Moscow but Dreaming (15 page)

Funny, and I thought I was being friendly. “Fair enough.”

“Do you hate this music as much as I do?”

“More.”

“Want to get coffee?”

I shake my head. “I really don’t want to hang out. It’s nothing personal, it’s just I’m not looking for more friends.” It’s better that way; at least so early on he has a chance of believing me. After a few conversations people usually assume that this is just a posture, that I really do want friends and am merely shy. But this is not the case: besides the Brazilian neuroscientists, I don’t want anyone.

He sighs again. “Tell me about your hat then.”

Iconography is a tricky business. So there’s a hat and a star, but how do you explain the depth of its meaning, the sheer cultural weight to a stranger, a foreigner who had never heard of Chapaev, has a very vague notion of the Red Cavalry, and overall perceived the epithet “red” as somewhat derogatory. He just sees a tin star and cannot smell the steppes and the galloping horses, the aroma of their sweat mixing with the sun and dust and wormwood in the air. The light carts the horses are dragging behind them, the backward-facing machine guns, the ringing of hooves. Tarragon and salt and summer, victory and heroism and the heart-aching infatuation with this imagined history, so much more beautiful and clear and taut than the real one, the icons instead of dirt and fleas and lice, the famine, the death. How do you explain something like that? This is why I’ve given up trying to be friends with the Americans. So instead I befriend Brazilians and other foreigners, and find some measure of cold comfort in the fact that we share the impossibility of proper communication, united in our isolation. At least, Cecilia and Veronica have each other.

And now I have the guy who attached himself to me at the party, and the party is over and I’m still struggling to explain. We’re standing outside, in front of the brownstone where Cecilia and Veronica live, and there’re no lights in their windows. And it is hopeless, hopeless, and I hear my voice give out and feel my eyelids grow hot, and I feel like crying from the futility. “I have to go,” I say.

“Wait—”

But already I flee, my heels striking the convex cobbles, and curse myself for even trying. Communication is only possible with a quick ta-ta-ta of the mounted machine gun, of the ta-ta-ta of feet striking in unison over the tamped down soil, the beating of the heart, the slow bleeding out of Hainuwele buried alive and danced over to death. With the rapid drumming of my running heels, short and stout, made for such running-drumming across the old part of the city, where streets are lined with cobbles and wind up and down invisible hills. And this is all I want to say to this guy as he recedes invisibly behind me, my only message. Let him think what he will.

And yet, the seed is planted. It wasn’t anything that he said or I said or the two of us stumbled over, some secretly discovered meaning. Rather, the thought crystallized from the entire muddled day, and as I fall asleep that night, I think of things I could do. Should do. Fuck the cockroaches and their stupid sensors, fuck the Turing and his tests. The lab complex certainly has enough shit lying around, and certainly it’ll be all right for me to do a little side project. Building a hero of the revolution will be a better use of my time, not to mention, tons more interesting than the cockroaches.

In the morning, I stop by the store-gallery where I found my star. It is still closed, but I lift the doormat, as if hoping to find a spare key a thoughtful relative may or may not have left for me, and instead I find a small silver fish dangling on a long small gauge chain. I take it with me. Fish means water, and surely there was fish in the Ural River and the ocean surrounding Indonesia.

At work, I am greeted by the familiar skittering of electronic cockroaches who all live in my office. Instead of making me want to slice my wrists as usual, they make me giddy instead. I sit at my desk without moving and watch their flat round bodies cautiously crawl from under the radiators and filing cabinets, and resume their usual blind wanderings around my desk; they will do it until I move. I sit still and plot in my head how to make a hero of the revolution.

In many ways, electronic Chapaev would have to be the opposite of my cockroaches: I even make a list of qualities, but the primary among them is that he would not skitter but remain steadfast, he would be afraid of neither light nor movement. He would not remain in my office but rather would explore widely and wildly, possibly all the way to Indonesia. He would not locomote using tiny wheels, he would have actual limbs and eyes and possibly a mustache. He would enjoy shooting a machine gun and would like horses; perhaps express some interest in riding them. He would be good at war but not bloodthirsty, sociable and easygoing but not obnoxious, and he would be charismatic like a good piece of iconography ought to be.

