Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  JUNE 3

  CHUNG.WON.PARK TO EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

  Eunhee,

  How do you think you have Mommy for? Any way you have trouble you write to me, not only for when you need money. When you work lawyer Mommy proud of you and you do not ask her for money. You will be proud also because you help Mommy and family. Family is most important, otherwise why GOD put us on earth? I very worry for you and Sally. Daddy not feeling good. Maybe all is my fault. I pray in church extra for you. Reverend Cho say all young people have special path. Do you know what it is your special path? Please tell me if you know, other wise we look together. And keep Jesu in your heart. It is important! Also there are korean boys everywhere. Go to korean church and you will find date. Maybe you do not understand my bad english.

  I Love you,

  Mommy

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD TO CHUNG.WON.PARK:

  What do you mean Daddy’s not feeling good? If anything bad is happening you and Sally have to go to Eunhyun’s house. Mom! Forget freaking Jesu for a second. THIS IS IMPORTANT. You’re making me very scared. Did he do anything to you or Sally? I tried to call the house eight times yesterday but all I got is the voice mail. Verbal me on my GlobalTeens account when you get this!

  CHUNG.WON.PARK TO EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

  Eunhee,

  Do not make uncomfortable yourself. Daddy drink a little much and he get mad because I make soon-dubu with spoilt tofu. I told Sally to go for walk but she sleep in guess room and I sleep in basement. So all okay! Did you get transfer fund to AlliedWaste? Check make sure. It a lot of money so don’t make me dissapoint. Enjoy rome, you make good student at Elderbird, you deserve. But now your life just begin. Do not make anymore mistake! Stay away from meeguk boy. They all have bad intent, even christian ones. I pray to Jesu every day that you find kind happiness I never have, because maybe I make sin against GOD. I have so much ashame. Write Sally more. She miss you. You have big responsibility because you big sister. I am very sorry you not get LSAT score you wanted. You sad, Mommy sad. When you hurt, Mommy hurt more.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally! What is going on with mom and dad?

  SALLYSTAR: Nothing. He got upset because of the soon-dubu. What do you care?

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Why are you angry at ME?

  SALLYSTAR: I’m not angry. Leave me alone. Do they have Saaami summer bras in Rome?

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Yes, but they’re eighty euros.

  SALLYSTAR: How much is that?

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Way too much. You can get it much cheaper at the Saaami store on Elizabeth Street or just order on TeenyBopper. Why do you want to wear a bra that lets everyone see your nipples? And I thought you didn’t care about fashion.

  SALLYSTAR: Everyone’s wearing them. Even in Fort Lee.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Who in Fort Lee?

  SALLYSTAR: Grace Lee’s sister.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Bona? She’s an idiot.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally, did dad hit you?

  SALLYSTAR: He says he misses California. The office was empty all week. All the Koreans in NJ already have podiatrists. Mom’s acting like a space cadet.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Fine, don’t answer my question. Thanks for hiding my LSAT.

  SALLYSTAR: Mom found it anyway. What’s up?

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: I met a cute white guy here. He works for LandO’LakesGMFord.

  SALLYSTAR: It’s easier to date a Korean guy. For the families and everything.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Thanks, Mom.

  SALLYSTAR: I’m just saying.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Yeah, maybe I’ll date a Korean guy like dad. That’s called “a pattern.”

  SALLYSTAR: Whatever. You take his money. I have to go to a meeting at 1.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: What meeting?

  SALLYSTAR: Columbia-Tsinghua protest against the ARA. We’re going to DC in a week.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: What’s ARA?

  SALLYSTAR: American Restoration Authority. The Bipartisans. Don’t you ever stream the news?

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: You ARE angry at me.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally, you don’t have to live with mom and dad. You can go live at the Barnard dorm. You can get a paid internship or a job in a store. I don’t want you getting Political. Let’s just try to enjoy our lives.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally? Hello? Do you want me to come home? I’ll fly back tomorrow if you want me to. I’ll take care of mom.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally, please don’t be angry at me. I’m sorry I’m not there when you and mommy need me. I’m such a fuck-up.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally? Hello? You’ve probably left. It’s one o’clock your time.

