Super Sad True Love Story (19 page)

JUNE 26

CHUNG.WON.PARK
TO
EUNI-TARD:

Eunhee,

Why you no respond to Mommy? Three times I call and right. We have dinner with Uncle Joon I make dolsot bap just like you like with extra crunchy rice from the pot bottom. When I was little girl we didn’t eat rice from bottom because we are from good family and we only give nooroonggi to beggars, but now I know you like it so I always cook dolsot bap too long even when you not here because I miss you so much!!
Ha, I try to make unhappy face, but it come out happy, so maybe Jesu telling me something! Be grateful and throw away of yourself because you are blessed in Christ. We are much more happy family now that you are close by and watching on Sally. Daddy love you very much but I have trouble in my heart. I see Joy Lee mother at H-Mart. You say you stay at Joy apartment in Manhattan but Mrs. Lee say it not true. Why you lie to Mommy? I find out everything anyway. Maybe you living now with some meeguk boy in dirty apartment? So shocking. So shocking. You come back home and live with us. Daddy much better now. Sally need you to be top roll model so you stay away from dirty meeguk boy. I know my english bad but you understand what I write I think.

I love you,

Mommy

Oh, what is 3200-yuan-peg-dollar “miscellaneous charge” on AlliedWasteCVS account?? This in addition to regular finance charge? I try to up-end link to new LSAT Prep Course in Fort Lee which Mrs. Lee say make Joy get best result. 174 and before she had 154. I ask other Mommies at Church what they got and this very good improvement.

EUNI-TARD:
Lenny, I thought I asked you to clean the bathtub. This apartment is DISGUSTINGLY DIRTY. I’ve swiffered the kitchen floor and the bathroom floor already and vacuumed the carpet in the foyer too. Do it today! I don’t like living in a pig-sty.

LABRAMOV:
Euny, I’m sorry but we have to stay late at work today. There’s a mandatory meeting about the Debt Crisis and the LNWI protest thing in Central Park and D.C. They think the Fed may default on the dollar this year (!) and not all our clients’ money is totally yuan-pegged. I have to pull up like a thousand records by six o’clock. I think Joshie’s going to meet the Chinese Central Banker! Anyway, it’s pretty good for my career that they trust me with this kind of stuff.

EUNI-TARD:
So? What does that have to do with the bathtub?

LABRAMOV:
Maybe over the weekend we can have a little cleaning party.

EUNI-TARD:
It’s mostly your hair in the bathtub, you know. You’re the one who sheds 24/7.

LABRAMOV:
I know. I’ve never really cleaned the bathtub before, so maybe next time we can switch chores.

EUNI-TARD:
I’ve shown you how to do it three times. You’re brain-smart enough when it comes to dollar defaults or whatever but you can’t clean the bathtub?

LABRAMOV:
Maybe you can supervise me while I do it over the weekend.

EUNI-TARD:
Never mind. I’ll just do it myself. It’s easier in the end to just do everything myself.

LABRAMOV:
No, don’t do it! Wait until I have some free time. I’m sorry it’s so busy at work.

LABRAMOV:
Hello! Are you there?

LABRAMOV:
Are you mad at me?

LABRAMOV:
Eunice!

EUNI-TARD:
Ugh.

LABRAMOV:
What?

EUNI-TARD:
I hate this.

LABRAMOV:
What can I do to make you feel better? I’ll clean all weekend, top to bottom.

EUNI-TARD:
Nothing. Nothing you can do. I can’t change you. So I guess I just have to take on all these responsibilities myself.

LABRAMOV:
That’s not true, Eunice.

LABRAMOV:
I AM changing. It just takes time.

LABRAMOV:
Let’s have a nice dinner at that Brazilian place in the village. My treat.

EUNI-TARD:
Don’t forget to pick up the TWO-PLY toilet paper on the way home.

LABRAMOV:
I won’t forget.

EUNI-TARD:
You always forget. That’s why you’re a tuna-brain.

LABRAMOV:
Ha ha. I’m glad you’re not mad at me.

EUNI-TARD:
Don’t count your blessings, nerd.

LABRAMOV:
I’m not counting anything.

