“Is this illegal, son?”
For his father’s generation, illegal was a word that set off alarm bells; for Grigor, it was an overrated term that already sounded antiquated.
“Not until it’s regulated,” said Grigor.
His cousin had made a fair amount of money using drones to make anonymous deliveries, but that hadn’t lasted long. Sooner or later someone with more capital and better contacts showed up. Regulation had nothing to do with setting standards; it meant putting rules in place that worked in favor of a few. Companies would soon take over the business opportunity behind the kentukis, and it wouldn’t be long before people figured out that if you had the money, rather than paying seventy dollars for a connection card that would turn on in a random corner of the world, it was better to pay eight times that and choose your location. There were people willing to shell out a fortune so they could spend a few hours a day living in poverty, and there were people who paid to be tourists without leaving their houses: to travel through India without a single day of diarrhea, or to witness the arctic winter barefoot and in pajamas. There were also opportunists for whom a connection in a law firm in Doha meant a chance to spend an evening rolling leisurely around over notes and documents that no one should ever get a look at. Then there was that father of the legless boy in Adelaide, who only three days ago had asked him for a “ well-behaved keeper” who practiced “extreme sports” in “paradisiacal places.” Money is no object, his e-mail had said. Sometimes the customers weren’t so sure about what they were looking for, and Grigor would send them two or three forms with examples of images and video. Sometimes even he managed to enjoy the connections he maintained. He would wield his gift of ubiquity in secret. He watched his keepers sleep, eat, shower. Some of them restricted him to specific areas, others let him move around with total freedom, and more than once, bored with waiting, he’d entertained himself going through his keepers’ things while they were out.
“We save about fifty kunas a week this way, son,” said his father, displaying his finished yogurt.
Grigor remembered he was still holding the plastic cup his father had given him. He tried some and understood what his father meant: he wasn’t buying yogurt anymore, but had made it himself in the kitchen. Grigor had to force himself not to spit it back into the cup, but to gulp it down with a smile.
Antigua
MARVIN CIRCLED the vacuum cleaners in the shop window, then spent a while looking out at the street. He could tell from the reflection in the glass that the shop was small and dark. It sold appliances. The image in the window didn’t quite include him; he still hadn’t been able to find a reflection of himself anywhere, and he couldn’t answer his friends when they asked what kind of kentuki he was. If he growled, the noise in his tablet’s speaker didn’t give him any clue, either—it could be the call of a bird of prey just as well as the creak of a door opening. He didn’t even know what city he was in, or what his keeper looked like. He’d told his friends about the snow, but they didn’t seem too impressed. They’d cracked some jokes about exactly why a princess’s ass and an apartment in Dubai were better, then told him that he couldn’t even touch the snow, so who cared. Marvin knew they were wrong: if you managed to get out into the snow, and if you pushed your kentuki hard enough against a bank that was nice and white and fluffy, you could leave your mark. And that was just like touching the other end of the world with your own fingertips.
In the shop window, the two square meters he inhabited felt more minuscule every day. He got so bored he’d even tried leaving the kentuki alone and studying instead. After all, the books were right there, so clunky and permanent; sometimes Marvin played a game where he opened them slowly, reverently, like they were relics of an earlier civilization. But he always went back to the kentuki, to that eternal dark night where almost no one ever went by. Once, an older man stopped to look at him and he spun the kentuki in circles, moving from side to side. The man clapped, cheering so loudly that Marvin thought he might be drunk. And another time he saw a boy who was older than him, one who would never have noticed him if they’d gone to the same school. The boy winked at him and kept walking down the street. He passed by again the next day, and the next. Marvin liked that boy and the sound his ring made against the glass every time he knocked on the window to say hi. Did the boy come by just to see him?
One night, after the main lights of the shop window went out, someone picked up the kentuki. For a moment Marvin saw everything: shelves full of radios, blenders, coffee makers, plus a counter and some shining floors. It was a small place, just as he’d suspected, though it was overflowing with plants and merchandise. The person set the kentuki on a table that seemed to be the only one, right in the middle of the shop. Now that he could finally get a look at the whole place, Marvin felt a strange excitement.
He looked around desperately for a mirror, a reflection that would tell him what kind of animal he was. He could finally see the woman who had taken him from the window—she was hefty and old, and she moved diligently from one side of the store to the other, running a cloth over the surfaces around her. She opened a side door to the shop window that Marvin had never seen opened before, and she also took out the vacuum cleaners from the display. As she leaned over the register, for a good while he could see only her legs and the gray feathers of a duster that sometimes peeked out from the other side. On the wall above the counter, seven clocks showed 1:07 in the morning. Marvin wondered why the woman was working at that hour, if she was the store’s owner or just took care of cleaning it. He remembered his mother saying that no one can clean up after you better than you yourself, and this woman seemed very committed to her work. He saw her stand up, leave the duster on the table, and pick up the cloth again. Then Marvin tried to put on a show: he spun around on the table opening and closing his little eyes, making his deep, sad caw. The woman turned around to look at him. Marvin shook himself a little on his axis in a way he imagined was like a dog shaking off water, and he rolled over to the edge of the table. He didn’t have much more to offer. The woman walked around the table. She came so close that the green apron she wore tied around her waist took up the whole screen. Marvin looked up, wanting to know if she was smiling, and he saw her other hand move above him. He couldn’t tell what that hand was doing; the woman’s arm had stopped, and hung suspended over the kentuki, connecting them in some strange way. A short, rough sound was repeated through the tablet’s speakers, and Marvin finally understood: she was petting him. He gave a brief growl, which he imagined to be like a cat’s purr, and he opened and closed his eyes several times, as fast as possible, while the arm’s movement made the apron ripple before the screen.
