Super Sad True Love Story (34 page)

Afterward, she returned to her perch on my collarbone, sniffing critically at the trail she had left on my chin. I read once more. I read loudly about the exploits of the fictional Tomas and his many lovers. I skipped around, looking for juicier bits to feed Eunice. The story moved from Prague to Zurich and then back to Prague. The little nation of Czechoslovakia was torn to shreds by the imperialist Soviets (who, the author had no way of knowing at the time of writing, would themselves be torn to shreds a negligible twenty-three years later). In the book, characters had to make political decisions that, in the end, meant nothing. The concept of kitsch was rightfully, if somewhat ruthlessly, attacked. Kundera forced me to ponder my mortality some more.

Eunice’s gaze had weakened, and the light had gone out of her eyes, those twin black orbs usually charged with an irrepressible mandate of anger and desire.

“Are you following all this?” I said. “Maybe we should stop.”

“I’m listening,” she half-whispered.

“But are you
understanding
?” I said.

“I’ve never really learned how to read texts,” she said. “Just to scan them for info.”

I let out a small, stupid laugh.

She started to cry.

“Oh, baby,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. Oh, baby.”

“Lenny,” she said.

“Even I’m having trouble following this. It’s not just you. Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a
visual
age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.”

I blubbered on like this for a few minutes. She went to the living room. Alone, I threw
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
across the room. I wanted to tear it to pieces. I touched my chin, still wet with her. I wanted to run out of the apartment, into the impoverished Manhattan night. I missed my parents. In times of trouble, the weak seek the strong.

In the living room, Eunice had opened up her äppärät and was concentrating on the last shopping page stored in its memory before communications collapsed. I could see she had instinctively opened a LandOLakes Credit Payment stream, but every time she tried to input her account info, she ended up throwing her head back as if stung. “I can’t buy anything,” she said.

“Eunice,” I said. “You don’t have to buy anything. Go to bed. We don’t have to read anymore. We don’t have to ever read again. I promise. How can we read when people need our help? It’s a luxury. A stupid luxury.”

When the morning light was at full blast, Eunice finally curled up next to me, covered in sweat, defeated. We ignored the morning and we ignored the day. We ignored the following day as well. But when I woke up on the third day, the heat raking its way through the opened window, she was gone. I ran into the living room; no Eunice. I ran to the lobby. I asked the loitering old people about her whereabouts. I could feel my heart stopping and the blood draining from my feet and hands.

When she finally showed up, twenty hours later (“I went for a walk. I needed to get out of here. It’s not
that
dangerous, Lenny. I’m sorry if you were worried”), I found myself on my knees in my usual position, begging her to forgive me for some ill-defined sin, praying for her real smile and her companionship, pleading for her never to leave me again.

Aican, aican, aican.

OH MY GOD, I’M SUCH A BAD GIRLFRIEND

FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

SEPTEMBER 10

WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:

Sender: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative

Recipient: Eunice Park

Hello there, my darling Ms. Eunice. How’s tricks? Okay, I’ve got to admit, I can’t stop thinking about our little time together last week. I am so totally HOOKED on you. Those twenty-four hours we spent drawing with Monsieur Cohen (ho ho ho, color theory, here we come!), rifling through what’s left of Barneys, oysters at the Staatling canteen, a little, um, fun in bed, and then doing those stretches together, holy moly, that was like the perfect date. You were so cute when you walked into my apartment. I can’t believe how your hands were shaking. I’m still picking up the glass shards off the floor (how did you manage to break TWO glasses?), but that’s okay, because it just shows how real you are. Thank you, Eunice, for making me feel FINE and limber and ready to hit the ground running. And thanks for picking out all those clothes. You’re right, there was something a little hippie-ish about the way I used to dress, and my mustache HAD to go. Over and done with. My only prob is that I miss you sooo much already. Can we do this again soon? Can we do this again like permanently? I can’t seriously see my life go on without the little patter of your feet by my bedside. And I’ve got a lot of living to do, ha ha.

