Super Sad True Love Story (10 page)

I owed Howard Shu 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars. My first stab at dechronification—gone. My hair would continue to gray, and then one day it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly
like
the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these
data
, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I’m talking about, would be gone. And that’s what immortality means to me, Joshie. It means selfishness. My generation’s belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.

There was a commotion on the water, a needed distraction. With a burble of warm white spray behind it, a northbound seaplane took off so gracefully, so seemingly free of mechanics and despair, that for a moment I imagined all our lives would just go on forever.

THE NEXT PLANE HOME

FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

JUNE 9

CHUNG.WON.PARK
TO
EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

Eunhee,

Today I wake up sad. But no problem! It will be OK! Only your father is very mad at you. He say you bohemia. What is this? He say you go to rome and you do not protect the mystery. He call you bad word in korean. He say you probably with black man. So shocking! He say only bohemia people go to Europe and bohemia people is bad people. He say maybe he stop being podiatrist and become painter which is always what he want but he grew up oldest son so he has responsibility to his parent and brothers. You are oldest sister. So you have responsibility. I say this already. We are not like American, don’t forget! Which is why now Korea very rich country and America owe everything to China people. Daddy say you should come home and take LSAT again but this time study, but maybe Daddy a little wrong because now there is army in the street and it is dangerous. Reverend Cho tell Daddy he is sinner and he must throw away of himself, to be empty inside, so his heart will be fill only with Jesu. Also he say he should see Special Doctor to talk to and maybe take medicine so that he don’t hit. But Daddy say it is shameful to take drug. Eunhee! Prepare yourself for LSAT to make Daddy happy and we can be good family again. Please forgive me because I am bad mother and bad wife.

Love,

Mommy

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Sally, I’m taking the next plane home.

SALLYSTAR:
It’s not so bad. Don’t listen to Mommy. She’s trying to guilt you. I’m staying over at Eunhyun’s this whole week. I’m so busy studying for chem I don’t even have time to deal.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
If you can’t deal, then who’s taking care of mom? If we’re both out of the house he’ll start blaming her for EVERY LITTLE THING. He’ll say she drove us away and turned us both against him. She’s completely un-protected. You know she’ll never call the police or even Cousin Harold if he hits her.

SALLYSTAR:
Don’t use that kind of language, please.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
What kind of language? That he HITS her.

SALLYSTAR:
Stop it. Anyway, I still have dinner there every night so I know what’s going on. He hasn’t done anything major.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Not to her, you mean. What about you?

SALLYSTAR:
I’m okay. Chem is killing me.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I know you’re lying to me, Sally. I’ll be on the next plane back and I’ll see what he’s done.

SALLYSTAR:
Stay in Rome, Eunice! You deserve to have a good time after college. One of us should be happy. Anyway, next week I’m going to DC for that thing so I won’t even see him. Don’t worry about Mommy. Cousin Angela is staying over while I’m gone. She has job interviews in the city.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
What thing in DC? The march against the ARA?

SALLYSTAR:
Yes. But don’t call it that. Some of the profs at school say we shouldn’t mention it on GlobalTeens because they monitor everything.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Did Daddy call me a ghee jee beh?

SALLYSTAR:
He had this crazy night where he thought you were sleeping with a black man. He said he had a dream about it. It’s like he can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality anymore.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Did you tell Daddy I help out at the shelter in Rome? Don’t tell him it’s for trafficked Albanian women. Just say it’s for immigrants, okay?

SALLYSTAR:
Why?

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I want him to know I’m doing something good.

SALLYSTAR:
I thought you didn’t care what he thinks. Anyway I’ve got to go scan texts for Euro Classics. Don’t worry, Eunice. Life only happens once. Enjoy it while you can! I’ll keep Mom safe. I’m praying for all of us.

SALLYSTAR:
BTW, that pewter Cullo bathing suit is on sale at Padma. The one with the chest guards that you wanted.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I’m already bidding on it on AssLuxury. I’ll tell you if it goes over 100 yuan-pegged, and then you can buy it at Padma if it’s still on sale.

JUNE 11

EUNI-TARD ABROAD
TO
GRILLBITCH:

Hi, Precious Pony.

