Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  In the meantime, the weekend came and hallelujah! I decided to dedicate Saturday night to Point No. 4: Care for Your Friends. Joshie’s right about one thing: Good relationships make you healthier. And the point is not just being cared for, but learning to return that care. In my case, learning to overcome an only child’s reluctance to commit fully to the world of others. Now, I haven’t seen my buddies since I’ve been back, because, like anyone who’s still employed in New York, they’re working insane hours, but we finally made plans to get together at Cervix, the newly hip bar in newly hip Staten Island.

  Before I left the 740 square feet of my apartment, I put the name of my oldest Media pal, Noah Weinberg, into my äppärät and learned that he would be airing our reunion live on his GlobalTeens stream, “The Noah Weinberg Show!,” which made me nervous at first, but, then, this is exactly the kind of thing I have to get used to if I’m going to make it in this world. So I put on a pair of painful jeans and a flaming-red shirt with a bouquet of white roses embroidered along my chest. I wished Eunice were around to tell me if this was age-appropriate. She seems to have a good sense of life’s limits.

  Down in the lobby, I noticed the ambulances were silently flashing their lights out on Grand Street, which meant another death in the building, another invitation to sit shiva at a grieving son’s house in Teaneck or New Rochelle, another apartment for sale on the community board. A wheelchair stood lonely amidst the antiseptic 1950s cream-on-cream décor of our building’s lobby. We’re all about immobility here in the Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, and so I prepared myself for an intergenerational encounter, thinking I might have to wheel the old fellow out into the early-evening sunshine, produce a few words of my grandmother’s Yiddish.

  I backed away. A body badly sheathed in an opaque plastic bag sat in the wheelchair, its head crowned with a pointy pocket of air. The body bag clung vehemently to a pair of slim male hips, and the deceased was huddled forward slightly, as if engaged in the fruitless act of Christian prayer.

  An outrage! Where were his caregivers? Where were the EMT workers? I wanted to get down on my knees and, against my better instincts, to offer solace to this former being growing cold in his sickening plastic robe. I beheld the tiny pocket of air above the dead man’s head, as if it were the visualization of his very last breath, and felt vomit rising from my breadbasket.

  Dizzy, I walked out into the stifling June heat toward the ambulance guys, the both of them enjoying a smoke by the flashing vehicle bearing the legend “American Medicle [sic] Response.” “There’s a dead person in my lobby,” I said to them. “In a fucking wheelchair. You just left it there. Some respect, guys?”

  Their faces were negligible, compromised, vaguely Hispanish. “You next of kin?” one said, nodding at my vicinity.

  “Does it matter?”

  “He’s not going anywhere, sir.”

  “It’s disgusting,” I said.

  “It’s just death.”

  “Happens to everybody, Paco,” the other added.

  I tried to contort my face into anger, but whenever I try to do that I’m told I look like a crazy old woman. “I’m talking about your smoking,” I said, my retort dying swiftly in the humidity around us.

  Nothing on Grand could offer me solace. Nothing could make me Celebrate What I Have (Point No. 6). Not the inherent life inside the barely clothed Latino children or the smell of freshly cooked arroz con pollo wafting out of the venerable Castillo del Jagua II. I projected “The Noah Weinberg Show!” again, listened to my friend making fun of our armed forces’ latest defeat in Venezuela, but I couldn’t follow the intricacies. Ciudad Bolívar, Orinoco River, pierced armor, Blackhawk down—what did it mean to me, now that I saw one possible end to my life: alone, in a bag, in my own apartment building, hunched over in a wheelchair, praying to a god I never believed in? Just then, passing by the ochre grandiosity of St. Mary’s, I saw a pretty woman, a little chunky and wide of hip, cross herself in front of the church and kiss her fist, her Credit ranking flashing at an abysmal 670 on a nearby Credit Pole. I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans.

  I had to cool my stress levels by the time I got to see my buddies. On the way down to the ferry, I chanted Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, Care for Your Friends, because I needed them by my side when the American Medicle [sic] Response ambulance trundled up to 575 Grand Street. In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.

