Still Here (22 page)

She hadn't been to the Met in ages. You couldn't consider yourself a refined and cultured person if you hadn't been to the Met in ages, could you? But then did New Yorkers even go there? Tourists and art students went there, yes, but what about regular New Yorkers? Vica tried to think of the most cultured New Yorker she knew. Regina? Regina wasn't a real New Yorker. Eden? No, Eden never went there. Both Eden and her husband had graduated from Harvard, so they didn't have to go to the Met because they didn't need to prove they were cultured.

Well, screw Eden and her husband. Vica would go to the Met, not because she needed to prove that she was cultured, but because she truly enjoyed art.

She bought her ticket for a pay-what-you-wish dollar and asked the guard about the restrooms. He pointed to the Egyptian wing. Vica walked briskly past all those mummies and gravestones. She always hated the Egyptian wing, because it reminded her of a cemetery, which it essentially was. These people seemed to have devoted their entire lives to preparing for death. Such a waste. Such a stupid horrible waste, Vica thought as she peed and then washed her hands in the tomblike bathroom. But then weren't modern people even more stupid when they chose to simply ignore death? Ethan was right. Death was inevitable, enormous, and terrifying. Wouldn't it be wiser to make at least some effort to be prepared?

She proceeded to examine several mummies. It was hard to believe that all of them used to be real people. Thousands of years ago, but still. They ate, they slept, they peed. She tried to imagine herself as an Egyptian woman, caring for her child, pining for her husband, all the while wearing that interesting headdress and jewelry. That jade snake must have felt deliciously cold against the skin. Vica moved to look at a photo essay documenting the embalming process.

She read the caption. “Then the embalmers would turn the body facedown to allow the brain to ooze out through the nostrils.”

The image of her own brain oozing through her nostrils made her feel suddenly sick. She rushed through all the rooms toward the exit, then ran down the steps and stopped to take a deep breath. Vica didn't know where to go; she just wanted to get away, away from the mass grave of the Egyptian wing, away from the museum.

She started to walk down the park's East Drive. Usually crowded, in this weather the drive was practically deserted. There were no bikers and just a couple of joggers. A thin man in a blue jogging suit and a white knitted hat passed Vica. Sergey! was Vica's ridiculous first thought. What is this white hat—I've never seen it before.

Then she took another look and saw that the man didn't resemble Sergey at all. This was the second time today she'd made that mistake. Vica wondered how much longer it would take to free her mind from Sergey.

She swerved in the direction of the boathouse and started to walk along the lake toward the Bethesda Fountain. The cold now flapped around her in waves, hitting her on the legs and the shoulders.

The clearing by the fountain was mostly deserted as well. Vica walked right up to the statue and peered into the angel's face. The expression was cold and strict rather than ethereal.

The last time they were here Sergey told Eric the story of the Angel of the Waters. How there was a fountain like this in Jerusalem and all the sick, blind, and crippled people were lying by the edge waiting for the angel. Every once in a while the angel would come and disturb the waters, and then the first person who got in would be cured.

“What do you mean ‘the first one'?” Eric asked. “Only the first one?”

“That's how it worked. The person who got into the disturbed water first was cured.”

“But that's so unfair! That means only the fastest and strongest could be cured.”

“That's the whole point,” Sergey said. He tried to tell Eric about this one paralyzed man who could never get to the water in time, so Jesus performed a miracle and cured him himself, but Eric wouldn't listen.

“Still unfair! The whole thing with the angel is a miracle, right? I don't get what's the point of a miracle if it's so unfair!”

Sergey tried to explain that the term
miracle
used to have a completely different meaning, then he got really annoyed and gave up.

Eric was a strange boy. The girls thought he was ugly and the boys thought he was a geek. Vica wouldn't have minded his being a geek, if he was a determined one, if he was reading a lot. He wasn't. He hardly read at all. But he was smart. He was! He liked to think things through. “I want to know exactly what I will feel when I die, that way I won't be that scared,” he'd said to her once. And he was kind. He was. He was capable of empathy in a way few people were.

Getting into that school would put him among other children like him, smart and weird and sensitive, and he would finally fit in. Being in that school would show him the point of learning. He'd learn how to read analytically, he'd learn how to look at art, he'd learn why people read, he'd learn why people looked at art. He'd learn how you could find something true, intimate, and personal, in the most unimaginable of places, in Egyptian art made a thousand years ago. No, Vica didn't hope that this school would make him feel privileged and self-assured like Eden, like Eden's husband, like Eden's sons—nothing would. And she didn't hope that this school would make him happy. She knew that people who went to good schools had their insecurities and their little miseries and their own ugliness, but still, she believed that even their unhappiness was far more interesting. A school like that opened the whole world for you. If you were bound to be miserable, you could have a whole variety of options, you could choose your own misery, not have one forced on you.

