Moscow but Dreaming

CHAPAEV AND THE COCONUT GIRL

I discovered that my mom left for Indonesia (Bali, to be exact) on her birthday. I called to wish her a happy one, but my dad answered the phone instead and informed me that she was traveling. To Bali. “She told me to tell you that she is in paradise,” he said.

“Give her my best,” I said.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled for my mom to be able to travel like this, because really, for people of her generation and ethnic disposition (she was born in 1942, in German-occupied Lithuania) life never promised anything remotely tropical or whimsical. Yet, I was a little troubled as I had been since 1989, when the world shifted askew cracking the foundation of our existence, and the cracks spread all over the formerly impenetrable and imaginary air bubble that surrounded the then-USSR. I found myself among those who somehow slipped through those cracks, like a goldfish in a temporary prison of a plastic bag, right into the cold and big world—or a fish tank; not that it made that much difference. And this was really the crux of the issue: people like me left so that the change around them would be explainable by travel and culture shock rather than by the impossible overturning if the world which suddenly folded, did a little flip, and pulled itself from under their securely planted feet. Travel lets you pretend that the world didn’t really change, that you just chose your terms. My terms include working in an AI lab at MIT; could be worse.

My parents stayed behind then, as they still do every time I visit, and when I leave them at the airport, I always look back, at how small they are, and my heart fractures anew. So I’m thrilled now that mom is getting to travel a little, and she doesn’t feel quite as abandoned to me when she does. She gets to do some abandoning of her own, and I console dad over the phone. Of course he can cook his own dinner, but he appreciates the sympathy. I think he does—at least, as effective as sympathy across the Atlantic can be, conveyed by sighs whispering through the impossible length of telephone wires.

And after we hung up, I was still pensive, thinking of my mom in such a distant place, even more distant than before. The positive thing about travel though is that if you go away sufficiently far, at some point you start getting closer. And of course distance was conducive of deceit: for all I knew, mom could’ve still been at home, giggling on the couch, and not at all in Indonesia. Distances are tricky like that.

There is a secret I have, a really embarrassing thing: I worship Chapaev. Despite the jokes that are his later legacy and the revolutionary terror of his earlier days, these people, their horses, the Red Army, and all that elementary school-level propaganda is lodged deep in my heart, like a metal splinter. Horses and steppes and wars fought with sabers rather than guns. They probably did have guns though; wouldn’t they? Of course they had guns. It’s just this is not how I imagined it in my childhood or now, for that matter. Temporal distances are tricky as well.

Dealing with the dead is frustrating because you can never ask them anything—you could, but they wouldn’t answer. So I compose long conversations in my head, asking about the Red Army and how did it all really happen, what the dirt under the horses’ hooves smelled like, if they were crawling with lice, this sort of thing. If he really drowned in the end, trying to swim across River Ural, or did he fake it, tired of war and fame, tired of being a hero. If he decided to quit the revolution gig and instead grow pumpkins somewhere. I wonder if he’s still alive, even though he would be over a hundred years old, hundred and twenty, to be exact, but that doesn’t seem too old for a hero. Come and think about it, all heroes of the revolutions are relatively young in historical terms. And I’m left to my own yarns, recursive narratives I spin as I drink my tea and stare out of the window at the houses across the street and imagine Charles River far behind them. I squint and the buildings disappear and I can see in my mind’s eye Charles, thick and green, speckled with oil slicks like a multicolored serpent, and if I squint further, it becomes Ural on the shores of which my stories either end or begin—it all depends on a day.

Today, I wait for the rooftops to turn molten yellow and orange, like a pumpkin, and I imagine him emerging from the freezing water, dripping wet, his teeth clattering, and the right sleeve of his uniform dark with blood. Then he walks, like giants walk, each leap taking him over a hill or a small river, the blood drips spawning lakes and craters in his wake, leaving the earth steaming and scorched, scars that it will take centuries to heal in the unforgiving Siberian climate. The pine and fir forest that gradually rises around him does nothing to impede his progress as he pushes the trees aside like mere branches, and pulls his feet out of the sucking morasses of swamps with ease.