EUNI-TARD:
I just want a nice, clean apartment, Lenny. Don’t you want to come home to a nice, clean apartment too? Don’t you want to be proud of where you live? Isn’t that what being an adult is about? It’s not just about reading Tolsoy and sounding smart. Big whoop.

LABRAMOV:
Reading who? Big what?

EUNI-TARD:
Forget it. I got to run to the laundry. Who else is going to pick up your undies? By the way, you should wear boxer briefs not just plain old regular briefs. They provide more support. You always complain that your balls hurt after a long walk, well why do you think that is?

LABRAMOV:
Because I wear bad underwear.

EUNI-TARD:
Who loves you,
kokiri
?

AMY GREENBERG’S “MUFFINTOP HOUR”:

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

JUNE 30

Dear Diary,

So, after the huge success with my parents, I asked Eunice to come out with me to Staten Island to meet my friends. I guess my intentions were self-aggrandizing and superficial. I wanted to introduce Eunice to my boys, impress them because she was so young and pretty. And I wanted to impress
her
because Noah and his girlfriend, Amy, were so Media.

The first part worked—you can’t really meet Eunice without appreciating her youth and her cool, shimmering indifference. The second part not so much.

The night in question was what we called Family Night, when all the boys invited their respective partners to Cervix, the kind of night when I was usually minus girlfriend and feeling like a fifth wheel. But on that night it would be Noah and his emotive girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, Vishnu and Grace, and Eunice and me, the couple-in-progress.

Even on the way to the subway, walking arm in arm, I tried to show my girl off to the denizens of Grand Street, but the selection of Eunice-appreciators was a bit thin that day. A crazy white man brushing his teeth in broad daylight. A retired Jew throwing a plastic cup of Coke at a discarded mattress. A feuding Aztec couple hitting each other over the head with two plastic yellow daisies from within the unremitting brick façade of a housing project.

I had almost made it to the subway without incident. But by the razor-wire-surrounded lot next to the RiteAid, where our neighborhood’s resident shitter would squat in the middle of the day, I noticed a curious thing. A new billboard had gone up, courtesy of my employer, the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation. It depicted a familiar latticework of glass and pomposity, a series of three-story apartments crashing into one another at odd angles like a bunch of half-melted ice cubes in a stirred drink. “
HABITATS EAST
,” the sign proclaimed, beside the flags of the United Arab Emirates, China-Worldwide, and the European Union.

AN EXCLUSIVE TRIPLEX COMMUNITY FOR
NON–U.S. NATIONALS

By Staatling Property

Seven TRIPLEX Living Units priced to move from 20,000,000 northern euros / 33,000,000 yuan

“Twenty million euros!” I said to Eunice. “That’s fifty years of my salary. Even foreigners don’t have that kind of money anymore!”

“Isn’t this the place where that guy shits all the time?” Euny said nonchalantly, evidently inured to the vagaries of my
quartier
. I continued to read:

A
TTENTION
F
OREIGN
R
ESIDENTS
!
B
UY A
T
RIPLEX
L
IVING
U
NIT
T
ODAY AND
R
ECEIVE

• Exemption from American Restoration Authority (ARA) Cavity, Data & Property Searches
  
• Prize-winning security by Wapachung Contingency
  
• EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance from our Post-Human Services Division
  
• Free parking for first 6 months
  

Credit ranking of 1500+ only please

This Area COMPLETELY Zoned for Harm Reduction

“EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance”? Beg pardon? You had to
prove
you were worthy of cheating death at Post-Human Services. Like I said, only 18 percent of our applicants qualified for our Product. That’s how Joshie intended it. Hence the Intakes I was supposed to perform. Hence the Language Cognition tests and the essays on outliving your children. Hence—the whole philosophy. Now they were going to bestow immortality on a bunch of fat, glossy Dubai billionaires who bought a Staatling Property “TRIPLEX Living Unit”?

I was about to start a healthy diatribe on the Subject of Everything (I think Eunice likes it when I teach her new stuff) when I noticed a familiar squiggle on the corner of the sign.

In a stenciled, bleeding-edge style that had been cool at the turn of the century, I saw—no, it couldn’t be!—an arty reproduction of Jeffrey Otter, my inquisitor at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, in his stupid red-white-and-blue bandana, a smudge of what could have been a cold sore on his hairy upper lip. “Oh,” I said, and actually backed away.

