by W. Len
“Oh? Who do you want to argue with?” He walked over and began scratching the flaking paint on my pillar. “Why were you late this morning?”
I thought of Anna and blushed. “The bus.”
“That’s why you’re still a boy. That’s why you are Andrei 1.0. Grown ups, real men, take responsibility for all their actions, good or bad,” he said. Flecks of pastel blue paint drifted down as he scratched.
Andrei 1.0—it’s a running joke between us. I hate it, but it’s the one joke that both Anton and Luka will laugh over. “That has nothing to do with it. The bus was late,” I protested.
“The bus, the bus—why don’t you ever take the Metro? It’s faster. And prettier.”
Ever since Luka made me read the Underground Man, my chest hurts whenever I think of the escalators leading to the trains, sinking, sinking. The bowels of each station are full of statues and everyone looks lifelike, as if molten bronze had been poured over real people. Each time I’m on those escalators, I can’t stop counting, converting speed and time into depth, trying not to think of people buried underground or drowned.
“Say what you will about Stalin, he had some right ideas. The Metro, the Seven Sisters, the pogroms. Would have been a better if he killed more. Just kill all the Russians and be done with, right?” His laugh had a brutal edge and unnerved me.
“Aren’t you part-Russian too?”
“You know nothing.” He pulled out a switchblade to work the paint. “Have you ever been to a foreign country?”
Some day, I want to travel—but his question didn’t sound like a question.
He pulled the strap of his gaming goggles, and they made a loud, angry snap against his skin. “I live in one. Every day. People here look down on my kind. On the streets, the cops stop and shake me down. In bars, people mock me. They think we’re inferior because of our skin, we’re half the man they are. They call us bums, then they say we’re terrorists, or homosexuals, or rapists. We’re everything they hate. So be it.”
I’d heard rumors about the hate groups before, but... “Surely not everyone is like that. How do you know they’re talking about you?” I wonder what he sees when he wears his goggles. More enemies probably.
“You’re right, Andrei. They must be discussing their grandma’s jam recipe. My mistake.” He made a contemptuous sound. “That’s why I dyed my hair. If they want to stare, I’ll give them a reason.” My skin prickled as his blade scored a teasing, jagged line. “A while back, two of my people, us half-breeds, were attacked after a Spartak Moscow match. The skinheads thought it’d be fun to make his older one watch as they did a free kick with his brother’s head. No newspaper or website ever reported that incident. Nobody dared. This is the kind of city we live in, Andrei, make no mistake. There is no kindness or fairness or mercy here.”
“What happened after that?”
“What happens when a boot connects with a young boy’s head?” His lips puckered into white ridges like scars as he flayed a long strip of paint free.
“I’m not sure I like this story.”
“Oh? Here’s another one then. Once, God, for shits and giggles, went to a man who’d been beaten up by his neighbor. He healed the man and told him He’d grant a wish for all the wrong he’d suffered. Whatever he wished for, his neighbor would get twice as much. ‘Why, God?’ the man raged. ‘After all the injustice? Why does he get rewarded?’ The man raged. ‘My son,” God told him, “I love you. Let go of your hate. Let go of your pain. I will reward you. I will take care of you.” The man spent the night thinking it over and next morning, God appeared. ‘Child, what is your wish?’ The man had his answer. ‘I want you to blind one of my eyes.’ Everyone hates us so we hate them back. People like me, we never forgive, we never forget.”
“I like you, Anton.” Luka does too; he’d been delighted to find Anton. The F.S.B. doesn’t hire mixed-bloods, he said. But if I told Anton that, he’d probably misunderstand everything. Again.
“You?” He examined a square crust of paint he pried free, then showered me with crushed blue confetti. “That’s for liking me. Alright, alright.” He reached for my hair, and I batted his hand away. “Your birthday’s coming, isn’t it? I’ll give you a present.” He sat down and typed on his laptop. Seconds later, an attachment appeared in my inbox.
“What’s that?” I tried not to sound suspicious. Among the three of us, I prefer to confront a program head-on and pick it apart, while Luka’s a jack-of-all-tricks. Neither of us comes close to Anton when it comes to churning out Trojans and converting computers into serf-bots.
