Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  Speaking of, I’ve been going to Tompkins Square with more supplies, doing some odd ends at CLOTHES WASHING AND SANITATION and just hanging out with David. He’s so funny. He just grabbed me at one point and threw me over his shoulder and carried me around the whole park so that I could wave to everyone. It felt good to have a strong guy taking charge of me, and David is SO strong, and not just because he was a soldier in Venezuela. And he keeps his little hut so NEAT (not like you-know-who, ha ha), which is something he said he learned in the army. He’s getting ready for when the Guard comes to clear them out, which is making me nervous. If you have any old äppäräti or even laptops, please send them to me, because these people are really desperate. I tried to get him to just have some lunch with me, but he won’t leave the park. He’s as dedicated to his people as my father is to his patients, and I guess I really admire that. I’ve been looking at his mouth, and there’s something charismatic about him having lost some teeth. He’s a rugged man who knows when to be physical and when to be smart. Anyway, I bet if he had Healthcare he could look even more handsome. Sometimes when he talks about what it’s going to be like after the Bipartisans are overthrown, I’m like hmm, that doesn’t sound bad. He’s against the Credit people, but he thinks Retail is always going to be a part of our lives and that Retail girls can be Creative. His ideas are a little out there, but at least he believes in something, right?

  Sigh. Okay, Princess P, I’m off to swiffer the balcony, which is covered with bird doo 24/7. This is New York and everyone always shits all over you. Ha ha.

  JULY 12

  GRILLBITCH TO EUNI-TARD:

  I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you right away, Panda. Something really BAD is happening here. These LNWIs ran into my father’s factory when it was closed and took it over and they phased out the LAPD last month and the National Guard won’t do anything and now it’s like we’re going to lose the business or something? I heard my mother and father just VERBALLING VERY QUIETLY in their bedroom and I got so scared, because I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to help. Usually they tell me everything but the look on my father’s face was like uhhhhhhhhhhhh and they were even talking about going back to Korea for a while. I tried to go to Padma and there was a road block on the 405 and they had people with their hands behind their heads, so I just turned off into a service station and sat there with the motor running and then I just started HITTING AND HITTING AND HITTING the steering wheel. WTF??????????? How can they not protect our business? How can they just let this Aziz’s Army do what it wants? It’s like they don’t want us to feel safe anymore. I don’t think you should hang out with this David guy, Eunice. He sounds like one of those dicks who’s destroying my family. And I don’t want to be with Gopher either because he’s not one of us and he understands NOTHING and his parents have old-school money and it’s all just a JOKE to him. I told him about my dad’s factory and he was like “good let the poor people take over.” I think this is the time for us to forget who we are and to be a part of our families and everything else is just that weird noise you hear when people you don’t know are verballing. It’s true, everyone is a ghost around me, except when I’m on the äppärät with you. This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I’m sorry you had a sucky dinner with your parents and I’m glad you’re loving Lenny more than ever, but you should take into consideration what your parents say, because they’ve been around for so long. I’m not saying don’t date Lenny, just balance in your mind what you feel for him and what you’ll eventually have to do. I love you, sweet potato.

  EUNI-TARD: Hi, Sally. Did you hear LNWIs took over the Kang’s plunger business?

  SALLYSTAR: No. That’s terrible.

  EUNI-TARD: That’s all you have to say?

  SALLYSTAR: What do you want me to say?

  EUNI-TARD: Do you want to get burgers? You can have a little red meat if you promise to just do vegetables and yogurt for a week.

  EUNI-TARD: Hello? Earth to Sally Park.

  EUNI-TARD: You must be busy. You still haven’t told me what you think of Lenny.

  SALLYSTAR: Everyone’s concerned about you.

  EUNI-TARD: They’re CONCERNED? That’s really nice.

  SALLYSTAR: Mommy and Daddy just don’t want you to rush into anything.

  EUNI-TARD: And you’re their Media spokeswoman now?

  SALLYSTAR: We’re not a perfect family but we’re still a family, right?

  EUNI-TARD: I don’t know. You tell me.

  SALLYSTAR: We have to get new carpeting for the living room and new runners for the stairs. Do you want to come to NJ and help us pick it out?

  EUNI-TARD: Can I bring Lenny?

  SALLYSTAR: You can do whatever you want Eunice.

  EUNI-TARD: I was kidding.

  SALLYSTAR: So you’ll come?

  EUNI-TARD: I’ll come. But I’m not going to sit next to Dad or say anything to him. Lenny uses the word truculent. Dad’s like a truculent child, it’s best to ignore him.

  SALLYSTAR: Cut him some slack. He’s trying. He’s not completely well inside and that means we have to forgive him.

  EUNI-TARD: Whatever.

  SALLYSTAR: Seriously. You will feel so much better if you forgive him, Eunice. Then you can focus on what’s happening on the rest of the planet. Maybe you can help me set up a food distribution committee for the tent cities we’re doing with Columbia and NYU. Things are getting really bad at Tompkins Square.

  EUNI-TARD: How do you know I’m not helping out already?

