Super Sad True Love Story (41 page)

SEPTEMBER 5

Dear Diary,

My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect.

It’s been almost a month since my last diary entry. I am so sorry. But I can’t connect in any meaningful way to anyone, even to you, diary. Four young people committed suicide in our building complexes, and two of them wrote suicide notes about how they couldn’t see a future without their äppäräti. One wrote, quite eloquently, about how he “reached out to life,” but found there only “walls and thoughts and faces,” which weren’t enough. He needed to be ranked, to know his place in this world. And that may sound ridiculous, but I can understand him. We are all bored out of our fucking minds. My hands are itching for connection, I want to connect to my parents and to Vishnu and Grace, I want to mourn Noah with them. But all I have is Eunice and my Wall of Books. So I try to Celebrate What I Have, one of my prime directives.

Work has been good. Kind of a blur, but even a blur is better than the slow churn of reality. Mostly I work alone at my desk with a half-turned bowl of miso by my side. I haven’t really spent time with Joshie since The Slap. He’s off somewhere, negotiating with the IMF or the Norwegians or the Chinese or whoever still gives a damn. Howard Shu, dork that he is, has become the standard-bearer for the few of us still left at Post-Human. He walks around with an old-fashioned clipboard and actually tells us what to do. Before the
Rupture, we would never have stood for anything so hierarchical, but now we’re just glad to have instructions, even barked ones. My job for the time being is to send out Wapachung emergency frequency messages to our clients, making sure they’re safe, but also subtly checking up on their businesses, their marriages, their children, their finances. Making sure
we’re
safe and that our monthly dues keep coming.

It’s not going to be easy. No one’s working. The teachers aren’t getting paid, is what I hear. No school. Children set loose and free into the difficult new city. I found a Vladeck House kid, maybe ten or twelve, sitting by the Arab bodega, licking out the inside of an empty bag of something called “Clük,” which the packaging warned was “inspired by real chicken flava!” When I sat down next to him, he could barely lift his eyes up to mine. Out of instinct, I took out my äppärät and pointed it at the kid, as if that would make things right. Then I took out a brown twenty-yuan note and set it at his feet. Immediately, his hand darted for it. The bill was scrunched into his fist. The fist was hidden behind his back. His face slowly turned to face mine. The brown-eyed look he gave me was not one of gratitude. The look said:
Leave me alone with my newfound fortune or I will lash out at you with the last strength I have
. I left him there with his fist behind his back, his eyes on my departing feet.

I don’t know what’s going on. The city is either completely finished or already shooting for redemption. New signs are going up. “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay
Edge:
Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?”

As far as I can tell, the most significant forms of employment around Manhattan are the “Staatling-Wapachung Works Progress” sites promising “One hour honest labor = 5-jiao coin. Nutritious lunch served.” Rows of men cracking open asphalt, digging ditches, filling in ditches with cement. These five-jiao men roam the city, hands in pockets, useless vestigial äppäräti plugs in their ears, like a pride of voiceless lions. They’re middle-aged to younger, sparse hair bleached by the sun, tyrannical sunburns on their face and neck, expensive T-shirts bought in happier days, new Antarcticas of perspiration
spreading down to the stomach. Shovels, picks, loud exhalations, not even grunts anymore, to save energy. I saw Noah’s old friend Hartford Brown, who only a few months ago was getting reamed on a yacht in the Antilles, working a five-jiao line on Prince Street. He looked cracked, half of him bronzed, the other half peeling, that slightly pudgy face of his devoid of all texture, like a thick slice of prosciutto. If they can make a fabulous gay man work like that, I thought, what can they do to the rest of us?

I went up close to him as he swung his pick, felt his rank odor battering its way into my nostrils. “Hartford,” I said. “It’s Lenny Abramov. Noah’s friend.” A terrible exhale from a terrible place inside him. “Hartford!” He turned away. Someone with a megaphone was yelling, “Let’s
do
get back to work, Brownie!” I handed him a hundred-yuan note, which he accepted, also without thanks, and then he went back to swinging his pick. “Hartford,” I said. “Hey! You don’t have to work now. A hundred yuan is two hundred hours of work. Take it easy. Get some rest. Get some shade.” But he just went on swinging mechanically, avoiding my presence, already back into his world, which began with the pick behind his shoulder and ended with the pick in the ground.

Back home, Eunice took charge of organizing the relief efforts for the older people. I don’t know why. The stirrings of her Christian background? Sorrow over not being able to help her own parents? I’m just going to take it at face value.

She went from floor to floor in each of our four co-op buildings, a total of eighty floors, knocked on each door, and if there were older people she took down their food and water needs and made sure the supplies were brought down the next week in one of Joshie’s Staatling-Wapachung Service convoys. Why is he helping us? I suppose he feels guilty about Noah and the ferry, or maybe about The Slap. In any case, we need what he’s got.

She delivered the water herself—with my sporadic help—to each apartment, she made sure all the windows and doors were open to
improve circulation, she sat there and listened to the old people cry about their children and grandchildren who were scattered around the country and for whom they feared the worst, she asked me to interpret certain Yiddish words (“that
farkakteh
Rubenstein,” “that
shlemiel
Rubenstein,” “that little
pisher
Rubenstein”), but mostly she sat with them and hugged them as their tears pollinated the dusty throw rugs and embattled last-century carpets. When the older women (most of our aged residents are widows) smelled particularly bad, she would clean their dirty bathtubs, help the shaky old ladies inside, and wash them. It was a task I found particularly repulsive—how I feared one day having to care for my parents in so thoughtful and tactile a manner, as Russian tradition expected of me—but Eunice, who despised any alien smell coming from our refrigerator or the rankness of my toenails after several missed pedicures, did not flinch, did not turn away from the sunken, splotched flesh in her hands.

