“Because there’s something wrong with them?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Sergei cautioned. “I’d just say that those who enjoy his acting are unfamiliar with human nature.”
Wasn’t this what every parent hopes for? To equip your child with the confidence and support to seize opportunity, to succeed where you failed? His boy, an entrepreneur. He felt a strange surge of patriotism, a gratitude for the vision of his leaders. Here in the New Russia, you weren’t bound by the past. The grandson of an enemy of the people, the son of a convict, his boy, a successful businessman.
Sergei explained that even though he had Mrs. McGlinchy’s bank numbers, he wouldn’t touch a penny. Of course he wouldn’t. Vladimir’s boy was honest and sensitive to the feelings of others, his primary school teachers had always said so. Instead, Sergei would sign her up for a few dozen credit cards, link them to phony PayPal accounts, and transfer thousands of dollars into his personal account at Sberbank.
“Even if she’s got bad credit, we should still get three or four thousand dollars. And it’s not like we’re taking anything from Mrs. McGlinchy personally. Just the credit card companies.”
A beautiful word, we. To be taken into the intimacy of a personal pronoun. Go forth, my child, but take me with you.
“I don’t even think what I’m doing is illegal. MMM and those other pyramid schemes? They didn’t go to jail. The bankers in the West who cratered the world economy? They didn’t go to jail. It’s just the free market at work.”
“Only terrorists go to jail for what they say on the telephone,” Vladimir said. Water this seed of ambition with much love and encouragement. “Don’t apologize for your success. The layperson cannot possibly understand the complexities of high finance.”
“I’m trying to do good.”
“My Seryozha, my little oligarch. You’re doing so well.”
Sergei limped toward the WC, enough cheer to his gait that he nearly walked right.
Vladimir moved to Sergei’s seat. The computer stared him down. No more than a television lashed to a typewriter by wiggly telephone cords, as far as he was concerned. He tried the headset. Nothing.
A halved egg of plastic sat on a square of blue foam. The receiver? He put it to his ear. “Are you there, Gogol? I’m searching for someone.”
The monitor didn’t blink. “Hello? Gogol?”
The waitress tapped his shoulder. A long grin was pressed between her wide lips. Her eyelashes were thicker than a fountain pen’s line. “It’s a mouse. You don’t speak into it.”
He assessed the plastic egg thing. “I know mice,” he said. “This is not one.”
“It’s only called a mouse,” she explained. “Set it on the mousepad and move it around.”
A little white arrow drifted across the blue bird sky.
“Do you see this?” he declared, dashing his palm against the table. “The machine has surrendered without a fight. It may have beaten Kasparov but it knows better than to test me.”
The waitress laughed, her thin fingers just touching his shoulder, and ah, what a day this was. She opened Internet Explorer before returning to the register. “It’s Google, not Gogol. You type what you’re searching for and hit enter.”
He studied the keyboard. No sense to its arrangement. Not even the alphabet would submit to alphabetical order. Everyone had to be an individualist, everyone thinking they’re precious little snowflakes when really they’re just boring drops of water.
Best to start simple, let this Google warm its engine.
is the earth flat, he typed.
Images of globes, biographies of Columbus, circumferences and curvatures crowded across the monitor with dizzying suddenness. Vladimir had expected Google to come back with a simple da or nyet, but this, this was something else.
He typed japan: chopsticks, Tokyo high-rises, Wikipedia articles, travel guides, mushroom clouds.
He typed knee and a thousand different knees popped up along with exhaustive accountings of its every bone, muscle, and tendon, diagnoses and treatments for every injury from arthritis to gunshot wounds.
How was a universe of information compressed into this little metal box? He couldn’t fit a whole chicken into his toaster oven and this thing fit the entire world. It felt tinged with sacrilege, even for an atheist. No one should know this much. It must be illegal. He glanced behind, certain that dark-suited security forces would storm the room, confiscate the computer, lead him away in handcuffs. Nothing but jittery teenagers blasting each other in blood-splattered squares of light.
If this machine knew everything, would it know his father?
vasily osipovich markin. He didn’t hit the enter key, not yet, because he’d never written his father’s name before, never seen it written. The cursor blinked impatiently. What good could come from this? You had to keep your eyes forward. Don’t turn your head. Don’t mind what lies in the periphery. Behind you is only ruin.
He deleted vasily osipovich markin and typed roman osipovich markin.
He wanted to hit enter but he was already standing, out of the chair, backing away. He was…devil, was he crying?
You’ve ripened into a pungent piece of cheese, Vladimir.
Yes, fine, okay. Just get me out of here.
“What’s wrong?” the waitress asked, when he reached the door.
“I have a lump in my throat,” he admitted.
“Oh my god,” she said. She was young enough to be his daughter-in-law but she looked at him like his mother. “Is it malignant?”
“Tell Sergei I’m not feeling well. Tell him I’ve gone home.”
When Sergei emerged from the bathroom, his father had already left. He sat down at his computer. The cursor blipped behind roman osipovich markin in the search bar. His father’s uncle. Curious, Sergei hit return.
Nadya
On a July morning in 2004, a surgeon in Moscow unwound the bandages from Nadya’s head.
“Everything will be blurry,” the doctor said. Nadya opened her right eyelid and three years of darkness peeled away.
The surgeon’s office was a 1970s Gerhard Richter, a quarter turn of the focus away from clarity. When she extended her arms, she couldn’t count the fingers on her hands but she could see they were there. Ruslan was too. Her fingers slipped into his.
Three nurses ran into the surgeon’s office when they heard Ruslan shout. They stood at the door, hesitant, because the cries of the ill, the suffering, the dying, and the bereaved had become well known to the three nurses. They had heard every iteration of pain. They were less familiar with the howling awe of rejoicing.
On her second day of sight, he gave her a paint sampler. It contained eighteen hundred named colors. Coral Fuchsia. Cream of Amethyst. Golden Evening. Siberian Russet. She read and reread until she could identify by name every shade in an ice cream freezer, in Journalists’ Park, in the morning sky. As poets went, Aleksandr Pushkin had nothing on the paint sampler copywriter.
They married eight months after she left the hospital. As a teenager, she’d imagined love to be a flare sparkling upward, unzipping the night sky. What she had with Ruslan gave off a warmth nearer to friendship than romance. That was fine with her. Better the dim heat of a hand in yours than all the fire in the sky. He massaged vaseline into her scars and she sat through endless American slapstick comedies. They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.