Still Here

Chapter 8: The Rest Is Silence?

It all started with a Skype call.

Sergey was working on Vadik’s MacBook Air — he preferred it to his own old Toshiba, which had a crack in the screen from when he dropped it on the cement stairs of his Staten Island basement. It’s been six weeks since he moved in with Vadik. Sergey was putting the finishing touches on his rough prototype for Virtual Grave. He had a storyboard and sample wireframes, and he was satisfied with them, even though what he had created was miles away from his original idea. What he really wanted was to resurrect the personality of a departed through the traces left in his or her social media. He thought of the drunken pitch he’d made at Vadik’s housewarming in Morningside Heights: “Our online presence is where the essence of a person is nowadays.” Sergey had never been a big fan of social media; he barely engaged in it himself, but he firmly believed that this was true for most people. But now that he had pored over tons of strangers’ tweets, public posts, and messages in order to test his algorithm, he found social media disappointing. In fact, he was appalled by how overly intimate yet somehow impersonal most of the entries were. People shared their and their relatives’ diagnoses, described how the illnesses progressed, posted pictures of their kids in hospital beds, wrote about their breakups in great detail, listed ingredients for their breakfasts and dinners, reported how their bodies reacted to said breakfasts and dinners, confessed that they were either “extremely happy” or “devastated” by political events that had nothing to do with them. The oversharing and overreacting felt insincere to him. As did the smoothness of the language people used. Sergey still believed that you could find the essence of a person on social media; the problem was that it was hidden, encoded in silences, in omissions, in typos, and was thoroughly impenetrable by his algorithm. Virtual Grave did a great job of distilling an online voice of the departed, but it failed at getting to his or her true voice.

Perhaps one day, Sergey thought as he picked up a dog-eared paperback of Hamlet lying facedown on his desk. Hamlet had been Vadik’s idea. Lately, Vadik was acting as if he couldn’t stand even the mention of Virtual Grave, but Sergey was so into it that he could talk about nothing else.

“It seems like all you’re trying to do is give a voice to your dead dad, right?” Vadik said to Sergey. “Just so he could speak to you one more time. How Shakespearean of you! How Hamletian!”

Sergey had told Vadik about the letter he received from his father after his death and how much it meant to him. And Vadik was mocking it?

“Yes, it is Hamletian. I don’t see anything wrong in it,” he said to Vadik, barely controlling his anger. There was a much-used Penguin Hamlet among Vadik’s books. Sergey had read it in Russian years ago, but this was the first time he was compelled to read it in English. Reading it in the original turned out to be harder than he’d expected, but he found the very shabbiness of the book encouraging — a lot of people had handled it, a lot of people had struggled through it, and a lot of people had made it to the end, so he could do it too.

And then there were footnotes and a glossary for difficult words. Well, he had to agree with Vadik. The scene with the ghost that had moved him so much in the Russian translation sounded kind of ridiculous in the original. “List, list, O, list!” and “Adieu, adieu, adieu!” were making him chuckle rather than cry. But the last words of Hamlet overwhelmed Sergey with their unexpected power.

O, I die, Horatio!

The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.

I cannot live to hear the news from England,

But I do prophesy th’election lights

On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.

So tell him, with th’occurrents, more and less,

Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Sergey put the book down and closed his eyes.

“He has my dying voice. He has my dying voice. He has my dying voice.” He repeated it in his head. What Hamlet probably meant was just his last will. As simple as that. And yet the very idea of granting somebody your “dying voice” made Sergey shiver with excitement. Or maybe it was hunger. It was noon and he’d been working since six. Sergey went to the kitchen, made himself a sandwich of stale bread with old cheese, heated up the dregs of his morning coffee, and went back to his (Vadik’s) computer.

He minimized his Virtual Grave screen and maximized Gmail. There were three new messages. One from Amazon confirming the shipment of Pitching in the Digital Age, one from Rachel, the girl he’d met at Fette Sau, and the last from his mother. Rachel had been out of town and now she was back and hoping to see him. Sergey didn’t like her that much, but he was lonely, and Rachel was nice, so he wrote: “Sure. I’d love to!”

