Oaxaca
SHE’D GOTTEN USED to moving around the room with the soft sound of Colonel Sanders behind her. Sometimes she let him come with her to the residency library. This past week, even, she had let the kentuki follow her to the terrace that looked out at the mountains, where Alina would lie on a lounge chair and sunbathe. They were short trips without stairs, and she liked that the kentuki could move on its own, liked to hear its well-won independence at her heels. Sometimes she heard it move under the lounge chair, and she thought maybe the sun had blinded the camera and whoever-he-was couldn’t see well. She liked that the crow took refuge under the shade of her body. More than anything, she had to admit, she loved to have it there waiting for her and to sporadically hear the little motor whir as it moved to follow the movement of the sun. Its effort relaxed her.
“Are you all right, honey?” her mother had asked her that morning.
It was the first time her mother had called her in Oaxaca. She said she had read Alina’s e-mails and gotten a strange feeling. Alina reassured her she was fine, things were going marvelously. Sven, too, yes, yes, the show would be in three weeks.
“And your little friend?”
Her mother always asked about pets, especially when she suspected it was better not to talk about other matters.
“You don’t have to service it at all?” she’d asked.
Did she mean give it food and water? Cut its claws and take it out to pee?
“It’s a cell phone with legs, Mom.”
“And what are you supposed to do with it, then?”
Alina explained what a kentuki really was, how when it was first connected the device’s IMEI was linked to a particular kentuki dweller, and how the link to a single keeper was preserved. Her mother was silent for a long time, so Alina tried to clarify further:
“The IMEI is an identification number, any telephone has one. Yours does, for example.”
“Is it a number I choose? I don’t remember ever choosing any number for my phone.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, Mom,” said Alina impatiently.
“So why don’t I buy another kentuki and send it to you? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? That way we could spend more time together.”
“You can’t choose who you connect to, Mom. That’s the beauty of it.”
“Then what’s it for?”
“Oh, Mom!” said Alina, though the question got her thinking.
She went to the library almost every morning now, after she got back from her run and took a shower. She ate lunch while she answered e-mails or read the news. When she was washing dishes in the small kitchen before lying down for a while, Colonel Sanders would tap against her feet, looking up at her and emitting his metallic little cries. The gesture was somewhere between funny and depressing, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that whoever-he-was was desperate for a little more attention. He wanted her questions, wanted a way to communicate, he wanted Alina to listen to what he had to say and for her to “service” him. But Alina wasn’t going to give in. Without a way of communicating, the kentuki was relegated to the simple function of a pet, and Alina was determined not to cross that line. She turned off the faucet, looked for some tangerines, and discovered there were none left. She would buy more at the fruit stand. She put away clothes and straightened her things, careful not to trip over the kentuki. The day before, she had accidentally kicked it and sent it rolling head over heels, and the crow had lost its plastic beak. She’d picked the Colonel up and set him back on his wheels. The kentuki didn’t move for a good while, and it wasn’t the first time he’d acted offended.
The truth was, if Alina had understood better what exactly a kentuki was, she wouldn’t have bought a device and been a keeper, she would have chosen to dwell in a kentuki. Without a doubt, she was more suited to that condition. Though in the end, if you can’t choose your parents or your siblings, why should you have the freedom to choose which side of a kentuki to be on? People paid for someone to follow them around like a dog all day; they wanted a real person beg ging to be looked at. Alina closed the drawers and flopped on the bed. She heard the kentuki’s motor as it came closer, and she languidly let her hand fall. The Colonel gently pushed against her palm, and his plush body brushed her fingertips. She felt for the empty space where the nose had been and scratched it with her fingertips. She let her arm go again, and the kentuki turned softly around her hand, as though petting itself.
Dwelling in a kentuki, thought Alina, was a much more intense experience. If being anonymous online was the maximum freedom for any user—and, what’s more, almost impossible—how would it feel, then, to be an anonymous actor in someone else’s life?