Achieving this would probably be more difficult than imagining—this is why we’ve been doing cockroaches for as long as I remember instead of anything interesting. But I have my hat with a star and a silver fish on a chain, and an entire network of computers that think they are neurons or something like it. How difficult can it be? I sit at my console and play with parameters—not quite devising a Turing test but trying to calibrate hypothetical responses. The console buckles at first but soon enough cooperates, and lines of code line up across the screen like obedient soldiers.

I spend weeks writing code, by the skin of my intuition’s teeth and by the mysterious mercies of silver fishes and other gifts from the Indonesian gallery. Every time I go, there is something new and mysterious waiting for me—some marbles, some carvings, a few pins. I collect them even if there was no obvious use for them just yet.

Cecilia and Veronica stop by the lab on Friday—and they laugh and nudge each other with their tanned, angular elbows. “There’s someone there who wants to see you,” Cecilia says.

Veronica rounds her eyes and hisses in a theatrical whisper, “He’s really into you.”

For a split insane second I hope that it is Chapaev, but that would be stupid. I sigh and look up from the console. “I’m kinda busy.”

But already he’s entering—the guy from the party—and the cockroaches skitter at his footsteps, and I think of how they learn, of how we taught them to learn—avoid light, then learn to associate light with footfalls (because people come in and turn on the light, see?), and once that simple algorithm is in place they extrapolate and avoid footfalls, clicking of switches, sounds of door, ground vibrations.

“Hi,” the guy says. “I’m sorry if I said something to upset you. I—”

I watch Cecilia and Veronica back out of the lab, conspiratorial grins on their faces, and make a mental note to stop by the sixth floor where they’re mutilating hamster and rat wetware, to tell them that I really don’t need awkwardness in the workplace.

“I forgot your name,” I tell him.

“Ryan. You want to get coffee?”

I do and we go to the Au Bon Pain across the street, and I frown and try to tune out his voice. Instead, I think of how to make Chapaev extrapolate from a simple set of premises. In my mind, I compile his set of his likes and dislikes—he should be afraid of water to stay away from rivers and streams and oceans, and he should love horses, war, the revolution. He should like Marx well enough but harbor a secret dislike of the bourgie Engels, and he would like Trotsky . . . of that I’m not really sure, but I hope that he would.

I drink my coffee and catalog the list of traits, and ways of coding them and then teaching him to extrapolate. For example, if he liked Trotsky he should dislike Stalin . . . or so I think. And if he liked the revolution, he would certainly like the Brazilians.

Ryan insists on paying. He really seems oblivious to the fact that I don’t need (or even like) him, and that I am only tolerating him for Cecilia’s and Veronica’s sake. And because I dislike being rude, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

“No,” I finally say. “I’ll pay for my coffee because I don’t want to be beholden.”

“It’s not like that,” he says. I of course know better. “You can pay the next time.”

“There won’t be the next time,” I say. “Unless you know something useful about programming, let me be.”

“I do,” he says. “I know Perl.”

I laugh. “I’ll call you when I need to conduct a Turing test.”

“That has nothing to do with Perl.”

“Exactly.” As if I would ever let him close to my console and my programs. “I might need volunteers. Look for fliers on campus.”

I look away, hoping that I impressed upon him my disinterest. Otherwise, it would have to go to a direct confrontation, and I truly hate those.

“I’ll see you around, I guess,” he says. He only pays for his coffee.

A week passes, and a feeble AI Chapaev starts flickering in my computer. Trying to talk to it is vastly reminiscent of a nineteenth-century séance with a medium: the AI answers only yes and no, and occasionally gives a low sepulchral moan that makes the speakers vibrate and whisper like falling sheets of paper.

I try to help him, tell him stories. I tell him about my mom coming to visit me and how her plane was so late and then she couldn’t find her way through the grave-cold, cavernous interior of the JFK Airport, and when she finally emerged, tired and on the verge of tears, I too cried because I missed her and because I couldn’t see her so upset. And then there was a long long drive to Boston, and I wished she could rest. She curled up in the passenger seat, so small, and it was ridiculous to think how large she loomed when I was just a baby, and I tell Chapaev now about something she said back then—on I-95, a long and empty stretch, so dark, so late—how she stared out of the window and whispered, sleepily, “I so like driving at night. It is so sad and alone, as if you are lost in the world, forever, and no one knows where you are and how to find you.”