He braced himself before opening his mother’s e-mail. Mira, who had never liked Vica, was “heartbroken” by his separation from her. Sergey couldn’t possibly tell her that Vica had thrown him out because “he had loser genes,” so he had just said that they had realized that they couldn’t live together anymore. Mira didn’t buy it. She would offer up her own reasons, a new one each week — and refute each of them right away. Is it because of money? But it never is! Is it because you were bored with each other? But that’s only natural! Was she interested in other partners? Were you? But who isn’t! Every time the reason would be wrong, but also a little bit right in some twisted way that made Sergey sick. This time Mira’s message came hidden in an attached article with the following highlighted passage: “Most middle-aged men experience decline of sexual desire and abilities. Some try to resolve the issue by getting a new sexual partner. The crucial thing to know is that getting a new sexual partner is utterly pointless, because this decline is inevitable and irreversible.”

Sergey hit Delete with a resolute motion of his index finger, as if saying no to his inevitable decline.

A new message popped up. This one was from Vica. Seeing Vica’s name in his in-box never failed to disrupt Sergey’s peace. Actually, any mention of Vica did that to him. There were times (almost every day) when he couldn’t resist and would browse through her Facebook page, which was filled with all these uplifting posts and happy photographs. None of that joy was sincere, he knew that, yet he couldn’t help squirming in pain every time. There was nothing cheery about her e-mails, however. They were always short, always businesslike. She would inform him about Eric’s awful grades, or discuss a change in his visitation schedule, or ask his approval for certain home repairs. She used to start her e-mails to him with some creative greeting. At various times in their marriage they were: Privetik Sergunya, Zdravstvuyj Seryj Volchische, Hi Graywolf, Hello Mr. Graywolf, Bonjour Monsieur Loup, and Hi Furry Pup. This time it was just Hi, which was somehow worse than no greeting at all. Sergey felt a sticky heaviness in his gut, the kind he’d usually get after eating a cheap hamburger or an especially bad pizza. The message was in English, in Vica’s harsh and imperfect English. He felt that he didn’t have the strength to read it through. He didn’t have to anyway, the few words that he managed to grasp were enough: “mediator” “no need to prolong” “separation agreement.” Sergey marked the message as unread. This made Vica’s name even more prominent, dominating the other messages with its bold font. He paused and hit the Delete button. Now the message wasn’t in his in-box at all, as if it hadn’t yet arrived. It was that easy to return to the virtual past.

Sergey went back to Hamlet.

That ghost was kind of nasty, wasn’t he? He got the precious chance to speak with his son some more, but instead of providing him with some valuable guidance or simply saying some words of affection, he said some cruel shit about Hamlet’s mother and demanded that Hamlet destroy his life by settling his father’s scores. Some people were probably better left dead.

And just then he heard a melodic ring. Skype’s sweet little icon appeared on his screen, a smiling female face in the frame. “Sejun Ku is calling you,” the icon insisted. If it had said “Sejun Ku is calling Vadim Kalugin,” Sergey might have resisted the urge to pick up, but it said “calling you.” He picked up.

“Vadik?” Sejun said.

“No, it’s his friend Sergey,” Sergey said and turned on the video.

“Oh, Sergey! I’m happy to see you again.” Sejun’s bright if a little fuzzy smile confirmed the sentiment.

Sergey told her that Vadik was at work.

“But today’s Friday,” Sejun said. “On Fridays he works from home.”

“He quit that working from home thing about a month ago,” Sergey said. “It’s easier for him to concentrate when he is in his office.”

Sejun said that she hated to work from an office. She was doing web design for a small start-up in Silicon Valley. The work was boring, but they let her work from home.

Small talk ensued that quickly grew in size and significance.

Sergey explained why he was living at Vadik’s at the moment. He said that he had lost his job and his wife.

Sejun said how sorry she was to hear that. She asked if he was dating.

He said that he hadn’t been, not that much, not really, but he had met a girl at a barbecue restaurant of all places.

