Still Here

Chapter 12: Cheat It! Screw It!

Sergey imagined that Goebbels would be fat, but he turned out to be skinny, mean, and half-blind. “No, no, Goering was the fat one,” his new neighbor, Helen, explained. Helen had a history degree but worked as a receptionist at a beauty salon. Her apartment was on the fifth floor too, and just as tiny as Goebbels’s. Helen was a divorcée who shared a one-bedroom apartment with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Teena. Teena, a pale, pudgy girl, was always there, mostly hiding out in the bedroom. Helen slept on the sofa separated from the rest of the living room by tall bookshelves. She took a liking to Sergey and often invited him over for a drink. She confessed that she hated Goebbels’s owner because he was so rude to her and Teena. But she loved, loved, loved the cat! She also said that she didn’t get the concept of online dating and would have loved to just meet a guy on the street and go home with him. Sergey had the sense that she would have liked for their relationship to be more romantic or at least more sexual, and he was attracted to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to act. Helen was a robust Nibelungen blonde who spoke in a low voice and smelled of artisanal soaps she kept in a basket in her bathroom — Sergey’s favorite were lavender harvest and lemon tea. She would invite him to watch Netflix and sit next to him on the couch, leaning closer and closer, tickling his neck with her hair, making his penis all but bounce in his pants, causing him to perspire from desire and panic. For all these years, having sex had meant having sex with Vica. He had had just two relationships since his separation, one was with an electronic voice of the GPS and the other was via Skype. The idea of touching, let alone penetrating, a real live woman terrified him. He confided this to Vadik back when they were still talking, but Vadik just shook his head. “It’s not supposed to be like that, man! A new woman is exciting, with her new smell, and all these unexplored little nooks on her body.” Sergey knew that he should just take the plunge and have sex with Helen, but something stopped him every single time.

They did become friends though, a friendship mostly based on cat-care help and oversharing of their marital troubles. Helen once saw a huge Facebook photo of Vica open on Sergey’s laptop. The caption read: “Enjoying sangria in the East Village. Could be worse .”

“That’s my wife,” Sergey explained, blushing. “Ex-wife. We’re separated.”

“She’s pretty, but kind of angry looking,” Helen said. Sergey proceeded to spill out all his grievances with Vadik and Vica and his suspicion that they might have slept together some years back. Helen said that the suspicion was probably well-founded, because she too had cheated on her ex-husband with his best friend. Teena knew about it and hated her for it.

“This is the guy who takes care of Goebbels.” Helen introduced him to Teena.

“Sergey,” Sergey said.

“Sir what?” Teena asked. “Sir Gay?” And she curtsied, laughing.

A few minutes later Sergey overheard some hushed parenting in the kitchen.

“What did we talk about, Teena? Huh? What did we talk about? We don’t make homophobic jokes in this household!”

“I wasn’t being homophobic. It’s just that his accent is superfunny.”

“Teena! We don’t make immigrant jokes either.”

It took Teena about two weeks to stop rolling her eyes every time she passed Sergey on the stairs. In three weeks she warmed up to him enough to start calling him “Sergio.”

It took Goebbels about the same amount of time to stop attacking Sergey in dark corners and biting him on the ankles. It was then that Sergey decided that he loved the apartment. Technically it was a one-bedroom, but the living room was used mostly for storage. The guy must have had a thing for antiques — the room was crammed with old musical instruments, mostly string, with the addition of a few brasses. Sergey had to spend most of the time in the dark bedroom, where the only window was half blocked by the A/C and which he had to share with Goebbels and his enormous cat tree. He learned to appreciate the apartment though, once he realized how nice it was to live by himself for a change. He could do whatever he wanted without worrying that he would upset, annoy, or disappoint someone.

