Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (36 page)

JULY 29

Dear Diary,

Grace and Vishnu had their pregnancy-announcing party on Staten Island. On the way to the ferry terminal, Euny and I saw a demonstration, an old-school protest march down Delancey Street and toward the broken superstructure of the Williamsburg Bridge. It was sanctioned by the Restoration Authority, or so it seemed, the marchers freely chanting and waving misspelled signs demanding better housing: “Peeple power!” “Houssing is a human right.” “Don’t throw us off the peir.” “Burn all Credit Pole!” “I am no a grasshopper,
huevón
!” “Don call me ant!” They were chanting in Spanish and Chinese, their accents jamming the ear, so many strong languages vying to push their way into our lackadaisical native one. There were small Fujianese men, big-backed Latina mothers, and, sticking out of the fray, gangly white Media people trying to stream about their own problems with condo down payments and imperious co-op boards. “We are being overruled by real estate!” the more erudite marchers shouted. “No more threats of deportation! Boo! Space for LGBT youth is not for sale! In unity there is power! Take back our city! No justice! No peace!” Their cacophony calmed me. If there could still be marches like this, if people could still concern themselves with things like
better
housing for transgendered youth, then maybe we weren’t finished as a nation just yet. I considered teening Nettie Fine the good news, but was preoccupied by the travails
of just getting to Staten Island. The National Guard troops at the ferry terminal checkpoints weren’t Wapachung Contingency according to my äppärät, so we submitted to the usual half-hour “Deny and Imply” humiliations like everyone else.

Grace and Vishnu lived on one floor of a Shingle Style manse in the hipster St. George neighborhood, the house’s Doric columns declaring an overbearing historicity, the turret providing comic relief, stained-glass windows a pretty kind of kitsch, the rest of it sea-weathered and confident, a late-nineteenth-century indigenous form built on an island at a tiny remove from what was then becoming the most important city in the most important country in the world.

They weren’t rich, my Vishnu and Grace—they had bought the house for almost nothing two years ago, when the last crisis was hitting its peak—and the place was already a mess, even without the impending baby, a flurry of broken Shaker furniture that Vishnu would never find the time to fix, and truly smelly books from another lifetime he would never read. Vishnu was out on the back porch grilling tofu and turning over vegetables. The porch deck elevated their apartment beyond the mundane, a full view of downtown Manhattan rising through the midsummer heat, the skyline looking tired, worn, in need of a bath. Vishnu and I did the Nee-gro slap and hug. I hovered around my friend, chatting him up with great care like I would a woman at a bar when I was young and single, while Eunice stood timidly in the distance, a glass of Pinot something-or-other tight in her fist.

I wasn’t sure what that meant. Vishnu gazed distractedly into the middle distance, while a root vegetable fell between the slats of the grill and issued a mild report.

The deck began to fill up. There was Noah, looking flushed and summer-weary but ready to emcee the announcement of Vishnu and Grace’s little girl soon to come, fully indebted, into our strange new
world, and Noah’s girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, the comic relief, streaming hard on her “Muffintop Hour,” filled with bursts of spasmodic laughter and not-so-subtle anger at the fact that Noah wasn’t planning to get her pregnant, that all she had was her hard-driven
career
.

My friends. My dear ones. We chatted in the typically funny-sad way of people in their very late thirties about the things that used to make us young as Amy passed around a real joint, seedless and moist, the kind that only Media people get. I tried to get Eunice involved, but she mostly stayed by the edge of the deck with her äppärät, her stunning cocktail dress like something out of an old movie, the haughty princess no one can understand but one man.

Noah came over to Eunice and started charming her retro (“How ya doin’, little lady?”), and I could see her mouth turning to form little syllables of understanding and encouragement, a terminal blush spreading like a rash across the gloss of her neck, but she spoke too quietly for me to hear her over the spitting din of vegetables being grilled black, the communal laughter of old friends.

More people showed up: Grace’s Jewish and Indian co-workers, Retail women-lawyers who effortlessly switched from friendly to stern, quiet to volatile; Vishnu’s summer-pretty exes, who still kept in touch because he was so swell a guy; and a bunch of people who went to NYU with us, mostly slick Credit dudes, one with a fashionable Mohawk and pearl earring who was trying to match Noah in pitch and importance.

I had a quick succession of vodka shots with Noah, who, turning off his äppärät, confided in me that Grace’s pregnancy was “totally making [him] nervous,” that he didn’t know what to do with himself next, and that his alcoholism, while charming to most, was starting to worry Amy Greenberg. “Do what feels right,” I glibly told him, advice from an era when the first Boeing Dreamliner, still flying under the American flag, lifted off the soil and broke the leaden Seattle skies.

“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.”