Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

  “It’ll be a sleepless night for me in any case.”

  “Sleepless?” asked Alina.

  “It’s just kids’ nonsense,” said Carmen, “this thing about the kentuki boycott. They want to spend the night hugging their kitties to be sure nothing happens to them. They want to nail boards up over the windows and turn the lights off inside, like it’s a damned zombie attack.”

  Carmen finished her coffee in one long sip and sat looking at the mountains.

  “And their father,” she said, “instead of calming them down, bought them each an emergency backpack with flashlights, sleeping bags, red paint guns . . . You get the idea of what’s in store for me.”

  As soon as Alina got back to the room, she turned on her tablet and googled boycott, kentukis, day of the dead. The Colonel would be about to come back from the studios and knock on the door, but what she’d just heard now had her full attention. Apparently, the movement had been born in Las Brisas, a neighborhood in Acapulco with narrow streets full of palm trees and designer houses, one of the twenty neighborhoods in the world where, according to the Financial Times, one out of every four families had at least one kentuki in the house. The surveys showed some nine losses a week, and in a small neighborhood like that one, where people had enough money to replace them immediately, it was starting to become a problem. The yards were too small to be burying pets, and people didn’t want to throw their kentukis in the garbage. Nearby, in the Unta Bruja area, a mother with two disconsolate children had gone to a shady corner—the closest thing to a public space to be found for miles—and dug a kind of grave, where they’d held funerals for two panda kentukis. Some days later, more graves appeared around the first. The space couldn’t hold many more bodies, and even so, there were more burial grounds appearing here and there in Las Brisas, in the few little public plazas that existed, and extending into other neighborhoods along Avenida Miguel Alemán.

  The municipal council had ordered the parks department to remove the graves and repair the damage to public property. The next day, an elderly couple stationed themselves in front of city hall to reclaim the body of their kentuki. On social media people were indignant, but no one buried kentukis in public places after that. A rock-star sociologist on TV called for a massive burial in every state in Mexico on the night of the Day of the Dead. His brother—an anti-imperialist reggaeton artist and standard-bearer for a nascent political party that was hot on the government’s heels—had ended his last concert with a disquieting counterproposal, yelling into the microphone: “Don’t bury the dead, bury live kentukis!” which had generated a confused discussion in the media. In the end, predictably, the mood had calmed down and the revolutionary boycott had been lost amid much more alarming and real political noise. The disquiet remained only among the youngest, where concerns were soon assuaged with a jump in sales of all kinds of survival-related accessories marketed to children who owned kentukis.

  When Colonel Sanders tapped at the door, Alina bookmarked the article she was reading and got up to let him in; he looked strange without his little wings. He had a clod of dirt stuck in one of his wheels and it turned with difficulty. Alina didn’t say anything, and she let him roll off toward his charger. The base was still beside the bed, though some days ago Sven had moved it to his side. He’d done it while she was asleep. Alina took off her sandals and flopped on the bed. For a week now, before she lay her head on the pillow, she’d been checking underneath it to be sure Sven hadn’t put anything there. She missed his big, square hands, and she kept thinking that, why not, he could also have left something for her. Tangerine peels or any other kind of signal, maybe something so minuscule she couldn’t even detect it. Then she lay down and stared at the ceiling.

  What was it she’d been waiting for, so many days and weeks just sitting around on the double bed? Something unprecedented from Sven? Something unprecedented from herself? And the kentukis . . . That was what most infuriated her. What was the whole stupid idea of the kentukis about? What were all those people doing rolling around on other people’s floors, watching how the other half of humanity brushed their teeth? Why didn’t anyone collude with kentukis to hatch truly brutal plots? Why didn’t anyone send a kentuki loaded with explosives into a crowded central station and blow it all to smithereens? Why didn’t any kentuki user blackmail an air traffic controller and force him to immolate five planes in Frankfurt in exchange for his daughter’s life? Why didn’t even one single user out of the thousands who must be moving at that very moment over truly important papers take note of some crucial detail and break the Wall Street markets, or hack into some software network and make all the elevators fall simultaneously in a dozen skyscrapers? Why wasn’t there a single miserable morning when thousands of consumers woke up dead from a simple bucket of lithium poured into a Brazilian milk factory? Why were the stories about kentukis so small, so minutely intimate, stingy, and predictable? So desperately human and quotidian. Not even the boycott on the Day of the Dead would bear results, she was sure. And Sven would never change his art for her. Nor would she change, for anyone, her state of existential fragmentation. Everything faded.

  She would buy her tickets to go back home for the first days of November, decided Alina. That way she could attend, unnoticed, Sven’s blessed exhibition that people were talking about so much in the residency’s hallways, and then, a day or two later, she’d get on a plane and hide away in dear old Mendoza forever. She’d take the kentuki with her. On the flight, she thought, she would put it in an upper compartment of the cabin and then never take it off the plane. Leave it there. Let someone else’s tits be randomly assigned to the Colonel.