Within three weeks Sergey finished his prototype and started revising his pitch. He debated whether to include Vica’s “prehumous” option and finally decided to do it. All the marketing manuals advised making his potential customer base as wide as possible, and considering the growing number of people concerned about their online legacy, Vica’s idea served that purpose really well. The next step was to learn how to submit it to investors. He shelled out a hefty sum of money for a three-hour online class and followed the teacher’s suggestions to the letter. His pitch turned out to be quite good: accessible, persuasive, detailed but not overly specific, peppered with power verbs and appealing visual images. He e-mailed it to the teacher, and he seemed to be impressed. “Yep, that’s pretty solid,” he wrote back. Sergey did wonder if this was an automatic reply that he sent to all his students.

Then Sergey proceeded to submit his application and the written pitch to ARC Angel Fund NYC, Life Sciences Angel Network, New York Angels, Astia Angels, SNK Investments, Tribeca Angels, Golden Seeds, and Gaingels Syndicate.

He got no replies.

“Are you kidding me?” Helen said when Sergey wondered why he hadn’t heard anything yet. “I don’t have a fancy MBA like you do, but even I know that blind submissions never work! You have to use your personal contacts.”

That was what his online teacher kept saying too. Use personal contacts, networking, and crowdfunding. But he warned his students that crowdfunding wouldn’t work unless you had a very strong online presence. Sergey’s online presence was virtually nonexistent. And he didn’t have any personal contacts.

“Oh, come on! One of your friends from your business school?” Helen asked. Sergey shook his head. He didn’t keep in touch with any of his business-school classmates.

Later, in bed, with Goebbels curled up at his feet, Sergey considered what other personal contacts he might have. He had worked for large banks and investment firms for many years, yet his only contacts were his bosses, the bosses who had fired him, the bosses who had thought that he lacked “skills, spirit, drive.” He could’ve used Vadik’s help, but they weren’t talking. Then there were Bob and Regina, but Bob had never liked him, and Sergey couldn’t endure yet another humiliation from Regina, who kept avoiding him after his separation from Vica as if he had the plague.

There was Sejun. She had offered to introduce him to a great investor, but asking Sejun would be awkward to the point of revulsion. He was still very angry with himself for starting that stupid, pathetic Skype affair with her. He didn’t miss Sejun, but he did miss Vadik. They had never gone without talking to each other for more than a couple of days before. Every so often, while Sergey browsed through Facebook, he would look at the right side of his page and see the green light next to Vadik’s name and be tempted to shoot him a brief message. He would stop short of that every time.

His remaining business contact was his former schoolmate from his university, Alexey Kuzmin. According to Facebook, he had recently moved to New Jersey and was involved in some kind of shady entrepreneurial scheme. They hadn’t seen each other more than a few times since they graduated, but Kuzmin liked to engage Sergey in Facebook chats, the sole purpose of which was to brag about his superrich friends in Russia and the United States.

Sergey started with Kuzmin. Called him up, endured chitchat about health and family. Kuzmin inquired about “that very pretty wife of yours,” said that he was so sorry that they had separated! Then he said that he was still married to his first wife, even though he could afford a younger and much prettier woman now. “I guess that’s called love, man,” he said. “I guess,” Sergey replied. He then told Kuzmin about his app. Vica had told him to be careful when pitching — she was afraid that somebody would steal his idea. Helen said the same thing. He thought they were both paranoid, but this Kuzmin was definitely sketchy, so Sergey tried to be as vague as possible.

“Hmm,” Kuzmin said, “virtual immortality, huh? So you’re looking for investors?” Sergey confirmed that he was. “I’ll have to think about it and call you back. You’ll definitely hear from me, man. I can promise you that.” They hung up. Sergey thought that it was pretty clear that he’d never hear from Kuzmin again.

He made an enormous effort and e-mailed Sejun. He received a swift, brief, businesslike reply. Yes, she would be happy to introduce him to her good friend, James Kisco.

Sergey googled the name and found out that James Kisco was one of the original investors in Vine, Airbnb, and Eat’n’Watch. He also turned out to be thirty-two, good-looking, and surprisingly easy to reach. James’s assistant sounded cordial, said that they had been expecting his call, and scheduled a “breakfast meeting” at their New York office within a week.

Sergey asked Helen and Teena to listen while he read his pitch aloud, because he wasn’t sure how to pronounce certain words like radial, infatuated, or neither.

