Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Protecting the neighborhood,” they said in these South African–sounding accents. “From the looters. You live here?”

  “I’m Nana Nanabragovna’s boyfriend.”

  “Really? What are you called?”

  “Fat Uncle. Snack Daddy. Misha Vainberg. Call me what you like, but please let me through.”

  “Be careful out there, sir. The people have lost their senses.”

  “That’s the people for you.” I pressed on toward a gallery of heat and sound. After a few solitary meters, I was accepted into a crowd of around a million persons gang-pressed into the dust bowl of the Sevo Terrace. Hands burrowed into me; little hands, big hands, sea-wet hands, sun-dried hands. Everyone was looking for my wallet but kept coming up with my balls. “They look and feel almost alike,” I hinted to my friendly assailants. “Keep looking. Ooh, you’re very warm. No, no, no. I don’t like tickling.”

  The crowd passed me around, squeezing and poking. This is what Jesus must have felt like on a good day. I was relayed under the tentacle-arches of the Sevo Vatican and toward the sad greenery of the waterfront. There was rumbling above us. A deep groaning sound. Then a couple of pop-pop-pops. Small-arms fire. I looked up, hoping to catch sight of my favorite GRAD missiles. Nothing doing. The teenage members of one of the True Footrest Posses were scrambling up a hill with their mortars and surface-to-air missiles. Good luck, kids! I hit something hard and stony. An old woman was laid out on an enormous marble conch shell, part of some defunct art nouveau fountain. Her whole family was crying over her, children by her feet, grown-ups at the head. “Is she dead?” I asked them.

  “We’ll never forget her,” the relatives wailed.

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “What may seem like a terrible loss today may be just an uncomfortable memory tomorrow. She was old. Hard to carry. Use this opportunity to move to America.” But after I spoke, the sobbing only increased. A fist waved through the air attached to some glandular epithets. I moved away, shaking my head. The people had lost their senses. It was all just jungle emotions now. They couldn’t wait to start mourning one another. That was the one thing they knew backward and forward. Death from above, death from within. Tyrants and heart attacks. The three most popular words in the Russian language: “Stalin. Gitler. Infarkt.”

  What the hell? Everyone was screaming at me now. I turned this way and that, toward the sea, away from the sea, and wherever I turned, I saw gleaming gold teeth and infected tonsils ululating in hatred and terror. “I didn’t do anything,” I said, looking at my feet. “Just let me be,” I told them. But the screaming only grew louder. And then the deep groaning sound resumed, and I heard a steel drum played over a second-rate loudspeaker. Pop, someone said. Pop pop pop. Shhhheeeeeouuuuuuu!

  I looked up. The people had put up their fists and were crouching fearfully on the ground. And then I understood. They weren’t angry with me. I wasn’t the problem. I looked into the people’s eyes. Their eyes, it would seem, were watching God. I followed them up to the Svanï Terrace. Nothing. Then upward to the International Terrace. Nothing still. No, wait. Something. Something unusual was happening up on the International Terrace. Something not quite right but beautiful still.

  The skyscrapers were dancing.

  Not with each other, but with each other in mind, like flirtatious poor folk sizing up each other’s hips across an equatorial dance floor. The Hyatt danced. The Radisson danced. So did Bechtel. BP was practically making a fool of itself. Only ExxonMobil stood aloof, nodding its head a fraction, tapping its feet, barely keeping up with the beat.

  And then the Hyatt decided to cut loose. She—for there was a slender femininity about her—lowered her hazel eyes, ignored the spaghetti strap that had fallen promiscuously off her pretty shoulder, and then, in a move of such dazzling brilliance that the enraptured sun turned rainbow every glittering piece of her broken heart, she jumped across the sea.

  38

  My Mother Will Be Your Mother

  Someone was fondling me, and I didn’t like it at all. I turned over on one side and felt a moist clam crunch beneath me. A disgusting male mouth, all turmeric and bad teeth, was breathing down my nose. “My hand!” the mouth said. I opened my eyes to face a man I can only describe as polluted. And in pain.

