Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Remember,” I tried again, “the first place we went to when we came to the park?” I took her by the hand and led her past the throng-choked Bethesda Fountain, the Angel of the Waters statue, lily in hand, blessing the tiny lakes below. Once the familiar Cedar Hill was in our sights, she turned around so quickly my arm cracked within its socket. “What’s the matter?” I said. But she was already taking me away from my nostalgia, walking toward safer emotional climes.

  “What is it, honey?” I tried again.

  “Don’t, Lenny,” she said. “You don’t have to keep trying.”

  “We can get out of here!” I almost shouted. “We can go to Vancouver. We can get Stability-Canada residency.”

  “Why, so you can be with your Grace?”

  “No! Because this place …” I gestured a full two hundred degrees with one spastic arm, trying to encompass the totality of what had become of my city. “We won’t survive together in this place, Eunice. No one can anymore. Only people with blood on their hands.”

  “So dramatic,” Eunice said. The way she said it, her tone not just compassionless but assured, made me fear the worst. She was in possession of something I didn’t know about, or maybe knew too well.

  We went in a southerly direction via a cemented road, avoiding the Sheep Meadow, where we had taken our first long kiss in New York, and all the other snug, green, tender-hearted places where we had found love. At Central Park South, before the row of reconfigured Triplexes that used to be the mansard-roofed Plaza Hotel, surrounded by the piles of horse shit that demarcated the grass and trees from the difficult city, we both looked back at the park.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Let me take you to work.” I stood there, not wanting to lose a minute with her, feeling the end drawing near. “Look, the cabs are back! Hallelujah! Let’s get one. My treat.”

  I let her go at Elizabeth Street, at the Retail place where, courtesy of Joshie’s connections, Eunice now sold recyclable leather wristbands featuring avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words RUPTURE NYC for two thousand yuan apiece. I hid behind the trunk of an exhausted urban tree and watched. She worked alongside another girl, a dark-haired and voluptuous member of Boston’s Irish diaspora, and the store’s manager, a much older woman who intermittently showed up to stick her finger in the chests of her underlings and to growl at them in Argentine-accented English. I watched Eunice work—diligently sweeping the store with a lovely Thai straw broom, anticipating the questions of the adventurous Chinese and French tourists who stopped by, and parrying them with a toothy smile, tallying up the sales on an old äppärät at the end of the day, and then, when the last yuan and euro were accounted for, waiting for the store’s shutters to close so that she could stop smiling and put on her usual face, the face of a grave and unmitigated displeasure.

  A Town Car pulled up to the curb, aggressively stubbing its nose between two parked cars. A man sprang out from the back seat, powerful legs carrying him into the store. Was it him? The back of the head, shorn, globular, rosy. A cashmere sport coat, a little too formal and expensive. The gait? That uncertain balance that had first made me fall for him? I wasn’t sure. But so what? So what if he had come to see her? He had got her the job after all. He was just checking up on his investment. In the store I saw her speaking to the man, looking up at him. Those eyes. When they took in important information they narrowed and refused to blink. Then there was the tilt of the chin. Worshipful.

  I went to a neighboring bar, which boasted some kind of idiotic Gallic theme, and began to drink with some assholes, one of whom also had parents from the former Soviet Union and was also named Lyonya in Russian and Lenny in English. He was a gemologist with both Belgian and HolyPetroRussia citizenship, a big guy with oddly delicate hands and the kind of obvious humor and natural rapport that had always been denied me. The night ended with my doppelgänger punching me twice in the stomach, like the older brother I never had—coincidentally, we had argued about the role of family in our lives—and then graciously putting me into a cab, from which I alighted directly onto an innocent Upper East Side hedge outside the former nurses’ dormitory where we were housed, and there, amidst the early-November gloom, enjoyed a brief coma, my first real sleep in weeks.

