Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

Rhesus Monkey! Be a good son and go visit your parents. I’m reserving some crack Wapachung security people for you on Monday. They’ll escort you out to Long Island. Stay away from those boiled Russian meats! And don’t get too excited, okay? I’m looking out for your epinephrine levels like a hawk.

I was met outside the Post-Human Services synagogue by two armored Hyundai Persimmon jeeps sporting enormous hood-mounted weaponry, probably leftovers from our ill-fated Venezuelan adventure. Our expedition leader seemed to be of Venezuela vintage as well, one Major J. M. Palatino of Wapachung Contingency, a small but powerfully put-together man smelling of middle-class cologne and horses. He surveyed me with professional eyes, quickly concluded that I was soft and in need of protection, slapped his sides militarily, and introduced his team of two young armed guys, both remnants of the Nebraskan National Guard, one missing the better half of his hand.

“Here’s the game plan,” Palatino said. “We follow the major arteries and hope there haven’t been any flare-ups along the way. We’re talking about I-495 here, the old Long Island Expressway. Don’t expect much trouble there. Then we swing over to the Northern and Wantagh Parkways. That could be trickier, depending on who’s in charge at this point in the day.”

“I thought that would be us,” I said.

“There’s still sporadic enemy-combatant activity after Little Neck. Nassau warlords fighting Suffolk warlords. Ethnic stuff. Salvadorans. Guatemalans. Nigerians . Got to tread lightly. Anyway, we’re armed to the teeth here, so no worries. We’ve got a heavy.50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun on the lead vehicle and AT4 anti-armor on both. Nothing even comes close out there. Expect we’ll be in Westbury at 1400 hours.”

“Three hours to drive thirty miles?”

“I didn’t create this world, sir,” Palatino said. “I’m just along for the ride. We’ve got Oslo Delight sandwiches for you in the back. You cool with lingonberry jam? Enjoy.”

At the entrance to the expressway, Wapachung troops were screening cars for weapons and contraband, throwing unlucky five-jiao men on the ground, and prodding them with weapons, the whole scene oddly quiet and methodical and reminiscent of the near-distant past. “It’s like the American Restoration Authority out here,” I said to the major. “Nothing’s changed but the uniforms.”

“You don’t just disband a force overnight,” Palatino said. “We’d have a situation like out in Missouri.”

“What’s in Missouri?” I asked.

He waved his hand at me as if to say: It’s better not to know . We turned our backs on Manhattan and rolled past the ugly gigantism of LeFrak City, a collection of buildings that, with their rows of balconies on both ends, resembled soot-covered accordions. These housing projects were riddled with Russian immigrants, and my parents had always thought that one more step down on the economic ladder would bring us directly to LeFrak, where, according to my mother, we would all be killed. She was something of a seer, Galya Abramov.

The grounds of the LeFrak development were littered with homemade tents. People were lying on mattresses on a pedestrian overpass, the acrid smell of bad meat being grilled wafting down below. As we passed LeFrak City (“Live a Little Better” its heartfelt mid-twentieth-century motto), the Manhattan-bound side of the Long Island Expressway became an endless jumble of cars slowly maneuvering around men, women, and children of all possible persuasions compliantly carting their belongings in suitcases and shopping trolleys. “Lots of folks going west,” Palatino said, as we crawled forward past a gaggle of poor middle-class cars, tiny Samsung Santa Monicas and the like, children and mothers huddled over one another in back. “The closer to the city, the better. Even if you have to work a five-jiao line. Work is work.”

“Where do you live?” I asked Palatino.

“Sixty-eighth and Lex.”

“Nice area,” I said. “Close to the park.”

“My kids love the zoo. Wapachung’s going to get us a panda.”

I had heard of this.

Three hours later, we were driving down Old Country Road, the Champs-Élysées of Westbury, past the mostly boarded-up ghosts of Retail past, the Payless ShoeSource, Petco, Starbucks. A crowd of would-be consumers still congregated around the 99¢ Paradise store. The smell of sewage and a brown savage haze filtered through the windows, but I also heard the loud, screechy sound of human laughter and people yelling to one another on the street, friendly-like. It seemed to me that in some weird way a suburban place like Westbury, with its working- and middle-class folks, its Salvadorans and Southeast Asians and the like, was what New York City used to be when it was still a real place. There was something lovely about Old Country Road today, folks milling about, trading goods, eating papusas, young boys and girls wearing nothing, verballing one another with love. “They maintain pretty good security,” Palatino seconded. “The good guys got all the weapons, and they’ve spread their assets out strategically.” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

We turned off the commercial street and drove headlong into the residential peace of Washington Avenue. Despite the serenity of my parents’ street, I found myself worried by a sign that said “Deaf Child Area.” I tried to remember a deaf neighborhood child from my days in Westbury, but no such creature sprang to mind. Who was this deaf child, and what kind of a future would she have today?

We approached my parents’ house, the gigantic flags of the United States of America and SecurityState Israel still fluttering obstinately. Huddled behind the screen door, I saw the Abramovs leaning in to each other. For a second it seemed like there was just one Abramov, for although my mother was delicate and pretty and my father was not, they appeared to take on a twin form, as if each was reflected in the other. What had happened in the past few months was unclear. They had aged, become grayer, but also it seemed as if some indeterminate part of each of them had been surgically taken out, leaving a kind of muddled transparency. When I approached them with my arms stretched out, with my bag of Tagamet ulcer remedy and other goodies banging against my hip, I saw a part of that transparency fill in; I saw their creased faces welcome in the joy of my survival, my physical presence, my indelible link to them, surprised that I stood in front of them, secretly hurt and ashamed that they could do less for me than I could for them.

We were surrounded by elements of one another: my mother’s immaculateness, my father’s unadulterated musk, and my own whiff of receding youth and passing urbanity. I can’t remember if we revealed nothing-or everything-to one another in the foyer, but after my mother ceremonially draped the living-room couch with a plastic bag so that I wouldn’t stain it with the foulness of Manhattan, my father followed through with his usual heartfelt request: “ Nu, rasskazhi ” (“So, tell me”).

I told them as much as I could about what had happened during the past two months, skirting Noah’s death (my mother had so enjoyed meeting “such a handsome Jewish boy” at our NYU graduation) but emphasizing how well Eunice and I were doing, and how I still had 1,190,000 yuan in the bank. My mother listened carefully, sighed, and went off to work on a beet salad. When I asked my father about how it had been for them, he turned up FoxLiberty-Prime, which was showing the deliberations of the Israeli Knesset, with Rubenstein, still nominally employed as the Defense Secretary of whatever entity we are becoming, lecturing the all-Orthodox parliament on ways to fight Islamofascism, the men in black nodding sympathetically, some staring off into deeply sacred space, playing with their bottles of mineral water. On the other screen, FoxLiberty-Ultra-where the hell were they still broadcasting this stuff from?-featured three ugly white men yelling at a pretty black man from all directions, while the words “Gays to wed in NYC” flashed beneath them.