When they finished eating, his father went up to the study to take a phone call. Only then did Marvin remember the battery. Never before had he disconnected without first fitting his kentuki on the charger. He had already wandered a lot and used up much more battery than usual. He realized that if no one charged his dragon while he was disconnected, he would never be able to turn it on again.
“Are you all right, Marvin?” the housekeeper asked as she cleared the table.
On the way to his room Marvin paused for a moment at the door to the study. He observed his father through the crack in the door, making sure he wasn’t seen. He was leaning over his papers, elbows on the table and his head resting on his fists. The tablet was a little to the side; his father could reach out and touch it, the On light blinking atop the pile of books.
Zagreb—Cartagena
GRIGOR HAD SOLD twenty-three “ pre-established kentuki connections,” as he called them in the classifieds. Some had been bought in under twenty-four hours. Not counting the ones he’d already delivered, there were fifty-three open connections. He published the ads along with the forms detailing their characteristics: animal, city, social strata, age of keeper, activities in the environment. He took some screenshots and uploaded those as well, making sure that the keepers themselves never appeared, and trying to communicate as faithfully as possible the kind of experience each connection could offer.
His father knocked on the door and came in, making as little noise as possible; he set a cup of yogurt on the desk with a spoon and left. By the time Grigor thanked him, his father was already gone. He devoured the yogurt in a few spoonfuls. Either the recipe had improved or he hadn’t eaten in hours. Everything happened so quickly these days, and he didn’t think his business could last much longer before some law absorbed the gap in regulations. But in the meantime Plan Fallback was going splendidly, and if there were still a few months of work ahead, Grigor was sure he could save up a solid amount of money.
The cards with their codes could be purchased online and downloaded virtually, but he needed a new tablet for each connection, because once the kentuki was installed on a device, it couldn’t be moved to a different one. So he bought an average of five tablets a week, and to keep from arousing suspicion, he bought them from different stores around the city. Ultimately, the tablets cost him less than the connection codes, which were already as expensive as the kentukis themselves. Why did they keep raising the prices on the codes? Was it an attempt to balance the market? Were there really that many more people interested in watching than in being watched? There was no need for sophisticated studies of the technology market; Grigor could draw his own conclusions with just a little common sense. Still, weighing the pros and cons of being a keeper or a dweller never left either side a clear winner. On one hand, few people were willing to expose their private lives to a stranger, and everyone loves to watch, to be a voyeur into someone else’s life. But then, buying a device meant obtaining something tangible that occupied a real place in the house; a kentuki was the closest thing on the market to having a household robot. Buying a connection code, on the other hand, meant spending a significant amount of money in exchange for eighteen measly virtual numbers, when people so love to take shiny new things out of sophisticated boxes. In the end, an equal price would keep demand relatively proportional for a while, but even so, Grigor thought that sooner or later the balance would tip toward the connection codes.
A message arrived with a new order. Someone was buying the kentuki he had based in Kolkata, the one owned by a little girl in India’s largest Chinatown: “Humble family, mother and father absent most of the time. Three children between 4 and 7. Three rooms. The kentuki takes daily outings to a day care. Nightly charge beside the girl’s bed.” The customer signed off with a woman’s name, and at the end was a postscript that Grigor found overly personal: “It will be the next best thing to having a daughter of my own,” she said. “I’ll be grateful to you for the rest of my life.” In general, he preferred not to know anything about the people who bought his connections. He simply checked to be sure the money arrived, put the tablet—powered off and fully charged—into a box, and sent it by certified mail to whatever address they gave him.
