Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  But how was he going to mentor her after this? How would he sit down and explain how our economy worked after she had seen him naked? He wanted to look into her unblemished face, her expression always bordering on some unspoken, built-in contentment, and say: “A REIT is a real estate investment trust. It trades in property but acts more like a stock.” He would make House Hunters look like kindergarten.

  They were asleep in no time.

  * * *

  —

  THE SUN blinded him awake. He was in a middle-class hotel room with a local southern girl next to him—what could be more perfect? He turned to see if he could give her a morning kiss, but she was gone.

  Barry shot up in the bed. He ran into the bathroom. It was empty. He opened the door to the hallway and peeked out. She wasn’t there. It struck him immediately.

  His watches.

  His luggage was missing from the corner of the room where he had casually placed it. Vanished.

  His watches. The Tri-Compax he had meant to give to Shiva. The rabbit toy that was going to thrill his son. The whole thing had been a scam.

  He picked up the phone, not knowing whom to call. She had talked to a woman in reception when checking him in. An older white woman. She had probably been in cahoots with Brooklyn. He would call the cops. He would sue them. He would sue the hotel. Although Brooklyn must have figured out he was on the run. No credit cards, a bunch of expensive watches. Fuck!

  As he was about to press the button for the front desk, he saw a note on the bedside table written on a Marriott notepad. The care of the handwriting could only mean she had written it.

  Dear Barry,

  That was so much fun and I feel like I’ve learned a lot. When I finally do get on a plane, I know I’ll be thinking of you! You said you wanted to try something authentic, so if you stay in Jackson you should check out the Big Apple Inn, which is in an old neighborhood called Farish. Their pig ear sandwich is famous. The front desk will draw you a map. And thank you for the Kind bar. You are very Kind. XOXOXOXO Brooklyn. P.S. I put your suitcase in the closet and the watches in the safe. The code is 7291 which also happens to be my birthday

  Barry felt sick. He ran to the closet. His rollerboard was propped up on a suitcase stand. He pressed the code for the safe. He took out his watches and arranged them on the hotel desk in a row, the way he had seen Shiva arrange compact discs and toys. He saw the high beam of the Mississippi sun reflected in their acrylic and sapphire crystals and bent down to hear the clicks of their movements, inhaling and exhaling with each tick of time.

  Barry read the note over. So what did it mean? Was she breaking it off? Why had she told him her birth date? Did she still want him to help her get into real estate? He read it again and again. It was a stupid thing to notice, but her punctuation was perfect, commas and all. He had portfolio managers who couldn’t type a fucking e-mail.

  He sniffed his hand to make sure she had been real. Then he threw on Jeff Park’s Georgia Aquarium T-shirt and his jeans and ran downstairs. A woman in oversize glasses was minding the front desk. She was light skinned and freckled. “Do you know where Brooklyn is?” he asked her.

  “She doesn’t work weekends.”

  “But I need to see her. Can you give me her number?”

  “We don’t give out that information, sir.”

  Once they said “sir,” the game was over. Barry grabbed a pen and pad. “Dear Brooklyn,” he wrote,

  I’m sorry if anything I did was displeasing last night. I did not mean to hurry you along, if that’s what happened. I know you’re a very smart and proper young woman and that is very attractive to me. I also know we’re from very different worlds, but I feel like this is a once-in-a-lifetime connection. I don’t think of you as just someone to mess around with. The messing around was really incidental. It happened because I was weak and because you are so beautiful. I want to be a mentor to you. I want to teach you about real estate investment trusts. I want to take you to the volcano atop the Big Island in Hawaii. There’s so much more we can share in a nonsexualized way. There is nothing like taking a private boat from Naples and seeing the cliffs of Capri looming in the distance. But more than anything, I just want to have the honor of helping you succeed at whatever you want to do. Yours sincerely, Barry. BCohen@ThisSide.com.

  “Please,” he said. “If you see her, tell her to e-mail me immediately. Well. I might not respond right away because I lost my phone, but—” He was sounding demented, he knew.