I know you’re in Tahoe so I don’t want to bother you, but things have gotten really bad with my dad and I think I’m coming home. It’s like the further away I am from him, the more he thinks he can get away with. Going to Rome was SUCH a mistake. I don’t know if I can handle Fort Lee, but I was thinking of crashing in New York and going over there on weekends. Remember that girl you were friends with, the one with the really old-school perm, Joy Lee or something? Does she have a place for me to crash? I don’t really know anyone in NY, everyone’s in LA or abroad. I think I might have to stay over at that old guy Lenny’s house. He keeps sending me these long teens about how much he loves my freckles and how he’s going to cook me an eggplant.

I broke up with Ben. It was too much. He is so beautiful physically, so smart and such a rising star in Credit that I am completely intimidated by him. I can never reveal who I really am to him because he would just vomit. I know a part of him must be disgusted by my fat, fat body. And sometimes he just stares off into space when I treat him badly like “I think I’ve had enough of this crazy bitch.” It’s so sad. I’ve been crying for days now. Crying over my family and crying over Ben. God, I’m sorry, Precious Pony. I’m such a downer.

The weird thing is I’ve been thinking about Lenny, the old guy. I know he’s gross physically, but there’s something sweet about him, and honestly I need to be taken care of too. I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I’m not in love with him. Maybe that’s how Ben feels with me. I had this fantasy that I was having sex with Lenny and I tried to block out the grossness and just enjoy his very serious love for me. Have you ever done that, Pony? Am I selling myself short? When we were walking down this pretty street in Rome I noticed Lenny’s shirt was buttoned all wrong, and I just reached over and rebuttoned it. I just wanted to help him be less of a dork. Isn’t that a form of love too? And when he was talking to me at dinner, usually I listen to everything a guy says and try to prepare a response or at least to act a certain way, but with him I just stopped listening after a while and looked at the way his lips moved, the foam on his lips and on his dorky stubble, because he was so EARNEST in the way he needed to tell me things. And I thought, wow, you’re kind of beautiful, Lenny. You’re like what Prof Margaux in Assertiveness Class used to call “a real human being.” I don’t know. I keep going back and forth on him. Sometimes I’m like no way, it’s never going to work, I’m just not attracted to him. But then I think of him going down on me until he could barely breathe, the poor thing, and the way I could just close my eyes and pretend we were both other people. Oh God, listen to me. Anyway, I miss you so much, Pony. I really do. Come to New York please! I need all the love I can get these days.

R
ATE
M
E
P
LUS

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

JUNE 12

Dear Diary,

God, I miss her. No messages from my Euny yet, no reply to my entreaty to move here and let me take care of her with garlicky carcasses of eggplant, with my grown man’s practiced affections, with what’s left of my bank account after Howard Shu docks me 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars. But I’m persevering. Every day I take out my handwritten checklist and remember that Point No. 3 implores me to Love Eunice until the dreaded “Dear Lenny” letter pops up on GlobalTeens and she runs off with some hot Credit or Media guy, some mindless jerk so taken with her looks he won’t even recognize how much this miniature woman in front of him is in need of consolation and repair. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, the Abramovs keep leaving all these desolate messages on GlobalTeens with illiterate subject lines reading “me and momee sad” and “me worry” and “without son laif lonely,” reminding me that Point No. 5, Be Nice to Parents, has almost come due. I just need to feel a little more secure about myself and my life and especially my money—a sore subject with the thrifty Abramovs—before I head off to Long Island to visit them in their vibrant right-wing habitat.

Speaking of money, I went to my HSBC on East Broadway, where a pretty Dominican girl with a set of dying teeth gave me a rundown of how my financial instruments were performing. In a word, shittily.

My AmericanMorning portfolio, even though it had been pegged to the yuan, had lost 10 percent of its value because, unbeknownst to me, the idiot asset managers had stuck the failing ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit albatross into the mix, and my low-risk BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China]-A-BRAC High-Performing Nations Fund had registered only 3 percent growth because of the April unrest near Putingrad in Russia and the impact of America’s invasion of Venezuela on the Brazilian economy. “I feel like I’m going to shit a BRIC,” I told Maria Abriella, my account representative.

Ms. Abriella bade me look at an old computer screen. I ignored the flickering capricious dollar amounts and focused on the steady yuan- and euro-pegged denominations. I had something like 1,865,000 yuan to my name, a figure that had been close to 2.5 million yuan before I had left for Europe. “You got top credit, Mr. Lenny,” she said, in her husky, pack-an-hour voice. “If you want to be patriotic, you should take out a loan and buy another apar’men’ as an inves’men’.”