Sejun said that she was taking a break from dating at the moment. Wasn’t dating exhausting? she asked. Especially breakups. Having to admit that you didn’t like someone anymore or perhaps had never liked him that much in the first place. Having to explain yourself, having to come up with an explanation. That was draining, wasn’t it?

Sergey started to tell her what went wrong with him and Vica, but he thought he detected a bored sigh on Sejun’s end. Did he sound whiny, pathetic, loserlike? Oh, yes, he did. He hurried to change the subject and said that he’d been working on his app full-time, and it was going really well. In fact, he was almost finished with the prototype.

“Virtual Grave? I loved that idea!” Sejun said. Sergey blushed with pleasure because she had remembered. He told her how the app was shaping up to be completely different from its original conception. He told her how exciting that was. He quoted Hamlet’s dying words.

Sejun stretched on her sofa and sighed. She seemed to be entranced.

“ ‘The rest is silence’?” she repeated after Sergey.

“ ‘The rest is silence,’ ” he said.

“But does it have to be?”

“Excuse me?” he asked.

Sejun removed her glasses, jumped off her couch, and assumed a stage actress’s pose (chin up, straight back, hands folded on the level of her pelvis).

“The rest is silence, but does it have to be?” she recited with great feeling.

Then she put her glasses back on and smiled at Sergey.

“You can use it for your sales pitch.”

Sergey stared at her, incredulous.

“Trust me, they love that cutesy shit,” Sejun said and started to laugh. Sergey joined her.

They talked for fifty-two more minutes until Sejun said that she had to do some work. Only then did Sergey remember to ask her why she called Vadik in the first place.

Her brother was going to visit New York in a month, Sejun said. She wondered if Vadik would let him stay at his place. “I guess not, since you’re living there?” she asked, and Sergey said, “Why not, he can sleep on the couch!” Sejun thanked him and said that she’d think about it.

Then she pressed End Call and her face vanished from the screen with an impish beep.

Sergey stared at the empty Skype screen for a moment longer: “Call from Sejun Ku, duration 02:08.” There it was, the proof that he hadn’t dreamed up this encounter. Was his heart really beating that fast? He took his own pulse — yes, it was.

Then he went back to the desk and he typed it in 12-point Courier New:

“The rest is silence, but does it have to be?”

Throughout the day, Sergey debated if he should tell Vadik about Sejun’s call. But when Vadik finally came home, he was in such a bad mood that Sergey decided to wait. Vadik barely looked at Sergey, and instead of cooking dinner for them, he fixed himself a ham sandwich — a slab of ham on a slice of bread — and plopped on the couch in front of the TV. He watched CNN for about an hour, then made himself another sandwich and put on The Wolverine. Sergey had always hated fantasy, but he decided to keep Vadik company. He made himself a sandwich too — he put a few slices of onion on his — and sat down in Sejun’s whimsical embroidered chair that stood next to the sofa. He thought it would be nice to sit like this, watch a movie together, eat their sandwiches. But Vadik wouldn’t even look at him, wouldn’t even register his presence except to wince whenever Sergey took a crunchy bite. Sergey had to admit that he hadn’t felt that comfortable or that welcome at Vadik’s for a while. Vadik had taken him in with such eagerness and warmth, but Sergey hadn’t expected anything less, because he would’ve done the same for Vadik. In fact, he had done the same for Vadik. All those times when Vadik would suddenly discover that he couldn’t spend a second more in a particular apartment, or with a girl he was seeing, he would come and stay at Sergey’s. Not for long, just a couple of days, a week at most, until he found something new. Sergey was always happy to house Vadik, and Vica was just as eager to welcome him. Too eager, in fact. There was one time when Sergey thought that something might have happened between them, but the thought was too scary and upsetting to take any further.

Now it felt as if Vadik was getting increasingly disappointed in his company. And there was the question of money. Sergey couldn’t possibly offer him any. You don’t offer money to your best friend when he takes you in. Plus, Vadik knew that Sergey was sending most of his unemployment checks to Vica so that she could pay the mortgage. Sergey did try to buy groceries at least. But Vadik just wouldn’t accept that. His first week at Vadik’s, Sergey went shopping and came back loaded with the food that he usually bought for Vica. Every single item annoyed the hell out of Vadik.