This is the thing that makes daydreaming so pleasant: one can keep the details vague and imagine tall firs and green meadows, serpentine rivers and lakes like mirrors, fields yellow with heavy nodding wheat—everything, everything. And his walk can take him anywhere, and today I imagine him walking like that, strides of a giant, a red star on his hat illuminating his way with a crimson strobe, across Siberia and past China, all the way to the Sea of Japan. I imagine him jumping off the edge of Kamchatka as if it it was a springboard, and then—Sakhalin, Japan. I watch him treading on islands and land formations as if they were mere stepping stones, all the way to the East China Sea where the islands grow a bit scarce and he has to swim a little. Then in the Philippines, he’s picking up his inhuman stride again, and there, finally, he reaches Indonesia. My mom said it was a paradise.

Coconut Girl is a myth common in Indonesia, my mom says. Suddenly, she is a folklorist who’s eager to educate me on foreign mythologies. She also emails me pictures of alien birds and large lizards—who is this woman?—and talks about where she would like to go next year. Right now, it’s a toss-up between Thailand and New Zealand. But for now she talks about the Coconut Girl and laughs, and I assume blushes a little, because it is really a dirty story. Girl shitting out stuff like that—of course, my mom doesn’t say “shitting out.” She says “excreting,” and that makes me giggle over the phone.

So, the Coconut Girl: there was a farmer named Ameta who found a coconut when it washed ashore. No one ever saw such things before on his island (called Seram). The next night he dreamt about planting it—a shadowy voice instructed him how to do such a thing. He planted the coconut and soon the coconut grew into a beautiful palm tree, and many flowers clustered between its feathered leaves. Ameta climbed the tree but cut his hand, and one of the flowers became stained with his blood. As such tales go, the flower stained with blood became a coconut that then became a girl, named Hainuwele.

Hainuwele, as it turned out, wasn’t just any coconut girl: every time she went to the bathroom, instead of regular human turds she dropped all sorts of interesting objects: earrings, serving dishes, coral statuettes, dinner plates, jewelry, stones, shells. Copper gongs and other treasures. And she gave all of those wonderful things to the villagers.

We all know how these stories go. Coconut Girl was the original Giving Tree, Rainbow Fish, and whatever other propaganda they’re feeding the kids nowadays. In her case, however, the story is truthful—after all her giving, she was killed, since we do not like those who make us feel grateful, and there’s no greater contempt than that for someone whom we owe a debt of gratitude. The Indonesian version tells it right.

I of course don’t tell this to my mom, because she would only get upset at my negativity. She thinks I’m cynical, but I am not. I’m normal. It is her who is abnormally naïve, and after all the crap she had to go through it is a small miracle that she manages to be happy, bouncy, and wanting to see New Zealand. “Will you walk the path to Mordor?” I ask her.

“A path to what, dear?” she asks, sweetly.

“Never mind,” I say. “Listen, I have to go.”

“Save your money,” she says. “International phone calls are expensive.”

I want to tell her that money has nothing to do with it, it’s just that I have to go to work, but change my mind. It doesn’t matter and she will never remember anyway. And as dad says, there’s just no point in arguing—I can stand being wrong as long as it makes her happy. I hope it does.

I take the subway to work, and while riding I consider the rest of the tale. Its sad sad end, especially.

So what did the villagers do to the girl who gave everything to them, the precious things she made come out of her own body? They dug a pit and pushed her into it, and then they danced and trampled the dirt over her. I can imagine a death like that— suffocation and lungs filled with mud, a broken sternum and ribs bristling with white shattered edges. Loss of consciousness and its black relief. Being buried alive not accidentally but intentionally. Hands grasping and failing, nails breaking.

