Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  "On Tenth Avenue," I said.

  "Not far from—"

  "—that new boutique hotel—"

  "—they're gonna build."

  "The one with the portholes—"

  "—next to the Belgian place."

  "The one thing you can't find—"

  "—in New York?"

  "Right—"

  "—is a good paella."

  "You need a very big skillet—"

  "—the tapas bar."

  "The one on Crosby—"

  "—with the sherries."

  "The hoquerones—"

  "—the olives."

  "Zagat-rated—"

  "—twenty-three for food."

  "I went on a date—"

  "—there?"

  "Everyone does."

  "Even you?"

  "Me?"

  "I wish."

  "I wish right now."

  "I wish I was—"

  "Me, too."

  I eased my elbows onto the fish-stained tabletop, sneaked my head into the crook of my arm, and let loose with the sadness. I felt Nana touch my soft wavy hairs with her hand, which was slow and methodical in its ministrations. Unconcerned about the snickering waiters, she was quiet and dry-eyed, a professional tour guide comforting her charge after he was robbed of his wallet and passport. "Sorry," I said.

  "Sorry for nothing," she said, which may not have been her best English, but I understood what she meant.

  "I'm drunk," I said, which was only pardy true. She setded the bill and we walked slowly, unevenly, at last hand in hand, down the pier toward the teeming esplanade. A SCROD billboard hung along the pier, a Communist-era-looking tableau of three middle-aged local men beneath an exclamatory slogan in the local language. All three had hooded gray eyelids, reminding me of a parade of turdes sauntering down toward the tide. One looked like a tired intellectual. He and another were distinguished by poorly made silver teeth, the third by a thick, feminine mouth and a daring young man's expression. A wheezing loudspeaker beneath them blasted the techno music of five years ago interrupted by snippets of angry Sevo oratory. "What does it say?" I asked, pointing at the billboard.

  " 'The Independence of the People Will Soon Be Realized!' "

  "I like that funny-looking guy with the girlie mouth," I said. "He looks like an Odessa singer. He must be the junior dictator of the bunch. 'Don't hate me. I'm not Stalin. I'm only in training!' "

  "He's my father," Nana said.

  I did not register what she had said at first; per the usual, I had been lost in thought about some aspect of myself. "Oh," I said finally. I stopped to examine my palms, the prominent green veins trying so desperately to bring blood to the fingers.

  "I have something to tell you, Misha," Nana said in Russian, dispelling what was left of my Belgian identity. "My papa knew your papa well. They were in business together. He was a very dear man. When he came to Svani City, to our house, he would bring me sugar cubes and mandarin oranges. As if there were still shortages, like in the Soviet days. As if I were starved for vitamins and sweets."

  "Oh," I repeated in English.

  I closed my eyes, trying to think of Papa, but what happened next trumped his memory. The ripe green papaya smell beneath the perfume, the feathery but strong feel of arms against my side hams, the soft kiss of downy lips against my forehead. Beneath the picture of her own father exhorting passersby to violent rebellion, my Nana was holding me close.

  24

  Foody Decor Service

  The next week I spent in love—with her, with the distant American city we held in common, and with myself for being able to so quickly recover from the post-traumatic stress of Sakha's murder and Alyosha-Bob's flight. We had sex practically on the same day we met; the myth of the conservative Eastern girl dispelled with a few slutty poses struck over a shared bottie of Flagman vodka at the Hyatt's Beluga Bar, followed by a trip up the glassed-in elevator, a fiveminute bout of red-lipped fellatio, and then the sloppy application of a South Korean condom. These all proved fun activities, and I was able to stay hard for a while, even though I find condoms repellent, another attempt to smother and belittle my khui, only this time at the hands of the South Korean rubber barons.

  She approached lovemaking as would many a big girl (and I mean big, not fat), with a sense of duty and equality and full-bodied joy that smaller, more rodentlike women do not possess. She giggled and playacted. She pushed me onto the bed, and I pretended to tip over, when in actuality that was exactly what I did, nearly snapping my fine Hyatt bed in two. "Come here, sweetie," I said, American to a fault.

  "Come to daddy."