  My äppärät pinged.

  CrisisNet: DOLLAR LOSES OVER 3% IN LONDON TRADING TO FINISH AT HISTORIC LOW OF 1€ = $8.64 IN ADVANCE OF CHINESE CENTRAL BANKER ARRIVAL U.S.; LIBOR RATE FALLS 57 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR LOWER BY 2.3% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥ = $4.90

  I really needed to figure out what this LIBOR thing was and why it was falling by fifty-seven basis points. But, honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn’t I have been born to a better world?

  The National Guard was out in force at the Staten Island Ferry building. A crowd of poor office women wearing white sneakers, their groaning ankles covered with sheer hose, waited patiently to walk past a sandbagged checkpoint by the gate to the ferry. An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.”

  Occasionally, some of us were pulled aside, and I worried about the otter flagging me in Rome, the asshole videotaping me on the plane, the asterisk that still appeared when my mighty credit score flashed on the Credit Poles, the continued disappearance of Nettie Fine (no response to my daily messages, and if they could get my American mama, what could they do to my actual parents?). Men in civilian clothes zapped our bodies and our äppäräti with what looked like a small tubular attachment of an old-school Electrolux vacuum cleaner and asked us both to deny and to imply consent to what they were doing to us. The passengers seemed to take the whole thing in stride, the Staten Island cool kids especially silent and deferential, shaking a little in their vintage hoodies. I overheard several young men of color whispering to one another “deee-ny and im-ply,” but the older women quickly shushed them with bites of “Restoration ’thority!” and “Punch you in the mouth, boy.”

  Maybe it was Howard Shu’s doing, but somehow I got through the checkpoint without being stopped.

  Once disembarked on the Staten Island side, I braced myself for a walk. The main drag, Victory Boulevard, ramps uphill with a San Franciscan vigor. These parts of Staten Island, St. George and Tompkinsville, were once completely off the grid. Immigrants used to wash up here from Poland, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and especially Mexico. They worked the storefronts of their respective ethnic restaurants and also ran dusty groceries, check-cashing places, and twenty-centavo-a-minute phone booths. Outside the stores, black men used to lounge in puffy jackets, tottering sleepily over milk crates. I remember this ’hood well, because when my buddies and I were right out of college we’d all take the ferry to raid this spicy Sri Lankan joint, where for nine bucks you could eat an insane shrimp pancake and some kind of ethereal red fish while baby roaches tried to clamber up your trouser leg and drink your beer. Now, of course, the Sri Lankan place, the roaches, the somnolent minorities were gone, replaced by half-man, half-wireless bohemians ramming their baby strollers up and down the hump of Victory Bouleva
rd, while kids from nearby New Jersey cruised past the outrageously priced Victorians in their Hyundai rice rockets, wishing they could work Media or Credit.

  Cervix is exactly what you would expect from yet another stupid Staten Island old man’s bar cleaned up and turned into a hangout for Media and Credit types, fake oily paintings from basement rec rooms of yore, hot women in their early twenties looking to supplement their electronic lives, so-so men in desperately cool clothes scratching the upper-thirty limit and pushing deep into the next decade. My boys fit the bill exactly. There they were, crowded around a table, their äppäräti out, speaking into their shirt collars while thumbing Content into their pearly devices, two curly, dusky heads completely lost to the world around them: Noah Weinberg and Vishnu Cohen-Clark, fellow alumni of what used to be called New York University, that indispensable local educator of bright-enough women and men, fellow romantic sufferers, fellow lovers of spicy words and endless arcana, fellow travelers down the under-lubricated craphole of life.

  “My Nee-groes!” I cried. They did not hear me. “My Nee-groes!”