  “Sorry, fellow,” I said. I rolled off his hand and he clutched it, crying and trying to unbend the fingers, which, in my dazed state, seemed as green and squirmy as the legs of a grasshopper. “Ooofah,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my intact pale squishies. Was I still on the Sevo Terrace? What the hell had happened? The lanza, for one thing. And then…Some strange memories swished about, filling my head with vapor trails. But the trails all led to one place: to the tentacles of the Sevo Vatican unfurling outward, as if to embrace me, one orange clump of stucco in particular somersaulting toward my happy, stoned, unflinching face. I raised my hand toward the bridge of my nose and felt a dark, deep, caved-in nasal pain. A hump had swollen on one part of it, but there was also a new emptiness underneath, a concavity, making me feel, in some ways, like a gentile. I stopped playing with my nose and looked upward at the city around me.

  The city was finished.

  The skyscrapers of the International Terrace were still standing, but their facades had been entirely stripped of glass, leaving only the joist-and-girder skeletons underneath. In their new incarnations, the buildings looked like charred model showrooms for disposable Western furniture. The Hyatt was no longer a magical destination for the city’s priciest hookers, but rather, an open-faced checkerboard of five hundred squares, each marked by an identical queen-size bed, cherry-wood dresser, and marble-topped desk. The office towers, on the other hand, were a complex geometry of scrambled workstations and blasted modular units, a dizzying white-collar crush akin to the world’s most difficult flowchart. But beneath this sophistication lay a simple, exposed fact: the West, when stripped bare, was essentially a series of cheap plastic components, pneumatic work chairs, and poorly framed motivational posters. The towers that had risen over the city as a watermark of Euro-American civilization were work hives and nothing more. As quickly as they had been put together, they could be taken apart. Already, teams of adventurous local alpinists were mounting the shorn facades of the towers and hauling down flat-screen televisions and gleaming Hyatt toilet fixtures by means of an ingenious pulley system they had rigged up in a matter of hours.

  Beneath the International Terrace, the Svanï Terrace had taken the brunt of the falling debris, the Moorish-style opera house covered in glistening shards of green glass and splattered dark blue by an infinity of exploding toner cartridges. Six Svanï churches had been set on fire and were smoldering evenly across the terrace like the smokestacks of some previously undiscovered industry. On the Sevo Terrace, the dome of the Sevo Vatican resembled an egg cracked down the middle by means of the world’s heaviest spoon. The tentacled columns had crumbled entirely; from this day forward, the church’s storied octopus shape would exist only on the pages of Soviet-era guidebooks and the reverse side of the hundred-absurdi (US$.001) note.

  I got up and walked toward the waterfront, thinking, improbably, of washing the blood from my face amid the oily swirls of the Caspian. I moved along carefully, for there were people everywhere in various stages of injury and distress. I didn’t know it yet, but the Hyatt and the office buildings had been evacuated completely before being hit by an afternoon’s worth of rocket-propelled grenades and artillery shells. Most of the casualties were Gorbigrad and countryside refugees trying to take shelter in the terraces below. I avoided the eyes of the gently rocking citizens still crouching instinctively on the ground. The scene around me had reached a perfectly abject equilibrium among those quietly bleeding to death and those stumbling ahead looking for water and some trace of authority.

  I walked toward the docks, the sun either setting or rising over the oil fields, it was impossible to grasp which. A woman in her forties approached me. She had gold teeth
and a clean Russian accent. “How do we get out of this circle?” the woman asked, her tone as soft and ponderous as the big bosom that she proudly held aloft. “This karma that’s been dealt to us?”

  “Good question,” I said, looking up at the high-rise remains of the International Terrace. I didn’t want to mention the fact that I never really believed in karma, that I thought most events were simply the outcomes of discrete actions taken by individuals, corporate entities, and nation-states. But how do you say that to a common person without sounding like a wisenheimer?