“You look very handsome when you pitch,” Helen said after Sergey’s first attempt. “Doesn’t he look just like Gregory Peck, Teena?”

“Who?” Teena asked.

“Gregory Peck? To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“Oh, right!” Teena said. “He does. Like a short and Jewish Gregory Peck.”

“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?”

Sergey had no idea what to say to that. He wasn’t sure if James told this story to imply that he liked Sergey’s pitch or that he hated it.

“That’s scary,” he said.

“Yes!” James agreed. “That’s fucking terrifying. You know what my shrink once said to me? ‘Death is not what it used to be.’ He’s a funny guy, my shrink is. His specialty is tech entrepreneurs.”

Cleo cleared her throat. Both James and Sergey turned to look. The wall now had large prints of dandelions with seeds flying away toward the corner.

“I’m sorry, James,” she said. “Do you want me to put up the flowers on the other wall too?”

“Not right now, Cleo. I want to see how I feel about the dandelions first.”

Cleo shrugged and went to sit on the ottoman next to James. She took a half-eaten dosa out of the bag and took a small bite.

“We just wanted something fun and uplifting for the office,” she explained to Sergey.

Sergey doubted that dying dandelions were uplifting, but then he never claimed to understand visual art.

“So back to your app,” James said. “What exactly do you want from me?”

“M-money,” Sergey said.

James and Cleo laughed.

“I get that. How much?” James asked.

Everybody said that you should be very specific about the amount of money you were asking for, and Sergey had prepared financial information to go along with his pitch, but asking for a specific amount still struck Sergey as rude. He dove in anyway.

“Well, I need a million to develop it properly, but, I guess, not right away. Maybe three or four hundred grand to start?”

There was another communal chuckle, to which Sergey reacted with another painful spasm in his stomach.

“No,” James said, “that’s not how you do it. You have to ask for an exact amount. And you have to sound confident, even arrogant. Even if you’re shitting your pants — act like a dick!”

Sergey stared at him in confusion.

“That was the problem with your entire pitch,” James said. “Lack of confidence. Didn’t you think so, Cleo?”

“Totally,” she said and took another delicate bite.

“You’re this brilliant guy with a brilliant idea, right?”

Am I? Sergey thought.

“You have to learn how to sell yourself. You graduated from NYSB, that’s good, I guess, but not superimpressive. Then you say that you’ve been working on Wall Street, but it doesn’t get you very far, does it? Who hasn’t worked there? And the fact that you’ve never got promoted past a junior position doesn’t sound very good either. But if you say that you’re a brilliant Russian linguist who also happens to have an MBA, that sounds much yummier.”

It does sound good, Sergey thought. It had been years since he thought of his Ph.D. in linguistics as anything but useless.

“Now that you’ve interested me in your person, sell me your idea. The best way to do it is to appeal to my FOMO.”

Sergey tried to guess what that was. Did he miss this term in business school?

“Look, Cleo, this guy here doesn’t know what FOMO is.”

“James, Sergey’s an immigrant!” Cleo said. “Give him a break!”

“Okay, point taken. FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out, is the most powerful tool of manipulation right now. Years ago, a guy approached me with this idea for a new social media platform where your posts would be limited to 140 characters. I said no, that’s stupid. Why would I want to read people’s random shit? Now I feel like an ass!”

“Twitter’s stock is up about 133 percent from its IPO price of twenty-six dollars,” Cleo said with a pensive expression, a small piece of dosa still in her hand.

“See what I mean?” James asked Sergey.

Sergey pondered FOMO. It did sound like a viable manipulation tool, but his app was so much more than that. He offered to conquer the ultimate fear — the fear of death — not the pathetic anxiety of somebody else making a profit.

“Your next step is to persuade me that people have an urgent need for your app. Cleo? How do we appeal to the need?”

It wasn’t clear to Sergey if James was involving her to teach her how to make a successful pitch or to actually ask for her advice.

“Cleo here is a graduate of Wharton. No shit, huh?” he said to Sergey.

Cleo swallowed whatever she still had in her mouth and wiped her lips, looking pensive.

