Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Now, how exactly would the app work? Would it only allow for the timed premade posts or tweets or photos to appear after you died, or would it also allow you to “react” to the posts of others?

“Posthumous feedback?” she wrote.

It shouldn’t be hard to program the app to give out random likes to the posts of loved ones. A “like” for every second thing posted by your child. Or for every third thing posted by your friends. People were always “liking” random things as it was. But that was easy enough. It would be far more interesting and challenging to program the app so that it made meaningful comments. Would it be possible for it to distinguish a post about something good from a post about something bad? So that it could comment either “Congratulations!” or “That sucks”? But what if it made a mistake? What if a son posted that he lost his job and got “Congratulations!” from his long-dead father? There had to be some neutral comments. “I’m with you,” for example. That would work for almost everything. iPhones already had ready-made quick text options that substituted for genuine emotions. You didn’t have to go to all that trouble and type in “I love you” or “I miss you”; all you had to do for the app was to make those quick responses automatic. So what you needed for Virtual Will was a robotlike program that would be activated after you died to post neutral comments to your loved ones’ posts. It should be compatible to any of your social media platforms. Vica thought about the most common expressions people used in their posts, tweets, and comments. She reached for her phone and opened her Twitter app. Her favorite social media was Facebook, so she never tweeted anything herself, but she enjoyed looking at other people’s tweets, even though she didn’t follow that many of them. Vadik’s tweet was at the top.

Zero retweets. Zero favorites. What did he expect with stupid shit like that? Still, Vica felt sorry for Vadik and marked his tweet as a favorite.

Then there were a couple of funny little tweets from Mindy Kaling, who she loved.

Vica soon forgot about her task and got carried away by the tweets themselves.

There was one from President Obama about climate change. Vica smiled. Not that she particularly cared about politics or the climate, but she got a kick out of the fact that you could follow the president on Twitter.

A tweet from Liliana in radiology. “Another busy day.” Well, yes, Vica thought, this was a weekday, and their job was hard. Why did Liliana feel the need to tweet about that?

Santiago from interventional radiology retweeted a picture of a Japanese dog with a square hairdo. Now that was really funny and cute!

Vica skipped through another ten or twelve tweets until she stumbled on this one from Ethan Grail.

Vica sighed. She felt a surge of pity that was so sharp it burned her throat the way hot coffee did.

Ethan Grail was her favorite patient. He was an actor, a quite famous one, even though Vica had never seen any of his movies. He was only thirty-two years old with a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. Ethan was the source of endless gossip at the hospital. Liliana would show Vica clips from his films on YouTube. Christine claimed that he had just broken up with his costar. Like right before his diagnosis. She’d read it in People magazine. “Poor fucker,” Santiago said.

Judging from the clips and the countless photos floating across the Internet, Ethan had been very handsome a mere six months ago. Now he was painfully thin and had the pallor of a dead man, with large eyes that seemed to retreat into his skull farther than would be bearable. No wonder people didn’t recognize him anymore. Ethan would always chat with Vica while she did his sonograms (his therapy made him prone to thromboses, so he needed frequent tests), and he would often sneak across the hall to see her when he came for his weekly radiation treatments.

Her male patients often tried to flirt with her. One man said that she had “the body of Marilyn and the soul of Chekhov.” A lot of men made the same joke that finally there was a woman who could see right through them. Vica usually just smiled back at them, but she couldn’t help but feel disgusted. It was as if she was kneading dough all day, and the dough suddenly decided to flirt with her.

But Ethan Grail was different. She actually enjoyed chatting with him. Not because he was a celebrity, but because there was something morbidly irresistible in the way he liked to flaunt his impending death. Usually, patients were encouraged to view death as if it were a mean but conquerable enemy, something they were expected to fight against rather than accept. Ethan said that Vica was the only one among the hospital’s personnel who didn’t discourage his quips about death, didn’t call his attitude defeatist. He said that he loved her accent. That there was some bluntness, some bitterness, some refreshing lack of optimism in the way she pronounced words.

Both Liliana and Christine thought that Ethan had a crush on Vica. “What if he dies and leaves Vica all his money in his will?” Liliana mused. Vica fantasized about that too. She hated herself for doing it, but she couldn’t help herself.

Vica clicked on Ethan’s name to read his recent tweets in succession.

Shit! Vica thought, pushing back tears. She couldn’t afford to get emotional over a patient. Everybody at work told her so. Some of her colleagues offered tips on fighting back emotions. Christine said that whenever she was about to feel weepy she would try to visualize her bank statement. Liliana thought of sex. Santiago of the recent soccer game’s score. But it was Sergey, who had never worked with dying people, who actually gave her the best advice. This was years ago, when she’d just started working at Bing Ruskin and would often come home sobbing. “Think of it as a movie or a TV show,” he said. “When I was little I used to get really upset over sad scenes in movies. And my dad once told me, ‘Serezha, listen, these are not real people. They will go home and change their clothes after this and go on with their lives. Lassie the dog is not really dead, she’s an actress. She will go home and gnaw on her favorite bone.’ It helped a lot, although it did ruin the magic of storytelling a little bit.”

For the most part Sergey’s protective strategy worked really well. This is not real, Vica would tell herself. This is just a TV series. ER, Grey’s Anatomy, House M.D. The doctors are not real. The patients are not real. That sweet kid who died last month didn’t really die; he was simply killed off by the writers, because some new show offered him a better role. It didn’t work with Ethan though. Possibly because he really was an actor, it was harder for her to imagine him as a pretend actor. Ethan was real and he was going to die for real. Fairly soon too. She had heard that the doctors were giving him only about a year.