HELENA （Dee）
You speak as if we were to blame for you being old.
SEREBRAKOFF （Ed）
I am more hateful to you than anyone.
（later）
HELENA
Wait, have patience; I shall be old myself in four or five years.
Vinod took note of the way Dee harnessed her inner smirk, the daily displeasure with herself. Later, the Actor threw himself at Dee, only to be rebuffed again and again （here the audience bestirred itself at the sight of the two famous social media lovers）。
UNCLE VANYA （the Actor）
My past does not count because I frittered it away on trifles, and the present has so terribly miscarried! What shall I do with my life and my love? What is to become of them? This wonderful feeling of mine will be wasted and lost as a ray of sunlight is lost that falls into a dark chasm, and my life will go with it.
HELENA （Dee）
I am as it were benumbed when you speak to me of your love, and I don’t know how to answer you. Forgive me I have nothing to say to you. Good-night!
Vinod wished that Chekhov had given Dee more lines here, because her refusal of the Actor required so much more of her. But the Actor’s pain was clear to see. As Zurich’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung noted on the day the play was first streamed （please forgive the poor computer translation）： “We see him broken into two; technology made of him her lover and then he worked hard on himself to make the love go away. But now once more he has subjected himself to the pangs of both love and rejection, and he must do so as a professional. It is not pleasant but edifying to watch this exquisite performer struggle and squirm. He is like the passenger of the last car to be backed up in the Gubrist Tunnel, his eyes dream of the light to come, but every moment he is standing still, unresolved.”
And now despite his best efforts, Vinod drifted away, even as the camera set up on the porch recorded him, his eyelids drawing nearer one to the other, his head slumping toward Karen’s mane, as she maneuvered his binoculars in front of him. But he did not lose consciousness entirely. An old fly basking in the sun set itself on his thigh. It didn’t fly, it didn’t buzz, it sat there contentedly, being alive in the presence of the universe. Vinod didn’t want to get too Jain about it, but he refused to swat it, though it moved so slowly he surely could have robbed it of life. He enjoyed the old perhaps blind fly even as the second act concluded and the third had begun. He heard a generous warble and turned his head, slowly, painfully, to the side to witness a bird feathered with a soft white underbelly regard him with a shopkeeper’s mien. A baby blue jay in flight bumped lightly against one of the screens, a slight loss of innocence. No play could compete with the sight of a long gray squirrel sitting on a high branch delivering an anxious monologue to no one in particular. The world was so full of pleasures it was impossible to think of the programmers in the interstellar Bangalore as anything but aesthetes. He wanted to get up, to walk over to the stage and hug the actors, thank them for the performance, and urge them to go to their lovers and their children, as applicable, and leave him be to the buzz of flies and the scrutiny of the avian world.
“Do you not want to look out of your binoculars, honey?” Karen asked.
“Just give me a second,” he said. “I’m enjoying this.” But he wasn’t talking about the play. He coughed wetly for a minute or two, his body convulsing in the summer heat, but when he looked down the old gray fly remained on his trouser leg. It hung on to him with all of its sticky pads, even though it must have registered each cough as a major earthquake. How impoverished the world would be, he found himself thinking, if it contained no flies.
* * *
—
Afterward, the Actor visited Vinod on the porch, Masha and a camera crew wearing face shields and garbage bags in tow. He stood on one knee before Vinod as if proposing. He was about to deliver a speech, but the violence he had done to the elderly-looking man, who now appeared sunken chested and wheezing before him, the oxygen tank by his side and the cannula in his nose, struck him afresh in the familiar environment of the covered porch, the bourgeoisie pleasure dome of their elaborate meals. Drained by his performance （which he judged to have been deficient）， he began the lines he had rehearsed: “Vinod, for what I’ve done to you—” But as soon as he hit the “you” part, the ridiculousness of his position hit him, and he barely had time to motion to the camera crew to turn off their feed, before he started to cry. This was not the weeping anyone had seen on the screen or in the West End, but a sputtering keening, broken into ugly half wails, that brought to mind religious women at a grave site upon the sudden, almost accidental realization that they would never be reunited with their loved one no matter what the holy books said, that now would begin their enhanced aloneness. The Actor had escaped from the clutches of Tr?? Emotions, only to fall into this rank humanity. Finally, he had found what he was looking for.