Super Sad True Love Story (37 page)

“We need to keep safe, asshole,” I said. “There’s a major riot on. I’m trying to save your life.”

“And what about Vishnu and Grace? If it’s not safe here, why don’t they come with us?”

“My boss told me they’d be okay here.”

“Why, because Vishnu’s collaborating?”

I grabbed his arm in a way that I never had, his thick flesh twisting in my strong grip, but also in a way that connoted that for once I was in charge between us. “Look,” I said. “I love you. You’re my friend. We’ve got to do this for Eunice and Amy. We’ve got to make sure they don’t get hurt.”

He looked at me with the easy hatred of the righteous. I had always been unsure of his affection for Amy Greenberg, and now I had no reason to doubt. He didn’t love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone.

We walked out on beautiful, leafy, Victorian St. Mark’s Place, like two fine couples, Noah’s arms around Amy, mine around Eunice. But the pretty coupledom and the handsome, drooping willows of the street formed a lie. A sickening Caucasian fear, mowed grass and temperate sex mixed with a surprising shot of third-world perspiration, crowded the borough’s most elegant street, the hipsterish white young humanity rushing back toward the Staten Island Ferry, toward Manhattan and then Brooklyn, while another crowd was trying to fight its way back onto Staten Island—neither side knowing if they had the right idea; to hear the Media chatter off our äppäräti, the entire city seemed engulfed in violence, either real or invented. We stalked past one another, the Media people streaming in motion, Amy giving off a précis of her wardrobe and her recent frustrations with Noah, Eunice watching her surroundings with one careful eye, while her formidable Fuckability rankings fluttered in the wind around us. A fresh armada of helicopters flew over us, just as a real storm was beginning to announce itself.

I got an emergency teen from Nettie Fine: “LENNY, ARE YOU SAFE? I’M SO WORRIED! WHERE ARE YOU?” I wrote her that Noah and Eunice and I were on Staten Island trying to get back to Manhattan. “LET ME KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING EVERY STEP OF THE WAY,” she wrote, calming my fears. Everything was going to hell, but my American mama was still looking out for me.

I bore left onto Hamilton Avenue, the Staten Island Ferry terminal but a rapid descent to the bay. We were almost knocked down by a running Mediastud, all teeth and sunburn and opened guayabera shirt. “They’re shooting at Media people!” he was projecting into his äppärät and at anyone who would listen.

“Where?” we shouted.

“Here. In Manhattan. Brooklyn. The LNWIs are burning down the Credit Poles! The Guard is firing back! The Venezuelans are sailing up the Potomac!”

Noah pulled us back, his arms around Eunice and me, his relative strength and the solidity of his dumb bulk squeezing us tight, making me hate him. “We’ve got to loop around!” he shouted. “There’s
no way we can make it down Hamilton. It’s covered in Credit Poles. The Guard’s going to start shooting.” I saw Eunice looking at him with a smile, congratulating his cheap decisiveness. Amy was streaming about her beloved mother—a sun-worn prototype of a contemporary Mediawhore—at present vacationing in Maine, how she missed her, how she wished she had gone up to see her this weekend, but Noah,
Noah
, had insisted they go to Grace and Vishnu’s party, and now life really sucked, didn’t it?

“Can you get me to Tompkins Park?” Eunice asked Noah.

He smiled. In the middle of the hysteria,
he smiled
. “Let’s see what I can do.”

“Are you all insane?” I shouted. But Noah was already dragging Eunice and Amy in the direction of Victory Boulevard. There were people running there, fewer than on Hamilton Avenue, but still at least a few hundred, scared and disoriented. I reached Eunice and tore her from Noah’s grasp. My body, flabby but real and nearly double Eunice’s weight, huddled fully around her and angled us against the flow, my arms bearing the brunt of the advancing horde, the parade of young, scared people, the frontal mass of their floral body washes, the denseness of their inability to survive. Ahead of us, two Credit Poles smoldered in the gray pre-storm heat, their LED counters knocked out, sparks flying from their electronic innards.

I pushed my way forward, innate Russianness, ugliness, Jewishness, beating through my system—emergency, emergency, emergency—while inuring my precious cargo against any harm, as her Padma cosmetics bag jammed into my ribs, misting my eyes with the pain of its sharp edges.

I was whispering to Eunice: “Sweetie, sweetie, it’s going to be okay.”

But there was no need. Eunice was okay. We linked hands. Noah led Amy, Amy led Eunice, and Eunice led me through the screaming crowd, which was turning in one direction and then another, rumors flashing around with äppärät speed. The sky changed as if to taunt us further, a strong wind lashing us from the east and then from the west.

Behind the old courthouse, a municipal area had become a National Guard staging ground, choppers taking off, armored personnel carriers, tanks, Browning guns in mid-swing, a small area cordoned off into a holding pen where some older black people were interred.

We ran. It meant nothing. It all meant nothing. All the signs. The street names. The landmarks. Even here, amidst the kingdom of my fear, all I could think about was Eunice not loving me, losing her respect for me, Noah the decisive leader in a time when she was supposed to need
me
. Staten Island Bank & Trust. Against Da’ Grain Barber Shop. Child Evangelism Fellowship. Staten Island Mental Health Society. The Verrazano Bridge. A&M Beauty Supplies. Planet Pleasure. Up and Growing Day Care. Feet, feet. Shards of data all around us, useless rankings, useless streams, useless communiqués from a world that was no longer to a world that would never be. I smelled the garlic on Eunice’s breath and on her body. I confused it with life. I felt the small heft of a thought that I could project at her back. The thought became a chanted mantra: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“Tompkins Park,” she said, her stubbornness clawing at me. “My sister.” A surge of black humanity from the ungentrified neighborhood just beyond St. George merged with ours, and I could feel the hipsterish component trying to separate themselves from the blacks, an American survival instinct that dated back to the arrival of the first slave ship. Distance from the condemned. Black, white, black, white. But it didn’t matter either. We were finally one. We were all condemned. A new squall of rain blanketing our faces, a rolling wave of heat following the rain, Noah’s weathered face staring into mine, cursing my slowness and indecision, Amy streaming just one word, “Mommy,” over and over again into the satellites above us, into the breezy reality of her mother’s Maine, Eunice, her face level and straight, her arms around me, all of her in my arms.

