Still Here (32 page)

“Would you rather that all traces of a person be erased?” Sergey asked, thinking of Vadik's revolting suggestion.

“Not necessarily,” Helen said. “You could just mark dead people's profiles to show that they were dead. A simple mark. A black frame over the photo or a cross over the profile, the way they marked plague sufferers' houses. We could browse through the ‘friends' rosters and see how many of them were dead.”

“But, Mom, Sergio's app lets dead people talk!” Teena said.

“I don't think dead people are supposed to talk, honey,” Helen replied.

On the day of the meeting with Kisko, Sergey woke up nauseous with anxiety. Helen's simple words pulsed in his brain like an alarm. Dead people were not supposed to talk. Period. End of conversation.

He showered and dressed, but barely managed to eat his usual piece of bread with butter and cheese. The meeting was set for 7:45 
A.M.
, so on the subway Sergey found himself surrounded by the midtown rush-hour crowd. All these people, surly, sleepy, smelling of acidic coffee, burned toast, and fresh aftershave, sitting down, getting up, squeezing to the exit, resigned yet purposeful, because they were going to their serious adult jobs. Just like Sergey had a mere few months ago. And here he was, a foolish man on his way to sell his foolish, foolish idea. He felt as if he had no business taking up precious rush-hour subway car space.

James Kisco's office looked like a construction site. There were boxes, assembly tools, buckets with paint, furniture in various stages of completeness, and purposeful people in overalls moving among them. In the middle of the room, two large men were busy erecting some very complicated bookshelves.

Sergey tried to ask them if they knew where he could find James Kisco, but they couldn't hear him because of the working drill. Finally, a young girl with a doll face and curly pitch-black hair that reached just below her shoulders appeared from behind a mirrored cube. She asked if he was Sergey. Or at least he thought that was what she asked, because he couldn't hear a thing. He nodded. She was very thin and very pretty in a slightly threatening way. Sergey thought that she would've been perfect for a lead in a horror movie. She must be James's assistant. The girl picked up one of the smaller boxes and motioned for him to follow her. She was wearing ribbed tights and a short gray skirt.

James Kisco's office was all white and had no windows. The only furniture was four large white leather ottomans set around a glass coffee table with a large takeout bag in the center. James was sitting on one of the ottomans drinking tea from a paper cup and eating something that looked like a crepe and smelled like Indian food. He was a large guy, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Shaggy-haired, with bushy eyebrows and a bushy beard the color of pumpkin pie.

Sergey felt very stupid in his wrinkled business suit.

James stood up and reached out his hand for a handshake. Sergey's clammy fingers disappeared in his grip, then reappeared whitened.

“Very nice to meet you!”

“Likewise,” Sergey said and lowered himself onto one of the ottomans.

“Tea? Dosa?” James's assistant offered, but Sergey shook his head. He really didn't want to leave a stain on this white leather.

“My favorite food,” James said, dipping his crepe into a puddle of bright green sauce on his plate. “I spend a lot of time in India. Love that country!”

Here was Sergey's chance to insert some bit of knowledge about India, show some appreciation of Indian culture, but his memory wouldn't cooperate.

James's assistant walked up to the wall behind James's back, opened her box, and took out something that looked like long strips of colored paper.

“So you're Sejun's friend,” James said.

Sergey nodded.

“Sejun and I go way back,” James said. Sergey wondered if they had been lovers, then he thought about Sejun's partiality to losers and decided that they couldn't have been.

James's assistant spread a strip of paper against the wall. It looked like a slightly crooked vertical line. Sergey wondered what it was.

“And Sejun tells me that you have a mind-blowing idea for an app,” James said.

He's urging me to talk, Sergey thought. He'll throw me out if I don't start right away. It occurred to him that he had barely said a word since he entered James's office. He had a painful spasm in his stomach and a rush of blood to his head. There was no way out. He had to speak.

“Well, I don't know if it's mind-blowing, but I'm certain that nobody else is doing it,” Sergey started.

