Super Sad True Love Story (36 page)

“But
nothing
feels right anymore,” Noah set me straight, his eyes lazily scanning Eunice’s tight form. I poured him a bigger shot, vodka overflowing and moistening my grill-blackened fingers. I was
happy that at least he wasn’t talking politics today, happy and a little surprised. We drank and let the passing joint add a tasty green humidity to our uncertain moods, danger pulsing behind my cornea, yet the field of vision bright and clear as far as my affections were concerned. If I could have my friends and my Eunice forever and ever I would be fine.

A fork clanged against a champagne glass, the only nonplastic glass in the couple’s possession. Noah was about to make his well-rehearsed “impromptu” speech. Vishnu and Grace stood in our midst, and my sympathies and love for them flowed in unabashed waves. How beautiful she looked in her featureless white peasant top and nontransparent jeans, that kind, awkward goose of a woman, and Vishnu, his dark features growing ever more Hebraic under the weight of upcoming responsibilities (truly our two races are uniquely primed for reproduction), his wardrobe more calm and collected, the youthful
SUK DIK
crap replaced by slacks of no vintage and a standard-issue “Rubenstein Must Die Slowly” T-shirt. Grace and Vishnu, my two adults.

Noah spoke, and although I thought I was going to hate his words, the surface nature of them, that always-streaming quality that Media people are unable to correct for, I didn’t. “I love this Nee-gro,” he said pointing to Vishnu, “and this here bride of Nee-gro, and I think they are the only people who should be giving birth, the only peeps
qualified
to pop one out.”

“Right on!” we call-and-responded.

“The only peeps sure of themselves enough so that, come what may, the child will be loved and cared for and sheltered. Because they’re good people. I know folks say that a lot—‘They’re good peeps, yo’—but there’s the kind of plastic good, the kind of easy ‘good’ any of us can generate, and then there’s this other, deep thing that is so hard for us to find anymore. Consistency. Day-to-day. Moving on. Taking stock. Never exploding. Channeling it all, that anger, that huge anger about what’s happened to us as a people, channeling it into whatever-the-fuck. Keeping it away from the children, that’s all I’m going to say.”

Eunice was appraising Noah with warm eyes, unconsciously closing her fingers around her äppärät and the pulsing AssLuxury in front of her. I thought Noah was finished speaking, but now he had to make some jokes to balance out the fact that we all loved Grace and Vishnu yet were immensely scared for them and their two-months-in-the-oven undertaking, and Amy had to laugh at the jokes, and we all had to follow suit and laugh—which was fine.

The joint returned, passed by a slender, unfamiliar woman’s hand, and I toked harshly from it. I settled into a memory of being maybe fourteen and passing by one of those then newly built NYU dormitories on First or Second Avenue, those multi-colored blobs with some kind of chicken-wing-type modernity pointedly hanging off the roof, and there were these smartly dressed girls just being young out by the building’s lobby, and they smiled in tandem as I passed—not in jest, but because I was a normal-looking guy and it was a brilliant summer day, and we were all alive. I remember how happy I was (I decided to attend NYU on the spot), but how, after I had walked half a block away, I realized they were going to die and I was going to die and that the final result—nonexistence, erasure, none of this mattering in that “longest” of runs—would never appease me, never allow me to enjoy fully the happiness of the friends I suspected I would one day acquire, friends like these people in front of me, celebrating an upcoming birth, laughing and drinking, passing into a new generation with their connectivity and decency intact, even as each year brought closer the unthinkable, those waking hours that began at nine post meridian and ended at three in the morning, those pulsing, mosquito-bitten hours of dread. How far I had come from my parents, born in a country built on corpses, how far I had come from their endless anxiety—oh, the blind luck of it all! And yet how little I had traveled away from them, the inability to grasp the present moment, to grab Grace by the shoulders and say, “Your happiness is mine.”

I saw Vishnu blink several times as the latest news scrolled on our äppäräti, and some of the Credit guys were whispering stuff to one another. Vishnu gripped his fiancée and cupped her still-small belly. We returned to the business of laughing at Noah’s rendition of Vishnu’s freshman year at NYU—a hayseed from Upstate, he had been partially run over by a light truck and had to be hospitalized with tread marks on his chest.

Two lines of helicopters, like a broken V of geese, were massing over what I imagined to be the Arthur Kill on one side and the poetic curve of the Verrazano Bridge on another. We all looked up from the speech Grace was tearfully giving us—how we meant the world to her, how she wasn’t worried about anything, as long as she had us—

“Holy fuck,” two of the Credit guys said to each other, their Coronas shaky in their hands.

“Let’s just—” Vishnu said. “Never mind it. Let’s just enjoy the day. People! There’s another joint going around this way!”

Our Credit rankings and assets started to blink.
RECALCULATION IN PROGRESS
. The gentleman with the Mohawk was already making his way for the exit.

