Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  Barry was exhausted. The Patterson-Clay-Schwartz Language Cognition Test, the final barometer for selection, could await another session. I knew already that this perfectly reasonable, preternaturally kind fifty-two-year-old would not make the cut. He was doomed, like me. And so I smiled at him, congratulated him on his candor and patience, his intellect and maturity, and with a tap of my finger against my digital desk threw him onto the blazing funeral pyre of history.

  I felt shitty about Barry, but even shittier about myself. Joshie’s office was crammed with people all day long, but during a quiet moment I found him by the window, staring quizzically at a sky of untrammeled blue, just a fat lone military helicopter trudging toward the East River, its armored beak pointed downward as if it were a predatory bird hunting for food. I sidled up to him. He nodded, not unfriendly, but with some tired reserve. I told him the story of Barry, stressing the man’s innate goodness and his problem of having too many children, whom he loved, and not enough money to save all of them, which elicited a shrug on his part. “Those who want to live forever will find a means of doing so,” Joshie said, a cornerstone of the Post-Human philosophy.

  “Hey, Grizzly,” I said, “do you think you can put me in for some of the dechronification treatments at a reduced rate? Just basic soft-tissue maintenance, and maybe a few bio years shaved off?”

  Joshie regarded the nine-foot fiberglass Buddha that furnished his otherwise empty office, its blissed-out gaze emitting alpha rays. “That’s only for clients,” he said. “You know that, Rhesus. Why do you have to make me say it out loud? Stick with the diet and exercise. Use stevia instead of sugar. You’ve still got a lot of life left in you.”

  My sadness filled the room, took over its square, simple contours, crowding out even Joshie’s spontaneous rose-petal odor. “I didn’t mean that,” Joshie said. “Not just a lot of life. Maybe forever. But you can’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a certainty.”

  “You’ll see me die someday,” I said, and immediately felt bad for saying it. I tried, as I had done since childhood, to feel nonexistence. I forced coldness to run through the natural humidity of my hungry second-generation-immigrant body. I thought of my parents. We would all be dead together. Nothing would remain of our tired, broken race. My mother had bought three adjoining plots at a Long Island Jewish cemetery. “Now we can be together forever,” she had told me, and I had nearly broken down in tears at her misplaced optimism, at the notion that she would want to spend her idea of eternity—and what could her eternity possibly comprise?—with her failure of a son.

  “You’ll see me extinguished,” I told Joshie.

  “That would be a big heartbreak for me, Lenny,” Joshie said, his voice broken with exhaustion, or maybe just boredom.

  “Three hundred years from now, you won’t even remember me. Just some flunky.”

  “Nothing is guaranteed,” Joshie said. “Even I can never be sure of whether my personality will survive forever.”

  “It will,” I said. A father should never outlive his child, I wanted to add, although I knew Joshie would disagree on principle.

  He put his hand on the side of my neck and squeezed lightly. I leaned in to him a little, hoping for more of his touch. He massaged softly. There was nothing special in that; we Post-Human staffers massage one another regularly. Still, I soaked in his warmth and believed it was only for me. I thought of Eunice Park and her pH-balanced body, healthy and strong. I thought of the warm early-summer day gathering in force outside the bay window, the New York of early summers past, the city that used to hold so many promises, the city of a million IOUs. I thought of Eunice’s lips on my nose, the love mixed in with the pain, the foretaste of almonds and salt. I thought of how it was all just too beautiful to ever let go.

  “We’re only getting started, Lenny,” Joshie said, his strong hand squeezing like a clamp at my tired flesh. “For now, diet and exercise. Focus on the work to keep your mind busy, but don’t overthink or give in to anxiety. There’s going to be loads of tsuris ahead. Trouble,” he clarified, when I didn’t catch on to the Yiddish word. “But also loads of opportunities for the right kind of people. And, hey, be happy you got your desk back.”

  “The LIBOR rate’s fallen fifty-seven basis points according to CrisisNet,” I said knowledgeably.