Well, it IS a big relief to know that your parents and sis are alive and doing as well as anyone else under the circumstances. I’ve passed on the relocation request to Headquarters, but the problem is that, even if they do get your family out of Ft. Lee, where are we going to put them? We’re working out future arrangements with the IMF and I think the idea is to rebuild New York as a kind of “Lifestyle Hub” where wealthy people can do their thang, spend their money, live forever, blah blah blabbity BLAH. So every inch of space is going to be accounted for, and the prices are going to be absolutely PREMIUM. And the rest of the country’s going to be carved up between a bunch of foreign sovereign wealth funds, with Wapachung Contingency taking over what’s left of the National Guards and the army and doing security support (yay for us!). I’m not sure if the Chinese are going to be “in charge” of New Jersey, or if that’s going to go to Norway or to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, but in either case I’m sure things are going to be a lot better and safer than they are now. Tho maybe your sis can learn to wear a burka. Totally kidding. It’s not going to be like that. They just want returns on investment.

Sigh. I miss you. I miss the very SCENT of you. I miss your sweet smiling face and your tight embrace. God, listen to me. Anyway, I might send Lenny on a weekend trip to visit his parents on Long Island (don’t tell him yet, but according to Wap Contingency they survived), which means more quality time for us!!! Mwah! as you like to say. Mwah, my dear, dear Eunice, my brave young love. Isn’t it exciting to be ALIVE these days?

SEPTEMBER 12

WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:

Sender: Eunice Park

Recipient: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative

Joshua,

I got your message. Thanks. Yes, Monsieur Cohen is very interesting. Is he gay, or just French? I’m sorry if I seem to be holding us back in class, I’m such a perfectionist and I really don’t think I’m very good. And if I’m as good as you and M. Cohen say then it’s just a fluke and I’ll come shattering back down to earth pretty soon, you can bet your bottom yuan. My father always said my hands were too weak to be an artist anyway.

I know we spent some good times together and I will remember those hours, but I also feel like a very bad girlfriend to Lenny. And that’s what I am, I’m Lenny’s girlfriend and I love him, and I’m really not able to explore anything more than friendship with you right now.

Thanks for finding out about my parents and sister. I miss my family very much and I wish there was some way to get them to Manhattan or even back to Korea. That’s what I’m concentrating on right now. I’ve been reading some of the old messages from my friend Jenny Kang, the one who disappeared and who you can’t seem to be able to find in Hermosa Beach, and one of the last things she wrote me was “I’m sorry I’m a bad friend and can’t help you with your problems right now. You have to be strong and do whatever you have to do for your family.” See, you don’t have a family. And you never really wanted one from what I can gather. But throughout this whole Rupture thing I guess that’s what I found out about myself, that my family matters the most to me and it always will.

Yours,

Eunice

WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:

Sender: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative

Recipient: Eunice Park

I have to say I was a little hurt by your last message. If you didn’t want to pursue a relationship, then why did you go home with me? I think you don’t fully comprehend how I feel about you, Eunice. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it, and I think I’ve sort of come to some conclusions. You’re very beautiful, but that doesn’t really matter to me in the long run. Everything about you is so perfect, so squared away (from the way you dress to the minimum amount of words you use to express yourself), but that doesn’t matter either. What matters to me is that I KNOW you are capable of love, that you cannot hide forever from the truth of being a full emotional human being with a need to connect, with a need to be with someone who can understand you and where you come from, respect you, and take care of you. And that’s what I want to do, Eunice, to take care of you, forever and ever. I want to help you become a full-fledged artist, even if that means you have to spend time away from me, studying Art & Finance at HSBC-Goldsmiths in London. I want to get you a job in Retail, if that’s what you want, once New York becomes a full Lifestyle Hub and we start to get back on our feet. And yes, I want to help your family to resettle in the city, but please just give me some time to see what I can do. The situation is still very fluid.

You say Lenny is your boyfriend. I’ve known Lenny since he was a young adult like you. He’s not a bad person, but he’s also very conflicted, impotent, and depressive. Those are not the qualities you want to look for in a serious partner, not today, not with the world in the shape it’s in. I want you to consider all these things, Eunice, and to know that, whatever you decide, I will always love you.

