“What should we name it?”
The kentuki turned and looked at her.
“Sanders,” said Alina. “Colonel Sanders.”
It was a silly name, but it had its charm. She wondered what had made her think the kentuki was male, and at the same time it seemed impossible to imagine that crow with a woman’s name.
“Like the old guy from Kentucky Fried Chicken?”
Alina nodded; it was perfect. Sven picked up the kentuki, which protested when they turned it over, looked at the wheels, and studied how its little plastic wings were attached to its body.
“How autonomous is it?”
Alina had no idea.
“Do you think it could follow us to dinner?” asked Sven, and he put it back down on the ground.
It would be fun to try. There was nothing even close to a nice restaurant in Vista Hermosa; in fact, there were no restaurants at all. There were a few women—they’d already been to three—who put out plastic tables in their yards, set them with tablecloths and baskets of tortillas, and offered a fixed menu of two or three dishes. Their husbands were usually eating at one of those tables, always the one closest to the TV, and sometimes they fell asleep with their beer or mezcal in hand. These makeshift restaurants were no more than half a mile away, and Sven figured that, if the technology was like a phone’s, the kentuki should be able to follow them with no problem.
Alina, though, was afraid the signal would be lost. She understood that each device held “a single life,” but she wasn’t clear on whether losing the signal also meant losing the connection.
They went out to the patio and started to walk, and the kentuki followed a few meters behind. Alina listened to its little motor buzzing behind them, aware that, while they stepped so lightly, someone was making a great effort not to lose sight of them. She forgot about the assistant for a moment and felt secure again; she took Sven’s hand and he held hers back, loving and distracted. On the asphalt, now out of the residency, the crow had more trouble following them. They heard it turn, slow down, catch up to them again. Then they heard it stop, and they turned around to see what had happened. It was some five meters away, looking off toward the mountains. It was hard to know if it was still there with them, admiring the sunset in the Mexican countryside, or if some technical fatality had suddenly caught up to its soul, and that was all the kentuki they’d have in this life. Alina thought of their $279. Suddenly the kentuki moved; it skirted Sven with a smug air and continued toward Alina.
“And what do you think you’re doing?” joked Sven. “Just where are you going with my woman, Colonel?”
They had a good time. They ate chicken with mole and rice, and they left the kentuki on the table through the whole meal. Every time Sven got distracted, the crow pushed his fork off the table and onto the dirt floor. Since it didn’t make a noise when it fell, Sven looked for it blindly. He didn’t get mad when he discovered the trick. Really, there was absolutely nothing in the ordinary world that could make the artiste angry; his energy was channeled toward greater things. Alina envied the calm with which Sven did exactly what he wanted with his life. He moved forward; she bobbed in the wake he left behind, trying not to let him get away. Running, reading, the kentuki—all her plans were contingency plans. The Colonel dropped the fork again, and Alina burst out laughing. When the kentuki looked at her she winked at him, and he made his crow noise for the first time that night.
“You mess with my woman,” Sven said with a laugh, “and you mess with me, too, Colonel.” And he bent down again to pick up his fork.
A few days later, when she was leaving the room, she went back at the last moment to get the kentuki. She wanted to show it to Carmen, the residency librarian. Carmen was the closest thing she had to a friend in the whole place. They’d exchange brief, pointed words and discreetly savor the beginning of what would clearly be a great alliance. She tapped on the counter to let Carmen know she was there, left the Colonel beside Carmen’s papers, and moved off down the fiction aisle to hide and watch what would happen. Carmen caught sight of the kentuki and went closer. She was wearing all black as always, her wrists covered with studded bracelets. She picked up the crow, turned it over, and studied its base for a while, running her fingers between the wheels. “This one seems like better quality than my two,” she said without raising her voice, as if she’d known all along that Alina was watching her.
Alina approached carrying two new books.
“I’ve never understood,” said Carmen, enjoying herself, “what’s this little ass for?” And she scratched her painted nails over the USB port hidden behind the back wheels.
Then she set the kentuki on the counter and it moved toward Alina. Carmen said it hadn’t even been a month since her ex-husband had given a kentuki to each of her kids, and she had already seen new versions on several occasions.
“My ex says these things grow exponentially: if there are three the first week, there’ll be three thousand the second.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little intimidating?” asked Alina.
“Which part?”
Carmen took a step to one side, and behind the kentuki’s back she mimed blindfolding her eyes. She pulled her phone from her bag and showed Alina a photo of her two sons with their “pets.” They were two yellow cats, and the boys had them in their bike baskets. Each kentuki had a black cloth tied around its head and covering its eyes. That was the only condition Carmen had given her ex-husband: she was afraid the whole thing was a plot so he could have two cameras roaming her house day and night.
Alina stood looking at the picture.
“But why does anyone want to wander around your house with their eyes blindfolded? Where’s the fun in that?”
“Right?” said Carmen. “They only have two senses to begin with, and here I go and take one away, and they just keep on toddling around. That’s how people are, manita, and with a library like this right in town,” and she waved her hands at her four empty aisles.