“What’s this? What’s that? Too many questions.” He pretended to sigh. “Since you’ve never travelled, let me show you a different world.” He tilted his laptop towards me. There’s a room with pink walls, trimmed with white crown molding. The polka-dot curtains were tucked beside the window frame, and the fabric swayed slightly. This wasn’t one of his virtual reality games. It’s too real. In the corner of the room, there was an empty bed. A rosy glaze over the window hinted at dusk. It’s early afternoon in Moscow. Where’s this?
“It’s my pet-bot. You can control everything. Press this button, and the webcam turns on without anyone knowing. This webcam is fancy. It even pans.” He pressed a button and the view shifted. I saw a wardrobe with carved knobs. Beside it, a mirror reflected the computer. How many layers of reality can a looking glass offer? “Don’t move the webcam when she’s around.”
“She?” I felt my pulse quicken. I thought of how my father made me close my room door whenever he brought one of his female students home. Once, I peeped and saw them on the couch, their limbs tangled. I’d closed the door softly, fearing that they, the world, would hear my heart thumping.
“I thought you hated porn.” I played it cool. “Didn’t you crash a porn site last month?”
“This? This is art,” he scoffed. “Don’t mistake this for your typical spyware, it’s undetectable, with built-in zoom and image optimization. And to clarify, I have nothing against porn, it’s exploitation I fight against. That, and oppression of all kinds. I’m a freedom fighter.”
Maybe I’m not that old after all because I don’t get it. His is a complicated morality.
“Here, you try, Andrei.”
Old Nelya told me temptation is a snake in Paradise. The warehouse is hardly Paradise but Temptation reared in my lap.
I wanted to look away. I edged closer to the screen instead.
1.25
Two weeks have passed and we’ve made little progress. Luka’s mood has steadily worsened. Until today.
“The system administrator’s name is Garrett O’Brien,” Luka trumpeted when we met up. “We’re back in business.” I knew he’d come up with something; he always does. Online, there are black market exchanges where you can buy information, from credit card numbers to personal secrets. It’s a fragmented and furtive market; the best exchanges are available only to a select few. I wondered whether Luka bought the information and how he knew to trust it. “Play the man, not the ball.” Luka instructed us to start prying into Garrett O’Brien’s life. Social networks, trade journals, blogs—we trawled the internet. “It’ll make sense once we have all the pieces.”
And he was right. O’Brien was cautious, but he made one mistake.
“Look,”—Anton sent the link around—“it’s a site for his wedding four years ago.” The website was updated with honeymoon pictures of a plain-looking couple travelling around. In one picture, they posed against a bridge. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, the caption read, although I didn’t see any golden gates, only rust-colored girders. Another album had them posing against a starry night somewhere. In the next, they’re high up, pale flabby figures steeped in an infinity pool, which overlooked a deep blue sea wrapped around an island city like a scarf. “Sometimes when you travel around the world, it leads the world right back to you,” Anton said, as we flicked through the pictures.
The internal site counter revealed that few have visited
this obscure and abandoned digital shrine. “Why do people create something like this?”
“Love,” Luka replied. “Idiocy,” Anton said at the same time.
Love and idiocy sounds about right. The way I see it, they’re a subset of each other. Each time I think of Anna, something gnaws my insides.
Luka ignored Anton. “Andrei, if you’re lucky enough to meet the right woman, make sure you never let her down.” He ran his hand through his hair, then it was back to work. “Keep digging.”
Apart from their travels, the O’Brien’s seemed like a solitary couple. No kids, few friends. Then, Anton found the wife’s Tumblr account. She used an anagram for her login, “As though that would hide her identity,” Anton sneered. One site led to the next and we discovered she belonged to a bird-watching society and maintained their official blog. On it, she posted pictures of sightings: birds singing, flying, posing with wings spread, mating, flapping. Kestrels, peregrines, blue-banded hawks, and ibises. Birds, birds everywhere.
