Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

All those words Vica had heard so many times in the recent weeks now sounded different. More poetic, more powerful.

Vica imagined Eric trying to get that moment of contact with her or Sergey and felt a lump in her throat. She had to make an effort to fight back tears. Even Vadik seemed moved. It was only Regina who couldn’t help but snicker. That bitch, Vica thought.

A loud sniffle came as if from under the coffee table.

“Sejun!” Vadik said. “I thought you’d left.”

The iPad screen had long gone black, and Vica had completely forgotten about her.

“Sejun,” Vadik said and tapped on the screen.

A glowing pixelated shape of Sejun’s face emerged from the darkness. Her eyes were moist as if she was about to cry.

“That is beautiful, guys. That is a beautiful, beautiful app,” Sejun said.

Bob’s was the only expression that was hard to read. He sat there staring at Sergey as if frozen. Then he rose from the couch, walked up to Sergey, and punched him on the shoulder.

“I love the way you think, man! Love it. Love it. Love it. It makes me sick that the whole tech business is in the hands of those young kids. What do they know about life? What do they care about death? What can they possibly create if they don’t know and don’t care? It’s only natural that they come up with dumb toys.”

Bob plopped back onto the couch that bent obediently to his shape. “Oh, how I love it…” He moaned again.

Vica reclined in her seat and closed her eyes. It was done. Bob was hooked. She could hear her heart thumping in drunken excitement. The image of their bright, bright future branched out in her mind and kept growing, past those omakase meals, five-star resorts in the Italian Alps, VIP beaches in the Caribbean, and their own Tribeca loft, and finally to a really good graduate school and her newfound happiness and amazing sex with the wonderful, talented, magnificent Sergey.

“I’m concerned about one thing though,” Bob said.

Vica opened her eyes and stared at Bob. His intoxication seemed to have subsided. His expression was sharp, even severe.

“I do like your idea, man,” Bob said. “I fucking love it! But it won’t take. Not in the North American market at least. You see, Americans deal with mortality either by enforcing their Christian beliefs or by ignoring it. We don’t like to think about death. We prefer to think about more uplifting things, like prolonging life or making it better. That’s the way it is. Sorry, man.” He sighed and reached under the table for another bottle.

“Vadik, tell your friend not to be upset,” Sejun said from the darkness of the screen.

“He’ll live,” Vadik said.

Was that it? Did Bob mean it was over? Vica thought. Over? Just like that? No, it couldn’t be over!

“No!” she screamed. “Our app is not about death! It’s about immortality, not death. Immortality. Sergey, tell Bob about immortality. Immortality is uplifting. Sergey, tell this to Bob! Tell Bob! Tell him!”

She jerked her foot and kicked Regina’s wineglass on the floor. The wine spilled all over Vadik’s newly waxed floor. They all threw their napkins over the puddle, and Vadik stomped on the pile of napkins with his foot as if trying to extinguish a fire. They all seemed to be avoiding looking at her. Sergey too. Especially Sergey.

“Sergey!” she screamed.

“You know what app would be really cool?” he said without looking at anybody in particular. “An app where you could press a button and turn somebody’s volume down. Like you do with the TV, only with a real live person. Imagine a dinner party and everybody’s talking, but there is this one person that you just wish would shut up. So you point your device at that person — you can do it under the table discreetly — and lower her volume. Everybody else can hear her fine, and you can hear everybody else but her. Now wouldn’t that be a dream?”

They all started to laugh. Not at the same time though. Vadik was the first with his series of chuckles. Then Bob with his hoarse hooting. Then Regina joined in, but with her it was not one hundred percent clear if she was laughing or crying. But Sejun was definitely laughing and her laugh was the happiest. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying, “it’s just so funny. Too funny. I want that app.”

Vica hated their laughter right away; she recognized it as disgusting, but it took her a moment to realize that they were all looking at her and laughing at her.

She turned away from them, stepped over the bunched-up napkins, and walked toward Vadik’s bedroom.

“No, no, don’t,” she heard Sergey say, “she’ll be fine. She just needs to be alone for a minute.”

Do I? she wondered, stepping onto the terrace. Do I need to be alone?

The air had become significantly cooler. Vica was holding on to the last remnants of her drunkenness to keep herself warmer and less sad. She was lost. They all were. So thoroughly lost. Why couldn’t anybody think of an app for that? To help one find one’s way in life? She didn’t care about immortality. Fuck immortality! What she cared about was this short meager life that they had to live. Why couldn’t they think of an app to make it easier?

Vica looked out at the roofs of other buildings. They boasted tangled wires and broken tarps. Some had water towers, perched on clumsy legs. Others had chimneys clustered together yet bending away from one another like dysfunctional families. Yes, exactly like dysfunctional families. It was the sight of the chimneys that made her cry.

Before Sejun there was Rachel II, and before Rachel II there was the sane Sofia, and before the sane Sofia there was Catherine Jenkins, and before Catherine Jenkins there was Tania. Vadik had met all of them through Hello, Love!

Tania had used the face of Saga Norén as her profile picture. Saga Norén was a Swedish detective with Asperger’s from the Danish series Broen. Vadik didn’t really like Tania, but he loved Broen and Broen ’s quirky heroine, so every time he saw Tania, he imagined that he was really seeing Saga Norén.

Millie, Fosca, Teresa, the insane Sofia. He had met them on another dating site Match4U because the vastly superior Hello, Love! hadn’t been available yet. Match4U made it very difficult to read the insanity level of a person based on his or her profile. The insane Sofia had turned out to be a freelance doll-maker. She made tiny scary dolls with eyelashes and fingernails and silky pubic hair. Who would’ve thought that three-inch dolls with pubic hair were even possible? “Touch it, Vadik!” Sofia would insist. “Stroke it. See how soft it is?”

Or take DJ Toma, for example, who Vadik had also met on Match4U. DJ Toma said that she used to own the largest PR firm in all of western Siberia but had to flee Russia because of political persecution. When Vadik met her, she was working as a cleaning lady during the day and deejaying in an East Village club at night. In her spare time she was trying to set up a business selling ancient Siberian potions. In the four months that Toma lived in Vadik’s apartment in the Bronx, she managed to fill the entire fridge with different potions in labeled jars. The labels read: DIVINE INSPIRATION, GRACE, LOVE, HEALTHY HEART, STOMACH PROBLEMS, and A LOT OF MONEY. Sergey had been particularly interested in the last two. He kept asking Vadik if they worked. “I guess they do,” Vadik said. “I guess they do.” One day, while Vadik was at work, Toma poured most of her potions down the toilet, packed her things (and a few of Vadik’s things), and left. She wrote Vadik a note in which she said that she was going to Peru to find out if San Pedro was all that different from LSD. She’d bought a package trip that included a week of San Pedro tastings at the house of a real shaman. Vadik hadn’t heard from her since. There was a rumor that she had overdosed and died. But there was also another rumor that she had become the shaman’s manager and helped him expand his client base.