Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  My colleagues regarded me as something of an oddity, but nothing compared to the young man who dressed up as a hamster during lunch and wept violently in the bathroom for exactly one hour and fifteen minutes (a fellow alumnus of Accidental, needless to say). Whenever the wisdom of having a sleepy Russian Gargantua clattering around the already tight quarters came up, I merely had to say something like "Malevich!" or "Tarkofsky!," letting the reflected sheen of my countrymen's accomplishments glisten off my Multicultural Studies medals. Eventually the hamster got fired.

  Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. My own life was similarly sweet and free of complexities, with only one need unaccounted for: I had no girlfriend, no buxom hardworking ethnic girl to urge me off the couch, no exotic Polynesian to fill my monochrome life with her browns and yellows. So every weekend night I would trudge up to these rooftops where Accidental College graduates would huddle together next to groups of students from similar colleges, their conversations forming barbed networks of privileged fact and speculation stretching from the Napa Valley to Gstaad. I basked in this information, making witty observations and absurdist jokes, but my real purpose was more traditional: I was looking for a woman who would accept me for what I was, for every last pound of me, and for the crushed purple insect between my legs.

  There weren't any takers, but I was beloved in my own way.

  "Snack Daddy!" the boys and girls would shout as I ascended the narrow stairways to their rooftops. Back then the girls drank buckets of bitter champagne through straws, and the boys swilled fortyounce containers of malt liquor, wiping their mouths with the back of their skinny ties. We were trying to be as "urban" as possible with-out passing into caricature, our eyes briefly skirting the darkened constellations of housing projects pressed menacingly against the distant horizons. I would stand to the side of the snack table, letting my fat settle around me in protective layers as I jabbed a long carrot into a bowl of spinach feta dip. The girls regarded me as a safe confidant, as if my weight had rendered me a beloved uncle. They hoisted buckets of champagne to my lips while complaining of their passing boyfriends, those diffident young schlemiels who were also my close friends but whom I would readily betray for just one occidental kiss tasting of spinach and feta.

  Filled with champagne, I would return alone to my endless Wall Street loft, take off my clothes, and press myself against the windows, letting the city lights flicker deep inside me. On occasion I would wail this deep-sea arctic wail invented specifically for my exile. I cupped what remained of my khui and cried for my papa five thousand miles to the east and north. How could I have abandoned the only person who had ever truly loved me? The Neva River sprang, unprompted, from the Gulf of Finland, the Nile from its Delta, the Hudson from some prosperous American source, and I sprang from my father. Feeling lonely, I would talk out loud to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which I had nicknamed Lionya and Gavril, begging those two iconic hulks to make me more like them: lean, glassyeyed, silent, and invincible. Sometimes, when a helicopter passed overhead, I would get on my knees and beg to be rescued—to be hoisted beyond the party-filled rooftops and billowing deck umbrellas onto a secret landscape, an inverted New York whose buildings were dug deep into the ground, the water towers and mansard roofs striking through the center of the earth, much as I wished to strike between the sweaty thighs of my former classmates—those infinitely clever and unflappable girls carved out of soft Californian rock and Roman tufa who breathed more inspiration into my life than all the pale Marxian offerings of the Accidental College Library combined. And then one day I got lucky. Here's how it happened. During my lunch break, I often liked to take a couple of chicken parmigiana sandwiches and a gallon of caramel fudge into a bar on Nassau Street, which, for those unfamiliar with this part of Manhattan, runs parallel to Lower Broadway into an uncharted fourth dimension, one part Melville, two parts Celine. There, I would round out my meal with a few vodka shots while talking to my lunchtime friend, a spindly middle-aged Jewish stockbroker from Long Island who had long given up on ever encountering human warmth or arousing the love of a woman. His name was Max, of course.

  This bar had something of a gimmick, and an effective one at that—its barmaids wore nothing but bikinis. If you bought yourself a specially priced tequila, they would pour lime juice into their considerable cleavage, sprinkle some salt on top of that, and invite you to lick up this mess (after which you downed your shot). Today the

  "body shot" is an integral part of American courtship, but back then it seemed to me and Max like the height of depravity.