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally, I love you.

  JUNE 4

  LEONARDO DABRAMOVINCI TO EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

  Oh, hi there. It’s Lenny Abramov. You might remember me from our little time in Rome. Thanks for brushing my teeth! Hee hee. So, anyway, just got back to the US of A. I’ve been practicing my abbreviations. I think you said ROFLAARP in Rome. Does that mean “Rolling On Floor Looking At Addictive Rodent Pornography”? See, I’m not that old! Anyway, been thinking about you. Coming to NYC anytime soon? You’ve got a place to stay here. I’ve got a nice place all set up, 740 square feet, balcony, view of downtown. Can’t compete with da tonino, but I make a pretty mean roasted eggplant. I can even sleep on the couch if you want me to. Call or write anytime. It was really, really, REALLY great to meet you. I’m committing the constellation of your freckles to memory as I write this (hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable).

  Love,

  Leonard

  THE OTTER STRIKES BACK

  FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

  JUNE 4

  New York City

  Dearest Diary,

  I saw the fat man at the first-class lounge at Fiumicino. There’s a special terminal for flights to the United States and SecurityState Israel, the most dilapidated terminal at the Roman airport, where everyone who is not a passenger is basically carrying a gun or pointing some sort of scanning gizmo at you. There aren’t even seats for the economy-class passengers by the gates, because they can scan you better standing up, get between your folds of flesh and light you up like a six-hundred-watt bulb. Anyway, life’s a lot better in the first-class lounge, and that’s where I went to see if I could find some last-minute High Net Worth Individuals, some potential Life Lovers who might be interested in our Product. I could see myself strolling into boss man Joshie’s office and saying, “Look at this! Even when he’s traveling, your Lenny’s looking for prospects. I’m like a doctor. Always on call!”

  First-class lounges aren’t what they used to be. Most Asian HNWIs fly private planes these days, but my äppärät picked up on some scan-able faces, an old-time porno star and a slick guy from Mumbai just starting out on his first worldwide Retail empire. They all had some money on them, if not the twenty million northern euros in investable income that I’m looking for, but there was this one guy who registered nothing. I mean he wasn’t there. He didn’t have an äppärät, or it wasn’t set on “social” mode, or maybe he had paid some young Russian kid to have the outbound transmission blocked. And he looked like a nothing. The way people don’t really look anymore. Not just imperfect, but awful. A fat man with deeply recessed eyes, a collapsed chin, limp and dusty hair, a T-shirt that all but exposed his large breasts, and a gross tent of air atop where one imagined his genital would be. No one would look at him except me (and then only for a minute), because he was at the margins of society, because he was without rank, because he was ITP or Impossible to Preserve, because he had no business being mixed up with real HNWIs in a first-class lounge. Now, in hindsight, I want to imbue him with some heroism; I want to place a thick book in his hands and perch even thicker bifocals on his nose. I want him to look like Benjamin Franklin. But, then, I promised you the truth, dear diary. And the truth is that from the moment I saw him I was scared.

  With his hands clasped at his crotch, the Impossible to Preserve fat m
an stared out the window, his head moving forward and backward contentedly, as if he were a half-submerged alligator enjoying a sunny day. Ignoring the rest of us, he watched, with an enthusiast’s abandon, the sleek new dolphin-nosed China Southern Airlines planes taxiing past our peeling UnitedContinentalDeltamerican 737s and some equally crappy El Als.

  When we finally boarded after a three-hour technical delay, a young man dressed in business casual walked down the aisle videotaping all of us, focusing repeatedly on the fat man, who blushed and tried to turn away. The filmmaker tapped me on the shoulder and bade me, in slow Southern English, to look directly into his boxy, antiquated camera. “Why?” I asked. But that little bit of sedition was apparently all he needed from me, and he moved on.