  Antigua—Honningsvåg

  THERE WAS A LOT TO TELL. At school he gave a report to his friends during the first break every day, and there were more and more kids who wanted to listen. There were four kentuki keepers in his class and a lot more who dwelled in kentukis, and some were on their second or even third life. But none of them lived in the land of Vikings, much less moved around liberated with a map of charger bases. Marvin’s situation was the best that people could get in their kentuki life. Restricted as he was to a schedule between eleven at night and two in the morning in Norway, he encountered very few people, and a lot of those he did come across were drunk—which never stopped being funny. Plus, if you were the height of a kentuki, you could see things around town that no one else did. The Liberation Club was everywhere: there was graffiti on the curbs and at the bottoms of the walls of houses. Arrows pointing you toward overhanging roofs in case it rained, dozens of homes willing to offer small repairs and chargers.

  The day before, at the base of a park bench, he read:

  All the best to you, SnowDragon! Write us!

  He thought about Kitty03, and wondered how much she’d paid Jesper to paint those words. It was silly to be there, alone in the middle of the night, when he had so many friends on the other side of town who were just waiting for a word from him. Reaching the snow was taking him a lot longer than he’d calculated, but he wasn’t going back until he’d done it. He opened the map and studied his options for a while.

  It was while he was distracted with the map that someone lifted him from the ground. He was on a dark corner and he hadn’t seen a soul, and all of a sudden there were two boys throwing him around. Where had they come from? They looked like brothers and they must have been around Marvin’s age, maybe a little younger. They were carrying slingshots. The smaller one had picked him up, and the older one snatched him away and tugged on his wheels as if trying to pull them off. His dragon fell to the ground and rolled, and the boys picked it back up. He couldn’t move fast enough. They shouted and fought over him, and the camera shook so much that he could barely figure out what was happening. In the struggle he saw part of the harness Jesper had used to attach the second battery lying on the ground. Marvin was scared. They pulled on him and threw him again. The younger boy cried out when his brother tried to take the kentuki away. Marvin didn’t think
twice, and activated the alarm. How long would it take Jesper to get there? He remembered that the alarm, in addition to activating the locator, should have left everyone around him deaf, but there was no sound. The dragon fell and rolled again. Marvin went on activating the alarm. It wasn’t working. He rolled up against the curb and miraculously managed to stand up on his wheels again. He tried to move away. A dog ran up to him and barked, baring its teeth. The boys came up behind him and lifted him up again. There was a man with the dog, and now he was in the man’s hands. The boys yelled in annoyance and the man scolded them, shoved them toward a truck and opened the cabin door for them. They got in, pulling each other’s hair. The man left the kentuki in back, in the truck bed. Marvin moved as soon as the man let go of him, though there was really nowhere to go. The metal of the bed was rusty, and there was no wall or railing on the sides, just a trench that barely marked the edges. Boxes of apples were piled up in the middle, secured to the cabin with cables. The man rummaged around to open the plastic covering on the first box, took out three apples, and left. He got into the truck and shook it with a slam of his door. The motor started up and the image on Marvin’s screen shook. He tried to find something to hold on to, finally pressing his face into the boxes. The town moved, they were passing houses and shops as they started off through Honningsvåg in the opposite direction from the snow. The truck turned, and Marvin had to make a great effort not to lose his balance. He thought about letting himself topple off, but the landscape was speeding by too fast; he wasn’t sure he would survive such a fall. Soon the town was left behind and they got onto the highway, moving uphill and away from the sea.

  He thought that if they didn’t go much farther and he paid enough attention, it would still be possible to find his way back. Soon there was no trace of the town left. The road dipped back down and a lake opened up at the bottom of the slope. A dock and two humble shacks went racing by. Beyond the lake, climbing up the hillside, he saw the snow. He was far away, but he was going toward it. They went straight for a good while. It was whiter than he had ever imagined.

  “Marvin!” His father’s voice came from the dining room, calling him to dinner.

  The truck left the highway and took a dirt road, and the camera’s jolting kept him from seeing clearly. He was afraid an especially hard bump would dump a box of apples on top of him, but there was nothing Marvin could do. A rough bounce threw the kentuki into the air. Marvin was sure he would fall out of the truck. He hit against the metal with his wheels and was able to maneuver quickly back to the center of the bed, as close as possible to the boxes. The image on his tablet was growing darker. Now all he could see was the truck’s red lights shining on the moving asphalt and, far away, almost in the sky, the snow lit up by the moon.

  His father called him again, this time from the stairs, closer.

  The truck sped up—it was going too fast. There was another bump, and it finally made him lose his balance. He rolled to the back, hit against the metal of the cabin and rolled forward again. They took another exit; it was steep, and some apples hit the camera. Everything was still shaking. It was impossible to stand up, impossible to brake against anything. He rolled up to one of the edges, and the groove in the metal held him in for a moment, but one final bump sent him flying into the air again.

  He fell. He felt the emptiness under his wheels, the blow against the asphalt, the screech of his rubber and his plastic and his metal rolling pell-mell down the hill.

