Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  I went back to our rooms in the nurses’ dormitory. I sat down on the hard bed and clutched the bedspread, then pressed my pillow into the equivalent softness of my stomach. The central air conditioning was still on, for some reason. The room was freezing. Cold sweat trickled down my chin, and my books felt cold to the touch. The wetness confused me, and I touched my eyes to make sure I wasn’t crying. I thought of the firecrackers going off. I heard their harsh, unnecessary noise. I saw Sally’s arm raised against the phantom punch about to be landed. The look on her face was pleading, but still loving, still believing that it could be different, that at the last moment something would give way, that the fist would fall by his side, and they would be a family.

  In the bathroom, Eunice’s allergy medications and tampons and expensive lotions were already gone—Joshie must have sent someone down to take them—but a bottle of Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser remained in the corner of the tub. I turned on the shower, climbed in, and poured the Cetaphil over myself. I rubbed it into my shoulders, my chest, my arms, and my face. And I stood there in the water’s painful heat, my skin at last as gentle and clean as the bottle promised.

  WELCOME BACK, PA’DNER

  NOTES ON THE NEW “PEOPLE’S LITERATURE PUBLISHING HOUSE” () EDITION OF THE LENNY ABRAMOV DIARIES

  LARRY ABRAHAM

  Donnini, Tuscan Free State

  1.

  When I was young, I loved my parents so much it could have qualified as child abuse. My eyes watered each time my mother coughed from the “American chemicals in the atmosphere” or my father clutched at his beleaguered liver. If they died, I died. And their deaths always seemed both imminent and a matter of fact. Whenever I tried to picture my parents’ souls I thought of these perfectly white Russian snowbanks I saw in history books on the Second World War, all those arrows being drawn into Russia’s heart along with the names of German panzer divisions. I was a dark blemish upon these snowbanks. Before I was even born, I had dragged my parents away from Moscow, a city where engineer Papa didn’t have to overturn wastebaskets for a living. I had dragged them away just so the fetus inside my mother, that future-Lenny, could have a better life. And one day God would punish me for what I had done to them. He would punish me by killing them.

  My father drove a typical ninety miles per hour in his boat-like Chevrolet Malibu Classic, swerving from one lane to another as his mood dictated, and eyeing the concrete median with unconcealed glee. He actually flipped over that median on one occasion and thundered into a tree, breaking the bones of his left hand, which kept him from his custodial duties for a month (“Let the Chinamen choke on their garbage!”). One winter day, my father was many hours late in picking up my mother from her secretarial duties, and I was certain he had done the tree maneuver once more. There they were: their faces wide and frozen, their thick Jewish lips an unnatural purple, shards of glass upon their foreheads, dead in some cruel Long Island ditch. Where would they go when they died? I tried to picture this Heavenly place of childhood rumor. It looked, according to the adolescent sages amongst us, like the fairyland castle out of the frustrating wizards-and-swords-and-naked-maidens computer game we all played; it looked, oddly enough, like a copy of the cheap garden-apartment complex where my family lived, only with turrets.

  An hour passed. And then another. Weeping and hiccups on my part, my mind journeying to my parents’ funeral. Synagogues have no bells, yet bells were tolling, deep and sonorous and thoroughly Russian. A gaggle of faceless, dark-suited Americans had to be conscripted to carry the two caskets down a winding path covered on both sides with that textbook Moscow snow. That was all that was left of my parents, cruel snow on both sides of the funeral path, snow too cold and deep for my spoiled American feet, which knew mostly the warm shag carpet stapled halfheartedly to our living-room floor by a retarded American man named Al.

  A key began to turn in the lock. I sprang, gazelle-like, to the door, chanting “Mama! Papa!” But it wasn’t them. It was Nettie Fine. A woman too stable, too sweet, too noble to be an Abramov, no matter how hard she tried to pick up our fine Russian phrases—“Priglashaiu vas za-stol” (“I invite you to the table”)—no matter the rich, silky texture of her homemade borscht, a recipe inherited from her Gomel-born great-great-great-grandmother (how the hell do these native-born Jews keep track of their endless genealogy?).