  By the time we were in the air, I tried to erase the videographer and the otter and the fat man from my mind. On my way back from the bathroom, I registered Fatty only as a pastel-colored blob in the corner, its form tickled by high-altitude sunlight. I took out a battered volume of Chekhov’s stories from my carry-on (wish I could read it in Russian like my parents can) and turned to the novella Three Years, the story of the unattractive but decent Laptev, the son of a wealthy Moscow merchant, who is in love with the beautiful and much younger Julia. I was hoping to find some tips on how to further seduce Eunice and to overcome the beauty gap between us. At one point in the novella, Laptev asks for Julia’s hand in marriage, and she initially turns him down, then changes her mind. I found this particular passage most helpful:

  [Attractive Julia] was distressed and dispirited, and told herself now that to refuse an honorable, good man who loved her, simply because he was not attractive [emphasis mine], especially when marrying him would make it possible for her to change her mode of life, her cheerless, monotonous, idle life in which youth was passing with no prospect of anything better in the future [emphasis mine]—to refuse him under such circumstances was madness, caprice and folly, and that God might even punish her for it.

  From this single passage I developed a three-point conclusion.

  Point One: I knew that Eunice didn’t believe in God and deplored her Catholic education, so it would be useless to invoke that deity and his endless punishments to make her fall for me, but, much like Laptev, I truly was that “honorable, good man who loved her.”

  Point Two: Eunice’s life in Rome, despite the sensuousness and beauty of the city, also seemed to me “cheerless, monotonous,” and certainly “idle” (I knew she volunteered for a couple of hours a week with some Algerians, which is incredibly sweet but not really work). Now, I do not come from a wealthy family like Chekhov’s Laptev, but my annual spending power of about two hundred thousand yuan would give Eunice some considerations in the Retail department and possibly “change her mode of life.”

  Point Three: Nonetheless, it would take more than mere monetary consideration to prompt Eunice to love me. Her “youth was passing with no prospect of anything better in the future,” as Chekhov said of his Julia. How could I take advantage of that fact re: Eunice? How could I trick her into aligning her youth with my decrepitude? In nineteenth-century Russia, it was apparently a much simpler task.

  I noticed that some of the first-class people were staring me down for having an open book. “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” said the young jock next to me, a senior Credit ape at LandO’LakesGMFord. I quickly sealed the Chekhov in my carry-on, stowing it far in the overhead bin. As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my äppärät and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives. By this point the young man in business-casual attire had returned with his video camera and just stood there at the front of the aisle recording the fat man with a trace of dull, angry pleasure hanging off his mouth (his quarry had buried his head in a pillow, either sleeping or pretending to be).

  I was looking for clues on Eunice Park. My beloved was a shy girl by comparison with others of her generation, so her digital footprint wasn’t big. I had to go at her laterally, through her sister, Sally, and her father, Sam Park, M.D., the violent podiatrist. Working my lusty, overheated äppärät, I pointed an Indian satellite at southern California, her original home. I zoomed in on a series of crimson-tiled haciendas to the south of Los Angeles, rows and rows of three-thousand-square-foot rectangles, their only aerial features the tiny silver squiggles that denoted rooftop central air conditioning. These units all bowed to the semicircle of a turquoise pool guarded by the gray halos of two down-on-their-luck palm trees, the development’s only flora. Inside one of these homes Eunice Park learned to walk and talk, to seduce and sneer; here her arms grew strong and her mane thick; here her household Korean was supplanted by the veneer of California English; here she planned her impossible escape to East Coast Elderbird College, to the piazzas of Rome, to the horny middle-aged festas of Piazza Vittorio, and, I hoped, into my arms.

  I then looked up Dr. and Mrs. Park’s new home, a square Dutch Colonial with one gaping chimney, deposited at an awkward forty-five-degree angle into a bowl of Mid-Atlantic snow. The California house they left was worth 2.4 million dollars, unpegged to the yuan, and the second, much smaller New Jersey one at 1.41 million. I sensed the diminution of her father’s income and I wanted to learn more.