Joshie (never Joshua) G.

P.S. Just a heads-up, but there is going to be some activity in your area in a month or so, what the ARA used to call “Harm Reduction,” in the Vladeck Houses. Nothing I have any control over, believe me, but there might be violence. I want you and Lenny to be safe. I’m thinking maybe that’s when I’ll send him to Long Island to see his folks and you and I can have a slumber party.

DEAF CHILD AREA

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

OCTOBER 12

Dear Diary,

Please forgive another month-long absence, but today I have to write in you with the greatest of news. My parents are alive. I found out five days ago, at 5:54 p.m. EST, the precise time Telenor, the Norwegian telecommunications giant, restored our communications and our äppäräti started whirring with data, prices, Images, and calumny; 5:54 p.m. EST, a time no one of my generation will ever forget. My parents’ voices filled my ears immediately, the baritone insanity of my father’s happy booms, the titter and laughter of my mother as they shouted: “
Malen’kii, malen’kii! Zhiv, zdorov? Zhiv, zdorov!
” (“Little one, little one! Alive and well? Alive and well!”). I hollered in such a way (
“Urá!”
) that Eunice became scared. She moved to the bathroom, where I could hear her verballing into her äppärät in a monotone English mixed together with an endless procession of passionate Korean honks directed at her mother: “
Neh, neh, umma, neh
.” And so the two of us celebrated with our parents, reconnected to them so strongly that when Eunice came into the bedroom and we faced each other, there was almost nothing to say in our common tongue. We found ourselves laughing at our stunned, merry silence, me wiping my tears, her with her hands pressed to the hardness of her chest.

The Abramovs. Surviving, scavenging, setting up their own roadblocks with Mr. Vida and the other neighbors while the world came undone around them, being hard-boiled working-class immigrants, designed by an angry God for a calamity of precisely this magnitude. How could I have doubted their tenacious hold on life? According to the stressful GlobalTeens messages they sent me right after we finished verballing, the security situation in Westbury was relatively normal, but the pharmacy had been ransacked and the heavily guarded Waldbaum’s supermarket was out of Tagamet, my father’s remedy against heartburn and his chronic peptic ulcers. So it was a happy surprise when I got a note, a
handwritten note
, from Joshie:

Rhesus Monkey! Be a good son and go visit your parents. I’m reserving some crack Wapachung security people for you on Monday. They’ll escort you out to Long Island. Stay away from those boiled Russian meats! And don’t get too excited, okay? I’m looking out for your epinephrine levels like a hawk.

I was met outside the Post-Human Services synagogue by two armored Hyundai Persimmon jeeps sporting enormous hood-mounted weaponry, probably leftovers from our ill-fated Venezuelan adventure. Our expedition leader seemed to be of Venezuela vintage as well, one Major J. M. Palatino of Wapachung Contingency, a small but powerfully put-together man smelling of middle-class cologne and horses. He surveyed me with professional eyes, quickly concluded that I was soft and in need of protection, slapped his sides militarily, and introduced his team of two young armed guys, both remnants of the Nebraskan National Guard, one missing the better half of his hand.

“Here’s the game plan,” Palatino said. “We follow the major arteries and hope there haven’t been any flare-ups along the way. We’re talking about I-495 here, the old Long Island Expressway. Don’t expect much trouble there. Then we swing over to the Northern and Wantagh Parkways. That could be trickier, depending on who’s in charge at this point in the day.”

“I thought that would be us,” I said.

“There’s still sporadic enemy-combatant activity after Little Neck. Nassau warlords fighting Suffolk warlords. Ethnic stuff. Salvadorans. Guatemalans.
Nigerians
. Got to tread lightly. Anyway, we’re armed to the teeth here, so no worries. We’ve got a heavy .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun on the lead vehicle and AT4 anti-armor on both. Nothing even comes close out there. Expect we’ll be in Westbury at 1400 hours.”

“Three hours to drive thirty miles?”

“I didn’t create this world, sir,” Palatino said. “I’m just along for the ride. We’ve got Oslo Delight sandwiches for you in the back. You cool with lingonberry jam? Enjoy.”

