Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Yeah, I’m sure that’ll solve everything.

  SALLYSTAR: Thanks for approving my dreams. You’re so much like Dad and you don’t even know it. Stay in Rome. I don’t need two of you here.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: I didn’t mean it.

  SALLYSTAR: Whatever.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: I’m very proud of you.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: I’m the fuck up, okay?

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Are you still there? I’ll get you those TotalSurrender panties, but you’re on your own with the nippleless bra.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally! You know when you just cut me off like that you really make me sad.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: You know I would do anything to make you and Mommy happy. Maybe I really WILL go to law school and I’ll work in High End Retail and we can buy Mommy her own apartment in Manhattan so that she can be safe.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: I’m coming home, Sally. Hello? As soon as I find a cheap ticket, I’m coming home.

  THE FALLACY OF MERELY EXISTING

  FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

  JUNE 6

  Dear Diary,

  Here’s a message from Joshie that popped up on my äppärät right after my ordeal at JFK:

  DEAR RHESUS MONKEY, U BACK YET? LOTS OF POSITIVE CHANGES AND CUTBACKS HERE; FEEL FREE TO REMAIN ROME AS YOU FEEL NEED; FUTURE SALARY & EMPLOYMENT = LET’S DISCUSS.

  What the hell was this? Was Joshie Goldmann, employer and ersatz papa, about to fire me? Had he sent me to Europe just to get me out of the way?

  I still have an old Mead Five Star notebook from when I was a child, which I’ve been dying to put to good use. So I ripped out an actual sheet of paper from it, put it on my coffee table, and started writing this out by hand.

  STRATEGY FOR SHORT-TERM SURVIVAL AND THEN IMMORTALITY FOLLOWING RETURN TO NEW YORK AFTER EUROPEAN FIASCO

  BY LENNY ABRAMOV, B.A., M.B.A.

  1) Work Hard for Joshie—Show you matter at the workplace; show you’re not just a teacher’s pet, but a creative thinker and Content Provider; make excuses for poor performance in Europe; get raise; lower spending; save money for initial dechronification treatments; double own lifespan in twenty years and then just keep going at it exponentially until you gain the momentum to achieve Indefinite Life Extension.

  2) Make Joshie Protect You—Evoke father-like bond in response to political situation. Talk about what happened on the plane; evoke Jewish feelings of terror and injustice.

  3) Love Eunice—Even if she’s far away, try to think of her as a potential partner; meditate on her freckles and make yourself feel loved by her to lower stress levels and feel less alone. Let the potential of her sweetness enhance your happiness!!! Then beg her to come to New York and let her become, in short order, reluctant lover, cautious companion, pretty young wife.

  4) Care for Your Friends—Meet up with them right after you see Joshie and try to re-create a sense of community with BFFs Noah and Vishnu.

  5) Be Nice to Parents (Within Limits)—They may be mean to you but they represent your past and who you are. 5a) Seek Similarities with Parents—they grew up in a dictatorship and one day you might be living in one too!!!

  6) Celebrate What You Have—You’re not as bad off as some people. Think of that poor fat man on the plane (where is he now? what are they doing to him?) and feel happy by comparison.

  I folded the paper up and put it into my wallet for easy reference. “Now,” I said to myself, “go make it happen!”

  First, I Celebrated What I Have (Point No. 6). I began with the 740 square feet that form my share of Manhattan Island. I live in the last middle-class stronghold in the city, high atop a red-brick ziggurat that a Jewish garment workers’ union had erected on the banks of the East River back in the days when Jews sewed clothes for a living. Say what you will, these ugly co-ops are full of authentic old people who have real stories to tell (although these stories are often meandering and hard to follow; e.g., who on earth was this guy “Dillinger”?).

  Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. And yet, in preparation for the eventual arrival of Eunice Park, I decided to be safe and sprayed some Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast in the vicinity of my tomes, fanning the atomized juices with my hands in the direction of their spines. Then I celebrated my other possessions, the modular-design furniture and sleek electronica and the mid-1950s Corbusier-inspired dresser stuffed with mementos of past relationships, some pretty racy and scented with nether regions, others doused in the kind of sadness that I should really learn to let go. I celebrated the difficult-to-assemble balcony table (one leg still too short) and had a pretty awful non-Roman coffee al fresco, looking out on the busy downtown skyline some twenty blocks away from me, military and civilian choppers streaming past the overblown spire of the “Freedom” Tower and all that other glittering downtown hoo-hah. I celebrated the low-rise housing projects crowding my immediate view, the so-called Vladeck Houses, which stand in red-brick solidarity with my own co-ops, not exactly proud of themselves, but feeling resigned and necessary, their thousands of residents primed for summer warmth, and, if I may speculate, summer love. Even from a distance of a hundred feet, I can sometimes hear the pained love-cries their residents make behind their tattered Puerto Rican flags, and sometimes their violent screams.

  With love in mind, I decided to celebrate the season. For me the transition from May to June is marked by the radical switch from knee to ankle socks. I slapped on white linen pants, a speckled Penguin shirt, and comfy Malaysian sneakers, so that I easily resembled many of the nonagenarians in my building. My co-ops are part of a NORC—a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community—a kind of instant Florida for those too frail or poor to relocate to Boca in time for their deaths. Down by the elevator, surrounded by withered NORCers in motorized wheelchairs and their Jamaican caregivers, I counted the daily carnage of the Death Board by the elevators. Five residents of the NORC had passed in the last two days alone. The woman who had lived above me, eightysomething Naomi Margolis in E-707, was gone, and her son David Margolis was inviting her eclectic neighbors—the young Media and Credit professionals, the old widowed socialist seamstresses, and the ever-multiplying Orthodox Jews—to “celebrate her memory” at his house in Teaneck, New Jersey. I admired Mrs. Margolis for living as long as she did, but once you give in to the idea that a memory is somehow a substitute for a human being, you may as well give up on Indefinite Life Extension. I guess you can say that, while admiring Mrs. Margolis, I also hated Mrs. Margolis. Hated her for giving up on life, for letting the waves come and recede, her withered body in tow. Maybe I hated all the old people in my building, and wished them to disappear already so that I could focus on my own struggle with mortality.

  In my trendy old-man’s getup, I ambled with easy grace down Grand Street toward the East River Park, stepping on each curb with the profound “oy” that is the call-and-response of my neighborhood. I sat on my favorite bench, next to the stocky, splay-footed realism of the Williamsburg Bridge’s anchorage, noticing how part of the structure looked like a bunch of stacked milk crates. I celebrated the teenaged mothers from the Vladeck Houses tending to their children’s boo-boos (“A bee touched me, Mommy!”). I relished hearing language actually being spoken by children. Overblown verbs, explosive nouns, beautifully bungled prepositions. Language, not data. How long would it be before these kids retreated into the dense clickety-clack äppärät world of their absorbed mothers and missing fathers?

  Then I caught sight of a healthy-looking old Chinese woman ripe for celebration and, at the speed of half a furlong an hour, tailed her down Grand Street and then East Broadway, watching her feel up
exotic tubers and slap around some silvery fish. She was shopping with suburban abandon, buying everything that came within her grasp and then, after each purchase, running over to stand next to one of the wooden telegraph poles that now lined the streets.

  My fashion friend Sandi in Rome had told me about the Credit Poles, yapping on about their cool retro design, the way the wood was intentionally gnarled in places and how the utility wire was replaced by strings of colored lights. The old-fashioned appearance of the Poles was obviously meant to evoke a sturdier time in our nation’s history, except for the little LED counters at eye level that registered your Credit ranking as you walked by. Atop the Poles, American Restoration Authority signs billowed in several languages. In the Chinatown parts of East Broadway, the signs read in English and Chinese—“America Celebrates Its Spenders!”—with a cartoon of a miserly ant happily running toward a mountain of wrapped Christmas presents. In the Latino sections on Madison Street, they read in English and Spanish—“Save It for a Rainy Day, Huevón”—with a frowning grasshopper in a zoot suit showing us his empty pockets. Alternate signs read in all three languages:

  The Boat Is Full

  Avoid Deportation

  Latinos Save

  Chinese Spend

  ALWAYS Keep Your Credit Ranking Within Limits

  AMERICAN RESTORATION AUTHORITY

  “TOGETHER WE’LL SURPRISE THE WORLD!”

