Still Here, page 29
The Uzbek woman walked in and sidled up to Kotov with a tray that held a single glass filled with thick yellow juice. “Orange mango,” she said. Kotov drained the juice, wiped his lips, and kissed her dark swollen hand.
“Thank you, darling,” he said with stifled affection in his voice.
She leaned in and kissed him on the top of his head with a fierce proprietary expression.
“Dinara used to be my nanny,” Kotov said after she had retreated into the kitchen. “I was ten and she was fifteen.”
“Was that your entire breakfast?” Kuzmin said with a stupid chuckle.
“I’ll have kasha when it’s ready.” He turned to the kitchen and yelled, “Dinara, how much longer?”
“Ten minutes,” she yelled back.
“Ten minutes,” Kotov said. “That should be enough for your pitch.”
“Plenty,” Sergey said. No, he wasn’t nervous. Not even a little bit. Probably because he wasn’t hoping to succeed. He was enjoying how calm he was, confident, arrogant. Arrogant was good, wasn’t it?
He managed to keep calm throughout the pitch, even though it was getting increasingly obvious that Kotov wasn’t and wouldn’t be interested. He kept scratching his neck, glancing toward the window, and checking his reflection in the gleaming surface of his Rolex. He wasn’t stirred by the beauty of Fyodorov’s philosophy. He wasn’t even a little impressed by the quote from Hamlet. It was clear that the rest would indeed be silence. That is, if Sergey didn’t come up with a new explosive punch line.
“Listen,” he said to Kotov, “my app won’t make you immortal. You will die.”
Kotov stopped playing with his Rolex.
Kuzmin audibly drew his breath in.
“But,” Sergey continued, “death is not what it used to be. You can actually screw it now. And that’s exactly what my app does.”
Now Kotov was listening with attention. He squinted, which made him look ruthless, more like the image of a shady Russian billionaire that Sergey had had in mind. He proceeded to give Kotov the details. At some point Kotov jumped out of his armchair and started pacing across the room. “Oh, the sweetness, the sweetness,” he moaned, looking out onto Central Park.
“I could arrange that for my wife. She would get a text from me. Every year for her birthday. ‘You’re a psycho bitch.’ ”
“Every year?” Sergey asked. “What if you change your mind?”
“Change my mind? I’ll be dead, dude!”
And right then Kuzmin squeaked from his seat: “We need two million in initial funding.”
Kotov frowned. “Two million? What the fuck are you talking about? You don’t need two million. Use programmers from Belarus, they’re dirt cheap! I’m giving you a million and a half, and then we’ll see.”
Sergey could barely register the rest of the talk. Kotov was going back to Russia. Kuzmin was to contact his accountant next week. Kotov would leave him the instructions. He expected to be informed about every aspect of the process. He wished them the best of luck.
“Can we trust him?” Sergey asked when he and Kuzmin exited the building.
“Oh, yes. He would never go back on his word. We got it!”
He made an attempt to embrace Sergey, but Sergey dodged the hug.
“We have to celebrate!” Kuzmin insisted. “Get brunch! Get drunk!”
But Sergey couldn’t wait to be alone. “Some other time, okay?” he said.
As soon as Kuzmin was out of sight, Sergey crossed the road into the park and started walking along the path toward the reservoir. He passed the field where dogs jumped wildly around performing their morning rituals. He felt a momentary urge to join them. He passed a few benches where old people sat with their old blankets spread over their laps. He felt like kissing each and every one of them. He rustled through a pile of dry leaves on the path. He kicked an old acorn with his foot and sent it flying into the air. He ran his hand along the sharp edge of the bushes framing the path. He stopped by a food cart and bought himself a bag of roasted peanuts. They were still hot and Sergey pressed the bag to his face to savor its warmth for a moment. He popped a few peanuts into his mouth and walked up to the black metal fence guarding the water. There were almost no people on the path, just one or two joggers. Sergey decided to ignore them. The water was perfectly still, the reflections on it very bright, so it was as if he were seeing two cities at once: one standing up on the other side, the other turned upside down and submerged in the water. He hadn’t been there in ages, he didn’t remember how shockingly beautiful the view was. He remembered that feeling he had had when crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, that he could fit the entire city onto his palm. What he felt now was different. He felt that it was the city that could fit him, Sergey Levin, onto its palm. That he finally belonged there. He ate the rest of the peanuts and put the empty bag into a pocket of his pants. He placed both his feet onto the little step at the bottom of the fence and grabbed the upper spikes with both hands. He rocked back and forth and right and left, while singing Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
He sang and sang until he felt that he was David the baffled king, and it was he composing “Hallelujah,” and it was he who finally struck that secret chord.