Later, they went out onto the terrace. Alina spent a while reading in the sun on the lounge chair, then put the book on the ground, took off her cover-up, and lay back in her bikini. Colonel Sanders came out from under her chair and moved farther away, as if wanting to take in the full view of what she was doing. He spent a few minutes like that, until Alina turned over onto her stomach and let her eyes close. She heard the kentuki roll away, then come back closer. By the sound she calculated the Colonel was underneath her, but he was moving suspiciously slowly. He didn’t hit against the chair legs like he usually did, but rather moved along just beneath her body. She sensed him under her stomach, advancing toward her breasts so slowly that Alina opened her eyes, though she was careful not to move. She waited. In the distance, a motorcycle silently plied the only line of asphalt on a mountain. Then she heard the kentuki turn a little to the left. The plastic material of the chair tensed, and the kentuki’s head softly brushed against one of her breasts. Alina jumped up. Colonel Sanders was motionless, and it took her a few seconds to remember she was barefoot and realize the flagstones were burning her feet. She cursed as she looked for some way to protect herself, and she moved a little farther off where she could stand on the grass. They stared at each other for a moment. Alina decided not to go back for her books and clothes. She went hopping on tiptoe back to the room, closed and locked the door behind her, and stood in the middle of the room, waiting.
A few minutes later she heard the soft, slow taps of the kentuki against the door, summoning her. She had a terrifying image: Colonel Sanders as a naked old man sitting in a bed with damp sheets, controlling the kentuki from his phone, tapping at her door, eager to touch her again. It was a repulsive sensation, but she closed her eyes and made an effort to focus on it, to see it all clearly. She grimaced in disgust and balled her fingers into fists. And yet, with an urgency she couldn’t explain even to herself, she leapt for the door and opened it. The Colonel was at her feet; his head turned up toward her as he came in. Alina closed the door and walked around him, the way he usually circled her. She reached behind her for her bikini string and pulled.
“Look,” she said.
Her top fell to the floor. It was the first thing the kentuki saw when it turned toward her, and then it raised its eyes to the height of her chest.
“You want to touch them?”
Alina wondered how exactly they would do that. When she’d turned on the kentuki for the first time, she had never imagined this situation, but there was a certain logic in which she continued to trust. She didn’t feel like she was imposing on either of their privacy. Whoever-he-was could take photos, keep screenshots, he could jack off inside a felt-covered plastic crow. But unlike the crew at this residency, she wasn’t an artist of anything, much less a maestro. And being nobody was another form of anonymity, one that made her just as powerful as him, and she wanted to make that very clear. She knelt down on the floor and let the kentuki come closer. She imagined herself with the old man in that damp bed. What kind of things would the old geezer like to do to her? She had never seen any porn with old people. She reached over to the desk and felt for her tablet. Nor had it ever occurred to her to look for porn with kentukis. She opened the search window and typed in porn, old, dick, kentuki. She got more than eight hundred thousand res
ults. Were there really that many people fucking kentukis? Could such a thing be done? She chose a video at random, and while it was loading she sat with her back against the side of the bed, picked up Colonel Sanders, and set him on her crossed legs. She turned him so he was looking in the same direction she was, and she calculated how far away she should hold her tablet so both of them could see it well. On the screen, a girl adjusted the camera above the bed. She lay down, and her tits were so big they fell to either side. She reached over for something on the nightstand: it was a kentuki, though it had too many things attached and Alina couldn’t tell which animal it was. There was a fluorescent horn fastened between its eyes. A big latex dildo hung from its belly, attached with a belt. And where the ass would be—if those creatures had asses—someone had painted a big red heart. Did the whoever-it-was in that poor kentuki know what they’d done to it? Was the dildo within its camera frame? Then the mattress trembled, shaking the girl and the well-hung unicorn, and a naked old man on his hands and knees entered the shot from the right. Alina paused the video. She didn’t know if she wanted to see what came next, but she’d just gotten an idea for something that would finally pull her out of her malaise. She took one of the benches from the kitchen and carried it to the middle of the living area. She put the kentuki in a small ceramic bowl, head down, so it couldn’t move. It fit like a ridiculous little hat, but it held the crow firmly. She put the bowl on the bench in front of her open tablet. She made a few adjustments to be sure the kentuki could see perfectly, arranging things so that the video was all it could see. Then she pressed Play again. There were still thirty-seven minutes of action left, and there was nowhere the Colonel could escape to.