Noah and Amy ran into the ferry terminal through a portal of finely shredded glass. Eunice had grabbed my arm and was pulling me toward our goal. Two ferries had just disgorged their last
screaming Manhattan passengers. Who was piloting these ferries? Why were they still crossing the bay? Was there safety in constant motion? Was there any safe place left to dock?

“Lenny,” she said. “I’m telling you right now that if you don’t take me to Tompkins I’m just going to go with Noah. I’ve got to find my sister. I’ve got to try to help my friend.
I know I can help him
. You can go and be safe at our house. I’ll come back, I promise.”

One ferry, the
John F. Kennedy
, had begun to chortle in the water in preparation for departure, and we headed for its open hold. Noah and Amy had already clambered on board and were huddled beneath a sign that read “ARA Transport—Ain’t That America, Somethin’ to See, Baby.”

You can go and be safe at our house
. I had to say something. I had to stop her, or she would be shot just like the LNWI protesters. Her Credit was bad enough. “Eunice!” I shouted. “Stop it! Stop running away from me! We have to stick together right now. We have to go
home
.”

But she shook off my arm and was running toward the
Kennedy
just as the ramp of the ferry had started lifting. I grabbed her by one tiny shoulder, and, with the intense fear of dislocating it, of hearing the crunch that meant I had hurt her, pulled her toward a second, waiting boat, its bridge bearing the legend
Guy V. Molinari
.

A black chopper circled overhead, its armed golden beak pointing in our direction and then at the island bristling with skyscrapers in the immediate distance. “No!” Eunice shouted, as the
Kennedy
pulled away, my friends, her new hero Noah, aboard.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll meet them on the other side. Come on! Let’s go!” We clambered onto the
Molinari
, elbowing our way through the young people and the families, so many families, full of new tears and drying tears and makeshift embraces.

“LENNY,” Nettie Fine teened me, “WHERE ARE YOU NOW?” Despite all the confusion, I quickly teened her that we were on a ferry to Manhattan and safe for the moment. “YOUR FRIEND NOAH SAFE WITH YOU?” she wanted to know, sweet, solicitous Nettie Fine, concerned even about people she had never met. She
was probably GlobalTracing us in real time. I wrote her he was on a different ferry but as safe as we were. “WHICH FERRY?”

I told her we were on the
Guy V. Molinari
and Noah was on the
John F. Kennedy
, just as stray gunfire opened up behind us, thundering up and down Hamilton Avenue, the resulting screams sneaking into my earlobes and momentarily turning them off. Deafness. Complete silence. Eunice’s mouth twisted into cruel words I couldn’t understand. The
Guy V. Molinari
’s oblong snout cut into the warm summer water, and we displaced ourselves furiously in the direction of Manhattan, and now more than ever I hated the false spire of the “Freedom” Tower, hated it for every single reason I could think of, but mostly for its promise of sovereignty and brute strength, and I wanted to cut my ties with my country and my scowling, angry girlfriend and everything else that bound me to this world. I longed for the 740 square feet that belonged to me by law, and I rejoiced in the humming of the engines as we sailed toward my concept of home.

A single raven appeared above Noah and Amy’s ferry. It lowered its golden beak, and its golden beak turned orange. Two missiles departed in rapid succession. One explosion, then two; the helicopter casually turned and flew back in the direction of Manhattan.

A moment of nonscreaming, of complete äppärät silence, overtook the
Guy V. Molinari
, older people holding tight to their children, the young people lost in the pain of suddenly understanding their own extinction, tears cold and stinging in the sea breeze. And then, as the flames bloomed across the ferry’s upper decks, as the
John F. Kennedy
reared up, split into two, disintegrated into the warm waters, as the first part of our lives, the false part, came to an end, the question we had forgotten to ask for so many years was finally shouted by one husky voice, stage left:
“But why?”

SECURITY SITUATION IN PROGRESS

AUGUST 7

Dear Diary,

The otter came for me in a dream. Not the cartoon otter that interrogated me in Rome, not the graffito otter I saw on Grand Street, but a true-to-life otter, a high-definition mammal, whiskers, fur, the dampness of the river. He pressed his wet plush black nose into my cheek, into my ear, kissing me with it, blessing my hungry face with his hot familiar and familial salmon breath, his little muddy paws destroying the clean white dress shirt I had put on for Eunice, because in my dreams I wanted her to love me again, because I wanted her back. And then he spoke to me in Noah’s voice, in that edgy, improper, but basically humane voice, the voice of a thwarted scholar. “You know Americans get lonely abroad,” he said, pausing to gauge the look on my face. “Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born.” Staring me up and down to see if I found him entertaining. “Did you meet any nice foreign people while you were abroad.” Not a question, but a statement. Noah had no time for questions. “I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny.” I felt my dream mouth move to betray Fabrizia yet again, but this time I couldn’t pry it open. The Noah-otter smiled as if he knew exactly what kind of man I was and wiped his whiskers with a human paw. “You said ‘DeSalva.’”