  Noah jumped up, not in the way he used to back in school, with an ambitious sprinter’s leap, but quick enough to nearly upset the table. With that stupid, inevitable smile, those blazing teeth, that spinning, lying mouth, those gleaming enthusiast’s eyes, he turned the camera nozzle of his äppärät my way to record my lumbering arrival. “Heads up, manitos, here he comes!” he shouted. “Get out your butt plugs and get ready to groove. This is a ‘Noah Weinberg Show!’ exclusive. The arrival of our personal number-one Nee-gro from a year of bullshit self-discovery in Rome, Italia. We’re streaming at you live, folks. He’s walking toward our table in real time! He’s got that goofy ‘Hey, I’m just one of the guys!’ smile. One hundred sixty pounds of Ashkenazi second-generation, ‘My parents are poor immigrants, so you gotta love me’ flava: Lenny ‘freak and geek’ Abramov!”

  I waved to Noah, and then, hesitantly, to his äppärät. Vishnu came at me with open arms and with nothing but joy on his face, a man possessed of roughly the same short-to-average height (five foot nine) and moral values as myself, a man whose choice in women—a tempered, bright young Korean girl named Grace who also happens to be a dear friend of mine—I can only second. “Lenny,” he said, lingering over the two syllables of my name, as if they mattered. “We missed you, buddy.” Those simple words made me tear up and stammer something mildly embarrassing into Vishnu’s ear. He had on the same SUK DIK bodysuit as my young co-worker at Post-Human Services, although his muzzle was gray and unshaven and his eyes looked tired and ITP, lending him a proper age. The three of us hugged one another close, in a kind of overdone way, touching buttocks and flailing at each other genitally. We all grew up with a fairly tense idea of male friendship, for which the permissive times now allowed us to compensate, and often I wished that our crude words and endless posturing were code for affection and understanding. In some male societies, slang and ritualistic embraces form the entire culture, along with the occasional call to take up the spear.

  As I hugged each boy and patted him on the shoulder, I noticed that we were surreptitiously sniffing one another for signs of decay, and that Vishnu and Noah were wearing some kind of spicy deodorant, perhaps as a way to mask their changing scent. We had each embarked on our very late thirties, a time when the bravado of youth and the promise of glorious exploits that had once held us together would begin to fade, as our bodies began to shed, slacken, and shrink. We were still as friendly and caring as any group of men could be, but I surmised that even the shuffle toward extinction would prove competitive for us, that some of us might shuffle faster than others.

  “Harm Reduction time,” Vishnu said. I still couldn’t figure out what the hell Harm Reduction meant, although the youth in the Eternity Lounge couldn’t shut up about it. “What does the wandering Jew-Nee-gro want? Leffe Brune or Leffe Blonde?”

  “Blonde me,” I said, tossing a twenty-dollar bill bearing the silver authenticity stripe and the holographic words “Backed by Zhongguo Renmin Yinhang/People’s Bank of China,” hoping the drinks were unpegged to the yuan, so that I could collect some serious change. The money was promptly thrown back at me, and I enjoyed Vishnu’s kind smile.

  “Nee-gro, please,” he said.

  Noah took an orator’s deep, rehearsed breath. “Okay, putas and huevóns. I’m still streaming right at you. Eight p.m. on the dot. It’s Rubenstein time in America. It’s a motherfucking Bipartisan evening here in the People’s Republic of Staten Island, and Lenny Abramov has just ordered a Belgian beer for seven yuan-pegged dollars.”

  Noah aimed his äppärät’s camera nozzle at me, marking me as the subject for his evening news segment. “The Nee-gro must tell all,” Noah said. “The returning Nee-gro must eh-jew-muh-cate our viewers. Start with the women you’ve done in Italy.” He switched to a falsetto voice: “‘Fuck-ah me-ah, Leonardo! Fuck-ah me now-ah, you beeg-ah heeb-ah!’ Then give us the pasta lowdown. Verbal at me, Lenny. Shoot me an Image of a lonely Abramov slurping up noodles at the neighborhood trat. Then the whole return-of-the-prodigal-Nee-gro shit. What’s it like to be a gentle, unsuspecting Lenny Abramov just back to Rubenstein’s one-party America?”