  “Of course, sir,” the woman said with what sounded like finality. He was panting miserably. The aquarium T-shirt stuck to his back despite the air-conditioning. “Would you like a glass of water?” she asked.

  “She’s just a really wonderful person,” he said.

  “We’re all real fond of her,” the woman allowed. Barry thought of asking which church she attended, but instead asked directions to the Big Apple Inn, the place she had recommended. Maybe he could have an early lunch there. A map was drawn for him and a gracious set of directions tendered.

  The Farish neighborhood was just a block away from downtown. The main street looked abandoned and ruined like the parts of Havana he had once seen on a luxury tour of Cuba. Signs declared its former glory; apparently Farish had done for black life in Mississippi what Jackson Ward had done for Richmond.

  The Big Apple Inn was the only business open on the street. A young girl was working the grill, and a big woman who looked like she was related was counting money. “My friend told me to get the pig-ear sandwich,” Barry said. The countertops were fake, the chairs seventies orange, the walls plastic, and the extension cords were draped over the joint like kudzu. What kind of dedication would it take to stay in a place like this? “Do you know her?” he asked. “Her name’s Brooklyn.”

  They did not. “She told me she really likes this place,” Barry said.

  “Medgar Evers used to have an office upstairs,” the girl said. It sounded like the kind of thing she would say to a tourist. Barry knew Evers was a civil rights person; there was a CUNY college named after him. He sat down on a hard orange chair. Jews had a connection to Mississippi, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The pig ear was soft and hot and gelatinous and came enclosed in a sweet little bun. It felt like he was eating someone else’s pain. Brooklyn had given him a quick snapshot of who she was, or at least where she came from. She said that some houses in Jackson cost less than his watch, and this was probably one of them. Maybe her father was a small-business owner whom he could help. He never liked Obama’s hatred of people in finance, but he had been slightly interested in Ben Carson’s candidacy until the surgeon had mistaken “Hamas” for “hummus.” He touched his own face. The scars inflicted by Seema and the nanny had healed and formed into little ridges.

  Was it so wrong to want to help a younger person? He would never be able to teach Shiva a damn thing. The child had kicked him in the chest the few times he had tried to hold him, to soothe him, to instruct him about the world the way every animal was programmed to teach its offspring. His own father would have broken him to pieces if he acted the way Shiva did, diagnosis or not. He pictured that happy family scene that had first led him to plunge into Seema with neither a condom nor a prenup: three half-brown children in front of a row of three Duravit sinks in the upstate house, splashing one another with mirth. But no one needed him as a father or a lover. He had scared Brooklyn away. What if Layla rejected him, too?

  Outside, he passed a billboard for Big Mama’s Bail Bonding. A blond-haired woman who looked like an older version of Brooklyn was holding a small child wearing a red ribbon in her hair. There was a phone number to call and the legend I’M ON MY WAY BABY. A large church hunkered down in a beat-up A-frame behind the sign. COME UNTO ME next to the rendering of a large red cross. Barry did as instructed. What if this was Brooklyn’s church? What if he could hear her voice in prayer? Maybe add his own?
He peeked inside. A dozen elderly black women in all their Sunday finery looked back at him in confusion, their eyes blinking behind large golden glasses. He caught sight of his own reflection in the window: a rumpled white man, unshaven, his T-shirt bearing a whale shark. Barry waved to them and walked back down the street. There were signs everywhere attesting to the area’s civil rights struggle. Black cities in majority white states had a particular sadness. All those dusty freedom trails. What if our country never healed?

  He left Farish for the Marriott. The same woman at the front desk was there. He would probably be at least seventy dollars short. Which watch would he leave as collateral? “Says here your room’s been comped,” the woman said.

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “There was a room-service charge, too.”

  “All comped.”

  “Did Brooklyn pay for this? She shouldn’t! I’m so embarrassed.”

