Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

  When the K0005973’s connection was finally established, the kentuki moved toward the bed. Alina started in fear and leapt to her feet. The movement was to be expected, but it still surprised her. The kentuki got down from its charging platform, rolled to the middle of the room, and stopped. She crept closer, though keeping a certain distance. She circled it, but the gadget didn’t move again. Then she realized its eyes were open. The camera is on, she thought. She touched her jeans—it was a miracle she wasn’t just in her underwear, as was usual when she was alone in this room. She thought about turning the thing off until she decided what to do, and then she realized she still didn’t know how. Upon closer inspection, she couldn’t find a switch on the kentuki or its base. She put it down on the floor again and stood looking at it for a moment. The kentuki looked back at her. Was she really going to talk to it? Like this, alone in the room? She cleared her throat. She moved even closer and knelt down in front of it.

  “Hi?” said Alina.

  A few seconds went by, and then the kentuki moved toward her. It was silly, yes, but also pretty intriguing.

  “Who are you?” Alina asked.

  She needed to know what kind of user she’d gotten. What kind of person would choose to “dwell” in a kentuki instead of “keeping” one? She thought that it could be someone who also felt alone, someone like her mother, at the other end of Latin America. Or a dirty old misogynist, or a pervert, or someone who didn’t speak Spanish.

  “Hi?” asked Alina again.

  Apparently, the kentuki couldn’t speak. She sat down in front of it and reached for the manual. In the section “First Steps,” she looked for a suggestion for this initial exchange. Maybe they recommended questions that could be answered with a yes or no, or maybe there were suggested procedures for beginners, like having the kentuki answer yes by turning to the left and no by turning to the right. Did the kentuki dweller have the same manual she did? Anyway, she found only technical information, advice on care and maintenance.

  “Take a step forward if you can hear me,” said Alina.

  The kentuki moved a few centimeters closer, and she smiled.

  “Take a step back when you want to say no.”

  The kentuki didn’t move. This was fun. Suddenly she had a clear idea of what she wanted to ask. She needed to know if the person was a man or a woman, how old they were, where they lived, what they did for a living, what they liked to do for fun. She needed to judge, urgently needed to decide for herself what kind of dweller she’d gotten. The kentuki was there looking at her, maybe as eager to respond as she was to ask.

  Then it occurred to her that this crow could peck openly at her private life, would see her whole body, get to know the tone of her voice, her clothes, her schedules; it could move freely about the room and at night it would also see Sven. She, on the other hand, could only ask questions. The kentuki could decide not to answer, or it could lie. It could say it was a Filipina schoolgirl when it was actually an Iranian oil dealer. But she had to show it her entire life, transparently, as available as she’d been to the poor canary she’d had as a teenager that had died watching her, hanging in its cage in the middle of her room. The kentuki chirped and Alina looked at it, frowning. It was a metallic chirp, like the sound a baby eagle would make inside an empty tin can.

  “Just a second,” she said. “I need to think.”

  She got up, went to the window that looked out over the studios, and craned her neck to glimpse the roof of Sven’s. Maybe desperate from the wait, the kentuki chirped again. Alina heard it move, saw it approach her, tottering at times over the rough wooden floor. When it got close to her, it stopped. They stayed like that, looking at each other.

  Then a sound from the studios distracted her and she turned back toward the window. Outside she could see that Sven’s new assistant was leaving. The girl was smiling, gesturing toward the studio, maybe toward someone inside who was laughing at her jokes, someone who went on waving at her while she kept looking back to see him as she walked away.

  Alina felt some little taps on her feet. The kentuki was right next to her, its head angled violently upward so it could look at her. She knelt down and picked it up. The creature was heavy; it seemed even heavier than when she’d taken it out of the box. She wondered what would happen if she dropped it. Whether the connection with that particular user would be lost, whether the crow would disconnect, or whether it was built to hold up through a few accidents. The crow blinked its eyes but never looked away from her.

  It was charming that it couldn’t talk. A good decision on the part of the manufacturers, she thought. A “keeper” doesn’t want to know her pet’s opinions.

  She understood now: it was a trap. Connecting with that other user, finding out who this other person was, also meant saying a lot about oneself. In the long run, the kentuki would always end up knowing more about her than she knew about it, that was true; but she was its keeper, and she wouldn’t allow the crow to be anything more than a pet. At the end of the day, a pet was all she needed. She wouldn’t ask it any questions, and without her questions the kentuki would depend only on her movements, and it would be incapable of communication. It was a necessary cruelty.

  She left the crow on the floor, looking back toward where it had come from, and she gave it a little push forward. The kentuki understood: it skirted the legs of the chairs and table, went around the dresser, and moved slowly toward its charger.

  Antigua

  SITTING ON HIS father’s desk chair, Marvin swung his feet, which didn’t quite reach the floor. He drew spirals in the margins of his school notes while he waited, and every once in a while he checked the message on his tablet; for more than ten minutes now it had been displaying the words Establishing connection. Below that was the warning This procedure could take some time. It was information meant for those who had never started up a kentuki before. Marvin, on the other hand, had already witnessed the exciting first connections that two of his friends had made. He knew what steps to follow.