She got dressed, picked up her keys, and left, slamming the door. Outside, dusk was already starting to fall and the lights were on in some of the studios. If she didn’t hurry she wouldn’t get to the library in time, and she wanted to see Carmen. That was what she most needed now, someone real to whom she could say something, anything.
She didn’t see Carmen at the front desk, so she rapped her fist lightly a few times on the wood. Carmen bounced up into view, loaded down with papers; she’d been organizing the space under the counter.
“That’s how you order a whiskey, my dear,” she said. “Not a Jane Austen novel.” She stood looking at Alina a few seconds and then dropped the papers. “Are you all right?”
Carmen looked her up and down again and then glanced at her watch. She told Alina to wait for her a second and they could leave the residency to get some air.
They walked to the street. Alina wanted the walk and she wanted the company, but she wasn’t ready to talk about what had just happened to her. She was pleased to find that the sun no longer stung and a warm breeze was blowing up from Oaxaca. Toward the center of town, in front of the church, there was an open-air kiosk that acted as both a pharmacy and an ice cream and coffee shop. It was the closest thing the town had to a café, and it was still open. The attendant came out right away to clean off the only table on the sidewalk, and they both ordered coffee.
“There’s no rest from that damned kentuki,” said Alina suddenly, stirring her cup. “I can’t stand it anymore. It’s depraved.”
“You don’t like Colonel Sanders anymore?” Carmen closed her eyes and leaned her head back to catch the last rays of sun. “You can always just throw them off a cliff, right?”
That wasn’t what Alina wanted. She wanted to rest, she wanted to be the one who decided when the little beast could move around the room and her life. It was outrageous that the keeper couldn’t impose a schedule on the kentuki.
They talked about books and ordered another round of coffee.
“Have you seen that?” Carmen pointed inside the kiosk.
On the TV screen, the six o’clock news was opening with a kentuki on the table.
“They turn one on every day.”
The two journalists were making signals that the kentuki obeyed, as if it were a dog being trained.
Carmen explained: “If you call in to the program and can prove it’s you moving the kentuki, you win half a million pesos. Just like that, they give it to you the same day.”
Alina bought more tangerines before heading back, and Carmen bought ice cream pops for both of them. They walked awhile in silence, each struggling with a dripping dessert.
When Alina got back to the room, the kentuki wasn’t there. Sven had come by and left again, she could tell from the clean cups and open windows—ventilation was one of the artiste’s great passions—but in particular because the bench where she’d left Colonel Sanders was under the table and her tablet was on her side of the bed. Sometimes Alina moved things around just for the pleasure of it, and at first the artiste had noticed and moved things, too, to show her he was capable of understanding what she was up to, even if only abstractly. It was an affectionate way of teasing each other. She would close the windows on him, move his shoes to the other side of the bed and leave her own sandals where his shoes had been. She replaced the toothpaste with a cream from the medicine kit, changed the order of some notebooks that he always kept neatly on his nightstand. Sven responded with much less ingeniousness, so little that sometimes Alina had to make an effort to notice. Oh, she remembered thinking, he moved my brushes from the bathroom counter into the kitchen, how clever. Sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t done it herself in a moment of distraction. Now she smiled nostalgically in the middle of the tidy living room, wondering if the kentuki’s absence might not be a signal from Sven—a way, though very removed, of trying to shift something.