  But he was looking into my äppärät, at an Image of Eunice flashing hard above the other data streams. She was pictured at a wedding of one of her ridiculously young Elderbird College friends in southern California, wearing a black polka-dotted dress that clung to her frame, desperately trying to coax out the preliminaries of an adult woman’s body. Her skin glowed in the warm afternoon sun, and her look was one of coy pleasure. “That’s Eunice,” I said. “That’s my girl. I think you’ll really like her. Do you like her?”

  “She looks healthy.”

  “Thank you,” I said, beaming. “I can forward you an Image of her if you’d like. She’s like a poster child for eternity.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. He looked at the Image some more. “Good boy, Lenny,” he said. “Well done.”

  · · ·

  The next day, Eunice and I took the Long Island Rail Road to Westbury, Long Island, to meet the Abramovs. The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons—it was systemic and it was complete. I knew Eunice was not ready to meet my parents, but she was doing it anyway, and she was doing it to please me. This was the first major kindness she had shown me, and I was drowning in appreciation.

  My sweet girl was nervous almost to the point of quaking (how many times could she reapply her lip gloss and wipe the shine off her nose?), which showed that she cared about me. She was dressed for the occasion, an extra pinch of conservatism in her outfit, a sky-blue blouse with a Peter Pan collar and white buttons, pleated wool skirt reaching down below the knees, a black ribbon tied around the neck—from certain angles, she looked like one of the Orthodox Jewish women who have overrun my building. The usual Korean elder-worship and elder-fear brought out a strange immigrant pride in me. With Eunice sweating so handsomely on her orange pleather commuter-train seat, I could project the natural longevity of our relationship, and, for a moment at least, the feeling that we were fulfilling our natural roles as the offspring of difficult parents from abroad.

  There was something else too. My first love for a Korean girl developed on the Long Island Rail Road some twenty-five years ago. I had been a freshman at a prestigious math-and-science high school in Tribeca. Most of the other kids were Asian, and although technically you had to live within the confines of New York City to attend, there were more than a few of us who faked our residency and commuted from various parcels of Long Island. The ride to Westbury amidst dozens of fellow nerd-students was a particularly difficult one, because it was public knowledge at the science high school that my weighted average was a dismal 86.894, while at least 91.550 had been recommended for entry into Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania, the weakest of the Ivy League schools (as immigrant children from high-performing nations, we knew our parents would slap us across the mouth for anything less than Penn). Several of the Korean and Chinese boys who took the railroad with me—their spiky hair still haunts my most literal dreams—would dance around me singing my average, “Eighty-six point eight nine four, eighty-six point eight nine four!”

  “You won’t even get into Oberlin with that.”

  “Have fun at NYU, Abramov.”

  “See you at the University of Chicago! It’s the teacher of teachers!”

  But there was one girl, another Eunice—a Eunice Choi, to be exact—a tall, quiet beauty, who would pry the boys away from me while shouting, “It’s not Lenny’s fault he can’t do well in school! Remember what Reverend Sung says. We’re all different. We all have different abilities. Remember the Fall of Man? We’re all fallen creatures.”

  And then she’d sit down with me and, unbidden, help me with my impossib
le chemistry homework, moving the strange letters and numbers around my notebook until the equations were, for some reason, deemed “balanced,” while I, utterly unbalanced by the magical girl next to me, her silken skin glowing beneath her summer gym shorts and orange Princeton jersey, tried to catch a brief smell of her hair or a brush of her hard elbow. It was the first time a woman had risen to defend me, had given me the inkling of an idea that I should actually be defended, that I wasn’t a bad person, just not as skilled at life as some others.