  SALLYSTAR: Huh?

  EUNI-TARD: Nothing. I’ll forgive Dad when he’s 70 years old and Uncle Joon has gambled all his money away and he’s this raving homeless man who turns to me and Lenny for help. Then I’ll be like, you treated me and Mommy and Sally like shit, but now here’s some money so you don’t starve.

  SALLYSTAR: That’s so horrible. I can’t believe you would even think that.

  EUNI-TARD: Hey, I’m kidding. Sense of humor?

  EUNI-TARD: Sally, are you still there? I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I really miss Myong-hee. Last time I was in LA I tried to braid her and she was squealing “No, Eunice emo!” like leave me alone, you’re not the boss of my hair!!! She’s such a cute little oinker. I bet next time we see her she’ll be like four inches taller. I don’t want her to grow up.

  EUNI-TARD: Sally? Come on! Was it the thing I said about dad?

  EUNI-TARD: Fine. My BOYFRIEND is almost home and we’re going to make a branzino together.

  EUNI-TARD: Sally, do you love me?

  SALLYSTAR: What?

  EUNI-TARD: I’m serious. Do you really love me? I mean like a person. Not just an older sister you’re supposed to look up to.

  SALLYSTAR: I don’t want to talk about this. Of course I love you.

  EUNI-TARD: Maybe I didn’t do enough.

  SALLYSTAR: What are you talking about? Would you please just SHUT UP ALREADY. I’m so sick of you. THE PAST, THE PAST, THE PAST!!!

  SALLYSTAR: Hello? Eunice.

  SALLYSTAR: Eunice?

  SALLYSTAR: Hello.

  ANTI-INFLAMMATION

  FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

  JULY 20

  Dear Diary,

  Noah told me there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day. He made it sound like an urban rapture, his aging face taking on a careful glow, as if he was borrowing some of the light of which he spoke. I thought he was emoting when he said it, but his äppärät was at standby, he wasn’t streaming: This was real enough. We were sitting in some crappy St. George café, oddly moved by the fact that there were still cafés out
in the world, much less on Staten Island. “I’d love to see that,” I said. “When does it happen exactly?”

  “We missed it,” Noah said. “It was late in June.”

  “Next year then,” I said.

  And then, like a perfect Media drama queen, Noah told me he expected to be dead by the next year. Something about the Restoration Authority, the Bipartisans, the price of biofuel, the decline of the tides—who can keep up anymore? That kind of ruined the effect of what he was saying about the light hitting the avenues just so. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to strain for me, that I liked him exactly as he was: perfectly above average, angry but decent, just smart enough. I thought of Sammy the Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, his calmly depressive countenance, the way he approached extinction with both equanimity and unobtrusive despair. Maybe this was what Noah was jabbering about when he followed the light across the city. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful.

  Speaking of the light, I had one luminous moment with Eunice this week. I caught her looking at my Wall of Books with some curiosity, specifically at a washed-out old cover of a Milan Kundera paperback—a bowler hat floats over a Prague cityscape—her index fingers raised above the book as if ready to tap at the BUY ME NOW symbol on her äppärät, her other fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness. When she saw me approach she slid the book back on its shelf and retreated to the couch, smelling her fingers for book odor, her cheeks in full blush. But I knew she was curious, my reluctant sentence-monger, and I chalked up yet another victory—the second after what I thought was a very successful dinner with her parents.

  Life with Euny has been okay. Exciting, sometimes upsetting. We argued daily. She never backed down. A fighter to the very last. This is how a human being is forged after an unhappy early life. This is the independence of growing up, of standing up for yourself, even if against a phantom enemy.

  Mostly we fought about social commitments. She’d be fine with her Elderbird friends who just moved back to New York. They seem like decent girls, effervescent but unsure of themselves, lusting after big-ticket items and some measure of identity, confusing one for the other, but basically in no great hurry to grow up. One girl who actually ate food scored only in the low 500s on her Fuckability, so the other girls would give her tips on how to lose weight. They’d reach over and pinch her all the time, coat her in creams until she glowed sadly on my living-room couch, and weigh her as if she were a prized albacore hanging over a Tokyo wharf. Another girl was going for that new Naked Librarian look, very little covering her body except glasses as thick as my storm windows, which I thought was funny because even a fine institution like Elderbird had recently closed its physical library, so what the hell was this girl even referencing? Then they’d get trashed on rosé out on our (our!) balcony, those cute, bloated, drunken faces of theirs, as they told these long, circular stories that were supposed to be funny but instead proved highly disturbing, narratives of a cheap, ephemeral world where everyone let everyone down as a matter of course and women sometimes got pissed on in front of others. I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.

  I had told Eunice, offhandedly and wearing my cutest platypus grin, that the next two weeks would prove busy on the social front. Joshie had been begging to meet her and expected us on Saturday at his house. Grace and Vishnu were having a party in Staten Island on the Monday after that to officially announce Grace’s pregnancy. “I know you’re not, like, the biggest socializer,” I said.