No, he didn’t eat McIntosh apples. And yes, there was a huge difference between organic and nonorganic yogurt. And nobody in his right mind would buy meat loaded with antibiotics and hormones. And Starbucks coffee wasn’t even drinkable!

So, yes, it was clear, Vadik didn’t like his shopping for food. So Sergey stopped doing it. But then there was the issue of toilet paper. Sergey had asked Vadik to buy the ultra-strength kind. The same brand — it wasn’t more expensive, just stronger. And it wasn’t like there was something wrong with Sergey’s ass that it required special treatment; ultra-strong was simply better. Vadik had grudgingly agreed. But the last time he went shopping, Vadik came home with twelve rolls of something called Tenderlicious, some new brand that literally dissolved in your fingers before you even brought it to your ass. “It was on sale” was all the explanation he offered.

And what about those few times when they went out together? Sergey would reach for his wallet, but Vadik would stop him and say that he would pay for the meal. It was as if the sight of Sergey’s scratched credit card embarrassed him. The worst thing was that after the meal Vadik would barely talk to Sergey and hang around the apartment with the sulky expression of somebody who had just been manipulated into doing something he didn’t want to do. Lately, he wore that expression pretty much all the time.

They’d barely watched an hour of The Wolverine when Vadik announced that he was tired and was going to bed. He turned the TV off and left the room without bothering to ask Sergey if he wanted to continue watching.

It was all Vadik’s fault that Sergey didn’t tell him about Sejun. He simply didn’t give him the chance.

Two days later, Sergey called Sejun to ask a few questions about the design for his app. This time he called her from his own Skype account. Sejun told him that she loved the logic and organization of the frames but hated the visual presentation. “A graveyard with tiny ghosts peeking from behind the stones? Seriously?” She found it both creepy and boring, like Walmart Halloween decorations.

This embarrassed Sergey so much that his voice went higher. He tried to explain that he didn’t mean for the ghosts to be in the actual design but thought they were okay for a proto. Sejun seemed to be touched by his embarrassment. She then offered a few simple solutions to make the visuals work and suggested a good website with graphic templates.

The next time Sergey called Sejun he asked her if Virtual Grave was a good name for his app.

She said that it was morbid but biting, and biting was the most important quality for the name. Her use of the word biting stirred Sergey so much that he blushed. She said that when his prototype was ready, she would introduce him to her investor friend.

The calls were becoming more frequent. They would start talking about the app but would inevitably swerve someplace else, someplace personal. Sejun asked Sergey how he’d come up with the idea. He told her about the posthumous letter from his father, how he had sat in the basement reading it over and over again, trying to find some last piece of advice. He saw Sejun remove her glasses and wipe her eyes with the corner of her sleeve.

She told him that her own father never, ever talked to her. He spoke to her, he said things to her, he asked questions, he gave instructions, but they never really “talked,” not when she was a child and not now. It was as if he found the idea of a conversation with his daughter incomprehensible. She said that one of the reasons she decided to move to the United States was to escape this condescending attitude that Asian men displayed to women. She wanted a Western man so that he would treat her as an equal. But here she found that the Western men who wanted to date Asian women were attracted to the idea of their servility.

“But not Vadik though?” Sergey asked. Sejun looked away from the screen. Sergey was afraid that he had made a faux pas. He shouldn’t have mentioned Vadik; he should’ve pretended to have forgotten the fact that Sejun used to be Vadik’s girlfriend.

Then she looked up at Sergey. “No,” she said, “with Vadik it was different.”

He wasn’t misogynistic at all. But he liked her because she was strange to him. Not exotic, but strange. He knew that he would never truly understand her or she him. And that was exactly what he wanted. To be able to project whatever he wanted on to her and to be able to imagine that in her eyes he was whatever he wanted to be at the moment. And she was so lonely and weak that she almost agreed to become that for him.

