Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  The bus was bouncing into a station. “Phoenix,” the bus driver announced. Barry stretched and yawned. It was time to get off the bus and see about the next ticket west. Barry looked at the empty seat next to him. Wasn’t there someone by his side? He had dreamed of Brooklyn, but she wasn’t on the bus, was she? He knew there had been someone there. No. Not someone. Some thing. His rollerboard.

  His rollerboard with the watches.

  His rollerboard with the watches was gone.

  “Excuse me!” Barry said in a shaky voice. “Excuse me!”

  Bleary-eyed black, brown, and white faces turned around to look at him. Everyone was moving in slow motion off the bus. “Excuse me!” Barry shouted. “My bag is missing!”

  There was a buzz of attention from the other passengers. “My bag is gone!” Barry shouted at them. He was squeezing his way now toward the exit and toward the bus driver, who was the authority figure and who maybe could help. Barry was shouting the word “Sir!” and then he was shouting a bunch of other words, and then he was falling down the stairs of the bus, and then he was on his knees, his hands on the tarmac, his lungs broadcasting the news of his terrible loss. And then there was silence and darkness.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAS sitting by a gigantic bus tire that smelled like the heat of the road. There were Greyhound employees in their green mesh vests gathered around him, and some of the more proactive passengers were talking, and his hand was holding a wet cloth to his forehead. A middle-aged black woman who reminded him of someone he had known, a housekeeper, maybe, was speaking loudly. “This man, his son autistic, and he say something about he lost his watch.”

  Barry looked up at the people who were trying to help him. He felt like he should thank somebody, all of them maybe. How did she know Shiva was autistic? He tried to remember what he had said or, rather, shouted, but his mind was a maze with the entrances blocked.

  “My son also autistic,” a Mexican woman rasped down to him.

  “Thank you,” Barry said. The kindness and concern were coming at him in waves. His son was autistic. Everyone knew now. And so what? So fucking what? The secret inside him had not made him a good man. “My watches,” Barry said. “They were one of a kind. I was saving them for my son.”

  A Greyhound employee bent down on one knee. “Sir,” he said. “Can you think of anyone who could have taken your bag?”

  “He should go to police,” the Mexican woman said.

  “Yeah, like that’s gonna help,” said the black woman.

  “Sometime,” the Mexican woman said.

  The police. In a different life, he would turn to them right away. But then he remembered the crack rock in his pocket and the fact that he had bought the bus ticket with Layla’s ATM card, which was now, technically, stolen. Layla, the woman who knew about his fake passport, which, come to think of it, was also in the rollerboard. He couldn’t go to the police. What could he do? “I love my son,” he said. The tears were streaming now, the early afternoon Phoenix heat building around him.

  “Sir,” the Greyhound man said.

  “It’s okay.” He felt the black woman’s elbow in the crook of his own. “You had a shock, honey,” she said. “But you okay. You okay.”

  Barry was crying beautifully. He felt nothing but grace with the catharsis of a snotty exhale. The woman took him by his arm into the hangarlike Greyhound station. The passengers let them pass as if he were Jesus. At the back of the station they had something called Cactus Café and Gifts. An obese woman named Flores worked the counter. “This man, his luggage stolen,” Barry’s new friend said. “He don’t have a dime.”

  “Aw, don’t cry, honey,” Flores said. She offered him a tissue.

  “I’m sorry,” Barry said.

  “Sorry for what?” Flores said. “Nothing your fault.” Nothing was his fault. Seema, Shiva, Brooklyn, Layla. None of it. He pictured living in a small suburban house with Flores and many of her family. The Luck of Kokura. Did her family have it? He should never have bet on Valupro. Somehow, his whole life had unraveled after that trade. His spirit had been judged and found wanting. The balance of good that Barry had always thought he had accrued, as a partial orphan, as the son of a troubled man, as a dutiful student and worker, had been tapped out. “What kind of food you like?” Flores asked. “I won’t charge you.” Barry got the breakfast platter. Eggs, hash browns, sausage, biscuit, and coffee. He took all the Splenda packets he could and two things of creamer.

  The black woman reached into her purse. “I gotta go, honey,” she said.

  “You don’t have to give me anything,” Barry said, but he took the five dollars she offered. “Let me write down your name, I’ll send you the money back.”