At the entrance to the expressway, Wapachung troops were screening cars for weapons and contraband, throwing unlucky five-jiao men on the ground, and prodding them with weapons, the whole scene oddly quiet and methodical and reminiscent of the near-distant past. “It’s like the American Restoration Authority out here,” I said to the major. “Nothing’s changed but the uniforms.”

“You don’t just disband a force overnight,” Palatino said. “We’d have a situation like out in Missouri.”

“What’s in Missouri?” I asked.

He waved his hand at me as if to say:
It’s better not to know
. We turned our backs on Manhattan and rolled past the ugly gigantism of LeFrak City, a collection of buildings that, with their rows of balconies on both ends, resembled soot-covered accordions. These housing projects were riddled with Russian immigrants, and my parents had always thought that one more step down on the economic ladder would bring us directly to LeFrak, where, according to my mother, we would all be killed. She was something of a seer, Galya Abramov.

The grounds of the LeFrak development were littered with homemade tents. People were lying on mattresses on a pedestrian overpass, the acrid smell of bad meat being grilled wafting down below. As we passed LeFrak City (“Live a Little Better” its heartfelt mid-twentieth-century motto), the Manhattan-bound side of the Long Island Expressway became an endless jumble of cars slowly maneuvering around men, women, and children of all possible persuasions compliantly carting their belongings in suitcases and shopping trolleys. “Lots of folks going west,” Palatino said, as we crawled forward past a gaggle of poor middle-class cars, tiny Samsung Santa Monicas and the like, children and mothers huddled over one another in back. “The closer to the city, the better. Even if you have to work a five-jiao line. Work is work.”

“Where do you live?” I asked Palatino.

“Sixty-eighth and Lex.”

“Nice area,” I said. “Close to the park.”

“My kids love the zoo. Wapachung’s going to get us a panda.”

I had heard of this.

Three hours later, we were driving down Old Country Road, the Champs-Élysées of Westbury, past the mostly boarded-up ghosts of Retail past, the Payless ShoeSource, Petco, Starbucks. A crowd of would-be consumers still congregated around the 99¢ Paradise store. The smell of sewage and a brown savage haze filtered through the windows, but I also heard the loud, screechy sound of human laughter and people yelling to one another on the street, friendly-like. It seemed to me that in some weird way a suburban place like Westbury, with its working- and middle-class folks, its Salvadorans and Southeast Asians and the like, was what New York City used to be when it was still a real place. There was something lovely about Old Country Road today, folks milling about, trading goods, eating papusas, young boys and girls wearing nothing, verballing one another with love. “They maintain pretty good security,” Palatino seconded. “The good guys got all the weapons, and they’ve spread their assets out strategically.” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

We turned off the commercial street and drove headlong into the residential peace of Washington Avenue. Despite the serenity of my parents’ street, I found myself worried by a sign that said “Deaf Child Area.” I tried to remember a deaf neighborhood child from my days in Westbury, but no such creature sprang to mind. Who was this deaf child, and what kind of a future would she have today?

We approached my parents’ house, the gigantic flags of the United States of America and SecurityState Israel still fluttering obstinately. Huddled behind the screen door, I saw the Abramovs leaning in to each other. For a second it seemed like there was just one Abramov, for although my mother was delicate and pretty and my father was not, they appeared to take on a twin form, as if each was reflected in the other. What had happened in the past few months was unclear. They had aged, become grayer, but also it seemed as if some indeterminate part of each of them had been surgically taken out, leaving a kind of muddled transparency. When I approached them with my arms stretched out, with my bag of Tagamet ulcer remedy and other goodies banging against my hip, I saw a part of that transparency fill in; I saw their creased faces welcome in the joy of my survival, my physical presence, my indelible link to them, surprised that I stood in front of them, secretly hurt and ashamed that they could do less for me than I could for them.

We were surrounded by elements of one another: my mother’s immaculateness, my father’s unadulterated musk, and my own whiff of receding youth and passing urbanity. I can’t remember if we revealed nothing—or everything—to one another in the foyer, but after my mother ceremonially draped the living-room couch with a plastic bag so that I wouldn’t stain it with the foulness of Manhattan, my father followed through with his usual heartfelt request: “
Nu, rasskazhi
” (“So, tell me”).

