Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

  WAIT.

  Marvin waited. The boy walked away, typing on his phone, and a rabbit kentuki followed his every move. Soon Marvin received a reply message in his in-box.

  Install this program.

  An application was attached. Marvin glanced at the closed door to the study and didn’t think twice. In under a minute the installation was in process. The controller closed, and when it opened again, there was a chat window on the right side of the screen. There were messages in very strange languages. None were in Spanish, but he understood the ones that were in English.

  “Kitty03= in knysna 24°, you owe me $2”

  “kingkko= and finally: the sardines. Now that’s a no go”

  “ElCoyyote= here -5°. Going into”

  “kingkko= that’s why I left my mom’s house, right?”

  “ElCoyyote= surgery. I’m taking out a kidney and I’ll see you guys later”

  “Kitty03= :-)”

  Marvin heard another message enter his in-box. It was a confirmation of membership in the Liberation Club. You’re here now, it said farther down, with a link to Google Maps. He was at 39 Prestevannsveien, in Honningsvåg. Honningsvåg! Where was that? He opened a map on the tablet and located it: Norway. It was as far north in Europe as one could possibly go. It was surrounded by snow. On the screen, the boy raised another card. Number 3 said:

  CHOOSE A SCREEN NAME AND SEND IT TO THE E-MAIL.

  Marvin thought about it for a moment. He made his decision, typed, and sent it.

  WELCOME, SAID CARD NUMBER 4.

  And then the boy turned the card over:

  YOUR KENTUKI HAS BEEN LIBERATED.

  Kingkko and Kitty03 greeted him in the chat. His nickname blinked, waiting for a reply. He ventured:

  “SnowDragon= Hello!”

  “Kitty03= I love your name, SnowDragon!”

  The others also praised it. A certain Tunumma83 joined the conversation, and a cascade of questions kept Marvin busy for a while. No one knew where Antigua was, or even Guate mala, so he sent a Google Maps link. He gave his age and the name of his school, and he clarified that he didn’t have a mother, or any siblings, or a dog.

  Tunumma83= but this is 3x better you’re in the liberation club! there are people who would die to be in your place.

  Marvin still didn’t understand what this club was all about. The next day, during the first break at school, he and his friends googled it. His club didn’t show up anywhere online. There were others, all small and improvised—it seemed like the idea of kentuki liberation had just been invented. It had occurred to someone that mistreating a kentuki was as cruel as keeping a dog tied up all day in the sun, even crueler if you considered that it was a human being on the other end. Some users had tried to found their own clubs and free kentukis that they considered were being abused.

  But why would a kentuki want to be freed? Couldn’t they just disconnect, problem solved? Marvin knew that freedom in the kentuki world wasn’t the same as in the real world, though that didn’t really settle anything if you thought about how the kentuki world was also real. And he had to remind himself that he had longed for his own freedom without once thinking of disconnecting. There were even clubs like his in Guatemala, and they listed all kinds of abuses, things Marvin would never have thought of. He was surprised when his friends pointed to the item “imprisonment or exposure for commercial promotions,” and they still had to explain to him that that was what had happened to him in the shop window where he’d lived for almost two months. Had he lived in a shop window for two months? He thought about all the times the boy had tapped on the glass and written his messages of freedom. And even so, Lis had seemed trustworthy and kind, not like someone who would ever have wanted to hurt him.

  He spent the following days investigating his kentuki’s new home and getting to know his companions. There were chargers in every corner. The boy had made a hole in the dance hall’s front door, with a plastic curtain over it to keep the heat from escaping when the kentukis went in or out. More than once one of them got stuck and cried out until someone went over and gave it a push.

  Sometimes SnowDragon went on excursions. He circled the building and moved within the “safe zone,” which was a radius of two kilometers that the boy had sent him marked on a map. The two kilometers basically reached the other end of town, where the few inhabitants who were out at that hour of the night knew about kentukis—though Marvin didn’t think they knew about the Liberation Club—and were careful not to run over them. Nor would they try to take them home for themselves.

  The boy’s name was Jesper, and he was a hacker, DJ, and dancer. He always had a different girl with him. The girls came and went; they were round like balls when they entered all bundled up, but once inside, wearing loose, light clothing, they dodged the kentukis, and Marvin would sit staring at them, enchanted. If he tapped against their feet, sometimes they would kneel down in front of him and scratch his head. They had blue eyes and very pale skin. Jesper didn’t pay too much attention to them; he was always in motion, constantly occupied.

  If you deposited €45 in Jesper’s account, he would attach an alarm to your kentuki’s back that could be activated from the controller. Then, if the kentuki was in danger and you activated the alarm, a siren went off inside the kentuki’s casing to call attention to whatever was happening. And meanwhile, most important, a locator was activated and Jesper’s map indicated where the kentuki in crisis was. A couple of days earlier, at three in the morning, a certain Z02xxx had gotten stuck on a frozen puddle. If it hadn’t been for the alarm, the battery would have run out and the kentuki would have been lost. Jesper rescued it from the ice only seven minutes after the alarm went off, confirming his claim that the service he offered was faster than an ambulance.