“
Kokiri?
” Eunice asked. “What’s up, nerd-face?”

I made a breathing sound. “Panic attack?” she asked. I put up my hand to indicate a “time-out.” My eyes ran up and down the graffito as if I were trying to scrub it into a different dimension. The otter stared back at me: curved, oddly sexual, pregnant with life, the fur smoothed into little charcoal mounds clearly warm and soft to the touch. It reminded me of Fabrizia. My betrayal. What had I done to her? What had
they
done to her? Who had drawn this? What were they trying to tell me? I looked at Eunice. She was using my forty-second pause to bury her head into her äppärät. What was I even doing with this sleek digital creature? I felt, for the first time since her arrival in my life, truly mistaken.

But the day wasn’t finished with me yet.

When we got to the Cervix, my friend Grace was the one to object.

“She’s too young for you,” she whispered to me after Eunice had turned away from us and started AssLuxury shopping. There wasn’t anything particularly antisocial about this—the boys were watching Chinese Central Banker Wangsheng Li’s visit to Washington on their own äppäräti, and Noah’s girl, Amy, was setting up hand lotions and other sponsored products for a live stream of the “Amy Greenberg Muffintop Hour.”

For a second I thought Grace was jealous of Eunice, and that was more than fine with me, because, to be honest, I’ve always had a crush on Grace. She wasn’t particularly pretty, the eyes too widely set apart, her bottom teeth like an interstate pile-up, and she was, if it’s at all possible, too thin from the waist up, to the point where she looked bird-like doing any activity, even walking up the stairs or passing a plate of Brie. But she was kind—so kind and forthright, and so well educated and serious about life, that when I thought I was in love with Fabrizia in Rome, all I had to do was think of Grace talking about her complex wintry childhood in the farthest reaches of Wisconsin State or the German artist Joseph Beuys, her passion, to know that everything about my relationship with poor, doomed Fabrizia was transitory and a lie.

“Why don’t you like Eunice?” I asked Grace, hoping she would stutter and painfully confess her love for me.

“It’s not that I don’t like her,” Grace said. “It just feels like she’s got a lot of things to work out.”

“I got a lot of things to work out too,” I said. “Maybe Eunice and I can work them out together.”

“Lenny.” Grace rubbed my upper arm and flashed me her lower yellows (how I relished her imperfections). “If you’re attracted to her physically, that’s fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. She’s hot. Have a good time with her. Have a fling. But don’t tell me, ‘I’m in love with her.’”

“I’m worried about dying,” I said.

“And she makes you feel young?” Grace said.

“She makes me feel bald.” I ran my hand through what was left.

“I like your hair,” Grace said, gently pulling at the clump standing armed sentinel over my widow’s peak. “It’s honest.”

“I guess in some ridiculous way I think Eunice will let me live forever. Please don’t say anything Christian, Grace. I really can’t handle it.”

“We’re all going to die, Lenny,” Grace said. “You, me, Vishnu, Eunice, your boss, your clients, everyone.”

The boys were now hooting over their äppäräti, and Grace and I joined them. They were watching the stream of Noah’s friend Hartford Brown, who did a political commentary show intermixed with his own hardcore gay sex. The esteemed Li—officially the Governor of the People’s Bank of China-Worldwide, unofficially the world’s most powerful man—was first shown chatting up our clueless Bipartisan leaders on the White House lawn. There was my father’s idol, Defense Secretary Rubenstein, bowing from the waist, his bumbling incoherent rage turned to quiet obedience, his trademark white handkerchief flashing out of his suit pocket like a cheap surrender. Rubenstein presented Li with some sort of golden fish, which flopped into the air and miraculously opened up into an approximation of China’s bulbous shape, a sign that America could still produce and
innovate
.

Then the positively ripped Hartford was mounted on top of what was announced as a yacht near the Dutch Antilles, fresh spray rainbowing his sunglasses, two hairy dark arms massaging his marbled chest and shoulders as his lover’s thrusts pushed him into the frame of his äppärät. “Fuck me, brownie,” he crooned to his sailing buddy, his lips so louche yet masculine, so full of life and heat that I found myself feeling happy for his happiness.