Sometimes he thought about his room as a panoptic window with multiple eyes all around the world. In reality, it was impossible to have more than six or seven kentukis awake at the same time—the desk wasn’t very big and he had only two hands. He had to move the kentukis around their various areas, charge them if they needed it, and have a minimum amount of interaction with the keepers, who had often been waiting hours for their kentukis to finally wake up and do some dumb thing. He had also bought a couple of small cameras with tripods so he could make analog recordings of connections. He’d thought about it a lot before taking on an expense like that. He wondered whether filming the screen directly—instead of paying for a patch for the tablets and saving the images digitally—wasn’t a pretty primitive approach. But he soon found that those videos were quite successful in his classifieds; the analog format gave the recordings a homey yet realistic feel. The customers could also see the exact tablet that they were about to buy, and Grigor’s hands, which sometimes entered the shot, lent transparency to the whole service. It was like buying a puppy with full knowledge of who had taken care of it and how well it behaved. As soon as he uploaded three or four videos of a given kentuki, the connection tended to be sold within a day.
In the afternoons, his father would sometimes sit on the bed and stare at the screens with a frown. Grigor had tried to assign him some connections—he couldn’t keep growing without someone helping him—but his father didn’t even seem to understand what the game was about. Although he’d thought about calling in a friend, he didn’t really have anyone he could trust. Nor did he want to split the money. There were already others like him in the market, and some of them had much higher sales. He wondered how they managed it, and if there were other legal gaps that had escaped him.
And he had also had an unpleasant experience. Something he would rather not think about but couldn’t get out of his head. That little rich kid who’d had a birthday, and who Grigor had imagined lived close to the Cuban beaches of Miramar, was actually from Cartagena, Colombia; the kid barely ever paid attention to him. The family had put his charger in the kitchen, a kitchen as big as the apartment Grigor shared with his father. Two women and a man moved about the house during the day wearing servants’ clothes, while the parents fought every time they laid eyes on each other, even in front of their son and their employees. There was another man who also lived in the house, maybe the boy’s uncle, and that man sometimes put the kentuki in strange places. He hid it in the parents’ master bedroom, making sure to put it somewhere it couldn’t escape from, so the parents would be fighting, or fucking, or throwing things, and suddenly they’d find the kentuki, and one of them would toss it out of the room. One day, the man put the kentuki in the master bath, on the shelf full of towels. Poised on the edge of the shelf, Grigor saw the naked mother get in and out of the shower, dry off, sit down on the toilet and spend a while pulling hairs out of her legs with a tweezer. Every once in a while, she peed. It was all very uncomfortable. But the unpleasant thing Grigor couldn’t get out of his head had been something much worse, something truly frightening.
It was afternoon. The man called to the kentuki from the main living room. Grigor tried to hide but didn’t make it in time, so the man went over to him, picked him up, and put what seemed to be a cloth blindfold over the camera. Though he couldn’t see, he could still hear, so he could tell that they’d left the house and gotten into a car. The car drove for some forty or fifty minutes. Grigor used that time to check on other kentukis, always attentive to what was happening. They went down a gravel road. Then the engine was turned off and there was the sound of some dogs barking. A door opened and closed. From the changes in the light that filtered through the cloth, he deduced that they had stopped in an open area and tha
t someone was taking him out of the car. He heard a cow mooing in the distance. They walked awhile, some seven or eight minutes. Little by little a strange murmur grew. A large gate opened and then closed. Now the sound had radically changed. It took him a while to understand; it was deafening, sharp, multitudinous. When the blindfold was removed he saw that he was in a mesh box. He wasn’t on the floor: he was floating among a thick mass of chicks that were stretching their necks and gasping for air. They stepped on and pecked at each other, screeched from asphyxiation and fear, pecked at him as well. There wasn’t just one mesh box; there were hundreds, aisle after aisle of mesh boxes. The chicks shrieked, some of their beaks had been torn off and the wounds were open and oozing. A thick cloud of feathers flew above the box and in the aisles of the large sheet-metal warehouse. He saw his kentuki’s gray and synthetic feathers flying amid the yellow ones. One of the chicks in front of him, or on top of him, or under him—everything was moving so fast—hit crazily against his camera. It had just lost its beak, and in a panic to defend itself, it smeared the camera with blood. Grigor felt paralyzed as he heard it let out another cry, a cry of intolerable terror that was even more ghastly and piercing filtered through his desktop speakers. Finally he yanked out the audio cables and turned the tablet off. The K52220980’s connection lasted just twenty-seven seconds more. After that, Grigor took down the classified ad for that kentuki and reinstalled the tablet’s operating system. He could use it for a different connection.
