Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

In the bathroom, Eunice’s allergy medications and tampons and expensive lotions were already gone-Joshie must have sent someone down to take them-but a bottle of Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser remained in the corner of the tub. I turned on the shower, climbed in, and poured the Cetaphil over myself. I rubbed it into my shoulders, my chest, my arms, and my face. And I stood there in the water’s painful heat, my skin at last as gentle and clean as the bottle promised.

Donnini, Tuscan Free State

When I was young, I loved my parents so much it could have qualified as child abuse. My eyes watered each time my mother coughed from the “American chemicals in the atmosphere” or my father clutched at his beleaguered liver. If they died, I died. And their deaths always seemed both imminent and a matter of fact. Whenever I tried to picture my parents’ souls I thought of these perfectly white Russian snowbanks I saw in history books on the Second World War, all those arrows being drawn into Russia’s heart along with the names of German panzer divisions. I was a dark blemish upon these snowbanks. Before I was even born, I had dragged my parents away from Moscow, a city where engineer Papa didn’t have to overturn wastebaskets for a living. I had dragged them away just so the fetus inside my mother, that future-Lenny , could have a better life. And one day God would punish me for what I had done to them. He would punish me by killing them.

My father drove a typical ninety miles per hour in his boat-like Chevrolet Malibu Classic, swerving from one lane to another as his mood dictated, and eyeing the concrete median with unconcealed glee. He actually flipped over that median on one occasion and thundered into a tree, breaking the bones of his left hand, which kept him from his custodial duties for a month (“Let the Chinamen choke on their garbage!”). One winter day, my father was many hours late in picking up my mother from her secretarial duties, and I was certain he had done the tree maneuver once more. There they were: their faces wide and frozen, their thick Jewish lips an unnatural purple, shards of glass upon their foreheads, dead in some cruel Long Island ditch. Where would they go when they died? I tried to picture this Heavenly place of childhood rumor. It looked, according to the adolescent sages amongst us, like the fairyland castle out of the frustrating wizards-and-swords-and-naked-maidens computer game we all played; it looked, oddly enough, like a copy of the cheap garden-apartment complex where my family lived, only with turrets.

An hour passed. And then another. Weeping and hiccups on my part, my mind journeying to my parents’ funeral. Synagogues have no bells, yet bells were tolling, deep and sonorous and thoroughly Russian. A gaggle of faceless, dark-suited Americans had to be conscripted to carry the two caskets down a winding path covered on both sides with that textbook Moscow snow. That was all that was left of my parents, cruel snow on both sides of the funeral path, snow too cold and deep for my spoiled American feet, which knew mostly the warm shag carpet stapled halfheartedly to our living-room floor by a retarded American man named Al.

A key began to turn in the lock. I sprang, gazelle-like, to the door, chanting “Mama! Papa!” But it wasn’t them. It was Nettie Fine. A woman too stable, too sweet, too noble to be an Abramov, no matter how hard she tried to pick up our fine Russian phrases-“ Priglashaiu vas za-stol ” (“I invite you to the table”)-no matter the rich, silky texture of her homemade borscht, a recipe inherited from her Gomel-born great-great-great-grandmother (how the hell do these native-born Jews keep track of their endless genealogy?).

No, she would not do. The fact was that when she kissed my cheek it didn’t hurt afterward, nor did it smell of onions. So to the devil with her good intentions, as my parents might say. She was an alien, a trespasser, a woman I couldn’t love back. When I saw her at the door, I threw the first and last punch of my life. It connected with her surprisingly narrow mid-torso, where the last of her three boys had just gestated in fine, cushy comfort. Why did I punch her? Because she was alive while my parents were dead. Because now she was all I had left.

She did not flinch from my ridiculous assault. She sat down and put me on her lap, held my tiny nine-year-old hands, and let my cry upon the tanned infinity of her scented neck. “I’m sorry, Missus Nettie,” I wailed in a Russian accent, for although I was born in the States my parents were my only confidants, and their language was my sacred, frightened one. “I think they die in car!”

“Who died in the car?” Nettie asked. She explained to me that my father had called and asked her to watch me for an hour because my mother was held up at her office. But knowing they were safe would not stop my tears.

“We all die,” Nettie told me, after she had fed me a powdered-cocoa-and-fruit concoction she called “the chocolate banana,” whose ingredients and manner of preparation I still don’t understand. “But someday you’ll have children too, Lenny. And when you do you’ll stop worrying about your parents’ dying so much.”

“Why, Missus Nettie?”

“Because your children will become your life.” For a moment at least, that made sense. I could feel the presence of another, someone even younger than myself, a kind of prototypical Eunice person, and the fear of parental death was transferred upon her shoulders.

According to the records of the Ospedale San Giovanni in Rome, Nettie Fine died of complications from “pneumonia” only two days after I had seen her at the embassy, after we had talked loudly in the hallway about the future of our country. She was perfectly hale when I saw her, and the records of her treatment were scant enough to appear satirical. I do not know who sent me those GlobalTeens messages from a “secure” address, including the one asking me which ferry Noah had boarded, seconds before it was destroyed. Fabrizia DeSalva died in a supposed motorino accident one week before the Rupture. I never had children.

Since the first edition of my diaries and Eunice’s messages was published in Beijing and New York two years ago, I have been accused of writing my passages with the hope of eventual publication, while even less kind souls have accused me of slavish emulation of the final generation of American “literary” writers. I would have to disabuse the reader of this notion. When I wrote these diary entries so many decades ago, it never occurred to me that any text would ever find a new generation of readers. I had no idea that some unknown individual or group of individuals would breach my privacy and Eunice’s to pillage our GlobalTeens accounts and put together the text you see on your screen. Not to say that I wrote in a vacuum, entirely. In many ways, my doodlings presage the diaristic flood of contemporary Sino-American writers-for example, Johnny Wei’s Boy, Is My Ass Tired (Tsinghua-Columbia) and Crystal Weinberg-Cha’s The Children’s Zoo Is Closed (Audacious, HSBC-London)-that appeared after the People’s Capitalist Party issued its “Fifty-one Represents” four years ago, the last of which shouted to the masses: “To write text is glorious!”