“You say something like this,” she started. “Our generation is the first one that has two lives: real and virtual. So far nobody knows what to do about our digital legacy after we die. Do we erase it? Do we allow it to remain active? Do we protect it from being overtaken? We know one thing: We can’t just let it fend for itself!”

“Perfect!” James said, staring at Sergey. “You appealed to my Jeff Ufberg situation. I’m hooked. Now you offer me your solution. Cleo?”

“Sure,” she said and stared at Sergey too. “Using my unique knowledge of linguistic algorithms, I can build an application that would allow us to preserve and re-create the voice of any Internet user, rendering him or her virtually immortal.”

Sergey marveled at how Cleo managed to effortlessly combine his and Vica’s ideas.

“Bingo!” James said. “And then after you’ve shown how huge and exciting this is, you ask me: ‘Are you in? Because if you’re not, you’re going to fucking regret it!’ ”

Sergey shifted in his seat. He was impressed. He had never felt more enthusiastic about Virtual Grave. He was finally sold on his own idea.

“You’re in then?” he managed to ask.

Cleo stood up, picked up the takeout bag from the table, and went to throw it in the garbage.

James looked away and exhaled. “No, Sergey, I’m not. And here’s why. Your project is just a little too visionary, too ahead of its time. I’m really impressed with you, man. But to be honest, I don’t see how it can make a lot of money. Sorry, pal.”

James stood up and offered his hand. Sergey didn’t have a choice but to stand up too. They shook hands. Then Cleo appeared at his side and led Sergey through the assembly labyrinth to the exit.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She had to shout to be heard over all the construction noise. “I really, really liked your idea!”

On the way back, the subway train was much roomier. Sergey pushed away a crumpled McDonald’s bag and stretched in the seat at the back of the train. He realized he wasn’t upset. Getting funding from James Kisco would have been too unreal, too good to be true, so it was only natural that Kisco had turned him down. But he seemed to genuinely like his idea. He did! He wouldn’t have wasted his time teaching Sergey how to pitch it if he hadn’t. And when he said that he didn’t see how Virtual Grave could make money, he meant huge money, Twitter, Uber, Eat’n’Watch kind of money, James Kisco money, celebrity money. Sergey didn’t need any of that. What he needed was to earn just enough so that he didn’t have to feel like a failure, didn’t have to work at a job that he did so badly at that it hurt. Just enough money to regain the respect of his family and friends. Nobody said that Virtual Grave couldn’t generate that kind of money. And James and Cleo did give him a very good pitch. Sergey took out a notebook and a pen from his pocket and wrote down the lines of the pitch: “Are you in? Because if you’re not, you’re going to fucking regret it!”

Sergey closed the notebook and smiled. Upset? No. He actually felt pretty good.

He got home, took a shower, and was making lunch for Goebbels and himself when he got a call from Kuzmin.

“I have the perfect guy for you. Perfect!” Kuzmin screamed into the phone. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of him right away. My good friend Dima Kotov!”

Sergey tried to sound impressed, but since he didn’t know who Kotov was, it was hard.

“Oh, come on, man. Kotov? He’s rich. Insanely rich. He’s been on and off the list of the hundred richest men in Russia. And he’s way into the immortality business. He has a good life, so good that it’s understandable that he doesn’t want for it to end. Kotov is fifty-two and for the last few years he’s been looking to invest in whatever will help him live longer. He’s built this huge high-tech yoga gym and a chain of health food stores. He’s bought a whole fleet of medical-testing equipment along with some Swiss doctors to run the tests. He’s invested in cryonics. He shelled out ten million to NYU for a research grant on longevity just a few weeks ago. There’s a whole team of scientists working on the longevity formula. As far as I understand it, the secret to the formula is to up the dosage on multivitamins.”

Sergey felt as if Kuzmin’s lustful spit was flying from the telephone right into his ear. He moved the phone away. Now Kuzmin’s screaming reached Goebbels, who didn’t seem at all happy about it. Sergey stroked him behind the ears and asked: “So you really think he’d be interested?”