“What a cute little guy,” said the woman, in some unintelligible language that the controller translated easily.
Dressed as she was and talking to him so sweetly, she reminded him of the woman who cleaned his own house, this outsize mansion in Antigua full of his mother’s curios and ornaments that now no one could bring themselves to get rid of. But that cleaning woman took care of Marvin like he was another orphaned knickknack. The woman in the green apron, however, had touched him. She’d scratched his head with the sincere love of a person petting a puppy, and as soon as she let go of him Marvin spun around and asked for more. Then the woman bent down closer, her immense face filling the screen, and she planted his first kiss on his forehead.
From then on, every other night, the woman took him out of the window and chatted to him while she cleaned. And that’s what they were doing one day when she moved the kentuki to clean the table and set him down in front of a mirror. It was only for a second, but at his desk Marvin shouted and flung his arms toward the ceiling, fists closed, as though cheering for a goal.
“I’m a dragon!”
It was what he had always wanted and he repeated it over and over: I’m a dragon! sitting at the desk, then standing in front of his mother’s photograph, and the next day at every break at school. Things were finall
y starting to happen at the appliance store.
The woman was usually worked up when she arrived; sometimes she seemed so angry when she spoke that the translator couldn’t fully convey her words. But cleaning calmed her down. Maybe it was the only thing that could distract her. Then she would talk to him about her two daughters, and about how badly her husband administered the store. He’d been the one to bring in the kentuki. Her husband was the kind of man who bought everything. When they’d decided to open the business twenty-three years before, she thought it would help him focus, or that at least he’d be entertained by buying things for other people, and he could also enjoy having others buy from him. But the man still managed to acquire an incredible number of useless objects, things that he claimed were essential in order to solve urgent problems that miraculously dissolved immediately after their acquisition.
The kentuki was meant to liven up the shop window—that was how the distributor, the same guy who promoted the line of coffee makers and electric kettles, had sold it to him. He’d delivered the kentuki along with a newspaper article full of statistics about the product, and a promise that, once it was turned on, it would “dance like a monkey” and people wouldn’t be able to help stopping in front of the store. What clearly no one had told him was that the little monkey would be connected to a real person, one who might be available only from eleven at night to three in the morning. And who passed the shop window at that hour, other than the town drunks?
Marvin had trouble taking in so much information. So, this woman wasn’t his keeper? And if he could only use his kentuki after school—that is, nighttime in this other world—he would never meet his real keeper, the man who had turned him on? And the woman’s complaint, that was what bothered him most—would he have to dance like a monkey if he wanted to make them happy? Would it do any good to dance at night? The woman’s long droning confused him, but he liked the sweet tone of her voice, her energy as she lectured him, and the noise she made against his casing when she kissed or dusted him.
One night she told him:
“My daughter has one of you at home. And they talk in Morse code. You should learn, so we can chat!”
So Marvin googled the Morse code alphabet and practiced in bed until he fell asleep, growling like his dragon under the sheets. He went over and over the letters of his name.
When the woman said, “Make a short growl for a dot, a long growl for a line,” he was ready. He growled his name with utter clarity. The woman said:
“Wait, wait!”
She ran for a pen and paper.
“OKAY! Repeat, little dragon!”
Marvin said his name again in Morse code, and she took notes carefully. Then she cried:
“Marvin! I love it!”
Marvin smiled.
“It’s a pleasure, dear Marvin,” and he saw her bow as though before a king. “My name is Lis, at your service.”
That week, Marvin realized that every time the boy who tapped his ring on the window went by, he was writing messages on the glass. He did it in English, which Marvin thought was very cool, even if he left slogans like “Free the kentuki!” or “Slavedrivers!” and the cold conserved the messages on the icy window for too long. He was afraid Lis would see them and think he had something to do with it. He wanted to be set free, yes, the idea wasn’t bad at all. But he didn’t want to hurt that keeper who wasn’t really his keeper, but with whom he had formed a connection anyway.
Sometimes he acted like a monkey, or what he thought acting like a monkey might entail. He spun around in the window, growling and blinking, circling the vacuums and stopping every once in a while in front of one to admire it. It didn’t do any good; there was almost never anyone in the street, and at that hour, even if someone passed by and he managed to draw their attention to the lovely casings of those vacuum cleaners, the store was already closed and dark.
“I want to go farther,” the dragon growled one night. Lis stopped shaking the duster, took her notebook and her Morse code chart, and a moment later she looked at him and smiled.
