Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Why don’t you like Eunice?” I asked Grace, hoping she would stutter and painfully confess her love for me.

  “It’s not that I don’t like her,” Grace said. “It just feels like she’s got a lot of things to work out.”

  “I got a lot of things to work out too,” I said. “Maybe Eunice and I can work them out together.”

  “Lenny.” Grace rubbed my upper arm and flashed me her lower yellows (how I relished her imperfections). “If you’re attracted to her physically, that’s fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. She’s hot. Have a good time with her. Have a fling. But don’t tell me, ‘I’m in love with her.’”

  “I’m worried about dying,” I said.

  “And she makes you feel young?” Grace said.

  “She makes me feel bald.” I ran my hand through what was left.

  “I like your hair,” Grace said, gently pulling at the clump standing armed sentinel over my widow’s peak. “It’s honest.”

  “I guess in some ridiculous way I think Eunice will let me live forever. Please don’t say anything Christian, Grace. I really can’t handle it.”

  “We’re all going to die, Lenny,” Grace said. “You, me, Vishnu, Eunice, your boss, your clients, everyone.”

  The boys were now hooting over their äppäräti, and Grace and I joined them. They were watching the stream of Noah’s friend Hartford Brown, who did a political commentary show intermixed with his own hardcore gay sex. The esteemed Li—officially the Governor of the People’s Bank of China-Worldwide, unofficially the world’s most powerful man—was first shown chatting up our clueless Bipartisan leaders on the White House lawn. There was my father’s idol, Defense Secretary Rubenstein, bowing from the waist, his bumbling incoherent rage turned to quiet obedience, his trademark white handkerchief flashing out of his suit pocket like a cheap surrender. Rubenstein presented Li with some sort of golden fish, which flopped into the air and miraculously opened up into an approximation of China’s bulbous shape, a sign that America could still produce and innovate.

  Then the positively ripped Hartford was mounted on top of what was announced as a yacht near the Dutch Antilles, fresh spray rainbowing his sunglasses, two hairy dark arms massaging his marbled chest and shoulders as his lover’s thrusts pushed him into the frame of his äppärät. “Fuck me, brownie,” he crooned to his sailing buddy, his lips so louche yet masculine, so full of life and heat that I found myself feeling happy for his happiness.

  Then cut to Li and our youthful puppet leader Jimmy Cortez at the White House, the American President seated stiffly, the Chinese banker more at ease, impervious to the microphone booms crowding the air before him. “I totally love what the Chinaman is wearing,” Hartford was saying over the White House visuals, intermittently groaning from being fucked by the Antillean. Viewers were reminded that Li had been picked the best-dressed man in the world by an informal multinational poll, with respondents particularly taken by “the simplicity of his suits” and “the glammy oversized glasses.”

  “We wish China to become a nation of consumers and not otters,” President Cortez begged the banker.

  Wait, what? A nation of otters? I replayed the stream on my own äppärät. “We wish China to become a nation of consumers and not savers,” the president had actually said. Jesus Christ, I was losing it. “The American people need China-Worldwide to become a savior of our last manufacturers, large and small. China is no longer a poor country. It is time for the Chinese people to spend.” Mr. Li nodded distractedly and smiled his great big nothing of a smile. President Cortez then said some words in Chinese, which were interpreted as “O.K. to spend now! Go have fun!”

  “Oh, shit,” Vishnu said, pawing frantically at his äppärät. “Something’s happening, Nee-groes!” We could hardly hear him above the roar of the bar. The young people were drinking more, and some women were getting nervously naked, even as Eunice Park tightened a light sweater around her shoulders, rubbing her nose from the air conditioning. “There’s a riot in Central Park,” Vishnu said. “This black dude is getting his ass kicked by the Guard and all these LNWIs are getting seriously whaled on.”