“If we can get a key logger on the man’s computer, we can figure out his VPN setup,” Luka mused as he reviewed our findings.
“You think he’ll be that careless?”
“He isn’t. But Mrs Cuckoo Brain is,” Anton said. “I’m sure they share a home network. If we can get to her,”—he snapped his fingers—“that’s our way in. It’d be easy from there.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Luka said.
They exchanged the first smile in a long time. The sun and the moon were friends again.
“Would he log in to work from home?” I asked tentatively, afraid to break the peace.
“Does a mother suckle her child?” Luka retorted. I thought of my mother who had never suckled me. “He’s a system administrator, they’re slaves to their machines. Those birds will lead him to us, you’ll see.”
1.30
Once, Anton asked, Hey Andrei, what does it feel like to be an orphan?
I told him that everyone becomes an orphan eventually, what’s the big deal? He’d looked impressed by that, or pretended he was. I don’t know why but I couldn’t concentrate on work the whole day.
Maybe it’s the quiet in my bedroom that brought back that particular conversation.
It’s night now, the silent hours when every creak of the floorboards, the sound of people quarreling next door, even a random cough on the street, carried. Anna had been practicing the piano earlier, but she stopped over an hour ago. Old Nelya had left me too. During dinner, I’d wondered about the O’Brien’s and asked her what it felt like to be married. Her wrinkles had disappeared as she spoke about her husband, a pilot, who died decades before I was born. After a few sentences, her face fell, as if her memory had been gunned down somewhere, somehow. Her hand twisted the ocher-colored kerchief around her head, fumbling to keep one end tied to the other. Eventually, she pleaded a headache and left.
I wonder why Old Nelya comes over. Is it pity? Or loneliness? If so, does that make her care for me less real? More questions without answers.
I finished another blog post and reviewed my work. Two days ago, after finding out O’Brien’s wife loved birds, Luka instructed me to set up a bird-watching blog. “Don’t you like birds?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, you do now. Consider it part of your education.”
Before this assignment, I’d never blogged. After I got the task, on the bus ride back, I saw starlings flocking around like a fisherman’s net amidst the clouds, dancing over the cityscape. They had provided my first inspiration.
Cities like Moscow, also Rome, are famous for their starlings, I’d written. People love these gorgeous birds and enigmatic dance! The best way to recreate their flying patterns is to focus on a lead starling and map how others relate geo-spatially, linking their vectors to simulate a flock.
I’d created a sample animation before doubt crapped all over me. Writing a blog entry was more difficult than I thought. “Make her relate to you, want to know you better,” Luka instructed, but somehow what I wrote seemed wrong.
“Maybe I should include the Big-O calculation,” I’d told Anton yesterday. “In case, you know, she’s concerned about the efficiency of the algorithm. Or something.”
“What algorithm?” He looked startled. “What are you trying to do?” He reviewed my posts, then burst out laughing. “You!” He clapped my cheeks with his hands, and rocked my head from side to side. “You don’t have a lot of friends, do you?”
I don’t like it when people touch me, but the warmth of his hand on my cheeks mesmerized me. “Sometimes, you remind me of…someone,” he trailed off, his look odd.
He showed me other blogs to mimic. They seemed frivolous, posts about nothing much, just pictures, then a few lines of banal text. It felt lazy, so I resolved to do more research and make things convincing.
These last two nights, as I read up on birds, the girl on my laptop had appeared several times. She reminded me of an exotic creature, housed in a tiny box to one side of my screen, free to come and go. I’d traced her IP address, then looked up Tokyo on an online map. In real life, she’s four thousand seven hundred miles away. Her presence felt closer. A lot closer.
Watching her, I learned what it felt like to stalk an elusive bird in its native habitat. This one sported blueberry mascara and liked punk-black lipstick. Her raven hair was usually plaited over one ear, but when she wore it loose, she appeared young. Despite her bold makeup, she had a vulnerable smile that flitted on her lips when she read her emails or watched some online video. I’d been tempted to write to her before. Hello. I am Andrei Yaklova. I am watching over you. That would guarantee a beautiful friendship! No. Better to enjoy her company in silence, to pretend she was a friend hanging out with me. She was about the same age as Anna and looked totally different. Yet there was something about her expression that made me think the two were alike. Or maybe it’s me. I felt like I knew this girl from a long time ago.