  A week before, when his father had discovered Marvin’s real grades, he’d made him promise to sit in the study for three hours every day, surrounded by books, doing homework. Marvin had said, “I swear to God that I will sit for three hours a day at the desk surrounded by books,” but he hadn’t said anything about studying, so he wasn’t really going back on his word. And it would be months before his father caught on that he’d installed a kentuki on the tablet—that is, if his father ever found the time to discover anything else about his son again. Marvin had paid for the kentuki connection using his mother’s savings account. It was digital money, the only kind the dead can have. Marvin had already used that account on other occasions, and he was starting to suspect that not even his father knew it existed.

  Finally the serial number was accepted. Marvin started in his chair and leaned over the screen. He didn’t know how well a kentuki would work from his tablet. His friends who were already kentukis—one in Trinidad and the other in Dubai—used virtual reality headsets; that’s what he had learned on, and he was afraid the experience wouldn’t be as good on his old tablet. On the screen, the camera came on and everything went white. “Dragon, dragon, dragon,” murmured Marvin, his fingers crossed. He wanted to be a dragon, though he knew he had to be open to whatever animal he got. His friends had also wanted to be dragons, but God had known better than they did what each of them really needed: the one who was a rabbit spent his days wandering around the bedroom of a woman who, at night, let him watch while she showered. The one who was a mole spent twelve hours a week in an apartment that looked out over the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf.

  The screen of his tablet was still white, and it took a minute before Marvin realized the problem: the kentuki was facing a wall, and he was too close to focus. He backed up. The application on the tablet was almost as good as the headsets, and still it was hard for him to tell where he was. He turned around and finally saw something: four compact vacuum cleaners lined up
one behind the other, almost all the same height as his kentuki. They were shiny and modern; his mother would have loved them. When he moved in the other direction he began to understand: the fourth wall was made of glass and it looked out onto the street. He was in a shop window. It was nighttime, and someone went by outside wearing a hood, so bundled up that Marvin couldn’t even guess whether it was a man or a woman, or how old the person was. And then he saw it: snow. It was snowing! Marvin’s feet jiggled under the desk. Whatever his friends may have had, none of them had snow. None of them had ever touched snow in their lives, and he could see it now right there in front of him. “One day I’m going to take you to see snow,” his mother used to promise him, before Marvin even knew what snow was. “When you touch it, your fingertips will hurt,” she’d say, and then she’d threaten to tickle him.

  He looked for a way out of the display window. He circled the vacuum cleaners and checked the four corners around him. In the street, a woman stopped for a moment to look at him. Marvin tried to growl, and he managed a soft, sad noise, so deep that, more than a dragon’s cry, it sounded like he had a burnt transformer. What animal was he? The woman went on with her walk. Marvin tried to push one of the vacuums. It was too heavy, and he could only turn it a little. He moved closer to the glass and spent a while looking for his reflection, but he couldn’t get the light in his favor, and so he sat watching the snowflakes fall and turn to liquid as soon as they touched the ground. How much more would it have to snow before it would stick and cover everything in white?

  Marvin practiced shortcuts a couple of times on his tablet, making sure he could quickly change from the kentuki controller to Wikipedia if his father came into the room. Then he sat looking at the photo of his mother that hung between his father’s old wooden crucifix and a prayer card of the Virgin of Mercy. Maybe God was waiting for the right moment to reveal what kind of animal he would be. He leaned over the screen again. In the display window, he brought the kentuki’s forehead up against the glass and sat looking at the empty street. He would find a way out, he thought. At least in this other life, he wouldn’t let himself be locked up.

  Umbertide

  “PLEASE STOP LOOKING at me like that,” said Enzo. “If you don’t mind, stop chasing me around the house like a dog.”

  It had been explained to him that the kentuki was “someone,” so he always spoke to it very politely. If it rolled between his legs, Enzo protested, but it was only a game—they were starting to get along. Things hadn’t always been like that, though; at first they’d had trouble getting used to each other, and the kentuki’s mere presence had been enough to make Enzo uncomfortable. It was a cruel invention: the boy never paid any attention to it, and Enzo had to spend the whole day dodging a stuffed animal rolling around the house. His ex-wife and the boy’s psychologist had explained the concept to him together in an “intervention,” listing in detail why having one of those gadgets would be good for his son. “It’s another step in Luca’s integration,” his ex-wife had told him. His suggestion of adopting a dog had left them flabbergasted: Luca already had a cat at his mother’s house; what he needed now was a kentuki at his father’s. “Do we have to explain it all over again?” the psychologist had asked him.

  Enzo gathered his gardening tools from the kitchen, then headed out to the backyard. It was four in the afternoon and Umbertide’s sky was gray and dark; it would start to rain soon. He heard the mole inside hitting against the kitchen door. It would reach him again before long.

