Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Then, about a week after their virtual affair ended, the time for retribution came. One night, as Sergey was perusing the contents of Vadik’s nearly empty fridge, Vadik appeared in the kitchen doorway with the iPhone in his hands. He looked confused rather than angry, but Sergey had a panicky premonition that this was going to be about Sejun.

It was.

“Look,” Vadik said. “It says here that I talked to Sejun on December 18. I didn’t talk to her. Was it you?”

Vadik was clearly anticipating some sort of crazy explanation. There wasn’t any.

“Yes, we talked,” Sergey said. “She called to ask you if her brother could stay here. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

“Her brother staying here? Staying with me? Or should I vacate my own apartment to accommodate him? That girl has some nerve!”

Sergey took out a wilted lettuce and a couple of tomatoes and cucumbers. “I’m making a salad, do you want some?”

Vadik nodded. He sat down on a flimsy bar stool that looked as if it were about to collapse and put his phone down.

Sergey took a cutting board out and started slicing tomatoes. Never an easy task, and especially difficult under Vadik’s stare.

“You should halve the tomatoes first,” Vadik said, “and better use a serrated knife.”

Sergey found the serrated knife.

“Not the cucumbers though. Never use a serrated knife on cucumbers. But you still have to halve them.”

Sergey answered him with a glare and Vadik went back to playing with his phone. He looked really stupid in that tiny kitchen, perched on that tiny chair. In his white sweater with his shock of blond hair, he looked like a huge dumb parrot in a cage. If there was one thing Sergey couldn’t stand, it was somebody’s presence while he was cooking. Vica would always leave the kitchen when he cooked. Not that he cooked that often. But he could make cucumber and tomato salad, and a spectacular omelet. His secret ingredients were leftover cold cuts from MyEurope. A prosciutto and salami combination worked the best. He would make it for Vica, and she would always ask for seconds and proclaim it the most delicious dish in the world. “Seriously,” she would say, “we should enter your omelet in contests.” Too bad Vadik didn’t have any leftovers. Or any eggs. Sergey felt a momentary pang of longing for Vica, but then he thought of Sejun and felt a pang of longing for her too.

“No, no, that’s rosemary-scented oil. It won’t do. Use the big bottle.”

Sergey put the rosemary-scented oil back and reached for the big bottle.

“Wait,” Vadik said, and Sergey felt like throwing the big bottle at his head. “Wait. It says here that the duration of the call was two hours and eight minutes. You couldn’t have been discussing Sejun’s brother for two hours, could you?”

Sergey stopped mixing the salad. He knew that one way or the other Vadik would get to the bottom of this. And the bottom of this — the fact that he had had an affair with his best friend’s ex-girlfriend — suddenly seemed pretty horrible, pretty disgusting. He used to tell himself that this was not about Vadik, that this was about him and Sejun, and Vadik had nothing to do with it. Now, for the first time, he realized that in Vadik’s eyes it would be very much about him.

He cleared his throat and said that Sejun and he talked.

“What did you talk about? Did you talk about me?” Vadik asked.

This suggestion offended Sergey. How typical of Vadik to think that they would have nothing to discuss except himself — such an endlessly fascinating topic.

“We talked about my app,” Sergey said.

Apparently this was a mistake.

“Oh, how nice! You talked about your fantastic, super-brilliant app! Your genius app! Sejun loved your idea, I remember that. She thought it was ‘brave and defiant.’ ”

Vadik said the last three words in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to be an imitation of how Sejun talked, but in fact it didn’t sound like her at all. He jumped off the stool and stood leaning on the kitchen counter, hovering over Sergey. He was seven inches taller than Sergey, but Sergey had never been so aware of it before.

“Well, I’ve always thought your idea was stupid,” he said. “Stupid and sick. Like freeze-drying your dead pet. No, worse than that, like freeze-drying your dead pet and making it talk.”

He paused and looked at Sergey, making sure that his words registered. They did.

“Nobody wants to hear from dead people, you hear me? Nobody! It’s creepy, it’s horrifying. It’s unbearably painful, for godsakes! I mean, yes, it’s true, we all talk to our loved ones in our minds. And, yes, we all wish that they would answer. A single word of affection, of acceptance. We all need that. But what you’re trying to do is not that! What people will hear is not the voice of their loved one, but the bits and pieces of that voice, the heartless morsels, a cruel parody. Listening to that voice will only make their sense of loss more acute. The person that they loved is gone. Gone! Nothing will bring him back. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not God, not Fyodorov, and certainly not your fucking app. I mean, how stupid must you be not to see that?”

Sergey looked away and tasted the salad. He’d put way too much oil in it. And what kind of food was salad anyway? It would only make them hungrier.

“The only app that could possibly make sense in the face of death would be one that would cancel your entire online presence. Cancel it! Erase all your messages, delete all your posts, get rid of every trace of you. Make sure nobody could revive you, or speak in your voice, or do any other shit. Now that’s the app we need. Because that’s the idea of death. Death brings an absolute end. And we all should just respect that.”

Sergey made a motion to go out of the kitchen, but Vadik was blocking the way.

“But you know all that, don’t you?” Vadik said with a gloating expression, as if he had discovered Sergey’s dirty secret.

“You don’t really want to ‘revive’ dead people à la Fyodorov — God, what a stupid fuck he was! You don’t really want to reconstruct their speeches or their souls. You’re just hanging on to the idea of this app because it’s the last thing, the very last thing, that you believe can pull you out of the dump, right? Right? Because if not for this app, you’re done. You’re stuck with being a loser forever.”

And Sergey just stood there, listening to Vadik’s diatribe, looking into his bowl, eating the salad, forkful after slippery forkful. He could hear and understand Vadik’s words, he felt them almost like physical blows, and yet they weren’t truly reaching him. He felt as if he were in the middle of a very wrong scene, a scene that wasn’t supposed to be happening. He remembered feeling like this once before. He was only five or six and it was a snow day. He went out of his apartment building dressed in snow boots, a winter coat, and a thick knitted hat, mittens, and whatever, and there were older boys waiting in ambush behind a row of snowdrifts armed with snowballs. Their attack was immediate and merciless. Vicious wads of pain hitting him on the neck, on the face, on the eyes. He remembered thinking that this was not supposed to happen. These were his friends. He knew their names. They played in the sandbox together. This was wrong! So wrong that it couldn’t be happening. He didn’t even turn away or cover his face. He just stood there waiting until this frightening scene would disappear or be changed into something else.

“And Sejun was impressed with your idea, wasn’t she,” Vadik said again. Sergey still didn’t say anything, but Vadik continued.

“Of course she was. Did she tell you how brilliant you were? How she was smitten with your intellect? How she was in love with your brain? How arousing your brilliance was? How she was dying for this brilliant, brilliant man to fuck her? Skype-fuck if nothing else? Oh, Sejun used to love Skype-fucking! She even preferred it to the real thing.”