Ameta found her body and cut it into pieces and buried it all over the place. Mom didn’t tell me why would he do such a thing—I can understand exhumation, but not dismemberment, but I’m sure he had his reasons and I’m just blinded by my own prejudices. Whatever the case, he dismembered her and buried her parts all over, and then they grew into various tuberous plants, yams etcetera. Mom is hazy on what exact plants they are, and she also said something about goddess and how people started having sex only after Hainuwele died. If I were in the mood, I would think how cool it is that the story manages to conflate the Eve’s apple with Jesus and throw in some creation to boot, but today I’m uninterested in Westernizing folklore and reducing everything to Christianity. Instead I sit and stare at my own reflection in the window across, as the subway train sways and hurtles itself closer and closer to MIT, my station, while thinking about how Chapaev fits into it and what would he do. He is an indispensable part of the Revolution—and as such, a creation mythology. The world he belonged to was forged in a celestial fire, a new world to which a very bloody creation myth was entirely appropriate, and heroes of the revolution were its sacrifices.

The mythology of the Red Cavalry is a pervasive one—no matter how many post-Communist years we accumulate, his image is always there, saved in the collective un- and semiconscioius, in jokes, old movies, books some of us had to read. They are the heroes, the martyrs, the creators. They are our Coconut Girl—without the fertility.

Why do I want to save Chapaev so badly? Two reasons: first, ambiguity of his death. If someone’s body is never found, you cannot really be sure that they are dead. Second, I want him to be alive so that he doesn’t end up like the stupid giving tree. We hate those who help us, and the only way to deal with that guilt is to kill them—like they did with the Coconut Girl, Hainuwele. Better yet if the benefactors kill themselves (we call it selfsacrifice, and this is our favorite) sparing us the mess. In my mind, heroes that live are a vindication, a heartfelt slap in the face of our collective greed. So I make him live, and I make him settle in Indonesia.

“So you made him an immigrant.” I don’t have many friends, except Veronica and Cecilia, two Brazilian grad students who are way too much fun for me, and I’m not even sure how to deal with them. But I just follow them around, awkwardly, and buy them drinks in any of Boston’s pubs if the opportunity presents itself. It presents itself after work today, and we all drink in the Bow and Arrow. Cecilia is downing fuzzy navels and Veronica is sticking with sweet wine; I drink Sam Adams, out of some guilty obligation of someone who knows they don’t really belong in Boston but appreciates the opportunity anyway. After a few, I tell them about Chapaev and Indonesia. They seem amused.

“So you made him an immigrant,” Cecilia says and laughs.

Veronica, who has a cold, laughs too in a sexy deep throaty way that makes me insanely jealous. “Everyone’s an immigrant somewhere. Except the people who stay home.”

“And who would want that?” Cecilia laughs and laughs. I’m jealous of how lanky and long she is, how her neck elongates and strains as she tosses back her head and finishes her drink. This is something about these two that I want so desperately and yet have no prospects of achieving: being in the center of attention, attracting people no matter where they go, having seemingly hundreds of friends. I always feel so honored when they choose to hang out with my own insignificant self.

“ What are you working on now, Elena?” Veronica asks. “Besides rewriting history, of course.”

“Still cockroaches,” I say and sigh. The AI lab I work in, the Minsky lab, is world famous for our research. I get to be a nameless collaborator, the one who equips our robotic cockroaches with sensors and simple programming, little chips that allow them to teach themselves to avoid light and scatter at the sound of footsteps. So they scatter and are a huge pain in my ass to catch and fix. “I’m doing vibration sensitivity programming now.”

Cecilia nods, politely. Or maybe she is genuinely interested. “They act like real ones?”

“Yeah,” I say and drink my beer. “It’s not much, and I’ve been in the lab for five years now, and I still do cockroaches. It’s something, I guess.”

They agree.

“What’s next for you?” Veronica asks. “Rats?”

I’m not sure if she’s mocking or not. “Probably more cockroaches. I want to make something that can learn more things, you know? More patterns. Like, not just light and sound and vibration, but the time of day, something that can make decisions. And not just react but to anticipate, to affect…” I stumble over my words and fall silent, afraid to bore, to take up too much of their valuable attention. Besides, they are training to become neuroscientists, and I expect them to have some contempt for those of us who try to replicate a great complexity of a brain via computer chips and switches linked together, the artificial neural networks that are not at all neural.

“It sounds pretty cool,” Veronica says, her white teeth gleaming, her skin the color of an ominous sunset. “This is the problem I have with much of the neurosience—it always interprets living beings as reactive, and you can’t really make a breakthrough within those constraints.”