  Fall arrived, the Indian summer finally at an end, the damaged city straining to regain lost glory. Along those lines, my employers were to throw a shindig to welcome the visiting members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Capitalist Party. The event would be held at the Triplex of one of our Staatling board members, and would double, trendily, as a kind of art opening.

  Eunice and I woke up late on the day of the party, and she crawled on top of me and pressed her rib cage into my face and started to close the last juncture between us. It had been a while. The past week, I had been too sad even to think of physical love, and our new gray surroundings were too depressing. “Euny,” I said. “Baby.” I tried to turn her around, to go down on her, because that’s what I do best, because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing her morning face so close to mine, the slight imperfections of sleep around the eyes, the unedited private version, my Eunice Park. But she clasped her legs around my swollen torso, and we were instantly together, two lovers on a tiny bed surrounded exclusively by boxes of books, weak light from the square porthole of a window illuminating nothing about us, save for the fact that we were one.

  “I can’t do this,” I remember saying to myself in the mirror a few minutes later, while Eunice fiddled with the lousy shower. She grabbed my hand, took me inside the bath, and soaped up the great twin confluences of my chest and pubic hair. I tried to wash her down too, but she had her own way of doing it, gingerly and with a loofah. Then I did some things wrong with my soap and Cetaphil skin cleanser and she re-did them for me. She put a great mess of conditioner into what’s left of my mane and stroked it alive. How vulnerable her body looked under the water; how translucent. “I can’t do this,” I said once more.

  “It’s okay, Lenny,” she said, looking away from me. She clambered out of the shower. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe for me.”

  The art opening/Chinese welcoming party was more formal than I had thought. I guess I should have read the invite more carefully and dressed in something hipper than the dress shirt and slacks I’ve been trotting out since I was a white-collar dork at age twenty. I can’t remember the name of the featured artist (John Mamookian? Astro Piddleby?), but I was moved by his work. He had done a series of extreme satellite zoom-ins of the deadly conditions in parts of the middle and the south of our country. The canvases were these rustling silky things, hung like meat off two or three hooks that descended from the hundred-foot-tall ceilings of the Triplex, and the works actually fluttered a tiny bit when people walked by, so that their presence next to you felt like that of a friend with a wisp of a secret.

  Dead is dead, we know where to file another person’s extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead. Grainy close-ups of people using people in ways I had never openly considered, not because murder doesn’t run through my veins, but because I grew up in an era when the baroque was safely held at bay. An old man from Wichita without eyes, with the eyes physically removed, with one of the eyeholes being forced open by a laughing young man. A woman on a bridge, naked, frizzy-haired, something of our former civilization represented by an ancient NPR tote bag at her feet, a smashed-in nose atop a bleeding mouth, forced to hold her arms up as something trickled from one armpit and a whole crowd of men all wearing these makeshift uniforms (on which one could see the insignia of a former pizza-delivery service) cheering blatantly around her, assault weapons pointed at her nakedness, an almost bohemian joy on their unshaven faces. All the works had these disarming titles, like St. Cloud, Minnesota, 7:00 a.m., which made them even worse, even scarier. There was one called The Birthday Party, Phoenix, with five adolescent gi
rls, anyway, I don’t want to talk about this anymore, but these works were amazing to see—real art with a documentary purpose.

  The Triplex was really one Triplex on top of another on top of another, each twisted at a forty-five-degree angle from the one below, like three carefully stacked bricks—essentially, a minor skyscraper—and then cantilevered over the East River, so that the destroyers of the visiting People’s Liberation Army Navy passed by at eye level, and you could almost reach over and touch the surface-to-air missile batteries glistening like tins of mint candy on their raised decks. About half of the Triplex was the living space carved out from the middle of the three Triplexes to form a busy souk-like area beneath the enormous skylight. It was roughly the size of the main hall in Grand Central Station, I was told. The space had been entirely cleared of furniture (or maybe this is how it always was), except for those frightening artworks shimmering at shoulder level and these little transparent cubes, which once you sat upon them filled with a red or yellow radiance, in deference to the Chinese flag and our guests. The place was so flooded with natural light that the distinction between indoors and outdoors no longer mattered, and at times I felt I was standing in a glass cathedral with the roof blown off.