  At Westbury, Euny and I disembarked before an armored personnel carrier sitting by the squat station house, its .50-caliber Browning gun bouncing up and down, tracking the departing train as if waving a fond, spirited farewell. National Guardsmen were checking the äppäräti of the diverse crowd, Salvadorans and Irish and South Asians and Jews and whoever else had chosen to make this corner of central Long Island the rich, smelly tapestry it has now become. The troops appeared angrier and more sunburned than usual; perhaps they had just been rotated out from Venezuela. Two men—one brown-skinned, one not—had been taken off the line and were being pushed into the APC. All you could hear were the whirs and clicks of our äppäräti being downloaded and the competing chirping of the cicadas emerged from their seven-year slumber. And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion. I almost teened Nettie Fine a message, begging her to lend me some of that sparkling native-born hope. Did she really think things were going to get better?

  A paunched, goateed muzhik in a camouflaged helmet scanned my äppärät with an unhappy display of teeth and a gust of morning breath that had lasted well into the afternoon. “Malicious pervision of data,” he barked at me in an accent that I placed somewhere between Appalachia and the deeper South, the word “data” now a three-syllable wonder. (How did this faux-Kentuckian become a New York National Guardsman?) “What the heck, son?” he said.

  I deflated immediately. The world momentarily retreated into its contours. More than anything, I was scared to be scared in front of Eunice. I was her protector in this world. “No,” I said. “No, sir. That’s being fixed. That’s a mistake. I was on a plane from Rome with a seditious fat man. I told the otter ‘Some Italians’ but I guess he thought ‘Somalians.’”

  The soldier held up a hand. “You work for Staatling-Wapachung?” he asked, mispronouncing the complicated name of my employer at at least four junctures.

  “Yes, sir. Post-Human Services division, sir.” The word “sir” felt like a broken weapon at my feet. Again I wished my parents were nearer to me, even though they were less than two miles away. I thought of Noah for some reason. Could he really be collaborating with the ARA, as Vishnu had suggested? If so, could he help me right now?

  “Deny and imply?”

  “What?”

  The man sighed. “Do you deny the ex-istence of our conversation and imply consent?”

  “Yes. Of course!”

  “Fingerprint here.” I grazed the pad of his thick brown äppärät with my thumb.

  A flick of the wrist. “Move along.” And as I did so, a legend on the armored personnel carrier caught my eye: “WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EQUIPMENT LEASE/OWN.” Wapachung Contingency was the frighteningly profitable security branch of our parent company. What the hell was going on here?

  We took a cab to my parents’ house, passing various examples of modest two-story capes covered with aluminum siding, New York Yankee pennants streaming from every other door—the kind of striving neighborhood where all the money goes into the forty-by-hundred-foot lawns, which even in the overripe heat of the East Coast summer bristle with carefully cultivated greenness. I felt a little embarrassed, because I knew that Eunice’s parents were much better off than mine, but I was pleased at how things had worked out with that twanging National Guardsman, at the appearance of power and grace that had been bestowed upon me as an employee of the mighty Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, which was now apparently arming the National Guard. “Were you scared back there, Euny?” I asked.

  “I know my kokiri isn’t some deviant criminal,” she said, rubbing my nose and leaning forward so that I could kiss her brow, celebrate the fact that she could make jokes in these difficult times.

  In a few minutes we reached the corner of Washington Avenue and Myron, the most important corner of my life. I could already see my parents’ brownish half-brick, half-stucco cape, the golden mailbox out in front, the faux nineteenth-century lamp beside it, the cheap lawn chairs stacked on the island of cement that passed for the front porch, a black horse-and-carriage motif across the steel screen door (I do not mean to besmirch their taste; all this junk came with the house), and the gigantic flags of the United States of America and SecurityState Israel billowing in the hazy breeze from two flagpoles. The flavorful husk of Mr. Vida, my parents’ neighbor and my father’s best friend, waved from the porch across the street, and shouted something encouraging at me and possibly salacious at Eunice. Both my dad and Mr. Vida had been engineers in their homelands reduced to working-class life: big callused hands, small horny bodies, clever brown eyes, a thickly landscaped conservatism, and striving, hustling children, three for Mr. Vida to my father’s one. His son Anuj and I went to NYU together, and now the little bastard was a senior analyst at AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup.