  News of the Central Park slaughter was spreading through the bar. No one was streaming live yet, but there were Images coming up on our äppäräti and on the bar’s big screens. A teenager (or so he seemed, those awkward lanky legs), his face turned away from view, a red concavity cut from the midsection of his body, bundled up like road kill on the soft green hump of a protruding hill. The bodies of three men and a woman (a family?) lying on their backs, their naked black arms thrown wildly across their bodies, as if haphazardly hugging themselves. And one man whom I thought I recognized—the unemployed bus driver Eunice and I had seen on Cedar Hill. Aziz something. I remembered mostly what he had been wearing, the white T-shirt and the gold chain with the oversized yuan symbol. There it was—the strange confluence of having seen him alive, if even for a moment, combined with a dot the size of a five-jiao coin that had punctured the upper half of his elongated brown forehead, red bleeding into rust along the links of his heavy chain, teeth bitterly stamped together, the eyes already turned up in their sockets. It took me several moments to come up with a description of what I was seeing—a dead man—just as the screen switched to a shot of the sky above the park, the tail end of a helicopter lifted upward, its beak presumably lowered for execution, and a backdrop of red tracer fire illuminating the warm close of a summer day.

  A silence overtook the Cervix. I could hear nothing but the sound of my Xanax bottle being instinctually opened by three of my benumbed fingers, and then the scratch of the white pill descending my dry throat. We absorbed the Images and as a group of like-incomed people felt the short bursts of existential fear. That fear was temporarily replaced by a surge of empathy for those who were nominally our fellow New Yorkers. What was it like to be one of the dead or the about-to-be-dead? To be strafed from above in the middle of a city? To receive the quick understanding that your family was dying around you? Finally, the fear and the empathy were replaced by a different knowledge. The knowledge that it wouldn’t happen to us. That what we were witnessing was not terrorism. That we were of good stock. That these bullets would discriminate.

  I teened Nettie Fine: “Did you see what’s happening in the park????”

  Despite the time difference in Rome (it must have been past 4 a.m.), she teened me back immediately: “Just saw it. Don’t worry, Lenny. This is horrible, but it will BACKFIRE on Rubenstein and his ilk. They’re shooting in Central Park because there aren’t enough ex–National Guardsmen there. They’ll never go after the former soldiers. The real action is in Tompkins Square, which Media isn’t covering at all. You have to go there and meet my friend David Lorring. I used to do post-traumatic counseling in D.C. and he came to see me after two tours in Ciudad Bolívar. He’s organizing a real resistance down there. Brilliant guy. Okay, I got to catch some zzzzz’s, sweetie. Stay strong! xxx Nettie Fine. P.S. I follow your friend Noah Weinberg’s stream religiously. When I’m back in the States I’d love to take him out to lunch.”

  I smiled when I read Nettie’s missive. A woman in her sixties was still active, still trying to shape our country in the right way. Surely there was some hope. As if to confirm my thoughts, CrisisNet pinged with a new announcement: “LIBOR RATE RISES 32 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR HIGHER BY 0.8% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥ = $4.92.” Could the markets be right? Was the Central Park massacre really a turning point? Would it backfire on Rubenstein and his friends?

  I re-read Nettie Fine’s message. It was inspiring, but there was something off about the wording. The real action is in Tompkins Square. I tried to picture the words “real action” leaving Nettie’s careful, intelligent lips. What had happened to her? The otter. I teened Fabrizia in Rome. “RECIPIENT DELETED.” Okay, I had to stop worrying. There was a real massacre in front of me. Forget the Old World. I was not responsible for what happened to either Nettie or Fabrizia. I was responsible only for Eunice
Park.

  Meanwhile, at the Cervix, the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales. All I remember is feeling a little hot around the temples and wanting to be closer to Euny. Things had been rocky between us since I had relapsed and picked up a book, and she had caught me reading, not just text-scanning for data. With the violence just a few miles to our north, I wanted nothing to separate me from my sweetheart, certainly not a two-brick tome of Tolstoy’s W&P.

  Noah started streaming right away, but his girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, was already live. She lifted up her blouse to show the negligible roll of fat that crowned her perfect legs and spilled from her perfect jeans, her so-called muffintop, slapped at it, and delivered her signature line: “Hey, girlfriend, gots muffintop?”