One morning Sergey was sick with flu and he called Sejun from bed.

“Are you in bed?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I love that lattice headboard. I was the one who picked this bed, did you know that?”

Sergey started to cough.

“Oh, poor Sergey!” she said. “I wish I was there with you, I would give you some tea.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t want to appear servile.”

“That’s true,” Sejun said. “But I could sit down on the edge of your bed and stroke your hair.”

“I would give anything to feel your hand on my forehead right now,” Sergey said.

Sejun smiled. Her glasses slipped down her nose when she was staring down, and she pushed them back with her index finger. She was sitting cross-legged on her couch. He could see her entire body, so her laptop must have been away, on the coffee table. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt and some sort of lounge pants. No socks, no bra. He searched for her nipples lost in the folds of her T-shirt.

“I would’ve tapped my fingertips on your forehead,” she said, “and then I would run them down your cheeks, all the way to your mouth.”

Sergey suppressed the urge to moan. “And I would have caught your finger with my teeth and pressed on it ever so gently,” he said.

That first time they had sex discreetly. Sejun brought her laptop closer so that everything below her neck was hidden from view. Sergey did the same. He tried to masturbate as quietly as possible. He was hoping that Sejun was masturbating too, but he couldn’t be completely sure. They kept talking the entire time.

“Oh, fuck!” Sergey finally cried, making his computer screen shake.

Sejun laughed. “Did you come?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “What about you?”

“Oh, I came a little while ago. I was just embarrassed to tell you.”

Afterward, Sergey felt feverish but insanely happy.

He went to the bathroom and aimed a perfect pale gold current into Vadik’s toilet.

“Is vigorous,” he said to the pearly gray tiles above the toilet. “Is brilliant. Is persistent. Is strong.”

Each time they became bolder and more intimate. They would put their computers farther away to have a full view of each other’s bodies, and they would wear ear- and mouthpieces to hear each other better. Her breasts turned out to be smaller than he’d thought, her hips wider. He couldn’t imagine anything sexier than Sejun wearing nothing but a mouthpiece and headphones. Everything about her was endlessly exciting. Sometimes, hours after their call was over, Sergey would see his headphones lying on the table where he’d left them and just the sight of them would get him hard. She told him how smart he was, how imaginative, how handsome. She said that he looked like that actor from Truffaut’s films. What was his name? Jean-Pierre Léaud? She asked him if he liked Truffaut. He said that he did. He loved Truffaut, had always preferred him to Godard. She had too, she said. She had always hated Godard.

Sergey walked around in a dazed painful state, the rest of his concerns — Vica, Eric, Virtual Grave, unemployment, Rachel, Vadik, especially Vadik — concealed from him by the smog of panic and excitement. He managed to disregard the fact that Sejun used to be Vadik’s girlfriend, that they had broken up a mere two months ago, and the morality of Skype-fucking her was questionable at best. Once after Sejun’s call, Sergey stayed frozen on the couch for hours, the MacBook in his lap, not doing anything, just thinking, or rather daydreaming, clinging to the details of what had just happened, as if trying to catch them all and lock them up. He was roused from his reverie by an angry call from Rachel. Apparently, they had scheduled a date and Sergey had forgotten about it. “What happened? Are you sick?” Rachel kept asking him, but there was no concern in her voice, just fury. And it was easier to address her fury than her concern. He said that he had met someone else.

The next morning Sejun didn’t answer his Skype call. He left her several messages. She didn’t reply. Three days later Sergey sent her a text: “Are you okay? I’m worried.” He got a reply the next day. She wrote that she was fine but feeling “weirded out” by their relationship. “Do you want us to stop?” he asked. This time she answered right away: “Yes!”

It was very difficult to work after that, very difficult to make himself focus, but Sergey knew that his work was actually his way to salvation, so he recommitted himself with even more intensity.

Then, about a week after their virtual affair ended, the time for retribution came. One night, as Sergey was perusing the contents of Vadik’s nearly empty fridge, Vadik appeared in the kitchen doorway with the iPhone in his hands. He looked confused rather than angry, but Sergey had a panicky premonition that this was going to be about Sejun.