  No, she would not do. The fact was that when she kissed my cheek it didn’t hurt afterward, nor did it smell of onions. So to the devil with her good intentions, as my parents might say. She was an alien, a trespasser, a woman I couldn’t love back. When I saw her at the door, I threw the first and last punch of my life. It connected with her surprisingly narrow mid-torso, where the last of her three boys had just gestated in fine, cushy comfort. Why did I punch her? Because she was alive while my parents were dead. Because now she was all I had left.

  She did not flinch from my ridiculous assault. She sat down and put me on her lap, held my tiny nine-year-old hands, and let my cry upon the tanned infinity of her scented neck. “I’m sorry, Missus Nettie,” I wailed in a Russian accent, for although I was born in the States my parents were my only confidants, and their language was my sacred, frightened one. “I think they die in car!”

  “Who died in the car?” Nettie asked. She explained to me that my father had called and asked her to watch me for an hour because my mother was held up at her office. But knowing they were safe would not stop my tears.

  “We all die,” Nettie told me, after she had fed me a powdered-cocoa-and-fruit concoction she called “the chocolate banana,” whose ingredients and manner of preparation I still don’t understand. “But someday you’ll have children too, Lenny. And when you do you’ll stop worrying about your parents’ dying so much.”

  “Why, Missus Nettie?”

  “Because your children will become your life.” For a moment at least, that made sense. I could feel the presence of another, someone even younger than myself, a kind of prototypical Eunice person, and the fear of parental death was transferred upon her shoulders.

  According to the records of the Ospedale San Giovanni in Rome, Nettie Fine died of complications from “pneumonia” only two days after I had seen her at the embassy, after we had talked loudly in the hallway about the future of our country. She was perfectly hale when I saw her, and the records of her treatment were scant enough to appear satirical. I do not know who sent me those GlobalTeens messages from a “secure” address, including the one asking me which ferry Noah had boarded, seconds before it was destroyed. Fabrizia DeSalva died in a supposed motorino accident one week before the Rupture. I never had children.

  2.

  Since the first edition of my diaries and Eunice’s messages was published in Beijing and New York two years ago, I have been accused of writing my passages with the hope of eventual publication, while even less kind souls have accused me of slavish emulation of the final generation of American “literary” writers. I would have to disabuse the reader of this notion. When I wrote these diary entries so many decades ago, it never occurred to me that any text would ever find a new generation of readers. I had no idea that some unknown individual or group of individuals would breach my privacy and Eunice’s to pillage our GlobalTeens accounts and put together the text you see on your screen. Not to say that I wrote in a vacuum, entirely. In many ways, my doodlings presage the diaristic flood of contemporary Sino-American writers—for example, Johnny Wei’s Boy, Is My Ass Tired (Tsinghua-Columbia) and Crystal Weinberg-Cha’s The Children’s Zoo Is Closed (Audacious, HSBC-London)—that appeared after the People’s Capitalist Party issued its “Fifty-one Represents” four years ago, the last of which shouted to the masses: “To write text is glorious!”

  Despite the abuse heaped upon me in my former homeland, I am heartened by some of the reviews in the People’s Republic itself. Writing in the Farmers’ Daily, the levelheaded Cai Xiangbao anoints my diaries as . That is precisely right. I am not a writer. And yet what I had written was, as
Xiangbao put it, “a tribute to literature as it once was [emphasis mine].”

  But as the Stateside critics have unanimously agreed, the gems in the text are Eunice Park’s GlobalTeens entries. They “present a welcome relief from Lenny’s relentless navel-gazing,” to quote Jeffrey Schott-Liu in whorefuckrevu. “She is not a born writer, as befits a generation reared on Images and Retail, but her writing is more interesting and more alive than anything else I have read from that illiterate period. She can be bitchy, to be sure, and there’s the patina of upper-middle-class entitlement, but what comes through is a real interest in the world around her—an attempt to negotiate her way through the precarious legacy of her family and to form her own opinions about love and physical attraction and commerce and friendship, all set in a world whose cruelties gradually begin to mirror those of her own childhood.” I would add that, whatever one may say about my former love, and whatever terrible things she has written about me, unlike her friends, unlike Joshie, unlike myself, unlike so many Americans at the time of our country’s collapse, Eunice Park did not possess the false idea that she was special.