It took Sergey about ten sweaty, stuttering minutes to recite the pitch for James and arrive at his punch line:

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

James met the punch line with an approving chuckle. He swallowed a mouthful of dosa and said: “No, it doesn't have to be! And, in fact, it isn't. Let me tell you a story, Sergey. I used to have a good friend, Jeff Ufberg. We called him Jeff the Squirrel, because he kind of looked like one—I don't know, something about his face. He died about six months ago. Skiing accident in Alaska. He was into extreme skiing, you know, like where you jump off cliffs.”

Now that the pitch was over Sergey could afford to relax, but he was still feeling shaky. There was a puddle of green sauce right on the gleaming surface of the coffee table. He put his finger in it, swirled some around the table, and without realizing what he was doing licked the sauce off his finger. The taste was sweet, fresh, and surprisingly sharp, just as the mortification that hit Sergey right after. He hoped James hadn't noticed.

“So, yeah, Jeff died.” James continued his story. “The funeral was in Taos, near where his house was. Beautiful ceremony. We all skied down the mountain. After dark, holding torches, in a single file. It was really moving. I can only hope to have a beautiful funeral like that. But a month later? I post a photo of my dog, Gandhi, on Facebook, and guess who ‘likes' it? Jeff Ufberg. I was, like, ‘what the fuck?' I thought maybe it was some other Jeff Ufberg. But no, it was the very same. He liked two more of my posts, and our friend Marcia's post.”

James turned to his assistant. “Cleo.”

“Yes?”

“Remember Ufberg?”

“Oh, yeah. My little brother posted a picture once, and the dead Jeff liked it. That was really creepy.”

“Creepy, yes!” James said. “And then Jeff's comments started to pop up. Except they weren't in Jeff's voice at all. The man was a fucking Viking; he would never say ‘so cute!' or ‘lol!' or ‘delish!' The worst happened when Jeff posted on my wall on my birthday. ‘Happy birthday, darling! Stay smart and stay cute!' Turned out it was his girlfriend, Amanda. She kept posting from his account to keep his memory alive, so to speak. All of us, including Jeff, thought that Amanda was an idiot. And here she was, speaking through his Facebook like the devil through a possessed person. The ironic thing is that Jeff had planned to dump her right after his trip to Alaska, and now she owns him forever. How about that, huh?”

Sergey had no idea what to say to that. He wasn't sure if James told this story to imply that he liked Sergey's pitch or that he hated it.

“That's scary,” he said.

“Yes!” James agreed. “That's fucking terrifying. You know what my shrink once said to me? ‘Death is not what it used to be.' He's a funny guy, my shrink is. His specialty is tech entrepreneurs.”

Cleo cleared her throat. Both James and Sergey turned to look. The wall now had large prints of dandelions with seeds flying away toward the corner.

“I'm sorry, James,” she said. “Do you want me to put up the flowers on the other wall too?”

“Not right now, Cleo. I want to see how I feel about the dandelions first.”

Cleo shrugged and went to sit on the ottoman next to James. She took a half-eaten dosa out of the bag and took a small bite.

“We just wanted something fun and uplifting for the office,” she explained to Sergey.

Sergey doubted that dying dandelions were uplifting, but then he never claimed to understand visual art.

“So back to your app,” James said. “What exactly do you want from me?”

“M-money,” Sergey said.

James and Cleo laughed.

“I get that. How much?” James asked.

Everybody said that you should be very specific about the amount of money you were asking for, and Sergey had prepared financial information to go along with his pitch, but asking for a specific amount still struck Sergey as rude. He dove in anyway.

“Well, I need a million to develop it properly, but, I guess, not right away. Maybe three or four hundred grand to start?”

There was another communal chuckle, to which Sergey reacted with another painful spasm in his stomach.

“No,” James said, “that's not how you do it. You have to ask for an exact amount. And you have to sound confident, even arrogant. Even if you're shitting your pants—act like a dick!”

Sergey stared at him in confusion.

“That was the problem with your entire pitch,” James said. “Lack of confidence. Didn't you think so, Cleo?”

“Totally,” she said and took another delicate bite.

“You're this brilliant guy with a brilliant idea, right?”

Am I? Sergey thought.

“You have to learn how to sell yourself. You graduated from NYSB, that's good, I guess, but not superimpressive. Then you say that you've been working on Wall Street, but it doesn't get you very far, does it? Who hasn't worked there? And the fact that you've never got promoted past a junior position doesn't sound very good either. But if you say that you're a brilliant Russian linguist who also happens to have an MBA, that sounds much yummier.”

