Super Sad True Love Story (48 page)

The Triplex was really one Triplex on top of another on top of another, each twisted at a forty-five-degree angle from the one below, like three carefully stacked bricks—essentially, a minor skyscraper—and then cantilevered over the East River, so that the destroyers of the visiting People’s Liberation Army Navy passed by at eye level, and you could almost reach over and touch the surface-to-air missile batteries glistening like tins of mint candy on their raised decks. About half of the Triplex was the living space carved out from the middle of the three Triplexes to form a busy souk-like area beneath the enormous skylight. It was roughly the size of the main hall in Grand Central Station, I was told. The space had been entirely cleared of furniture (or maybe this is how it always was), except for those frightening artworks shimmering at shoulder level and these little transparent cubes, which once you sat upon them filled with a red or yellow radiance, in deference to the Chinese flag and our guests. The place was so flooded with natural light that the distinction between indoors and outdoors no longer mattered, and
at times I felt I was standing in a glass cathedral with the roof blown off.

I wanted to congratulate the artist on his work, that’s how strongly I felt about it, and to recommend a trip out to my parents’ Westbury so that he could see a different, more hopeful take on post-Rupture America. But they had this gimmicky thing going on, where, any time someone approached the artist whom he didn’t know or didn’t like the looks of, these spikes shot up from the floor all around him and you had to back away. He was actually a nice-looking guy, kind of square-jawed but with something milky, almost Midwestern, in his eyes, and he was wearing this cougar-print shirt and an old-school pinstriped Armani jacket which was festooned with random numbers made out of masking tape. He was busy talking to a wildly emotive post-American doyenne dressed in a cheongsam covered with dragons and phoenixes. The moment I approached them, the spikes shot out from the floor around him, and some of the serving girls in Onionskins who were standing next to the artist just gave me the old familiar look that denoted I was not a human being.
Oh well
, I thought. At least the art was great.

A lot of young Media people were hanging around one another protectively, clusters of boys and sometimes girls in proper suits and dresses, trying to impress their betters but clearly lost in the immensity of the place. Anyway, they were just so happy to be there, to be fed, to drink their rum and Tsingtaos, to be a part of society, and to avoid the five-jiao lines. I wondered if they had ever heard of Noah or knew how he had died. Like all the Media people left in the city, they were wearing blue badges handed out by Staatling-Wapachung that read “We Do Our Part.”

The Staatling-Wapachung bigwigs were dressed like young kids, a lot of vintage Zoo York Basic Cracker hoodies from the 2000s, and tons of dechronification, making me think they were actually their own children, but my äppärät informed me that most of them were in their fifties, sixties, or seventies. Sometimes I saw someone who I thought had been one of my Intakes, and I tried to say hi, but they could not really comprehend me in this glamorous context.

I noticed that none of our clients or our directors wore äppäräti,
only the servants and Media folk. Howard Shu had told me that more than once: The truly powerful don’t need to be ranked. It made me feel conscious of the shiny, warbling pebble around my neck. I passed by some Media twentysomethings streaming at one another and overheard the little tidbits of verballing that always depressed me. “Did you know November is bike week?” “There’s nothing wrong with her except she’s completely fucked up.” “When they say ‘12
p.m
.’ does that mean noon or midnight?”

Next to a cluster of StatoilHydro execs, ruddy elongated Norwegians and upper-caste Indians as tall as Norwegians, I spotted Eunice and her sister, Sally, talking to Joshie. As I began to make my way over to them, I passed one of the pieces showing a dead man perched upon the family couch in Omaha, a guy about my age, part Native American by the looks of him, with his face creeping slightly off his skull and the eyes eerily silenced, as if they had just been erased (“an interesting narrative strategy,” someone was saying). The picture was no less harrowing than anything else around me, the guy was mercifully
dead
, but for some reason I became agitated just looking at it, and my tongue went dry, sticking painfully to the roof of my mouth. I did what everyone eventually did: looked away.

I want to talk about their clothes. This seems important to me. Joshie was wearing a cashmere sport coat, wool tie, and cotton dress shirt, all JuicyPussy4Men—a slightly more formal approximation of the same clothes Eunice had chosen for me. She was wearing a French-blue two-piece Chanel bouclé suit with a faux-pearl center and knee-high leather boots, so that all of her was concealed except for the tiny glow of her sharp kneecaps. She looked less like a woman than a gift. Sally was also overdressed for the occasion, a pinstriped suit and the pinprick of a golden cross around the soft pad of her neck. I noticed the beginnings of two hard-won laugh lines, and a chin dominated by a single disarming dimple. When I approached them, both sisters stopped talking to Joshie and put their hands to their mouths. And then, apropos of nothing, I realized what was bothering me about the picture of the dead guy on the couch in Omaha. At the corner of the work, beyond a scattering of
youthful personal effects heavy on string instruments and obsolete laptops, a bitch lay dead, a German shepherd shot point-blank, a lightning bolt of blood spilling across the warped living-room floor. A puppy of negligible weeks, maybe days, had staked its front paws on the dead animal’s exposed stomach, astride her still-swollen teats. You couldn’t see the puppy’s face, but you could tell its ears were alert and its tail was tucked under its rear, from either sadness or fear. Why, of all things, did this worry me so?

