Still Here, page 32
He was equally disgusted with his tweets. Quotes from Sartre? Was he fucking kidding?
Still, his Facebook was the worst. When he first started Facebook, he browsed through the posts of his friends and acquaintances and came to the conclusion that the main purpose of Facebook was to boast of nonexistent happiness and barely existent achievements. Just look at the photos of Vica and Sergey’s 2010 ski trip to Vermont. All beaming smiles, bursting with happiness. Vadik happened to know that this was a particularly miserable trip, because the weather was awful, Eric had an ear infection, Sergey had the stomach flu, and he and Vica had fought the whole time. And so Vadik followed suit and started covering up his own misery, only posting optimistic photos. It was only when he was going through an especially hard breakup that he realized how cruel this strategy was. He would turn to Facebook in search of some friendly warmth and be hit with this obnoxious parade of happiness that only made his pain stronger by contrast.
Yep, he had to delete all of that shit!
All the social media giants reacted to Vadik’s decision with displeasure.
“Hopefully this is just hypothetical!” Tumblr responded, when Vadik typed in “how to remove my account.” They tried to be good sports and sound humorous, but Vadik felt the pleading desperation as he followed the necessary steps, all boasting countless warnings about how much he would lose.
“You must have found your soul mate,” Hello, Love! said in a mocking tone.
Twitter refused to use the words remove, or cancel, or delete. What you could do was to deactivate, which sounded less permanent and less scary.
Facebook’s tactic was to hide the instructions. Vadik had to browse for a long time until he finally found a way. Apparently you couldn’t delete your account, but you could ask nicely, and the Facebook team was willing to do it for you. The tone was slightly threatening:
“If you don’t think you’ll use Facebook again, you can request to have your account permanently deleted. Please keep in mind that you won’t be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you’ve added.”
Vadik shook his head at Facebook’s self-importance and proceeded to follow the suggested steps for all of the sites.
When all of that was done, Vadik shut his laptop and got off the floor.
Now that his virtual self was in the virtual grave, he was ready to go on living.
I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to Lynn Nesbit, a super-agent and super-woman, who inspires borderline-crazy admiration in me. To Lynn’s wonderful assistant, Hannah Davey, whose very voice gives me hope and whose edits are very much appreciated.
To my fantastic editor, Alexis Washam. I still can’t believe how lucky I got with her.
To the entire terrific team at Hogarth, Lindsay Sagnette, Rachel Rokicki, Kevin Callahan, Sarah Grimm, Annsley Rosner, Kayleigh George, and Sarah Bedingfield.
To the brilliant Deborah Treisman, whose support has helped sustain me through my entire career.
To my supremely talented colleagues at Columbia’s MFA department, whose mere presence at the same program inspires me. Special thanks to Binnie Kirshenbaum, Victor LaValle, June Folley, Stacy Pies, Steven Hutkins, and Mark Mirsky for their support and encouragement.
To my amazing students, who made me discover so many unexpected aspects of writing.
To my extraordinary American professors, Nancy Miller, Louis Menand, Andre Aciman, Lawrence Weschler, Mary Ann Caws, and Elizabeth Beaujour, whose insights I still remember and shamelessly use.
To my excellent Russian linguistics professors, who taught me how speech recognition works.
To the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ledig House residencies for providing me with such divine escapes and inspiration.
To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Foundation of Jewish Culture for providing me with their invaluable support.
To all the brilliant artists and academics I befriended at residencies and panels. Especially Chloe Aridjis, Jennifer Gilmore, Olga Gershenson, Jonathan Wilson, Josip Novakovich, David Means, Mary Gaitskill, Chris Sullivan, Anya Ulinich, Kathleen Tolan, Valerie Hegarty, Rebecca Schiff, Vadym Neselovsky, Mikhail Shishkin, and my beautiful “swim team” (Shelly Silver, Meredith Maran, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Sarah Woolner).
To Andre Yanpolsky, Stepan Pachikov, and Alex Fridlyand, who supplied me with priceless infomation about the tech and investment businesses. To the friends who gave me insights into the world of online dating.
To David Gelber for being the first person to suggest that I should try writing.
To my kids, who were patient with my questionable writer-style parenting and provided me with warmth and support. To David for his lecture on video games and the sticker of a sheep. To Stephanie for her astute literary criticism, insights into the dark workings of a teenage mind, and sounding sincere when she said that Still Here was one of the best novels she has ever read.
To my husband for being the best husband and the best literary critic ever.
And finally, to Vadym Tyemirov for coming up with the idea of the Virtual Cemetery.
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Lara Vapnyar, Still Here