  The woman followed my gaze up to the rump of the defunct Daewoo Building. “Oh, those,” she said. “I don’t really care what happens to the foreigners. Our lives will be hell with or without them. Do you want to hear my story?”

  “Um,” I said. I was coming off my lanza high, and I wanted to get right back on.

  “Don’t worry, it’s a short story. I can tell that you are an important man and that you are expected all over town. Generally speaking, I earned thirty dollars a month working for the railways ministry. Until the trains stopped running. Then my son got drafted into the Sevo forces before he could take his magister exams. And we’re ethnic Russians. What do we care who wins, the Sevo or the Svanï? And then my husband left me. I want to marry again, but there are no more normal men left. If you know of a good man, please tell me.” She looked up and down my well-fed profile and brushed her sparse reddish hair back seductively. Did she consider me a good man? Given her circumstances, maybe I was. I tried, as a common courtesy, to picture her with her skirt hiked up to her waist while I took her from behind, but nothing was registering. Where was my Nana, anyway? Safe at home, I assumed. Surrounded by armed men.

  A little girl ran up to us and clutched at the woman’s leg. She was of that age when all children get to look sleek and confident, a tanned summertime face and a bun of straw hair held back by a bonnet, and yet there was something mousy and unkind in her smile. I noticed that her feet were dirty and unshod. “Where are your sandals, dear?” I murmured. “There’s broken glass everywhere.”

  The woman started whispering violently into the girl’s ear. “Talk nicely,” she said. “Talk intelligently to the good man. Don’t be a stupid little one. Don’t make things up.”

  The girl turned away from me and shook her head. She buried her face in her elbow and made some indecent noises. “What a cute one,” I said. “What’s the matter? You don’t want to talk to your Fat Uncle? Well, don’t be scared. The war will be over soon, and then we’ll all go home and play with our kittens.”

  The woman gave the child a nasty bump forward with her knee. “Yulia, talk to the nice man!” she commanded. “Children are difficult,” she said to me, “but at least you can teach them things. She’s my youngest. Five years old. She’s a bit slow. My two sons, now, they’re a real treasure. One has a bronze medal in school, and the other is clever like an oligarch.”

  “I know a fairy tale,” the girl said in her syrupy little girl’s voice. “It’s about a fishee that gets caught in the sea and then the fisherman plucks the fishee’s eyes out so she can’t swim back, and then he cuts her stomach open to take out the caviar—”

  The mother reached down and swatted the girl’s tender neck. “That’s a stupid story,” the mother said. The girl did not cry out. She merely touched her neck and whispered, “Didn’t hurt at all.”

  “Listen,” the mother said. “You’re a nice man. Too nice to be talking to us, or to such a stupid girl with her ugly stories. My boys are starving. If you give me fifty dollars, we can go beneath the docks, all three of us. I know a little space where no one can see us. You can do whatever you want.”

  “What?” I said.

  My body floated up, like a balloon, like a Walloon or what have you. I was gone from this place; I was in New York, with Nana, on a park bench. The sun was setting. A day of commerce was at an end. I could smell frankfurters and homeless men. I could smell myself on Nana’s smooth brown hand.

  “What?” the woman repeated, as if mocking me.

  “What are you saying?” I said.

  “Just that if you wanted to,” the woman said evenly, “if you had the money, we could go beneath the docks. All of us, or just you and Yulia. It would take fifty dollars, and we wouldn’t ask any questions.”

  I swung at her. I had no plan of attack, but almost immediately, my fist found its way inside her mouth and was working to dislodge those hideous golden incisors. To no avail. She bit down on me, but there was no blood. Neither of us screamed. I breathed out the word “bitch” but heard only its stinging falsity. I raised my other hand, trembling, into the air, as if I were an A student trying to draw the teacher’s attention. I formed a second fist and brought it down on the woman’s head, co-opting all the weight at my disposal. The woman crumpled. She just lay there on the broken, glass-strewn concrete, shaking feverishly and trying to mouth a single word, which may have been “police.”