  “It’s Rubenstein time in Central Park,” Noah was saying. “It’s Harm Reduction, giving away the store, everything must go, ‘our prices are insane’ time in America, and R-stein won’t feel good until all the niggers and spics are cleared out of our city. He’s dropping bombs on our moms like Chrissy Columbus dropped germs on the redman, cabróns. First the shooting, then the roundup. Half the mamis and papis in the city are going to end up in a Secure Screening Facility in Utica before the week is over. Better keep your äppäräti away from those Credit Poles.…” He paused to look over the raw data streaming at him. And then he turned his tired, professionally animated face to us, unsure of what emotion to muster next but unable to contain the visceral thrill. “There’s eighteen people dead,” he said, as if he had surprised himself. “They shot eighteen.”

  And I wondered about the excitement in his voice: What if Noah was secretly pleased that all this was happening? What if we all were? What if the violence was actually channeling our collective fear into a kind of momentary clarity, the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association? I could already envision myself excitedly proclaiming the news of how I had seen this dead Aziz bus driver in Central Park, had maybe even exchanged a smile with him or an urban whassup. Don’t get me wrong, I felt the horror too, but I wondered, for instance, what were these Secure Screening Facilities that Noah always talked about? Were people really shot in the back of the head without a trial? Once, I reminded Noah about how The New York Lifestyle Times used to have actual correspondents who would go out and report and verify, but he just gave me one of those “Old man, don’t even,” looks and went back to hollering Spanish slang into his camera nozzle. But, then again, Nettie Fine followed his stream religiously, so maybe I was missing something. Maybe Noah was as good as it got these days.

  “Eighteen people dead!” Amy Greenberg was shouting. She put her hand on her make-believe muffintop, over the negligible waistline and the pretty serious musculature above, as if to scold Rubenstein and the administration, but this maneuver also allowed the outline of her left breast—which a random poll had publicly declared to be the better one—to spill out of her décolletage and frame the center of the shot. “Huge riot in Central Park, National Guard just shooting everyone, smashing up their little shacks, and I am so glad my man Noah Weinberg is right over my shoulder, because I just cannot handle this anymore. I mean, hello, stop me before I snack again. Noah, I am so blessed to have you in my life at this terrible moment, and I know I’m not perfect, but, okay, and this is like total cliché alert, but you mean the world to me, because you are so kind and sensitive and man-hot, you are so Media, and”—her voice started to shake, she started to blink voluntarily in a way that always hastened the tears—“I don’t know how you can go out with a fat loser like me.”

  Grace and Vishnu were leaning in to each other as if they were two parts of an ancient ruin, while new death tolls appeared in the air around us, the numbers swelling. I recalled Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, and again my friends were the ones who took care of me. Noticing me standing alone next to Eunice, who was deep into AssLuxury (was she too shocked by the violence to stop shopping?), they reached out and brought me into their circle, so that I could feel the warmth of their hands and the boozy comfort of their breath.

  Noah and Amy were loudly streaming a few feet apart from each other, straining to be heard over the din of the bar.

  “Rubenstein’s making a point to Li,” Noah was saying. “We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we’re not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we’ll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips. Keep the credit rolling, chinos.”

  Amy Greenberg: “Remember Jeremy Block, the guy I broke up with last Passover?” A stream of a naked, masturbating guy who resembled Noah was projected next to Amy’s äppärät, and she scowled at the Image of his generous penis, her pretty post-bulimic face betraying the beginnings of a muzzle. “Remember how I couldn’t count on that jerk-off when there was, like, trouble in the world? Remember how he wouldn’t explain anything to me, even though he worked for LandOLakes? Remember how he made me weigh myself every morning? Remember how he …” Big pause, and then a bright, smiley face. “… didn’ respect the muffintop?”