  "Whatchoo got for me, daddy?" she said, arms on her hips, young face shining with sweat, dark brown eyes glazed over with sexy drunkenness. "Show me whatchoo got."

  "Yeah, you wanna see, sugarplum?" I said. "You wanna see what I got?" And for the first time since the Hasids snipped me, I was not afraid to bring it out to the light—the long scar, the patches of skin stapled to the stem, the general look of a rocket that had failed reentry. Nana was not interested in the particulars. She shrugged, smiled, then went at it progressively—putting it in her mouth, turning it around, withdrawing it with a popping sound, some laughter at that, wiping her mouth with the inside of her elbow, then stuffing my thing back into the warmth of her oral cavity.

  "Oh, that's nice," I said, all riled up by her easy middle-class Western ways: such a pleasant contrast from the seriousness of the Russian girls who approached my khui with the gravity of Leonid Brezhnev stepping up to the podium at the 23rd Party Congress in Moscow.

  "Oh, keep doing it to me, baby doll," I said. "Don't make me beg. Uh-huh. Aw, shit."

  "You wanna pop me?" she said. This must have been some newfangled youth term. The verb "to pop."

  "I wanna bust a nut inside you, shorty," I said. "I wanna make you sweat, boo. Let's do this thing."

  I'd like to say that she stepped out of her jeans, but in truth it took a while to maneuver two large dimpled buttocks and the accompanying vaginal wedge out of the hard shell of her Miss Sixty denims. We huffed and sweated; I had her hanging off the edge of the bed while I gripped the cuffs of her jeans; I nearly pulled a groin muscle getting her naked; but through it all I stayed hard, a testament to how much I wanted her. She kept her T-shirt on throughout the initial popping, which is just how I like my sex, infused with a litde mystery. I slipped my hands beneath the cotton tee and felt the smooth creamery of her breasts while saving the visuals of those brown glossy globes for later. Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media—a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. Was it especially hairy? Good Lord, yes it was. Mountains of kinkiness black as the night above the Serengeti with paprika shoots at the edges—the pubic hair alone must have clocked in at half a kilo, while providing the inspiration for two discernible trails of hair, one running up to the navel, the other to the base of the spine. Naturally, considering my size, she got on top of me. But given her impressive overall body mass and natural resilience, I could see a day when we could broach the missionary position, not that there's anything special in attacking a poor woman that way. After we had fussed with the condom, I reached for her pubes, but she slapped me away. These preliminaries did not interest her. Instead, she just plain mounted me, holding on to my tits for balance, slipping me inside with no effort, both vaginal lips working to usher me into her tightness. I find it cliched when couples insist that they have "the perfect fit," but between the busted-up, zigzag, Broadway boogie-woogie of my maligned purple khui and the all-encompassing nature of her Caspian pizda, we reached a third way, as it were. That is to say, she rode me. It was all very classy and contemporary, like a modern-art survey course at NYU. I wanted to have the slogan I RODE MISHA VAINBERG imprinted on her T-shirt. "Yeah, do me," she kept saying, after issuing a few grunts so male and assertive they startled me into a brief homosex
ual fear, a fear compounded by one of her sharp nails digging into my tight rectum. "Do me, daddy," she said, her eyes closed, her thighs slapping against my upper and lower stomachs, my own tits making wet noises against my frame. "Just like that," she said, stealing a brief glance at me and then turning her head to the side so that I could lick her ear and plunge into her neck.

  "Just. . . like . . . that."

  "Yeah," I said, "I'm fucking you, boo," but the words did not convince me. "I'm busting my nut tonight," I sang.

  "My pussy fills so tight," she sang back in perfect ghetto English.

  "Ouch," I said. She was crushing my pubic bone, grinding into it.

  "Ouch," I repeated. "Baby doll. . . ouch."

  "Just a minute, pops," she said. "Just give me a minute. Do me right. Just like that."

  "Move up a little," I said. "Move up. It hurts. My bone."

  "Just. . . like . . . that," she said.

  "My bone hurts," I said. "I'm losing it."

