Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  Vishnu was settling into the life of a smart, fancy loser, the SUK DIK bodysuit and vintage Bathing Ape sneakers that must have cost five hundred yuan, an overeagerness to laugh too hard at others’ jokes with a strange new honking sound that had developed in my absence—ha-huh, ha-huh—a laughter born of a life of diminishing returns that, I’ve been told, would miraculously end in marriage to a loving, forgiving woman named Grace.

  As for me, I was now the odd man out. It would take a while for my boys to get used to my return. They glanced at me strangely, as if I had unlearned English, or repudiated our common way of life. I was already something of a weirdo for living all the way out in Manhattan. Now I had wasted an entire year and a good chunk of my savings in Europe. As a friend, a well-respected member of the technological elite, and, yes, a fellow “Nee-gro,” I needed to reclaim my prime position among the boys as a kind of alternate Noah. I needed to replant myself on native soil.

  The three things I had going for me: an inbred Russian willingness to get drunk and chummy, an inbred Jewish willingness to laugh strategically at myself, and, most impressively, my new äppärät. “Damn, cabrón,” Noah said, eyeing my pebble. “Whuddat, a 7.5 with RateMe Plus? I’m going to stream that shit fucking close-up.”

  He filmed my äppärät with his äppärät, while I swallowed another mug of triglycerides. Some Staten Island girls had shown up, wearing trendy retro clothes from some point in my youth, looking very Media in their sheepy Ugg boots and rhinestone-encrusted bandanas, a few of them mixing the old-school duds with Onionskin jeans which clung transparently to their thin legs and plump, pink bottoms, revealing to us all of their shaven secrets. They were also looking our way, scrolling their devices, one of them a pretty brunette with beautiful sleepy eyes.

  “Let’s fuck,” Vishnu said, pointing in their direction.

  “Jeez, cool it, Nee-gro,” I said, already slurring my words. “You’ve got a little cutie at home.” I looked directly into the camera nozzle of Noah’s äppärät: “’Sup, Grace. Long time no see, baby girl. You watching this live?”

  The boys laughed at me. “What an idiot!” Noah cried. “Did you hear that, beloved cocksucking audience? Lenny Abramov thought Vishnu Cohen-Clark just said, ‘Let’s fuck.’”

  “It’s F-A-C,” Vishnu explained. “I said, ‘Let’s FAC.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He sounds like my granny in Aventura!” Noah was bellowing. “‘FAC? What’s that? Who am I? Where’s my diaper?’”

  “It means ‘Form A Community,’” Vishnu said. “It’s, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.” He took my äppärät, and slid some settings until an icon labeled “FAC” drifted onto the screen. “When you see FAC, you press the EmotePad to your heart, or wherever it can feel your pulse.” Vishnu pointed out the sticky thing on the back of my äppärät that I thought could be used to attach it to a dashboard or a fridge. Wrong again.

  “Then,” Vishnu continued, “you look at a girl. The EmotePad picks up any change in your blood pressure. That tells her how much you want to do her.”

  “All right, Mediastuds and Mediawhores,” Noah said. “We’re streaming live here as Lenny Abramov tries to FAC for the first time. This is a future-reference event, folks, so widen your bandwidth. This is like the Wright brothers learning to fly, except neither of them was mildly retarded like our boy Lenny here. JBF, Nee-gro. Tell me if I’m going too far. Or wait. There’s no such thing as too far in Rubenstein’s America. Too far is when you’re shot in the back of the head somewhere Upstate and the National Guard burns your body to a crisp and flushes the ashes down a cold winter’s port-a-potty at some Secure Screening Facility in Troy. Lenny’s looking at me like What are you talking about? Here’s the breakdown on what you’ve missed during your ‘junior year abroad,’ Lenny-boy: The Bipartisans run the American Refund Agency, or whatever the fuck it’s called, the ARA runs the infrastructure and the National Guard, and the National Guard runs you. Oops. Not supposed to mention that on GlobalTeens. Maybe I have gone too far!”

