exactly what he wanted. To be able to project whatever he wanted on to her and to be able to imagine that in her eyes he was whatever he wanted to be at the moment. And she was so lonely and weak that she almost agreed to become that for him.
One morning Sergey was sick with flu and he called Sejun from bed.
“Are you in bed?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“I love that lattice headboard. I was the one who picked this bed, did you know that?”
Sergey started to cough.
“Oh, poor Sergey!” she said. “I wish I was there with you, I would give you some tea.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t want to appear servile.”
“That’s true,” Sejun said. “But I could sit down on the edge of your bed and stroke your hair.”
“I would give anything to feel your hand on my forehead right now,” Sergey said.
Sejun smiled. Her glasses slipped down her nose when she was staring down, and she pushed them back with her index finger. She was sitting cross-legged on her couch. He could see her entire body, so her laptop must have been away, on the coffee table. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt and some sort of lounge pants. No socks, no bra. He searched for her nipples lost in the folds of her T-shirt.
“I would’ve tapped my fingertips on your forehead,” she said, “and then I would run them down your cheeks, all the way to your mouth.”
Sergey suppressed the urge to moan. “And I would have caught your finger with my teeth and pressed on it ever so gently,” he said.
That first time they had sex discreetly. Sejun brought her laptop closer so that everything below her neck was hidden from view. Sergey did the same. He tried to masturbate as quietly as possible. He was hoping that Sejun was masturbating too, but he couldn’t be completely sure. They kept talking the entire time.
“Oh, fuck!” Sergey finally cried, making his computer screen shake.
Sejun laughed. “Did you come?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “What about you?”
“Oh, I came a little while ago. I was just embarrassed to tell you.”
Afterward, Sergey felt feverish but insanely happy.
He went to the bathroom and aimed a perfect pale gold current into Vadik’s toilet.
“Is vigorous,” he said to the pearly gray tiles above the toilet. “Is brilliant. Is persistent. Is strong.”
Each time they became bolder and more intimate. They would put their computers farther away to have a full view of each other’s bodies, and they would wear ear- and mouthpieces to hear each other better. Her breasts turned out to be smaller than he’d thought, her hips wider. He couldn’t imagine anything sexier than Sejun wearing nothing but a mouthpiece and headphones. Everything about her was endlessly exciting. Sometimes, hours after their call was over, Sergey would see his headphones lying on the table where he’d left them and just the sight of them would get him hard. She told him how smart he was, how imaginative, how handsome. She said that he looked like that actor from Truffaut’s films. What was his name? Jean-Pierre Léaud? She asked him if he liked Truffaut. He said that he did. He loved Truffaut, had always preferred him to Godard. She had too, she said. She had always hated Godard.
Sergey walked around in a dazed painful state, the rest of his concerns—Vica, Eric, Virtual Grave, unemployment, Rachel, Vadik, especially Vadik—concealed from him by the smog of panic and excitement. He managed to disregard the fact that Sejun used to be Vadik’s girlfriend, that they had broken up a mere two months ago, and the morality of Skype-fucking her was questionable at best. Once after Sejun’s call, Sergey stayed frozen on the couch for hours, the MacBook in his lap, not doing anything, just thinking, or rather daydreaming, clinging to the details of what had just happened, as if trying to catch them all and lock them up. He was roused from his reverie by an angry call from Rachel. Apparently, they had scheduled a date and Sergey had forgotten about it. “What happened? Are you sick?” Rachel kept asking him, but there was no concern in her voice, just fury. And it was easier to address her fury than her concern. He said that he had met someone else.
The next morning Sejun didn’t answer his Skype call. He left her several messages. She didn’t reply. Three days later Sergey sent her a text: “Are you okay? I’m worried.” He got a reply the next day. She wrote that she was fine but feeling “weirded out” by their relationship. “Do you want us to stop?” he asked. This time she answered right away: “Yes!”
It was very difficult to work after that, very difficult to make himself focus, but Sergey knew that his work was actually his way to salvation, so he recommitted himself with even more intensity.
Then, about a week after their virtual affair ended, the time for retribution came. One night, as Sergey was perusing the contents of Vadik’s nearly empty fridge, Vadik appeared in the kitchen doorway with the iPhone in his hands. He looked confused rather than angry, but Sergey had a panicky premonition that this was going to be about Sejun.
It was.
“Look,” Vadik said. “It says here that I talked to Sejun on December 18. I didn’t talk to her. Was it you?”
Vadik was clearly anticipating some sort of crazy explanation. There wasn’t any.
“Yes, we talked,” Sergey said. “She called to ask you if her brother could stay here. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you.”
“Her brother staying here? Staying with me? Or should I vacate my own apartment to accommodate him? That girl has some nerve!”
Sergey took out a wilted lettuce and a couple of tomatoes and cucumbers. “I’m making a salad, do you want some?”
Vadik nodded. He sat down on a flimsy bar stool that looked as if it were about to collapse and put his phone down.
Sergey took a cutting board out and started slicing tomatoes. Never an easy task, and especially difficult under Vadik’s stare.
“You should halve the tomatoes first,” Vadik said, “and better use a serrated knife.”
Sergey found the serrated knife.
“Not the cucumbers though. Never use a serrated knife on cucumbers. But you still have to halve them.”