She took the phone from Alina, kissed the image of her sons, and put it back in her bag.
“There was a kentuki that got run over yesterday on the street, right in front of the taxi stand,” Carmen went on, as she recorded the books Alina was checking out. “It belonged to a friend of my kids, and the mother had to bury it in the yard, next to the dog graves.”
The crow turned toward Carmen, and Alina wondered if Colonel Sanders could understand her.
“Such a shame, now the kid’s all broken up.” Carmen smiled. It was hard to know what she was really thinking. “And with what those things cost.”
“And what was the kentuki supposedly doing alone in the street?” asked Alina.
Carmen looked at her in surprise, maybe because she hadn’t thought about that.
“You think it was trying to escape?” she asked, smiling mischievously.
Later, when Alina returned to the room, she set the kentuki on the floor and went into the bathroom. She had to close the door so the crow wouldn’t follow her in—he always tried to. She stood by the door until she heard Colonel Sanders roll away. Then she took off her clothes and got into the shower. It was such a good thing she’d never communicated with her kentuki—the more she learned, the more certain she was she’d made the right decision. Without e-mails or messages or agreeing on any other method of communication, her kentuki was nothing but a dumb and boring pet, so much so that sometimes Alina forgot Colonel Sanders was there, and that behind Colonel Sanders was a camera and someone watching.
And so the days passed. Her alarm went off at 6:20 in the morning. None of the artists dared to show their faces around the residency at that hour; the alarm didn’t even seem to wake Sven. Alina had time to get up and go down to the kitchen in the common area, have breakfast without any social interaction, and read for a while before she went out to run. Over her second cup of coffee she’d sit straight in her chair, her ass right on the edge, her legs stretched out before her and her feet open in a V. It was her
cruising position, and she could read like that for hours. Colonel Sanders went under her legs, pushing the outer points of the V her feet made until he got stuck. Sometimes Alina lowered the book and asked him a question, just to find out if the person controlling him was still there with her, or if he’d left the crow to go do something better. The first option, the idea of someone sitting there and staring at her for hours, always intimidated her, and the second offended her. Wasn’t her life interesting enough? Did that whoever-he-was have a life that was so much more important than hers that he’d leave the kentuki hanging until his return? No, she answered herself, if that were true he wouldn’t be between her feet now, playing pet at 6:50 in the morning.
“You know what just happened on page 139?”
And Colonel Sanders was almost always there; he’d growl or flutter his wings slightly on either side of his body, but she didn’t take the trouble to answer her own questions. At 7:30 she stopped by the room to drop the crow off, and then went out to run in the hills. She turned at the church and moved off the main street. She knew a path that led away from the houses, across fields and down hillocks toward greener areas. She made it farther each time. And each time, she felt stronger. Running didn’t make her any more or less intelligent, but the blood flowed through her body in a different way, and her temples pounded. The air changed, and when she got distracted, her brain pumped ideas with incredible speed. When she got back, Sven had already gone down to his studio. Alina took a shower and put on something comfortable, ate her tangerines slowly, faceup on the bed. On the floor, Colonel Sanders moved restlessly, circling her like a caricature of a bird of prey.
She’d been thinking the day before, thinking too much. And at night, at three in the morning, she’d gotten up and taken a chair to the patio so she could smoke and look out at the hills in the dark. She felt close to some kind of revelation; it was a process that she knew, and the adrenaline of reaching a conclusion made up for the lack of sleep.
And that morning, after coming back from her run and flopping on the bed with her tangerines, she kept turning the matter over and over with the sense she was getting ever closer to an epiphany. She stared at the ceiling and thought that if she were to organize her thoughts to guess what kind of discovery was coming, she would have to remember a piece of information that she hadn’t thought about in days: at some point the week before, she’d gone down to the only kiosk in the village, next to the church, and in her distraction she’d caught a glimpse of something she would rather not have seen. Sven’s manner of explaining something to a girl. The sweetness with which he was trying to make himself understood, how close they were standing, the way they smiled at each other. Later she learned it was the assistant. She wasn’t surprised, nor did it strike her as an important discovery, because a much deeper revelation suddenly caught her attention: nothing mattered. In her body, every impulse asked, What for? It wasn’t tiredness, or depression, or lack of vitamins. It was a feeling similar to lack of interest, but much more expansive.
Lying in bed, she gathered the tangerine peels into one hand, and the movement brought her to another revelation. If Sven knew all, if the artiste was a committed laborer and every second of his time was another step toward an irrevocable destiny, then she was exactly the opposite. The last point at the other end of the continuum of beings on this planet. The un-artiste. Nobody, for no one and for nothing, ever. Resistant to any kind of concretion or creation. Her body placed itself in the in-between, protecting her from the risk of ever one day achieving something. She closed her fist and squeezed the peels. They felt like a cool, compact paste. Then she reached her arm over the sheets toward the head of the bed and left the peels in a little pile under Sven’s pillow.