  As if there were any police left.

  My ankle throbbed. Yulia, the little girl, was biting me, digging her nails into my flesh. At first I didn’t shake her off. I stood there and let the pain accumulate, willing it to shock me into action, into a new state of resolve. But the little girl couldn’t do it. She had neither the strength nor the sharp teeth to change me, to make me see differently. I turned around and started to walk away, loosening her grip on me with each hard-won step, dragging her silently across the concrete and broken glass. “Papa,” I heard her cry after she had finally fallen off my ankle. I didn’t look back.

  I wanted to go back to my bed in the Hyatt. I wanted to take a long bath in the Roman tub. I wanted my allergy-free pillow and a mindful note from Larry Zartarian by my bedside. The farther I walked away from the pier, the more I hated the little girl. A part of me—a hideous part, to be sure—wished I had punched her instead of her mother. Wished I had killed her. A brick to that mousy smile, to all our mousy smiles. Let us all die, I thought. Let this planet be free of us. And then, a hundred years later, let the resurgent earth sprout wispy dandelions and delicate hamsters and five-star hotels. Nothing will ever come of the human race. Nothing will ever come of this land.

  I was walking, or so it seemed, toward the International Terrace, toward the 718 perfume store, and toward the Hyatt—but those three things existed only in a very abstract sense. I was walking toward the ideal of the Hyatt. Toward the memory of a 718 perfume store. Toward the faint outcropping of the burnt-out International Terrace. What I was really doing was walking away from the girl, whose screams for Papa followed me down a road stained with the blood of others.

  “Friend,” a voice called out to me. “Friend, where are you going?” A spry old man, an amiable clown, was running alongside me, his feet barely keeping up with my long, desperate strides.

  “To the Hyatt,” I said.

  “It’s gone,” said the old man. “The Svanï bombed it. Tell me, friend, who are you by nationality?”

  I told him. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man crossing himself. “Some of the best people in the world are Jews,” he told me. “My mother will be your mother, and there will always be water in my well to drink.”

  I continued staring ahead, walking briskly, and trying to recapture my solitude. Everyone talked too much here. No one left you alone. What if I didn’t want the man’s mother? What kind of stupid imposition was this ritualized mother-swapping?

  We walked for a while without a word between us. And then the man took several authoritative steps that were actually the prelude to a halt. Without knowing why, solely through the power of his suggestion, I lingered as well. I looked into his face. He wasn’t old at all. The thick zipperlike creases forming an odd parallelogram across his face were the strokes of a large knife wielded with impunity. His nose had absorbed so many uppercuts that it had taken on the retroussé shape of a New England debutante’s. And his eyes—his eyes were gone, replaced by small black cylinders that could see only the target in front of
them, the pupils reflecting but one frightening idea trapped in a single cone of light. “Let me shake your hand,” the man said as he took hold of my limp arm and squeezed. “No, not like that. The way real brothers shake it.”

  I did my best, but the air had gone out of me. His fingers were covered by a jumble of numerical tattoos, testifying to a life spent in Soviet prisons. “Yes, I’ve been to jail,” he said, noticing my gaze, “but not for thieving or killing. I’m an honest man. You don’t believe me?”

  “I believe you,” I whispered.

  “Any enemy of yours in Svanï City is an enemy of mine,” the man said. “What did I tell you about my mother?”

  “That she’s my mother also,” I stammered. I could feel fat bloody pain in my right hand, and the world tilted toward the left, as if to compensate. If I was going to die, I wanted my Rouenna near me.

  “My mother…no, our mother is in the hospital—” the man started.

  “What do you want?” I whispered.

  “Just hear me out,” the man said. “I could have done wrong by you. I could have called my friends who are waiting around the corner with their kinjals. Just like this one.” He turned his torso to let me see the glint of the short Caucasian dagger glowing dully in its wilted leather scabbard. “But I didn’t.”