Another apartment? I was
hemorrhaging
funds. I turned away from Ms. Abriella’s beautiful seagull-shaped lips as if slapped, and let death wash over me, the corned-beef smell of my damp neck giving way to an old man’s odor rising from my thighs and armpits like steam, and then the final past-due stench of the Arizona hospice years, the orderly swabbing me down with detergent as if I were some sickly elephant.

Money equals life. By my estimation, even the preliminary beta dechronification treatments, for example, the insertion of SmartBlood to regulate my ridiculous cardiovascular system, would run three million yuan per year. With each second I had spent in Rome, lustily minding the architecture, rapturously fucking Fabrizia, drinking and eating enough daily glucose to kill a Cuban sugarcane farmer, I had paved the toll road to my own demise.

And now there was only one man who could turn things around for me.

Which brings me back to Point No. 1: Work Hard for Joshie. I think I’m doing all right on that front. The first week back at Post-Human Services is over and nothing terrible happened. Howard Shu hasn’t asked me to do any Intakes yet, but I’ve spent the week hanging out at the Eternity Lounge, fiddling with my pebbly new äppärät 7.5 with RateMe Plus technology, which I now proudly wear pendant-style around my neck, getting endless updates on our country’s battle with solvency from CrisisNet while downloading all my fears and hopes in front of my young nemeses in the Eternity Lounge, talking about how my parents’ love for me ran too hot and too cold, and how I
want
and
need
Eunice Park even though she’s so much prettier than I deserve—basically, trying to show these open-source younguns just how much data an old “intro” geezer like me is willing to share. So far I’m getting shouts of “gross” and “sick” and “TIMATOV,” which I’ve learned means Think I’m About to Openly Vomit, but I also found out that Darryl, the guy with the
SUK DIK
bodysuit and the red bandana, has been posting nice things about me on his GlobalTeens stream called “101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For.” At the same time, I heard the ticka-ticka-ticka of The Boards as Darryl’s mood indicator fell from “positive/playful/ready to contribute” to “annoying the heck out of Joshie all week.” His cortisol levels are a mess too. Just a little more stress on his part and I’ll get my desk back. Anyway, all this passes for progress, and soon I’ll be hitting the Intakes, proving my worth, trying to corner the market in Joshie’s affection and reclaim my big-man-on-campus status in time for the Labor Day tempeh stir-fry. Also, I’ve spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

In the meantime, the weekend came and hallelujah! I decided to dedicate Saturday night to Point No. 4: Care for Your Friends. Joshie’s right about one thing: Good relationships make you healthier. And the point is not just being cared for, but learning to return that care. In my case, learning to overcome an only child’s reluctance to commit fully to the world of others. Now, I haven’t seen my buddies since I’ve been back, because, like anyone who’s still employed in New York, they’re working insane hours, but we finally made plans to get together at Cervix, the newly hip bar in newly hip Staten Island.

Before I left the 740 square feet of my apartment, I put the name of my oldest Media pal, Noah Weinberg, into my äppärät and learned that he would be airing our reunion live on his GlobalTeens stream, “The Noah Weinberg Show!,” which made me nervous at first, but, then, this is exactly the kind of thing I have to get used to if I’m going to make it in this world. So I put on a pair of painful jeans and a flaming-red shirt with a bouquet of white roses embroidered along my chest. I wished Eunice were around to tell me if this was age-appropriate. She seems to have a good sense of life’s limits.

Down in the lobby, I noticed the ambulances were silently flashing their lights out on Grand Street, which meant another death in the building, another invitation to sit shiva at a grieving son’s house in Teaneck or New Rochelle, another apartment for sale on the community board. A wheelchair stood lonely amidst the antiseptic 1950s cream-on-cream décor of our building’s lobby. We’re all about immobility here in the Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, and so I prepared myself for an intergenerational encounter, thinking I might have to wheel the old fellow out into the early-evening sunshine, produce a few words of my grandmother’s Yiddish.

I backed away. A body badly sheathed in an opaque plastic bag sat in the wheelchair, its head crowned with a pointy pocket of air. The body bag clung vehemently to a pair of slim male hips, and the deceased was huddled forward slightly, as if engaged in the fruitless act of Christian prayer.

An outrage! Where were his caregivers? Where were the EMT workers? I wanted to get down on my knees and, against my better instincts, to offer solace to this former being growing cold in his sickening plastic robe. I beheld the tiny pocket of air above the dead man’s head, as if it were the visualization of his very last breath, and felt vomit rising from my breadbasket.

Dizzy, I walked out into the stifling June heat toward the ambulance guys, the both of them enjoying a smoke by the flashing vehicle bearing the legend “American Medicle [sic] Response.” “There’s a dead person in my lobby,” I said to them. “In a fucking
wheel
chair. You just left it there. Some respect, guys?”

