Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

We hit the glowing, mahogany-paneled insinuation that was the JuicyPussy4Men store. “You have a weak chin,” Eunice told me, “so all these shirts you wear with the huge, high collars just showcase your chin and accentuate how weak it is. We’re going to get you some V-necks and some solid-colored tees. Striped cotton shirts a bit on the roomy side are going to make your flabby breasts less noticeable, and do yourself a favor, okay? Cashmere. You’re worth it, Len.”

She made me close my eyes and feel different fabrics. She dressed me in nontight JuicyPussy jeans and stuck a hand down my crotch to make sure my genitals had room to breathe. “It’s about comfort,” she said. “It’s about feeling and acting like a thirty-nine-year-old. Which is what you are, last time I checked.” I could feel her family inside her-rude, snide, unsupportive, yet getting the job done, acting appropriately, making sure there was room for my genitals, saving face. Beyond the mountains, according to the old Korean proverb Grace had once told me, were more mountains. We’d only just begun.

When I went into a changing room, one of the teenaged sales clerks said to me, “I’ll tell your daughter you’re in there, sir,” and instead of taking offense at being mistaken for Eunice’s presumably adoptive father, I actually felt in awe of my girl, in awe of the fact that every day we were together she ignored the terrible aesthetic differences between us. This shopping was not just for me or for her. It was for us as a couple. It was for our future together.

I left JuicyPussy with the equivalent of ten thousand yuan’s worth of goods. My debt load was blinking frantically with the words RECALCULATION IN PROGRESS, which scared off the swarms of Debt Bombers looking to give me more money. When I walked by a Credit Pole on 42nd Street, I registered a ranking of 1510 (down ten points). I may have been poorer, but you couldn’t confuse me for the overaged faux-hipster that had entered the UNRC three hours ago. I was what passed for a man now.

There was more. I looked healthier. The breathable fibers took about four years off my biological age. At work, Intakes asked if I was undergoing dechronification treatments myself. I took a physical, and my statistics started flapping on The Boards, my ACTH and cortisol levels plummeting, my designation now “a carefree and inspiring older gent.” Even Howard Shu came down to my desk and asked me to lunch. By this point, Joshie was sending Shu down to Washington on his private jet every week. Rumor had it Shu was bound for the White House or even higher up than that. “Rubenstein,” people hiccupped, covering their mouths. We were negotiating with the Bipartisans themselves! Over what, though, I still couldn’t tell.

But I was no longer scared of Shu. At our lunch meeting, I stared him down as I played with the cuffs of my striped cotton shirt, which indeed gave cover to my incipient man-breasts. We sat in a busy canteen drinking Swiss water we had alkalinized ourselves at the table and eating a few pellets of something fishy.

“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot when you came back from Rome,” Shu allowed, his full-bore eyes floating through the data fog of his äppärät.

“No big,” I said.

“I’m going to tell you something for your ears only.”

“Whatevs,” I said. “Verbal me, friend.”

Shu wiped his mouth as if I had just spat in it, but then resumed his collegial air. “There’s a good chance there’s going to be a disturbance. A realignment. Bigger than with the last riots. Not sure when. It’s what we’re picking up from Wapachung Intelligence. Just playing out some war games.”

“Safety first,” I said, looking bored. “What’s going on, Shu-ster?”

Shu descended into another äppärät reverie. I did the same, pretending it was something serious and work-related, but really I was just GlobalTracing Eunice’s location. She was, as always, at 575 Grand Street, Apt. E-607, my home, deep into her own äppärät, but subconsciously saturated by the presence of my books and mid-twentieth-century-design furniture. It pleased me, in a parochial way, the fact that I could always count on her being there. My little housewife! She tracked me moment by moment as well, getting suspicious if I veered off course from the daily set of my life, an impromptu meeting at a bar with Noah or Vishnu or a walk in the unbloodied part of Central Park with Grace. The fact that she was suspicious of me, the fact that she cared-that pleased me too.

“Let’s not talk about what might happen,” Shu said. “I just wanted you to know that Post-Human Services values you.” He swallowed too much water and coughed into his hand. He had had the same educational and work background as I had, but I noticed the callused tips of his fingers, as if he volunteered at a knitting factory during the weekends. “And we want you to be safe.”

“I’m touched,” I said, and I meant it. A high-school memory resurfaced, the day I found out that a wispy freshman girl whom I fancied, complete with an attractive limp and a penchant for poetry, liked me as well.

Howard nodded. “We’ve updated your äppärät. If you see any National Guard troops, point your äppärät at them. If you see a red dot, that means they’re Wapachung Contingency personnel. You know”-he tried to smile-“the good guys.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to the real National Guard?”

But Shu never answered me. “That girl you have on your äppärät,” he said, pointing to an Image of Eunice I had floating all over my screen.

“Eunice Park. My gf.”

“Joshie says to make sure you’re with her in any emergency.”

“Duh,” I said. But it was nice that Joshie remembered I was in love.

Shu picked up his glass of alkalinized water and made a jokey toast with it. Then he leaned back and drank it down in such forceful gulps that our veined marble table shook, and the business people who shared the premises looked at this small brown almond of a man in their midst and tried to snicker at his display of strength. But they too were afraid of him.

After my Shu lunch, I walked from the Essex Street F stop to my far-flung riverside co-op with a renewed sense of grandeur. Since Eunice had picked out my new duds, I had started obsessively FACing every girl in sight: pretty, average, thin, skeletal, white, brown, black. It must have been my confidence, because my PERSONALITY was hitting the 700s and my MALE HOTNESS skirted into the 600s-so that, in an enclosed space like the M14 bus, with its small herd of trendoids grazing amidst the dying old people, I could sometimes emerge in the middle range of attractiveness, say the fifth-cutest man out of nine or ten. I would like to describe this utterly new feeling to you, diary, but I fear it will come out in purely evangelical terms. It felt like being born again. It felt like Eunice had resurrected me on a bed of cotton and wool.

But getting Eunice to meet Joshie was not easy. On the night before we were to go over to his place, she couldn’t sleep. “I don’t know, Len,” she whispered. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

She was wearing a long satin twentieth-century sleeping gown, a gift from her mother that left everything to the imagination, instead of her usual TotalSurrenders.

“I feel like you’re making me do this,” she said.

“I feel like I’m being pushed.”

“I feel like things are moving too fast.”

“Maybe I should move back to Fort Lee.”

“Maybe you need to be with a real adult.”

“We both knew I was going to hurt you.”

I gently pawed her back in the dark. I did my patented cornered-rat-tapping-his-foot-in-distress noise against the mattress and made an ambiguous animal sound.