Alina went back out. The idea of Sven and the kentuki alone together worried her because of how fast the artiste could break the long project of noncommunication she had been building: all it would take was for Sven to show the crow a paper with an e-mail address to transform her subjugated fantasy pet into the reality of a dirty old man. She went down toward the common areas and crossed the central kitchen and rec room. At that hour, the traffic of artists reached its peak. They played foosball, they dozed in front of the large projector screen on a massive sofa. They ate standing up with the refrigerator door open, and they sacked the pantry. Squeezed into a hot-pink velvet outfit, Sven’s assistant twirled her curls while she chatted with the Russian sculptor who’d arrived the week before. Alina went through the last room, where a group of people were shouting their bets around two dragon kentukis that were competing in a race toward the main picture window.
Alina crossed the exhibition gallery. They had taken down the installation of transparent burkas by the French Afghan woman from New York, and for the first time the space looked wide and open. She went out to the studio area, where some artists were still at work. The crazy woman who made cork installations was singing reggaeton, using what looked like a flashlight as a microphone. In the next room the Chilean photographer couple were working, leaning over a giant print, each of them cutting an area with a razor. Alina passed two more studios and stopped in front of the door to the last one. A small sign said Sven Greenfort. It was his handwriting. She knocked before going in. No one answered, so she entered and switched on the lights. The place was clean and tidy, as expected. The wood blocks for printing were lined up by size against the window, and a large number of two-color monoprints were drying on the main table. What she didn’t expect to find were those three boxes on the back table. Three white boxes, just like the one Alina had taken the Colonel from. They were empty. Beyond them, alongside the rollers, she saw a kentuki user’s manual. The other two manuals seemed to have met a different fate—their pages were also on the table, torn apart by hand and each one stamped, in red ink, with a fingerprint like all his artistic interventions. That’s how poor Sven had worked ever since she met him: though he occasionally got up the nerve to experiment a little beyond his limits when he was in his private space, he only ever showed his usual monoprints and xylographs—big and gray enough to hide any mediocrity—while he denied his true desire “to shake up the mark
et.” Alina left the studios and went back toward the rooms. Where were Sven and the Colonel? Shouldn’t Sven have told her he was working on a project with kentukis? Suddenly that infidelity mattered much more than the one with the assistant. She crossed the path to the pools. The cries of the crickets came down from the mountains, furious. She could feel how they lodged in her ears.
Umbertide
AFTER WORK, Enzo watered the plants in the greenhouse and cut some parsley for the meat. He took longer than usual, waiting for the mole to come out and look over the basil and peperoncini. But the screen door never opened, and in the end he got tired of waiting and went inside to make dinner. He called Luca in to help him set the table, and they ate while they listened to the news. When a short report on kentukis came on, the mole came out from behind the sofa and rolled under the table. It was the first time Mister had made himself known that day, and it had been the same all the previous week—things were no longer going well between them. Mister hadn’t at any point neglected his responsibilities as co-parent, but since that disastrous Sunday when Enzo tried to communicate with him, the mole consistently avoided him. How could he be so annoyed at a simple attempt to converse as equals? Would he really rather crawl around the house as a mole than strike up some kind of friendship with Enzo? They were both alone and they spent a lot of time together, and sharing a few beers—even if it was at a distance with a phone in hand—couldn’t do anyone any harm. Enzo couldn’t understand why he himself was so mad about it, though. Why he felt disappointed and offended by a snub from a gadget less than a foot tall. And still, he couldn’t stop himself from doing everything possible to reconcile with the little guy; it was unbearable. He turned on the RAI when it was time for the programs he knew Mister was interested in; he propped him in the back window of the car on every trip to the supermarket or to pick up Luca; he constantly checked to make sure the boy hadn’t hidden Mister’s charger again. While he got Luca ready for school, when he made food or sat down to do a little paperwork, he was constantly talking to Mister and asking him questions. How are you today, Mister? Are you going to go outside a while? Do you want to watch some more TV? Do you want me to open the window? Sometimes he wondered if he might not be talking to himself. Mister addressed Enzo only to let him know when the boy fell asleep in front of the TV, that he wasn’t doing his homework, or that, even after his bedroom light was turned off, he was still awake, playing with his tablet under the covers.
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