Still Here

Chapter 11: Bye Bye Love

No, Vadik wasn’t alarmed when he woke up and didn’t find Vica there. He was disappointed but not alarmed; he knew that she had to leave early to make it to work on time. The bathroom was still misty and fragrant after her shower and he found her freshly washed underpants hanging on the edge of the sink. The mere sight of them gave him a huge hard-on.

The kitchen had some traces of Vica’s presence as well. Some coffee left for him in the coffeemaker, a recently washed coffee mug and a spoon in the rack, a dollop of yogurt on the floor by the counter. He texted her: “How are you?” She replied almost right away: “Great! Thank you so much!”

Was she thanking him for fucking her? Or choosing to ignore the fucking and thanking him for letting her spend the night?

Both versions were disconcerting and painful.

He asked if he could see her. She texted that it was crazy at work, sending him into an agony of frustration. But then an hour later she offered to see him at lunch if he could come up there. He drank his coffee and went to his office in Dumbo, which seemed especially hideous that day.

Bob’s idea had been to furnish the office in an anti-Google way. He wanted conspicuously adult furniture with a cool modern feel. He adored Herman Miller pieces, which were elegant, sturdy, and expensive to the sight and touch.

Vadik sat down in his Aeron chair, thinking how much his ass hated the subtle curves of its seat, put his elbows on his glass-top desk, and started massaging his head. When he raised his eyes, he saw two flies moving across his computer screen. He made an instinctive movement to swat at them, but then remembered that they were part of the beautiful graphic design for their new project. They were deep into their work on the Dancing Drosophilae app. The new designer they hired offered to use the images of mating drosophilae just for fun. “Or, you know, whenever you find your genetic match, there would be a fly ‘hovering’ over your profile.” Both Bob and Laszlo thought this was brilliant. Now Vadik was in charge of embedding the flies’ movements into his script. The designer, whose name was Kieran, loved to make his life difficult. “Here, I made this little animation with the two flies tap-dancing together, let’s make sure it fits.” Making flies dance meant two more days of pointless idiotic work.

“Giddy-up, kids!” Laszlo yelled from his office. With Bob gone for a few weeks, Laszlo was in charge. Actually, Bob’s sudden departure was bizarre. He said that he had some urgent family business in Russia, that he was going there with his wife. Vadik had called and texted Regina several times, but she wouldn’t respond save for a brief note to let him know she was okay. They had never had a break in communication before. Regina’d acted so strangely at that team dinner back in February. He hoped she wasn’t having a nervous breakdown.

“Time to buckle down, pal!” Laszlo yelled to Vadik from his desk. Vadik made an effort to smile and peered into his screen with an expression of great concentration. Laszlo’s idea of leadership was to shower his employees with American idioms on the subject of hard work and devotion like “buckle down” or “dig in your heels” or “paddle your own canoe” that seemed to have been lifted from some out-of-date management manual. Vadik found himself unable to buckle down and just sat there staring into his screen and counting the minutes until he had to go meet Vica at a coffee shop on Fifty-third Street.

He arrived early and sat down on one of the squishy, slippery bar stools by the window. There she was, walking fast, almost running, crossing the street on the yellow light, waving to him, then opening the heavy door of the coffee shop. Panting, puffy-eyed, but radiant.

Vadik slid off the stool to give her a proper hug, but she squeezed past him and was up on her stool before he had a chance. They did kiss, and it was her kiss that told Vadik everything. Hurried and tense and trying so hard to pass for something friendly. He found everything about her embarrassingly stirring — her damp forehead, her forced smile, her sharp hospital smell — while she obviously didn’t want him at all, not even a little bit, and that was stirring too. It was over, whatever romantic history they had had together was over now, and it was as clear as day to Vadik, although not yet as clear to his dick. Oh, give up, will you! Vadik thought, addressing his inapt erection.

“So, how are you?” Vadik asked after they got their coffee and sandwiches.

“Much, much better!” Vica answered with her mouth full, then said that she had left her panties in Vadik’s bathroom. They hadn’t been dry and she had planned to stuff them into her bag, but she’d forgotten. She gave him an embarrassed smile that made him squirm.

She must have noticed his disappointment, so she started talking very fast, how she had been distraught last night and acting crazy, how she hoped that he wasn’t upset with her and that what had happened wouldn’t spoil their friendship.