  I felt the perfunctory liberal chill at seeing entire races of human beings so summarily reduced and stereotyped, but was also voyeuristically interested in seeing people’s Credit rankings. The old Chinese woman had a decent 1400, but others, the young Latina mothers, even a profligate teenaged Hasid puffing down the street, were showing blinking red scores below 900, and I worried for them. I walked past one of the Poles, letting it zap the data off my äppärät, and saw my own score, an impressive 1520. But there was a blinking red asterisk next to the score.

  Was the otter still flagging me?

  I sent a GlobalTeens message to Nettie Fine, but got a chilling “RECIPIENT DELETED” in response. What could that mean? No one ever gets deleted from GlobalTeens. I tried to GlobalTrace her but got an even more frightening “RECIPIENT UNTRACEABLE/INACTIVE.” What kind of person couldn’t be found on this earth?

  Back in Rome, I used to meet Sandi for lunch at da Tonino and we’d talk about what we missed the most about Manhattan. For me it was fried pork-and-scallion dumplings on Eldridge Street, for him bossy older black women at the gas company or the unemployment office who called him “honey” and “sugar” and sometimes “baby.” He said it wasn’t a gay thing, but, rather, that these black women made him feel calm and at ease, as if he had momentarily won the love and mothering of a complete stranger.

  I guess that’s what I wanted right now, with Nettie Fine “INACTIVE,” with Eunice six time zones away, with the Credit Poles reducing everyone to a simple three-digit numeral, with an innocent fat man dragged off a plane, with Joshie telling me “future salary & employment = let’s discuss”: a little love and mothering.

  I stalked up and down the eastern part of Grand Street, trying to get my bearings, trying to re-establish my hold on the place. But it wasn’t just the Credit Poles. The neighborhood had changed since I left for Rome a year ago. All the meager businesses I remember were still there, decayed linoleum places with names like the A-OK Pizza Shack, frequented by poor patrons who pawed at the keyboard of an old computer terminal while smearing their faces with pizza oils, a moldy 1988 ten-volume edition of The New Book of Popular Science stacked in the corner, awaiting customers who could read. But there was an added aimlessness to the population, the unemployed men staggering down the chicken-bone-littered street as if drunk off a pint of grain alcohol and not just a bevy of Negra Modelos, their face blunted beneath the kind of depressive affect that I usually associate with my father. An angelic seven-year-old girl in braids was shouting into her äppärät: “Nex’ time I see her ass I’m gonna punch that nigga in the stomach!” An old Jewish woman from my co-ops had fallen on the sun-baked asphalt, and her friends had made a protective scrim around her as she spun around like a turtle. By the razor-wired fence delineating a failed luxury-condo development, a drunk in a frilly guayabera shirt pulled down his pants and began to evacuate. I’ve seen this particular gent publicly crapping before, but the pained expression on his face, the way he rubbed his naked haunches while he shat, as if the June heat wasn’t enough to keep them warm, the staggering grunts he spat at the direction of our city’s cloud-streaked harbor skies, made me feel as if my native street was slipping away from me, falling into the East River, falling into a new time wrinkle where we would all drop our pants and dump furiously on the motherland.

  An armored personnel carrier bearing the insignia of the New York Army National Guard was parked astride a man-sized pothole at the busy intersection of Essex and Delancey, a roof-mounted .50-caliber Browning machine gun rotating 180 degrees, back and forth, like a retarded metronome along the busy but peaceable Lower East Side streetscape. Traffic was frozen all across Delancey Street. Silent traffic, for no one dared to use a horn against the military vehicle. The street corner emptied around me until I stood alone, staring down the barrel of a gun like an idiot. I lifted up my hands in panic and directed my feet to scram.

  My celebrations were turning sour. I took out the list I had written by hand and decided to make immediate use of Point No. 2 (Make Joshie Protect You). By a recently shuttered Bowery scones-and-libations establishment called Povertea, I found a cab and directed it to the Upper East Side lair of my second father.