  CrisisNet: RUBENSTEIN BLAMES CENTRAL PARK RIOT LEADER FORMER BUS DRIVER AZIZ JAMIE TOMPKINS FOR RIOTS. QUOTE: “ARA REPORTS IDENTIFIED ‘AZIZ’ AS HAVING TRAINED WITH HEZBOLLAH FORCES IN SOUTHERN LEBANON.” QUOTE: “WE ARE DEALING WITH FRONTLINE ISLAMOFASCIST TERRORISM.” QUOTE: “NOW IS THE TIME FOR SPENDING, SAVING, AND UNITY. ONE PARTY, ONE NATION, ONE GOD.”

  Vishnu had gone to get us more beer, and Eunice and Grace were doing AssLuxury together. Grace said something that made Eunice smile, and then they talked back and forth, Grace’s eyes on Eunice, Eunice’s eyes mostly on her äppärät, but occasionally, shyly, on Grace. I though I heard some words in Korean—“Soon-Dooboo” (however it’s spelled) is a tofu stew that Grace had ordered a lot on 32nd Street. I wanted to join their conversation, but Grace gently pushed me away. Eunice was FACing a little with three of the other Asian girls in the room, and her FUCKABILITY, I noticed with pride and a little worry, was 795, although her PERSONALITY just 500 (maybe she wasn’t extro enough). But one very young Filipina Mediawhore in a suburban cardigan, big clunky orthopedic-type shoes, and Onionskin jeans streamed quietly by the jukebox rated several points higher on the FUCKABILITY. “That girl has the perfect body,” I heard Eunice saying to Grace. “God, I hate twenty-one-year-olds.”

  I looked sadly at my own rankings. Most of the men tonight were wearing cool Mr. Rogers–like V-neck sweaters and were appraising me coldly at best. Someone had written about my stubble, “That dude next to the cute Asian spermbank has like pubic hair growing out of his chin,” and I was ranked fortieth out of the forty-three guys in the room. Did Eunice care? I noticed that when I put my arm around her my MALE HOTNESS shot up by a hundred points, and I ranked a respectable thirty out of forty-three men. But what did that say about me? That I needed Eunice just to be acknowledged in the greater world? For one thing, I resolved to shave my stubble tomorrow. It only worked for a certain kind of very attractive guy.

  Amy Greenberg, pointing to the little flaps of skin hanging between her armpits and breasts: “I’ve got wings! Thirty-four and I’ve got wings like an angel. I can’t believe any guy would want to feel me up with all this bra goo! Look at me! Look at me!”

  Noah Weinberg: “Thirty-three casualties in the Low Net Worth riots as of nine-oh-four p.m. EST. And the Guard is still shooting up in Central Park. But we’ve lost four hundred National Guardsmen in Ciudad Bolívar alone in the last two months. That’s the Rubenstein strategy: The more Americans die, the less anyone cares. Redefine the normative down. Start digging the graves.”

  Amy Greenberg: “Let me break down what I’m wearing. The shoes are from Padma, the blouse is a Marla Hammond original, and the nippleless bra is a Saaami Wing Concealer—my mother got it for me on
sale at the United Nations Retail Corridor.”

  Noah Weinberg: “And I’m not even talking about the LIBOR rate here. I’m talking—” He stopped and looked around. A trio of Staten Island girls were lustily humming a song whose only discernible lyric was “Mmmmmmm …” Noah started to say something, but in the end all he said was “You know what, patos? I—I have nothing more to say to any of you.”

  Amy Greenberg: “I just want to say, my mom is freaking amazing. When I was breaking up with Jeremy Block, she just like made me see through all his bullshit. We looked at his rankings together and we were like, who cares about his big dick and the fact that he can bone all night. He made me give him a rim job for his thirtieth birthday, and then he wouldn’t kiss me afterwards. That really says a lot about a guy, when he won’t kiss his girlfriend after she’s licked out his junk. My mom, she’s so cute, she was like ‘You deserve so much better, Aimeleh. Be your own pimp, girl!’”

  Grace took me aside. “Hey,” she said. “I think Eunice has some real problems.”

  “Duh,” I said. “Her father’s a dickhead.”

  “I know this kind of girl,” Grace was saying. “It’s the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven. I mean even shallower than Noah’s girlfriends. At least Amy Greenberg knows exactly what she’s doing.”