“That I can’t promise you, man. Kotov’s unpredictable. But we should definitely set up a talk. I got in touch with his assistant. He happens to be on his ranch in Costa Rica now, then before going back to Russia he’s going to spend a few days in New York. I guess we should pounce, man.”

“Let’s pounce,” Sergey said.

The meeting with Kotov was to be a “breakfast meeting” too. They set the time — nine — and the place — Kotov’s New York apartment on Eighty-sixth and Central Park West. Kuzmin suggested that they meet by the entrance so that they could go up to the apartment together. Sergey arrived five minutes early and had to stand leaning on the blue mailbox across from the building, while Kotov’s doorman eyed him suspiciously. Kuzmin arrived in a business suit and Sergey wondered if he had made a huge mistake wearing jeans and a sweater. “What is that?” Kuzmin asked, pointing at Sergey’s computer bag.

“My laptop, in case Kotov wants to see how it actually works.”

“Trust me, he won’t.”

The lobby of the building didn’t look as grand as he’d imagined. He thought that Bob and Regina’s place was more impressive, and the doorman here wasn’t nearly as imposing as theirs. Another thing that surprised Sergey was that he wasn’t all that anxious. Kuzmin, on the other hand, appeared to be a nervous wreck. He stuttered, he stumbled, he even farted while they were riding the elevator. Sergey pretended that he didn’t notice.

A puffy Uzbek woman in her fifties opened the door for them. She was wearing a long bright green tunic and wide pants underneath it.

“Hurry up!” she said when Sergey hesitated before entering — he couldn’t decide if he should remove his dirty shoes. “Hurry up! I have kasha on the stove.”

She led them into a spacious but drab living room, pointed to the gray sofa, and told them to sit down. “He will see you,” she said before retreating to the kitchen. Sergey noted that she didn’t add “soon” or “in a moment” to that sentence.

“He doesn’t use the place that often,” Kuzmin whispered in an attempt to justify the lack of glamour.

The only bright feature of the living room was the magnificent view of Central Park from the window. Sergey stood up to see it better, but Kuzmin hissed at him: “She told us to sit down.” His eyes were shiftier than ever, and he was visibly sweating and exuding a barely noticeable stench, as if something inside him had started to rot. Sergey sat down and listened to the faint sounds of the shower. Finally, the water stopped and they heard the loud bang of the bathroom door, and a few moments later Kotov appeared in the living room.

He was barefoot, wearing loose linen pants and a white cotton sweater, his short light brown hair wet from the shower. He smelled of something very expensive.

Sergey was surprised to find that Kotov was delicately built.

He shook hands and sat down across from them in a low armchair. He had an unusual face with thin lips, pointy ears, sharply defined cheekbones, and slanted gray eyes. The eyes of a bobcat, Sergey thought. He fixed his stare on both of them and seemed to be reading them carefully. His expression was tense, alert, wary. A protruding zigzaggy vein kept throbbing in his right temple.

The Uzbek woman walked in and sidled up to Kotov with a tray that held a single glass filled with thick yellow juice. “Orange mango,” she said. Kotov drained the juice, wiped his lips, and kissed her dark swollen hand.

“Thank you, darling,” he said with stifled affection in his voice.

She leaned in and kissed him on the top of his head with a fierce proprietary expression.

“Dinara used to be my nanny,” Kotov said after she had retreated into the kitchen. “I was ten and she was fifteen.”

“Was that your entire breakfast?” Kuzmin said with a stupid chuckle.

“I’ll have kasha when it’s ready.” He turned to the kitchen and yelled, “Dinara, how much longer?”

“Ten minutes,” she yelled back.

“Ten minutes,” Kotov said. “That should be enough for your pitch.”

“Plenty,” Sergey said. No, he wasn’t nervous. Not even a little bit. Probably because he wasn’t hoping to succeed. He was enjoying how calm he was, confident, arrogant. Arrogant was good, wasn’t it?