I nod and hold my breath—it is not often that Veronica (or Cecilia, for that matter) want to geek out with me. Normally, they just try to give me advice, because apparently to them I look especially helpless and awkward. And I am grateful, I really am, and I hope to learn their effortless laugh and ability to not become tongue-tied when faced with people, and managing to not dress as a dork. Not mangling every English idiom I learn with such effort would also be nice, but I’m not setting the bar high here. At least, in terms of personal social achievement.

“I think most of us are reactive though,” I tell Veronica. “It takes a hero to be able to shape the circumstance rather than follow them. You know how only main characters in books manage to shape their own destiny and the rest just follow? I think it’s the same in human history.”

“I was thinking more about my animals,” Veronica says, and mercifully doesn’t laugh. With a blistering wave of shame, I remember that she works with bats. “But I take your point. Bats are always scanning their environment for clues, so they are searching for their own shape of being… of their spaces. It’s one thing to merely perceive the surroundings, and yet quite another to send out the signal to find out what those surroundings are; by choosing direction, they create the reality they want to interact with.”

I nod. “This makes sense. Maybe I should equip my cockroaches with a sonar or some echolocation device. This way I can teach them to make decisions about what to explore.”

“Let me know how it goes,” Veronica says.

Cecilia smoothly interjects, “And meanwhile, we’re having a party this Saturday. Our friend Todd will be bringing his band.”

“You have something to wear, right?” Veronica says, and their concern with my lack of a cohesive wardrobe forces away all other thoughts, and I bask in their attention and consider highlights. We finish our drinks and Cecilia skips, to prepare the place for the party. Veronica stays with me, and before I can get over the prospect of a one-on-one conversation, she informs me that we have to go to Filene’s Basement. “You absolutely cannot wear those palazzo pants again,” she tells me firmly. “They’re too synthetic, there’re sparks flying off the cuffs when you walk.”

I want to debate whether it is even possible for something to be too synthetic, isn’t it an either-or situation? But Veronica grabs my hand and it makes me melt a little, and we’re off to scour the expanse of Mass Ave for proper party outfits.

But before we reach Filene’s Basement, something in a store window catches my eye and I freeze despite Veronica’s impatient tugging and pulling, and I stare. It looks like some local gallery, one of those shops with hardwood floors polished so even the most modest heel clacks too loudly and the fronts of which are nothing but thick glass. In this window display I see: coral beads, copper gongs, dishes, wonderful objects. This place has Hainuwele all over it, and I go inside, suddenly conquering my fear of these posh and severe places.

Veronica follows, her perfect eyebrows drawn like Scythian bows, and her nose, reddened by the cold, sniffling with irritation. “What gives?”

“I have to see this,” I say. Our shoes clack on the parquet, blond and polished, and there’s no one but us in there. I look around for clues, for some sign that I’m in the right place. Finally, I see a dinner plate, carved out of soapstone, heavy and perfect, with a bunch of smaller knickknacks piled on it. “Take one,” the handwritten sign over the plate invites. I sort through— mostly single earrings (my ears aren’t pierced), coral beads, tiny statuettes, until finally I find a tin five-splayed star, painted red. The star Chapaev wore over his helm, I have to assume. I clasp it in my fist and tell Veronica, “Okay, we can go.”

At the party, I feel unusually at ease—perhaps because there’s a red star hastily sewn onto the bill of the hat I picked up while shopping. It is gray and has copper buttons on the sides, and gives a vaguely military impression. I’m wearing it with my new dress despite Veronica’s suggestions. I am at ease.