We were all shouting at one another now. Shouting and grabbing on to one another, the excitement of what we always suspected would happen tinged with the reality that we were actually, finally, in the middle of the movie, unable to leave the cineplex for the safety
of our vehicles. All of us were looking into one another’s eyes, our
real
eyes, sometimes blue and hazel but mostly brown and black, as if gauging our alliances: Would we be able to survive together, or would it be better apart? Noah craned his neck upward, ever upward, as if both to get a grip on the situation and to assert his primacy as a tall man. “We have to stick together,” I was saying to Amy Greenberg, but she was in a different place, a place where calculations were made and the data and Images flowed like
vino verde
in July. I worked through my own data as I tried to find Eunice.

There were streams now. From the Media people living in the tenements around Tompkins Park, gingerly leaning their äppäräti out their windowsills. The rectangle of green was choked in smoke; even the sturdiest trees had been denuded by the scale of the artillery, their bare branches shuddering wordlessly in the helicopter wind. The LNWIs had been surrounded. Their leader, now listed by Media as David Lorring, two “r”s, one “n,” was badly wounded. Guardsmen were carrying him out of the park and toward an armored personnel carrier. I couldn’t see his face beyond the meaty red lump peering out from behind a hasty bandage, but he was still wearing his own jungle-green Venezuela-vintage uniform, one arm dangling off the stretcher at an inhuman angle, as if it had been torn away and reattached by
psychotics. Through the smoke, I caught snatches of bodies too compromised to categorize, the outlines of men with guns at their side breaching further into the chaos, and everywhere the pop of exploding plastic water bottles. A sign bearing the surprising word “
DIPHTHERIA
” billowed right into the camera nozzle of someone’s äppärät.

Eunice swiftly came up to me. “I want to go to Manhattan!” she said.

“We all want to go home,” I said, “but look at what’s happening.”

“I have to go to Tompkins Park. I know someone there.”

“Are you crazy? They’re killing people there.”

“A friend of mine’s in trouble.”

“A lot of people are in trouble.”

“Maybe my sister’s there too! She helps out in the park. Help me get to the ferry.”

“Eunice! We’re not going
anywhere
right now.”

The dead smile came on with such full force that I thought a part of her cheekbone had cracked. “That’s fine,” she said.

Grace and Vishnu, who were loading bags full of food for people who did not cook in their homes, predicting the siege-like situation to come with their forebears’ canniness. My äppärät started to warble. I was being hit with a serious data package.

Eunice had turned away from me and was crying intermittent but voluptuous tears that curled around her nose and beaded, gathering volume and strength. “Eunice,” I said. “Sweetheart. It’s going to be all right.” I put one arm around her, but she shook it off. The ground echoed nearby, and I picked up an entirely surreal sound beyond the unkempt hedges of Grace and Vishnu’s little palazzo—the sickening contralto of middle-class people screaming.

The few of us who were from Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn were lining up before Vishnu and Grace, trying to get a place to crash in their house; other Staten Islanders were offering fold-out cots and oven-warm spaces in their attics. The names and numbers of car service companies were bouncing around from äppärät to äppärät, and people were trying to figure out if the Verrazano Bridge was still passable.

My own äppärät squealed again, and without warning Joshie’s voice, as urgent as I’ve ever heard it, filled my head. “Where are you, Len?” he said. “GlobalTrace is showing Staten Island.”

“St. George.”

“Is Eunice with you?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got to make sure she’s all right.”

“She’s all right. We’re going to bed down in Staten Island, wait for the worst to pass.”

“Bed down? You didn’t get the memo? You’ve got to get back to Manhattan.”

“I got it, but it doesn’t make any sense. Aren’t we safer here?”

“Lenny.” The voice paused, allowing my name to ring in my lower consciousness, as if it were God calling me to him. “These memos don’t come from nowhere. This is straight from Wapachung Contingency. Get off Staten Island
now
. Go home immediately. Take Eunice with you. Make sure she’s safe.”

I was still stoned. The windows to my soul were foggy and red. The transition from relative happiness to complete fear made no sense. Then I remembered the source of that relative happiness. “My friends,” I said. “Will they be okay if they stay on Staten Island?”

“It depends,” Joshie said.

“On what?”

“Their assets.”

I did not know how to respond to this. I wanted to cry. “Your friends Vishnu and Grace are going to be fine where they are,” Joshie said.
How did he know the names of my friends? Had I told him?
“Your main focus should be getting Eunice back to Manhattan.”

“What about my friends Noah and Amy?”

There was a pause. “I’ve never heard of them,” Joshie said.

It was time to move out. I kissed Vishnu on both cheeks, Nee-gro–slapped the others, and accepted a small container of kimchi and seaweed wrap from Grace, who begged us to stay.

“Lenny!” she cried. Then she whispered into my ear, careful not
to let Eunice overhear: “I love you, sweetie. Take care of Eunice. Both of you take care.”

“Don’t say it like that,” I whispered back. “I’ll see you again. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I found Noah and Amy streaming next to each other, him shouting, her crying, the air dense with panic and Media. I reached over and turned off Noah’s äppärät. “You and Amy have to come with us to Manhattan.”

“Are you crazy?” he said. “There’s fighting downtown. The Venezuelans are on their way.”

“My boss says we’ve got to get to Manhattan. He said we’re safer there. He heard it from Wapachung Contingency.”

“Wapachung Contingency?” Noah shouted. “What, are you Bipartisan now?” And for once I wanted to smack the indignation out of my friend.