It was.

“Look,” Vadik said. “It says here that I talked to Sejun on December 18. I didn’t talk to her. Was it you?”

Vadik was clearly anticipating some sort of crazy explanation. There wasn’t any.

“Yes, we talked,” Sergey said. “She called to ask you if her brother could stay here. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

“Her brother staying here? Staying with me? Or should I vacate my own apartment to accommodate him? That girl has some nerve!”

Sergey took out a wilted lettuce and a couple of tomatoes and cucumbers. “I’m making a salad, do you want some?”

Vadik nodded. He sat down on a flimsy bar stool that looked as if it were about to collapse and put his phone down.

Sergey took a cutting board out and started slicing tomatoes. Never an easy task, and especially difficult under Vadik’s stare.

“You should halve the tomatoes first,” Vadik said, “and better use a serrated knife.”

Sergey found the serrated knife.

“Not the cucumbers though. Never use a serrated knife on cucumbers. But you still have to halve them.”

Sergey answered him with a glare and Vadik went back to playing with his phone. He looked really stupid in that tiny kitchen, perched on that tiny chair. In his white sweater with his shock of blond hair, he looked like a huge dumb parrot in a cage. If there was one thing Sergey couldn’t stand, it was somebody’s presence while he was cooking. Vica would always leave the kitchen when he cooked. Not that he cooked that often. But he could make cucumber and tomato salad, and a spectacular omelet. His secret ingredients were leftover cold cuts from MyEurope. A prosciutto and salami combination worked the best. He would make it for Vica, and she would always ask for seconds and proclaim it the most delicious dish in the world. “Seriously,” she would say, “we should enter your omelet in contests.” Too bad Vadik didn’t have any leftovers. Or any eggs. Sergey felt a momentary pang of longing for Vica, but then he thought of Sejun and felt a pang of longing for her too.

“No, no, that’s rosemary-scented oil. It won’t do. Use the big bottle.”

Sergey put the rosemary-scented oil back and reached for the big bottle.

“Wait,” Vadik said, and Sergey felt like throwing the big bottle at his head. “Wait. It says here that the duration of the call was two hours and eight minutes. You couldn’t have been discussing Sejun’s brother for two hours, could you?”

Sergey stopped mixing the salad. He knew that one way or the other Vadik would get to the bottom of this. And the bottom of this — the fact that he had had an affair with his best friend’s ex-girlfriend — suddenly seemed pretty horrible, pretty disgusting. He used to tell himself that this was not about Vadik, that this was about him and Sejun, and Vadik had nothing to do with it. Now, for the first time, he realized that in Vadik’s eyes it would be very much about him.

He cleared his throat and said that Sejun and he talked.

“What did you talk about? Did you talk about me?” Vadik asked.

This suggestion offended Sergey. How typical of Vadik to think that they would have nothing to discuss except himself — such an endlessly fascinating topic.

“We talked about my app,” Sergey said.

Apparently this was a mistake.

“Oh, how nice! You talked about your fantastic, super-brilliant app! Your genius app! Sejun loved your idea, I remember that. She thought it was ‘brave and defiant.’ ”

Vadik said the last three words in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to be an imitation of how Sejun talked, but in fact it didn’t sound like her at all. He jumped off the stool and stood leaning on the kitchen counter, hovering over Sergey. He was seven inches taller than Sergey, but Sergey had never been so aware of it before.

“Well, I’ve always thought your idea was stupid,” he said. “Stupid and sick. Like freeze-drying your dead pet. No, worse than that, like freeze-drying your dead pet and making it talk.”

He paused and looked at Sergey, making sure that his words registered. They did.

“Nobody wants to hear from dead people, you hear me? Nobody! It’s creepy, it’s horrifying. It’s unbearably painful, for godsakes! I mean, yes, it’s true, we all talk to our loved ones in our minds. And, yes, we all wish that they would answer. A single word of affection, of acceptance. We all need that. But what you’re trying to do is not that! What people will hear is not the voice of their loved one, but the bits and pieces of that voice, the heartless morsels, a cruel parody. Listening to that voice will only make their sense of loss more acute. The person that they loved is gone. Gone! Nothing will bring him back. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not God, not Fyodorov, and certainly not your fucking app. I mean, how stupid must you be not to see that?”

