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napkins, and walked toward Vadik’s bedroom.
    “No, no, don’t,” she heard Sergey say, “she’ll be fine. She just needs to be alone for a minute.”
    Do I? she wondered, stepping onto the terrace. Do I need to be alone?
    The air had become significantly cooler. Vica was holding on to the last remnants of her drunkenness to keep herself warmer and less sad. She was lost. They all were. So thoroughly lost. Why couldn’t anybody think of an app for that? To help one find one’s way in life? She didn’t care about immortality. Fuck immortality! What she cared about was this short meager life that they had to live. Why couldn’t they think of an app to make it easier?
    Vica looked out at the roofs of other buildings. They boasted tangled wires and broken tarps. Some had water towers, perched on clumsy legs. Others had chimneys clustered together yet bending away from one another like dysfunctional families. Yes, exactly like dysfunctional families. It was the sight of the chimneys that made her cry.

Before Sejun there was Rachel II, and before Rachel II there was the sane Sofia, and before the sane Sofia there was Catherine Jenkins, and before Catherine Jenkins there was Tania. Vadik had met all of them through Hello, Love!
    Tania had used the face of Saga Norén as her profile picture. Saga Norén was a Swedish detective with Asperger’s from the Danish series
Broen.
Vadik didn’t really like Tania, but he loved
Broen
and
Broen
’s quirky heroine, so every time he saw Tania, he imagined that he was really seeing Saga Norén.
    Millie, Fosca, Teresa, the insane Sofia. He had met them on another dating site Match4U because the vastly superior Hello, Love! hadn’t been available yet. Match4U made it very difficult to read the insanity level of a person based on his or her profile. The insane Sofia had turned out to be a freelance doll-maker. She made tiny scary dolls with eyelashes and fingernails and silky pubic hair. Who would’ve thought that three-inch dolls with pubic hair were even possible? “Touch it, Vadik!” Sofia would insist. “Stroke it. See how soft it is?”
    Or take DJ Toma, for example, who Vadik had also met on Match4U. DJ Toma said that she used to own the largest PR firm in all of western Siberia but had to flee Russia because of political persecution. When Vadik met her, she was working as a cleaning lady during the day and deejaying in an East Village club at night. In her spare time she was trying to set up a business selling ancient Siberian potions. In the four months that Toma lived in Vadik’s apartment in the Bronx, she managed to fill the entire fridge with different potions in labeled jars. The labels read: DIVINE INSPIRATION, GRACE, LOVE, HEALTHY HEART, STOMACH PROBLEMS, and A LOT OF MONEY. Sergey had been particularly interested in the last two. He kept asking Vadik if they worked. “I guess they do,” Vadik said. “I guess they do.” One day, while Vadik was at work, Toma poured most of her potions down the toilet, packed her things (and a few of Vadik’s things), and left. She wrote Vadik a note in which she said that she was going to Peru to find out if San Pedro was all that different from LSD. She’d bought a package trip that included a week of San Pedro tastings at the house of a real shaman. Vadik hadn’t heard from her since. There was a rumor that she had overdosed and died. But there was also another rumor that she had become the shaman’s manager and helped him expand his client base.
    There was Barbara, the New Age–y masseuse. Before Barbara (but actually during) there was Abby. Then Barbara found out about Abby and Abby found out about Barbara, and Vadik was alone again.
    Who else was there? Jesse, his headhunter. Dana, the woman who worked in the next cubicle at Morgan Stanley—he’d sworn off dating his coworkers after Dana. Vica. Yep, his former girlfriend now his best friend’s wife, Vica. That was the one encounter he was trying very hard to forget.