  But she had already turned away from me, the angry spires of her shoulder blades staying my comforting hand.

  “Your boss,” she said, “wants to meet me?”

  “He loves young people. He’s turning into a teenager himself.”

  “That bitch Grace wants us over? Why? So she can laugh at me some more?”

  “Are you kidding? Grace loves you!”

  “Probably wants to be my big sister. No thanks, Len.”

  “She does care about you, Eunice. She wants to find you a job in Retail. She said her Princeton roommate might know of an internship at Padma.” The three times we had briefly, tangentially, touched upon the subject of Eunice procuring employment and helping out with the escalating air-conditioning bill ($8,230 unpegged, just for the month of June), she had mentioned working in Retail. All her Elderbird friends wanted the same. No big surprise there. Credit for boys, Retail for girls.

  “You don’t understand, Leonard.”

  The phrase I hate the most in the world. I do understand. Not everything, but a lot. And what I don’t understand, I certainly want to learn more about. If Eunice ever asked me to I would take an entire week off from work, claim some family-related emergency (which is essentially what this is), and listen to her talk. I would put a box of tissues and some calming miso broth between us, take out my äppärät, write it all down, pinpoint the hurt, make reasonable suggestions based on my own experiences, become completely versed in all things Park. “I’m broke,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I have nothing to wear. And my butt is fat.”

  “You weight eighty-three pounds. Everyone on Grand Street stares at your ass in wonder. You have three closets’ worth of shoes and dresses.”

  “Eighty-six. And I have nothing for the summer, Lenny. Are you even listening to me?”

  We fought some more. She went to the living room and started teening, legs crossed, the dead smile on her face, forceful sighs, my entreaties rising in pitch. Eventually we reached a kind of compromise. We would go to the United Nations Retail Corridor and buy new clothes for the both of us. I would contribute 60 percent of the cost of her outfits, and she would cover the rest with her parents’ Credit. Like I said, a compromise.

  I’d never been to the UNRC. I’ve always been intimidated by Retail Corridors, and this one was supposed to be the biggest yet. When I went to the Corridor they carved out of Union Square two years ago, everyone looked better and way younger than I did. I love going to these little offbeat boutiques in Staten Island with Grace, even if the clientele is older and grayer, folks who came of age in the grand Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and who have now been forced to retreat to Staten Island.

  I started panicking the moment we got to the UN: the crush of humanity pouring out of the seven layers of underground parking; the floor samples emitting info that flooded my äppärät with impulsive data; the Debt Bombers singling me out for my impressive Credit ranking; the giant ARA “America Celebrates It’s [sic] Spenders” banners, which now featured this girl Eunice actually knew from high school who finagled all these Credit lines and managed to buy six spring collections and a house.

  The afterglow of the setting sun rushed through the glass roof of the UNRC, the steel trellises hundreds of feet above us gleaming like the ribs of a fearsome animal. I think this is where the Security Council used to meet, although I could be wrong. Since my sabbatical in Rome, it seems that America had learned her lesson on overhead, had shuttered her traditional malls. These thrifty Retail Corridors were supposed to mimic North African bazaars of yore, their only purpose a quick exchange of goods and services, minus the plangent cries of the sellers and the whiffs of tangerine sweat.

  Eunice didn’t need a map. She led and I followed past the merchandise crowding the endless floor space in haphazard fashion, one store running into another, rack after rack after rack, each approached, surveyed, considered, dismissed. Here were the famous nippleless Saaami bras that Eunice had shown me on AssLuxury and the fabled Padma corsets that the Polish porn star wore on AssDoctor. We stopped to look at some conservative JuicyPussy summer cocktail dresses. “I’m going to need two,” Eunice said. “One for your boss’s party and one for that bitch Grace.”

  “With my boss it’s not really a
party,” I said. “We’ll drink two glasses of wine and eat some carrots and blueberries.”

  Eunice ignored me and set about her task. She did some äppärät work to get a sense of how things were selling around the world. Then she went over to a circle of black, identical-looking dresses and started clicking through them. Click, click, click, each hanger hitting the preceding one, making the sound of an abacus. She spent less than a full second on each dress, but each second seemed more meaningful than the hours she spent on AssLuxury viewing the same merchandise; each was an encounter with the real. Her face was steely, concentrated, the mouth slightly open. Here was the anxiety of choice, the pain of living without history, the pain of some higher need. I felt humbled by this world, awed by its religiosity, the attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all work.

  “They either don’t have a size zero,” Eunice said, upon clicking through the last of the JuicyPussy summer dresses, “or there’s this weird embroidery on the hem. They’re trying to make themselves more classy than TotalSurrender, which has the slit down the crotch. Let’s go to Onionskin.”

  “Aren’t those the sheer jeans?” I said. I imagined Eunice with her labia and behind exposed to passersby as she crossed an especially busy Delancey Street, drivers of cars with Jersey plates rolling down their tinted windows in disbelief. I felt protective of her minimalist package, but there was a frisson of eroticism as well, not to mention social positioning. Others would see her little landing strip and think highly of me.