  The woman kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll pray for your son, too,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with your son?” Flores asked, as his late breakfast sizzled on the grill.

  “He’s autistic,” Barry said. “We found out last September.” He had stopped crying.

  “Here’s your delicious breakfast,” Flores said.

  He sat down with his food and felt the urge to say a prayer over it. And then he saw the dull glow on his wrist, the blued hands that had stopped hours ago.

  The Tri-Compax.

  The watch he would give to Shiva. It was still on his wrist. No one had taken it. His beautiful watches were gone, but the Tri-Compax remained. “Rabbit,” he said out loud. He took in the landscape of the lackluster bus station, this place and time, all these mothers, all these children, all these solitary men hacking their way through the underbrush of a country that didn’t want them or need them. The Tri-Compax was silent, it had stopped for good during the bus ride. The watch was no longer registering his passage through the universe, but he had it to give to his son.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER HE had eaten the Greyhound breakfast, he had to go to the station’s bathroom for a very long time, and when he came out he was hungry again. An older white man, his teeth likely rotting from meth, was eating the remains of his hash browns and biscuit. “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I thought you were finished.”

  Barry told him to go ahead. There were bananas for sale and a bread pudding that was not out of date. Barry needed money to purchase all those things and a ticket to San Diego. He needed investors. A broken-down Frito-Lay cardboard box lay behind Flores’s counter space. He asked her if he could have it and the Magic Marker hanging out of her shirt pocket, next to the familiar Greyhound pin reading YES, I CAN.

  Barry sat down at the table opposite the meth man eating his biscuit. He remembered all the homeless men he had seen in the last two months of travel and the signs they had attesting to the state of their lives. He began to write on the back of the cardboard in his neatest letters:

  THEY STOLE ALL MY MONEY.

  I HAVE AN AUTISTIC SON.

  PRAYING FOR A MIRACLE.

  ANY LITTLE BIT HELPS!

  GOD BLESS YOU

  He asked Flores for an empty plastic cup. He brushed his hair down a little so that he wouldn’t look crazy. He tried on several expressions. Basically, he needed to look penitent, but not sad, which was how he felt. He needed to show that he was one of the fallen, but that he was not ashamed of his station. He set himself down beside the front entrance of the station, next to a sign for Greyhound’s very own lattice chips: CRISPY AND DELICIOUS, GRAB A BAG FOR THE ROAD. Immediately a man with a green vest marked SECURITY appeared.

  “Sir,” he said.

  “My son’s autistic,” Barry said.

  “You the one who got robbed?” Barry nodded. The man was young and looked like a nerdy ASU postdoc in his wire-frames. “Yeah, you can’t solicit in the station,” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened, but maybe you can try up the road?”

  Barry walked outsid
e with his sign, where the dry heat burned his calves and his neck. One highway ran into another, and beyond there was the endless archipelago of the Phoenix airport.

  He stuck out his sign with one hand and held his plastic cup out with the other. His bald spot burned red.

  Rigs passed by. Pontiacs, too. He had no idea Pontiacs still existed. People watched him wearily while they waited for the lights to change. SUVs never gave, but he got three dollars out of a Mitsubishi. A biracial woman in a Taurus gave him two dollars. Her husband was in the back feeding a soda to a small child. Freddy’s Landscaping kicked in a buck. The folks were rough and leathery, working folks. One middle-aged-verging-on-old woman in a Pontiac volunteered that her son was also autistic. “Every last nickel we spend on his therapies,” she said.

  “I know how that goes,” Barry said. “God bless you for stopping.” They looked at each other kindly. Barry saw his own reflection in her sunglasses, a tired, old man in a red El Paso Chihuahuas T-shirt. A day’s worth of stubble had come in gray. Right now he was all his dad, except for the flicker of human interest in his tired eyes. After six hours in the sun, he had twenty-four dollars, slightly more than half of a ticket to San Diego. He had never worked harder in his life. He needed a Dasani badly.

  He went back into the station. The coolness both relieved the burns on his body and brought attention to his pain. Setting a budget of four dollars, he bought a pudding parfait and a bottle of water and sat down at a table. There could be nothing more delicious in the world than the Greyhound pudding parfait.