Vadik rushed to assure her that he wasn’t upset in the least.

“Really?” Vica asked. “Good!”

She soon swerved to her favorite conversation topic: Sergey. Now she said that she had a plan to get him back and implored Vadik to listen carefully, because it was important for her to get a male perspective.

Is she really that insensitive? Vadik wondered. Or is this her way of telling me that we are back in the depths of the friend zone? This can’t be her revenge, can it? Because back then after their tryst on her Staten Island couch, it was Vadik who said that this was clearly a mistake. But no, he didn’t think so. Vica was tough, but she wasn’t malicious. It looked like she truly didn’t realize how much she was hurting him. He remembered how Sergey used to complain that Vica was emotionally obtuse.

“So I’m thinking something like this,” she was saying. “He comes to drop off Eric, right? And here I am, in my hottest outfit, but not like party-hot, more like casual-hot, or better yet homey-hot. A T-shirt and yoga pants? And I’ll have something on the stove, right? Warm, pleasant, homey atmosphere. And I’ll be kind and attentive to him. And hot. Like the best version of me, right?”

There was nothing Vadik could do but nod his head in support. Nod and nod and nod.

Luckily, Vica had only twenty minutes before she had to get back to the clinic.

Vadik endured the rest of the day in the office. Did all that was required of him. Fixed some lines of code. Wrote some new ones. Answered an e-mail from Bob. Discussed a few issues with Dev. Discussed a few issues with Laszlo. Said “Yes, sir!” to yet another “Buckle up.” Fixed some more lines of code. So what was he to do now? He didn’t know, but, fuck, how he wanted to swat those stupid flies on his screen! And God help them, if they started to dance, God help them then!

It took an eternity for the working day to be over. Vadik went home to his empty apartment, He was looking forward to a few ammonia-soaked seconds of inner peace that the act of peeing never failed to grant him, but the first thing he saw in his bathroom were Vica’s underpants hanging on the shower curtain rod. They were dry and stiff. He shoved them behind his large laundry hamper and peed quickly and without any pleasure.

He made himself a light dinner and ate it while browsing through Hello, Love! offerings.

There were some very attractive new faces. He went ahead and scheduled four dates in the next three days.

His best date was with a woman named Serena who worked as an adjunct professor at NYU. “What do you teach?” Vadik asked. “English,” she said with a shy smile, as if this was a frivolous and slightly embarrassing choice of profession. That smile made Vadik like her right away. He wasn’t that attracted to Serena, but she was nice and she seemed to get his jokes.

Later at home he studied her profile once more. Yep, it was witty and smart and brief, a bit too brief. He wanted to know more about her. He looked her up on Facebook. Her posts were mostly shares of op-eds from the New York Times, Salon, and Slate. She rarely commented on them, only if one of her friends asked her a specific question. Vadik looked at her photos. There were countless cityscapes, autumn leaves, and spring flowers. He skipped over them, hunting for actual photos of Serena. There she was in bulky skiing garb, red cheeks, wet bangs. And there she was at a party, adorably drunk. Serena in a Halloween costume — fake dark braids, short black dress with a white collar, chalk-white face. Vadik tried to guess who she was supposed to be. A schoolgirl with cancer? A schoolgirl who studied too hard? Nope, no clue. Not getting cultural references was his secret shame. You could pretend to fit in all you wanted, but you couldn’t truly fit in unless you understood Halloween costumes.

There was a nice photo from five years ago — Serena and two more girls posing on a white cliff overlooking a bright blue lake: “Lake Minnewaska reunion.” It was the same Lake Minnewaska where the sane Sofia had a membership to swim laps. Vadik smiled at the coincidence. All three girls in the photograph wore knitted hats and Windbreakers. Nice colors. Serena was in a yellow Windbreaker and a blue hat, the girl next to her all in green, and the last girl in a red Windbreaker and an orange hat — her light brown hair was sticking out from under the hat. There was something vaguely familiar about her face. He moved the mouse closer to her face to read the Facebook name tag. Rachel Meer. No, that didn’t ring a bell, he decided. Until suddenly it did. It rang a deafening bell. Rachel! The girl in the picture was Rachel. His Rachel. The one and only Rachel I.

He wanted to switch to Rachel’s page but was terrified to let go of that photo as if it were a mirage about to disappear. Rachel Meer. After years of searching, to stumble upon her just like that. It couldn’t be real, could it? He had to force himself to go to her page; his heart was beating wildly and his hands shook so badly that he missed the Enter button.

