Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  But I’ve also been thinking. Maybe David was wrong about everything in the end? Maybe there isn’t going to be an Act Two for America like he said. Maybe you were right about him. Maybe he was just a dreamer and would never be able to look out for me and my family. But if not him, then who? Lenny?

  Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not more of an accomplished person, because then I could help my sister and my mother. Maybe I should ask Joshie about what I should do, if he can check up on my family somehow. Ugh, how fucked am I? Tell me please. Write me or verbal me. Anytime, day or night, whenever you get this, whenever it’s safe to write or holler back. I need to hear your voice, Pony of my heart. Tell me I’m not alone.

  GLOBALTEENS AUTOMATIC ERROR MESSAGE

  AUGUST 22

  EUNI-TARD TO CHUNG.WON.PARK:

  Hi, Mommy. I bet I’m going to get an error message after I write this, but I feel like I have to write this anyway. If you get this someday, I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry. You’re so close and yet I can’t help you and Sally and dad. I know you raised me better than that. I know that if this were Korea you’d figure out a way to help your parents no matter what the personal sacrafice. I’m just not a good person. I don’t have any strength and I don’t have any accomplishments under my belt and I’m so so sorry I didn’t do better on my LSAT. I wish I knew what my special path was, as Reverend Cho likes to say. If Sally’s with you, please tell her I’m sorry I failed her as a sister too.

  Your useless daughter,

  Eunice

  GLOBALTEENS AUTOMATIC ERROR MESSAGE

  WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:

  Sender: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative

  Recipient: Eunice Park

  Hi, Eunice. How are you doing? Listen, I know there are some food shortages downtown, so I’m going to send you a big care package. Look for a black Staatling-Wapachung Service Jeep at 575 Grand around 4pm tomorrow. Any special requests? I know you girls totally heart organic peanut butter and lots of soy milk and cereal, right?

  Listen, things are going to get better very soon, I promise. This whole situation is clearing right up. Hint: Brush up on your Norwegian and Mandarin. JBF. And guess what? That art teacher is going to come from Paris, so we can start practicing together at my place! Parsons is out of business. I can’t wait to see you again. We’re gonna have so much fun, Eunice. As always, please let’s keep this our little secret. We’ve got a very sensitive Rhesus Monkey on our hands and he might misconstrue, if you know what I mean. Ha ha.

  AUGUST 23

  WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:

  Sender: Eunice Park

  Recipient: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative

  Hi Joshie. I got your sweet message. I’m really excited about the food package. We’ve been eating nothing but carbs and fats for the last week. Tap water is pretty hit or miss and our local bodega ran out of bottled last week. Also there are some old people in the building who need water and supplies and the heat is really bad for them, although I worry what will happen when winter comes if there’s not ENOUGH heat. Thanks so much! Yes, I totally heart cereal (Smart Start is my favorite) and organic PB. I’m sorry to bother you about this stuff, but could you please find out if my parents are okay? I haven’t heard from them since my GlobalTeens went off and I’m super worried. Dr. Sam Park and Mrs. Chung-won Park, 124 Harold Avenue, Fort Lee, NJ 07024. Also, I haven’t heard from my best friend Jennifer Kang, who’s at 210 Myrtle Avenue, Hermosa Beach, CA, I don’t know the zip code. Also, my friend David Lorring was in Tompkins Square when all this stuff happened, maybe there’s some way you can check to see if he’s okay. Again, I’m so sorry to impose on you like this, but I’m scared out of my mind.

  I think it would be great to draw with you, but I wonder if we should let Lenny know. He is a very sensitive Rhesus Monkey, as you say, but I think if he ever found out he would be very angry with me. And he IS my boyfriend. Thanks for understanding.

  Yours, Eunice

  WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:

  Sender: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative

  Recipient: Eunice Park

  Smart Start! Wow, that’s my favorite cereal too! I’m glad we have so much in common. You really take care of yourself and it shows in how beautiful and young you look. There’s a real overlap between our philosophies on life and staying younger and taking care of oneself, something I think we’ve both been trying to instill in Lenny, but ultimately I think Lenny’s immune to that. I’ve been trying to get him to think about health choices, but he’s just really focused on his parents and worried about THEIR death, without really understanding what it means to want to live life to the fullest, to the freshest, to the youngest. In some ways, you and I are really from the same generation of people and Lenny is from a different world, a previous world that was obsessed with death and not life, and was consumed with fear and not positivism. Anyway, I’m going to totally load up a couple of jeeps with supplies so you can have lots of food for yourself and also feed and hydrate all those poor old people in your building.

  I don’t know if Lenny explained to you, but the Post-Human Services division I run is part of the same company as Wapachung Contingency. So I talked to some of the Contingency folks and they’re going to make some inquiries about your parents. I know the situation in Fort Lee is very touch and go. Basically, the week after the Rupture no one had command & control over there, but it’s not so bad as in other parts of the country, because it’s right over the river from us. In other words, I’m sure they’re okay. I couldn’t get any info on Hermosa Beach, CA, except there were reports of very heavy small-arms fire during and after the Rupture. I’m sorry, Eunice. I don’t know if your friend was in the area at the time of the fighting. I just want you to be prepared for the worst.

