Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

I went to get some beers, passing the girls on the way, but they were too busy looking at rankings. The bar was filling up with Senior Credit guys in tapered chinos and oxfords. I felt superior to them, but my MALE HOTNESS was swiftly falling to last place out of thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty males. Walking past Annie, I clicked on her Child Abuse Multimedia, letting the sound of her screaming vibrate my eardrums as a pixelated disembodied hand hovered above an Image of her naked body and the screaming segued into what sounded like a hundred monks chanting the mantra “He touched me here, he touched me here, he touched me here, he touched me here .”

I turned in Annie’s direction with my left lip crinkled in sadness and my brow heavy with empathy, but the words “Look away quickly, dork,” appeared on my äppärät. “Hair-transplant time for RAG?” another girl wrote. (“Rapidly aging geezer,” according to my electronic pebble.) “I can smell the DO from here.” (“Dick odor,” my äppärät helpfully told me.) And the slightly consoling: “Nice ¥¥¥, Pops.”

The bar was now utterly aflash with smoky data spilling out of a total of fifty-nine äppäräti, 68 percent of them belonging to the male of the species. The masculine data scrolled on my screen. Our average income hovered at a respectable but not especially uplifting 190,000 yuan-pegged dollars. We were looking for girls who appreciated us for who we were. We had absent fathers, who sometimes were not absent enough. A man ranked uglier than me walked in and, ascertaining his chances, turned right around. I wanted to follow his bald, creased head out of the bar into the all-forgiving summer air, but instead got a double whiskey for myself, along with two Leffe Brunes.

“After getting his ass handed to him by the RateMe Plus, Lenny Abramov is turning to drink,” Noah intoned. But upon seeing the deep hamster funk of my expression, he said, “It’s going to be okay, Lenny. We’ll get you all fixed up with the bitches. You’ll find the mercy in this rude data stream.”

Vishnu had his hand on my shoulder and was saying, “We really care about you, buddy. How many of these Senior Credit assholes can say that? We’ll get your rankings up, even if we have to slice an inch off your nose.”

Noah: “And add one to your Johnson.”

“Ha- huh ,” Vishnu laughed, sadly.

I appreciated the sentiments, but I felt bad receiving their kindness. The point was for me to care for them . That would help lower my stress profile and do wonders for my ACTH levels. Meanwhile, the double whiskey and the slow triglyceride death it portended had sunk into the last compartment of my stomach, and the world was projecting at me in an angry way. “Eunice Park!” I wailed into Noah’s äppärät. “Eunice, honey. Can you hear me out there? I miss you so much.”

“We’re streaming these emotions live, folks,” Noah said. “We’re streaming Lenny’s love for this girl Eunice Park in real time. We’re ‘feeling’ the many levels of his pain just as he feels them.”

And I started to blabber about how much she meant to me. “We were sitting in this restaurant in Via Giulia, or someplace…”

“Losing hits, losing hits,” Noah whispered. “No foreign words. Cut to chase.”

“… And she just. She really listened to me. She paid attention to me. She never even looked at her äppärät while I was speaking to her. I mean we were mostly eating. Bucatini all’…”

“Losing hits, losing hits.”

“Pasta. But when we weren’t eating, we were saying everything about ourselves, who we were, where we come from. She’s an angry girl. You’d be too if you were her. All the shit she’s had to put up with. But she wants to get to know me better, and she wants to help me, and I want to care for her. I think she weighs, like, seventy pounds. She should eat more. I’ll make her eggplant. She showed me how to brush my teeth.”

“Streaming these emotions live,” Noah repeated. “You’re the first to hear them, patos . Straight from the Abramov’s mouth. He’s verballing. He’s emoting. But I’m getting a message from a hoser in Windsor, Ontario. He wants to know, did you fuck her, Lenny? Did you stick your thingie inside her tight snatch? Fifteen thousand souls absolutely need to know right now or they’ll get their news elsewhere.”

“We’re such an unlikely couple, so unlikely,” I was crying, “because she’s beautiful, and I’m the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss each one of her freckles again? She has like a million. But every one of them means something to me. Isn’t this how people used to fall in love? I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America, like you keep saying. But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this. To this bar. To this FACing. The two of us. What if we just went home and read books to each other?”

“Oh God,” Noah groaned. “You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov… Okay, folks, we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.”

In the bathroom next to a graffito encouraging the pisser to “Vote Bisexual, Not Bipartisan,” and the quizzical “Harm Reduction Reduced My Dick,” I let go of several ounces of Belgian ale and the five glasses of alkalized water I’d had before leaving my house.

Vishnu sidled up to me. “Turn off your äppärät,” he said.

“Huh?”

He reached over and yanked my pendant into the off position. His eyes locked with mine, and even through the mist of my own drunkenness I noticed that my friend was basically sober. “I think Noah may be ARA,” he whispered.

“What?”

“I think he’s working for the Bipartisans.”

“Are you crazy?” I said. “What about ‘It’s Rubenstein time in America’? What about the zero hour?”

“I’m just telling you, watch what you say around him. Especially when he’s streaming his show.”

My urination stopped of its own accord, and my prostate felt very sore. Care for your friends, care for your friends , the mantra repeated itself.

“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “He’s still our friend, right?”

“People are being forced into all kinds of things now,” Vishnu said. He lowered his voice even further. “Who knows what they got him for. His Credit ranking’s been going to shit ever since he started doing Amy Greenberg. Half of Staten Island is collaborating. Everyone’s looking for backing, for protection. You watch, if the Chinese take over, Noah will be sucking up to them. You should have stayed in Rome, Lenny. Fuck that immortality bullshit. Ain’t going to happen for you anyway. Look at us. We’re not HNWIs.”

“We’re not Low Net Worth either!” I protested.

“That don’t matter. We’re poster children for Harm Reduction. This city has no use for us. They privatized the MTA last month. They’re going to knock down the projects. Even your fancy Jew projects. We’ll be living in Erie, Pennsylvania, by the time this decade’s over.”

He must have noticed the lethal unhappiness disfiguring my expression. He zipped up and patted my back. “That was some good emoting about Eunice in there,” he said. “That’ll get your PERSONALITY ranking higher. And who knows about Noah? Maybe I’m wrong. Been wrong before. Been wrong lots, my friend.”