Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Vica raised her hand to wave to her son, but he didn’t turn to look. He followed the guard and disappeared into the depths of the Castle.

“What are you feeding him? He looks awful!” Vica’s oldest sister had exclaimed after she saw Eric on Skype. Their mother often said the same thing. “Let him be,” Vica’s father said, but when did they ever listen to him.

Guilt mixed with anger balled up somewhere in Vica’s stomach. It was her own fault. It was the general unhappiness of their family, her constant fights with Sergey, the never-ending tension, and now the separation that made Eric fat, that made him slump in front of the TV with junk food instead of doing sports. It was his sick relationship with Sergey’s mother, who kept overfeeding and overpraising her grandson. Mira was a tiny, fussy, heavily made up, not very smart woman. They had arranged for her to move to the United States after Sergey’s father died. Vica was hoping that Mira would sell her apartment in Moscow, but she left it to her spinster sister instead. “Maechka is so sick, she wouldn’t have survived on her pension.” She herself came penniless. Sergey and Vica made sure she was getting benefits, found her state-sponsored housing in Brooklyn. But Mira wasn’t adjusting to her new life that well. She was a clingy mother and a clingier grandmother. She and Eric had some sort of crazy romance going. He badly needed to be admired and she badly needed to be needed. Once Vica overheard the following exchange:

“Now, who is the smartest? Who is the handsomest?”

“Okay, okay, Grandma. I guess I am.”

It was creepy, Vica thought, but they both looked so pleased with each other. They would spend hours talking. Mira would tell him all about her life in Russia, about his genius grandfather, and about Sergey as a little boy. Eric shared some of the facts with Vica. “Did you know that Dad used to be really good at picking berries? They would go into the woods and he would fill his little basket in minutes. Grandma says I would be really good too.”

What hurt Vica the most about this was that Eric didn’t have any connection with her side of the family. Her mother was very much involved in bringing up Vica’s sister’s kids; she considered them her real grandchildren, and Eric was nothing but a stranger whose first language was English and couldn’t speak her language very well. Vica would prep him and make him rehearse some Russian phrases before their monthly Skype calls, but Eric would invariably stutter and mix up his words. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!” Vica’s mother would say. “Better go play and put your mom back on.”

Other parents from the line were dispersing in all directions. Outer Boroughs were heading to nearby cafés, Susan Sontags were walking west, to their beautiful apartments just across the park. The time was now 8:35. She had to pick Eric up at 12:30. She’d taken the whole day off work, so she had all that time to herself. She was free to do what she wanted. Vica’s plan was to have breakfast at Café Sabarsky. She had heard Eden mention that they had “hands down the best coffee in the city.” Vadik said that it was a bit pricey but a truly elegant setting. She walked to Neue Galerie, entered the museum, and stopped at the door of Café Sabarsky and peeked in. The dark wood interior was both cozy and grand. Vica loved marble tabletops and chairs with a dent in it for your butt. She took the dent as a special sign of luxury. At this hour, the café was almost empty; an old man was sitting at a table by the window with a deliciously fresh newspaper spread above his coffee cup. She would take a table by the window too. She would just order a cup of coffee and a bread basket. She would butter one of the rolls, put it on her plate, take a selfie of herself enjoying “the best coffee in the city” in “a truly elegant setting,” and post it on Facebook. Let them see! Let them see that she was perfectly fine about her separation, happy, in a good place. She wasn’t sure who “they” were, however. Her sisters? They didn’t really use Facebook, preferring the Russian social media site VKontakte. Her coworkers? Yeah, why not? Regina and Vadik? Definitely! Sergey himself? Sergey had never been a fan of social media — what an irony that he was so obsessed with that app! — but if he ever happened to browse and see her photo, Vica wanted to make sure that it would send the right message. Vica was about to enter the café when her eyes fell on the menu clipped to the door. Seven dollars for coffee. Eight dollars for a bread basket with jam. That would be eighteen dollars with tax and more than twenty dollars with tip. She could afford it, but twenty dollars for bread and coffee! When she could buy a bagel from a breakfast cart for just a dollar! No, that was ridiculous. Vica turned to leave, then hesitated. What about her Facebook photo? Vica, smiling, relaxed, sipping her seven-dollar coffee as if it were perfectly natural? No, she decided, it wasn’t worth it. She wouldn’t be able to drink that coffee without constantly running the price through her head. So the picture would come out as anything but natural.

Vica walked back to Madison, went into a deli, and stood in line for a bagel and a sour-tasting coffee in a paper cup. There was a man a few feet away, standing with his back to Vica, perusing the yogurts on a shelf. Short, wiry, dark hair. Sergey! Vica thought for a second. Then the man turned, revealing that he was not.

It was only nine. Vica sat down at the one of the rickety plastic tables, reached into her bag, and pulled out a book she’d recently bought at Barnes & Noble. It was called Mobile Apps for Dummies.

She opened the book to the marked page:

Step 1. Define the Goal of Your App. Before you go into details, you must clearly define the purpose and mission of your app. What is it going to do? What is its core appeal? What concrete problem is it going to solve, or what part of life is it going to make better?

“To fight death” she wrote in her notepad. That was kind of a larger goal. She needed to make it more practical, more plausible.

Vica had never been that interested in Sergey’s idea of re-creating the virtual voice or even the virtual personality of the departed. What she wanted was an app that would allow people to keep some of their online presence after they died. She thought the app should be designed for people who were going to die (which was everybody!) rather than their relatives and friends. They would be able to preprogram the posts, messages, or tweets that would appear after they died. It was more like a virtual will. “Virtual Will”—now, there was a nice name, so much better than Virtual Grave. She had mentioned it to Sergey and he sounded interested. “But where would my algorithm come in, if people will be creating their own messages before they die?” he asked. “They can’t possibly prewrite everything. Some of them have to be automatic!” He took some time to think it over and told her that he loved her idea. He thought it was great that Virtual Grave could work both ways as posthumous restoration and as “prehumous” preparation. He did love it! Yet, he chose to pitch only his part to Bob. He must have thought that her idea was too banal, too practical. It was practical, and that was what was so great about it.

So what would be her app’s plausible goal?

To keep your social media alive after you die.

To keep your online presence after you die.

To control your online presence after you die.

To keep control over your social media after you die.

Vica liked the word control . One of the things that was so scary about dying, falling down, or even falling asleep was the loss of control.

Yes, control was a powerful word, and no, she wasn’t so naive that she thought you could actually keep it. But you could keep some semblance of it. Or at least die thinking that you did.