I blanked for a second, catching snatches of what Joshie was saying. “I met him through the skater scene.…” “I come from a different budgeting culture.…” “When you think about it, the capitalist system is more entrenched in America than anywhere else in the world.…”

And then his arm was around me and we were walking away from the girls. I cannot recall our exact surroundings when he gave me his speech. We were lost in negative space, his closeness the only thing I could still cling to. He spoke of the seventy years in which he had not known love. How unfair that had been. How much love he had to give; how I had, in some ways, been a recipient of that love. But now he needed something different: intimacy, closeness, youth. When Eunice first walked into his apartment, he
knew
. He picked up my äppärät and produced a study on how May-December relationships lifted the lifespan ceilings for both partners. He spoke of practical things, my parents in Westbury. He could move them to a safer, peripheral region, like Astoria, Queens. He spoke of how we needed to spend some time apart, but how eventually the three of us could reconcile. “We could be like a family someday,” he said, but when he mentioned family, I could think only of my father, my
real
father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind turned away from what Joshie was saying, and I pondered my father’s humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

I lost track of where I was, until Joshie brought me back to Eunice
and Sally, who were holding hands and staring up into the blue portal of the skylight, as if awaiting deliverance. “Maybe you and Lenny should be alone right now,” he said to Eunice. But she wouldn’t let go of her sister and she would not look into my eyes. They stood together, silent, with their little chests thrust out ahead of them, their eyes quiet and blank, the seemingly endless continuation of their lives stretched out before them into the three dimensions of the Triplex.

Words broke out of me. Stupid words. The worst final words I could have chosen, but words nonetheless. “Silly goose,” I said to Eunice. “You shouldn’t have worn such a warm suit. It’s still autumn. Aren’t you hot? Aren’t you hot, Eunice?”

There was high-pitched yelling from the direction of the vestibule, not far from where we were, and Howard Shu was sprinting ahead like a gorgeous greyhound, shouting things at many people.

The Chinese delegation had arrived. Two giant banners floated into the air, held aloft by an invisible force, as the opening bars of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (“Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while”) blared in the background.

A series of loud pops exploded in the air, reminding me of tracer fire during the Rupture. Firecrackers were being launched from the center of the souk-like space and through the enormous skylight above us. As the first batch went off, I saw Sally cringe and raise her arm protectively. Then there was a push to get to the front to see the Chinese. I let the bodies wash over me, the young octogenarians, wearing ironic John Deere T-shirts and trucker’s caps that barely contained their masses of silky new hair. Separated from the people I loved, pushed out of the glass house, I found myself in the winter-cold air, by a phalanx of limousines bearing the insignia of the People’s Capitalist Party, by a row of Triplexes cantilevered over the
FDR Drive and the East River. There had once been housing projects here and a street called Avenue D. Media people ran past me as if there was a fire somewhere, as if tall buildings were burning. I was looking south. I should have been thinking about Eunice, mourning Eunice, but it wasn’t happening at the moment.

I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home to the 740 square feet that used to be mine. I wanted to go home to what used to be New York City. I wanted to feel the presence of the mighty Hudson and the angry, besieged East River and the great bay that stretched out from the pediment of Wall Street and made us a part of the world beyond.

I went back to our rooms in the nurses’ dormitory. I sat down on the hard bed and clutched the bedspread, then pressed my pillow into the equivalent softness of my stomach. The central air conditioning was still on, for some reason. The room was freezing. Cold sweat trickled down my chin, and my books felt cold to the touch. The wetness confused me, and I touched my eyes to make sure I wasn’t crying. I thought of the firecrackers going off. I heard their harsh, unnecessary noise. I saw Sally’s arm raised against the phantom punch about to be landed. The look on her face was pleading, but still loving, still believing that it could be different, that at the last moment something would give way, that the fist would fall by his side, and they would be a family.

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.

WELCOME BACK, PA’DNER

NOTES ON THE NEW “PEOPLE’S LITERATURE PUBLISHING HOUSE” (
) EDITION OF THE LENNY ABRAMOV DIARIES