  Standing by the coffee counter, a big muscular guy in a mesh shirt was talking to an old woman in mirrored Oakleys. They were both supplementing their coffees with plenty of free creams. “I left Kentucky on Monday,” the man said. “Headed up to Vegas.”

  The muscleman’s hair was blond and cropped, and his tired face could have been anywhere from twenty to forty years of age. One of his enormous biceps bore a tattoo of the Bentley logo, a circled B with wings. If Barry remembered correctly from Jeff Park’s Bentley, the B was supposed to be white against a black background, but this aspiring young man had colored it bloodred. “I’ve never been to Kentucky,” the woman said. “Is it nice?”

  “Not really,” Bentley said. “But the people are nice.”

  “I’m going to Dallas,” the woman said. “I’ve got ten dollars on my debit card.” Her mirrored Oakleys must be fake, Barry thought. “Well, you have a good time whatever you’re doing,” she said. “I’m sure it’s none of my business.”

  “I’m just going home,” Bentley said, confused by the menace in the old woman’s voice.

  Barry went to the bathroom to wash up. He looked at himself in the mirror. His olive skin was nothing of the sort. He was a real redneck now. He took off his shirt and splashed water under his armpits. Bentley came in and nodded to him. “Where you headed?” he asked. His voice was also full of muscle.

  “San Diego,” Barry said, “but I’m short of funds.” He reached into his pockets to check to make sure all his money was there, and the crack rock loosened itself and fell out onto the floor. Barry scrambled after it.

  “That what I think it is?” Bentley asked.

  “I got it as a goof in Baltimore.”

  “No worries. I’m cool.”

  Barry threw some water on his face.

  “Looks like you caught some sun there,” Bentley said.

  “I’ve been begging for money out by Sky Harbor Circle,” Barry said. He was half naked in a Greyhound bathroom talking about begging, but he was not ashamed. The truth was powerful. His Tri-Compax was all cream and gold in the mirror.

  “I’d love to help you out,” Bentley said. “Maybe you can help me out. I still got seven hours until I get to Vegas, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m sorry?” Barry said.

  “What you got in your pocket.” Barry still wasn’t following. “How much you want for it?”

  “Oh,” Barry said. “I’ve been trying to save it. You know, for a special occasion.”

  “No offense, but you don’t look like a guy who’s going to have many special occasions,” Bentley said. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for it. Way more than it’s worth. My bus to Vegas not leaving for a long while. I’ll let you have a hit, too.”

  Barry thought the rock, which was substantial, was probably worth way more than twenty dollars, but twenty would be enough for the rest of his bus ticket and a banana. They walked outside into the mild coronary of a late Phoenix day, past an employees’ lot for National and Alamo and over to a chain-link fence behind which squatted a dozen FedEx tractor trailers. Stunted-looking trees blocked them from the gaze of the wide highway beyond. The road was almost entirely free of traffic; it was difficult to imagine which two parts of Phoenix it served to connect. “Here is good,” Bentley said. They settled in by the chain-link fence. “Put this on or you’ll cook to death,” Bentley said. He took a sun cape hat out of a duffel bag and gave it to Barry.

  “Mind if I have the twenty dollars now?” Barry asked. Bentley laughed. He didn’t mind at all. He took a tiny screwdriver out of his bag and smashed the Parmesan-looking rock into manageable pieces. Barry was sad to see it destroyed. Bentley’s hands were covered in burn marks and cuts that refused to fully heal. He took out a Pyrex pipe, scrunched a screen into it with his thumb, and then banged a little ball of crack inside. He lit it up with a cheap Bic lighter, turning the pipe in his fingers, letting the rock soften. He was so practiced, organized, just this nice American kid on the road. The crack smelled like the burning tires coming in from the colonias of Juárez, along with the tang of something sweet like marshmallow. Finally, Bentley put the pipe to his lips and inhaled deeply. Mist filled the glass. He passed the pipe to Barry, who was leaning uncomfortably against the chain-link fence in his outrageous sun hat.

  “Just one hit,” Barry said. The pipe burned his fingers. “Ouch!” he cried. Bentley laughed again. He took out some lip balm from his duffel bag and passed it to Barry.

