Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

One ferry, the John F. Kennedy , had begun to chortle in the water in preparation for departure, and we headed for its open hold. Noah and Amy had already clambered on board and were huddled beneath a sign that read “ARA Transport-Ain’t That America, Somethin’ to See, Baby.”

You can go and be safe at our house . I had to say something. I had to stop her, or she would be shot just like the LNWI protesters. Her Credit was bad enough. “Eunice!” I shouted. “Stop it! Stop running away from me! We have to stick together right now. We have to go home .”

But she shook off my arm and was running toward the Kennedy just as the ramp of the ferry had started lifting. I grabbed her by one tiny shoulder, and, with the intense fear of dislocating it, of hearing the crunch that meant I had hurt her, pulled her toward a second, waiting boat, its bridge bearing the legend Guy V. Molinari .

A black chopper circled overhead, its armed golden beak pointing in our direction and then at the island bristling with skyscrapers in the immediate distance. “No!” Eunice shouted, as the Kennedy pulled away, my friends, her new hero Noah, aboard.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll meet them on the other side. Come on! Let’s go!” We clambered onto the Molinari , elbowing our way through the young people and the families, so many families, full of new tears and drying tears and makeshift embraces.

“LENNY,” Nettie Fine teened me, “WHERE ARE YOU NOW?” Despite all the confusion, I quickly teened her that we were on a ferry to Manhattan and safe for the moment. “YOUR FRIEND NOAH SAFE WITH YOU?” she wanted to know, sweet, solicitous Nettie Fine, concerned even about people she had never met. She was probably GlobalTracing us in real time. I wrote her he was on a different ferry but as safe as we were. “WHICH FERRY?”

I told her we were on the Guy V. Molinari and Noah was on the John F. Kennedy , just as stray gunfire opened up behind us, thundering up and down Hamilton Avenue, the resulting screams sneaking into my earlobes and momentarily turning them off. Deafness. Complete silence. Eunice’s mouth twisted into cruel words I couldn’t understand. The Guy V. Molinari ’s oblong snout cut into the warm summer water, and we displaced ourselves furiously in the direction of Manhattan, and now more than ever I hated the false spire of the “Freedom” Tower, hated it for every single reason I could think of, but mostly for its promise of sovereignty and brute strength, and I wanted to cut my ties with my country and my scowling, angry girlfriend and everything else that bound me to this world. I longed for the 740 square feet that belonged to me by law, and I rejoiced in the humming of the engines as we sailed toward my concept of home.

A single raven appeared above Noah and Amy’s ferry. It lowered its golden beak, and its golden beak turned orange. Two missiles departed in rapid succession. One explosion, then two; the helicopter casually turned and flew back in the direction of Manhattan.

A moment of nonscreaming, of complete äppärät silence, overtook the Guy V. Molinari , older people holding tight to their children, the young people lost in the pain of suddenly understanding their own extinction, tears cold and stinging in the sea breeze. And then, as the flames bloomed across the ferry’s upper decks, as the John F. Kennedy reared up, split into two, disintegrated into the warm waters, as the first part of our lives, the false part, came to an end, the question we had forgotten to ask for so many years was finally shouted by one husky voice, stage left: “But why?”

Dear Diary,

The otter came for me in a dream. Not the cartoon otter that interrogated me in Rome, not the graffito otter I saw on Grand Street, but a true-to-life otter, a high-definition mammal, whiskers, fur, the dampness of the river. He pressed his wet plush black nose into my cheek, into my ear, kissing me with it, blessing my hungry face with his hot familiar and familial salmon breath, his little muddy paws destroying the clean white dress shirt I had put on for Eunice, because in my dreams I wanted her to love me again, because I wanted her back. And then he spoke to me in Noah’s voice, in that edgy, improper, but basically humane voice, the voice of a thwarted scholar. “You know Americans get lonely abroad,” he said, pausing to gauge the look on my face. “Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born.” Staring me up and down to see if I found him entertaining. “Did you meet any nice foreign people while you were abroad.” Not a question, but a statement. Noah had no time for questions. “I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny.” I felt my dream mouth move to betray Fabrizia yet again, but this time I couldn’t pry it open. The Noah-otter smiled as if he knew exactly what kind of man I was and wiped his whiskers with a human paw. “You said ‘DeSalva.’”

Noah. Three days after the Rupture. Instead of mourning, instead of grief, shallow memories of us sharing a joint on the gravel mounds of Washington Square, our early friendship as tenuous and goofy as a young love affair. Politics on our tongues, girls on our minds, just two guys from the suburbs, freshmen at NYU, Noah’s already working on one of the last novels that will ever see print, I’m working on being the friend of someone like Noah. Are these memories even real? This is my life now. Dreams, nothing but dreams.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch. Eunice and I have barely spoken since I dragged her home and away from her goddamn Tompkins Park, from whatever or whomever she thought she could save. Her mysterious male friend? Her sister? What the hell would Sally be doing in the middle of a battlefield?

“I don’t think this is going to work,” I had told Eunice of our relationship after she had sulked in the bedroom for the better part of that blood-soaked day. “If we can’t take care of each other now , when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to make it? Eunice! Are you even listening to what I’m saying? I’ve lost one of my best friends. Don’t you want to, like, comfort me?” No response, dead smile, retreat to the bedroom. E basta .

The booms, big and small, faraway and close, the pounding in my head, tracer rounds against the overcast moon, tracer rounds lighting up the secret, hidden parts of the city, an entire building of crying babies, and, even scarier, the temporary absence of those wails. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. You can see the magenta flashes even against the fully closed curtains, you can hear them on your skin. At night, the sound of metallic scraping coming off the river, like two barges slowly crashing against each other. When I open a window, the strange bloom of flowers and burnt leaves hits my nose-a sweet, dense rot, like the countryside after a storm. Oddly enough, no car alarms. I listen for the comfort-food sounds of ambulances presumably rushing to keep people alive-every few minutes the first day after the Rupture, then every few hours, then nothing.

My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect. No one’s äppäräti are working anymore. “It’s an NNEMP,” all the thirtysomething Media wizards hanging out in the lobby of our building are saying with finality. A Nonnuclear Electromagnetic Pulse. The Venezuelans must have detonated it high above the city. Or the Chinese. Like anyone knows. Like there’s any difference between the quality of “news” since the Media’s gone out.