Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan

“I am Misha Vainberg,” I said. “I come in peace.”

“Vainberg!” the voice trilled, and then, switching to Texan English: “Well, shoot, come on in, buster!”

The room must have been the tidiest in the entire hotel, free of giant green spiders and petulant Absurdis, save for the hotel hooker fixing up her mustache by the vanity mirror. Mr. Jimbo Billings, a short, muscular man in denims and short sleeves, looked vaguely Levantine or Greek, sun-wrinkled and drained of blood, with perfect blue and green eyes (one color each) and fast-moving hands made of fine leather. I could see how, after a fifty-hour immersion in the iconic American show Dallas, the Mossad agent could begin to pass for a middle-aged Texan. “Darlin’,” Billings said to the whore. “Do me a favor, willya? Scram.” The young lady pouted and made a show of her hips but quickly left us alone.

“So,” I said, “my sources tell me we share a certain religion in common. Although I’m fairly lapsed and modern. In any case, shalom. ”

“Sources?” Billings said. “Sha -lome ? Shoo, doggie! That’s some imagination you got on you, boy.” His mood rapidly shifted downward; he shook his gray head and said, “Hot damn, what we gon’ do with you, Vainberg?”

“Nuthin’,” I said, falling for some reason into his ridiculous accent. “I’m all fine and dandy right here.”

“How you reckon?” Billings asked.

“I got somethin’ for you,” I said. “It’s good for Israel, good for the Jews. A Holocaust museum. Gonna make some old-fashion’ synergy happen. Gonna make people believe again.” I held out my laptop for him to examine.

“ ‘The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies,’” Jimbo read, “ ‘aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship.’” He pursed his thick sunburned Sabra lips and read on a bit longer. “You know what ain’t good for the Jews, Vainberg?” he said after a while. “You ain’t.”

“Screw you,” I said. “I’m just tryin’ to help.”

“You tryin’ to help Nanabragov and his daughter, so don’t play me the fool, son,” Billings said.

“And so what?” I said. “So what if I want to help an oppressed people other than my own? I’m a new kind of man. And you better hope, for everyone’s sake, there are more like me.”

“A new man? And what kind of man that be?”

“A man that ain’t got no racial memory.”

“Sure you do. You the biggest Jew of us all. You cain’t help yerself. You cain’t help where you come from. Just lookit your papa. He had you cut by Hasids when you were eighteen. God damn, son.”

“My papa loved Israel.”

“Your papa…” Billings stopped. He looked into my eyes, lifted his shoulders, then lowered them to reveal himself a man of very small stature and a generation older than I had thought. “You can call me Dror,” he said in a Mid-Atlantic accent tinged with something phlegmy and Hebrew. “Although that’s not my name.”

“What were you saying about my papa?” I said.

Jimbo-Dror shook his head. “Look, Misha,” he said. “In the seventies, a drunk, charming refusenik was sort of poignant. Shabbat Shalom in Leningrad and all that. But by the nineties, your father was just another Russian gangster…an antisocial personality with limited impulse control. I’m quoting from his file now.”

The official Mossad characterization of my papa—so small-minded and bleak—did little to provoke me. The dried patch of snakeskin that had been my toxic hump was depleted of toxins. The anger was gone. My papa was long dead, relegated to Israeli files and the receding nighttime shadow play of his hands upon me.

“Maybe he was what you say,” I told Jimbo-Dror, “but I doubt he loved Israel one shekel less than any of you Mossadniks. He gave three million dollars to some rabbi who wanted to drive the Arabs into the sea.”

“We’re not required to love it,” Dror said of Israel. “Just to make sure it exists.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of wire-rims, looking like a tired Indian merchant relentlessly pushing his stock of goods across the oceans. He unfolded a piece of paper. “There’s an American Express train that leaves Svanï City September seventh, arriving at the border on the eighth. AmEx has bribed the border guards so that passengers can get out of the country. I’ll be on that train, if you need my help. The next train leaves on September ninth, arriving on September tenth. I suggest very strongly that you get out while you can, certainly before the Russians start bombing next week. You can get your Nana to help you with the ticketing. I think it’s fifty thousand a person. But don’t take her with you! Her father will kill you if you take her away from him. You know how these black-asses are about their daughters.”

“You’re leaving, too?” I said. “Goddammit, Dror. Nobody cares about this country at all. And the Sevo support you against the Palestinians, you know. Doesn’t Israel need friends?”

“This requires a two-part answer,” said Jimbo-Dror. “Yes, we need friends. And no, we really don’t care about this country at all.”

“Fine,” I said. “But what about the oil? Don’t you at least care about the oil?”

“Oil?” Jimbo-Dror took off his glasses and looked me over with his keen polymorphic eyes. “Are you joking with me, Vainberg?”

“What joking?” I pointed a bloated index finger at the window, beyond which I assumed the Caspian seabed toiled and bubbled. “The oil,” I said. “Figa-6. The Chevron/BP consortium. KBR. Golly Burton.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Dror said. “Son of a bitch. I thought Nanabragov would let you in on the secret. You know, sometimes, after all these years of playing urban cowboy, I still have the capacity to be amazed.”

“What secret? Tell me!”

“Misha, you poor fat shmegegge of a man. There is no oil.”

“No oil,” I said. To make sure I had understood correctly, I repeated the words in Russian. “Nyefti nyetu.” I felt as if something dear had been taken away from me, as if a flotilla of my papa’s rubber-sole boats were sailing away from me and over the horizon. I had gotten so used to the oil; one could almost say I had gotten close to it. Everywhere and everything was nyeft’ . The modern world was composed entirely of petrol.

I walked away from Jimbo-Dror and toward his window to look at the stubby, sea-lapped orange legs of the nearby oil platforms and the skeletal derricks idling above them.

“Empty,” he said.

“But what about Figa-6?”

“Let me give you the big picture,” the Mossadnik said. “There are supposed to be fifty billion barrels of oil reserves in the Absurdi sector of the Caspian. In truth, there isn’t one percent of that left. Figa-6 will run out by the end of the year. It doesn’t make sense to start pumping it. The Absurdis have been lying to the investors from the start. Most of their hydrocarbon reserves were tapped out during Soviet times.”

“But how can that be?” I said. “What about the KBR luau? What about the pipeline to Europe? Wasn’t that the reason for this whole Sevo-Svanï war? Wasn’t that why they shot down Georgi Kanuk’s plane?”

“Georgi Kanuk’s plane was never shot down,” Dror said. “The old man’s living in a villa near Zurich, quite nicely, from what I’ve heard. Kellogg, Brown and Root bribed him with two-point-four million dollars and gave Nanabragov the same. And that was just a down payment. There was supposed to be plenty more once the LOGCAP contract got started.”