  I feel a little stupid writing this, but I want to be completely honest. I really have strong feelings for you, Eunice. From the moment I met you, I felt so flustered, I thought my mind was about to go blank. It took me a good ten minutes just to open a bottle of resveratrol because my hands were shaking so much! When I saw you, I remembered some of the worst parts of my life, some things I shouldn’t really be talking about over this emergency signal. Let’s just say there were some difficult moments, moments that it may take several more lifetimes to get over (which is why I simply cannot die), and when I saw you, AFTER I started breathing again (ha ha), I felt some of that weight lift off my shoulders. I felt like I knew what I wanted, not just from eternity, but from the present moment too. And when things got bad recently, it was thinking of you that kept me going. What is that effect you have over people, Eunice? Where does it come from? How does your smile reduce one of the most powerful men in the hemisphere to a dopey teenager? It’s like I feel that together we can redeem whatever misery we encountered on this planet, whatever awfulness we faced as children.

  Anyway, I feel so totally, like, weird opening up my heart like this to you, because what I feel for YOU and for YOUR FAMILY IN FORT LEE AND THEIR WELL-BEING, is so strong and without reservation, that I fear it might make you run away from me. I’m sorry if that’s the case. But if it’s not, please let me know and we’ll just do some drawing together, no strings attached. Better than hanging out at miserable 575 Grand Street, right? Ha ha ha.

  Love,

  Your Joshie

  FIVE-JIAO MEN

  FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

  SEPTEMBER 5

  Dear Diary,

  My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect.

  It’s been almost a month since my last diary entry. I am so sorry. But I can’t connect in any meaningful way to anyone, even to you, diary. Four young people committed suicide in our building complexes, and two of them wrote suicide notes about how they couldn’t see a future without their äppäräti. One wrote, quite eloquently, about how he “reached out to life,” but found there only “walls and thoughts and faces
,” which weren’t enough. He needed to be ranked, to know his place in this world. And that may sound ridiculous, but I can understand him. We are all bored out of our fucking minds. My hands are itching for connection, I want to connect to my parents and to Vishnu and Grace, I want to mourn Noah with them. But all I have is Eunice and my Wall of Books. So I try to Celebrate What I Have, one of my prime directives.

  Work has been good. Kind of a blur, but even a blur is better than the slow churn of reality. Mostly I work alone at my desk with a half-turned bowl of miso by my side. I haven’t really spent time with Joshie since The Slap. He’s off somewhere, negotiating with the IMF or the Norwegians or the Chinese or whoever still gives a damn. Howard Shu, dork that he is, has become the standard-bearer for the few of us still left at Post-Human. He walks around with an old-fashioned clipboard and actually tells us what to do. Before the Rupture, we would never have stood for anything so hierarchical, but now we’re just glad to have instructions, even barked ones. My job for the time being is to send out Wapachung emergency frequency messages to our clients, making sure they’re safe, but also subtly checking up on their businesses, their marriages, their children, their finances. Making sure we’re safe and that our monthly dues keep coming.

  It’s not going to be easy. No one’s working. The teachers aren’t getting paid, is what I hear. No school. Children set loose and free into the difficult new city. I found a Vladeck House kid, maybe ten or twelve, sitting by the Arab bodega, licking out the inside of an empty bag of something called “Clük,” which the packaging warned was “inspired by real chicken flava!” When I sat down next to him, he could barely lift his eyes up to mine. Out of instinct, I took out my äppärät and pointed it at the kid, as if that would make things right. Then I took out a brown twenty-yuan note and set it at his feet. Immediately, his hand darted for it. The bill was scrunched into his fist. The fist was hidden behind his back. His face slowly turned to face mine. The brown-eyed look he gave me was not one of gratitude. The look said: Leave me alone with my newfound fortune or I will lash out at you with the last strength I have. I left him there with his fist behind his back, his eyes on my departing feet.

  I don’t know what’s going on. The city is either completely finished or already shooting for redemption. New signs are going up. “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?”

  As far as I can tell, the most significant forms of employment around Manhattan are the “Staatling-Wapachung Works Progress” sites promising “One hour honest labor = 5-jiao coin. Nutritious lunch served.” Rows of men cracking open asphalt, digging ditches, filling in ditches with cement. These five-jiao men roam the city, hands in pockets, useless vestigial äppäräti plugs in their ears, like a pride of voiceless lions. They’re middle-aged to younger, sparse hair bleached by the sun, tyrannical sunburns on their face and neck, expensive T-shirts bought in happier days, new Antarcticas of perspiration spreading down to the stomach. Shovels, picks, loud exhalations, not even grunts anymore, to save energy. I saw Noah’s old friend Hartford Brown, who only a few months ago was getting reamed on a yacht in the Antilles, working a five-jiao line on Prince Street. He looked cracked, half of him bronzed, the other half peeling, that slightly pudgy face of his devoid of all texture, like a thick slice of prosciutto. If they can make a fabulous gay man work like that, I thought, what can they do to the rest of us?