—
For the next couple of days as Sergey was busy preparing a detailed business plan, he was burning to tell somebody. Eric, his mother, Vadik, Regina, Bob, Sejun, Vica. Especially Vica. The idea was partly hers after all. And Vica was the only who could truly share his joy. Vica could get deeply angry and profoundly sad—no grown person cried as much as she did, but she could get insanely happy too. She would’ve screamed. She would’ve been jumping up and down. That was what she did when he announced that they had accepted him to New York School of Business.
And there was Helen waiting to hear how the meeting went. Sergey was about to tell her the good news, but something prevented him from doing it. Kuzmin assured Sergey that the deal was solid, that Kotov rarely promised things, but when he did, he never, ever backed out on his word. But Sergey was afraid to jinx it. He told Helen that he wouldn’t know Kotov’s decision for a while. He decided not to say a word to anybody until the check was safely in his bank account.
That decision proved to be very wise, because a week after their meeting with Kotov, the bad news came.
“I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news,” Kuzmin said on the phone. “Kotov was shot and killed last night. He was in his car on the outskirts of Moscow.”
Sergey was in the kitchen, making yet another meal for Goebbels, scraping some brown gunk off the sides of the cat food can into a bowl. He put the bowl down and leaned against the fridge. Kotov was dead. Just a few days ago Sergey was sitting across from the man, so close that he could smell his cologne. He thought of Kotov’s eyes, of the throbbing vein in his temple. He wondered how exactly he’d been shot. In his chest? In his head? He thought of how he looked Kotov in the eye and said: “You will die.” Embarrassment and revulsion at the memory of these words made him cringe.
And only then did Sergey realize that Kotov’s death meant the end of Virtual Grave. He had just a few weeks left of unemployment—he needed to look for another job. He had no other investment contacts. But, more important, he didn’t have the stamina anymore. That short-lived euphoria over the deal with Kotov had exhausted him more than all the time he had spent working on the app.
You’ve got to hand it to Death though, he thought. Just as he and Kotov were planning to screw it, it went ahead and screwed them.
—
Sergey spent the following days browsing the job ads, barely eating, hardly registering Helen’s attempts to cheer him up. “I’ll tell you what,” she said at the end of the week. “Teena will be at her dad’s all weekend, so let’s have a little party at my place Saturday night. Order some nice food, watch a movie. How about 9½ Weeks? Haven’t seen that in a while.”
9½ Weeks? Sergey thought. Wasn’t that the old soft-porn movie where Mickey Rourke fed the blindfolded Kim Basinger a chili pepper? He hated that movie! But he said yes simply because he didn’t have the energy to say no.
On Saturday morning he drove to Staten Island to spend his usual time with Eric. It was a long, long drive. There was traffic on the BQE. More traffic on the Verrazano Bridge. Traffic on Father Capodanno, where traffic was extremely rare. The ocean was a sickly grayish-brown, as if it hadn’t yet quite recovered after Sandy. Some houses along the shore still stood covered with plywood. There wasn’t much traffic on Hylan, which was surprising, but, God, how ugly Hylan looked! Those car dealerships, those disgusting storefronts, those billboards for doctors, MRIs, and funeral homes.
Sergey had to admit that the neighborhood where his house stood was actually quite beautiful. Neat houses, sycamores, lilac bushes, streets leading up and down the hills and into the woods. Yet the prettiness of his former neighborhood made Sergey even more depressed than the ugliness of Hylan Boulevard had. He didn’t belong there anymore.
