CrisisNet: CHINA INVESTMENT CORPORATION QUITS U.S. TREASURIES.
I saw Vishnu blink several times as the latest news scrolled on our äppäräti, and some of the Credit guys were whispering stuff to one another. Vishnu gripped his fiancée and cupped her still-small belly. We returned to the business of laughing at Noah’s rendition of Vishnu’s freshman year at NYU—a hayseed from Upstate, he had been partially run over by a light truck and had to be hospitalized with tread marks on his chest.
Two lines of helicopters, like a broken V of geese, were massing over what I imagined to be the Arthur Kill on one side and the poetic curve of the Verrazano Bridge on another. We all looked up from the speech Grace was tearfully giving us—how we meant the world to her, how she wasn’t worried about anything, as long as she had us—
“Holy fuck,” two of the Credit guys said to each other, their Coronas shaky in their hands.
CrisisNet: CHINESE CENTRAL BANKER WANGSHENG LI ISSUES CAUTIONARY STATEMENT: “WE HAVE BEEN PATIENT.”
“Let’s just—” Vishnu said. “Never mind it. Let’s just enjoy the day. People! There’s another joint going around this way!”
Our Credit rankings and assets started to blink. RECALCULATION IN PROGRESS. The gentleman with the Mohawk was already making his way for the exit.
CrisisNet: URGENT: AMERICAN RESTORATION AUTHORITY RAISES THREAT LEVEL FOR NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA TO RED++IMMINENT DANGER.
We were all shouting at one another now. Shouting and grabbing on to one another, the excitement of what we always suspected would happen tinged with the reality that we were actually, finally, in the middle of the movie, unable to leave the cineplex for the safety of our vehicles. All of us were looking into one another’s eyes, our real eyes, sometimes blue and hazel but mostly brown and black, as if gauging our alliances: Would we be able to survive together, or would it be better apart? Noah craned his neck upward, ever upward, as if both to get a grip on the situation and to assert his primacy as a tall man. “We have to stick together,” I was saying to Amy Greenberg, but she was in a different place, a place where calculations were made and the data and Images flowed like vino verde in July. I worked through my own data as I tried to find Eunice.
CrisisNet: SIGNIFICANT SMALL ARMS COMBAT IN PROGRESS NEW YORK CITY, AREAS IMMEDIATELY UNDER NATIONAL GUARD QUARANTINE, CENTRAL PARK, RIVERSIDE PARK, TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK.
URGENT MESSAGE FROM AMERICAN RESTORATION AUTHORITY MID-ATLANTIC COMMAND (6:04 p.m., EST) Text follows—Insurgent attacks have been launched on the Borrower-Spender-Financial-Residential Complex in Lower Manhattan. Residents MUST report to primary residence for further instructions/relocation. By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.
There were streams now. From the Media people living in the tenements around Tompkins Park, gingerly leaning their äppäräti out their windowsills. The rectangle of green was choked in smoke; even the sturdiest trees had been denuded by the scale of the artillery, their bare branches shuddering wordlessly in the helicopter wind. The LNWIs had been surrounded. Their leader, now listed by Media as David Lorring, two “r”s, one “n,” was badly wounded. Guardsmen were carrying him out of the park and toward an armored personnel carrier. I couldn’t see his face beyond the meaty red lump peering out from behind a hasty bandage, but he was still wearing his own jungle-green Venezuela-vintage uniform, one arm dangling off the stretcher at an inhuman angle, as if it had been torn away and reattached by psychotics. Through the smoke, I caught snatches of bodies too compromised to categorize, the outlines of men with guns at their side breaching further into the chaos, and everywhere the pop of exploding plastic water bottles. A sign bearing the surprising word “DIPHTHERIA” billowed right into the camera nozzle of someone’s äppärät.
Eunice swiftly came up to me. “I want to go to Manhattan!” she said.
“We all want to go home,” I said, “but look at what’s happening.”
“I have to go to Tompkins Park. I know someone there.”
“Are you crazy? They’re killing people there.”
“A friend of mine’s in trouble.”
“A lot of people are in trouble.”
“Maybe my sister’s there too! She helps out in the park. Help me get to the ferry.”
“Eunice! We’re not going anywhere right now.”
The dead smile came on with such full force that I thought a part of her cheekbone had cracked. “That’s fine,” she said.
Grace and Vishnu, who were loading bags full of food for people who did not cook in their homes, predicting the siege-like situation to come with their forebears’ canniness. My äppärät started to warble. I was being hit with a serious data package.
TO: Post-Human Services Shareholders and Executive Personnel
FROM: Joshie Goldmann
SUBJECT: Political situation.
