Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

They’d barely watched an hour of The Wolverine when Vadik announced that he was tired and was going to bed. He turned the TV off and left the room without bothering to ask Sergey if he wanted to continue watching.

It was all Vadik’s fault that Sergey didn’t tell him about Sejun. He simply didn’t give him the chance.

Two days later, Sergey called Sejun to ask a few questions about the design for his app. This time he called her from his own Skype account. Sejun told him that she loved the logic and organization of the frames but hated the visual presentation. “A graveyard with tiny ghosts peeking from behind the stones? Seriously?” She found it both creepy and boring, like Walmart Halloween decorations.

This embarrassed Sergey so much that his voice went higher. He tried to explain that he didn’t mean for the ghosts to be in the actual design but thought they were okay for a proto. Sejun seemed to be touched by his embarrassment. She then offered a few simple solutions to make the visuals work and suggested a good website with graphic templates.

The next time Sergey called Sejun he asked her if Virtual Grave was a good name for his app.

She said that it was morbid but biting, and biting was the most important quality for the name. Her use of the word biting stirred Sergey so much that he blushed. She said that when his prototype was ready, she would introduce him to her investor friend.

The calls were becoming more frequent. They would start talking about the app but would inevitably swerve someplace else, someplace personal. Sejun asked Sergey how he’d come up with the idea. He told her about the posthumous letter from his father, how he had sat in the basement reading it over and over again, trying to find some last piece of advice. He saw Sejun remove her glasses and wipe her eyes with the corner of her sleeve.

She told him that her own father never, ever talked to her. He spoke to her, he said things to her, he asked questions, he gave instructions, but they never really “talked,” not when she was a child and not now. It was as if he found the idea of a conversation with his daughter incomprehensible. She said that one of the reasons she decided to move to the United States was to escape this condescending attitude that Asian men displayed to women. She wanted a Western man so that he would treat her as an equal. But here she found that the Western men who wanted to date Asian women were attracted to the idea of their servility.

“But not Vadik though?” Sergey asked. Sejun looked away from the screen. Sergey was afraid that he had made a faux pas. He shouldn’t have mentioned Vadik; he should’ve pretended to have forgotten the fact that Sejun used to be Vadik’s girlfriend.

Then she looked up at Sergey. “No,” she said, “with Vadik it was different.”

He wasn’t misogynistic at all. But he liked her because she was strange to him. Not exotic, but strange. He knew that he would never truly understand her or she him. And that was exactly what he wanted. To be able to project whatever he wanted on to her and to be able to imagine that in her eyes he was whatever he wanted to be at the moment. And she was so lonely and weak that she almost agreed to become that for him.

One morning Sergey was sick with flu and he called Sejun from bed.

“Are you in bed?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I love that lattice headboard. I was the one who picked this bed, did you know that?”

Sergey started to cough.

“Oh, poor Sergey!” she said. “I wish I was there with you, I would give you some tea.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t want to appear servile.”

“That’s true,” Sejun said. “But I could sit down on the edge of your bed and stroke your hair.”

“I would give anything to feel your hand on my forehead right now,” Sergey said.

Sejun smiled. Her glasses slipped down her nose when she was staring down, and she pushed them back with her index finger. She was sitting cross-legged on her couch. He could see her entire body, so her laptop must have been away, on the coffee table. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt and some sort of lounge pants. No socks, no bra. He searched for her nipples lost in the folds of her T-shirt.

“I would’ve tapped my fingertips on your forehead,” she said, “and then I would run them down your cheeks, all the way to your mouth.”

Sergey suppressed the urge to moan. “And I would have caught your finger with my teeth and pressed on it ever so gently,” he said.

That first time they had sex discreetly. Sejun brought her laptop closer so that everything below her neck was hidden from view. Sergey did the same. He tried to masturbate as quietly as possible. He was hoping that Sejun was masturbating too, but he couldn’t be completely sure. They kept talking the entire time.

“Oh, fuck!” Sergey finally cried, making his computer screen shake.

Sejun laughed. “Did you come?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “What about you?”

“Oh, I came a little while ago. I was just embarrassed to tell you.”

Afterward, Sergey felt feverish but insanely happy.

He went to the bathroom and aimed a perfect pale gold current into Vadik’s toilet.

“Is vigorous,” he said to the pearly gray tiles above the toilet. “Is brilliant. Is persistent. Is strong.”

Each time they became bolder and more intimate. They would put their computers farther away to have a full view of each other’s bodies, and they would wear ear- and mouthpieces to hear each other better. Her breasts turned out to be smaller than he’d thought, her hips wider. He couldn’t imagine anything sexier than Sejun wearing nothing but a mouthpiece and headphones. Everything about her was endlessly exciting. Sometimes, hours after their call was over, Sergey would see his headphones lying on the table where he’d left them and just the sight of them would get him hard. She told him how smart he was, how imaginative, how handsome. She said that he looked like that actor from Truffaut’s films. What was his name? Jean-Pierre Léaud? She asked him if he liked Truffaut. He said that he did. He loved Truffaut, had always preferred him to Godard. She had too, she said. She had always hated Godard.

Sergey walked around in a dazed painful state, the rest of his concerns — Vica, Eric, Virtual Grave, unemployment, Rachel, Vadik, especially Vadik — concealed from him by the smog of panic and excitement. He managed to disregard the fact that Sejun used to be Vadik’s girlfriend, that they had broken up a mere two months ago, and the morality of Skype-fucking her was questionable at best. Once after Sejun’s call, Sergey stayed frozen on the couch for hours, the MacBook in his lap, not doing anything, just thinking, or rather daydreaming, clinging to the details of what had just happened, as if trying to catch them all and lock them up. He was roused from his reverie by an angry call from Rachel. Apparently, they had scheduled a date and Sergey had forgotten about it. “What happened? Are you sick?” Rachel kept asking him, but there was no concern in her voice, just fury. And it was easier to address her fury than her concern. He said that he had met someone else.

The next morning Sejun didn’t answer his Skype call. He left her several messages. She didn’t reply. Three days later Sergey sent her a text: “Are you okay? I’m worried.” He got a reply the next day. She wrote that she was fine but feeling “weirded out” by their relationship. “Do you want us to stop?” he asked. This time she answered right away: “Yes!”

It was very difficult to work after that, very difficult to make himself focus, but Sergey knew that his work was actually his way to salvation, so he recommitted himself with even more intensity.