Buenos Aires
WHEN HE FINALLY GOT to Buenos Aires, he found out that his uncle had stopped talking. He was met at the apartment door by a nurse, who kindly took his coat and asked how his trip had been, and whether he’d like a cup of tea before he went in to see his uncle. Claudio accepted. During the flight he had imagined himself several times going straight into the room and giving the old man a good hug—he wouldn’t get sentimental; he’d even try for some of that black humor they’d always shared—but the nurse put the tea in his hands, pointed him to a chair, and then tried to explain the situation a little: what he heard in the next room over was not the sound of snoring, but rather the only way his uncle could manage to breathe. His body was too rigid, she said, and as he thought about that word, Claudio felt his own body stiffen. Then he thought: He’s awake, he’s listening to this conversation.
On the floor behind the nurse’s chair he saw a charger. It looked like the round base of his electric kettle, the one he’d bought as soon as he got to Tel Aviv. Then he remembered that about three months before, at the same store where he’d bought that kettle and at the recommendation of an insistent sales clerk, he’d bought a kentuki for his uncle and sent it over with an acquaintance. He hadn’t spoken to the old man since.
The nurse went on.
“I don’t think he’ll make it through the night,” she said, looking at her watch. “My shift ends in twenty minutes, and before I go I need to explain some things to you.”
Claudio set the teacup on the table.
The nurse showed him where the morphine was and how to inject it. She gave him her contact information and the emergency numbers in case anything happened, although she suggested, very delicately, that it was time to let him go. She gave Claudio an envelope that his father had left for him the week before, when he had also passed through Buenos Aires to say goodbye to his brother.
“Your father said this is everything you’ll need for the funeral.”
Only then did Claudio understand that the final arrangements would also fall to him. The dark knot that had crept up on him in the airport and that was stuck between his throat and chest now threatened to strangle him. He sucked in air and pushed it back down. He told himself he’d deal with the knot another time.
The nurse left and Claudio stood for a while in the middle of the living room. He realized that it wasn’t so easy to run into the other room and give his uncle that hug. He heard him snoring, or breathing, and now that he knew what the sound meant, it was hard for him to stand it. It grew louder at times, as his uncle was consumed by a lack of air.
Another sound distracted him, and instead of going into the sickroom, he headed for the kitchen. Apparently the nurse had left something on. It was a soft and intermittent sound. When he saw the kentuki, he understood. In Tel Aviv he’d even seen people out strolling the boulevard with them, but he’d never noticed the sound they made as they moved. The kentuki was hidden under the small breakfast table. He crouched down, called to it and snapped his fingers, but instead of coming over, the kentuki rolled off in the other direction. The small digital display between its hind wheels was blinking red, but it seemed to have no intention of going to its charger. Instead, it hid out in another corner of the kitchen. Claudio found it strange, but what did he know about these toys. He went closer again, and the kentuki looked at him without moving; it had nowhere to escape to. He touched it with one finger, tapping it lightly on the forehead. He had never looked at one closely before, and he wondered what his professors of nanotechnology at the Weizmann Institute would think if they knew that, in a fit of nostalgia and tenderness, he had given his uncle a gadget like this.