  The woman shrugged. “That’s all I know, sir,” she said. When she saw the look on his face, she added: “I’ll give her your message, I promise.” He collected his rollerboard and took one last look at the room where she had touched him. Someone had come and tidied it to perfection.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE YOU made a bad trade, you moved on, and Jackson had been a bad trade. Everything and everyone looked hurtful to him, even the poor people gathered to take the bus to Dallas, even the hunchbacked old man in the green vest who loaded his rollerboard into the bus. The world had dimmed around him, like he was wearing sunglasses. What had he promised her in that stupid note? Capri? The Big Island? He was a fucking island.

  Pff, the bus said. Pff. The intercom came on, and the passengers were asked not to drink or curse. “On behalf of Greyhound and myself, I just want to say thank you,” the driver said. She was a woman. And then they were on their way. A hawk coasted over the fields, his head slung over his shoulder as if he had forgotten to look for prey. BIENVENUE EN LOUISIANE, a sign said. The Mississippi River spread below them like a vast brown lake, even the riverboat casinos could not diminish her. They passed a field of sugarcane so green, Barry lowered his gaze. He was dreaming of Brooklyn, the weight of her breath against his collarbone as she slept.

  “The body of Joshua, the body of Abraham.” A loud voice woke him up. Unlike previous rides, there was a handful of white people on the bus. Some were in uniform; others were truck drivers talking about how they had stashed their rigs in one city and were now headed across the country for another job. The person speaking of the bodies of Joshua and Abraham was sitting in front of Barry. He had a scruffy little beard that ended before it could truly begin, darting blue eyes, and a buzz cut. He was talking to another young white man sitting across the aisle. Both of them were wearing denim shorts and ankle socks. “They say God is strange and sinister,” the man said. “Me? I hate ignorance, any kind of ignorance. What if Jesus had believed everyone when they said he was crazy? What if Moses had? Or the Wright brothers? Do you read Breitbart and InfoWars? I’m thinking of going to school for church. Like to be a pastor. Can you get an apprenticeship there?”

  “I think so,” said the guy across the aisle. “I think you can apprentice with a pastor and then after a while they let you preach.”

  “I was having depression for a year,” the would-be preacher continued. “I wanted to die. I was taking methamphetamines and then I joined the army and that’s where I’m at now. I’m going to take it as far as I’m going to take it. I have a contract with God as to what I eat and what I drink. There’s a difference between a slave and a servant, and I’m not a slave.” Barry noticed a marine tattoo on his bicep. Weren’t the army and the marines different? He had the feeling that the preacher wasn’t in the military at all. “They’re trying to create slaves, but I ain’t a slave. They even talk to you like a slave.”

  “I know how that goes,” said the man across the aisle. A short black man in a hoodie was seated between him and the would-be preacher. He was thoroughly asleep as the white men talked past him.

  “Do you read Breitbart or InfoWars? The times are a-changing. Mike Pence is a good man. He knows that big things are coming. That’s why they nailed the Jews to the cross. That’s why Muhammad was killed, because he couldn’t accept Jesus Christ as permanent. He was like that his entire life. Obstinate, they call it.”

  Barry realized that the man was now looking at him. And also that he was a Jew. He hadn’t really thought of being Jewish since he was in grade school. But he did now. The preacher had a short hunter’s knife tucked into his belt, its serrated edge exposed and gleaming. “All things work for the good of the Lord. Do you believe in the Bible?”

  “Yes!” the other man said.

  “People can change their perspective, even the Jews.”

  Another storm had started, and the bus was hydroplaning. Barry was staring out the window. “We just have different perspectives on who the Messiah was,” the man was saying, as much to Barry as to his friend across the aisle. A group of men in ankle socks and shorts in the seats just up the aisle were also half listening, half talking about their next long-haul jobs. “But why did God feel the need for Jesus to come again if nobody needed to change? And this is the summer of change, too. The angels are watching. He’s coming again. Coming one last time. Maybe he’s already here.”