“I have two silly daughters,” she said, “and I’ve waited a lifetime for one of them to say something like that.”
Lis came closer.
“Where do you want to go, little Marvin the Dragon?”
At his father’s desk, the question sounded as if she were offering to grant him a wish. Marvin raised his eyes to the books, the old wallpaper, and the portrait of his mother. If he left this house, the portrait would be the only thing he would take with him, though it was too high for him to reach.
“I want to be free,” he growled.
“Well, I think that seems like a very good idea,” said Lis.
Marvin pictured himself touching the snow. He would have to figure out a way to reach the mountains alone—from the shop window the streets always looked dry, as the snow disappeared as soon as it hit the pavement—but he would find a way. He saw Lis walk away toward the drawer under the shop window and come back with his charger. She left it on the floor with another joking bow, as if making an offering to royalty.
“Starting now, this whole kingdom shall be yours,” she said. “Goodbye, shop window, goodbye, captivity.”
She picked him up and set him on the floor by her feet.
That wasn’t what Marvin wanted. He got onto the charger and surveyed, from his new position, the space that no longer seemed so big or so unknown.
“I want to go outside,” he growled.
Lis transcribed his growls in her notebook and then laughed. At his father’s desk, Marvin frowned.
“I’ll come back.”
She looked at him. She was serious as she glanced first at the window, then at the door.
“Please,” growled Marvin.
As if she’d suddenly gotten bored with him, Lis left the notepad on the counter and moved off with her duster. She spent a while cleaning. Then she came back, knelt down in front of the dragon, and said:
“OKAY.”
And what she said next made Marvin think maybe she, too, had been considering a liberation. Maybe some keepers did for their kentukis what they couldn’t do for themselves.
“I’m going to leave you outside the store: on your charger but under the stairs,” said Lis. She picked him up and put him beside the cash register. “You can only go out at night. I want to see you back here every morning so I can put you in the window before he arrives, or else he’ll realize. Do we have a deal?”
The dragon gave a series of growls that spelled out yes. Lis opened the register and took out one of the gift tags they kept in there alongside the money. She showed it to the camera so he could see it—under the logo, in gold letters, were the shop’s address and phone number, but the strange letters gave no clue as to where he was. She stuck the tag on his back, just above his rear wheels.
“If anything happens,” said Lis as she put him back on the floor, “look for someone good who can bring you home.”
Before she left him under the stairs, she gave him one last kiss on the forehead.
“Wait!” growled Marvin. He wanted to ask: “What city are we in?”
But Lis must have been thinking of other things, and she walked off without turning around once.
Beijing—Lyon
CHENG SHI-XU HAD BOUGHT a kentuki card and established a connection with a device in Lyon. Since then, he’d spent over ten hours a day at his computer. His bank account balance was shrinking every day, his friends almost never called anymore, and all the fast food was burning a hole in his stomach. “So this is how you’re going to let yourself die?” his mother asked him over the phone, perhaps because she really had been working on her own death for years now, though he was always too busy to notice. For over a month now, though, Cheng Shi-Xu had been focused on something new: he was experiencing the birth of a great love, perhaps the most authentic and inexplicable of his life.
The first thing that happened was that he met his kentuki’s keeper. Her name was Cécile and she
had received him on her fortieth birthday; he wasn’t exactly a birthday present, but Cheng Shi-Xu didn’t know that yet. As soon as the K7833962’s connection was established, she picked him up and carried him into the bathroom, then held him up in front of the mirror, and then Cheng Shi-Xu could see everything. He was a panda kentuki, covered end to end in fuchsia and turquoise felt. On his belly, in gray plastic letters, were the words Rappelez-vous toujour. Emmanuel. Cheng Shi-Xu thought that Cécile was very pretty. Tall and thin, reddish hair, and a face covered with freckles. She smiled at him in the mirror.
“Welcome, my darling,” she said.
Cheng Shi-Xu understood a fair amount of French, so he went to the controller’s settings and deactivated the translator.
Soon he discovered that the rest of the apartment was just as large and sophisticated as the bathroom, and that it was a kingdom Cécile had generously arranged so her kentuki could have total autonomy. She had placed mirrors at floor level, made small openings—the kind often installed for pets—in the doors and windows that led out to the balcony, and installed a long ramp, hidden behind the three-person sofa, that went from end to end at the height of its broad leather armrests; Cheng Shi-Xu learned to navigate it easily.
Cécile imposed her rules from the very first day without an ounce of shyness, counting out each law on her fingers.
“You can never come into my room. If I come home with a man, you don’t leave your charger. If I’m sleeping, or sitting at that desk, it’s forbidden to move around the house.”
He obeyed.
Outside of those rules, Cécile was attentive and fun. Sometimes they went out on the balcony and she picked him up to show him Lyon. She pointed out the plaza where the world’s first black flag of anarchy had been hoisted, and the old storefront where her family’s silk shop had once been, and she told him other stories of bombings and revolutions that her grandfather had once told her while standing on that very same balcony.
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