Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

My last Roman day. I had my macchiato. I bought some expensive deodorant, perhaps anticipating love. I took a three-hour, slightly masturbatory nap in the ridiculous glow of my sun-strangled apartment. And then, at a party thrown by my friend Fabrizia, I met Eunice-

Wait, no. That’s not exactly true. This chronology isn’t right. I’m lying to you, diary. It’s only page seven and I’m already a liar. Something terrible happened before Fabrizia’s party. So terrible I don’t want to write about it, because I want you to be a positive diary.

I went to the U.S. Embassy.

It wasn’t my idea to go. A friend of mine, Sandi, told me that if you spend over 250 days abroad and don’t register for Welcome Back, Pa’dner, the official United States Citizen Re-Entry Program, they can bust you for sedition right at JFK, send you to a “secure screening facility” Upstate, whatever that is.

Now, Sandi knows everything -he works in fashion-so I decided to take his vividly expressed, highly caffeinated advice and headed for Via Veneto, where our nation’s creamy palazzo of an embassy luxuriates behind a recently built moat. Not for much longer, I should say. According to Sandi, the strapped State Department just sold the whole thing to StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil company, and by the time I got to Via Veneto the enormous compound’s trees and shrubbery were already being coaxed into tall, agnostic shapes to please their new owners. Armored moving vans ringed the perimeter, and the sound of massive document-shredding could be divined from within.

The consular line for the visa section was nearly empty. Only a few of the saddest, most destitute Albanians still wanted to emigrate to the States, and that lonely number was further discouraged by a poster showing a plucky little otter in a sombrero trying to jump onto a crammed dinghy under the tagline “The Boat Is Full, Amigo.”

Inside an improvised security cage, an older man behind Plexiglas shouted at me incomprehensibly while I waved my passport at him. A competent Filipina, indispensable in these parts, finally materialized and waved me down a cluttered hallway to a mock-up of a faded public-high-school classroom decked out in the Welcome Back, Pa’dner, motif. The Mexican otter from the “Boat Is Full” campaign was here Americanized (sombrero replaced by red-white-and-blue bandana worn around his hirsute little neck), then perched upon a goofy-looking horse, the two of them galloping toward a fiercely rising and presumably Asian sun.

A half-dozen of my fellow citizens were seated behind their chewed-up desks, mumbling lowly into their äppäräti. There was an earplug lying slug-dead on an empty chair, and a sign reading INSERT EARPLUG IN EAR, PLACE YOUR ÄPPÄRÄT ON DESK, AND DISABLE ALL SECURITY SETTINGS. I did as I was told. An electronic version of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” (“Ain’t that America, somethin’ to see, baby!”) twanged in my ear, and then a pixelated version of the plucky otter shuffled onto my äppärät screen, carrying on his back the letters ARA, which dissolved into the shimmering legend: American Restoration Authority.

The otter stood up on his hind legs, and made a show of dusting himself off. “Hi there, pa’dner!” he said, his electronic voice dripping with adorable carnivalesque. “My name is Jeffrey Otter and I bet we’re going to be friends!”

Feelings of loss and aloneness overwhelmed me. “Hi,” I said. “Hi, Jeffrey.”

“Hi there, yourself!” the otter said. “Now I’m going to ask you some friendly questions for statistical purposes only. If you don’t want to answer a question, just say, ‘I don’t want to answer this question.’ Remember, I’m here to help you ! Okay, then. Let’s start simple. What’s your name and Social Security Number?”

I looked around. People were urgently whispering things to their otters. “Leonard or Lenny Abramov,” I murmured, followed by my Social Security.

“Hi, Leonard or Lenny Abramov, 205-32-8714. On behalf of the American Restoration Authority, I would love to welcome you back to the new United States of America. Look out, world! There’s no stoppin’ us now!” A bar from the McFadden and Whitehead disco hit “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” played loudly in my ear. “Now tell me, Lenny. What made you leave our country? Work or pleasure?”

“Work,” I said.

“And what do you do , Leonard or Lenny Abramov?”

“Um, Indefinite Life Extension.”

“You said ‘effeminate life invention.’ Is that right?”

“ Indefinite Life Extension ,” I said.

“What’s your Credit ranking, Leonard or Lenny, out of a total score of sixteen hundred?”

“Fifteen hundred twenty.”

“That’s pretty neat. You must really know how to pinch those pennies. You have money in the bank, you work in ‘effeminate life invention.’ Now I just have to ask, are you a member of the Bipartisan Party? And if so, would you like to receive our new weekly äppärät stream, ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now!’? It’s got all sorts of great tips on readjusting to life in these United States and getting the most bang for your buck.”

“I’m not a Bipartisan, but, yes, I would like to get your stream,” I said, trying to be conciliatory.

“Okey-dokey! You’re on our list. Say, Leonard or Lenny, did you meet any nice foreign people during your stay abroad?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What kind of people?”

“Some Italians.”

“You said ‘Somalians.’”

“Some Italians,” I said.

“You said ‘Somalians,’” the otter insisted. “You know Americans get lonely abroad. Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born. What’s the point? Tell me, for statistical purposes, did you have any intimate physical relationships with any non -Americans during your stay?”

I stared hard at the otter, my hands shaking beneath the desk. Did everyone get this question? I didn’t want to end up in an Upstate “secure screening facility” simply because I had crawled on top of Fabrizia and tried to submerge my feelings of loneliness and inferiority inside her. “Yes,” I said. “Just one girl. A couple of times we did it.”

“And what was this non- American’s full name? Last name first, please.”

I could hear one fellow sitting several desks in front of me, his square Anglo face hidden partially by a thick mane, breathing Italian names into his äppärät.

“I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny,” said the otter.

“DeSalva, Fabrizia,” I whispered.

“You said ‘DeSalva-’” But just then the otter froze in mid-name, and my äppärät began to produce its “heavy thinking” noises, a wheel desperately spinning inside its hard plastic shell, its ancient circuitry completely overtaxed by the otter and his antics. The words ERROR CODE IT/FC-GS/FLAG appeared on the screen. I got up and went back to the security cage out front. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning into the mouth hole. “My äppärät froze. The otter stopped speaking to me. Could you send over that nice Filipina woman?”

The old creature manning this post crackled at me incomprehensibly, the lapels of his shirt trembling with stars and stripes. I made out the words “wait” and “service representative.”

An hour passed in bureaucratic metronome. Movers carried out a man-sized golden statue of our nation’s E Pluribus Unum eagle and a dining table missing three legs. Eventually an older white woman in enormous orthopedic shoes clacked her way down the hall. She had a magnificent tripartite nose, more Roman than any proboscis ever grown along the banks of the Tiber, and the kind of pinkish oversized glasses I associate with kindness and progressive mental health. Thin lips quivered from daily contact with life, and her earlobes bore silver loops a size too large.