BODY OF MESSAGE FOLLOWS: We are in the process of a profound change, but we urge all members of the Post-Human family to remain both calm and vigilant. The expected collapse of the Rubenstein/ARA/Bipartisan regime presents us with great possibilities. We at Staatling-Wapachung are reaching out to other nations’ sovereign wealth funds looking for investment and alliance. We anticipate social changes that will benefit all shareholders and top-level personnel. In the initial stages of the transformation our primary concern is the safety of all shareholders and co-workers. If you are currently located outside New York, please make haste to return to the city. Despite appearances of lawlessness and collapse in certain sections of downtown and midtown, your safety can be best guaranteed if you are in your own Triplexes, houses, or apartments within Manhattan and Brownstown Brooklyn. Wapachung Contingency personnel have been instructed to protect you from rioting Low Net Worth Individuals and rogue National Guard elements. Please contact Howard Shu at Life Lovers Outreach if you have any questions or require immediate assistance. If regular äppärät transmissions cease for any reason, please look for Wapachung Contingency emergency scrolls and follow the directions given. An exciting time is about to begin for us and the creative economy. We are all fortunate, and, in an abstract sense, blessed. Onward!
Eunice had turned away from me and was crying intermittent but voluptuous tears that curled around her nose and beaded, gathering volume and strength. “Eunice,” I said. “Sweetheart. It’s going to be all right.” I put one arm around her, but she shook it off. The ground echoed nearby, and I picked up an entirely surreal sound beyond the unkempt hedges of Grace and Vishnu’s little palazzo—the sickening contralto of middle-class people screaming.
CrisisNet: UNIDENTIFIED SOURCES: VENEZUELAN NAVY MISSILE FRIGATES MARISCAL SUCRE & RAUL REYES PLUS SUPPORT SHIPS REPORTED 300 MILES OFF NORTH CAROLINA COAST. ST. VINCENT’S OTHER NEW YORK AREA HOSPITALS ON HIGH ALERT.
The few of us who were from Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn were lining up before Vishnu and Grace, trying to get a place to crash in their house; other Staten Islanders were offering fold-out cots and oven-warm spaces in their attics. The names and numbers of car service companies were bouncing around from äppärät to äppärät, and people were trying to figure out if the Verrazano Bridge was still passable.
My own äppärät squealed again, and without warning Joshie’s voice, as urgent as I’ve ever heard it, filled my head. “Where are you, Len?” he said. “GlobalTrace is showing Staten Island.”
“St. George.”
“Is Eunice with you?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got to make sure she’s all right.”
“She’s all right. We’re going to bed down in Staten Island, wait for the worst to pass.”
“Bed down? You didn’t get the memo? You’ve got to get back to Manhattan.”
“I got it, but it doesn’t make any sense. Aren’t we safer here?”
“Lenny.” The voice paused, allowing my name to ring in my lower consciousness, as if it were God calling me to him. “These memos don’t come from nowhere. This is straight f
rom Wapachung Contingency. Get off Staten Island now. Go home immediately. Take Eunice with you. Make sure she’s safe.”
I was still stoned. The windows to my soul were foggy and red. The transition from relative happiness to complete fear made no sense. Then I remembered the source of that relative happiness. “My friends,” I said. “Will they be okay if they stay on Staten Island?”
“It depends,” Joshie said.
“On what?”
“Their assets.”
I did not know how to respond to this. I wanted to cry. “Your friends Vishnu and Grace are going to be fine where they are,” Joshie said. How did he know the names of my friends? Had I told him? “Your main focus should be getting Eunice back to Manhattan.”
“What about my friends Noah and Amy?”
There was a pause. “I’ve never heard of them,” Joshie said.
It was time to move out. I kissed Vishnu on both cheeks, Nee-gro–slapped the others, and accepted a small container of kimchi and seaweed wrap from Grace, who begged us to stay.
“Lenny!” she cried. Then she whispered into my ear, careful not to let Eunice overhear: “I love you, sweetie. Take care of Eunice. Both of you take care.”
“Don’t say it like that,” I whispered back. “I’ll see you again. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I found Noah and Amy streaming next to each other, him shouting, her crying, the air dense with panic and Media. I reached over and turned off Noah’s äppärät. “You and Amy have to come with us to Manhattan.”
“Are you crazy?” he said. “There’s fighting downtown. The Venezuelans are on their way.”
“My boss says we’ve got to get to Manhattan. He said we’re safer there. He heard it from Wapachung Contingency.”
“Wapachung Contingency?” Noah shouted. “What, are you Bipartisan now?” And for once I wanted to smack the indignation out of my friend.
“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.
CrisisNet: UNIDENTIFIED SOURCES: 18 CREDIT POLES SET ON FIRE BY LOW NET WORTH PROTESTERS IN MANHATTAN CREDIT DISTRICT. NATIONAL GUARD TO RESPOND WITH “SWIFT ACTION.”
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.
Super Sad True Love Story Page 26
