Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (37 page)

“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.

“We need to keep safe, asshole,” I said. “There’s a major riot on. I’m trying to save your life.”

“And what about Vishnu and Grace? If it’s not safe here, why don’t they come with us?”

“My boss told me they’d be okay here.”

“Why, because Vishnu’s collaborating?”

I grabbed his arm in a way that I never had, his thick flesh twisting in my strong grip, but also in a way that connoted that for once I was in charge between us. “Look,” I said. “I love you. You’re my friend. We’ve got to do this for Eunice and Amy. We’ve got to make sure they don’t get hurt.”

He looked at me with the easy hatred of the righteous. I had always been unsure of his affection for Amy Greenberg, and now I had no reason to doubt. He didn’t love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone.

We walked out on beautiful, leafy, Victorian St. Mark’s Place, like two fine couples, Noah’s arms around Amy, mine around Eunice. But the pretty coupledom and the handsome, drooping willows of the street formed a lie. A sickening Caucasian fear, mowed grass and temperate sex mixed with a surprising shot of third-world perspiration, crowded the borough’s most elegant street, the hipsterish white young humanity rushing back toward the Staten Island Ferry, toward Manhattan and then Brooklyn, while another crowd was trying to fight its way back onto Staten Island—neither side knowing if they had the right idea; to hear the Media chatter off our äppäräti, the entire city seemed engulfed in violence, either real or invented. We stalked past one another, the Media people streaming in motion, Amy giving off a précis of her wardrobe and her recent frustrations with Noah, Eunice watching her surroundings with one careful eye, while her formidable Fuckability rankings fluttered in the wind around us. A fresh armada of helicopters flew over us, just as a real storm was beginning to announce itself.

I got an emergency teen from Nettie Fine: “LENNY, ARE YOU SAFE? I’M SO WORRIED! WHERE ARE YOU?” I wrote her that Noah and Eunice and I were on Staten Island trying to get back to Manhattan. “LET ME KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING EVERY STEP OF THE WAY,” she wrote, calming my fears. Everything was going to hell, but my American mama was still looking out for me.

I bore left onto Hamilton Avenue, the Staten Island Ferry terminal but a rapid descent to the bay. We were almost knocked down by a running Mediastud, all teeth and sunburn and opened guayabera shirt. “They’re shooting at Media people!” he was projecting into his äppärät and at anyone who would listen.

“Where?” we shouted.

“Here. In Manhattan. Brooklyn. The LNWIs are burning down the Credit Poles! The Guard is firing back! The Venezuelans are sailing up the Potomac!”

Noah pulled us back, his arms around Eunice and me, his relative strength and the solidity of his dumb bulk squeezing us tight, making me hate him. “We’ve got to loop around!” he shouted. “There’s
no way we can make it down Hamilton. It’s covered in Credit Poles. The Guard’s going to start shooting.” I saw Eunice looking at him with a smile, congratulating his cheap decisiveness. Amy was streaming about her beloved mother—a sun-worn prototype of a contemporary Mediawhore—at present vacationing in Maine, how she missed her, how she wished she had gone up to see her this weekend, but Noah,
Noah
, had insisted they go to Grace and Vishnu’s party, and now life really sucked, didn’t it?

“Can you get me to Tompkins Park?” Eunice asked Noah.

He smiled. In the middle of the hysteria,
he smiled
. “Let’s see what I can do.”

“Are you all insane?” I shouted. But Noah was already dragging Eunice and Amy in the direction of Victory Boulevard. There were people running there, fewer than on Hamilton Avenue, but still at least a few hundred, scared and disoriented. I reached Eunice and tore her from Noah’s grasp. My body, flabby but real and nearly double Eunice’s weight, huddled fully around her and angled us against the flow, my arms bearing the brunt of the advancing horde, the parade of young, scared people, the frontal mass of their floral body washes, the denseness of their inability to survive. Ahead of us, two Credit Poles smoldered in the gray pre-storm heat, their LED counters knocked out, sparks flying from their electronic innards.

I pushed my way forward, innate Russianness, ugliness, Jewishness, beating through my system—emergency, emergency, emergency—while inuring my precious cargo against any harm, as her Padma cosmetics bag jammed into my ribs, misting my eyes with the pain of its sharp edges.

I was whispering to Eunice: “Sweetie, sweetie, it’s going to be okay.”

But there was no need. Eunice was okay. We linked hands. Noah led Amy, Amy led Eunice, and Eunice led me through the screaming crowd, which was turning in one direction and then another, rumors flashing around with äppärät speed. The sky changed as if to taunt us further, a strong wind lashing us from the east and then from the west.

Behind the old courthouse, a municipal area had become a National Guard staging ground, choppers taking off, armored personnel carriers, tanks, Browning guns in mid-swing, a small area cordoned off into a holding pen where some older black people were interred.

We ran. It meant nothing. It all meant nothing. All the signs. The street names. The landmarks. Even here, amidst the kingdom of my fear, all I could think about was Eunice not loving me, losing her respect for me, Noah the decisive leader in a time when she was supposed to need
me
. Staten Island Bank & Trust. Against Da’ Grain Barber Shop. Child Evangelism Fellowship. Staten Island Mental Health Society. The Verrazano Bridge. A&M Beauty Supplies. Planet Pleasure. Up and Growing Day Care. Feet, feet. Shards of data all around us, useless rankings, useless streams, useless communiqués from a world that was no longer to a world that would never be. I smelled the garlic on Eunice’s breath and on her body. I confused it with life. I felt the small heft of a thought that I could project at her back. The thought became a chanted mantra: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“Tompkins Park,” she said, her stubbornness clawing at me. “My sister.” A surge of black humanity from the ungentrified neighborhood just beyond St. George merged with ours, and I could feel the hipsterish component trying to separate themselves from the blacks, an American survival instinct that dated back to the arrival of the first slave ship. Distance from the condemned. Black, white, black, white. But it didn’t matter either. We were finally one. We were all condemned. A new squall of rain blanketing our faces, a rolling wave of heat following the rain, Noah’s weathered face staring into mine, cursing my slowness and indecision, Amy streaming just one word, “Mommy,” over and over again into the satellites above us, into the breezy reality of her mother’s Maine, Eunice, her face level and straight, her arms around me, all of her in my arms.

Noah and Amy ran into the ferry terminal through a portal of finely shredded glass. Eunice had grabbed my arm and was pulling me toward our goal. Two ferries had just disgorged their last
screaming Manhattan passengers. Who was piloting these ferries? Why were they still crossing the bay? Was there safety in constant motion? Was there any safe place left to dock?

“Lenny,” she said. “I’m telling you right now that if you don’t take me to Tompkins I’m just going to go with Noah. I’ve got to find my sister. I’ve got to try to help my friend.
I know I can help him
. You can go and be safe at our house. I’ll come back, I promise.”

One ferry, the
John F. Kennedy
, had begun to chortle in the water in preparation for departure, and we headed for its open hold. Noah and Amy had already clambered on board and were huddled beneath a sign that read “ARA Transport—Ain’t That America, Somethin’ to See, Baby.”

You can go and be safe at our house
. I had to say something. I had to stop her, or she would be shot just like the LNWI protesters. Her Credit was bad enough. “Eunice!” I shouted. “Stop it! Stop running away from me! We have to stick together right now. We have to go
home
.”

But she shook off my arm and was running toward the
Kennedy
just as the ramp of the ferry had started lifting. I grabbed her by one tiny shoulder, and, with the intense fear of dislocating it, of hearing the crunch that meant I had hurt her, pulled her toward a second, waiting boat, its bridge bearing the legend
Guy V. Molinari
.