  One afternoon we were making merry along with some other Wall Street miscreants, urging two blond barmaids to kiss each other, which they sometimes did for a big tip, when a new staff member came along dragging an artificial palm tree behind her (the theme was tropical). I caught her attention at once. "Holy fucking shit!" she said, dropping the palm and making a cute motion as if rubbing her eyes. "Whoa, daddy!"

  "Be nice to Misha," one of the barmaids growled at her.

  "Yeah, that's the first rule of the house," another snickered. I was known as a very generous tipper and would occasionally spring for an abortion. Although all the barmaids were from the Bronx, and uneducated, they treated me as something of an innocent child, as opposed to the rooftop girls from Accidental College y who deferred to me as a wise old European. My point is that poor people often have a wisdom and cunning all their own.

  "Chill out, bitches," the newcomer said to her colleagues as she slipped out of her jeans to reveal her tightly sheathed mons, packed like a six-shooter in a holster. "I like this guy."

  "I think she likes you," Max whispered into my ear, pinpricks of his spit gentiy tickling my face. He put his palms on the bar and dropped his head into them. He often ended his lunch hour feeling unwell.

  "Hi," I said to the young woman.

  "Hi yahself, jumbo," she said. "You like these?" She lifted up her breasts with her thumbs, after which they somehow managed to rise on their own, like shy animals peeking out from behind a hedge.

  "These make you sweat, mister?"

  "Very much," I said. "But I've got pretty nice ones myself, miss." I cupped my beauties and rubbed my nipples hard. The other barmaids laughed, as usual. "Get Misha behind the bar!" one of them shouted.

  "Dang, mister, you funny!" the new barmaid said. She reached behind me and pulled down on my hair. "But when I'm behind the bar, boy-o, you keep your eyes on my titties. I don't need no competition."

  "Ouch," I said. She was hurting me. "I was only joking." She stopped pulling my hair but continued to hold on to it, her palm stroking the preliminary fold of my neck. Her breath was awful—

  sour milk, rubbing alcohol, cigarettes, post-industrial rot. But she was beautiful in an impoverished kind of way. She reminded me of a lovely olive-colored mannequin I had seen in a store vitrine. The way that mannequin was casually bent over a billiard table, cue in hand, suggested she knew a lot more about the sex act than any woman in Leningrad, even the trollops at the Red October Hotel. My new friend, likewise, looked like she was privy to all kinds of information. She had a large, pretty face set off by small brown mestizo eyes, her pallor a bit gray from sun and vitamin deficiency, and a globe of a belly that looked half pregnant (with processed foods, not with child) in an arousing way. Her breasts were ponderous. "You Jewish?" she asked me.

  Max woke up immediately upon hearing "Jewish." "What? What?" he said. "Whad'you say?"

  "Yes, I am a secular Jew," I said proudly.

  "Knew it," the girl said. "Totally a Jewish face."

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . " Max mumbled.

  "Look at your pretty face," the girl continued. "I love your little blue eyes, mister, and your big fat smile—oh, dip! If you lost some weight, yo
u could be one of those fat movie stars." She brought her hand around to touch my chin, and I bent down to kiss it, in contravention of the bar's unspoken laws.

  "My name is Misha," I said.

  "Desiree's my bar name," she said, "but I'll tell you my real name." She bent forward, her fast-food breath jolting me out of my antiseptic Accidental College existence and into the world of the living. "It's Rouenna."

  "Hi, Rouenna," I said.

  She slapped me across the face. "At the bar you call me Desiree," she hissed.

  "I'm sorry, Desiree," I said. I did not notice the pain, so taken was I by the prospect of knowing her real name. At that point a customer called her away to lick up salt and lime juice from her cleavage. I have not kept the image of how he squished his acne-covered nose in between her breasts, nor the slurping sounds he made, but I do remember how dignified she looked when she straightened up and wiped the resulting mess with a moist towelette.

  "You Jewish boys need a little Manischewitz in between these?" she shouted to me and Max.

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute," Max said.