  I took Eunice’s arm and led her over my parents’ pristine lawn. At the door my mother appeared in her usual outfit—white panties and utilitarian bra—a woman who since taking her retirement had committed herself to intensive housebound living and whom I haven’t seen in proper dress for years.

  She was about to throw her arms around my neck in typically overblown fashion when she noticed Eunice, let out some Russian garble of amazement, and retreated inside the house, leaving me, per the usual, with the visuals of her thick gravity-pulled breasts and white little round of belly. My father, shirtless, in stained beige shorts, soon took her place, also gaped at Eunice, ran his hand against his naked muscular breasts perhaps out of embarrassment, said “O!” then hugged me anyway. There was hair against my new dress shirt, the gray carpet that my father wore with an odd touch of class, as if he were a royal in some tropical country. He kissed me on both cheeks and I did the same, feeling the flood of intimacy, of sudden closeness with a person who usually orbited so far away from me. The instructions, the Confucian-like code of Russian father-son relations, spooled in my mind: Father means I have to love him, have to listen to him, can’t offend him, can’t hurt him, can’t bring him to task for past wrongs; an old man now, defenseless, deserving of all I can offer.

  My mother reappeared in shorts and a wife-beater. “Sinotchek” (“Little son”), she shouted, and kissed me in the same meaningful way. “Look who’s come to us! Nash lyubimeits” (“Our favorite”).

  She shook Eunice’s hand, and both of my parents swiftly evaluated her, affirmed that she was, like her predecessors, not Jewish, but quietly approved of the fact that she was thin and attractive with a healthy black mane of hair. My mother unwrapped her own precious blond locks from the green handkerchief that kept them safe from the American sun and smiled prettily at Eunice, her skin gentle and pale, aged only around the frantically moving mouth. She began talking in her brave post-retirement English about how glad she was to have a potential daughter-in-law (a perennial dream—two women against two men, better odds at the dinner table), filling in the contours of her loneliness with rapid-fire questions about my mysterious life in faraway New York. “Does Lenny keep clean house? Does he vacuum? Once, I came to college dormitory, okh, awful! Such smell! Dead ficus tree! Old cheese on table. Socks hanging in window.”

  Eunice smiled and spoke in my favor. “He’s very good, Ms. Abramov. He’
s very clean.” I looked at her with endearment. Somewhere beneath the bright suburban skies I felt the presence of a .50-caliber Browning gun swiveling toward an incoming Long Island Rail Road train, but here I stood, surrounded by the people who loved me.

  “I got Tagamet from the discount pharmacy,” I said to my father, taking five boxes out of the bag I’d brought.

  “Thank you, malen’kii” (“little one”), my father said, taking hold of his beloved drug. “Peptic ulcer,” he said to Eunice gravely, pointing at the depth of his tortured stomach.

  My mother had already grabbed hold of the back of my head and was madly stroking my hair. “So gray,” she said, shaking her head in an exaggerated way, as if she were an American comedic actress. “So old he gets. Almost forty. Lyonya, what is happening to you? Too much stress? Also losing hair. Oh my God!”

  I shook her off. Why was everyone so concerned about my decline?

  “You are named Eunice,” my father said. “Do you know where it come from, such name?”

  “My parents …” Eunice gamely began.

  “It from the Greek, yoo-nee-kay. Meaning ‘victorious.’” He laughed, happy to demonstrate that, before he was forced to be a janitor in America, he had served as a quasi-intellectual and minor dandy on Moscow’s Arbat Street. “So I hope,” he said, “that in life you will be victorious also!”

  “Who cares about Greek, Boris,” my mother said. “Look at how she is beautiful!” The fact that my parents admired Eunice’s looks and capacity for victory brightened me quite a bit. All these years, and I still craved their approval, still longed for the carrot and stick of their nineteenth-century child-rearing. I instructed myself to lower the heat of my emotions, to think without the family blood bursting at my temples. But it was all for nought. I became twelve years old as soon as I passed the mezuzah at the front door.