I told them as much as I could about what had happened during the past two months, skirting Noah’s death (my mother had so enjoyed meeting “such a handsome Jewish boy” at our NYU graduation) but emphasizing how well Eunice and I were doing, and how I still had 1,190,000 yuan in the bank. My mother listened carefully, sighed, and went off to work on a beet salad. When I asked my father about how it had been for them, he turned up FoxLiberty-Prime, which was showing the deliberations of the Israeli Knesset, with Rubenstein, still nominally employed as the Defense Secretary of whatever entity we are becoming, lecturing the all-Orthodox parliament on ways to fight Islamofascism, the men in black nodding sympathetically, some staring off into deeply sacred space, playing with their bottles of mineral water. On the other screen, FoxLiberty-Ultra—where the hell were they still broadcasting this stuff from?—featured three ugly white men yelling at a pretty black man from all directions, while the words “Gays to wed in NYC” flashed beneath them.

Pointing to FoxLiberty-Ultra, my father asked me: “Is it true they are letting
gomiki
marry in New York?”

My mother quickly darted out of the kitchen, a plate of beet salad in hand. “What? What did you say? They are letting
gomiki
marry now?”

“Go back to the kitchen, Galya!” my father shouted with a measure of his usual depressed vitality. “I am talking to my son!” I confessed that I did not know what was happening in my hometown, nuptial-wise, and that we really had other things to worry about, but my father wanted to share more of his opinions on the matter. “Mr. Vida,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his Indian neighbor, “believes that
gomiki
are the most disgusting creatures in the world and should be castrated and shot. But I don’t know. They say,
naprimer
[‘for example’], that the famous Russian composer Tchaikovsky was a
gomik
. That
on soblaznil
[‘he corrupted’] little boys, even the Tsar’s own son! And that when he died it was the Tsar who had pressured him to make suicide. Maybe this is true, maybe it is not.” My father sighed and brought one hand to his face. His tired brown eyes were marked with a sadness I had seen only once before—at my grandmother’s funeral, when he had emitted a howl of such unknown, animalistic provenance, we thought it had come from the forest abutting the Jewish cemetery. “But for me,” he said, breathing heavily, “it doesn’t matter. You see, for a genius like Tchaikovsky I could forgive anything,
anything
!”

My father’s arm was still around me, holding me in place, making me his. I no longer had any idea what he was talking about. A bewildered part of me wanted to say, “Papa, there’s an armored jeep guarding the 99¢ store on Old Country Road and you’re talking about
gomiki
?” But I kept quiet. Whom would it help if I spoke? I felt the sorrow that flowed in all directions in this house, sorrow for him, for them, for the three of us—Mama, Papa, Lenny. “Tchaikovsky,” my father said, each heavy syllable eliciting an unquantifiable pain in his deep baritone voice. He raised his hand in the air and silently directed a movement, from the depressive Sixth Symphony perhaps. “Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,” my father said, lost in reverence for the homosexual composer. “He has brought me so much joy.”

By the time my mother called me down to dinner—after I had taken a breather upstairs and noticed the replacement of my father’s essay on “The Joys of Playing Basketball” with a gleaming poster of the Israeli fortress of Masada—I was nearly in tears myself. The dinner table would usually be covered lengthwise with meats and fish, but today it was nearly empty—just beet salad, tomatoes and peppers from the garden, a plate of marinated mushrooms, and some slices of a suspiciously white bread.

My mother noticed my chagrin. “There is a deficit at the Waldbaum’s, and anyway we are afraid of the Credit Poles,” she said. “What if they are still on? What if they try to deport us? Sometimes Mr. Vida takes us in the truck, but otherwise it is very hard to find food.”

And then a different kind of truth appealed to me, reminded me of how self-involved I was, how residually angry I had remained at the Abramovs and their difficult household. The transparency I had noticed in my parents earlier, the way they had melded into each other—it was simply a matter of looking closely at their bodies and their stunted movements.