  I noticed Vishnu moving his head out of the frame of Noah’s äppärät’s camera nozzle at the mention of the ARA and the Bipartisans. “Okay, Nee-gro,” he said to me. “Set up your Community Parameters. Make it ‘Immediate Space 360’—that’ll cover the whole bar. Now look at a girl, then press the pad to your heart.” I looked at the pretty brunette, at the hairless crotch glowing from within her see-through Onionskin jeans, at the lithe body crouched imperiously atop a set of smooth legs, at her worried smile. Then I touched my heart with the back of my äppärät, trying to fill it with my warmth, my natural desire for love.

  The girl across the bar laughed immediately without even turning my way. A bunch of figures appeared on my screen: “FUCKABILITY 780/800, PERSONALITY 800/800, ANAL/ORAL/VAGINAL PREFERENCE 1/3/2.”

  “Fuckability 780!” Noah said. “Personality 800! Leeeetl Lenny Abramov’s got himself a beeeeeg crush.”

  “But I don’t even know her personality,” I said. “And how does it know my anal preferences?”

  “The personality score depends on how ‘extro’ she is,” Vishnu explained. “Check it out. This girl done got three thousand–plus Images, eight hundred streams, and a long multimedia thing on how her father abused her. Your äppärät runs that against the stuff you’ve downloaded about yourself and then it comes up with a score. Like, you’ve dated a lot of abused girls, so it knows you’re into that shit. Here, let me see your profile.” Vishnu slid some other functions, and my profile shimmered on my warm pebbly screen.

  LENNY ABRAMOV ZIP code 10002, New York, New York. Income averaged over five-year-span, $289,420, yuan-pegged, within top 19 percent of U.S. income distribution. Current blood pressure 120 over 70. O-type blood. Thirty-nine years of age, lifespan estimated at eighty-three (47 percent lifespan elapsed; 53 percent remaining). Ailments: high cholesterol, depression. Born: 11367 ZIP code, Flushing, New York. Father: Boris Abramov, born Moscow, HolyPetroRussia; Mother: Galya Abramov, born Minsk, VassalState Belarus. Parental ailments: high cholesterol, depression. Aggregate wealth: $9,353,000 non-yuan-pegged, real estate, 575 Grand Street, Unit E-607, $1,150,000 yuan-pegged. Liabilities: mortgage, $560,330. Spending power: $1,200,000 per year, non-yuan-pegged. Consumer profile: heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious, non-Bipartisan. Sexual preferences: low-functioning Asian/Korean and White/Irish American with Low Net Worth family background; child-abuse indicator: on; low-self-esteem indicator: on. Last purchases: bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact, 35 northern euros; bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact, $126 yuan-pegged; bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact, 37 northern euros.

  “You’ve got to stop buying books, Nee-gro,” Vishnu said. “All those doorstops are going to drag down your PERSONALITY rankings. Where the fuck do you even find those things?”

  “Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!” Noah cried. And then, staring directly into his äppärät’s camera nozzle: “We’re FACing pretty hard now, people. We’re getting Lenny’s RateMe on.”

  Streams of data were now fighting for time and space around us. The pretty girl I had just FACed was projecting my MALE HOTNESS as 120 out of 800, PERSONALITY 450, and something called SUSTAINABILIT¥ at 630. The other girls were sending me similar figures. “Damn,” Noah said. “The prodigal Nee-gro Abramov is getting creamed here. Looks like the chicas, they no likey that big Hebraic snorkel our boy was born with. And those flabby Hadassah arms. Okay, rank him up, Vish.”

  Vishnu worked my äppärät until some RANKINGS came up. He helped me navigate the data. “Out of the seven males in the Community,” he said, gesturing around the bar, “Noah’s the third hottest, I’m the fourth hottest, and Lenny’s the seventh.”

  “You mean I’m the ugliest guy here?” I ran my fingers through the remnants of my hair.

  “But you’ve got a decent personality,” Vishnu comforted me, “and you’re second in the whole bar in terms of SUSTAINABILIT¥.” />
  “At least our Lenny’s a good providah,” Noah said. I remembered the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed to Howard Shu and became even more depressed by the prospect of being deprived of them. Money and Credit was about all I had at this point. That, and my sparkling PERSONALITY.

