Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

“Teena!”

Sergey half expected Teena to call him “Gregory Pecker,” but she didn’t.

He ended up reciting his pitch four times, until Helen and Teena finally said that he “got it.” Could it be that they were simply sick of listening to it over and over again? And even if he did “get it,” what if the whole idea for this app was foolish? Now that his idea was about to enter the real world, Sergey started to doubt it more and more.

Teena said that she liked it. She said it was creepy but kind of cool. Helen was more skeptical. In her opinion dead people shouldn’t be granted either virtual presence or control over it.

“Would you rather that all traces of a person be erased?” Sergey asked, thinking of Vadik’s revolting suggestion.

“Not necessarily,” Helen said. “You could just mark dead people’s profiles to show that they were dead. A simple mark. A black frame over the photo or a cross over the profile, the way they marked plague sufferers’ houses. We could browse through the ‘friends’ rosters and see how many of them were dead.”

“But, Mom, Sergio’s app lets dead people talk!” Teena said.

“I don’t think dead people are supposed to talk, honey,” Helen replied.

On the day of the meeting with Kisko, Sergey woke up nauseous with anxiety. Helen’s simple words pulsed in his brain like an alarm. Dead people were not supposed to talk. Period. End of conversation.

He showered and dressed, but barely managed to eat his usual piece of bread with butter and cheese. The meeting was set for 7:45 A.M., so on the subway Sergey found himself surrounded by the midtown rush-hour crowd. All these people, surly, sleepy, smelling of acidic coffee, burned toast, and fresh aftershave, sitting down, getting up, squeezing to the exit, resigned yet purposeful, because they were going to their serious adult jobs. Just like Sergey had a mere few months ago. And here he was, a foolish man on his way to sell his foolish, foolish idea. He felt as if he had no business taking up precious rush-hour subway car space.

James Kisco’s office looked like a construction site. There were boxes, assembly tools, buckets with paint, furniture in various stages of completeness, and purposeful people in overalls moving among them. In the middle of the room, two large men were busy erecting some very complicated bookshelves.

Sergey tried to ask them if they knew where he could find James Kisco, but they couldn’t hear him because of the working drill. Finally, a young girl with a doll face and curly pitch-black hair that reached just below her shoulders appeared from behind a mirrored cube. She asked if he was Sergey. Or at least he thought that was what she asked, because he couldn’t hear a thing. He nodded. She was very thin and very pretty in a slightly threatening way. Sergey thought that she would’ve been perfect for a lead in a horror movie. She must be James’s assistant. The girl picked up one of the smaller boxes and motioned for him to follow her. She was wearing ribbed tights and a short gray skirt.

James Kisco’s office was all white and had no windows. The only furniture was four large white leather ottomans set around a glass coffee table with a large takeout bag in the center. James was sitting on one of the ottomans drinking tea from a paper cup and eating something that looked like a crepe and smelled like Indian food. He was a large guy, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Shaggy-haired, with bushy eyebrows and a bushy beard the color of pumpkin pie.

Sergey felt very stupid in his wrinkled business suit.

James stood up and reached out his hand for a handshake. Sergey’s clammy fingers disappeared in his grip, then reappeared whitened.

“Very nice to meet you!”

“Likewise,” Sergey said and lowered himself onto one of the ottomans.

“Tea? Dosa?” James’s assistant offered, but Sergey shook his head. He really didn’t want to leave a stain on this white leather.

“My favorite food,” James said, dipping his crepe into a puddle of bright green sauce on his plate. “I spend a lot of time in India. Love that country!”

Here was Sergey’s chance to insert some bit of knowledge about India, show some appreciation of Indian culture, but his memory wouldn’t cooperate.

James’s assistant walked up to the wall behind James’s back, opened her box, and took out something that looked like long strips of colored paper.

“So you’re Sejun’s friend,” James said.

Sergey nodded.

“Sejun and I go way back,” James said. Sergey wondered if they had been lovers, then he thought about Sejun’s partiality to losers and decided that they couldn’t have been.

James’s assistant spread a strip of paper against the wall. It looked like a slightly crooked vertical line. Sergey wondered what it was.

“And Sejun tells me that you have a mind-blowing idea for an app,” James said.

He’s urging me to talk, Sergey thought. He’ll throw me out if I don’t start right away. It occurred to him that he had barely said a word since he entered James’s office. He had a painful spasm in his stomach and a rush of blood to his head. There was no way out. He had to speak.

“Well, I don’t know if it’s mind-blowing, but I’m certain that nobody else is doing it,” Sergey started.

It took Sergey about ten sweaty, stuttering minutes to recite the pitch for James and arrive at his punch line:

“The rest is silence, but does it have to be?”

James met the punch line with an approving chuckle. He swallowed a mouthful of dosa and said: “No, it doesn’t have to be! And, in fact, it isn’t. Let me tell you a story, Sergey. I used to have a good friend, Jeff Ufberg. We called him Jeff the Squirrel, because he kind of looked like one — I don’t know, something about his face. He died about six months ago. Skiing accident in Alaska. He was into extreme skiing, you know, like where you jump off cliffs.”

Now that the pitch was over Sergey could afford to relax, but he was still feeling shaky. There was a puddle of green sauce right on the gleaming surface of the coffee table. He put his finger in it, swirled some around the table, and without realizing what he was doing licked the sauce off his finger. The taste was sweet, fresh, and surprisingly sharp, just as the mortification that hit Sergey right after. He hoped James hadn’t noticed.

“So, yeah, Jeff died.” James continued his story. “The funeral was in Taos, near where his house was. Beautiful ceremony. We all skied down the mountain. After dark, holding torches, in a single file. It was really moving. I can only hope to have a beautiful funeral like that. But a month later? I post a photo of my dog, Gandhi, on Facebook, and guess who ‘likes’ it? Jeff Ufberg. I was, like, ‘what the fuck?’ I thought maybe it was some other Jeff Ufberg. But no, it was the very same. He liked two more of my posts, and our friend Marcia’s post.”

James turned to his assistant. “Cleo.”

“Yes?”

“Remember Ufberg?”

“Oh, yeah. My little brother posted a picture once, and the dead Jeff liked it. That was really creepy.”

“Creepy, yes!” James said. “And then Jeff’s comments started to pop up. Except they weren’t in Jeff’s voice at all. The man was a fucking Viking; he would never say ‘so cute!’ or ‘lol!’ or ‘delish!’ The worst happened when Jeff posted on my wall on my birthday. ‘Happy birthday, darling! Stay smart and stay cute!’ Turned out it was his girlfriend, Amanda. She kept posting from his account to keep his memory alive, so to speak. All of us, including Jeff, thought that Amanda was an idiot. And here she was, speaking through his Facebook like the devil through a possessed person. The ironic thing is that Jeff had planned to dump her right after his trip to Alaska, and now she owns him forever. How about that, huh?”