  3.

  After I left New York, I lived in Toronto, Stability-Canada, for the better part of a decade, where I changed my worthless American passport to a Canadian one and my name from Lenny Abramov to Larry Abraham, which seemed to me very North American, a touch of leisure suit, a touch of Old Testament. In any case, following my parents’ death, I could not stomach the idea of bearing the name they had given me and the surname that had followed them across the ocean. But eventually I crossed that ocean myself. I cashed in my remaining Staatling preferred stock, gathered all the yuan I had, and moved to a small farmhouse in the Valdarno Valley of the Tuscan Free State. I wanted to be in a place with less data, less youth, and where old people like myself were not despised simply for being old, where an older man, for example, could be considered beautiful.

  A few years after my final immigration, I heard that Joshie Goldmann was coming to the fractured Italian peninsula. Some jerk from Bologna had made a documentary about the heyday of Post-Human Services, and the medical school of the university had flown in whatever was left of Joshie.

  “We’re all going to die,” Grace Kim once said to me, echoing Nettie Fine. “You, me, Vishnu, Eunice, your boss, your clients, everyone.” If any part of my diaries yields anything resembling the truth, it is Grace’s lament. (Or perhaps it is no lament at all.)

  Onstage, my ersatz papa’s face, initially contorted into a serious academic expression, quickly fell apart, and he began to twitch from the recently discovered Kapasian Tremors associated with the reversal of dechronification. Drooling magnificently over his interpreter, he told us, without preamble or apology: “We were wrong. The antioxidants were a dead end. There was no way to innovate new technology in time to prevent complications arising from the application of the old.

  “Our genocidal war on free radicals proved more damaging than helpful, hurting cellular metabolism, robbing the body of control. In the end, nature simply would not yield.”

  And, like an idiot, I started to feel sorry for him. When the clients began to die, when the tremors started and the organs failed, the Staatling-Wapachung board of directors fired Joshie. Howard Shu took over Post-Human Services and made of it what he’d always imagined, an enormous lifestyle boutique doling out spa appointments and lip-enhancement surgery. Eunice left Joshie even before the decline began. I know little about the young man she left him for, but what information I have points to a person of perfectly decent temperament and controlled ambition, a Scotsman. For a time, at least, I know they made a home together outside of Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their relationship was the only product of the one semester she had spent at Goldsmiths College in London proper, where she had attempted to study art or finance with Joshie’s encouragement.

  After Joshie had finished his warbling, I ran out of the auditorium. I didn’t want to ask him what it was like to know that he was about to die. Even at this late date, even after he had betrayed me, the foundation myth between us precluded that question.

  4.

  Last winter, I visited my Roman friends Giovanna and Paolo at their country home, a fourteenth-century stone barn in the direction of Orvieto. I spent the first night beneath the wide-beamed timber ceiling of the redesigned living room, drinking my allotted Sagrantino di Montefalco, marveling at the recently built alcoves and wooden shelves, which with their rough-edged simplicity complemented the barn’s age, and also surveying, with a kindly glare, my pretty younger friends and their gorgeous five-year-old kid, a Russian adoptee already an expert at Mandarin and Cantonese, whose wispy blond hair rebuked his parents’ dark physiognomies. Wood smoke filled the room, bathing us all in a sweet olfactory glow. We were talking, placidly despite the wine intake, about global warming and the end of human life on earth. The Italians were describing our role on the planet as that of bothersome horseflies, and the planet’s self-regulating ecosystems as a kind of gigantic fly-swatter. I could not understand how, as parents, my friends could even begin to imagine the extinguishing of their son’s world, and, perhaps sensing that this topic was depressing me, and knowing that I probably had but a decade or two to live myself, the master and mistress of the house promptly got up to deliver an antibiotic shot to a sick prized goat.