Just last week, when they were walking along the beach on Staten Island, Vica thought she would try to explain all this to Eric. But how do you talk about these things with a child? The day was surprisingly mild, and the wind was strong but not cold. They were heading toward their favorite picnic spot by the salt marsh, but it happened to be high tide, so there wasn't as much dry land as usual. Vica started to walk down the mossy, crunchy path built by colonies of mussels. “Mom, you're hurting the mussels, can't you hear it?” Erik said. She stepped away, but then her feet started to get wet. Erik ran to the beach and hauled back a large log stuck in the bushes. He put it over the wet area so that Vica could use it as a little bridge. She smiled and bumped Erik on the shoulder. He bumped her back. She felt good, and she thought that she didn't have to explain anything to Eric, that he understood. In his own way, he understood her better than anybody else.

Vica hit Eric for the second time just outside the Castle school.

The other parents were crowded by the entrance, looking anxiously at the door, Susan Sontags and Outer Boroughs alike. They started to let the children out around twelve forty. The children were walking out in trickles of ten or twelve. Eric walked out alone. He didn't see her at first; he stood there turning his head to the right and to the left, scanning the faces of parents. She yelled out his name and waved. He waved back.

“I'm hot,” he said. She touched the top of his head. His hair was a little damp.

“How was it?” Vica asked. “Tough questions?”

He nodded. He looked a little shell-shocked, but not upset. She would even say that he looked relieved. Vica took that as a good sign.

“Did you answer them all?”

He said, “Yeah.”

“And what about the essay? What was the topic?”

He said, “It was okay, not too hard.”

“But what was the topic?”

He sighed.

She said, “Okay, fine, I won't ask. Better not to ask, not to jinx it, right?”

He nodded. She smiled and kissed him on the top of his head. He thought that public kisses were embarrassing, but he made an exception for the ones on the top of his head.

“Okay, let's get out of here,” she said.

They passed a hot dog cart. Eric looked at her. Normally, she wouldn't have allowed hot dogs from a street cart, but these smelled so good and she was so hungry, and she knew that Eric must be hungry as hell.

She bought two. Both with mustard and ketchup.

Eric was about to bite into his when she noticed that he wasn't wearing his hat.

“Where is your hat?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Oh, right!” he said. “I put it in my pocket.”

He reached into his pocket and yanked the hat out, and a pink square fell and landed on the pavement. She bent to pick it up.

“Admission slip? What's it doing in your pocket? Admission slip? Didn't you have to give it to the people in there? Admission slip? Why do you still have it?”

She would have preferred to keep asking these questions to delay the answer, which she knew, which she had guessed right away.

“You didn't take the test, did you.”

He hunched his shoulders and started to cry, the hot dog still in his hand. He was saying something to her, quickly, quietly. How he had spent the entire time hiding in the bathroom. How he didn't want to go to that school. How the Castle was creepy. How it had no windows. How these kids were weird. How they were geeks. How they had weird ears. How he didn't want to go to school with weird geeks with weird ears.

It stunned her how loud the sound of the slap was. He dropped the hot dog. They both watched how it landed on the sidewalk, a smash of ketchup, the frank out. People were staring at them, but she didn't care. She looked at Eric. There was a red mark on his cheek. She watched it brighten. She wanted to run away, to hide, to sob and wail as loudly as she could.

Vica gave Eric her hot dog. “Here,” she said, her voice trembling.

He took the hot dog and raised his eyes to hers. She couldn't believe it, but there was pity in his eyes.

He broke off half and handed it to her.

She suddenly remembered something Eric had said to her when he was very young—five or six. She had walked into the bathroom as he stood by the sink brushing his teeth. They'd just had a big fight.

“Sometimes I don't love you,” he'd said and spat into the sink—Vica remembered that—blue frothy spittle. “But even when I don't love you, I still love you more than I don't love you.” He said that and went on rinsing. He was very small. He barely reached the sink.

It was his kindness that hurt the most.

It all started with a Skype call.