  Noah hadn’t always been this angry and caustic, but there was something disproportionate about his efforts these days, as if he could no longer keep track of how his personal decline paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store. Lately he did “The Noah Weinberg Show!,” which had a grand total of six sponsors, whom he struggled to mention casually throughout his rants—a medium-sized escort service in Queens, several ThaiSnak franchises in Brownstone Brooklyn, a former Bipartisan politician who now ran security consulting for Wapachung Contingency, the well-armed security division of my employer, and I can’t remember the rest. The show got hit about fifteen thousand times a day, which put him somewhere in the lower-middle echelon of Media professionals. His girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, is a pretty well-known Mediawhore who spends about seven hours a day streaming about her weight. As for Vishnu, my buddy does Debt Bombing for ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit, hanging around street corners and zapping people’s äppäräti with Images of themselves taking on more debt.

  Courtesy of the Debt Bomber, three wheaty beers, high in triglycerides, were smacked on the table. I began my debriefing, trying to entertain the boys with stories of my funny, dirty, crosscultural romance with Fabrizia, drawing with my fingers the outlines of her bush. I sang lyrical about the fresh garlic tang of old-world ragù and tried to inculcate them with a love of the Roman arch. But the truth was, they didn’t care. The world they needed was right around them, flickering and bleeping, and it demanded every bit of strength and attention they could spare. Noah, the one-time novelist, could probably think of Rome in nonimmediate terms, could conjure up Seneca and Virgil, The Marble Faun and Daisy Miller. But even he seemed unimpressed, glancing impatiently at his äppärät, which was alive with at least seven degrees of information, numbers and letters and Images stacked on the screen, flowing and eddying against one another as the waters of the Tiber once did. “We’re losing hits,” he whispered to me. “Ix-nay on the Rome-ay, okay?” And then, in a really low voice: “Humor and politics. Got it?”

  I cut short a description of the Pantheon’s empty space drenched with early-morning sunlight, as Noah pointed the clumped remains of his frontal hair at me and said: “All right, here’s the situation, Nee-gro. You have to fuck either Mother Teresa or Margaret Thatcher.…”

  Vishnu and I laughed just the right amount and smiled at our leader. I raised my hands in defeat. This is the only way men could talk anymore. This is how we told one another that we were still friends and that our lives were not entirely over. “Maggie Thatcher if it’s missionary,” I said. “Definitely Mother Teresa from behind.”

  “You are so Media,” Noah said, and we smacked fi
sts.

  From there the conversation moved on to Threads, a cult BBC nuclear-holocaust film, then over to the music of early Dylan, then a new way of fighting genital warts with a kind of smart foam, Secretary of State Rubenstein’s latest bungling in Venezuela (“nothing more oxymoronic than a Jewish strongman, am I right, pendejos?” Noah said), the near collapse of AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit, the ensuing failed bailout by the Fed, our faltering portfolios, the “wah-wuh” sound of the doors closing on the 6 train versus the resigned “sheeesh” sound on the L, the life and bizarre death of the deviant comic known as Pee-wee Herman, and finally, inexhaustibly, the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.

  “I could eat, like, a dozen of those ThaiSnak Issan larb chicken salads right about now,” Noah said, in deference to one of his sponsors.

  As the retro sound system went into an old Arcade Fire tune, I let myself get cozy with another glass of foaming ale, observing the boys on a meta-level. Noah had aged worst of all. The weight had seemingly trickled from his thick, brainy forehead down into his jowls, where it jiggled inopportunely, giving him an afterglow of anger and dissatisfaction. At one time he was clearly the most handsome and successful of our number, he had introduced us to half the girlfriends we ever had (not that many, to be sure), had given us our edgy racial vocabulary, and had kept us updated with a dozen messages an hour on how we should act and what we should think. But with every year it was getting harder to keep me and Vishnu in check. The almost-forties, once the fulcrum of adulthood, was now a time of exploration, and each of the boys had struck out on his own.