Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

SALLYSTAR: Ask your boyfriend.

EUNI-TARD: What?

SALLYSTAR: Ask him about Wapachung Contingency.

EUNI-TARD: I don’t get it.

SALLYSTAR: Don’t worry about it.

EUNI-TARD: Fuck you, Sally. Why do you have to be like that? What has Lenny ever done to you or to mom? And FYI Lenny doesn’t work for Wapachung Whatever, he works for Post Human Services. I met his boss and he’s really nice. It’s just a company that helps people look younger and live longer.

SALLYSTAR: Sounds pretty egotistical.

EUNI-TARD: Right, because only you and dad can be saints ministering unto Jerusalem.

SALLYSTAR: Huh?

EUNI-TARD: Look it up, it’s in your bible. You probably have it highlighted in twenty different colors. Guess what? I’ve been helping too, Sally. I’ve been at the park the last few weeks. And I’ve become friends with David who thinks you’re just a spoiled little Barnard girl.

SALLYSTAR: How much longer are you going to go on just being a little ball of anger, Eunice? One day your looks are going to fade and all these stupid old white men won’t be chasing after you and then what?

EUNI-TARD: Nice, Sally. Well, at least your being honest for the first time in your life.

SALLYSTAR: I’m sorry, Eunice.

SALLYSTAR: Eunice? I’m sorry.

EUNI-TARD: I have to go see David in the park. I’m getting them Men’s Biomultiples because they need to be strong in case there’s an attack.

SALLYSTAR: Okay. I love you.

EUNI-TARD: Sure.

SALLYSTAR: Eunice!

EUNI-TARD: I know you do.

AZIZARMY-INFO TO EUNI-TARD:

Hi, Eunice. Good meeting your dad and talking to him. He reminds me of you, in the sense that you’re both hardcore. I’m glad you said being together at Tompkins Square Nation has brought you closer. Seeing your dad made me miss mine. When we were growing up they were even tougher on us than they had to be and that means their kids became stronger than they had to be. OBSERVATION: You bitch and whine a lot, Eunice, that’s your SOP, but you’re still a very strong woman, scary strong sometimes. Use that strength for good. Move on.

It is COLD with the rain tonight. Everyone’s asleep and the only sound is Marisol’s little girl Anna singing old R amp;B by the water fountain. I’m worried about Force Protection. My MPs say there’s no ARA activity around the park perimeter, which doesn’t feel right for a Friday. I’m going to send a unit downrange to the Laundromat on St. Mark’s. Maybe the Bipartisans see the writing on the wall. Maybe we really are going to get our Venezuela bonuses this time.

OBSERVATION: You’re very lucky overall, Eunice, you know that? It would be helpful if you were here with me right now so that we could talk in the quiet of the tent (I tried to verbal you, but you’re probably asleep) and it would be just like in college all over again, only no one at Austin was as pretty as you. FYI, Chauncey at Malnutrition says we need 20 cans of mosquito repellent and if we get a 100 more avocado and crabmeat units from H-mart that would really up our nutritional profile.

Hope you’re staying dry and that your mind and body are in a good place. Don’t give in to High Net Worth thinking this week. Perform useful tasks that your dad would be proud of. But also: Relax a little. Whatever happens, I got your back.

David

Dear Diary,

Grace and Vishnu had their pregnancy-announcing party on Staten Island. On the way to the ferry terminal, Euny and I saw a demonstration, an old-school protest march down Delancey Street and toward the broken superstructure of the Williamsburg Bridge. It was sanctioned by the Restoration Authority, or so it seemed, the marchers freely chanting and waving misspelled signs demanding better housing: “Peeple power!” “Houssing is a human right.” “Don’t throw us off the peir.” “Burn all Credit Pole!” “I am no a grasshopper, huevón !” “Don call me ant!” They were chanting in Spanish and Chinese, their accents jamming the ear, so many strong languages vying to push their way into our lackadaisical native one. There were small Fujianese men, big-backed Latina mothers, and, sticking out of the fray, gangly white Media people trying to stream about their own problems with condo down payments and imperious co-op boards. “We are being overruled by real estate!” the more erudite marchers shouted. “No more threats of deportation! Boo! Space for LGBT youth is not for sale! In unity there is power! Take back our city! No justice! No peace!” Their cacophony calmed me. If there could still be marches like this, if people could still concern themselves with things like better housing for transgendered youth, then maybe we weren’t finished as a nation just yet. I considered teening Nettie Fine the good news, but was preoccupied by the travails of just getting to Staten Island. The National Guard troops at the ferry terminal checkpoints weren’t Wapachung Contingency according to my äppärät, so we submitted to the usual half-hour “Deny and Imply” humiliations like everyone else.

Grace and Vishnu lived on one floor of a Shingle Style manse in the hipster St. George neighborhood, the house’s Doric columns declaring an overbearing historicity, the turret providing comic relief, stained-glass windows a pretty kind of kitsch, the rest of it sea-weathered and confident, a late-nineteenth-century indigenous form built on an island at a tiny remove from what was then becoming the most important city in the most important country in the world.

They weren’t rich, my Vishnu and Grace-they had bought the house for almost nothing two years ago, when the last crisis was hitting its peak-and the place was already a mess, even without the impending baby, a flurry of broken Shaker furniture that Vishnu would never find the time to fix, and truly smelly books from another lifetime he would never read. Vishnu was out on the back porch grilling tofu and turning over vegetables. The porch deck elevated their apartment beyond the mundane, a full view of downtown Manhattan rising through the midsummer heat, the skyline looking tired, worn, in need of a bath. Vishnu and I did the Nee-gro slap and hug. I hovered around my friend, chatting him up with great care like I would a woman at a bar when I was young and single, while Eunice stood timidly in the distance, a glass of Pinot something-or-other tight in her fist.

CrisisNet: CREDIT MARKET DEBT EXCEEDS 100 TRILLION NORTHERN EURO BENCHMARK.

I wasn’t sure what that meant. Vishnu gazed distractedly into the middle distance, while a root vegetable fell between the slats of the grill and issued a mild report.

The deck began to fill up. There was Noah, looking flushed and summer-weary but ready to emcee the announcement of Vishnu and Grace’s little girl soon to come, fully indebted, into our strange new world, and Noah’s girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, the comic relief, streaming hard on her “Muffintop Hour,” filled with bursts of spasmodic laughter and not-so-subtle anger at the fact that Noah wasn’t planning to get her pregnant, that all she had was her hard-driven career .

My friends. My dear ones. We chatted in the typically funny-sad way of people in their very late thirties about the things that used to make us young as Amy passed around a real joint, seedless and moist, the kind that only Media people get. I tried to get Eunice involved, but she mostly stayed by the edge of the deck with her äppärät, her stunning cocktail dress like something out of an old movie, the haughty princess no one can understand but one man.