  As the evening wore on, my friends received still more visitors, two young Cinecittà actresses just arrived from Rome. They had no idea who I was, but we soon learned that one of these glamorous young personages had just been charged with playing Eunice Park in a new Cinecittà video spray of my diaries. The hacks at Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang had already clocked in one artistic disaster with their Lenny ♥ Euny Super Sad True Love series, and now the Italians were having a go at it.

  “I have to do this with my face!” the actress playing Eunice said, pulling at her eyelids and then sticking out her upper front teeth. She then launched into a fairly accurate rendition of a spoiled pre-Rupture California girl while her friend hastened to appropriate the luckless Abramov. “My tuna-brain! My jerk-face! My nerd-face!” the first actress belted out, as her colleague, in the role of Abramov, fell prostrate on the ground at her feet, weeping hysterically. This prompted my friends’ five-year-old son to jump up and down around them, trying to mimic the funny English words.

  My friends smiled warily at me and tried to signal the actresses to end their performance. Nonetheless, I presented a subdued mien. I set my mouth into its own version of Eunice’s dead smile and let the laughter come out of me like the first coughs of water from a frozen pipe. I had been mechanically laughing for some time when I realized that the Cinecittà actress playing Eunice was using her performance as a springboard for a long-winded critique of America, reaching as far back as the Reagan era, to a time when even her parents were not yet born.

  Oh, give it up, I thought. America’s gone. All these years, and still a visceral hatred for a country that had destructed so suddenly, spectacularly, irreversibly. When would it end already? How long would we be forced to attend this malevolent wake? And then, before I could stop myself, I realized what was happening to me. I had begun to grieve. For all of us. For Joshie and Eunice and her parents and sister and Grillbitch a.k.a. Jenny Kang, and for the land that still shudders between Manhattan and Hermosa Beach.

  There was only one way to stop the young actress’s diatribe. “They’re dead,” I lied.

  “Cosa?”

  “They didn’t survive.” And I laid out a scenario for the final days of Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park more gruesome than any of the grisly infernos splashed on the walls of the neighboring cathedral. The young Italians grew annoyed by this sudden end to their levity. They stared at me, at each other, and then at the beautifully laid wooden floors leading out to the pergola, beyond which a tableau of olive trees and grain fields, arrested by winter, dreamed of a new life. For a while at least, no one said anything, and I was blessed with what I neede
d the most. Their silence, black and complete.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book is real hard and lonely, let me tell you. I am so grateful that I have a generous group of readers who lift up their red pens and challenge me to do better.

  David Ebershoff’s editing of the many drafts of this book was truly heroic. Here is that rare find, an editor who is also a brilliant author, brimming with emotional intelligence and real love for our old dear friend, the sentence. Denise Shannon has been a great agent and terrific reader for over a decade, through tales of immigrant angst, fat gangster sons, and now this. Sara Holloway of Granta offered thoughtful advice carrier-pigeoned across the Atlantic. And any Random House author who has Jynne Martin on their case is lucky indeed.

  I want to thank my research assistant, Alex Gilvarry, for helping me understand how science works. (Apparently we’re all made up of many cells.) He has helped me burrow into the works of two thinkers who have influenced this volume: Ray Kurzweil, author of, among many books, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, and Aubrey de Grey, author of Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthrough That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.

  The American Academy in Berlin, the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, and the Corporation of Yaddo have all given me splendid shelter and mouthwatering fare.

  There are so many dear people who have gone through the numerous drafts of this book. I know I’m leaving out at least a half-dozen of them, but that’s only because my memory has taken a beating over the years. For everyone who has helped me with this book, please accept my love and gratitude. Among them: Elisa Albert, Doug Choi, Adrienne Day, Joshua Ferris, Rebecca Godfrey, David Grand, Cathy Park Hong, Gabe Hudson, Christine Suewon Lee, Paul LeFarge, Jynne Martin, Daniel Menaker, Alana Newhouse, Ed Park, Shilpa Prasad, Akhil Sharma, and John Wray.