Then cut to Li and our youthful puppet leader Jimmy Cortez at the White House, the American President seated stiffly, the Chinese banker more at ease, impervious to the microphone booms crowding the air before him. “I totally
love
what the Chinaman is wearing,” Hartford was saying over the White House visuals, intermittently groaning from being fucked by the Antillean. Viewers were reminded that Li had been picked the best-dressed man in the world by an informal multinational poll, with respondents particularly taken by “the simplicity of his suits” and “the glammy oversized glasses.”

“We wish China to become a nation of consumers and not otters,” President Cortez begged the banker.

Wait, what? A nation of
otters
? I replayed the stream on my own äppärät. “We wish China to become a nation of consumers and not
savers
,” the president had actually said. Jesus Christ, I was losing it. “The American people need China-Worldwide to become a savior of our last manufacturers, large and small. China is no longer a poor country. It is time for the Chinese people to
spend
.” Mr. Li nodded distractedly and smiled his great big nothing of a smile. President Cortez then said some words in Chinese, which were interpreted as “O.K. to spend now! Go have fun!”

“Oh, shit,” Vishnu said, pawing frantically at his äppärät. “Something’s happening, Nee-groes!” We could hardly hear him above the roar of the bar. The young people were drinking more, and some women were getting nervously naked, even as Eunice Park tightened a light sweater around her shoulders, rubbing her nose from the air conditioning. “There’s a riot in Central Park,” Vishnu said. “This black dude is getting his ass kicked by the Guard and all these LNWIs are getting seriously whaled on.”

News of the Central Park slaughter was spreading through the bar. No one was streaming live yet, but there were Images coming up on our äppäräti and on the bar’s big screens. A teenager (or so he seemed, those awkward lanky legs), his face turned away from view, a red concavity cut from the midsection of his body, bundled up like road kill on the soft green hump of a protruding hill. The bodies of three men and a woman (a family?) lying on their backs, their naked black arms thrown wildly across their bodies, as if haphazardly hugging themselves. And one man whom I thought I recognized—the unemployed bus driver Eunice and I had seen on Cedar Hill. Aziz something. I remembered mostly what he had been wearing, the white T-shirt and the gold chain with the oversized yuan symbol. There it was—the strange confluence of having seen him alive, if even for a moment, combined with a dot the size of a five-jiao coin that had punctured the upper half of his elongated brown forehead, red bleeding into rust along the links of his heavy chain, teeth bitterly stamped together, the eyes already turned up in their sockets. It took me several moments to come up with a description of what I was seeing
—a dead man—
just as the screen switched to a shot of the sky above the park, the tail end of a helicopter lifted upward, its beak presumably lowered for execution, and a backdrop of red tracer fire illuminating the warm close of a summer day.

A silence overtook the Cervix. I could hear nothing but the sound of my Xanax bottle being instinctually opened by three of my benumbed fingers, and then the scratch of the white pill descending my dry throat. We absorbed the Images and as a group of like-incomed people felt the short bursts of existential fear. That fear was temporarily replaced by a surge of empathy for those who were nominally our fellow New Yorkers. What was it like to be one of the dead or the about-to-be-dead? To be strafed from above in the middle of a city? To receive the quick understanding that your family was dying around you? Finally, the fear and the empathy were replaced by a different knowledge. The knowledge that it wouldn’t happen to us. That what we were witnessing was not terrorism. That we were of good stock. That these bullets would discriminate.

I teened Nettie Fine: “Did you see what’s happening in the park????”

Despite the time difference in Rome (it must have been past 4 a.m.), she teened me back immediately: “Just saw it. Don’t worry, Lenny. This is horrible, but it will BACKFIRE on Rubenstein and his ilk. They’re shooting in Central Park because there aren’t enough ex–National Guardsmen there. They’ll never go after the former soldiers. The real action is in Tompkins Square, which Media isn’t covering at all. You have to go there and meet my friend David Lorring. I used to do post-traumatic counseling in D.C. and he came to see me after two tours in Ciudad Bolívar. He’s organizing a real resistance down there. Brilliant guy. Okay, I got to catch some zzzzz’s, sweetie. Stay strong! xxx Nettie Fine. P.S. I follow your friend Noah Weinberg’s stream religiously. When I’m back in the States I’d love to take him out to lunch.”