He managed to keep calm throughout the pitch, even though it was getting increasingly obvious that Kotov wasn’t and wouldn’t be interested. He kept scratching his neck, glancing toward the window, and checking his reflection in the gleaming surface of his Rolex. He wasn’t stirred by the beauty of Fyodorov’s philosophy. He wasn’t even a little impressed by the quote from Hamlet. It was clear that the rest would indeed be silence. That is, if Sergey didn’t come up with a new explosive punch line.

“Listen,” he said to Kotov, “my app won’t make you immortal. You will die.”

Kotov stopped playing with his Rolex.

Kuzmin audibly drew his breath in.

“But,” Sergey continued, “death is not what it used to be. You can actually screw it now. And that’s exactly what my app does.”

Now Kotov was listening with attention. He squinted, which made him look ruthless, more like the image of a shady Russian billionaire that Sergey had had in mind. He proceeded to give Kotov the details. At some point Kotov jumped out of his armchair and started pacing across the room. “Oh, the sweetness, the sweetness,” he moaned, looking out onto Central Park.

“I could arrange that for my wife. She would get a text from me. Every year for her birthday. ‘You’re a psycho bitch.’ ”

“Every year?” Sergey asked. “What if you change your mind?”

“Change my mind? I’ll be dead, dude!”

And right then Kuzmin squeaked from his seat: “We need two million in initial funding.”

Kotov frowned. “Two million? What the fuck are you talking about? You don’t need two million. Use programmers from Belarus, they’re dirt cheap! I’m giving you a million and a half, and then we’ll see.”

Sergey could barely register the rest of the talk. Kotov was going back to Russia. Kuzmin was to contact his accountant next week. Kotov would leave him the instructions. He expected to be informed about every aspect of the process. He wished them the best of luck.

“Can we trust him?” Sergey asked when he and Kuzmin exited the building.

“Oh, yes. He would never go back on his word. We got it!”

He made an attempt to embrace Sergey, but Sergey dodged the hug.

“We have to celebrate!” Kuzmin insisted. “Get brunch! Get drunk!”

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?”

“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.

“Too bad we don’t have any food,” Sergey said.

Eric reached into his pockets and pulled out a bunch of baby carrots in various stages of decay.

“I wonder if they are still chock-full of A and C,” Sergey said.

Eric threw a few toward the deer.

The deer jolted back.

“Don’t throw them! Offer her some,” Sergey said.

Eric took a few steps forward and extended his hand as far as he could.

The deer looked away and headed back into the woods.

“She doesn’t understand the concept of the carrot,” Eric said.

Sergey’s heart tightened with an overwhelming mix of tenderness, worry, and guilt. But then wasn’t this what parental love was supposed to feel like?

“Will you have time to come into the house?” Eric asked when they got into the car. “I could show you how deathcams work and other stuff.”

“Sure,” Sergey said.

He would play with Eric, then he would go home and send out his résumé to all those banks he had marked and answer all his LinkedIn inquiries. And tonight, after they watched that stupid movie, he would finally man up and make love with Helen.

It was almost dark by the time they made it back to the house. The first thing he saw was Vica’s car, parked a mere inch away from the garage door. Vica never slowed down when she drove into the driveway. She took pride in making her turns sharp and precise.

“I’m sorry, Eric,” Sergey said, “I think we’d better look at your games some other time.”

Eric tried to hide his disappointment under a mask of male camaraderie. “Sure, Dad,” he said, “or if you install a console at your place, we could play each other.”

“I’ll think about it,” Sergey said.

He waited until Eric entered the house and started to pull away. Just then the front door opened with a bang and Vica came running toward the car, barefoot.

Sergey stopped the car and rolled down the window. “What is it?” he asked, hoping that his voice wouldn’t tremble.

“Could you come out for a second?” she said.

Sergey got out of the car, bracing himself for a very unpleasant conversation.

But Vica wasn’t saying anything. She just stood in the driveway, in her ridiculous too-tight yoga pants, her bare feet pressing into the gravel. There was that hungry, pleading look on her face that he hadn’t seen in such a long time that it took him a while to recognize it.

“Do you want me to come in?” he asked.

She nodded and started to cry.