Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Okay,” Barry said.

  “Just put on some lip balm first.”

  In the encroaching darkness, he was more or less formless, and Barry was guided mostly by his musk. What he had in his mouth was so soft and human. It was sweaty and rank and tasted like pee, but he wanted it as far back in his mouth as he could stand. Barry’s mind was still reeling from the contradictions of that, when he felt Bentley’s hand on his head, pushing him up and down. That’s right. That’s how it was supposed to go. That’s how Seema did it twice a year, his birthday and the first night of Hanukkah. His nose scrunched into the Brillo-like wires of Bentley’s unshowered pubis, and that proved a little too much. He gagged, his teeth scraping against the barely erect shaft.

  “Man, you really don’t know what you’re doing,” Bentley said, pushing him away. Barry sat back against the chain-link fence. He felt ashamed but also elated. Bentley pulled himself up and began to stroke himself, and Barry was inspired to do the same. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t think of anything to fantasize about, just the steady jerking motion, the Tri-Compax moon above, an occasional high-beamed Hyundai floating by. Eventually Bentley started to snore, his head sliding into the musculature of his neck. All the energy had drained out of Barry, and the only thing that was real was the taste of another human being in his mouth. “Hey, wake up,” he whispered to Bentley. “You’ll miss your bus to Vegas. Wake up.” But Bentley would not.

  * * *

  —

  “NO USE of alcohol or illegal drugs on this bus,” the driver was saying. Barry felt a flash of paranoia. “If you try to buy alcohol, that will terminate your trip. If your meal is tuna or sardines, don’t open it until you’re in an outside area.” The bald black driver was handsome like the star of a good TV show on a minor cable channel. Barry knew that he was going to miss the Hound. He saw the Phoenix skyline disappear behind them. Saguaro cacti appeared like one-armed men amid the scrubland. He wondered if in some way he had failed to fully connect with Bentley, despite the blow job. He could have mentioned Jeff Park and his Bentley, and maybe, in the midst of his high, he had. The taste of sex still burned on his lips. His fingers were singed and covered with crack dust. Mountains reared up like the outlines of Tuscan cities.

  They crossed the Colorado River into California. “Woo-hoo!” some people shouted, happy to have Arizona at their back. At some point in the middle of the Mojave, an overweight mentally handicapped man in his sixties got on the bus, and nobody wanted to sit next to him, but Barry welcomed him. A woman in the back of the bus started clapping and gospel singing “Happy Birthday” to her child. Imagine celebrating a birthday in the back of a Greyhound. Barry started weeping hot tears that smelled like crack. The fat man put his hand on his bald spot and rubbed it back and forth. “I’m sucking up your brain energy,” he said, kindly.

  “I’m just crying because I’m going to see my daddy’s grave,” Barry said, very loudly.

  This caught people’s attention. People started telling him he’d be all right, but they also started talking loudly about their own lives. A hot Mexican girl with purple hair and a skateboard was telling some massive white guys from an army base about growing up on the streets at age five. “You’re strong,” one of the white guys was saying. “You’ll be all right. My dad was an alcoholic. Not all the time. It wasn’t all bad.”

  Barry’s seatmate started talking loudly, too. He had grown up in Louisiana. His momma used to hit him for stealing apples. His name was Kenneth Long. The atmosphere in the bus changed, and now the people on the bus were happy to have Kenneth along, and he was one of them just like Barry was one of them. “You’re all right, Kenneth,” the Mexican goth girl said.

  “I came all the way from Manhattan!” Barry cried.

  “When you’re living on the streets, there are a lot of rats,” the Mexican girl said. Others had experiences with rats and with mommas who hit and with daddies who drank. The whole bus was a confessional now, and sometimes when they said something wrong, the bus driver would yell over the loudspeaker “Language!” but that wouldn’t stop them, not for a minute. People talked about where they had gone to prison the way people on the Acela talked about where they had gone to law school. They started writing down one another’s e-mails, and Barry found that he was unable to use the pen he was given. Had the crack scrambled his brain? “Just tell me what it is and I’ll write it down,” Kenneth Long said.

  They stopped at a sandwich place, and Barry cried that he didn’t have any money, and a bespectacled Mexican girl with a bare midriff bought him a carne asada torta and a tamarind Jarritos soda. The earth around the sandwich place was dry and cracked. The sky was ribboned pink. Desert sky. California sky. The sun set behind an unnamed gas station. The fat man next to him kept farting for the rest of the ride, but he was forgiven. He had motion sickness, too, and many pairs of hands helped him get to the bathroom in time to throw up. “Shut the fuck up!” a mother was screaming at her little girl. “I told you six times.” The child started crying. “Don’t do me like that!” But all the aggrieved and abused passengers around Barry would not let that stand, and they began screaming at the woman, screaming as if they could turn their own lives back, stand up to their fathers and their mothers, make them bleed. Black voices, white voices, Latino voices. The whole bus was screaming at the woman, and the bus driver kept saying “Language” over and over on the intercom.

  San Diego approached in the dusk. They passed a PAYDAY LOANS sign lit up red and green like an advertisement for a Christmas that would never come, and Barry had that Californian feeling that the ocean was right ahead of him, that any moment it would present itself with blue-dark infinity. And it was. And it did.