  Marvin transferred the €45 for an alarm. It wasn’t that much for the benefits he would get in return, and there was still some money left in his mother’s account. Kitty03 and FURIOUS_cowboy both had cameras on their heads that let them record their experiences twenty-four hours a day, even when they were recharging, and the videos went directly to hard drives in their houses. Jesper was working on a drone now for Kitty03. Kitty03 had money and wanted to buy everything; Jesper, basically, was at her service.

  In Antigua, Marvin’s friends had found Jesper and followed him on social media. Many of his inventions and applications were ideas that were shared among clubs for freed kentuki. Jesper had uploaded a video of the dance hall when, a few days earlier, six of the kentukis had been playing with a ball. It was lovely to catch a glimpse of a world that Marvin saw only at night, and that seemed so much larger and warmer with natural light. At two minutes, nineteen seconds he glimpsed his kentuki sleeping inside one of the cubbyholes. His friends sent him the link and Marvin spent the afternoon watching it over and over. His kentuki’s eyes were closed, and Marvin thought it looked so sweet that he would have paid all the money left in his mother’s account for Jesper to mail the little guy to him in Antigua so he could hug it.

  On the following nights it had snowed again and SnowDragon had gone out into the safe zone to watch the show from up close. In reality, what Marvin wanted—even more than to hug his kentuki—was to be very close to the snow, to bury his kentuki in a nice snowbank, all white and fluffy. He was disappointed to see how fast the flakes melted when they hit the ground.

  In the controller chat, Kitty03 wanted to know if his obsession with snow had anything to do with his mother. He had talked about many things, and now his kentuki companions knew more about Marvin’s life than his father did, or their housekeeper in Antigua who saw him every day. His new friends were grown-ups who lived in cities he’d never heard of before, but that he’d looked up and marked on his geography map, so his school friends could understand at a glance what kind of people he was hanging out with now.

  One night he went out for a spin around the hall with Kitty03. There was a pig at the house behind Jesper’s place, and it always squealed when it saw them. Kitt
y03 loved it; she went to see it every day and had offered Jesper €300 to buy it, keep it on his land, and make sure it never ended up in any oven. Kitty03 had done her homework and learned that at a slaughterhouse you’d get €150 for one of those hogs, and she was offering exactly double. But Jesper said that his business included only matters of kentukis, and she’d have to find another employee to buy and sell farm animals.

  SnowDragon chatted a lot with Kitty03. Although the chat was open, the message history wasn’t saved, so if they were the only ones connected, there was enough privacy to talk about personal matters. Marvin told her more about his mother, and Kitty03 said his was the saddest story she’d heard in her life.

  Kitty03= from 1 to 10, how much do you wanna touch snow?

  “SnowDragon= 10”

  “Kitty03= that’s how much I want the pig. talk to Jesper. pay 4 what you want, that’s what $$$ is for.”

  “SnowDragon= pay 4 what?”

  Kitty03 said that Jesper could build whatever he needed. With a battery extension and a way to move over the snow, he could get anywhere. Who knows, maybe it was just a matter of asking. So Marvin asked Jesper for a budget. He explained what he needed. Two hours later he had a reply. For €310 he could attach a battery-life extension and fit his wheels onto an all-terrain base—he sent a link so Marvin could see what he was talking about. With Jesper’s accessories he could go wherever he wanted, take long excursions in a world where he could live without ever going down even once for dinner; in fact, he could live without eating at all, and he could touch snow all day long, once he finally reached the mountains.

  Three hundred ten euros was nearly everything that was left in his mother’s account. He agreed. He transferred the money immediately, and half an hour later he wrote again to say that he would transfer €47 more—the exact amount left in the account—if Jesper would also send a bouquet of flowers to Lis at the appliance shop. It had to be a very big bouquet. Jesper said okay. He said he had a lot of orders in, that it would take him at least a week, and he’d keep him informed. Marvin wrote back to thank him and say that the timing was fine. He just had one more request. Could he add a card to the bouquet? The message had to say: Dear keeper: I wanted to go even farther. Thank you, SnowDragon.

  Zagreb

  IT’S NOT A SIN to buy twenty tablets a week, thought Grigor, though at the rate things were going, it was better not to raise any suspicions. He took Ilica Street down toward Jelačić Square. It was a long way to walk, but he needed to clear his head; and he’d always liked to cross the city following the train tracks. Once he reached the square, he would have seven different stores to choose from. He was starting to have to repeat the online shops where he usually bought the tablets, and Grigor decided that, while he planned a new strategy, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go out and buy them himself. He would buy three in each store. He’d take the tablets out of their boxes and put them in his backpack. If he managed to buy fourteen tablets without anyone realizing what he was doing, he’d have the week’s quota taken care of.

  Nikolina, the girl from 2C, was helping him administer the kentukis. For a while now, once or twice a month, she’d been stopping at Grigor’s door with a Tupperware full of food and ringing the bell until he or his father answered.

  “Don’t want you two to miss out on a good meal,” she’d say as she handed the Tupperware to them.

