Still Here, page 3
It had gotten darker outside, and the living room was now bathed in the soft light of the floor lamp. Vadik wasn’t back yet, and Bob must have been still busy with the osso buco. Sergey and Regina were alone in the room. Taking dishes out of the cabinet and setting them on the coffee table. Talking. The coziness of the scene made Vica so sick that she considered going back into the bathroom.
—
In the light of Vadik’s lamp, Regina did look a little bit like Julia Roberts. Except, of course, for the toes. But then who knew what kind of toes Julia Roberts had.
“I also enjoy Frasier,” Sergey was saying. “It’s kind, you know? A kind show about kind people. Sometimes that’s what you want. A little bit of kindness.”
“Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It’s soothing.”
Vica wiped her damp forehead with her sleeve.
“Excuse me!” Bob said, squeezing past her with a huge plate in his hands. “The osso buco is here. Now where is our host?”
And just then Vadik came out from the bathroom with his iPad.
They ate dinner balancing the heavy plates on their knees. Vica, Regina, and Sergey were sitting on the couch, and Vadik and Bob were on the two large leather puffs across from them. There wasn’t any place to put the wineglasses, so they kept them on the floor by their feet.
Vadik insisted that Sejun should join them for the meal, so he propped the iPad in the middle of the coffee table right next to the platter with the osso buco.
“Isn’t it insanely hot in New York?” Sejun asked.
“It is!” Sergey rushed to confirm.
“And you’re eating roasted meat?” Sejun asked.
“The A/C is on full blast,” Vadik said.
After they were finished, Vadik cleared the plates and brought out large bowls of salad. “Kale and peach,” he announced.
Vica found the salad disgusting. The kale was so tough that it felt like she was chewing on the sleeve of a leather jacket, and the peaches were overripe and slimy. And anyway, what an idea to serve salad after the meat! She kept throwing glances in Bob’s direction, but he behaved as if he had forgotten all about their encounter. Oh well, she thought, fuck you, Bob. His face acquired that tranquil pinkish hue, which signified that he might be just drunk enough and ready for the pitch. Vica shot a look at Sergey, but his attention was apparently focused on removing a piece of kale from between his teeth.
“Where is Sejun?” Bob asked. “I don’t see her.” He tapped on the screen and called for her as if she were hiding. “Sejun?” Vadik called.
Sejun sighed with a little too much exasperation and said that she was going to the library.
“It’s ten p.m.!” Vadik protested.
“It’s seven here,” Sejun said, “and I’m kind of tired of watching you guys eat.”
“Sejun!” Vadik said, but the screen went blank.
Vadik put the iPad back on the table. He was visibly upset.
“I love your apartment, Vadik!” Regina said, attempting to change the subject. “It’s a little strange, you know, but maybe that’s why it fits you so well.”
Bob nodded in agreement, then drained yet another wineglass. One more drink and he would become unpitchable. Vica wanted to tap Sergey on the shoulder, but she couldn’t reach across Regina.
“She’s right, man,” Sergey said, turning to Vadik. “Really cool place. It’s not that big, but you can actually breathe in here. It’s the suburbs that make you suffocate.”
Vadik stared into his glass for a long time, then sighed. “Did you know that I wanted to kill myself, when I lived out in Jersey?”
Not the bike story again, Vica thought. She had heard it three or four times before. As had Sergey. As had Regina. But they all looked at Vadik attentively. Even Bob did.
“Yeah, that’s right. I wanted to kill myself. It happened eight years ago when I first came here. I lived in Carteret first, then in Avenel. Avenel had Mom’s Diner. Carteret had a view of the Staten Island dump. In Avenel, I rented a two-bedroom. I had just come from Istanbul and I had a two-bedroom there, so I thought that that was what I wanted. But in Istanbul, I had furniture, and here there were three enormous rooms, perfectly empty. I put the bed in the master bedroom. I put the TV and the exercise bike in the living room, but there was nothing left for the second bedroom. The emptiness scared me. I tried to avoid it, but I kept wandering in. So I decided to put the exercise bike in the middle of the second bedroom. It looked small in all that empty space. I got on it and started pushing the pedals. I was pushing and pushing, but then I caught my reflection in one of the windows. I was perched on that bike, pushing the pedals, inside of that huge white box. I looked like a lab rat strapped to some piece of equipment. I got off the bike, went to the bathroom, and grabbed a bottle of Tazepam. I didn’t know how many pills I’d need to kill myself. Ten? Twenty? Thirty just to be sure? I unscrewed the bottle and there were three. Just three. I remember thinking how pathetic that was. Well, I took those three and went to sleep. I slept for fourteen hours. When I woke up, I packed up my things—a suitcase, a computer bag, and two boxes of books—and escaped to the city.”
Regina started either sniffling or snickering, as she always did at the end of this story.