  The rain turned to sunshine, and the cars on the highway left slick rainbows behind them. The bus had detoured onto a cinder-block campus. GRAMBLING STATE UNIVERSITY WELCOMES YOU TO TIGER LAND, a sign read. It was a black college. The campus was half empty for the summer, but attractive men and women still hurried along in the heat, the recent burst of rain spreading a tinge of happiness across the dusty quads. Some of them wore funny T-shirts: 0% IRISH, one said. Barry felt lonely for their company. And then he realized why.

  Grambling State. Brooklyn had gone here. Brooklyn had been one of these students.

  The two white men were watching the scene with narrowed eyes. Their associates up the aisle had gone quiet, too. One of them made a low whistling sound, like he was trying to expel something between his teeth.

  “Look at that,” the would-be-preacher said. “Just look at that.”

  “They must have their own police department,” said the man across the aisle. “I’m sure they need it. And I’ll bet you we’re the ones staffing it. They can’t police their own.”

  Barry felt himself starting to rise up from his seat. No, he had not worked out in a long while, but there was still force in his shoulders and his upper arms. He did not have a knife stuck in his belt, but he could still wreak havoc. You did not have an AUM of 2.4 billion without being able to turn the world upside down.

  “This is fine,” the would-be preacher was saying, his voice loud enough to reach the back of the bus, but suffused with the calmness of authority. “This is good. They have their own universities, and one day we’ll have ours.” Ours? White universities? What did he think most campuses looked like? Barry was still in his half-risen position. The black people on the bus were looking out the window and pretending the preacher wasn’t there. They formed the majority of the passengers, but they knew better than to take action. What could Barry do? How could he avenge them? Avenge her? The preacher looked so clean-cut, despite the knife under his belt.

  He mustn’t win, Barry thought to himself. For Shiva. For Seema. For Brooklyn. He mustn’t.

  Barry sat down. He was from Manhattan. He understood the consequences of his actions. He did not need the police dragging him off the bus. In fact, he needed to hedge against any sort of conflict. It wasn’t just these two men; they had at least four more associates up the aisle, a minor Breitbart franchise. At the Greyhound depot in Shreveport, a Gujarati man sold him a New Testament coloring book for $4.99. His stomach ached, but the pinkish hot dogs turning within some kind of hot-dog rotisserie made him ill. He got back on the bus. Somewhere Brooklyn and Coach and the res
t of her family were sitting down to a full dinner, a big juicy bird on the table, collard greens, and yams. And he was on a bus full of racists with nothing to eat.

  “There will be one world government,” the preacher with the knife was saying. “Look up George Soros and Paul Singer, and you’ll start to understand.” Barry had met both of them at broker dinners. Both were Jewish like himself. He knew the preacher was looking at him directly now. One of his best friends in fifth grade had once used the expression “Jewed him down” and had apologized for it immediately. That was the extent of him being called out for the religion of his fathers. He took out his New Testament coloring book and turned to something about Matthew collecting taxes. “Sir,” the preacher asked. “May I ask you, what’s your heritage? I don’t mean any disrespect.”

  What if Barry told him the truth? The preacher’s stare brushed up and down Barry’s swimmer’s shoulders, sizing them up. He leaned into the aisle, his knife fully visible. Barry saw it all. The searing pain, the strobe lights, the police interrogating him in the county hospital after the doctors finished stitching up his face.

  Sir, why do you not have a form of identification?

  My wallet got stolen.

  We’re going to need you to come down to the station.

  But I’m the victim here.

  “I’m Greek,” Barry heard himself saying. “Greek Orthodox.” He held up his coloring book.

  “Are you a workingman?” the preacher asked. Barry could feel the preacher’s excitement, how much he was enjoying the situation.

  “I clean pools,” Barry said. “I have a small company.”

  “That’s good,” the preacher said. “It’s good to have a trade. I was supposed to be a welder, but it never worked out. A man with a trade can never be a slave.”