Cecilia and Veronica went for a tropical theme, and there are piña coladas and pineapples and papayas everywhere. The place is a loft, and they moved most of the furniture into the kitchen, and there’s a vast expanse of hardwood floor, like the gallery, but the sounds of heels are muffled by so many bodies packed into the space, their soft heat dissipating any too-clear sounds. The sideboard with drinks and fruit and strong cheeses is stretched along the far wall, by the window, which shows an incredible molten sunset, streaked bronze and pink and red, and soon it is violated and abandoned, cheeses crumbled and left undone on the bamboo cutting boards, the dull flat knives crusted over with white film like murder. I make my way over to the sideboard and pick on crumbs of camambert and smoked gouda, and sneak a grape or two. I would’ve liked some pineapple, but I know it would only make the corners of my mouth turn red and hurt for days, so I wisely stay away and sip a piña colada. The band is tuning up in the corner and the party surges toward them, leaving me and the cheeseboard in a contented solitude.

Our silent communion is interrupted when someone above me says, “Cecilia tells me you’re in Minsky lab.”

“Yeah,” I say through a mouthful of cheese and give the intruder a hostile look. “What of it?”

He stares down at me through his thick glasses, his face expressing sincere concern. “So do you think AI is really possible?”

I swallow my cheese, and don’t enjoy it anymore. “It depends on how you define AI. It probably isn’t going to be cute or sexy if that’s what you’re asking.”

He frowns and takes a step back. My mom always tells me that I’m too abrupt; she gave up on the honey and vinegar analogy some years ago, ever since I asked why would I want to catch flies in the first place. I knew, of course, what she meant.

“I’m just being curious,” he says, frowning. “You don’t have to be… like that.” He of course means to say “such a bitch,” but to his credit doesn’t.

I shrug and scope the board for more stray cheese bits. “You don’t have to ask inane questions. You asked Cecilia what I did so you could talk to me, but you don’t really care. So don’t expect a thoughtful well-reasoned answer while making small talk.”

“Nothing wrong with small talk.”

“Of course not. Just try not to trivialize shit other people care about.”

At this point, I expect him to make an exit, but he just shakes his head. “Would asking you about your hat also qualify as trivializing?”

“Depends on why you ask.”

He heaves an exaggerated sigh, and it is almost drowned by the first twangs of the garage band guitar. He wrinkles his nose. “I ask because it’s an interesting hat, and I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you because all you do is glower and eat cheese, and stare daggers and wear weird hats with a really pretty dress.”

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.

“Oh,” I say and step away. “Do they ever have sales help here?”

“There’s a bell on the counter,” he says.

I ring the bell, regretting it isn’t a gong, and I wait, until footfalls shuffle and approach, and an old woman, her parallel wrinkles carved into her cheeks like if they were wood, slips into the store slash gallery through a small door behind the counter. She smiles at me. “You like freebies,” she says.

“Who doesn’t?” I mumble and blush and hope that Ryan didn’t hear.

“Some more than others,” she says, and laughs so mirthfully I have to smile too. “What can I get you?”

“Hainuwele,” I say.

She frowns. “What about her?”

“If you were to capture her in one object, what would it be— here, I mean, and how much?”

Of course it turns out to be a copper gong wrapped in a cloth decorated with embroidered vegetables (the crops she turned into, I assume), and of course it costs about as much as my monthly rent. But at this point, I don’t really care—I need to finish before I go home, and Hainuwele is tricky.

I nod goodbye to Ryan and thank the old woman, and head back for the lab. As I walk, I compile the list of attributes for Hainuwele—afraid of crowds, dancing floors, dirt. Probably not crazy about the club scenes—very much like myself, for I’m afraid of being trampled. Hainuwele likes gongs, coconuts, flowers, root vegetables. Writing an AI is a lot like writing a dating ad, except longer and with actual commands.

My office has become a depository of little tokens from the Indonesian store as well as some old mementos—a VHS of Chapaev the movie, some notes from history classes I dragged with me across the ocean for no other reason but reluctance to throw away any bits of knowledge, no matter how petty and political. Then there are cookies for the AI cockroaches, and I crumble them onto the floor. At night, they gather around the crumbs but don’t eat them because they cannot eat, and I passingly worry that the cookie crumbs would attract real cockroaches and consider tidying up a little—maybe just getting rid of cookies and Cheeto dust and empty snack bags that rustle when my cockroaches skitter over them.