Their faces were negligible, compromised, vaguely Hispanish. “You next of kin?” one said, nodding at my vicinity.

“Does it matter?”

“He’s not going anywhere, sir.”

“It’s disgusting,” I said.

“It’s just death.”

“Happens to everybody, Paco,” the other added.

I tried to contort my face into anger, but whenever I try to do that I’m told I look like a crazy old woman. “I’m talking about your
smoking
,” I said, my retort dying swiftly in the humidity around us.

Nothing on Grand could offer me solace. Nothing could make me Celebrate What I Have (Point No. 6). Not the inherent life inside the barely clothed Latino children or the smell of freshly cooked
arroz con pollo
wafting out of the venerable Castillo del Jagua II. I projected “The Noah Weinberg Show!” again, listened to my friend making fun of our armed forces’ latest defeat in Venezuela, but I couldn’t follow the intricacies. Ciudad Bolívar, Orinoco River, pierced armor, Blackhawk down—what did it mean to me, now that I saw one possible end to my life: alone, in a bag, in my own apartment building, hunched over in a wheelchair, praying to a god I never believed in? Just then, passing by the ochre grandiosity of St. Mary’s, I saw a pretty woman, a little chunky and wide of hip, cross herself in front of the church and kiss her fist, her Credit ranking flashing at an abysmal 670 on a nearby Credit Pole. I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans.

I had to cool my stress levels by the time I got to see my buddies. On the way down to the ferry, I chanted Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, Care for Your Friends, because I needed them by my side when the American Medicle [sic] Response ambulance trundled up to 575 Grand Street. In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.

My äppärät pinged.

CrisisNet: DOLLAR LOSES OVER 3% IN LONDON TRADING TO FINISH AT HISTORIC LOW OF 1€ = $8.64 IN ADVANCE OF CHINESE CENTRAL BANKER ARRIVAL U.S.; LIBOR RATE FALLS 57 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR LOWER BY 2.3% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥ = $4.90

I really needed to figure out what this LIBOR thing was and why it was falling by fifty-seven basis points. But, honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn’t I have been born to a better world?

The National Guard was out in force at the Staten Island Ferry building. A crowd of poor office women wearing white sneakers, their groaning ankles covered with sheer hose, waited patiently to walk past a sandbagged checkpoint by the gate to the ferry. An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT
.”

Occasionally, some of us were pulled aside, and I worried about the otter flagging me in Rome, the asshole videotaping me on the plane, the asterisk that still appeared when my mighty credit score flashed on the Credit Poles, the continued disappearance of Nettie Fine (no response to my daily messages, and if they could get my American mama, what could they do to my
actual
parents?). Men in civilian clothes zapped our bodies and our äppäräti with what looked like a small tubular attachment of an old-school Electrolux vacuum cleaner and asked us both to deny and to imply consent to what they were doing to us. The passengers seemed to take the whole thing in stride, the Staten Island cool kids especially silent and deferential, shaking a little in their vintage hoodies. I overheard several young men of color whispering to one another “deee-ny and
im-
ply,” but the older women quickly shushed them with bites of “Restoration ’thority!” and “Punch you in the mouth, boy.”

Maybe it was Howard Shu’s doing, but somehow I got through the checkpoint without being stopped.

Once disembarked on the Staten Island side, I braced myself for a walk. The main drag, Victory Boulevard, ramps uphill with a San Franciscan vigor. These parts of Staten Island, St. George and Tompkinsville, were once completely off the grid. Immigrants used to wash up here from Poland, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and especially Mexico. They worked the storefronts of their respective ethnic restaurants and also ran dusty groceries, check-cashing places, and twenty-centavo-a-minute phone booths. Outside the stores, black men used to lounge in puffy jackets, tottering sleepily over milk crates. I remember this ’hood well, because when my buddies and I were right out of college we’d all take the ferry to raid this spicy Sri Lankan joint, where for nine bucks you could eat an insane shrimp pancake and some kind of ethereal red fish while baby roaches tried to clamber up your trouser leg and drink your beer. Now, of course, the Sri Lankan place, the roaches, the somnolent minorities were gone, replaced by half-man, half-wireless bohemians ramming their baby strollers up and down the hump of Victory Boulevard, while kids from nearby New Jersey cruised past the outrageously priced Victorians in their Hyundai rice rockets, wishing they could work Media or Credit.