  "Oh, relax, pal," Rouenna told Max. "I've been to, like, fifteen bar mitzvahs."

  "You're Jewish?" Max said.

  "Nah," Rouenna said. "But I've got friends."

  "What are you, then?" Max demanded.

  "Half Puerto Rican. And half German. And half Mexican and Irish. But I was raised mostly Dominican."

  "Catholic, then," said Max, satisfied she wasn't Jewish.

  "We was Catholic, but then these Methodists came around and gave us food. So we were like—okay, we're Methodists now." That theological discussion almost made me cry. In fact, I was crying quite readily and happily at that point, my tears dropping with fat thuds on my crotch, where the crushed purple insect was registering its presence. Half Puerto Rican. And half German. And half Mexican and Irish and everything else besides.

  After her shift was over, I took her down the street to visit my outsize loft and, in ridiculous Russian fashion, immediately told her that I loved her.

  I don't think she heard me, but she was impressed by my lifestyle.

  "Dang, jumbo," Rouenna said, her husky voice bouncing off the hangar-sized living space. "I think I finally made it." She looked around my small collection of artworks. "Why you got all these giant dicks around the house?"

  "Those sculptures? Oh, I guess they're all part of a Brancusian motif."

  "You a fudge-packer?"

  "A what? Oh, no. Although homosexuals do number among my friends."

  "What did you just say?"

  "Homosexuals—"

  "Jesus Christ, man. Who are you?" She laughed and punched me full-on in the gut. "Just kidding," she said. "I'm playing hard to get with you, is all."

  "Keep playing," I said, smiling and rubbing my stomach. "I like to play."

  "Where ya sleep, jumbo? You mind if I keep calling you that?"

  "At college they called me Snack Daddy. Here are stairs that go up to my bed."

  My bed was a kind of muscular Swedish plank that grudgingly accommodated my bulk a la carte but grunted pathetically when both Rouenna and I tumbled upon it. I wanted to explain to her yet again, though this time in detail, that I loved her, but she was immediately kissing me on the mouth and rubbing my breasts and bellies with both hands. She unbuckled my pants, letting out a gust of stale trapped air. She drew back and looked at me sadly. Oh, no, I thought. But all she said was "You sweet."

  "I am?" I lay down on the bed completely. I was sweating and jiggling obscenely.

  "A heartbreaker," she said.

  "No, I'm not," I said. "I've never even really been with a girl before. At college I only got a few hand jobs. And I'm twenty-five, almost."

  "You a nice, nice man, that's what you are. You treat me like a queen. I'm gonna be your queen, that all right, Snack Daddy?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Show me what you got for mommy." She started to pull hard on the billowing square sail I used as underwear.

  "No, please," I said, holding on to my goods with both hands. "I have a problem."

  "Your boy too big for me?" Rouenna asked. "It's never too big for mommy." I tried to explain to her about the zealous Hasids and their low-paid proxies at the public hospital, the butchers of Crown Heights. Tell me, please, who in their right mind circumcises a fat eighteen-year-old man-child in an operating room reeking of mildew and fried rice?

  I fought with all my mass, but Rouenna overpowered me. My underwear ripped in two. The crushed purple insect shyly drew its head back into its neck.

  It would seem to the untrained eye that the khui knob had been unscrewed from its proper position and then screwed back into place by incompetents so that now it listed at an angle of about thirty degrees to the right, while the knob and the khui proper were apparently held in place by nothing more than patches of skin and thread. Purple and red scars had created an entire system of mountain-ridge highways running from the scrotum to the tip, while the bottom had been so eviscerated by post-op infection that instead of being smooth, taut skin, it looked like a series of empty garbage bags fluttering in the wind. I suppose the crushed-insect comparison had worked best when my khui was still covered with blood on the operating table. Now my genitalia looked more like an abused iguana.

  Rouenna bent forward with the globe of her stomach and rubbed my khui with that soft surface. I thought maybe that was the only way she was capable of touching it, but I was wrong. She bent down with her open mouth and breathed on it for a while. My khui straightened out and crept toward her waiting orifice. Stop it! I told myself. You're a disgusting creature. Tou don't deserve this.