  Vishnu was pointing at the girls with his index finger, interpreting the data streams that were by now the sum total of our attention: “The one on the left, with the scar on her ankle and that little landing strip on her muff, Lana Beets, she went to Chicago Law, now has a Retail internship at Saaami Bras, making eighty thousand yuan-pegged. The one with the labia stud, name’s Annie Shultz-Heik, works in Retail, she’s got the smart foam for the genital warts and is on the pill, and last year she gave three thousand yuan to the Bipartisan Party’s Young Future Leaders of America Together We’ll Surprise the World Fund.”

  Annie was the girl I had FACed first. The one who had been allegedly abused by her dad and ranked my MALE HOTNESS a meager 120 out of 800.

  “That’s right, Annie,” Noah said into his äppärät. “Vote Bipartisan and your warts will melt away faster than our country’s sovereign debt rating. They’ll disappear like our troops down in Ciudad Bolívar. Rubenstein time in America, folks. Rubenstein time.”

  I went to get some beers, passing the girls on the way, but they were too busy looking at rankings. The bar was filling up with Senior Credit guys in tapered chinos and oxfords. I felt superior to them, but my MALE HOTNESS was swiftly falling to last place out of thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty males. Walking past Annie, I clicked on her Child Abuse Multimedia, letting the sound of her screaming vibrate my eardrums as a pixelated disembodied hand hovered above an Image of her naked body and the screaming segued into what sounded like a hundred monks chanting the mantra “He touched me here, he touched me here, he touched me here, he touched me here.”

  I turned in Annie’s direction with my left lip crinkled in sadness and my brow heavy with empathy, but the words “Look away quickly, dork,” appeared on my äppärät. “Hair-transplant time for RAG?” another girl wrote. (“Rapidly aging geezer,” according to my electronic pebble.) “I can smell the DO from here.” (“Dick odor,” my äppärät helpfully told me.) And the slightly consoling: “Nice ¥¥¥, Pops.”

  The bar was now utterly aflash with smoky data spilling out of a total of fifty-nine äppäräti, 68 percent of them belonging to the male of the species. The masculine data scrolled on my screen. Our average income hovered at a respectable but not especially uplifting 190,000 yuan-pegged dollars. We were looking for girls who appreciated us for who we were. We had absent fathers, who sometimes were not absent enough. A man ranked uglier than me walked in and, ascertaining his chances, turned right around. I wanted to follow his bald, creased head out of the bar into the all-forgiving summer air, but instead got a double whiskey for myself, along with two Leffe Brunes.

  “After getting his ass handed to him by the RateMe Plus, Lenny Abramov is turning to drink,” Noah intoned. But upon seeing the deep hamster funk of my expression, he said, “It’s going to be okay, Lenny. We’ll get you all fixed up with the bitches. You’ll find the mercy in this rude data stream.”

  Vishnu had his hand on my shoulder and was saying, “We really care about you, buddy. How many of these Senior Credit assholes can say that? We’ll get your rankings up, even if we have to slice an inch off your nose.”

  Noah: “And add one to your Johnson.”

  “Ha-huh,” Vishnu laughed, sadly.

  I appreciated the sentiments, but I felt bad receiving their kindness. The point was for me to care for them. That would help lower my stress profile and do wonders for my ACTH levels. Meanwhile, the double whiskey and the slow triglyceride death it portended had sunk into the last compartment of my stomach, and the world was projecting at me in an angry way. “Eunice Park!” I wailed into Noah’s äppärät. “Eunice, honey. Can you hear me out there? I miss you so much.”

  “We’re streaming these emotions live, folks,” Noah said. “We’re streaming Lenny’s love for this girl Eunice Park in real time. We’re ‘feeling’ the many levels of his pain just as he feels them.”

  And I started to blabber about how much she meant to me. “We were sitting in this restaurant in Via Giulia, or someplace.…”

  “Losing hits, losing hits,” Noah whispered. “No foreign words. Cut to chase.”

  “… And she just. She really listened to me. She paid attention to me. She never even looked at her äppärät while I was speaking to her. I mean we were mostly eating. Bucatini all’ …”

  “Losing hits, losing hits.”