I once read a website that said everyone came from an Oversoul, and we’re fragments blown apart during the Big Bang, so no one’s special or unique. I don’t believe in souls: dead is dead. I’m also not sure about the concept of unique. You’re unique, my father told me once, and it made me feel proud. I’d imagined myself as individual as a snowflake, or as special as that famous psychic, the one who claims Chernobyl changed him, or as unique as that moment when my father took my hand and patted it for no reason. Andryushka, you’re one in a billion, he said.
Later, I realized in a world with more than seven billion people, there are many others like me. Maybe they have different faces and similar worries, or vice versa. Maybe they’re orphans scattered in different corners of the world, all of us bit pieces in the giant computer that is the world, like recursive functions, each of us handing off a tiny part of the answer we’ve found to the question that is life to the next, then the next. Maybe we’re all working towards something bigger, something better, cycle after cycle, life after life, death after death. It’s a comforting idea.
Perhaps it’s the secret defiance lining her lips that reminds me of Anna.
A text message buzzed on my phone. Well??? It was Luka on edge.
I texted back. We agreed to meet at the Café Volga so he could see my progress.
Finish it by then!! His impatience punctuated everything he said ever since we took the job.
Which means more posts to be written up. I went back to my laptop and typed away. After I finished a dozen more entries, I saw the girl rolling back her chair. She stood and started peeling off her t-shirt.
I quickly slammed my laptop cover shut. I’m not like that, I reminded myself, but my fingers itched and rubbed themselves against the laptop’s hard edge. That was when I decided to go to sleep. Wake up earlier tomorrow, finish the blog.
That night, I dreamed of my other selves clustered around, holding me. One of them told me I’m better than I thought. I want to believe that.
1.35
I arrived a
t Café Volga before Luka. He’d called earlier to remind me of the time, yet he was late himself. It happens. Like me, he’s not good at keeping track of time.
The café was near G.U.M, the department store with fancy colonnades. Once upon a time, only the elite were allowed to shop there and skirt rationing. Now, anyone with more money than sense can. This café tried to be posh, what with its handwritten chalkboards and an exorbitant menu, but the faint smell of varnish made everything seem fake.
As I waited patiently for Luka, I reviewed my bird blog again and again. It’s official: I’m now a bird expert, especially those with long legs like egrets and herons.
Not that anyone cared. I glanced around. A group of foreigners entered, chatting aloud in English. An inferior language, I imagined Luka sniffing as he entered behind them. The door closed behind the noisy group. Still no Luka.
Phone check: my battery was almost flat. I must have forgotten to recharge it the night before. I tried texting Luka to let him know, but before the message was sent, it blinked out. Not good. For a moment, I considered connecting my laptop to the café’s WiFi, but Luka told us not to connect online needlessly. The N.S.A., the F.S.B.—apparently, a whole alphabet soup’s worth of agencies bug everything these days.
So I continued waiting. I pulled out the latest book Luka lent me. It’s a thick one, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Luka said his genius was indisputable: “Worth five, no, ten American authors any day.” When he said that, I’d imagined an equivalency table for people. What would the matrix be like: one Russian author equals X American authors equals Y Armenian authors? Can one weigh the worth of a life? The first time I tried reading the book, I fell asleep. War and Peace—the title promised, so I flipped to a random page hoping to find something exciting instead of the dull, lulling prose I read last time. A character leapt out at me this time. Prince Andrei Nikolaevich Bolkonsky. Another Andrei just like me. I flipped a page, then paused when Elgar’s Enigma Variations began playing over the café speakers. Anna had liked it, I remembered, because each variation signified something different: a laugh remembered, a close friend, immortalized love, all the themes different yet alike. It reminded me of people. Of life. Almost all our genes are the same, yet everyone has a different fate. What would it be like if I’d been born royalty? An enigma.