Sergey looked away and tasted the salad. He’d put way too much oil in it. And what kind of food was salad anyway? It would only make them hungrier.

“The only app that could possibly make sense in the face of death would be one that would cancel your entire online presence. Cancel it! Erase all your messages, delete all your posts, get rid of every trace of you. Make sure nobody could revive you, or speak in your voice, or do any other shit. Now that’s the app we need. Because that’s the idea of death. Death brings an absolute end. And we all should just respect that.”

Sergey made a motion to go out of the kitchen, but Vadik was blocking the way.

“But you know all that, don’t you?” Vadik said with a gloating expression, as if he had discovered Sergey’s dirty secret.

“You don’t really want to ‘revive’ dead people à la Fyodorov — God, what a stupid fuck he was! You don’t really want to reconstruct their speeches or their souls. You’re just hanging on to the idea of this app because it’s the last thing, the very last thing, that you believe can pull you out of the dump, right? Right? Because if not for this app, you’re done. You’re stuck with being a loser forever.”

And Sergey just stood there, listening to Vadik’s diatribe, looking into his bowl, eating the salad, forkful after slippery forkful. He could hear and understand Vadik’s words, he felt them almost like physical blows, and yet they weren’t truly reaching him. He felt as if he were in the middle of a very wrong scene, a scene that wasn’t supposed to be happening. He remembered feeling like this once before. He was only five or six and it was a snow day. He went out of his apartment building dressed in snow boots, a winter coat, and a thick knitted hat, mittens, and whatever, and there were older boys waiting in ambush behind a row of snowdrifts armed with snowballs. Their attack was immediate and merciless. Vicious wads of pain hitting him on the neck, on the face, on the eyes. He remembered thinking that this was not supposed to happen. These were his friends. He knew their names. They played in the sandbox together. This was wrong! So wrong that it couldn’t be happening. He didn’t even turn away or cover his face. He just stood there waiting until this frightening scene would disappear or be changed into something else.

“And Sejun was impressed with your idea, wasn’t she,” Vadik said again. Sergey still didn’t say anything, but Vadik continued.

“Of course she was. Did she tell you how brilliant you were? How she was smitten with your intellect? How she was in love with your brain? How arousing your brilliance was? How she was dying for this brilliant, brilliant man to fuck her? Skype-fuck if nothing else? Oh, Sejun used to love Skype-fucking! She even preferred it to the real thing.”

Sergey put the bowl on the counter and looked at Vadik. A muscle or something must have shifted in his face and Vadik caught it. His expression immediately changed from vicious and mocking to helpless and almost scared.

“Huh, so you did, didn’t you?” Vadik said. There was a pleading note in his voice now. As if he were begging Sergey not to answer. “On Skype?”

Sergey pushed Vadik away and walked toward the bedroom.

“That’s pathetic!” Vadik yelled at his back. “Do you know how pathetic that is?”

It didn’t take him long to pack his things. Vadik had barely given him any space in the closet, so most of his clean clothes were still in his duffel bag, and he kept the dirty ones in the plastic HippoMart bags under the bed — the red fat hippo stretched even fatter by his socks and underwear. Vadik employed a complicated sorting system in his laundry hamper, so Sergey preferred not to mess with it. He zipped up his duffel bag. Put his old laptop in his sturdy backpack, pondered whether he should take the paperback of Hamlet, decided that he should — after all, Vadik had never returned his copy of Hell Is Other People: The Anthology of 20th-Century French Philosophy. He threw the book into the backpack, picked up the hippo bags, and headed to the door.

Vadik was in the living room pacing, in sync with all those passersby in the window, his facial expression a complex mix of hatred, remorse, and fear, as if he were debating whether to hit Sergey or beg him to stay.