  My retro äppärät churned slowly with data, which told me that the father’s business was failing. A chart appeared, giving the income for the last eighteen months; the yuan amounts were in steady decline since they had mistakenly left California for New Jersey—July’s income after expenses was eight thousand yuan, about half of my own, and I did not have a family of four to support.

  The mother did not have any data, she belonged solely to the home, but Sally, as the youngest of the Parks, was awash in it. From her profile I learned that she was a heavier girl than Eunice, the weight plunged into her round cheeks and the slow curvature of her arms and breasts. Still, her LDL cholesterol was way beneath the norm, while the HDL surged ahead to form an unheard-of ratio. Even with her weight, she could live to be 120 if she maintained her present diet and did her morning stretches. After checking her health, I examined her purchases and felt Eunice’s as well. The Park sisters favored extra-small shirts in strict business patterns, austere gray sweaters distinguished only by their provenance and price, pearly earrings, one-hundred-dollar children’s socks (their feet were that small), panties shaped like gift bows, bars of Swiss chocolate at random delis, footwear, footwear, footwear. I watched their AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup account rise and fall like the chest of a living, breathing animal. I noticed the links to something called AssLuxury and several L.A. and New York boutiques on one side, and to their parents’ AlliedWaste account on the other, and I saw that their precious immigrant nest egg was declining steadily and ominously. I beheld the numerical totality of the Park family and I wanted to save them from themselves, from the idiotic consumer culture that was bleeding them softly. I wanted to give them counsel and to prove to them that—as the son of immigrants myself—I could be trusted.

  Next, I did the social sites. The photos flashed before me. Mostly they were of Sally and her friends. Asian kids getting furtively drunk off Mexican beer, attractive boys and girls in decent cotton sweatshirts flashing V-signs at the äppärät lens in front of doily-covered pianos and gilt-edged pastoral paintings of Jesus in blissed-out freefall. Boys roughhousing on their parents’ wide bed, denim jeans upon denim jeans upon denim jeans. Girls huddled together, all eyes on a busy äppärät, serious attempts at laughter and spontaneity and light feminine “clowning around.” Sister Sally, hurt kindness radiating from her face, her arms draped over an equally heavy girl in a Catholic-school uniform who has snuck her hand behind Sally to make a pair of childhood horns, and there, at the end of a chorus line of ten desperately grinning recent college grads, was my Eunice, her eyes coolly surveying an asphalted patch of Ca
lifornia backyard and a flimsy dog-proof gate, her cheeks rising with difficulty to produce the requisite glossy three-quarters of a smile.

  I closed my eyes and let the image slide into my mind’s burgeoning Eunice archive. But then I looked again. It wasn’t Eunice’s brilliantly fake smile that had struck me. There was something else. She had turned away from the äppärät lens, while one hand was forever stuck in midair trying to quickly apply a pair of sunglasses. I magnified the image by 800 percent and focused on the eye farthest from the camera. Beneath it and to one side, I saw what looked like the leathery black trace of burst capillaries. I zoomed in and out, trying to decipher the blemish on a face that would tolerate no blemishes, and eventually distinguished the imprint of two fingers, no, three fingers—index, middle, thumb—striking her across the face.

  Okay, stop. Enough detective work. Enough obsessiveness. Enough trying to position yourself as the savior of a beaten girl. Let’s see if I can write three pages without mentioning Eunice Park even once. Let’s see if I can write about something other than my heart.

  Because, when the plane’s wheels finally licked the tarmac in New York, I almost failed to notice the tanks and armored personnel carriers squatting amidst the islands of sunburned grass between the runways. I nearly failed to heed the soldiers in their muddy boots running alongside our airplane as we shuddered to a premature stop, the pilot’s anxious voice over the PA system drowned out by a jagged electronic hiss.