  He’d gotten used to the mole’s company. He commented on the news to it, and if he sat down to work for a while, he’d lift the thing up onto the table and let it circulate among his papers. The relationship reminded him of the one his father used to have with his dog. Sometimes, just to himself, Enzo repeated some of his father’s sayings and mannerisms, the way he would put his hands on his hips after washing the dishes or sweeping the floor and protest affectionately, always with a half smile: “Stop looking at me like that! Stop chasing me around the house!”

  But the kentuki’s relationship with the boy wasn’t working. Luca said he hated how it followed him everywhere, how it went into his room and “messed up his things,” how it watched him like an idiot all day long.

  Luca had learned that if he managed to let the battery run out, the kentuki’s dweller and its keeper would be unlinked, and the apparatus couldn’t be used again.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Enzo had threatened him. “Your mother would kill us.” But the mere idea of running out the kentuki’s battery made the boy’s face light up. His favorite game was to lock it in the bathroom or set traps so it couldn’t reach its charger. By now Enzo was used to waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the red light blinking on the floor, the kentuki banging against the foot of the bed, begging him to help it find its charger base. The mole always found a way to get his attention. And Enzo (if he didn’t want another intervention) had to keep it alive. Because although they shared custody of Luca, his ex-wife had won all of the psychologist’s sympathy, so it was best that nothing bad happen to the damned kentuki.

  He stirred the dirt and added compost. The greenhouse had belonged to his ex-wife, and it was the last thing they’d fought over before their divorce. Sometimes he remembered that and thought how funny it was that he’d ended up with it. Never before had he noticed how pleasant the dirt in those flower beds was. These days he liked the perfume and the dampness, the idea of a small world that obeyed his decisions with an open, vital silence. It relaxed him, helped him breathe in a little air. And he had bought all kinds of things for it: sprinklers, insecticides, moisture meters, shovels and rakes of every size.

  He heard the screen door creak a little. All it took was a slight push to open, and the mole seemed to like that autonomy. It moved quickly to get out of the way of the door’s backswing; sometimes it wasn’t fast enough, and when the door swung back, it knocked the kentuki over. Then the creature protested, letting out a soft growl, until Enzo went over to help.

  This time it landed on its feet, and Enzo waited for the kentuki to approach.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “One of these days I won’t be here, and no one else is going to worry about setting you straight.”

  The kentuki came over and touched his shoes and then backed up a few centimeters.

  “What?”

  The kentuki looked at him. It had dirt on its right eye, and Enzo knelt down and blew on it.

  “How’re the basil plants?” Enzo asked.

  The kentuki turned and rolled quickly away. Enzo went on adding compost to the dirt, attentive to the little motor as it sped up and left the nursery, and to the bounce the wheels tended to give over the edges of some of the paving stones in the patio. That would grant him a few minutes, he thought. He went to the sink for the scissors and, when he returned, the kentuki was already back, waiting for him.

  “So, do they need water?”

  The kentuki didn’t move or make any noise. Enzo had taught it that, and they had an understanding: no movement meant no, a purring sound meant yes. The quick, short movement forward was an invention of the kentuki’s that Enzo still didn’t understand. It seemed confused and variable to him. Sometimes it seemed to mean something like “Follow me, please,” and other times it could mean “I don’t know.”

  “What about the peperoncini? Did the sprouts from Thursday survive?”

  The kentuki moved off again. Its dweller was an old person, or else someone who liked to say they were old. Enzo knew because he asked it questions like a game, and the mole loved to play. He had to engage with it every once in a while, like when you bathe a dog or change the cat’s litter. They played their game while Enzo was drinking his beer, lying on the lounge chair in the backyard. It was almost no work at all to think of questions. Sometimes, even, he asked and didn’t pay attention to the answer. He’d close his eyes between one sip and another, let sleep catch up to him, and the kentuki had to run into the chair l
eg to make him keep going.

  “Yes, yes . . . I’m thinking,” Enzo would say. “Let’s see, what does the mole do for a living? Is he a cook?” The mole would stay motionless, which clearly meant no. “Does he grow soybeans? Is he a fencing instructor? Does he own a candle factory?”

  It was never very clear what the real answer was, or whether Enzo got it fully right or only close. As the days passed, Enzo found out that whoever it was roaming around his house inside that kentuki had traveled a lot, but so far the places the person had visited were not any of the ones he had named. He also knew that it was an adult man, although it wasn’t entirely clear how old. Sometimes he was neither French nor German, and other times he was both, so Enzo thought maybe he was Alsatian. He liked to let the kentuki spin in circles, clamoring desperately for that intermediate option that hung in the air and that Enzo was careful never to pronounce: Alsace.

  “Do you like Umbertide?” he’d ask. “Do you like the Italian villages, the sun, the flowered dresses, our women’s giant asses?”

  Then the kentuki ran around the lounge chair purring at its loudest.

  Some afternoons Enzo carried the kentuki to the car and sat it in the rear window so it could look out the back the whole way to Luca’s tennis class, then to the supermarket, and back home again.

  “Just look at those women,” Enzo would say. “Where could a mole come from who’s never seen women like these?”

  And the mole purred again and again, perhaps out of fury, perhaps out of joy.

  Lima