The lights are dimmed and the programs are running. Chapaev speaks in a faint whisper, and Hainuwele, small as she is, uncertain, is silent altogether. I take the gong out of its wrapping and put the cloth on top of the monitor, so that the traditional root vegetables flutter in the breeze and festoon around the pale monitor light, like ghosts of harvests past. I do not dare to ring the gong out of fear—I don’t want to attract attention of my lab members (are they still working? It seems like I haven’t spoken to anyone in so long, it could be a very long night or a four day weekend, who even knows anymore?) So instead of ringing I just brush my fingertips against its convex surface, and the dry skin whispers against polished metal, iron in my blood evoking copper of hers. The ringing of the gong is so faint, it lingers on the very edge of hearing, almost imagined but neverending.

There’s a week before I have to go home, and between buying presents and arranging for cat sitters and tweaking the two AIs that now possess my work computer, I manage to call Cecilia and Veronica and ask them to come and to bring Ryan. They bubble with excitement, deceived that their matchmaking skills finally bore shriveled and bitter fruit. I wait for them in the darkened lab, my office windows shuttered with horizontal plastic slats that barely let in little zebra stripes of the sunlight. I drum my fingers on the black surface of the desk and hum to myself, keeping tune with the AIs whispering in the wires. I think idly of making them some sort of physical vehicles, like the little cockroach bodies, and wonder if that would help them develop their personalities. I wonder in Cecilia and Veronica might be able to lend me some rat brains, to play with chips and whatnot. I’d rather my Chapaev be a real rat than a fake cockroach; at least in a rat body he would have whiskers. Ideally of course I would like him to have limbs for locomotion and a mustache for historical accuracy, and a sparkle in his eyes to humor my childhood fantasies.

The three of them arrive, and they all look at me, frowning with concern.

“You okay?” Veronica finally says.

“Yes,” I say. “Just a ton of work, and I’m going home for a few weeks so there’s a lot of things to finish. Can you help me to test this program?”

“How?” Ryan says.

I have no idea; how do you verify the authenticity of artificial personality, how do you make sure it matches a long-ago dead hero of the revolution or a mythological coconut girl? “Play twenty questions with it,” I tell them. “Try to figure it out.”

They crowd around the keyboard, taking turns typing and giggling. From their mounting excitement, I’m guessing that the AIs are doing fairly well, but fatigue overwhelms. I rest my head over my folded arms, for just a moment, and the next thing I know I dream about being inside the computer, about flickering along the wires and bursting into sparkling fireballs at the connections, chips and silvery spiders of etched aluminum filigree. It always calms me down to imagine it, and to dream it is an unexpected joy. I sigh with happiness in my sleep and fly faster and faster, turning into pure energy, the resistance of metals my only constraints. And soon enough I feel that I’m not alone—although how can a flow of electrons possibly be alone?—as two discrete entities join me and flow alongside.

I recognize them, of course—one by his mustache and the other by her gong. “We will administer a Turing test,” Chapaev says and flashes me a smile bright as stars in the electronic darkness. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.” I do what I can not to laugh, and then Hainuwele whispers softly next to me, her voice lilting like the gentle stammering of a forest stream, and I cannot understand her words.

“What are you saying?” I ask, laughing and crying and flying through metal, the distant echo of a jet flight—an echo preceding the event, I think, and imagine humming of wings and the metal guts, the whispering of electronic blood that would take me home.

They speak in unison, and I do not understand. Their words fuse into a lulling melody, into whistling of winds and churning of water, and then it grows lower and and stronger, so that my entire body starts vibrating and humming, like a flower when a bumblebee touches it with its furry legs.

Cecilia shook my shoulder, and I peeled my eyes open, annoyed. I was so close to making out their words, and they were so close to me—so alive, their tingling electric flesh flowing over mine.

“You ok?” Cecilia asks.

I nod and yawn. “Yeah. How’s the test?”

“It’s a joke, right?” Veronica says, and even Ryan frowns at me.

“What?”

“Your program doesn’t work,” Ryan says and heaves an exasperated sigh. “It looks like an elementary school project… what were you trying to do?”

I rub my eyes again, redundantly. “What happened?”

“See for yourself,” Cecilia says. “Have you even tried this before? It started out all right, but then it just got stupid and then the computer froze.”