He was finally in the driveway of his house. And, yes, legally, this was still his house. He still owned the rusted mailbox. The ugly porch with the scuffed column. The plastic bat hanging off the awning since three Halloweens ago. He still had the key. He felt it would be wrong to open the door with his own key, even though he knew that Vica wasn’t there. He pressed the button of the doorbell. There was a wheezing half-choked ring followed by some commotion in the house.
“Eric, open the door!” his mother yelled. “Eric, now! Eric, my hands are all covered in meat!”
Then there was the clicking of the locks. Mira insisted on locking all of them even though both Vica and Sergey tried to persuade her that the neighborhood was very safe.
“Who is this?” she asked from behind the door in her strained and thus a little rude-sounding English.
“Mom, it’s me,” Sergey said.
Mira opened the door and moved to the side to let him pass. She stood wiping her hands on her little apron printed with cat paws. Complicated jewelry dangled off her hands, ears, and neck. She had stopped dyeing her hair since Sergey’s father died, and there was something intensely sad about the combination of her childish frame, her fancy jewelry, and her sparse white hair.
“I’m making ezhiki,” she announced.
“Great, Mom,” he said and leaned in to kiss her. Her skin felt dry and brittle under his lips, which it did more and more so each time they saw each other. His father’s death was abrupt, Sergey thought, but he was being forced to witness his mother’s demise unraveling in slow motion.
Mira went back into the kitchen, and Sergey walked up the stairs to the top floor. He took great care not to touch or see anything that would remind him of Vica, so he was grateful that the door to their former bedroom was shut, but the door of the hallway closet was gaping open and he caught a glimpse of the pink towels that he had seen wrapped around Vica’s body so many times. Eric’s door was half open too. Inside, he saw the usual picture: Eric sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, one sock on, the other sock for some reason lying in the middle of the room. He was flushed and sweaty, clutching his Xbox controller, his thumbs jerking as if on their own, his entire body swaying right and left with the characters on-screen. And what characters they were! Nasty, vicious, dressed in full military garb, loaded with various weapons, screaming, jumping, bursting into flames. Sergey had always said that they shouldn’t let Eric play those games, but he never found enough support from Vica to carry it through. “This is normal,” she would say, getting angrier as she talked, “this is what boys do. You don’t want Eric not to do what other boys do, do you? To grow up weird and alone?”
“Eric!” he called.
“Not now, Dad!” The characters on the screen started screaming in what sounded like Mandarin to Sergey.
“Hey!” Sergey called again.
Eric bit on his lower lip and made several jerky movements with his hands. There was a series of explosions that left a lonely mutilated corpse on the smoke-clouded field.
“Dad! You distracted me! Now I’m dead!” Eric said and dropped his controller on the floor.
“Is that supposed to be you?” Sergey asked, pointing to the corpse.
“Yep,” Eric said.
A husky Asian man, bent under his excessive weaponry, sprinted over to the mutilated corpse, squatted over his face, and proceeded to push his pelvis up and down.
“What in hell was that?” Sergey asked.
“Tea-bagging. The winner is supposed to do that to humiliate the dead guy.”
Sergey’s face contorted with disgust, but Eric must have misinterpreted his expression, because he proceeded to reassure him.
“It’s okay, Dad. I won’t stay dead forever. All I have to do is to choose a safe place to respawn and then I’ll go back to the battle.”
“Respawn?” Sergey asked.
“Yeah, when you die, you just follow the spawning process and then you’re alive again. It takes no time.”
“Boys, lunch!” Mira called from the kitchen.
Eric put his second sock on and they headed to the kitchen.
Sergey loathed these weekly lunches that he had there since the separation. Being a guest in his own house, having his mother cook for him as if he were still a child, straining to fit some parental influence into the little time he now spent with Eric.