  I wanted to congratulate the artist on his work, that’s how strongly I felt about it, and to recommend a trip out to my parents’ Westbury so that he could see a different, more hopeful take on post-Rupture America. But they had this gimmicky thing going on, where, any time someone approached the artist whom he didn’t know or didn’t like the looks of, these spikes shot up from the floor all around him and you had to back away. He was actually a nice-looking guy, kind of square-jawed but with something milky, almost Midwestern, in his eyes, and he was wearing this cougar-print shirt and an old-school pinstriped Armani jacket which was festooned with random numbers made out of masking tape. He was busy talking to a wildly emotive post-American doyenne dressed in a cheongsam covered with dragons and phoenixes. The moment I approached them, the spikes shot out from the floor around him, and some of the serving girls in Onionskins who were standing next to the artist just gave me the old familiar look that denoted I was not a human being. Oh well, I thought. At least the art was great.

  A lot of young Media people were hanging around one another protectively, clusters of boys and sometimes girls in proper suits and dresses, trying to impress their betters but clearly lost in the immensity of the place. Anyway, they were just so happy to be there, to be fed, to drink their rum and Tsingtaos, to be a part of society, and to avoid the five-jiao lines. I wondered if they had ever heard of Noah or knew how he had died. Like all the Media people left in the city, they were wearing blue badges handed out by Staatling-Wapachung that read “We Do Our Part.”

  The Staatling-Wapachung bigwigs were dressed like young kids, a lot of vintage Zoo York Basic Cracker hoodies from the 2000s, and tons of dechronification, making me think they were actually their own children, but my äppärät informed me that most of them were in their fifties, sixties, or seventies. Sometimes I saw someone who I thought had been one of my Intakes, and I tried to say hi, but they could not really comprehend me in this glamorous context.

  I noticed that none of our clients or our directors wore äppäräti, only the servants and Media folk. Howard Shu had told me that more than once: The truly powerful don’t need to be ranked. It made me feel conscious of the shiny, warbling pebble around my neck. I passed by some Media twentysomethings streaming at one another and overheard the little tidbits of verballing that always depressed me. “Did you know November is bike week?” “There’s nothing wrong with her except she’s completely fucked up.” “When they say ‘12 p.m.’ does that mean noon or midnight?”

  Next to a cluster of StatoilHydro execs, ruddy elongated Norwegians and upper-caste Indians as tall as Norwegians, I spotted Eunice and her sister, Sally, talking to Joshie. As I began to make my way over to them, I passed one of the pieces showing a dead man perched upon the family couch in Omaha, a guy about my age, part Native American by the looks of him, with his face creeping slightly off his skull and the eyes eerily silenced, as if they had just been erased (“an interesting narrative strategy,” someone was saying). The picture was no less harrowing than anything else around me, the guy was mercifully dead, but for some reason I became agitated just looking at it, and my tongue went dry, sticking painfully to the roof of my mouth. I did what everyone eventually did: looked away.

  I want to talk about their clothes. This seems important to me. Joshie was wearing a cashmere sport coat, wool tie, and cotton dress shirt, all JuicyPussy4Men—a slightly more formal approximation of the same clothes Eunice had chosen for me. She was wearing a French-blue two-piece Chanel bouclé suit with a faux-pearl center and knee-high leather boots, so that all of her was concealed except for the tiny glow of her sharp kneecaps. She looked less like a woman than a gift. Sally was also overdressed for the occasion, a pinstriped suit and the pinprick of a golden cross around the soft pad of her neck. I noticed the beginnings of two hard-won laugh lines, and a chin dominated by a single disarming dimple. When I approached them, both sisters stopped talking to Joshie and put their hands to their mouths. And then, apropos of nothing, I realized what was bothering me about the picture of the dead guy on the couch in Omaha. At the corner of the work, beyond a scattering of youthful personal effects heavy on string instruments and obsolete laptops, a bitch lay dead, a German shepherd shot point-blank, a lightning bolt of blood spilling across the warped living-room floor. A puppy of negligible weeks, maybe days, had staked its front paws on the dead animal’s exposed stomach, astride her still-swollen teats. You couldn’t see the puppy’s face, but you could tell its ears were alert and its tail was tucked under its rear, from either sadness or fear. Why, of all things, did this worry me so?