  I went up close to him as he swung his pick, felt his rank odor battering its way into my nostrils. “Hartford,” I said. “It’s Lenny Abramov. Noah’s friend.” A terrible exhale from a terrible place inside him. “Hartford!” He turned away. Someone with a megaphone was yelling, “Let’s do get back to work, Brownie!” I handed him a hundred-yuan note, which he accepted, also without thanks, and then he went back to swinging his pick. “Hartford,” I said. “Hey! You don’t have to work now. A hundred yuan is two hundred hours of work. Take it easy. Get some rest. Get some shade.” But he just went on swinging mechanically, avoiding my presence, already back into his world, which began with the pick behind his shoulder and ended with the pick in the ground.

  Back home, Eunice took charge of organizing the relief efforts for the older people. I don’t know why. The stirrings of her Christian background? Sorrow over not being able to help her own parents? I’m just going to take it at face value.

  She went from floor to floor in each of our four co-op buildings, a total of eighty floors, knocked on each door, and if there were older people she took down their food and water needs and made sure the supplies were brought down the next week in one of Joshie’s Staatling-Wapachung Service convoys. Why is he helping us? I suppose he feels guilty about Noah and the ferry, or maybe about The Slap. In any case, we need what he’s got.

  She delivered the water herself—with my sporadic help—to each apartment, she made sure all the windows and doors were open to improve circulation, she sat there and listened to the old people cry about their children and grandchildren who were scattered around the country and for whom they feared the worst, she asked me to interpret certain Yiddish words (“that farkakteh Rubenstein,” “that shlemiel Rubenstein,” “that little pisher Rubenstein”), but mostly she sat with them and hugged them as their tears pollinated the dusty throw rugs and embattled last-century carpets. When the older women (most of our aged residents are widows) smelled particularly bad, she would clean their dirty bathtubs, help the shaky old ladies inside, and wash them. It was a task I found particularly repulsive—how I feared one day having to care for my parents in so thoughtful and tactile a manner, as Russian tradition expected of me—but Eunice, who despised any alien smell coming from our refrigerator or the rankness of my toenails after several missed pedicures, did not flinch, did not turn away from the sunken, splotched flesh in her hands.

  We saw a woman die. Or Eunice did anyway. I think it was a stroke. She couldn’t get the words out of her mouth, this withered creature, sitting beside a coffee table littered with unusable remote controls, a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe showing off his beautiful beard framed behind her. “Aican,” she kept saying, arcing spittle across Eunice’s shoulders. And then, more emphatically: “Aican, aican, aican!”

  Did she mean to say, “I can”? I left the apartment, because I couldn’t bear to rekindle the memories of my own grandmother after her final stroke, in a wheelchair, covering up the dead parts of her body with her shawl, worried about looking helpless in front of the world.

  I feared the old people, feared their mortality, but the more I did so, the more I fell in love with Eunice Park. I fell for her as hopelessly and thoroughly as I had in Rome, where I had confused her for a different, stronger person. My problem was that I couldn’t help her find her parents and sister. Even with my Staatling connections, I couldn’t find out what had happened to her family in Fort Lee. One day Eunice told me she could feel that they were still alive and doing well—a sentiment that floored me with its almost religious naïveté, but also made me wish I could believe the same thing about the Abramovs.

  Aican, aican, aican.

  So many things have happened since I’ve last written in you, diary, some of them awful, most of them mundane. I guess the main thing I can think of is the fact that things are getting better with Eunice, that through our mutual depression over what’s happened to our city, our friends, and our lives we’ve become closer. Because we can’t connect to our äppäräti, we’re learning to turn to each other.

  Once, after a long weekend of scrubbing and watering our elderly, she even asked me to read to her.

  I went over to my Wall of Books and picked up Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, whose cover I had caught Eunice examining once before, tracing with her finger the depicted bowler hat flying over the Prague skyline. There were laudatory quotes for the author and his work on the first page of the book from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times (the real Times, not the Lifestyle Times), even something called Common
weal. What had happened to all these publications? I remember reading the Times in the subway, folding it awkwardly while leaning against the door, caught up in the words, worried about crashing to the floor or tripping over some lightly clad beauty (there was always at least one), but even more afraid to lose the thread of the article in front of me, my spine banging against the train door, the clatter and drone of the massive machine around me, and me, with my words, brilliantly alone.

  Reading Kundera’s book, I felt a growing anxiety as the words on the crinkly yellow pages came out of my mouth. I found myself struggling for breath. I had read this book many times over as a teenager, had bent the topmost edges of many pages where Kundera’s philosophy touched my own. But now even I had trouble understanding all the concepts, never mind what Eunice could understand. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a novel of ideas set in a country that meant nothing to her, set in a time—the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—that might as well not have existed as far as Eunice was concerned. She had learned to love Italy, but that was a far more digestible, stylish land, a country of Images.

  In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice’s sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual “living” characters—I recalled this was a love story—and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice’s worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?