  “Put it on your lips,” Bentley said. “This stuff really dries you out.” His eyes were the blue of an Anguilla infinity pool. The muscles inside his mesh shirt were dancing. Barry inhaled and coughed. “You want to keep turning the pipe over like that with your fingers,” Bentley said. “Keep sucking on it.”

  The crack tasted like a hospital room, and suddenly Barry was back in the hospital as Shiva was being born, the horrors of Seema’s screams, the doctor, kind but steely, shouting at her to push harder (“Get mad, Seema, get mad!”), some young woman’s anthem playing on the little Tivoli boombox Seema had bought to inspire herself, and then the gasps and squeals of the little alien that popped out from between her legs. The scene replayed itself before Barry, but this time instead of being scared and sneaking off to the bathroom for shots of ten-thousand-dollars-a-mouthful Japanese single malt, he stood there fully witnessing the outlandish pleasure of a mother knowing that her child is alive.

  Barry’s mind and body thrummed with energy. He wanted to tell Bentley everything about his life, but momentarily the power of speech was gone. A Southwest plane, one of many, was angling its way down to the Phoenix Sky Harbor all silver and light, but instead of the roar of its jets, Barry heard the rumble of a Long Island Rail Road train making its way in from the city, the day coming to an end, the low thunder of his father talking to himself while cracking open cans of tuna in the kitchen, the absence of his mother, the loneliness of a keen mind in a tiny bedroom, a solitary SUNY-Binghamton poster depicting a bunch of Long Island kids hanging off one another’s shoulders in a burst of springtime warmth. Barry finally found his voice. “I’m from Queens,” he said to Bentley. “What about you?”

  Bentley was talking, but Barry understood only some of what he was saying, as if it were in another language, but the import was that Bentley was missing not just one of his parents but both, and his grandmothe
r, whom he loved and who loved him back, died over a very long period of time, her departure from the world punctuated by the loss of one limb after another. She had been in Kentucky, while the remainders of his life were scattered around Nevada and the poor inland parts of California. It was hard to understand how all those far-flung states were tied together, or in which one Bentley had originated. With each word he said, he jerked his chest forward as if he were in ecstasy, or in pain.

  “I’m not voting for Trump,” Barry said.

  “I’m not voting for anyone,” Bentley said. He offered Barry a re-up, and he couldn’t say no. The pipe was hot and oily, singeing the tips of his fingers. Barry felt another wave of energy. The gentle whir of memory being erased. If he smoked all the way through the night, would he emerge reborn?

  Barry removed his sun hat and tried to fix the dried clumps of his hair. The sun was setting, and now he was babbling on about his eating club back at school, how hard it had been for his dad to come up with the fees. “So you went to college and all?” Bentley asked. Barry didn’t want to confirm that he went to Princeton, didn’t want to open up a gulf between them, but the jittery energy felt like pride, and he told him the truth. “Yeah, right, Princeton,” Bentley said. “I’m going to have to call bullshit on you, pal.”

  Barry laughed. How could he have gone to Princeton? The whole thing was a case of mistaken identity. That and Goldman Sachs and This Side of Capital. Only his love for the women along the way and Jonah and his son was true. “I used to feel bad,” he said, “because I made my mother drive out to the mall to get me a Han Solo action figure and then she got killed in a car accident. But I don’t feel bad anymore. After today, I’m not going to feel bad. Because wherever she is, she’s forgiven me. If only I could see her eyes again. She had beautiful eyes. Do you think I have beautiful eyes?”

  “I do,” Bentley said.

  Barry wanted to take off his clothes and show off his swimmer’s shoulders. They were both white American men enjoying their country in an On the Road kind of way. “A one-eyed Mexican man fell asleep on my shoulder!” he shouted. Bentley used what looked like a piece of umbrella wire to poke inside the pipe and get out more juicy morsels of crack. They wanted to celebrate each Southwest jet that was landing over them, but they had no idea how, and when the engine of one of the FedEx trucks suddenly kicked in behind the chain-link fence, they could neither of them give a damn. The temperature dropped a bit, and when the sun disappeared entirely and the white desert moon began to float up diagonally like in a movie, Bentley unbuckled his pants. “We’re out of rock,” he said. “Do you want to suck me off?”