And finally there she was. Rachel Meer. Big black-and-white profile photo. Still so lovely. He braced himself before looking at her About page. He was almost sure she’d be married, but there was nothing about her relationship status. Well, that didn’t confirm or disprove his fears — not everyone shared details of their private lives on Facebook. She’d graduated from the CUNY Graduate Center and was working at Our City Books as a senior editor. How old was she now? Thirty? Thirty-two? Senior editor was impressive. Other than that her Facebook page told him nothing about Rachel’s life. Apparently, she only used it to push the books by Our City’s authors. She posted good reviews, press releases, and invitations to readings. There was a reading scheduled for this coming Friday. John Garmash would present his deeply haunting novel The Frozen Train. Rachel insisted that this would be a fun event—780 people were invited, 23 had confirmed that they would attend. The invite was public, which meant that she was inviting everybody, absolutely everybody, everybody including him. That’s how easy it was. All Vadik had to do was go to KGB Bar on the corner of Second Avenue and East Fourth Street at 7:00 P.M. this Friday, and he would see Rachel.

In the following days more and more reasons for anxiety accumulated, legitimate and not (Rachel could be married, her husband could be there, Rachel could be mad at him, he might not be able to summon up the courage to talk to her), until all of them were drowned out by his biggest fear — that Rachel wouldn’t recognize him, wouldn’t remember who he was. She would look at him and give him a blank stare, a polite, uncomprehending smile that would demolish the entire myth of the great love of his life. He wouldn’t be able to bear that. All Vadik’s efforts became focused on making it impossible for her not to recognize him. He would do his best to look exactly like he had that day. He found some photos of his first months in the U.S. There were a couple that Angie had taken, a waitress in Avenel. In most of them, he was wearing that horrible pretentious tweed jacket over ill-fitting jeans that he had bought in Istanbul. He had been wearing that jacket when he met Rachel, he was sure of it. The problem was that he no longer owned it. It was Sejun’s fault, because she had made fun of that jacket every time she had seen him in it. When he thought about it, Sejun had robbed him of many things dear to his heart — to name just a few: his jacket, his futon, and his best friend. The hell with Sejun! He went and bought himself a very similar tweed jacket in a great secondhand store on Bedford Avenue. He tried it on — it looked perfect, just as ridiculous as in that photo. His body and his face hadn’t changed that much in eight years. He hadn’t gained much weight. He was starting to calm down when a new panicky thought hit him. His beard! He went through so many beard/no-beard periods that he couldn’t remember if he had had one back when he first came to the U.S. In that Avenel picture he had had a beard, but a very closely trimmed one. It could have been a new one that he’d decided to grow, or it could have been the mutilated remains of an old one. He looked in the mirror — he had a nice lush beard now, but it might make him unrecognizable. Vadik sat down and closed his eyes, trying to focus and remember if he had had a beard on his first day in the United States. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. There were only two people who would possibly remember that: Sergey and Vica. Well, he wasn’t speaking to Sergey and he really didn’t want to ask Vica. He finally decided that he would have a compromise beard. He went to a barber and asked him to trim his beard as closely as possible. The nudity of the face that met Vadik in the mirror after the barber was done filled him with a new wave of anxiety, but what was done was done.

On Friday, he began dressing about two hours earlier than necessary. He just wanted to make sure that his second-time-around jacket went well with his compromise beard. They looked okay. He took the L train to Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, then walked down ten blocks to Fourth, turned west toward the blue neon letters spelling out KGB, and walked the one flight up to the bar. It was only six forty-five. The bar was nearly empty. He ordered a beer and sat down at a dark slippery table in the corner. There were numerous portraits of Lenin staring at him from the red walls. Red Soviet flags. A wartime poster with the angry red woman raising her arm in the air to demand that he give his life for the Motherland. This poster had been in a museum in his hometown. It had been displayed next to a glass case with empty shells in it. The red woman was supposed to be the Motherland or EveryMother. He remembered being scared shitless when he saw the poster for the first time when he was a child. And yet somebody found it cool enough to display in a bar. Vadik was on his second beer when the writer, a tall, pudgy man in a sweat-stained shirt, squeezed behind the podium and cleared his throat into the mike to signal that he was about to start. There were a few more people there now. But no Rachel. Vadik tried to listen to the writer. He couldn’t understand a single word. The writer was sweating even more profusely. He had to wipe his forehead and his nose with the back of his hand. His hands were shaking, making the typewritten pages he was holding quiver and rustle. There were times when he had trouble understanding his own text and had to apologize and reread a sentence. He couldn’t have been a good writer, could he? But what if he was? What if he was an unrecognized genius who couldn’t bear reading aloud in public?