  “Pasta. But when we weren’t eating, we were saying everything about ourselves, who we were, where we come from. She’s an angry girl. You’d be too if you were her. All the shit she’s had to put up with. But she wants to get to know me better, and she wants to help me, and I want to care for her. I think she weighs, like, seventy pounds. She should eat more. I’ll make her eggplant. She showed me how to brush my teeth.”

  “Streaming these emotions live,” Noah repeated. “You’re the first to hear them, patos. Straight from the Abramov’s mouth. He’s verballing. He’s emoting. But I’m getting a message from a hoser in Windsor, Ontario. He wants to know, did you fuck her, Lenny? Did you stick your thingie inside her tight snatch? Fifteen thousand souls absolutely need to know right now or they’ll get their news elsewhere.”

  “We’re such an unlikely couple, so unlikely,” I was crying, “because she’s beautiful, and I’m the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss each one of her freckles again? She has like a million. But every one of them means something to me. Isn’t this how people used to fall in love? I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America, like you keep saying. But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this. To this bar. To this FACing. The two of us. What if we just went home and read books to each other?”

  “Oh God,” Noah groaned. “You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov.… Okay, folks, we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.”

  In the bathroom next to a graffito encouraging the pisser to “Vote Bisexual, Not Bipartisan,” and the quizzical “Harm Reduction Reduced My Dick,” I let go of several ounces of Belgian ale and the five glasses of alkalized water I’d had before leaving my house.

  Vishnu sidled up to me. “Turn off your äppärät,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  He reached over and yanked my pendant into the off position. His eyes locked with mine, and even through the mist of my own drunkenness I noticed that my friend was basically sober. “I think Noah may be ARA,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I think he’s working for the Bipartisans.”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “What about ‘It’s Rubenstein time in America’? What about the zero hour?”

  “I’m just telling you, watch what you say around him. Especially when he’s streaming his show.”

  My urination stopped of its own accord, and my prostate felt very sore. Care for your friends, care for your friends, the mantra repeated itself.

  “I don’t understand,” I muttered. “He’s still our friend, right?”

  “People are being forced into all kinds of things now,” Vishnu said. He lowered his voice even further. “Who knows what they got him for. His Credit ranking’s been going to shit ever since he started doing Amy Greenberg. Half of Staten Island is collaborating. Everyone’s looking for backing, for protection. You watch, if the Chinese take over, Noah will be sucking up to them. You should have stayed in Rome, Lenny. Fuck that immortality bullshit. Ain’t going to happen for you anyway. Look at us. We’re not HNWIs.”

>   “We’re not Low Net Worth either!” I protested.

  “That don’t matter. We’re poster children for Harm Reduction. This city has no use for us. They privatized the MTA last month. They’re going to knock down the projects. Even your fancy Jew projects. We’ll be living in Erie, Pennsylvania, by the time this decade’s over.”

  He must have noticed the lethal unhappiness disfiguring my expression. He zipped up and patted my back. “That was some good emoting about Eunice in there,” he said. “That’ll get your PERSONALITY ranking higher. And who knows about Noah? Maybe I’m wrong. Been wrong before. Been wrong lots, my friend.”

  Before my melancholy could get the best of me, Vishnu’s girlfriend, Grace Kim, showed up to drag him homeward, to their pleasant, air-conditioned Staten Island abode, making me pine in a heartbreaking way for Eunice. I stared at Grace with a need bordering on grief. There she was: intelligently, creatively, timidly dressed (no Onionskin jeans to show off her slender goods), full of programmed intentions and steady, interesting plans, hardwired for marriage to her lucky beau, ready to bear those beautiful Eurasian kids that seem to be the last children left in the city.

  Along with Noah, I was invited to Vishnu and Grace’s house for a nightcap, but I claimed jet lag and bade everyone farewell. They were sweet enough to walk me to the ferry station, although not sweet enough to brave the National Guard checkpoint with me. I was duly searched and poked by tired, bored soldiers. I denied and implied everything. I said, in answer to some metaphysical question, “I just want to go home.” It wasn’t the right answer, but a black man with a little golden cross amid his paltry chest hairs took pity on me and let me board the vessel.