  I blanked for a second, catching snatches of what Joshie was saying. “I met him through the skater scene.…” “I come from a different budgeting culture.…” “When you think about it, the capitalist system is more entrenched in America than anywhere else in the world.…”

  And then his arm was around me and we were walking away from the girls. I cannot recall our exact surroundings when he gave me his speech. We were lost in negative space, his closeness the only thing I could still cling to. He spoke of the seventy years in which he had not known love. How unfair that had been. How much love he had to give; how I had, in some ways, been a recipient of that love. But now he needed something different: intimacy, closeness, youth. When Eunice first walked into his apartment, he knew. He picked up my äppärät and produced a study on how May-December relationships lifted the lifespan ceilings for both partners. He spoke of practical things, my parents in Westbury. He could move them to a safer, peripheral region, like Astoria, Queens. He spoke of how we needed to spend some time apart, but how eventually the three of us could reconcile. “We could be like a family someday,” he said, but when he mentioned family, I could think only of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind turned away from what Joshie was saying, and I pondered my father’s humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

  I lost track of where I was, until Joshie brought me back to Eunice and Sally, who were holding hands and staring up into the blue portal of the skylight, as if awaiting deliverance. “Maybe you and Lenny should be alone right now,” he said to Eunice. But she wouldn’t let go of her sister and she would not look into my eyes. They stood together, silent, with their little chests thrust out ahead of them, their eyes quiet and blank, the seemingly endless continuation of their lives stretched out before them into the three dimensions of the Triplex.

  Words broke out of me. Stupid words. The worst final words I could have chosen, but words nonetheless. “Silly goose,” I said to Eunice. “You shouldn’t have w
orn such a warm suit. It’s still autumn. Aren’t you hot? Aren’t you hot, Eunice?”

  There was high-pitched yelling from the direction of the vestibule, not far from where we were, and Howard Shu was sprinting ahead like a gorgeous greyhound, shouting things at many people.

  The Chinese delegation had arrived. Two giant banners floated into the air, held aloft by an invisible force, as the opening bars of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (“Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while”) blared in the background.

  Welcome to America 2.0: A GLOBAL Partnership

  THIS Is New York: Lifestyle Hub, Trophy City

  A series of loud pops exploded in the air, reminding me of tracer fire during the Rupture. Firecrackers were being launched from the center of the souk-like space and through the enormous skylight above us. As the first batch went off, I saw Sally cringe and raise her arm protectively. Then there was a push to get to the front to see the Chinese. I let the bodies wash over me, the young octogenarians, wearing ironic John Deere T-shirts and trucker’s caps that barely contained their masses of silky new hair. Separated from the people I loved, pushed out of the glass house, I found myself in the winter-cold air, by a phalanx of limousines bearing the insignia of the People’s Capitalist Party, by a row of Triplexes cantilevered over the FDR Drive and the East River. There had once been housing projects here and a street called Avenue D. Media people ran past me as if there was a fire somewhere, as if tall buildings were burning. I was looking south. I should have been thinking about Eunice, mourning Eunice, but it wasn’t happening at the moment.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home to the 740 square feet that used to be mine. I wanted to go home to what used to be New York City. I wanted to feel the presence of the mighty Hudson and the angry, besieged East River and the great bay that stretched out from the pediment of Wall Street and made us a part of the world beyond.