“What’s Tazepam?” Bob asked.
“Russian tranquilizer,” Sergey explained.
“Can you get it here?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of like Xanax but deadlier.”
“So how many do you need to off yourself?” Bob asked.
“Still no idea,” Vadik said. “I wish there was an app that helped you commit suicide. Just, you know, help you find the easiest and most rational way to do it.”
“Suicide Buddy?” Sergey asked. They all laughed.
Now, now was the perfect moment to bring up Sergey’s idea! Vica thought. But Sergey being Sergey, he wasn’t getting it.
Vica reached around Regina’s back and prodded Sergey with her fork. He didn’t budge. She prodded him harder. He glared at her. She knew exactly what he was thinking: that she was a coldhearted bitch to try to pitch their idea right after the suicide story. But she didn’t care what he thought.
“Bob,” she said.
Bob raised his eyes to her. His eyes were now the same color as his face. Red. Forget about their encounter in the kitchen, he looked as if he’d have trouble remembering who she was. She hoped he wasn’t past lucidity.
“Bob!”
“Yeah?”
“Speaking of death…”
“Yeah?”
“Sergey has the most amazing idea for an app.”
They all stared at her as if she were drunk. She was tipsy, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about being subtle either. She would just pitch the idea head-on. And she would pitch it right to Bob.
“This new app, Bob. It would allow you to fight death.”
Bob stretched and screwed up his face while making an honest effort to understand. “To fight death?” he asked.
Sergey cleared his throat. They all turned to look at him.
“Well, not exactly, of course, but it would allow you to keep your online presence after you die,” Sergey said, “to remain immortal in a virtual reality. You see, the idea that inspired me comes from a nineteenth-century Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fyodorov.”
No, not Fyodorov! Vica thought. But then she looked around and saw that Bob was listening with great interest.
“Fyodorov’s main idea was the resurrection of the fathers. He thought that it was the duty of every son to resurrect his father.”
“Huh,” Bob said. “My shrink thinks just the opposite. ‘Bury your father’ is what he tells me. Bury your father, free yourself of his grip, or you’ll never become your own man.”
“Well, not so in Fyodorov’s opinion. He thought that the problem with modern man was that he had lost connection to his ancestors. Fyodorov thought that mortality was conquerable, and it was also necessary to conquer, because mortality was the source of all the evil among men. I mean, why be good if you’re going to die anyway? Fyodorov argued that the struggle against mortality should become the common cause for all humans, regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Science was advancing in such a fast and powerful way that it would soon be possible to make human life infinite and to revive the dead. Fyodorov thought that eventually we could collect and synthesize the molecular material of the dead. He actually predicted cloning.”
Sergey was gaining confidence as he spoke. He had such an impressive voice—slightly scratchy, but deep and commanding. Vica had forgotten how much she had always loved his voice. Even his English had improved. He still had a strong accent, but it was the accent of a confident man.
“What year was this?” Bob asked.
“The 1880s,” Sergey said.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Bob said.
“But Fyodorov thought that the genetic or physical restoration of a person wasn’t enough. It was also necessary to give the revived person his old personality. Fyodorov explored the theory of ‘radial images’ that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death, but he had a very vague idea of how to preserve or extract those images.”
“ ‘Radial images’?” Bob asked.
“I think he meant the soul,” Vadik said.
“Yes, the soul,” Sergey said. “The soul that is supposed to be immortal by definition, but it’s really not. Because where does it go after we die?”
“Right,” Bob said.
Vica saw that his eyes were beginning to glaze over and that he was looking for a bottle of wine. She peered at Sergey, trying to communicate: “Get off Fyodorov!” He wasn’t looking at her.
“And that was Fyodorov’s problem. How do you go about preserving something if you don’t know how to find it?”
“Right,” Bob said again.
“But now we know where to find it.”
“We do?”
“We do. It’s in your online presence. Your e-mail. Your Twitter. Your Facebook. Your Instagram or whatever. That’s where people now share their innermost feelings and thoughts, whatever they find funny or memorable or simply worthy in any way. Our online presence is where the essence of a person is nowadays.”
“Right!” Bob said. The phrase online presence seemed to revive him a little.
“And that’s where my app comes in.”
Sergey listed the basics of Virtual Grave. “I created a linguistic algorithm that would allow you to preserve and re-create a virtual voice of a deceased person from all of the texts he had created online while he was alive. It’s not that hard to run the entire flow of somebody’s speech through a program and come up with semantic and syntactic patterns as well as the behavorial patterns determined by people’s online personalities. Suppose your loved one suddenly died. You would be able to connect Virtual Grave to her social media accounts, run the app, and re-create her voice. Then you would be able to ask her questions. No, the answers aren’t expected to be meaningful—this is not spiritualism. But we don’t need meaningful advice from dead people anyway. It’s the contact that matters, the illusion that they are still present somewhere, watching over us, if only virtually.”
