Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

You, dear diary.

This will be my last entry.

A month ago, mid-October, a gust of autumnal wind kicked its way down Grand Street. A co-op woman, old, tired, Jewish, fake drops of jade spread across the little sacks of her bosom, looked up at the pending wind and said one word: “Blustery.” Just one word, a word meaning no more than “a period of time characterized by strong winds,” but it caught me unaware, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its capacity for recall. Not cold, not chilly, blustery. A hundred other blustery days appeared before me, my young mother in a faux-fur coat standing before our Chevrolet Malibu Classic, her hands protectively over my ears because my defective ski hat couldn’t be pulled down to cover them, while my father cursed and fumbled with his car keys. The streams of her worried breath against my face, the excitement of feeling both cold and protected, exposed to the elements and loved at the same time.

“It is blustery, ma’am,” I said to the old co-op woman. “I can feel it in my bones.” And she smiled at me with whatever facial muscles she still had in reserve. We were communicating with words.

I returned from Westbury to find Eunice in one piece, but the Vladeck Houses turned into shells, their orange carapaces burned black. I stood in front of the houses with a posse of still-employed Media guys in expensive sneakers, as we evaluated the jagged lines of windows past, made poetry out of a lone Samsung air conditioner dangling back and forth on its cord in the shallow river breeze. Where were the project dwellers? The Latinos who had once made us so happy to say we were living in “downtown’s last diverse neighborhood,” where had they gone?

A Staatling truck full of five-jiao men pulled up. The men clambered out and were immediately presented with tool belts, which they eagerly, almost happily, tied around their shrunken waists. A rural log truck pulled up behind the first. But these weren’t logs stacked five to a row, these were Credit Poles, blunt and round, lacking even the adornments of their predecessors. They were up within a day, a new slogan billowing from their masts, the outline of the new Parthenon-shaped IMF headquarters in Singapore, and the words:

“Life Is Richer, Life Is Brighter! Thank You, International Monetary Fund!”

I met Grace for a picnic lunch in the park. She was sitting on a comfortable rock outcropping in the Sheep Meadow, a glacier-era chaise longue. Less than half a year ago, the blood of a hundred had washed over the neighboring pillows of grass. In a white cotton dress loosely draping her shoulders, in a perfect curve of hair draping the concentration of her face, deeply pregnant yet elegant in repose, she seemed, from afar, a vision of something incomprehensibly right in the world. I walked toward Grace slowly, gathering my thoughts. Now I would have to figure out how to adjust our friendship to include someone else, someone even smaller and more innocent than her mother.

I could see the child already. Whatever her nature would impress upon him (I was told it would be a boy), he was sure to have at least some of Vishnu’s furriness, his bumbling nature, his kindness and naïveté. It was strange for me to consider a child the product of two people. My parents, for all their temperamental differences, were so alike that at times I consider them a uni-parent, made heavy with child by a Yiddish Holy Ghost. What if Eunice and I had a child together? Would it make her happier? She seemed, in recent days, distant from me. Sometimes even when she was viewing her favorite anorexic models on AssLuxury, it would appear Eunice’s gaze was boring right through them into some new dimension devoid of hip and bone.

Grace and I drank watermelon juice and ate freshly sliced kimbap from 32nd Street, the pickled daikon radish crunching smartly between our teeth, rice and seaweed coating our mouths with sea and starch. Normalcy, that’s what we were going for. After some jokey preliminaries, she put on her serious face. “Lenny,” she said, “there’s something a little sad I have to tell you.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Vishnu and I got permanent residency in Stability. We’re moving to Vancouver in three weeks.”

I felt the rice expanding in my throat and coughed into my hand. I beheld the terms I was given. Grace . The woman who had loved me the most. Had listened to me for the past fifteen years, me with all that melancholy and dysthymia. Vancouver . A northern city, far away.

Grace’s arms were around me, and I breathed in her conditioner and her impending motherhood. She was abandoning me. Did she still love me? Even Chekhov’s ugly Laptev had an admirer, a woman named Polina, “very thin and plain, with a long nose.” After Laptev marries the young and beautiful Julia, Polina tells him:

“And so you are married… But don’t be uneasy; I’m not going to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart. Only it’s annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one else; that what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but simply a body, good looks, and youth… Youth!”

I wanted Grace to hiss similar words at me, to confront me once again for loving someone so young and inexperienced, and to make me consider being with her instead of Eunice. But, of course, she didn’t.

And that made me angry.

“So how did you guys get Canadian residency?” I asked her, not even bothering to modulate the acidity of my tone. “I thought it was impossible. The waiting list is over twenty-three million.”

“We got lucky,” she said. “And I have a degree in econometrics. That helps.”

“Gracie,” I pressed on, “Noah told me a while ago that Vishnu collaborated with the ARA, with the Bipartisans.”

She didn’t say anything, ate her kimbap. A man and woman conversing in a rolling foreign language walked behind a dirty mountain of a Saint Bernard whose tongue was dragging along the ground from the Indian-summer heat. Behind a scrim of trees a group of five-jiao men were digging a ditch. One had clearly disobeyed, because his leader was now approaching him bearing something glinty and long. The five-jiao guy was on his knees, his hands covering his long, matted blond hair. I tried to shield Grace’s view with my plastic cup of watermelon juice and prayed there wouldn’t be violence. “I’m sure it’s not true,” I continued, picking grass off my jeans as if this were any other conversation. “I know Vishnu’s a good guy.”

“I don’t want to talk about these things,” Grace said. “You know, the three of you were always pretty strange friends. The boys . Like in books. With all that swagger and camaraderie. But that was never going to work. When you were apart you were real people, but when you were together you were like a cartoon.”

I sighed and put my head in my hands.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “I know you loved Noah. That’s no way to speak of the dead. And I don’t know what happened with the ARA and who did what. I just know that there’s no future for us here. And there’s no future for you either, when you think about it. Why don’t you come to Canada with us?”

“I don’t seem to have your connections,” I said, too roughly.

“You have a business degree,” she said. “That could put you at the front of the list. You should try to get to the Quebec border. You can take an armored Fung Wah bus. If you make it across legally, the Canadians have a special category. I think it’s something like ‘Landed Immigrants.’ We can hire a lawyer on the other side to get to work for you.”

“They’ll never let Eunice in,” I said. “Her education is worthless. Major in Images, minor in Assertiveness.”