  SEEMA AND her father and Shiva were following a hilly, woodsy path through the Ramble in Central Park, which completely winded Seema, but which Shiva and his grandfather conquered daily since her parents moved into her apartment three weeks ago, almost immediately after she had told them about the diagnosis. Shiva had to travel to this peaceful place through the regular world of noise and, possibly for him, terror, but his grandfather was determined and processed the outside world for him, explaining a sudden onslaught of ambulances or the sensory impossibility of Park Avenue at rush hour. Who knew what Shiva understood (what did any three-year-old understand?), but as soon as her dad pointed to something and talked about it in his step-by-step former-engineer way, the boy calmed down. Out here, in the wilds of the Ramble, without the presence of constricting walls and man-made lights and high-pitched noises, her son was an athlete. He knew the maze of the Ramble by heart, its arches and stairs and meandering pathways. He threw himself at rock faces, making his ascent by hanging on to gnarled roots and the dry leaves of city plants, every leap perfect, every foothold well placed. “Everesting,” his grandfather called it.

  “Watch out,” a hippieish white woman was shouting at a black girl of about seven who was following close behind a young blind Asian boy using a cane. They were heading along a rugged path toward Shiva’s favorite gazebo. “Stop before that ridge! Rachel!” Seema imagined the kids were brother and sister, adopted by the hippieish white parents. Each parent had coarse, early gray hair and a T-shirt that spoke of small Catskill communities. Seema wondered what it was like to raise two children on a regular income—a thought that would have never occurred to her before she married her husband—but here they were, the four of them, in Central Park, shouting to one another like it was nothing, like they were that mythical happy family with the three-sinked bathroom Barry had told her about on their second date.

  “Momma, how far to the gazebo?” the girl shouted back.

  Every few feet, she would take her brother by the hand and correct his course as he clacked ahead with his cane. “Rachel, watch the drop-offs.”

  “I got it, Mom!”

  “What about the rocks?” the boy shouted.

  “We already pa
ssed the rocks, Sander. On the way back, we’ll let you feel them all over.”

  “Dad, I don’t think Shiva is going to want to share the gazebo,” Seema said. “He’s not used to other people in there.” The two kids scrambled inside, shouting to each other. Their father took off his giant, cheap canvas bag, and both parents started loudly taking out sandwiches and thermoses.

  As soon as Shiva saw the occupants of the gazebo he stopped in place, shut his eyes, covered his ears, and fell to the ground. The child began to kick the dirt and spin on his back like an overturned insect. “It’s okay,” her father said, waving her away with one hand as he crouched down and began to rub his grandson’s ankles with the other.

  Seema bent down to clean the dirt off Shiva’s velvety Loro Piana trousers, even as she scanned the reaction of the other family, but she felt superfluous. She didn’t know why she had foisted herself upon this daily ritual of her father and her son. But what was the other option? Staying at home and listening to her mother rant about how lonely she was in New York, plucked from her community (she had twice the Facebook friends of both her daughters combined), while manically researching every brilliant autist who had ever existed, from Nikola Tesla (probably) to Albert Einstein (possibly) to Wolfgang Amadeus (a reach). The rest of her time was spent figuring out whom to blame for “this”: negligent Seema, nonresponding Shilpa, the universe, or the man whose genetics were surely responsible for her grandson’s difficulties—Barry. “Is New York a no-fault state when it comes to divorce?” she would hiss at Seema first thing in the morning. “Well, it shouldn’t be. Because it’s all his fault. You need to get a lawyer, a real one.”

  Her father picked Shiva up and spun him through the air, making him giggle, brown eyes ablaze. “Daddy,” Seema said, “your knee.”

  He never really listened to her when he was with Shiva. Maybe that’s one reason she had been reticent to have a child, the idea that her father would love someone more than he loved her. Damn it, she had to grow up. “Let’s go home,” Seema said. “It’s not like we can kick those guys out of the gazebo.” Her son could scale a twenty-foot rock face, but having to share a gazebo with another family brought on a full meltdown.

  “I have some strategies.” Her father put Shiva down. He was wearing khakis and an oxford shirt despite the early September heat, as if he were about to interview for a bookkeeping job at some small industrial concern. “First we sing a song.” He crouched down to Shiva’s level and began to sing “C Is for Cookie.” Shiva immediately unclasped his ears, although his eyes were still shut. Four verses in, his grandfather said, “And now, we’ll do the shimmy-shimmy.” Shiva opened his eyes. His grandfather shimmered his own fingers in front of his face. Shiva immediately followed suit. The two of them sat there, allowing the summer light to filter through their flickering fingers, both in rapt concentration and delight.

  “Dad,” Seema said.

  “I know,” her father said.

  “You’re reinforcing stereotyped behaviors.”

  “Shhh,” her father said. “Look at him.”

  “Okay, but some of his therapists will object. I’m just saying. We put a lot of time and thought into this. And he’s the one who has to live in the world. It’s fine at home, but how does it look to others?”