Sergey answered him with a glare and Vadik went back to playing with his phone. He looked really stupid in that tiny kitchen, perched on that tiny chair. In his white sweater with his shock of blond hair, he looked like a huge dumb parrot in a cage. If there was one thing Sergey couldn’t stand, it was somebody’s presence while he was cooking. Vica would always leave the kitchen when he cooked. Not that he cooked that often. But he could make cucumber and tomato salad, and a spectacular omelet. His secret ingredients were leftover cold cuts from MyEurope. A prosciutto and salami combination worked the best. He would make it for Vica, and she would always ask for seconds and proclaim it the most delicious dish in the world. “Seriously,” she would say, “we should enter your omelet in contests.” Too bad Vadik didn’t have any leftovers. Or any eggs. Sergey felt a momentary pang of longing for Vica, but then he thought of Sejun and felt a pang of longing for her too.
“No, no, that’s rosemary-scented oil. It won’t do. Use the big bottle.”
Sergey put the rosemary-scented oil back and reached for the big bottle.
“Wait,” Vadik said, and Sergey felt like throwing the big bottle at his head. “Wait. It says here that the duration of the call was two hours and eight minutes. You couldn’t have been discussing Sejun’s brother for two hours, could you?”
Sergey stopped mixing the salad. He knew that one way or the other Vadik would get to the bottom of this. And the bottom of this—the fact that he had had an affair with his best friend’s ex-girlfriend—suddenly seemed pretty horrible, pretty disgusting. He used to tell himself that this was not about Vadik, that this was about him and Sejun, and Vadik had nothing to do with it. Now, for the first time, he realized that in Vadik’s eyes it would be very much about him.
He cleared his throat and said that Sejun and he talked.
“What did you talk about? Did you talk about me?” Vadik asked.
This suggestion offended Sergey. How typical of Vadik to think that they would have nothing to discuss except himself—such an endlessly fascinating topic.
“We talked about my app,” Sergey said.
Apparently this was a mistake.
“Oh, how nice! You talked about your fantastic, super-brilliant app! Your genius app! Sejun loved your idea, I remember that. She thought it was ‘brave and defiant.’ ”
Vadik said the last three words in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to be an imitation of how Sejun talked, but in fact it didn’t sound like her at all. He jumped off the stool and stood leaning on the kitchen counter, hovering over Sergey. He was seven inches taller than Sergey, but Sergey had never been so aware of it before.
“Well, I’ve always thought your idea was stupid,” he said. “Stupid and sick. Like freeze-drying your dead pet. No, worse than that, like freeze-drying your dead pet and making it talk.”
He paused and looked at Sergey, making sure that his words registered. They did.
“Nobody wants to hear from dead people, you hear me? Nobody! It’s creepy, it’s horrifying. It’s unbearably painful, for godsakes! I mean, yes, it’s true, we all talk to our loved ones in our minds. And, yes, we all wish that they would answer. A single word of affection, of acceptance. We all need that. But what you’re trying to do is not that! What people will hear is not the voice of their loved one, but the bits and pieces of that voice, the heartless morsels, a cruel parody. Listening to that voice will only make their sense of loss more acute. The person that they loved is gone. Gone! Nothing will bring him back. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not God, not Fyodorov, and certainly not your fucking app. I mean, how stupid must you be not to see that?”
Sergey looked away and tasted the salad. He’d put way too much oil in it. And what kind of food was salad anyway? It would only make them hungrier.
“The only app that could possibly make sense in the face of death would be one that would cancel your entire online presence. Cancel it! Erase all your messages, delete all your posts, get rid of every trace of you. Make sure nobody could revive you, or speak in your voice, or do any other shit. Now that’s the app we need. Because that’s the idea of death. Death brings an absolute end. And we all should just respect that.”
Sergey made a motion to go out of the kitchen, but Vadik was blocking the way.
“But you know all that, don’t you?” Vadik said with a gloating expression, as if he had discovered Sergey’s dirty secret.
“You don’t really want to ‘revive’ dead people à la Fyodorov—God, what a stupid fuck he was! You don’t really want to reconstruct their speeches or their souls. You’re just hanging on to the idea of this app because it’s the last thing, the very last thing, that you believe can pull you out of the dump, right? Right? Because if not for this app, you’re done. You’re stuck with being a loser forever.”
And Sergey just stood there, listening to Vadik’s diatribe, looking into his bowl, eating the salad, forkful after slippery forkful. He could hear and understand Vadik’s words, he felt them almost like physical blows, and yet they weren’t truly reaching him. He felt as if he were in the middle of a very wrong scene, a scene that wasn’t supposed to be happening. He remembered feeling like this once before. He was only five or six and it was a snow day. He went out of his apartment building dressed in snow boots, a winter coat, and a thick knitted hat, mittens, and whatever, and there were older boys waiting in ambush behind a row of snowdrifts armed with snowballs. Their attack was immediate and merciless. Vicious wads of pain hitting him on the neck, on the face, on the eyes. He remembered thinking that this was not supposed to happen. These were his friends. He knew their names. They played in the sandbox together. This was wrong! So wrong that it couldn’t be happening. He didn’t even turn away or cover his face. He just stood there waiting until this frightening scene would disappear or be changed into something else.
“And Sejun was impressed with your idea, wasn’t she,” Vadik said again. Sergey still didn’t say anything, but Vadik continued.
“Of course she was. Did she tell you how brilliant you were? How she was smitten with your intellect? How she was in love with your brain? How arousing your brilliance was? How she was dying for this brilliant, brilliant man to fuck her? Skype-fuck if nothing else? Oh, Sejun used to love Skype-fucking! She even preferred it to the real thing.”