  "AW," she shouted. "FUCK ME." She leaned back. I slipped out. Her thighs trembled before me, and I felt a warm, abundant liquid spreading on my own thighs, not sure which of us had issued it. My bedroom was filled with the smell of asparagus and related greenery.

  "Aw," she said again. "Fuck me."

  "Are you all right?" I said. "Did I . . ."

  "Did you what?" She laughed. Her mouth was long and equine, prickly around the edges. When seen in profile, her teeth cast their own shadows. She seemed to me then two bits silly and one bit dangerous, like a middle-class American high school girl stumbling upon the lechery of a Cancun hotel room. "That was it," she said. "You did it."

  "I did it?"

  "Just like that."

  "Oh," I said. "So you came?"

  She embraced me; I held on to her sweaty T-shirt, tracing circles around her surprisingly tiny shoulders. "Yeah," she said. "Didn't you?"

  "Sure," I lied. "I busted a nut." The words were so stale in my mouth that I reached for a breath mint on the nightstand. I plucked off the empty condom and managed to throw it under the bed. I felt strange and happy, violated and possibly pissed upon. My asshole no doubt glowed red; my breast and stomach mounds were slippery with our combined saliva.

  "Hold me," she said, even though I had been holding her all the while.

  "Sweetie," I said. "Sweet girl of mine." These words made me sad with longing, but for what I could not say. For dessert, maybe.

  "Talk to me," she whispered.

  "About what?" I whispered back. The whispering inspired me to reach for the remote-control dimmer on the nightstand. As I lowered the lights, the distant constellations of oil rigs lit up the panorama beneath us, and the more our bodies faded from each other's sight, the more we could make out the world around us, the seaborne oilpumping skyscrapers that stretched out in daisy chains toward Turkey, toward Russia, toward Iran, toward all the places for which we had no use.

  "Tell me something," she whispered, her breath humid with the carbon smells of my khui, the saline waft of our afternoon's sturgeon, and the fading echo of an interim breath mint.

  It was not the time to mention that I loved her, not before con-firming it with Dr. Levine. Besides, there were things more elusive, symbolic, and somehow more important to share with her. I thought of what these things could be. I thought of that distant island lodged between two mighty rivers and the ways it had made us who we were—two fine people trying to overcome (we shall overcome, my friend). I thought of a possible future spent fucking, loving, and eating side by side. I thought of a litde red book, not Mao's, exactly, but a volume of far greater importance, one I decided to quote to her from memory.

  " 'This ain't your grandfather's Lower East Side,' say devotees of this 'cramped,' 'walk-in-closet-sized' temple of New American cuisine where Chef Rolland Du Plexis holds sway to a crowd of admiring dot-commers, local hipsters, and the occasional 'bridge-and-tunnel Visigoth.' Although some say the kitchen may have 'slipped on a banana' since 'the limos with Garden State plates rolled in,' a reasonably priced wine list and frequent celeb sightings 'keep 'em coming.'

  Food—26, Decor—16, Service—18."

  I could feel her breathing hard against me. She grasped my toxic hump and rubbed it up and down. "That's that place on Clinton Street," she said. "I've been there."

  "Muh-huh," I groaned. Her hands on my hump, kneading the dark, molten rock, were as natural as her vagina deep around my khui. I couldn't think of the English word, but when I did, I nearly cried out in recognition. Soothe. She soothed me.

  "Go ahead," she said, "tell me some more."

  "What do you want to hear?" I said.

  "Go north," she whispered.

  I walked with her down Rivington, making a turn on Essex Street; her hand on my back rubbing my hump; her erect bosom arousing the looks of Latino passersby, male and female, pctpi and mami, with its untrammeled young girl's freshness, its simple "I'm just Nana from the block" honesty.

  Avenue A was ablaze with sordid colors. A tectonic shift, an influx of Eurotrash and computer money, had taken place in the past two decades, turning the neighborhood into a roaring volcano of hipness beneath which the cute multicultural citizens of the Lower East Side cowered like the Pompeians of yore. Soon the disaster would be complete, and the whole of Lower Manhattan would be covered by a lava slide of laptops and lattes, l's and O's standing in for the khuis and pizdcis that once kept this 'hood pumping, the nights punctured by the wails of newborns hungry for nipples the size of caramels. I swiveled my Nana around Sixth Street, past First Avenue, and up a flight of stairs. "Tell me," she said.

