Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (24 page)

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.”

I smiled when I read Nettie’s missive. A woman in her sixties was still active, still trying to shape our country in the right way. Surely there was
some
hope. As if to confirm my thoughts, CrisisNet pinged with a new announcement: “LIBOR
RATE RISES
32
BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR HIGHER BY
0.8%
AGAINST YUAN AT
1¥ = $4.92.”
Could the markets be right? Was the Central Park massacre really a turning point? Would it backfire on Rubenstein and his friends?

I re-read Nettie Fine’s message. It was inspiring, but there was something off about the wording.
The real action is in Tompkins Square
. I tried to picture the words “real action” leaving Nettie’s careful, intelligent lips. What had happened to her?
The otter
. I teened Fabrizia in Rome. “
RECIPIENT DELETED
.” Okay, I had to stop worrying. There was a real massacre in front of me. Forget the Old World. I was not responsible for what happened to either Nettie or Fabrizia. I was responsible only for Eunice Park.

Meanwhile, at the Cervix, the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales. All I remember is feeling a little hot around the temples and wanting to be closer to Euny. Things had been rocky between us since I had relapsed and picked up a book, and she had caught me reading, not just text-scanning for data. With the violence just a few miles to our north, I wanted nothing to separate me from my sweetheart, certainly not a two-brick tome of Tolstoy’s
W&P
.

Noah started streaming right away, but his girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, was already live. She lifted up her blouse to show the negligible roll of fat that crowned her perfect legs and spilled from her perfect jeans, her so-called
muffintop
, slapped at it, and delivered her signature line: “Hey, girlfriend, gots muffintop?”

“It’s Rubenstein time in Central Park,” Noah was saying. “It’s Harm Reduction, giving away the store, everything must go, ‘our prices are insane’ time in America, and R-stein won’t feel good until all the niggers and spics are cleared out of our city. He’s dropping bombs on our moms like Chrissy Columbus dropped germs on the redman,
cabróns
. First the shooting, then the roundup. Half the mamis and papis in the city are going to end up in a Secure Screening Facility in Utica before the week is over. Better keep your äppäräti away from those Credit Poles.…” He paused to look over the raw data streaming at him. And then he turned his tired, professionally
animated face to us, unsure of what emotion to muster next but unable to contain the visceral thrill. “There’s eighteen people dead,” he said, as if he had surprised himself. “They shot eighteen.”

And I wondered about the excitement in his voice: What if Noah was secretly pleased that all this was happening? What if we all were? What if the violence was actually channeling our collective fear into a kind of momentary clarity, the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association? I could already envision myself excitedly proclaiming the news of how I had seen this dead Aziz bus driver in Central Park, had maybe even exchanged a smile with him or an urban
whassup
. Don’t get me wrong, I felt the horror too, but I wondered, for instance, what
were
these Secure Screening Facilities that Noah always talked about? Were people really shot in the back of the head without a trial? Once, I reminded Noah about how
The New York Lifestyle Times
used to have actual correspondents who would go out and report and verify, but he just gave me one of those “Old man, don’t
even
,” looks and went back to hollering Spanish slang into his camera nozzle. But, then again, Nettie Fine followed his stream
religiously
, so maybe I was missing something. Maybe Noah was as good as it got these days.

“Eighteen people dead!” Amy Greenberg was shouting. She put her hand on her make-believe muffintop, over the negligible waistline and the pretty serious musculature above, as if to scold Rubenstein and the administration, but this maneuver also allowed the outline of her left breast—which a random poll had publicly declared to be the better one—to spill out of her décolletage and frame the center of the shot. “Huge riot in Central Park, National Guard just shooting everyone, smashing up their little shacks, and I am so glad my man Noah Weinberg is right over my shoulder, because I
just cannot handle this anymore
. I mean, hello, stop me before I snack again. Noah, I am so blessed to have you in my life at this terrible moment, and I know I’m not perfect, but, okay, and this is like
total cliché alert
, but you mean the world to me, because you are so kind and sensitive and man-hot, you are
so
Media, and”—her voice
started to shake, she started to blink voluntarily in a way that always hastened the tears—“I don’t know how you can go out with a fat loser like me.”

Grace and Vishnu were leaning in to each other as if they were two parts of an ancient ruin, while new death tolls appeared in the air around us, the numbers swelling. I recalled Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, and again my friends were the ones who took care of
me
. Noticing me standing alone next to Eunice, who was deep into AssLuxury (was she too shocked by the violence to stop shopping?), they reached out and brought me into their circle, so that I could feel the warmth of their hands and the boozy comfort of their breath.