Sergey was working on Vadik's MacBook Air—he preferred it to his own old Toshiba, which had a crack in the screen from when he dropped it on the cement stairs of his Staten Island basement. It's been six weeks since he moved in with Vadik. Sergey was putting the finishing touches on his rough prototype for Virtual Grave. He had a storyboard and sample wireframes, and he was satisfied with them, even though what he had created was miles away from his original idea. What he really wanted was to resurrect the personality of a departed through the traces left in his or her social media. He thought of the drunken pitch he'd made at Vadik's housewarming in Morningside Heights: “Our online presence is where the essence of a person is nowadays.” Sergey had never been a big fan of social media; he barely engaged in it himself, but he firmly believed that this was true for most people. But now that he had pored over tons of strangers' tweets, public posts, and messages in order to test his algorithm, he found social media disappointing. In fact, he was appalled by how overly intimate yet somehow impersonal most of the entries were. People shared their and their relatives' diagnoses, described how the illnesses progressed, posted pictures of their kids in hospital beds, wrote about their breakups in great detail, listed ingredients for their breakfasts and dinners, reported how their bodies reacted to said breakfasts and dinners, confessed that they were either “extremely happy” or “devastated” by political events that had nothing to do with them. The oversharing and overreacting felt insincere to him. As did the smoothness of the language people used. Sergey still believed that you could find the essence of a person on social media; the problem was that it was hidden, encoded in silences, in omissions, in typos, and was thoroughly impenetrable by his algorithm. Virtual Grave did a great job of distilling an online voice of the departed, but it failed at getting to his or her true voice.

Perhaps one day, Sergey thought as he picked up a dog-eared paperback of
Hamlet
lying facedown on his desk.
Hamlet
had been Vadik's idea. Lately, Vadik was acting as if he couldn't stand even the mention of Virtual Grave, but Sergey was so into it that he could talk about nothing else.

“It seems like all you're trying to do is give a voice to your dead dad, right?” Vadik said to Sergey. “Just so he could speak to you one more time. How Shakespearean of you! How Hamletian!”

Sergey had told Vadik about the letter he received from his father after his death and how much it meant to him. And Vadik was mocking it?

“Yes, it is Hamletian. I don't see anything wrong in it,” he said to Vadik, barely controlling his anger. There was a much-used Penguin
Hamlet
among Vadik's books. Sergey had read it in Russian years ago, but this was the first time he was compelled to read it in English. Reading it in the original turned out to be harder than he'd expected, but he found the very shabbiness of the book encouraging—a lot of people had handled it, a lot of people had struggled through it, and a lot of people had made it to the end, so he could do it too.

And then there were footnotes and a glossary for difficult words. Well, he had to agree with Vadik. The scene with the ghost that had moved him so much in the Russian translation sounded kind of ridiculous in the original. “List, list, O, list!” and “Adieu, adieu, adieu!” were making him chuckle rather than cry. But the last words of
Hamlet
overwhelmed Sergey with their unexpected power.

O, I die, Horatio!

The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit.

I cannot live to hear the news from England,

But I do prophesy th'election lights

On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.

So tell him, with th'occurrents, more and less,

Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Sergey put the book down and closed his eyes.

“He has my dying voice. He has my dying voice. He has my dying voice.” He repeated it in his head. What Hamlet probably meant was just his last will. As simple as that. And yet the very idea of granting somebody your “dying voice” made Sergey shiver with excitement. Or maybe it was hunger. It was noon and he'd been working since six. Sergey went to the kitchen, made himself a sandwich of stale bread with old cheese, heated up the dregs of his morning coffee, and went back to his (Vadik's) computer.

He minimized his Virtual Grave screen and maximized Gmail. There were three new messages. One from Amazon confirming the shipment of
Pitching in the Digital Age,
one from Rachel, the girl he'd met at Fette Sau, and the last from his mother. Rachel had been out of town and now she was back and hoping to see him. Sergey didn't like her that much, but he was lonely, and Rachel was nice, so he wrote: “Sure. I'd love to!”

He braced himself before opening his mother's e-mail. Mira, who had never liked Vica, was “heartbroken” by his separation from her. Sergey couldn't possibly tell her that Vica had thrown him out because “he had loser genes,” so he had just said that they had realized that they couldn't live together anymore. Mira didn't buy it. She would offer up her own reasons, a new one each week—and refute each of them right away. Is it because of money? But it never is! Is it because you were bored with each other? But that's only natural! Was she interested in other partners? Were you? But who isn't! Every time the reason would be wrong, but also a little bit right in some twisted way that made Sergey sick. This time Mira's message came hidden in an attached article with the following highlighted passage: “Most middle-aged men experience decline of sexual desire and abilities. Some try to resolve the issue by getting a new sexual partner. The crucial thing to know is that getting a new sexual partner is utterly pointless, because this decline is inevitable and irreversible.”

Sergey hit Delete with a resolute motion of his index finger, as if saying no to his inevitable decline.