  " 'It's always Christmas' at this reliable Curry Row standby lit up

  'like your stomach after a bad vindaloo.' While dissenters call the cooking 'uninspired' and the harried atmosphere akin to 'life during wartime,' the cheap tabs and free mango ice cream make sure 'the party never stops.' Food—18, Decor—14, Service—11."

  "Tell me more." She clutched me tight. One of my kneecaps, a solitary outpost of bone amid flesh, was wedged provocatively between her loins. I decided to walk her westward, pushing my knee into her moistness even as I chanted my singsong:

  " 'Painfiilly long lines' take the 'Zen' out of this garden spot, but with sushi so fresh 'it water-skis down your tongue' and a sake selection as 'long as Japan,' even the 'most jaded downtown samurai' will scream 'Banzai!' Food—26, Decor—9, Service—15."

  "More," Nana said. I rubbed my knee inside her, but she did not encourage my gathering lust. "More," she said. I walked her along the breadth of the city to the edge of the West Side Highway; I gave her everything I knew, Food, Decor, Service; I recited from memory, and when memory failed, I reached into imagination, cobbling together restaurants that didn't but should exist, busding places where the tablecloths were a little dirty, the waiters a littie dodgy, but the food was cheap and good and meant to fill you up through and through. And then, once the bill was setded, once the need of both toilet and bidet pressed into you from all sides, you would take a taxi back to your flat high up in the sky, falling asleep in your loved one's arms even before the elevator sounded its bell tone, announcing your arrival to the empty gray corridors, the churning waste-disposal system, the solid anonymous door with the apartment number you would so proudly write, with vestigial Cyrillic curlicues, on the back of envelopes bound for less fortunate lands.

  The doorknob turned, the lights clicked, the cable television came on with a roar. And wouldn't you know it, Nana, my sweet brown rider. Just . . . like . . . that. We were home.

  2 7

  The Men from SCROD

  I was feverishly filing my nails when there was a knock on the door. A knock on my door! The last two weeks on the town with Nana had convinced me I was in a sexy full-bodied thriller, but all that awaited me on the other side of the door was Larry Zartarian's balding head and that of his mother peeking out from behind an ice machine a few paces back. "We've got to talk," he said.

  I offered him a bucket of buf
falo wings, which he spurned. "Are you popping Nana Nanabragovna?" Larry asked me.

  "Her body's mad ripe," I said in my defense. "I'm having dinner with her family tonight. All the SCROD bigwigs are going to be there."

  The hotel manager walked over to the window and shoved the curtains aside. "Something's going on," he said.

  "What now?"

  "The airlift. Those Chinooks that landed at the Exxon. I thought they were evacuating everyone, but they were bringing people, too. Eighty-five foreign nationals, mostiy U.K. and U.S."

  "I don't understand," I said. "Even Josh Weiner got his litde ass out of here."

  "They airlifted out the embassy personnel and most of the oil majors—Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron," Zartarian said, "but now I've got eighty-five new guests. And they're all . . ." He motioned me to come closer. He leaned over and whispered into my ear, "KBR." I raised my shoulders and let out a heavy sigh to indicate that I had no knowledge or interest in the affairs of the ubiquitous Golly Bur-ton. There was a civil war going on, or a cease-fire, or something—I was interested in that, in the ethnic strife and the killing, and in my own possible role in making things better for Nana's sweet absurdist people.

  "There's a KBR rooftop luau planned for next week," Zartarian said, nodding meaningfully.

  "A luau sounds like fun," I said.

  "It's to celebrate the Figa-6 Chevron/BP oil fields coming online."

  "Even the whores in the lobby have been talking about the Figa-6," I said.

  The hotel manager poked a stubby thumb at the tinted windowpane. "That's Figa-6," he said, inviting me to look inside his thumbprint. I scanned the distant horizon until I made out another inevitable skyline of oil rigs. "That's the future of the Absurdi oil sector," Zartarian said.