Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

I’d never been to the UNRC. I’ve always been intimidated by Retail Corridors, and this one was supposed to be the biggest yet. When I went to the Corridor they carved out of Union Square two years ago, everyone looked better and way younger than I did. I love going to these little offbeat boutiques in Staten Island with Grace, even if the clientele is older and grayer, folks who came of age in the grand Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and who have now been forced to retreat to Staten Island.

I started panicking the moment we got to the UN: the crush of humanity pouring out of the seven layers of underground parking; the floor samples emitting info that flooded my äppärät with impulsive data; the Debt Bombers singling me out for my impressive Credit ranking; the giant ARA “America Celebrates It’s [sic] Spenders” banners, which now featured this girl Eunice actually knew from high school who finagled all these Credit lines and managed to buy six spring collections and a house.

The afterglow of the setting sun rushed through the glass roof of the UNRC, the steel trellises hundreds of feet above us gleaming like the ribs of a fearsome animal. I think this is where the Security Council used to meet, although I could be wrong. Since my sabbatical in Rome, it seems that America had learned her lesson on overhead, had shuttered her traditional malls. These thrifty Retail Corridors were supposed to mimic North African bazaars of yore, their only purpose a quick exchange of goods and services, minus the plangent cries of the sellers and the whiffs of tangerine sweat.

Eunice didn’t need a map. She led and I followed past the merchandise crowding the endless floor space in haphazard fashion, one store running into another, rack after rack after rack, each approached, surveyed, considered, dismissed. Here were the famous nippleless Saaami bras that Eunice had shown me on AssLuxury and the fabled Padma corsets that the Polish porn star wore on AssDoctor. We stopped to look at some conservative JuicyPussy summer cocktail dresses. “I’m going to need two,” Eunice said. “One for your boss’s party and one for that bitch Grace.”

“With my boss it’s not really a party,” I said. “We’ll drink two glasses of wine and eat some carrots and blueberries.”

Eunice ignored me and set about her task. She did some äppärät work to get a sense of how things were selling around the world. Then she went over to a circle of black, identical-looking dresses and started clicking through them. Click, click, click, each hanger hitting the preceding one, making the sound of an abacus. She spent less than a full second on each dress, but each second seemed more meaningful than the hours she spent on AssLuxury viewing the same merchandise; each was an encounter with the real. Her face was steely, concentrated, the mouth slightly open. Here was the anxiety of choice, the pain of living without history, the pain of some higher need. I felt humbled by this world, awed by its religiosity, the attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all work.

“They either don’t have a size zero,” Eunice said, upon clicking through the last of the JuicyPussy summer dresses, “or there’s this weird embroidery on the hem. They’re trying to make themselves more classy than TotalSurrender, which has the slit down the crotch. Let’s go to Onionskin.”

“Aren’t those the sheer jeans?” I said. I imagined Eunice with her labia and behind exposed to passersby as she crossed an especially busy Delancey Street, drivers of cars with Jersey plates rolling down their tinted windows in disbelief. I felt protective of her minimalist package, but there was a frisson of eroticism as well, not to mention social positioning. Others would see her little landing strip and think highly of me.

“No, jerk-face,” Eunice said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in those jeans. They make normal dresses too.”

“Oh,” I said. The fantasy came to an end, and I found myself oddly happy with the conservative girl by my side. We wended our way through a half-kilometer of racks and hit upon the Onionskin outlet. True enough, there were several racks of cocktail dresses, a bit revealing around the bosom, but certainly not see-through. Women, tired and aggrieved, were plowing through the brand’s signature transparent jeans, hanging like rigid, empty skins in the center of the Retail space.

As Eunice started clicking through the dresses, a Retail person came over to talk to her. My äppärät quickly zoomed in past the data outflows spilling out from the customers like polluted surf falling upon once-pristine shores and focused on McKay Watson. She was beautiful, this Retail girl. A tall, straight-necked creature whose eyes, clear and present, spoke of native-born honesty, as if to say, With a background like mine, who needs self-invention? I caressed McKay’s data, even as I took in the Onionskin jeans that clung to her slight if bottom-heavy body-she wore the semi-translucent kind that partly obscured her nether regions and gave them an impressionistic quality, the kind you had to step back to admire. She had graduated from Tufts with a major in international affairs and a minor in Retail science. Her parents were retired professors in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she grew up (baby Images of an oblivious but affectionate McKay hugging a container of orange juice). She didn’t have a boyfriend at present but enjoyed the “reverse cowgirl” position with the last one, an aspiring young Mediastud from Great Neck.

Eunice and McKay were verballing each other. They were discussing clothes in a way I couldn’t fully appreciate. They were discussing the finer points of a particular dress not made of natural fibers. The waists, stretched, unstretched. Composition-7 percent elastane, 2 percent polyester, a size three, 50 percent rayon viscose.

“It’s not treated with sodium hydroxide.”

“I bought the one with the slit to the left and it stretched.”

“Coat the inside of the hem with petroleum jelly.”

Eunice had put one hand on the shiny white arm of the Retail girl, a gesture of intimacy I had seen only extended to one of her Elderbird friends, the plump, matronly girl with the low Fuckability ranking. I heard some funny retro expressions like “JK,” which means one is “just kidding,” and “on the square,” which means one is not. I heard the familiar “JBF” and “TIMATOV!” but also “TPR!” and “CFG!” “TMS!” (temporary motion sickness?), “KOT!,” and the more universal “Cute!” This is just how people talk, I thought to myself. Feel the wonder of the moment. See the woman that you love reaching out to the world around her.

She bought two cocktail dresses for 5,240 yuan-pegged dollars, of which I covered three thousand. I could feel my debt load groaning a little, shedding a few points, immortality slipping a few notches into the improbable, but nothing like the 239,000-yuan-pegged-dollar punch I had recently taken in the balls from Howard Shu.

“Why didn’t you ask that girl if she could get you a job at Onionskin?” I asked Eunice when we had walked away from the Retail space.

“Are you kidding?” Eunice said. “Do you know what kind of grades you have to have to work UNRC? And she had the perfect body too. A nice round butt, but a totally boyish top. That’s so hot right now.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Your grades or looks aren’t any worse than hers,” I said. “Anyway, at least you could have gotten her Teens address. She seems like a good friend to have.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Eunice said.

“I mean-”

“Okay, shhhh… It’s your turn to shop. Breathable fabrics are going to do wonders for my kokiri .”