Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

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.