All those words Vica had heard so many times in the recent weeks now sounded different. More poetic, more powerful.
Vica imagined Eric trying to get that moment of contact with her or Sergey and felt a lump in her throat. She had to make an effort to fight back tears. Even Vadik seemed moved. It was only Regina who couldn’t help but snicker. That bitch, Vica thought.
A loud sniffle came as if from under the coffee table.
“Sejun!” Vadik said. “I thought you’d left.”
The iPad screen had long gone black, and Vica had completely forgotten about her.
“Sejun,” Vadik said and tapped on the screen.
A glowing pixelated shape of Sejun’s face emerged from the darkness. Her eyes were moist as if she was about to cry.
“That is beautiful, guys. That is a beautiful, beautiful app,” Sejun said.
Bob’s was the only expression that was hard to read. He sat there staring at Sergey as if frozen. Then he rose from the couch, walked up to Sergey, and punched him on the shoulder.
“I love the way you think, man! Love it. Love it. Love it. It makes me sick that the whole tech business is in the hands of those young kids. What do they know about life? What do they care about death? What can they possibly create if they don’t know and don’t care? It’s only natural that they come up with dumb toys.”
Bob plopped back onto the couch that bent obediently to his shape. “Oh, how I love it…” He moaned again.
Vica reclined in her seat and closed her eyes. It was done. Bob was hooked. She could hear her heart thumping in drunken excitement. The image of their bright, bright future branched out in her mind and kept growing, past those omakase meals, five-star resorts in the Italian Alps, VIP beaches in the Caribbean, and their own Tribeca loft, and finally to a really good graduate school and her newfound happiness and amazing sex with the wonderful, talented, magnificent Sergey.
“I’m concerned about one thing though,” Bob said.
Vica opened her eyes and stared at Bob. His intoxication seemed to have subsided. His expression was sharp, even severe.
“I do like your idea, man,” Bob said. “I fucking love it! But it won’t take. Not in the North American market at least. You see, Americans deal with mortality either by enforcing their Christian beliefs or by ignoring it. We don’t like to think about death. We prefer to think about more uplifting things, like prolonging life or making it better. That’s the way it is. Sorry, man.” He sighed and reached under the table for another bottle.
“Vadik, tell your friend not to be upset,” Sejun said from the darkness of the screen.
“He’ll live,” Vadik said.
Was that it? Did Bob mean it was over? Vica thought. Over? Just like that? No, it couldn’t be over!
“No!” she screamed. “Our app is not about death! It’s about immortality, not death. Immortality. Sergey, tell Bob about immortality. Immortality is uplifting. Sergey, tell this to Bob! Tell Bob! Tell him!”
She jerked her foot and kicked Regina’s wineglass on the floor. The wine spilled all over Vadik’s newly waxed floor. They all threw their napkins over the puddle, and Vadik stomped on the pile of napkins with his foot as if trying to extinguish a fire. They all seemed to be avoiding looking at her. Sergey too. Especially Sergey.
“Sergey!” she screamed.
“You know what app would be really cool?” he said without looking at anybody in particular. “An app where you could press a button and turn somebody’s volume down. Like you do with the TV, only with a real live person. Imagine a dinner party and everybody’s talking, but there is this one person that you just wish would shut up. So you point your device at that person—you can do it under the table discreetly—and lower her volume. Everybody else can hear her fine, and you can hear everybody else but her. Now wouldn’t that be a dream?”
They all started to laugh. Not at the same time though. Vadik was the first with his series of chuckles. Then Bob with his hoarse hooting. Then Regina joined in, but with her it was not one hundred percent clear if she was laughing or crying. But Sejun was definitely laughing and her laugh was the happiest. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying, “it’s just so funny. Too funny. I want that app.”
Vica hated their laughter right away; she recognized it as disgusting, but it took her a moment to realize that they were all looking at her and laughing at her.
She turned away from them, stepped over the bunched-up napkins, and walked toward Vadik’s bedroom.
“No, no, don’t,” she heard Sergey say, “she’ll be fine. She just needs to be alone for a minute.”
Do I? she wondered, stepping onto the terrace. Do I need to be alone?
The air had become significantly cooler. Vica was holding on to the last remnants of her drunkenness to keep herself warmer and less sad. She was lost. They all were. So thoroughly lost. Why couldn’t anybody think of an app for that? To help one find one’s way in life? She didn’t care about immortality. Fuck immortality! What she cared about was this short meager life that they had to live. Why couldn’t they think of an app to make it easier?
Vica looked out at the roofs of other buildings. They boasted tangled wires and broken tarps. Some had water towers, perched on clumsy legs. Others had chimneys clustered together yet bending away from one another like dysfunctional families. Yes, exactly like dysfunctional families. It was the sight of the chimneys that made her cry.