  Why would they miss out on a good meal? Grigor thought she must have a crush on him, so he avoided her whenever possible. Then one afternoon he ran into her as she was coming out of her apartment, and her face was as red as a tomato—she had clearly been crying. She was carrying something about the size of a watermelon wrapped in a black bag. Grigor asked if everything was all right—ignoring her would have been too rude—and then she burst out crying.

  “What’s wrong?”

  What else could he ask?

  She threw her arms around Grigor and hid her face against his chest, without ever letting go of the bag. Then she pulled away and opened it to show him what was inside. It was a kentuki.

  “He’s dead,” she said, and her voice broke again. “My little bear.”

  She’d gone out on Monday to visit her mother. She had baked some pastries to bring and they’d burned, so she left the kitchen door closed to keep the smell from filling the whole apartment. Then she’d found her mother with a fierce flu, and decided to stay with her over the weekend.

  “I don’t understand,” said Grigor.

  “His charger was in the kitchen, don’t you get it? He banged against the door so much he left a little blue mark on the wood. He’s blue, see?” she said, opening the bag again and softly touching the fabric.

  Grigor saw that the eyes of the device were closed, and he wondered if the user had shut them or if they were programmed that way, to die humanely.

  “May I?” asked Grigor.

  The girl stood staring into the bag. Grigor reached in and pulled the kentuki out. It was the first time he’d actually held one. He had seen them dozens of times, but never held one in his hands.

  “I’ll buy it from you.”

  The girl gave him a little shove.

  “You don’t buy the dead,” she said, offended.

  She tried to take the kentuki back from him and he delicately dodged her.

  “Do you need a job?” he asked.

  “Always.”

  Grigor didn’t say anything, but he wondered how she’d been able to buy a kentuki if she was so hard up. He invited her into his apartment and showed her his room full of tablets and spreadsheets. He explained what he was doing, how much he made and what percentage he was willing to offer her if she helped him move the active kentukis for four hours a day. He talked to her without ever putting down her kentuki. She nodded. If her eyes landed on the bear, they filled up again with tears. When she agreed, Grigor put the kentuki on his desk and asked if she’d be willing to start that very afternoon.

  Now they spent almost every day together, and this morning was the first time he had left her alone in his room. She wasn’t his girlfriend, but still, Grigor thought she was the closest thing he’d ever had to one. His father thought they were in the midst of a romance, and he never came into Grigor’s room anymore. If one of them opened the door to go to the bathroom or leave the apartment, they found two yogurts on a tray on the floor. The girl was delighted with her new job; she worked with great concentration and spoke only when necessary.

  She mostly took care of the upkeep of the already active kentukis. He still took notes on each case, managed the sales, and established the new connections. He liked those first minutes of uncertainty, when he wandered around absolutely unknown places. More than once, when he established a new connection, he came across an old, deactivated kentuki in some corner. He hadn’t seen anything like that in his first weeks of work, but he’d started to see some of these used and discarded devices with the new connections. Some were broken, others crushed, some faded. Their eyes were almost always closed. He was most disturbed, perhaps, when he saw discarded kentukis that were still pristine. What had led them to disconnect? Then there was the one he saw after a week of connection in the south of Kyoto: he was nosing around under the bed in the master bedroom and he found a kentuki that was destroyed, literally torn apart, as if a dog had chewed away at its plastic, fabric, and overlay for days. It was the work of an animal in a house where, at least since he’d been turned on, he hadn’t seen a single pet.

  As he walked, the street became pedestrian-only and then opened onto the square. Grigor went into a Tisak Media shop first. He bought three tablets and paid in cash, then crossed over to the next store. He picked up three more devices and went to the registers. The whole side display window was full of kentukis and all kinds of accessories that plugged into the USB port. They had harnesses that simulated little hands coming out of the device itself, and with them you could have your kentuki light your path with an LED, cool you off with a tiny electronic fan, or even sweep up
crumbs from the table with a little brush. It all looked garish and low quality. At the register counter, a kentuki held a plastic tray attached with a harness to its body. When the woman gave Grigor his total, the kentuki moved closer to him and purred. Grigor put the money on the tray and the kentuki brought it to the woman.

  “We’ve got some good ones here,” she said, indicating her display window. “Our kentukis have made some happy customers, I can tell you.”

  She smiled proudly and winked an eye.

  Grigor took his change from the tray, thanked her, and left. Even if it were possible to follow up on the devices she’d sold, how could she possibly know that their dwellers were behaving themselves?

  By the fourth store the backpack already weighed a ton. He’d have to return for more during the week, he thought, and headed back to the apartment sooner than he’d planned. He said hi to his father, who was entertaining himself by watching the match between Dinamo and Hajduk Split, and went straight to his room, where he could finally drop his heavy backpack onto the desk. Nikolina had set up the kitchen table against the opposite wall, where she was leaning over an array of seven tablets. Her dress showed the first four vertebrae of her spine, and Grigor stared at them as if he were discovering a body part he had never considered before. Something about the shape of those bones reminded him of the old terrified excitement he felt when he watched Alien as a boy. And at the same time, in a weird way, also of the soft and invisible velvet of his mother’s neck. Nikolina’s slender fingers came and went from one tablet to another, waving at the ends of arms that were pale and flexible, like octopus tentacles. How had he been able to work alone for so long?