Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

But Sergey couldn’t wait to be alone. “Some other time, okay?” he said.

As soon as Kuzmin was out of sight, Sergey crossed the road into the park and started walking along the path toward the reservoir. He passed the field where dogs jumped wildly around performing their morning rituals. He felt a momentary urge to join them. He passed a few benches where old people sat with their old blankets spread over their laps. He felt like kissing each and every one of them. He rustled through a pile of dry leaves on the path. He kicked an old acorn with his foot and sent it flying into the air. He ran his hand along the sharp edge of the bushes framing the path. He stopped by a food cart and bought himself a bag of roasted peanuts. They were still hot and Sergey pressed the bag to his face to savor its warmth for a moment. He popped a few peanuts into his mouth and walked up to the black metal fence guarding the water. There were almost no people on the path, just one or two joggers. Sergey decided to ignore them. The water was perfectly still, the reflections on it very bright, so it was as if he were seeing two cities at once: one standing up on the other side, the other turned upside down and submerged in the water. He hadn’t been there in ages, he didn’t remember how shockingly beautiful the view was. He remembered that feeling he had had when crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, that he could fit the entire city onto his palm. What he felt now was different. He felt that it was the city that could fit him, Sergey Levin, onto its palm. That he finally belonged there. He ate the rest of the peanuts and put the empty bag into a pocket of his pants. He placed both his feet onto the little step at the bottom of the fence and grabbed the upper spikes with both hands. He rocked back and forth and right and left, while singing Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

I’ve heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

He sang and sang until he felt that he was David the baffled king, and it was he composing “Hallelujah,” and it was he who finally struck that secret chord.

—

For the next couple of days as Sergey was busy preparing a detailed business plan, he was burning to tell somebody. Eric, his mother, Vadik, Regina, Bob, Sejun, Vica. Especially Vica. The idea was partly hers after all. And Vica was the only who could truly share his joy. Vica could get deeply angry and profoundly sad — no grown person cried as much as she did, but she could get insanely happy too. She would’ve screamed. She would’ve been jumping up and down. That was what she did when he announced that they had accepted him to New York School of Business.

And there was Helen waiting to hear how the meeting went. Sergey was about to tell her the good news, but something prevented him from doing it. Kuzmin assured Sergey that the deal was solid, that Kotov rarely promised things, but when he did, he never, ever backed out on his word. But Sergey was afraid to jinx it. He told Helen that he wouldn’t know Kotov’s decision for a while. He decided not to say a word to anybody until the check was safely in his bank account.

That decision proved to be very wise, because a week after their meeting with Kotov, the bad news came.

“I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news,” Kuzmin said on the phone. “Kotov was shot and killed last night. He was in his car on the outskirts of Moscow.”

Sergey was in the kitchen, making yet another meal for Goebbels, scraping some brown gunk off the sides of the cat food can into a bowl. He put the bowl down and leaned against the fridge. Kotov was dead. Just a few days ago Sergey was sitting across from the man, so close that he could smell his cologne. He thought of Kotov’s eyes, of the throbbing vein in his temple. He wondered how exactly he’d been shot. In his chest? In his head? He thought of how he looked Kotov in the eye and said: “You will die.” Embarrassment and revulsion at the memory of these words made him cringe.

And only then did Sergey realize that Kotov’s death meant the end of Virtual Grave. He had just a few weeks left of unemployment — he needed to look for another job. He had no other investment contacts. But, more important, he didn’t have the stamina anymore. That short-lived euphoria over the deal with Kotov had exhausted him more than all the time he had spent working on the app.

You’ve got to hand it to Death though, he thought. Just as he and Kotov were planning to screw it, it went ahead and screwed them.

—

Sergey spent the following days browsing the job ads, barely eating, hardly registering Helen’s attempts to cheer him up. “I’ll tell you what,” she said at the end of the week. “Teena will be at her dad’s all weekend, so let’s have a little party at my place Saturday night. Order some nice food, watch a movie. How about 9½ Weeks ? Haven’t seen that in a while.”

9½ Weeks? Sergey thought. Wasn’t that the old soft-porn movie where Mickey Rourke fed the blindfolded Kim Basinger a chili pepper? He hated that movie! But he said yes simply because he didn’t have the energy to say no.

On Saturday morning he drove to Staten Island to spend his usual time with Eric. It was a long, long drive. There was traffic on the BQE. More traffic on the Verrazano Bridge. Traffic on Father Capodanno, where traffic was extremely rare. The ocean was a sickly grayish-brown, as if it hadn’t yet quite recovered after Sandy. Some houses along the shore still stood covered with plywood. There wasn’t much traffic on Hylan, which was surprising, but, God, how ugly Hylan looked! Those car dealerships, those disgusting storefronts, those billboards for doctors, MRIs, and funeral homes.

Sergey had to admit that the neighborhood where his house stood was actually quite beautiful. Neat houses, sycamores, lilac bushes, streets leading up and down the hills and into the woods. Yet the prettiness of his former neighborhood made Sergey even more depressed than the ugliness of Hylan Boulevard had. He didn’t belong there anymore.

He was finally in the driveway of his house. And, yes, legally, this was still his house. He still owned the rusted mailbox. The ugly porch with the scuffed column. The plastic bat hanging off the awning since three Halloweens ago. He still had the key. He felt it would be wrong to open the door with his own key, even though he knew that Vica wasn’t there. He pressed the button of the doorbell. There was a wheezing half-choked ring followed by some commotion in the house.

“Eric, open the door!” his mother yelled. “Eric, now! Eric, my hands are all covered in meat!”

Then there was the clicking of the locks. Mira insisted on locking all of them even though both Vica and Sergey tried to persuade her that the neighborhood was very safe.

“Who is this?” she asked from behind the door in her strained and thus a little rude-sounding English.

“Mom, it’s me,” Sergey said.

Mira opened the door and moved to the side to let him pass. She stood wiping her hands on her little apron printed with cat paws. Complicated jewelry dangled off her hands, ears, and neck. She had stopped dyeing her hair since Sergey’s father died, and there was something intensely sad about the combination of her childish frame, her fancy jewelry, and her sparse white hair.

“I’m making ezhiki, ” she announced.

“Great, Mom,” he said and leaned in to kiss her. Her skin felt dry and brittle under his lips, which it did more and more so each time they saw each other. His father’s death was abrupt, Sergey thought, but he was being forced to witness his mother’s demise unraveling in slow motion.

Mira went back into the kitchen, and Sergey walked up the stairs to the top floor. He took great care not to touch or see anything that would remind him of Vica, so he was grateful that the door to their former bedroom was shut, but the door of the hallway closet was gaping open and he caught a glimpse of the pink towels that he had seen wrapped around Vica’s body so many times. Eric’s door was half open too. Inside, he saw the usual picture: Eric sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, one sock on, the other sock for some reason lying in the middle of the room. He was flushed and sweaty, clutching his Xbox controller, his thumbs jerking as if on their own, his entire body swaying right and left with the characters on-screen. And what characters they were! Nasty, vicious, dressed in full military garb, loaded with various weapons, screaming, jumping, bursting into flames. Sergey had always said that they shouldn’t let Eric play those games, but he never found enough support from Vica to carry it through. “This is normal,” she would say, getting angrier as she talked, “this is what boys do. You don’t want Eric not to do what other boys do, do you? To grow up weird and alone?”