He went back to the living room, and his uncle’s breathing drove him over to the sliding glass door and out onto the balcony for a moment. The hoarse sound now reached him from the bedroom window. There was a railing made of two wide wooden beams that didn’t reach all the way to the floor. Claudio leaned against it and looked down at the tips of his shoes peeking out over the edge. It was something he had always done on that balcony, ever since he was little. The cars waited at the traffic lights on Avenida Cabildo below. He missed Buenos Aires, and as he stood there on the balcony, he also missed his new city. According to Google Maps, he lived 12,2111 kilometers from his childhood home, but his childhood home hadn’t existed for a long time now.
It was hard to go back to the living room. Once inside he could no longer find any excuse for delay, so he peered into the bedroom. His uncle’s body lay under blankets that were pulled neatly up to his chest. His head arched strangely backward in the service of his snore. Claudio stood for a while on the threshold, surprised by how silent his own breathing was. Finally he took a step toward the bed.
“Hi,” said Claudio.
He said it because he thought his uncle couldn’t hear him. Then the man’s right hand lifted up toward him and its open palm called him closer. Claudio swallowed hard. He brought a chair over and sat next to his uncle.
“I like your kentuki,” said Claudio.
And in a movement that was clearly excessive in his condition, his uncle raised both hands and reached them toward the window. A slight grimace appeared on his skeletal face, and then both hands fell, defeated, to either side of his body.
“Do you need more morphine?”
It was perhaps the first time in his life that he’d uttered that word. His uncle didn’t say yes or no, but from his rattled breathing Claudio knew he was still alive. Why would he have gestured so desperately toward the window? He leaned back in the chair and looked around. The shelves, chairs, and tables, normally piled high with his uncle’s books and sheet music, were now spotless surfaces covered with jars, pills, cotton, and adult diapers. On the nightstand, the sole personal object in the room was almost touching the pillow: a metal box barely larger than the palm of a hand. Claudio didn’t remember having seen it before, and he thought it looked like some sort of souvenir from an exotic Middle Eastern city, the kind his uncle had always longed to visit. Though he was tempted to pick it up, he didn’ t—he didn’t want to disturb his uncle. He sat there some twenty minutes longer, still smelling the airplane food on his own body.
When his uncle stopped breathing, his toes, at the other end of the bed, tensed up. Claudio jumped to his feet and away from the bed. For a while, neither of them moved. Then the silence calmed him, and the sound of traffic on the street returned little by little. He called the funeral home; they would take care of sending a doctor for the death certificate
in a few hours, and they would collect the body that night. He went back over to the bed and pulled the sheet all the way up over the body. It was strange—he’d been sure this death was going to hurt, but he couldn’t feel anything.
He picked up the little metal box and opened it. He vaguely heard the kentuki’s motor as it moved around the kitchen. Inside the box were handwritten letters. They could have been in Arabic or Hebrew, Claudio really couldn’t tell the difference. Every once in a while, between one paragraph and another, his uncle’s name appeared, written in letters he could recognize. There was a small plastic ring, like a party favor, and it was broken. Behind the letters he found photographs. They were of a boy around twelve years old. He was always the same age and they were taken in what could have been his room or on the patio of his house, and they seemed to be current. He was a handsome boy with chubby cheeks and dark skin. He held up for the camera objects that—as Claudio gradually understood—evidently his uncle had been sending him. In the last one, his parents, their eyes wide and shining with joy, were laughing and holding up his uncle’s Yamaha organ, one at either end; at the keyboard, the boy was excitedly pretending to play.
He felt the dark knot again. He put the box down and left the room. He needed to breathe. He crossed the living room and went back to the balcony. He leaned against the railing, feeling suffocated, and stared out at the cars on the avenue below. Only when he noticed that the traffic was stopped in one spot did he see the kentuki. It took him a second to comprehend what he was looking at, but in the end there was no doubt about it: his uncle’s kentuki had crashed to the street eleven floors down, very near the sidewalk. Two women were directing the cars so they wouldn’t run over the remains. They were trying to pick up the pieces while some pedestrians looked on in horror. The connection of the K94142178 had lasted for eighty-four days, seven hours, two minutes, and thirteen seconds.
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