  Her father picked up Shiva, the child docile and happy in his arms. “I never told you how much of myself I had to give up when I came to this country,” her father said to her.

  “That’s different,” Seema said. “Being Indian is not a disability.”

  “I’m glad you were born in 1987 so that you can say that.”

  Slowly, wearily, he carried the child to the gazebo where the parents of the other family were chewing on sandwiches. Everyone smiled at everyone else. The blind boy was drawing his name, SANDER, in the dirt. His sister was ribbing him about his s looking “stupid,” but, at the same time, she was holding him by the elbow. The parents didn’t have to mind the boy, because his sister did. The mother was wearing a Phoenicia Volunteer Fire Department T-shirt many sizes too big. The girl was wearing yellow clogs. Everything was brilliantly imperfect, like a scene out of a modern storybook.

  “Both my kids threw a lot of tantrums when they were his age,” the mother said, nodding at Shiva.

  “Well, he’s autistic,” Seema said. This was the new thing she was working out. Just saying it out loud to strangers. Announcing who he was. Asserting it.

  “Oh, sorry,” the mother said.

  “You’re not supposed to say you’re sorry,” the father said.

  “I mean I’m sorry that I—” She laughed nervously. “Can I offer you a sandwich?” They definitely weren’t from the city if they were offering strangers food.

  A few days earlier Shiva had had a meltdown in Whole Foods, and Seema had explained his condition to the cashier, and her mother had yelled at her afterward for “telling the whole world,” but the cashier had just shrugged. This was New York, and everybody had something. Everybody. Each time Seema saw a gaggle of teenagers sitting cross-legged, absorbed in their devices, tuned out of one another’s physicality, she wondered if the world to come would be slightly more hospitable to Shiva’s condition. If only she could get him to speak. That had become the sole mission of her life.

  Both Shiva and his grandfather were now actively flicking their fingers in front of the boy’s eyes, creating their own kingdom of light. From afar, they probably looked like two magicians up to no good. “I love his outfit,” the mother of the other kids tried again. She had been taking in Shiva’s clothes. “Why’s he all dressed up?”

  “He’s got sensory issues,” Seema said. “This is one of the few outfits he doesn’t find scratchy.”

  “Brenda!” the husband said. “Will you please leave this poor woman alone.”

  “It’s okay,” Seema said. She tried a laugh. A part of her wanted to do the disability tango with Brenda, ask her something stupid about her blind son in return. The daughter was now dragging the boy off to confront an especially loud orange-breasted bird behind the gazebo. The way she pulled his arm, and the way he let himself be pulled after her, felt so natural, like a diagram of the rest of their lives. They would grow into whatever people they were going to be, but these early memories would always be a part of their relationship, one person drawing a mental map for the other. If only Shiva had had a sibling who could do the same for him. But her womb was empty now.

  She had done it a week before her parents arrived. The office in which the procedure was done was right around the corner from Lenox Hill, where Shiva had been born and then stashed in the Beyoncé Suite, a meal of filet mignon wheeled in upon her recovery, and Barry’s chief of staff having bombarded the room with allergy-inducing flowers and over-the-top chocolates. She had been considering an abortion even before Barry left. But the moment she was in the stirrups, Seema thought, What if? What if the child inside her wasn’t autistic? What if it was a boy with Barry’s athleticism or her father’s charm? A kid you didn’t have to spend your whole lifetime guiding and looking out for and “coordinating.” What if this was the last time she would ever be pregnant? What if all the other men she would ever meet in this goddamn city would all be a form of either Barry or Luis? She had the means to take care of another child. The abortion wasn’t a sin, exactly, Seema didn’t think in those terms, but what if it was, as her father would gently tell her when she dithered about taking the LSAT at the end of junior year or failed to get in all her intern applications early, a “missed opportunity”?

  No, she didn’t want to take the chance. Her body would be a cell-producing factory for just a few minutes longer, and then it would be free of the Cohen gene pool forever. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but in her mind “this,” as her mother called autism, was Barry’s fault. Barry with his old sperm. Barry the keeper of the Watch Log. Which, yes, the therapists would say, was unproductive thinki
ng on her part, blah, blah, blah.

  Shiva and Arturo were having more playdates now, some in the Goodmans’ smaller apartment. Other than her father, whom Seema referred to as “the Big Regulator,” Arturo was the only other person who could calm Shiva, and hence she called him “the Little Regulator,” although not to his face, of course. Some people just had it when it came to Shiva, and others, like her mother, did not. Arturo read the Piggie and Elephant books out loud and with great affect while Shiva bounced on his ball, each getting what the other needed: a loyal audience and a nonjudgmental friend. On the second playdate, Luis showed up from his “writing room,” a refurbished utility closet recently Zillowed in as a “0.5 bedroom” to complain about all the noise, and then he saw Seema. “Are you sure this is such a good idea?” he whispered to her in the hallway.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” she said. She gave him a little pout from the first iteration of their relationship, the Indian comic actress on TV. “What? We can’t be friends, Louie?” Everything was an act in this town, even falling out of love was a performance. And it surprised her, how quickly she could fall out of love, how little of Barry’s contrived, practiced romanticism had ever rubbed off on her.