I don’t know whether the AI Chapaev understands me, whether he would ever be able to comprehend what it’s like, to miss your mom so much even when you yourself an adult. Just as I think that, he whispers, his voice a ghost in the speakers, “Then why did you leave her?”

I avoid the answers and stoke the feeble consciousness, I bring him things I now buy from the Indonesian shop—I bring him seashells pink on the inside and parrot feathers, I bring him bead necklaces and statuettes of the elephants, I bring plates and gongs, marvelous gongs Hainuwele would be proud of.

He is feeble however, and his voice gutters and dies, and I think of ways of stabilizing him. This is all awfully unscientific, but it occurs to me that things in pairs persist better than single units, even though I don’t buy the whole rib story. Or the Ark story, for that matter. What I do buy, however, is that Hainuwele is both a creation myth and the genesis and the birth of original sin—before her death, no one had sex. It was only after she died and was buried and sprouted into agriculture did people discover animal husbandry and, by extension, their own. Or so the story goes.

Hainuwele is God, Jesus, and the serpent in this story, and she is everything to my Chapaev’s nothing—he’s just a whisper from a distant book, in a distant place, in a distant time. He did not beget sin but only a mediocre book, a few movies, and a shitload of jokes. His creation myth guttered out after a few decades, and there’s only the dead and wistfulness for something that could’ve—should’ve—been that is left in its wake. He’s not a god, he’s the hero of the failed Revolution, and those creation myths are not the same.

Mom calls the next day, and her voice is weak and distant. She assures me that everything is all right, fine really, and both of my parents are of the age when no news is good news, and I dread it when they call, because they don’t call unless there’s news. And despite her reassurances, there’s a lump in my throat and a knot in my belly.

She talks about travel instead, and about the trip to Estonia her and dad were planning—and I think about how it changed, how Estonia used to be the same country but was now “abroad,” grown more distant, while America had moved closer. My head spins as I imagine the stretchings and contractions of the world, the distortions—the way neat squares of criss-crossing parallels and meridians buckle, like wet hardwood floors, and how the surface of the globe itself becomes ridged instead of smooth. And then I see Chapaev stepping from one ridge to the next, as the Earth folds and moves Indonesia just a few steps away from the Ural River.

“You seem distracted,” mom says, reproachful.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just thinking about geopolitics.” “We miss you,” mom says, and I suddenly know that it is time

for me to go visit. I buy my ticket the next day, for two weeks ahead. I need two weeks to make some headway with Chapaev and the Coconut Girl.

It is time to bite the bullet, and I head for the Indonesian shop and its endless bowl of “take one” freebies. I know I’ve been relying on its serendipitous nature entirely too much, and I even wonder if my superstition led me astray, away from the proper design of my AIs. I also feel guilty for neglecting my cockroaches, and I buy them some old cookies from the bakery next door. They like food, sugar, darkness, uncleanness. At some point, one has to question the wisdom of turning one’s office over to the artificial cockroaches.

To my surprise, I find Ryan of the party and the awkward Au Bon Pain meeting browsing through the store, looking at the sculptures and the copper gongs. Marvelous gongs, I think, my mom called them. Just like in the hotel brochure.

“Hi,” he says, not at all surprised to see me.

“Anything good?” I ask, sidestepping his unasked questions— where have I been, how was work, if I’ve been talking to Cecilia and Veronica lately.

He jerks his shoulder in a shrug. “Same old. I come here sometimes, just to relax. I love this exotic stuff.”

He probably doesn’t mean to and it is terribly unfair of me to assume that he does, but I feel my cheeks burning as if from a slap. How I hate that word, exotic. How I loathe it, how stupid I feel not to having realized until now that he spoke to me because I was exotic too, a bored quest for novel experiences with a minimum of investment and always at someone else’s expense. This is why I think Chapaev would be good for the Coconut Girl—they would be strange to each other and alien, but never exotic, never animal-like, never to be studied and prodded and ask why they were so sensitive, so worked up about minor stuff. Never to be amusing when one felt like being amused—only to be understood, or at least mutually incomprehensible, the mutuality possible only between equals.