Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

“Eric!” he called.

“Not now, Dad!” The characters on the screen started screaming in what sounded like Mandarin to Sergey.

“Hey!” Sergey called again.

Eric bit on his lower lip and made several jerky movements with his hands. There was a series of explosions that left a lonely mutilated corpse on the smoke-clouded field.

“Dad! You distracted me! Now I’m dead!” Eric said and dropped his controller on the floor.

“Is that supposed to be you?” Sergey asked, pointing to the corpse.

“Yep,” Eric said.

A husky Asian man, bent under his excessive weaponry, sprinted over to the mutilated corpse, squatted over his face, and proceeded to push his pelvis up and down.

“What in hell was that?” Sergey asked.

“Tea-bagging. The winner is supposed to do that to humiliate the dead guy.”

Sergey’s face contorted with disgust, but Eric must have misinterpreted his expression, because he proceeded to reassure him.

“It’s okay, Dad. I won’t stay dead forever. All I have to do is to choose a safe place to respawn and then I’ll go back to the battle.”

“Respawn?” Sergey asked.

“Yeah, when you die, you just follow the spawning process and then you’re alive again. It takes no time.”

“Boys, lunch!” Mira called from the kitchen.

Eric put his second sock on and they headed to the kitchen.

Sergey loathed these weekly lunches that he had there since the separation. Being a guest in his own house, having his mother cook for him as if he were still a child, straining to fit some parental influence into the little time he now spent with Eric.

Their small kitchen table was crowded with little plates and bowls and tiny serving dishes overflowing with chopped, minced, and sautéed vegetables. Sergey had always marveled at how elaborately his mother set the table, even for a simple lunch, even for just the three of them. He remembered this from childhood: her pretty serving dishes, her layered salads, the mushrooms made from tomatoes and eggs, the palm trees made from franks, the farmer’s cheese snowmen.

“ Ezhiki, cool!” Eric said and piled some onto his plate, ignoring the salad with strawberries and tiny shrimp, the minced eggplant, and the mushroom-stuffed zucchini. Mira took a piece of bread, generously spread it with butter, and gave it to Eric. He accepted it with great enthusiasm.

“Mom, I don’t think he needs that much butter,” Sergey said, watching Eric take a great big bite out of the bread slice. He immediately regretted it. Mira’s lips trembled as she tried to put on the defensive expression that made her appear all the more vulnerable.

“Butter helps digest vitamins,” she said.

“That’s right,” Sergey said, “but we don’t see him eating vitamin-rich food, do we?”

“She gives me baby carrots all the time!” Eric said. “They’re, like, chock-full of A and C.”

“And iron,” Mira whispered.

Sergey doubted that Eric was actually eating those carrots, but he wasn’t going to pick a fight with his mother in front of his child. Once, about a year ago, Eric had asked him “to be nicer to Grandma.” “I’m very nice to her,” Sergey had said. “No, Dad, you’re not nice, you’re polite.” Sergey couldn’t help but feel that Eric might have been right. He had never loved his mother as much as he loved his father. What he felt for her was pity rather than affection. And the more aware he was of that, the more pity and the less affection he felt.

After lunch, he took Eric for a walk.

“Great Kills or Mount Moses?” Sergey asked, starting the car.

“Mount Moses,” Eric answered from the backseat. He was already furiously pressing buttons on his Nintendo DS.

They drove up to the woodsy part of Staten Island and parked the car off a tiny street overgrown with tall blueberry bushes. They made their way through the bushes, into the large clearing that held the remains of the foundation of some old stone structure, deeper into the woods between the large rocks and the tall trees the names of which Sergey didn’t know. Mount Moses wasn’t that tall and wasn’t really a mountain, just a large hill. They climbed up the slope panting and cursing and trying to hold on to the brittle tree branches along the way. “Ooooh,” Eric said when they reached the top. He was sweaty and winded — they really should make him exercise more.

“Hey, Eric,” he said, “let’s start jogging in Great Kills on weekends.”

Eric scrunched his nose. He was probably weighing the physical hardships of weekly jogging against the emotional rewards of spending time with his dad.

“Okay,” he finally said.

They went to sit down on the cluster of rocks that presented a panoramic view of Staten Island.

“Look, Dad,” Eric said, still breathing hard.“The ocean!”

Yes, they could see a narrow line of ocean on the horizon. Blindingly white in the sun, like a sliver of ice.

They could just sit there enjoying the view or Sergey could attempt some parental guidance.

“I didn’t really like that game you were playing,” Sergey said.

Eric picked up a little rock from the ground and started scratching the surface of the boulder they were sitting on. His expression was one of resigned boredom. He knew that he had to suffer through this conversation, but he also knew that the conversation wouldn’t change anything. None of the previous ones had.

“What game? Battlefield? I like it.”

“Isn’t it a tad too violent?”

“Yeah. But I’m in a battle, battles are violent. That’s normal.”

“Isn’t it tiresome though? You have those guys killing one another over and over again? You dying over and over again?”

“Maybe. But no, not really. I die only because I’m not very good at the game. If I get better at it, I can avoid dying. I can kill all the other guys and not die.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad when all the other guys kill you?” Sergey asked.

“No, Dad! I told you — I don’t stay dead for long. I respawn and go into the battle again.”

Respawning — what an addictive concept, Sergey thought.

“Does it work like that in all video games?”

“What? Respawning? Pretty much. In Skyrim, if something kills me — a robot sentry, or a dragon, or even my wife — I just restart the game, and it starts from the point where I last saved. And I can restart from anywhere, like, even if I’m halfway up the dragon’s mouth.”

Eric could sense his father’s sincere interest and was getting more and more animated. He even stood up so that he could face Sergey.

“In Pokemon, if you faint in the battle, you just have to go to a Pokemon center to restore your health. Are you getting this, Dad?”

Sergey nodded.

Eric smiled and continued. “And in Destiny respawns are weirder. Basically when you die, your Ghost, which is this alien robot pal, gathers up all your particles and slowly brings you back to life, while you’re watching everything from a deathcam, which is like a pair of floating eyes.”

“You’re dead, but you’re watching everything. You know, I’ve actually been working on something very similar,” Sergey said.

“Virtual Grave, I know,” Eric said. “An app that would allow dead people to keep talking. Mom told me about it.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. It sounds a little weird. Could be kind of cool though.”

Sergey smiled and squeezed Eric’s shoulder.

It was starting to get dark. The clouds above the ocean took on a dirty pink color.

“Let’s head back,” Sergey said.

They were just a hundred feet from the car when they saw a deer. She was standing on the clearing between two birch trees looking at them with calm attention.