  But Rouenna didn't put my khui in her mouth. She turned it over, found the most hideous spot on its underbelly—a vivid evocation of the bombing of Dresden—and, for the next 389 seconds (a handy clock helped me count), imparted upon it a single, silent kiss. My gaze traveled beyond the dark mound of her hair, past the Brancusian dicks lining the walls of my loft, and right out my doublepane windows. I floated above the city, glancing generously in each direction. The careless hooks and crags of Queens and Brooklyn, slivers of industry, quadrangles of brown-bricked terraced flats; the fanatic middle-class hopes of already half-darkened New Jersey tendering their resignation for the night; the carpeted grid of Manhattan sinking into the flat horizon, the garlands of yellow light—sharp, overreaching—that form the facades of skyscrapers, the garlands of yellow light—diffuse, flickering—that form the sprawl of tenements, the garlands of yellow light—swerving, opportunistic—that form the headlights of taxi caravans: the garlands of yellow light, aye, in their horizontal and vertical arrangements that form a final resting place for the collected hopes of our civilization.

  And to my father, I say: I'm sorry, But this floating feeling, this yellow city at my feet, those full lips around what's left of me, this is my happiness, Papa. This is my pierogi.

  And to the generals in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who have been patiently reading this tale of the Bronx mixed-race girl and the overweight Russian, I ask: In what other country could we have found succor together ? In what other country could we have even existed?

  And after getting down on my knobby knees, I say to the INS generals: Please, sirs. I say to them like a child: Please, please, please . ..

  Among the Merry Mourners

  On the way home from the Russian Fisherman, my heart broken with news of Papa's death, I squeezed in on the Rover's back bench with Alyosha-Bob and wept into his neck, wiping my nose against his Accidental College sweatshirt. He draped both arms around my head and tickled the willowy hair around my bald spot. From afar it may have looked like an anaconda strangling a rodent, but it was really just my love spilling out over a dear friend. There was even something compassionate about Alyosha's smell that evening—greasy summer sweat, the sharp pungency of fish highlighted by alcohol—and I found myself wanting to kiss his ugly lips. "Nu, ladno, nuy ladno" he kept saying, which co
uld be translated as "It's going to be okay" or

  "So there it is" or, if you're a less charitable translator, "Enough already." To be honest, I wept not for my father but for the children. On the way home, we passed by a corner of Bolshoi Prospekt, where last winter I'd had a little breakdown for the stupidest of reasons. I had seen a dozen kindergarten pupils trying to cross the boulevard, each bundled in a jaunty collection of misshapen coats, their shapkas falling off their tiny heads, their feet encased in monstrous hand-medown galoshes. A boy and a girl, one at the front and one in the back, held aloft giant red flags to warn motorists that they were deigning to cross. A young, pretty teacher was on hand to help them ambulate in the right direction. Who knows why—primordial memory, a sudden reprise of my stunted conscience, a big man's evolutionary compassion for anything small—but I wept for the children that day. Diminutive, cherubic, Slavic, they stood by the teeming Bolshoi Prospekt with those idiotic red flags, their puffy faces producing small steam clouds that looked like little child-thoughts struggling in the monumental cold. The cars kept passing them, the rich man's Audi and the poor man's Lada. No one would pause to let them past. As we waited for the light to change, I opened my window and leaned out, blinking like a great Northern turtle in the chill, trying to read their faces. Were those smiles I saw? Delicate new teeth, wisps of blond hair peering out from the fortress of their hats, and grateful, unmistakable grins accompanied by disciplined Petersburg children's laughter. Only the schoolteacher—silent, straight, proud in the way only a Russian woman who makes US$30 a month could be—seemed cognizant of the collective future that awaited her charges. The light changed, my driver, Mamudov, zoomed ahead with his typical Chechen ferocity, and I looked back at the children, catching the boy with the red flag taking his first careful step onto Bolshoi Prospekt, waving his banner with gusto, as if this were 1971, not 2001, and the flag he held were still the emblem of a superpower. I asked myself, If I were to give each of them US$100,000, would their lives change?