They all seem genuinely annoyed with me for wasting their time and I feel sorry about that; yet I wish they would just tell me what exactly went wrong. But already they’re leaving, filing out of the lab, and I stare at the screen. The transcript should be autosaved, and I find it quickly enough.

They are right—it is embarrassing. It reads like one of those programs you can have a conversation with, and you can throw it off with any simple question. The transcript soon enough disintegrates into “And what do you want to do?” and “Tell me more about it” and “I don’t know.” It is embarrassing.

“Why do you do this to me?” I ask the computer, and their voices—their long-ago dead voices—fill my ears like water filling up an empty scallop shell, and their words crowd and lap at my tympanic membranes.

We didn’t do anything, they say. We just didn’t know how to talk—their fingers were so awkward on the keyboard, and their ears are too coarse to hear us. We’re sorry if we’ve embarrassed you.

“It’s all right,” I whisper back. “Not your fault.”

And here we go again, choosing terms for our defeat and creating our own realities as heroes would. I agree with them and blame Cecilia and Veronica and the guy from the party that seems so long ago for their inability to hear, to pay attention properly, rather than myself. I resolve to build them bodies, and this is way beyond my purview, and I saunter to the robotics lab next door.

I make small talk with grad students there, none of whose names I can remember, but nothing seems to be doing since one of them is working on a creepy-looking hand operated by a bundle of strings that replicate motion of human muscles— at least in theory; in reality, it looks like an overly elaborate marionette, and the rest putz about with various simple things that all look like roombas and dryers and other household appliances. I ask to borrow one of the roombas at least, and tell them that I need to try a new program for my cockroaches. As if. They grumble but let me, and for a moment I feel vertiginous, as if standing on a great precipice—and finally, finally, I would be able to give shape to the world, to become active rather than reactive. To choose my own direction.

The roomba I drag to the lab with me is smallish—maybe five pounds of wheels and gears and receptors, light and pressure, with a small knot of electronics for its brain. It takes me the rest of the day to equip it with the twin consciousness of my heroes. The night before it’s time for me to go I equip it with a mustache and a gong and pack it into a cardboard box and stuff the box into my carry-on—no way I’m checking them in.

The plane is half-empty, and it is off-season. Most of the passengers are my compatriots, and I avoid talking to them, studiously. The night falls so fast—we are traveling east after all, forever east, like Chapaev searching for a passage to Indonesia— and only when everyone is asleep and the lights are dimmed I let the robot out of its prison.

It hums and feels its way along the aisles, and the plane is cutting through the thick damp air outside like a fat silver knife, carving up space to make a tunnel, to bring me closer to my mom. And at my feet, two AIs shift and whisper nervously in their single shared body, silver and flat like a cockroach, and I can only imagine what will happen when we touch the ground. I feel fevered and elated, and I picture the small silver thing touching the ground and springing up as a handsome mustachioed man (this is how it happens in fairy tales—a bird hits the ground and becomes a hero), and then he would step forth and bring Hainuwele out by her hand. Her gong would ring, and the sound of it, as impossible as that of the Tsar-Bell, will carry over this new fractured, corrugated world where close things have grown far away, and the far things are smushed together.

The sound of her gong and the roar of his laughter will smooth out the wrinkles and bind what was fractured, and the world will become whole again: my mom will meet me on the tarmac instead of the twisty bowels of the airport, and the horses will gallop through the streets, blood of revolutionary terror washed off by River Ural’s waters, sparkling like dew on the hairs of their bay hides, like rain. And the gong and the bell will ring even louder, amplified by a million horseshoes striking the stones, and all those who were trampled over underground will spring up, break through the pavements and stand in sunlight, and the doors of the Mausoleum will swing open and all the heroes of the revolution will toddle outside on their stubborn soft and new legs, squinting at the sunlight, and the root vegetables that will flourish right in the middle of Red Square—and it won’t be necessary to bury dismembered bodies to sustain their growth. My Brazilian neuroscientists will fix the decaying brains of the dead and we will install AIs that will whisper shyly in the wires of their new souls, and we will make as many heroes as we need.