“You don’t have to go, man,” he said in a more or less controlled voice. “It’s all perfectly understandable. I mean, who wouldn’t try to fuck his best friend’s woman, given the opportunity? We are not saints, neither of us.”

Vadik was about to say something else, but he stopped himself.

Sergey was standing with his back to Vadik, his right hand on the door handle. The image of a wild-eyed, disheveled Vica with that strange scratch across her cheek tramped through his mind. His heart was beating so fast that it was becoming less and less possible to breathe. He thought that if Vadik followed through and admitted that he had fucked Vica in their house on Staten Island, his heart would collapse, he would go into cardiac arrest and die.

“Oh, come on, man,” Vadik finally said, and Sergey opened the door and left.

He walked briskly down Bedford Avenue, away from Vadik, away from Vadik’s words, toward the place where he parked his car. A few blocks away from there, he stopped and looked around. He had no idea where to go. Some tiny cold drops fell onto his face and hands. Sergey looked up and saw that it was either drizzling or snowing. He went into the coffee shop next door, ordered a large tea, pushed his bags under the table, and sat down.

He could go back to Staten Island. Vica would have no choice but to let him in. But that would be the Vica who had thrown him out, who wanted to “get it over with,” and who might have fucked Vadik. He couldn’t bear to see her.

There was his mother, who would be overjoyed to let Sergey into her one-bedroom in the projects and have him stay on her “Italian” sofa. She would feed him the foods that he used to love when he was five, like rice meatballs called ezhiki and sweet farmer’s cheese, and make him watch some endless movie on her Russian TV channel, and after the movie was over she would plague him with talk of his inevitable decline until he felt the decline in his bones.

And there was Regina, who had reacted to the news of his separation from Vica with shocking coldness. Didn’t want to meet for a drink, didn’t bother to answer his long letter. Still, it was impossible to imagine that she would refuse to let him stay at her place for a couple of days. He thought she should be back from Russia by now. He imagined entering her and Bob’s sparkling lobby with his bulging HippoMart bags, then Bob looking at him with squeamish pity. No, that was out of the question.

His mother was the only acceptable option. Sergey braced himself. It looked like a night of Russian TV and ezhiki.

“I’m fucking desperate, man!” cried out the man at the adjacent table. “I can’t believe Natalie just bailed on me. Now I can’t go.”

He had a long silky beard that probably required very expensive shampoos. His friend had no facial hair himself, but he wore an “I Love Castro” T-shirt as if to compensate.

“What about your neighbor? She could watch your cat.”

“My neighbor Helen? The one who called the police on me? Twice? My music was too loud? No, thank you! She would just poison the fuck out of him.”

“Why don’t you leave him with a pet care service?”

“Hey, why don’t you leave your child with a child care service?”

“I would. Absolutely!”

“Well, I happen to love my cat. And you know how Goebbels is crazy, he loves the apartment, he loves his fucking cat tree, he won’t be happy anywhere else. And he’s arthritic, poor thing. He needs his pills.”

So this man had to go on a trip, Sergey thought. But there was this arthritic cat, and he couldn’t leave the cat anywhere else but in his apartment. And the catsitter had fallen through. This could be his chance!

“Hey,” Sergey said after he cleared his throat, “sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. I happen to be really good with cats.”

The bearded man turned to Sergey and looked him over, as if trying to determine his trustworthiness.

“I’m a financial analyst,” Sergey said as proof of his reliability. “I work at Langley Miles.”

The bearded man seemed duly impressed.

“My wife just threw me out and I need a place to stay.”

“Ouch!” the beardless man said.

The bearded man tapped his fingers on the table surface. “We’re talking about six months here. I got this composers’ fellowship in Rome. You can’t bail on me, because I’ll be in Europe.”

“Six months is perfect.”

They continued to discuss details and logistics, but it was clear that the thing was going to work out.

Okay, Sergey thought, a sick cat named Goebbels. This could be interpreted either as yet another unfortunate complication in his already terribly confusing life or as divine intervention — a cat savior, a redeemer cat, a knight cat on a white horse.