It does sound good, Sergey thought. It had been years since he thought of his Ph.D. in linguistics as anything but useless.

“Now that you've interested me in your person, sell me your idea. The best way to do it is to appeal to my FOMO.”

Sergey tried to guess what that was. Did he miss this term in business school?

“Look, Cleo, this guy here doesn't know what FOMO is.”

“James, Sergey's an immigrant!” Cleo said. “Give him a break!”

“Okay, point taken. FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out, is the most powerful tool of manipulation right now. Years ago, a guy approached me with this idea for a new social media platform where your posts would be limited to 140 characters. I said no, that's stupid. Why would I want to read people's random shit? Now I feel like an ass!”

“Twitter's stock is up about 133 percent from its IPO price of twenty-six dollars,” Cleo said with a pensive expression, a small piece of dosa still in her hand.

“See what I mean?” James asked Sergey.

Sergey pondered FOMO. It did sound like a viable manipulation tool, but his app was so much more than that. He offered to conquer the ultimate fear—the fear of death—not the pathetic anxiety of somebody else making a profit.

“Your next step is to persuade me that people have an urgent need for your app. Cleo? How do we appeal to the need?”

It wasn't clear to Sergey if James was involving her to teach her how to make a successful pitch or to actually ask for her advice.

“Cleo here is a graduate of Wharton. No shit, huh?” he said to Sergey.

Cleo swallowed whatever she still had in her mouth and wiped her lips, looking pensive.

“You say something like this,” she started. “Our generation is the first one that has two lives: real and virtual. So far nobody knows what to do about our digital legacy after we die. Do we erase it? Do we allow it to remain active? Do we protect it from being overtaken? We know one thing: We can't just let it fend for itself!”

“Perfect!” James said, staring at Sergey. “You appealed to my Jeff Ufberg situation. I'm hooked. Now you offer me your solution. Cleo?”

“Sure,” she said and stared at Sergey too. “Using my unique knowledge of linguistic algorithms, I can build an application that would allow us to preserve and re-create the voice of any Internet user, rendering him or her virtually immortal.”

Sergey marveled at how Cleo managed to effortlessly combine his and Vica's ideas.

“Bingo!” James said. “And then after you've shown how huge and exciting this is, you ask me: ‘Are you in? Because if you're not, you're going to fucking regret it!' ”

Sergey shifted in his seat. He was impressed. He had never felt more enthusiastic about Virtual Grave. He was finally sold on his own idea.

“You're in then?” he managed to ask.

Cleo stood up, picked up the takeout bag from the table, and went to throw it in the garbage.

James looked away and exhaled. “No, Sergey, I'm not. And here's why. Your project is just a little too visionary, too ahead of its time. I'm really impressed with you, man. But to be honest, I don't see how it can make a lot of money. Sorry, pal.”

James stood up and offered his hand. Sergey didn't have a choice but to stand up too. They shook hands. Then Cleo appeared at his side and led Sergey through the assembly labyrinth to the exit.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She had to shout to be heard over all the construction noise. “I really, really liked your idea!”

On the way back, the subway train was much roomier. Sergey pushed away a crumpled McDonald's bag and stretched in the seat at the back of the train. He realized he wasn't upset. Getting funding from James Kisco would have been too unreal, too good to be true, so it was only natural that Kisco had turned him down. But he seemed to genuinely like his idea. He did! He wouldn't have wasted his time teaching Sergey how to pitch it if he hadn't. And when he said that he didn't see how Virtual Grave could make money, he meant huge money, Twitter, Uber, Eat'n'Watch kind of money, James Kisco money, celebrity money. Sergey didn't need any of that. What he needed was to earn just enough so that he didn't have to feel like a failure, didn't have to work at a job that he did so badly at that it hurt. Just enough money to regain the respect of his family and friends. Nobody said that Virtual Grave couldn't generate that kind of money. And James and Cleo did give him a very good pitch. Sergey took out a notebook and a pen from his pocket and wrote down the lines of the pitch: “Are you in? Because if you're not, you're going to fucking regret it!”