Vadik picked up one of the books stacked on the adjacent table for sale and signing. The Frozen Train. Vadik opened it to page one and read a couple of sentences. He hadn’t had that much experience reading fiction in English, so he knew that he wouldn’t be able to form a trustworthy opinion, but he liked what he read. The prose was dense, with a thorough absence of clarity, no clearings, no cracks that would allow even the thinnest ray of light, no loopholes, no compromises. You had to respect the guy. Vadik raised his eyes from the book and met Rachel’s quizzical stare. She was sitting just two tables away from him. She must have walked in while he was reading and taken a seat somebody had saved for her. She looked away as soon as their eyes met and fixed her gaze on the writer. There was no way to tell if she recognized him or not. She looked plainer than in her photographs, much plainer than he had remembered. But he experienced a shock of recognition so great that his whole body contracted in a painful spasm. There was Rachel. His own Rachel. And the whole bar started to crumple. The writer’s voice turned to a distorted drone. The Communist posters blended with the walls. The people turned into blurry figures. There was only Rachel. Sitting as if in a vacuum. Excruciatingly real, unbearably close. So close that he thought he could see her heart beat under her thin white sweater with some sort of ridiculous leather appliqué across the front.

She didn’t look at him once. The reading ended and she stood up, raised her hands above her head, and gave the writer tensely enthusiastic applause. Other people started to clap too. The writer inched from behind the podium to the table where he was supposed to sign books. A young red-headed girl arranged the books in a beautiful pyramid, then put a pen and a glass of water next to it. She looked over at Vadik and saw that he was holding a copy of The Frozen Train. “Do you want to purchase the book, sir?” she asked. “It’s twenty-five dollars.”

Vadik reached for his wallet, gave the girl two crumpled twenties, and turned to search for Rachel. She was still at the same table talking to a whole bunch of people, nodding eagerly. “Do you want me to sign it?” the writer asked. He was drinking water from the glass and it was dripping down his neck into the opening of his shirt. “Yes, please,” Vadik said.

“Your name?” the writer asked.

“Vadim.”

“Spelling?”

Vadik paused. He couldn’t remember.

“Just sign it, please,” he said to the writer, and the writer shrugged and made a fat, ugly doodle in the middle of the title page.

“Here’s your change, sir,” the bookseller said, handing Sergey a wad of bills.

Rachel was still talking to those people. Vadik decided that it would be best if he approached her outside. He would come up to her as she exited the bar and introduce himself. It was unlikely that she would be alone. He would still go and talk to her. He would ask her for a drink. There was no plan B.

People were exiting the bar in groups. Chatting, laughing, discussing plans for the evening. They had no idea how irrelevant they all were. Vadik kept looking at the door.

He expected to see her in about twenty minutes or so. She appeared in three. Alone. Wearing a blue raincoat. She stopped on the top step, took a beret out of her bag, put it on, and headed down the steps.

“Rachel,” he said, stepping forward. It sounded too coarse and was barely audible. “Rachel,” he said again. She stopped and looked at him. She was a few steps above the ground, so their eyes were on the same level. She reacted with the polite uncomprehending smile that he had anticipated and feared. But then almost immediately she gasped and said, “Oh!” She walked the few steps down and looked up at him. “Vladimir, isn’t it?”

He hadn’t expected this. He had expected her not to remember his name at all, but to use another name? And a Russian name at that. Like he was just some random Russian guy with some random Russian name.

“Vadik,” Vadik said.

She crinkled her nose in embarrassment. “Right! I’m sorry!”

That bulky beret looked ugly on her. He could see that she had aged a little bit. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which made her look strangely exposed, unprotected. There were sharp lines as if separating her mouth from her cheeks. And her beautiful amber eyes looked even brighter, highlighted by the dark circles underneath. She kept touching her lips, kneading them with the knuckles of her fingers. He couldn’t remember if that was something she had done back then.