  His father’s voice yelled his name from the other side of the door, and Marvin had to make an effort not to burst out crying. He was rolling, he was still rolling toward the lake when he thought of his mother and the snow. It seemed that he was to have nothing, that God would insist on taking away the things that mattered most. He was still rolling when his father opened the door. Marvin moved the tablet and set it on his books, gritted his teeth so hard he thought he wouldn’t be able to move any other part of his body. The noise from the fall could still be heard, metallic, emanating from the tablet into the room. What would he do if his father asked what was going on? How would he explain that in reality he was beaten up, he was broken, and he was still rolling, out of control, down a hill? He made an effort and managed to breathe. Could his father hear him falling? Did he understand that the noise on the tablet came from Marvin’s own body hitting the gravel? He looked at his father, who, with a movement of his head, told him to come. Marvin got down from the chair. When he passed his father he saw the school report card hanging from his hand. It was as if Marvin couldn’t feel the ground, as if he were walking on air. He reached the stairs, and before he started down them, he stopped. The whole house felt too light, unreal. It took him a second to recognize the silence, to accept that it came from the tablet.

  “Down,” his father said.

  Marvin wanted to tell him it was impossible, that he felt sick and dizzy, that he couldn’t go down any farther than he already had. He heard his father close the door to the study, and then the sound of the key and footsteps behind him. Marvin had to lean against the marble handrail. For a moment, the cold stung the tips of his fingers. He thought of his mother. It was only a few seconds, and then the Antigua heat pulled him out of it.

  “Down,” he heard again.

  His father’s hand was pushing on his back. Step after step, farther and farther down.

  Zagreb—Surumu

  AT NOON, TWO DIFFERENT DELIVERYMEN took away tablets to fill five late orders. Plan Fallback had reached a point where, even with Nikolina’s help and after almost quadrupling his prices, he was selling more units than they were able to replace. But Grigor knew the cycles of boom businesses. Prices were already going down and clearance sales were multiplying by the day. Resellers always saw their prices fall last, and soon he would feel the decline, too.

  The Surumu madness had kept Nikolina in Grigor’s room for two nights and three days. Glued to the news and the phone, which still sometimes rang, they’d largely ignored the other kentukis, and now they had a lot of work to catch up on. They slept in shifts and ate basically nothing but crackers and the yogurt Grigor’s father still brought them on schedule, oblivious to all that was happening.

  The Surumu kentuki was still in a torturous limbo. When the five-hour charge was complete, Nikolina woke the device and saw with relief that the doors to the house were still open. In Zagreb, she shook Grigor, who was sleeping on the floor at her feet, and together they went back out to the sidewalk to evaluate their surroundings. They were crossing the second block when someone picked them up. They saw the sky, still gray and lowering. They saw—Nikolina was convinced—two police cars on the sidewalk across the street, their lights on. Then there was only darkness, as if they’d been put in a bag or their camera had been blindfolded. There didn’t seem to be anything beneath their wheels.

  “We’re in the air,” said Grigor. “We’d better save power.”

  They deduced from the sound that they’d been put into a truck, or maybe some kind of trailer. Though they were on the floor, there was nowhere to move. Maybe they’d been put in a box or the trunk of a car. Nikolina stopped all actions on the controller and left the tablet on the table in Sleep mode.

  Since then they had opened the kentuki’s eyes from time to time to check on what was happening, and every time they were greeted by that devastating blackness. No one spoke, they didn’t hear anything. They tried to find news online, but there was only some vague civil indignation over the recordings that they themselves had handed over to the media; there was no official information. So they went to work on the other connections they were behind schedule on.

  They tried to distract themselves with other tablets, but deep down all their attention was on that suspended connection in Brazil. They worked, dozed in shifts on the bed, and then went back to work. When fifteen hours had passed since what Nikolina referred to as “the kidnapping,” she woke the kentuki, and, though she was still in the dark, she heard voices and doors and there were some ha
los of light, as if she were moving in an open space. Grigor came right over. He shook his head, disconcerted.

  What the hell is happening? he thought.

  “Should I make noise?” asked Nikolina.

  “Let’s wait, wait till we see something.”

  They spent almost another day in darkness. Nikolina turned on the kentuki ever more sporadically to preserve the charge, until they connected on the fifth day and found the situation had completely changed.

  They were in a dining room; it was large, but the house was humble. The walls were old and unpainted, there were two plastic tables to one side, and a screen divided the rest of the room. Three big windows without curtains opened onto an outer gallery, and beyond that, there was jungle. They were in a tropical zone. Three children were playing on the floor and they looked curiously at the kentuki, maybe because it was the first time they’d seen it move. One of them got up and went running to a room on the left, returning with two women in tow.

  “It’s her!” cried Nikolina.

  When the girl saw the kentuki awake, she greeted it with emotion. The woman behind her seemed to be her mother, and she looked on curiously, drying her hands on her apron. They came closer. The girl had a piece of chalk and she drew on the floor in front of the kentuki, reproducing the simple cross they had tried to communicate with before. Mother and daughter looked at the camera and spoke to them joyfully, interrupting each other. They seemed to be thanking them, though neither Grigor nor Nikolina could make out a word, and again, the girl’s cross only offered answers to questions. They couldn’t think of a way to say they weren’t understanding a thing.

  “They seem like very good people.” Nikolina was clearly moved to see them again, too.