  The Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation is housed in a former Moorish-style synagogue near Fifth Avenue, a tired-looking building dripping with arabesques, kooky buttresses, and other crap that brings to mind a lesser Gaudí. Joshie bought it at auction for a mere eighty thousand dollars when the congregation folded after being bamboozled by some kind of Jewish pyramid scheme years ago.

  The first thing I noticed upon my return was the familiar smell. Heavy use of a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener is encouraged at Post-Human Services, because the scent of immortality is complex. The supplements, the diet, the constant shedding of blood and skin for various physical tests, the fear of the metallic components found in most deodorants, create a curious array of post-mortal odors, of which “sardine breath” is the most benign.

  With one or two exceptions, I haven’t made any work-time buddies at Post-Human Services since I turned thirty. It’s not easy being friends with some twenty-two-year-old who cries over his fasting blood-glucose level or sends out a GroupTeen with his adrenal-stress index and a smiley face. When the graffito in the bathroom reads “Lenny Abramov’s insulin levels are whack,” there is a certain undeniable element of one-upmanship, which, in turn, raises the cortisol levels associated with stress and encourages cellular breakdown.

  Still, when I walked through the door I expected to recognize someone. The synagogue’s gilded main sanctuary was filled by young men and women dressed with angry post-college disregard, but projecting from somewhere between the eyes the message that they were the personification of that old Whitney Houston number I’ve mentioned before, that they, the children, were de facto the future. We had enough employees at Post-Human Services to repopulate the original Twelve Tribes of Israel, which were handily represented by the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. How dull we looked in their ocean-blue glare.

  The ark where the Torahs are customarily stashed had been taken out, and in its place hung five gigantic Solari schedule boards Joshie had rescued from various Italian train stations. Instead of the arrivi and partenze times of trains pulling in and out of Florence or Milan, the flip board displayed the names of Post-Human Services employees, along with the results of our latest physicals, our methylation and homocysteine levels, our testosterone and estrogen, our fasting insulin and triglycerides, and, most important, our “mood + stress indicators,” which w
ere always supposed to read “positive/playful/ready to contribute” but which, with enough input from competitive co-workers, could be changed to “one moody betch today” or “not a team playa this month.” On this particular day, the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating—a droning ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka—to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from “overcoming loss of loved one” to “letting personal life interfere with job” to “doesn’t play well with others.” Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues, including my fellow Russian, the brilliantly manic-depressive Vasily Greenbaum, were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELED.

  As for me, I wasn’t even listed.

  I positioned myself in the middle of the sanctuary to a spot beneath The Boards, trying to make myself a part of the soft jabber around me. “Hi,” I said. And with a splash of the arms: “Lenny Abramov!” But my words disappeared into the new soundproofed wood paneling while various configurations of young people, some arm in arm, as if on a casual date, swooped through the sanctuary, headed for the Soy Kitchen or the Eternity Lounge, leaving me to hear the words “Soft Policy” and “Harm Reduction,” “ROFLAARP,” “PRGV,” “TIMATOV,” and “butt-plugging Rubenstein,” and, attendant with female laughter, “Rhesus Monkey.” My nickname! Someone had recognized my special relationship to Joshie, the fact that I used to be important around here.

  It was Kelly Nardl. My darling Kelly Nardl. A supple, low-slung girl my age whom I would be terminally attracted to if I could stand to spend my life within three meters of her nondeodorized animal scent. She welcomed me with a kiss on both cheeks, as if she were the one just returned from Europe, and took me by the hand toward her bright, clean wedge of a desk in what used to be the cantor’s office. “I’m going to make you a plate of cruciferous vegetables, baby,” she said, and that sentence alone halved my fears. They don’t fire you after they feed you flowering cabbage at Post-Human Services. Vegetables are a sign of respect. Then again, Kelly was an exception to the hard-edged types around here, Louisiana-bred for kindness and gentility, a younger, less hysterical Nettie Fine (may she be alive and well, wherever she is).