“I enjoyed the reading,” Vadik said, pointing to the book under his arm.

“Thank you! I thought it went very well too. And thank you for buying the book! I’m John’s editor, you know. Do you like his work?”

Vadik said that even though he hadn’t read that much of Garmash’s work, he admired how there weren’t any compromises, no deference to public demands. Not a lot of people were brave enough to write like that anymore.

Rachel was nodding eagerly. She seemed to warm to Vadik a little bit. Now was his chance to ask her for a drink. He made a huge effort to quiet his twitchy heart and did just that.

“Well, it would have to be a very quick drink, then,” she said. “I have to be home by ten.”

Vadik didn’t know any nice places in the neighborhood. He was kicking himself for not having done any research on the neighborhood before the reading.

“This one looks okay,” Rachel said, pointing to a bar next door.

They went in, winced at the loud fifties music, and walked to a table in the quietest corner. Rachel ordered a glass of wine, Vadik a beer, and by the time they finished them, they managed to exchange all the important facts about their lives. Rachel was lucky to get an internship at Random House right after she graduated, and even luckier to get a permanent position in a year. Then one of the senior editors left to open her own house and took Rachel with her. She was paid next to nothing, but she loved her job. His own job was too materialistic, Bob’s applications too silly. There wasn’t any existential meaning in Dancing Drosophilae whatsoever. Its main purpose was to advertise more genetic testing for medical companies. And, anyway, his position at Bob’s company was too low.

He said that he was a partner in a start-up that was developing an amazing application. It would allow you to keep your online voice after you died. And not just an online voice, but the very essence of a person. Because where else could we find our essence nowadays? Social media.

Rachel seemed to be impressed. She said that it must be very challenging.

“It is challenging,” Vadik said, “but if you get some excellent programmers and team them up with some excellent linguists, it’s very doable.”

He wondered if he should mention Fyodorov, then thought better of it. He said that it had been Shakespeare’s Hamlet that had given him the idea.

“Hamlet?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “ ‘The rest is silence.’ ”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” she said, “Hamlet. You probably know the whole thing by heart too.”

Vadik detected a mocking note in her tone, but that could have been his paranoia. As a matter of fact, he did remember quite a few passages from Hamlet in Pasternak’s translation.

To change the subject, he said that he lived in Williamsburg now. He loved the neighborhood.

Rachel lived in Greenpoint. With her fiancé, Peter, a journalist. They were getting married in May. This bit of news didn’t shock Vadik. Rachel’s demeanor had already told Vadik that she was either married or in a serious relationship. It was as if she was wearing a T-shirt with huge letters on it spelling out TAKEN on the front. Vadik felt a desperate need to lie that he used to have a fiancée as well.

He mentioned Sejun and said that she had left him for his best friend.

“That sucks,” Rachel said, but she didn’t appear to be as moved as he’d hoped she’d be.

Vadik recognized the song that was playing now: “Bye Bye Love.” How fitting, he thought. How cheesy, but how fitting.

Rachel checked her messages and said that they had time for another drink.

It was only then that they started talking about that day. Both remembered it well, but they differed on the details. Rachel didn’t remember the smell of chlorine in the diner or that there was a homeless man sleeping in the corner. She didn’t remember that it was snowing. She didn’t remember her angry rant about Leonard Cohen. She laughed when Vadik quoted some of it. Vadik didn’t remember that there was some change jiggling in his pocket all the way to Rachel’s place. She found two quarters on the bedroom floor after he left. He didn’t remember the dog (Kibbles was his name) who came and sniffed him by the entrance to Rachel’s building. “You said something in Russian to the dog.” He didn’t remember that Rachel wasn’t asleep when he left. She heard him moving in the other room and called for him. He didn’t answer. He said that he couldn’t hear her.

He asked her to forgive him.

She said, “No! There was nothing to forgive!” Her protest was so violent that she almost knocked her wineglass over.

She said that their encounter had been wonderful for her in every sense. She had had just one boyfriend all through college. He had dumped her a few months before she came to New York City to study. She was still reeling from her breakup, and everybody told her that dating in New York was brutal. She was a quiet bookish girl from the Midwest — she didn’t know if she could handle it. Her roommate told her: “Just have your first horrible one-night stand, so everything that comes after will seem better.”

Is that what I was? Vadik thought. Her first horrible one-night stand?