We saw a woman die. Or Eunice did anyway. I think it was a stroke. She couldn’t get the words out of her mouth, this withered creature, sitting beside a coffee table littered with unusable remote controls, a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe showing off his beautiful beard framed behind her. “Aican,” she kept saying, arcing spittle across Eunice’s shoulders. And then, more emphatically: “Aican, aican, aican!”

Did she mean to say, “I can”? I left the apartment, because I couldn’t bear to rekindle the memories of my own grandmother after her final stroke, in a wheelchair, covering up the dead parts of her body with her shawl, worried about looking helpless in front of the world.

I feared the old people, feared their mortality, but the more I did so, the more I fell in love with Eunice Park. I fell for her as hopelessly and thoroughly as I had in Rome, where I had confused her for a different, stronger person. My problem was that I couldn’t help her find her parents and sister. Even with my Staatling connections, I couldn’t find out what had happened to her family in Fort Lee. One day Eunice told me she could
feel
that they were still alive
and doing well—a sentiment that floored me with its almost religious naïveté, but also made me wish I could believe the same thing about the Abramovs.

Aican, aican, aican.

So many things have happened since I’ve last written in you, diary, some of them awful, most of them mundane. I guess the main thing I can think of is the fact that things are getting better with Eunice, that through our mutual depression over what’s happened to our city, our friends, and our lives we’ve become closer. Because we can’t connect to our äppäräti, we’re learning to turn to each other.

Once, after a long weekend of scrubbing and watering our elderly, she even asked me to
read
to her.

I went over to my Wall of Books and picked up Kundera’s
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, whose cover I had caught Eunice examining once before, tracing with her finger the depicted bowler hat flying over the Prague skyline. There were laudatory quotes for the author and his work on the first page of the book from
The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times
(the real
Times
, not the
Lifestyle Times
), even something called
Commonweal
. What had happened to all these publications? I remember reading the
Times
in the subway, folding it awkwardly while leaning against the door, caught up in the words, worried about crashing to the floor or tripping over some lightly clad beauty (there was always at least one), but even more afraid to lose the thread of the article in front of me, my spine banging against the train door, the clatter and drone of the massive machine around me, and me, with my words, brilliantly alone.

Reading Kundera’s book, I felt a growing anxiety as the words on the crinkly yellow pages came out of my mouth. I found myself struggling for breath. I had read this book many times over as a teenager, had bent the topmost edges of many pages where Kundera’s philosophy touched my own. But now even I had trouble understanding all the concepts, never mind what Eunice could understand.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
was a novel of ideas set in a country that meant nothing to her, set in a time—the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—that might as well not have existed as far as Eunice was concerned. She had learned to love Italy, but that was a far more digestible, stylish land, a country of Images.

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice’s sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual “living” characters—I recalled this was a love story—and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice’s worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

On page eight, I read a part I had underlined as a moody, unlaid teenager. “What happens but once … might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” Next to this I had written in shaded block letters: “EUROPEAN CYNICISM or VERY SCARY TRUTH???” I re-read the lines again, slowly, with emphasis, directly into Eunice’s pert, wax-free ear, and as I did so I wondered if perhaps it was this book that had launched my search for immortality. Joshie himself had once said to a very important client, “Eternal life is the only life that matters. All else is just a moth circling the light.” He had not noticed my standing by the door to his office. I returned to my cubicle in tears, feeling abandoned to nothingness, moth-like, yet stunned by Joshie’s unusual lyricism. The part about the moth, I mean. He never talked like that with me. He always underlined the positive things about my brief existence, the fact, for example, that I had friends and could afford good restaurants and was never completely alone for very long.

I read on, feeling Eunice’s solemn breath against my chest. The main character, Tomas, started having sex with many attractive Czech ladies. I re-read several times a passage about Tomas’s mistress standing in front of him, in panties and bra and a black bowler hat. I pointed to the black bowler hat on the cover. Eunice nodded, but I felt that Kundera had put too many words around the fetish
for her to gain what her generation required from any form of content: a ready surge of excitement, a temporary lease on satisfaction.

By page sixty-four, Tomas’s girlfriend Tereza and his mistress Sabina are taking photographs of each other naked, dressed only in that recurring black bowler hat. “She was completely at the mercy of Tomas’s mistress,” I read two pages later, winking at Eunice. “This beautiful submission intoxicated Tereza.” I repeated the words “beautiful submission.” Eunice stirred. She took off her TotalSurrenders with a snap of her finger and moved up to straddle my face between her legs. With the book still partly open in one hand, I cupped her behind with the other while using my tongue in the familiar motions against her opening. She pulled back for a while and let me look into her face. I mistook her expression for a smile. It was something else, a slight opening of the mouth, with the lower lip leaning rightward. It was astonishment: the astonishment of being fully loved. The miracle of not being hit. She returned to her position on top of me and let out a volley of grunts of a pitch and treble I had never heard. It was as if she were speaking a foreign language, one that had not kept up with history, one that was stuck on the primal sound “guh.” I lifted her up, not sure she was enjoying herself. “Should we stop?” I asked. “Am I hurting you?” She forced herself down on my face and rocked her body faster.

Afterward, she returned to her perch on my collarbone, sniffing critically at the trail she had left on my chin. I read once more. I read loudly about the exploits of the fictional Tomas and his many lovers. I skipped around, looking for juicier bits to feed Eunice. The story moved from Prague to Zurich and then back to Prague. The little nation of Czechoslovakia was torn to shreds by the imperialist Soviets (who, the author had no way of knowing at the time of writing, would themselves be torn to shreds a negligible twenty-three years later). In the book, characters had to make political decisions that, in the end, meant nothing. The concept of kitsch was rightfully, if somewhat ruthlessly, attacked. Kundera forced me to ponder my mortality some more.