A new message popped up. This one was from Vica. Seeing Vica's name in his in-box never failed to disrupt Sergey's peace. Actually, any mention of Vica did that to him. There were times (almost every day) when he couldn't resist and would browse through her Facebook page, which was filled with all these uplifting posts and happy photographs. None of that joy was sincere, he knew that, yet he couldn't help squirming in pain every time. There was nothing cheery about her e-mails, however. They were always short, always businesslike. She would inform him about Eric's awful grades, or discuss a change in his visitation schedule, or ask his approval for certain home repairs. She used to start her e-mails to him with some creative greeting. At various times in their marriage they were: Privetik Sergunya, Zdravstvuyj Seryj Volchische, Hi Graywolf, Hello Mr. Graywolf, Bonjour Monsieur Loup, and Hi Furry Pup. This time it was just Hi, which was somehow worse than no greeting at all. Sergey felt a sticky heaviness in his gut, the kind he'd usually get after eating a cheap hamburger or an especially bad pizza. The message was in English, in Vica's harsh and imperfect English. He felt that he didn't have the strength to read it through. He didn't have to anyway, the few words that he managed to grasp were enough: “mediator” “no need to prolong” “separation agreement.” Sergey marked the message as unread. This made Vica's name even more prominent, dominating the other messages with its bold font. He paused and hit the Delete button. Now the message wasn't in his in-box at all, as if it hadn't yet arrived. It was that easy to return to the virtual past.

Sergey went back to
Hamlet.

That ghost was kind of nasty, wasn't he? He got the precious chance to speak with his son some more, but instead of providing him with some valuable guidance or simply saying some words of affection, he said some cruel shit about Hamlet's mother and demanded that Hamlet destroy his life by settling his father's scores. Some people were probably better left dead.

And just then he heard a melodic ring. Skype's sweet little icon appeared on his screen, a smiling female face in the frame. “Sejun Ku is calling you,” the icon insisted. If it had said “Sejun Ku is calling Vadim Kalugin,” Sergey might have resisted the urge to pick up, but it said “calling you.” He picked up.

“Vadik?” Sejun said.

“No, it's his friend Sergey,” Sergey said and turned on the video.

“Oh, Sergey! I'm happy to see you again.” Sejun's bright if a little fuzzy smile confirmed the sentiment.

Sergey told her that Vadik was at work.

“But today's Friday,” Sejun said. “On Fridays he works from home.”

“He quit that working from home thing about a month ago,” Sergey said. “It's easier for him to concentrate when he is in his office.”

Sejun said that she hated to work from an office. She was doing web design for a small start-up in Silicon Valley. The work was boring, but they let her work from home.

Small talk ensued that quickly grew in size and significance.

Sergey explained why he was living at Vadik's at the moment. He said that he had lost his job and his wife.

Sejun said how sorry she was to hear that. She asked if he was dating.

He said that he hadn't been, not that much, not really, but he had met a girl at a barbecue restaurant of all places.

Sejun said that she was taking a break from dating at the moment. Wasn't dating exhausting? she asked. Especially breakups. Having to admit that you didn't like someone anymore or perhaps had never liked him that much in the first place. Having to explain yourself, having to come up with an explanation. That was draining, wasn't it?

Sergey started to tell her what went wrong with him and Vica, but he thought he detected a bored sigh on Sejun's end. Did he sound whiny, pathetic, loserlike? Oh, yes, he did. He hurried to change the subject and said that he'd been working on his app full-time, and it was going really well. In fact, he was almost finished with the prototype.

“Virtual Grave? I loved that idea!” Sejun said. Sergey blushed with pleasure because she had remembered. He told her how the app was shaping up to be completely different from its original conception. He told her how exciting that was. He quoted Hamlet's dying words.

Sejun stretched on her sofa and sighed. She seemed to be entranced.

“ ‘The rest is silence'?” she repeated after Sergey.

“ ‘The rest is silence,' ” he said.

“But does it have to be?”

“Excuse me?” he asked.

Sejun removed her glasses, jumped off her couch, and assumed a stage actress's pose (chin up, straight back, hands folded on the level of her pelvis).

“The rest is silence, but does it have to be?” she recited with great feeling.

Then she put her glasses back on and smiled at Sergey.

“You can use it for your sales pitch.”

Sergey stared at her, incredulous.

“Trust me, they love that cutesy shit,” Sejun said and started to laugh. Sergey joined her.

They talked for fifty-two more minutes until Sejun said that she had to do some work. Only then did Sergey remember to ask her why she called Vadik in the first place.

Her brother was going to visit New York in a month, Sejun said. She wondered if Vadik would let him stay at his place. “I guess not, since you're living there?” she asked, and Sergey said, “Why not, he can sleep on the couch!” Sejun thanked him and said that she'd think about it.

Then she pressed End Call and her face vanished from the screen with an impish beep.

Sergey stared at the empty Skype screen for a moment longer: “Call from Sejun Ku, duration 02:08.” There it was, the proof that he hadn't dreamed up this encounter. Was his heart really beating that fast? He took his own pulse—yes, it was.

Then he went back to the desk and he typed it in 12-point Courier New:

“The rest is silence, but does it have to be?”