Their small kitchen table was crowded with little plates and bowls and tiny serving dishes overflowing with chopped, minced, and sautéed vegetables. Sergey had always marveled at how elaborately his mother set the table, even for a simple lunch, even for just the three of them. He remembered this from childhood: her pretty serving dishes, her layered salads, the mushrooms made from tomatoes and eggs, the palm trees made from franks, the farmer’s cheese snowmen.
“Ezhiki, cool!” Eric said and piled some onto his plate, ignoring the salad with strawberries and tiny shrimp, the minced eggplant, and the mushroom-stuffed zucchini. Mira took a piece of bread, generously spread it with butter, and gave it to Eric. He accepted it with great enthusiasm.
“Mom, I don’t think he needs that much butter,” Sergey said, watching Eric take a great big bite out of the bread slice. He immediately regretted it. Mira’s lips trembled as she tried to put on the defensive expression that made her appear all the more vulnerable.
“Butter helps digest vitamins,” she said.
“That’s right,” Sergey said, “but we don’t see him eating vitamin-rich food, do we?”
“She gives me baby carrots all the time!” Eric said. “They’re, like, chock-full of A and C.”
“And iron,” Mira whispered.
Sergey doubted that Eric was actually eating those carrots, but he wasn’t going to pick a fight with his mother in front of his child. Once, about a year ago, Eric had asked him “to be nicer to Grandma.” “I’m very nice to her,” Sergey had said. “No, Dad, you’re not nice, you’re polite.” Sergey couldn’t help but feel that Eric might have been right. He had never loved his mother as much as he loved his father. What he felt for her was pity rather than affection. And the more aware he was of that, the more pity and the less affection he felt.
After lunch, he took Eric for a walk.
“Great Kills or Mount Moses?” Sergey asked, starting the car.
“Mount Moses,” Eric answered from the backseat. He was already furiously pressing buttons on his Nintendo DS.
They drove up to the woodsy part of Staten Island and parked the car off a tiny street overgrown with tall blueberry bushes. They made their way through the bushes, into the large clearing that held the remains of the foundation of some old stone structure, deeper into the woods between the large rocks and the tall trees the names of which Sergey didn’t know. Mount Moses wasn’t that tall and wasn’t really a mountain, just a large hill. They climbed up the slope panting and cursing and trying to hold on to the brittle tree branches along the way. “Ooooh,” Eric said when they reached the top. He was sweaty and winded—they really should make him exercise more.
“Hey, Eric,” he said, “let’s start jogging in Great Kills on weekends.”
Eric scrunched his nose. He was probably weighing the physical hardships of weekly jogging against the emotional rewards of spending time with his dad.
“Okay,” he finally said.
They went to sit down on the cluster of rocks that presented a panoramic view of Staten Island.
“Look, Dad,” Eric said, still breathing hard.“The ocean!”
Yes, they could see a narrow line of ocean on the horizon. Blindingly white in the sun, like a sliver of ice.
They could just sit there enjoying the view or Sergey could attempt some parental guidance.
“I didn’t really like that game you were playing,” Sergey said.
Eric picked up a little rock from the ground and started scratching the surface of the boulder they were sitting on. His expression was one of resigned boredom. He knew that he had to suffer through this conversation, but he also knew that the conversation wouldn’t change anything. None of the previous ones had.
“What game? Battlefield? I like it.”
“Isn’t it a tad too violent?”
“Yeah. But I’m in a battle, battles are violent. That’s normal.”
“Isn’t it tiresome though? You have those guys killing one another over and over again? You dying over and over again?”
“Maybe. But no, not really. I die only because I’m not very good at the game. If I get better at it, I can avoid dying. I can kill all the other guys and not die.”
“Doesn’t it make you sad when all the other guys kill you?” Sergey asked.
“No, Dad! I told you—I don’t stay dead for long. I respawn and go into the battle again.”
Respawning—what an addictive concept, Sergey thought.
“Does it work like that in all video games?”
“What? Respawning? Pretty much. In Skyrim, if something kills me—a robot sentry, or a dragon, or even my wife—I just restart the game, and it starts from the point where I last saved. And I can restart from anywhere, like, even if I’m halfway up the dragon’s mouth.”