“And I thought no, I can’t possibly do that. To be naked with a complete stranger? To touch a stranger’s private parts? To let him touch mine? But then I decided that it was something I had to do. To prove myself or something. It was like going down a double-diamond trail. Or like skydiving.”

He could see how that second drink was affecting her, making her looser or, as a Russian expression had it, “untying her tongue.”

“And there you were. Tall. Foreign. In your ridiculous professor’s jacket. With your Sartre! I couldn’t believe somebody would be reading Sartre in a diner. With your English poetry in Russian. The fact that you were so bizarre made the whole thing much easier. It was like having sex with some eccentric literary character, not with a person. I wasn’t scared or intimidated.”

Okay, Vadik thought.

“And then the sex turned out to be surprisingly good. Tense, awkward, of course, but also so much better than I’d expected.”

She reached for her wineglass, but it was empty, so she finished her water in a couple of gulps.

“I mean, it was a bit hurtful when you left without saying good-bye, but I thought that this was a necessary part of the experience. A one-night stand is called that for a reason. You need that moment of pain in order to feel really free and unencumbered.”

There was no need to explain himself now. Still, Vadik felt that he had to say something.

“It was my first day in America. I didn’t know what I was doing. I really didn’t.”

Rachel nodded and looked at her phone again.

“Where are you going?” Vadik asked when they exited the bar.

“Home. Greenpoint,” she said.

“Let’s share a cab,” he said. “I’ll get out in Williamsburg, and you’ll continue to Greenpoint.”

She nodded.

In the cab, Vadik immediately felt carsick, and he knew from experience that it was best not to talk when you felt nauseous, but he had to tell Rachel the truth. He thought it was crucial that somebody besides him knew what she had really meant to him.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “All these years. I didn’t know your last name. I didn’t know your address. I couldn’t even remember where that diner was. I would come to the city every weekend and just go to the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue and walk downtown, swerving down the side streets hoping to find that diner.”

She was now looking right at him and it was hard to take, he had to turn away.

“It was only years later that I discovered Missed Connections, and I posted hundreds of inquiries about you. And then I found you on Facebook. By pure accident. I was browsing through a friend’s photos and saw you in one of them. Her name is Serena Geller.”

“Yes,” Rachel said, “Serena. We were in grad school together.”

All this talking was making Vadik’s nausea unbearable.

“Do you mind if I crack open the window?” he asked.

She shook her head. He might have been mistaken, but he thought he saw tears in her eyes.

They were approaching the bridge. The wind from the river whooshed right into his ear. He fought a painful spasm in his chest and continued.

“I went and stalked you on Facebook. That’s how I knew about the reading. So I just went there, hoping to see you. I’d never heard of John Garmash before. I’m glad I bought the book though.” He pointed to it in his lap.

Rachel reached over and stroked the cover with her fingers. “I had no idea,” she said.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip, but as the cab was approaching Williamsburg, Rachel tapped Vadik on the hand and said, “You know that name I called you, Vladimir? I had thought of it years ago. I thought that if I ever saw you again I would call you by some Russian name. A different Russian name. As if you were some random Russian dude who didn’t matter. I was so proud of myself that I didn’t lose my cool at the last moment, that I did call you Vladimir.”

Her voice kept breaking as she talked.

“I mean, how stupid we all are!”

And then it was Vadik’s stop.

“Can I ride with you to Greenpoint?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Vadik paid the full fare plus twenty bucks extra for Rachel, then got out of the car.

The cab started to pull away. Rachel was looking at him through the window, then as the car sped up, she abruptly turned away.

Vadik followed the car with his eyes for as long as he could, until it merged with the other bright yellow spots on the road and disappeared behind the buildings. He kept staring ahead until it seemed that the streets and the buildings were moving too, moving away from him, getting smaller and smaller, merging with the horizon.

He had come to this city in pursuit of happiness, and the city had in fact offered him happiness on his very first day here, but he had been too stupid and too blind to recognize it.

Vadik was desperate to share this revelation with his friends, but did he even have friends anymore? Sergey wasn’t speaking to him, Vica had just dumped him, and Regina wasn’t answering his messages. Even the virtual friends he had on social media tended to ignore his posts. He imagined telling the Rachel story to some brand-new friends in some new city and perhaps even a new country, because, boy, was he done with this one!

He went home and shot a message to his headhunter asking her to find him a position in some faraway place.