Zagreb
FINALLY GRIGOR HAD a great idea. He called it his “Fallback,” and he’d invested the last of his savings in it—his and his father’s, if what his father had left could be called savings. He was sure, though, that his Fallback would end his rough patch and put him back in the game. It had been two weeks since he’d had the idea, and he still felt like the work was just getting started. He told his father he’d eat lunch later and then half closed the door to his room. If things went well, soon he could buy the old man a kentuki. It would be good company for him, keep him entertained and maybe even remind him when it was time to take his medicine. Who knew, maybe it would really end up being a big help. He looked at the calendar on the wall above the desk. His severance checks would run out in less than two months, and when his father tried to pay for his yogurt with his bank card and the machine spat it back out, Grigor would be forced to tell him the truth. So the Fallback just had to work.
The tablet’s screen told him that the K1969115’s connection had found an IP address, and now it was asking for a serial number. The camera turned on and Grigor immediately had to lower the volume. It was a birthday party, and a boy of maybe six years old was shaking him and banging him against the floor. This one won’t last long, thought Grigor, though he had already encountered a few surprises. Sometimes the kentukis didn’t end up seeing eye to eye with the person they were originally meant for, and someone else in the family adopted them. Like the kentuki that had been connected in Cape Town, South Africa, as the hospital pet of a woman who died a few days later. It ended up traveling with the woman’s daughter, stashed in the plane cabin’s luggage compartment, to be given to a nephew who lived in the New Zealand countryside. The family set up the kentuki in a shed on their farm on the outskirts of Auckland, where pigs sometimes sat on the charger and Grigor had to hit them on the ass over and over to get them to finally move. That’s how fast the luck of a connection could change.
The important thing, Grigor always repeated, was to keep the devices active. It wasn’t a technical requirement; that is, even if a kentuki wasn’t used in days, the assigned IP connections continued to work—he had studied the matter on social networks, forums, conversations among aficionados, and all kinds of specialized sites, and he was sure that leaving a device unattended didn’t mean it would be lost. But if he wanted to sell those connections, he had to keep them alive and on good terms with their keepers. He had to turn them on daily, a good while for each one, and move around and interact. It was a part of the job that he hadn’t fully factored in, and it was taking up too much of his time. In fact, he had lost a kentuki for just that reason in the inexperience and disorganization of the first week. He’d neglected it for over two days, and its keeper—a rich and impatient Russian woman who must not ever have had to put up with being ignored for so long—ended up abandoning it. The K1099076, installed on tablet number 3, had given him a red alert with its final message: Connection ended.
With that, the connection card of the kentuki’s “being” was lost, and so was the kentuki itself. Neither of the two parts could be used again. “One connection per purchase” was the manufacturers’ policy—it came written on the side of the box, as if it constituted some kind of selling point. Grigor had seen a boy with the saying printed on his T-shirt some days earlier, when he’d gone out to buy a few more tablets to install more codes. Ultimately, people loved restrictions.
At the birthday party where his eleventh kentuki was fighting for its life, someone finally freed him from the boy’s hands and set him on the ground. The paving stones were a porous brick; farther back, between the guests, he caught a glimpse of a large pool. The occasional waiter walked by holding a tray of sodas. A sign said ¡Felicidades!, which Grigor thought was Spanish. He moved among the guests, and someone followed a little behind him. Every once in a while the person lifted him up, turned him, and set him down with his camera pointing back toward the boy, who in any case wasn’t paying him any attention and was entertained enough opening other gifts. Maybe I’m in Cuba, thought Grigor. It was something he’d hoped would happen from the very first kentuki he’d connected. If he’d been able to choose a place, he would have picked Havana or some Miramar beach. A dog sniffed at him and fogged up the camera. In
his room, Grigor opened his folder and started to fill out a new form. He’d designed the form himself, on day one of Plan Fallback. He’d printed fifty, and he planned to print many more. He wrote down the serial number the program had assigned him, along with the date. He left the boxes for Kentuki Type and City of Kentuki blank; sometimes it took several days of use to figure those things out. He made his first notes in General Characteristics. Upper class, family environment with domestic employees, pool, several cars, possibly rural area, tropical, Spanish language. There was music and the noise of many voices, so the translator was no help at all.
Grigor opened the bottom drawer and counted the cards he had left to activate. Only nine. If Plan Fallback worked out, he felt confident that soon he’d have enough money to buy more connections and more tablets. He had a schedule—eight hours a day—and he had a system—he already administered some seventeen kentukis, which required a certain order. And although he’d decided to raise his prices substantially, the inquiries kept coming in, and he just knew that sales would soon skyrocket. He had let the first three go at very low prices; he’d had to pay his dues, and now the business would start to grow.
His father tapped gently on the door and came in. He was old, but he was still a tall and imposing man. He held a plastic cup in each hand, and he set one on the desk in front of Grigor.
“It’s yogurt, son.”
He sat on the bed with the other cup. Grigor had tried to explain what he was doing, but his father never really understood. When these new technologies come on the market, he’d told the old man, you have to make the most of the legal lag time before everything is regulated.
Little Eyes Page 5