Super Sad True Love Story

“Fuck that. A better America. The Norsemen, the Chinese, they’re going to want returns on their investment. They’re going to want to clear out our trophy cities of all the riffraff with no Credit and make them real lifestyle hubs. And who’s going to profit from that? Staatling-Wapachung, that’s who. Property, security, and then us. Immortality. The Rupture’s created a whole new demand for not dying. I can see StatoilHydro, the Norwegians, getting together with Staatling. Maybe a merger! Yeah, that’s the way to do it. The Norwegians have euros and renminbi to burn.”

“What do you mean, get rid of all the riffraff with no Credit?”

“Relocate them.” He took an excited sip of green tea. “This town’s not for everyone. We have to be competitive. That means doing more with less. Balancing our ledgers.”

“A black man at my bank said it’s all Staatling-Wapachung’s fault,” I said, trying to tap into the liberal hierarchy of “a black man said.”

“What’s our fault?”

“I don’t know. We bombed the ferry. Three hundred dead. My friend Noah. Remember what you told me right before the Rupture. That Vishnu and Grace were going to be okay. But you said you didn’t know who Noah was.”

“What are you saying?” Joshie leaned in, elbows on his desk. “Are you accusing me of something?”

I kept quiet, played the role of the hurt son.

“Look, I’m sorry that your friend is dead,” Joshie went on. “All these deaths were tragic. The ferry, the parks. Obvi. But at the same time, who were all these Media people, what did they bring to the table?”

I coughed into my hand, a painful chill across my body, as if an iceberg had stabbed me in the anus.

I had never told Joshie that Noah was Media.

“Spreading useless rumors. Secure Screening Facilities Upstate. Yeah, right. Rubenstein’s government couldn’t organize a clambake on a mussel shoal. Lenny, you know the score. You’re not dumb. We’re working on something important here. We’ve put so much into this place. You and I. And look at it now. It’s a real game-changer. Whoever’s in charge tomorrow, Norwegians, Chinese, they want what we got. This isn’t some stupid apparat app. This is eternity. This is the heart of the creative economy.”

“Fuck the creative economy,” I said, without thinking. “There’s no food downtown.”

One instant. His hand. My cheek. The parameters of the world moving sixty degrees to the left and then buzzing into stillness. I felt my own hand rising to my face without knowing I had moved it.

He had slapped me.

I suppose the memory of the first paternal slap surfaced somewhere in the back pocket of my soul, Papa Abramov’s hand parting the air before it, the wide boxer stance of his feet as if he were going after a two- hundred-pound bruiser and not a nine-year-old kid, but for some reason all I could think about was that I would turn forty in November. In three months I would be a forty-year-old man who had just been slapped by his friend, his boss, his secondary father.

And then I was upon him. Across the desk, its sharp ridges slicing at my stomach, the scruff of his silky black T-shirt in both of my hands, his face, his humid, scared face thrust into mine, the gentle brownness of his eyes, the expressiveness, that funny Jewish face that could turn sad on a dime, everything we had done together, all those battle plans hatched over trays of safflower-oil-fried vegan samosas.

One hand let go of his T-shirt, a fist was cocked. I either did this or didn’t. I either chose this final path or put my fist down. But what did I have other than Joshie? Could he still pull this together after everything that had happened? Didn’t the Renaissance eventually follow the fall of Rome?

Could I really punch this man?

I had waited too long. Joshie was gently removing my remaining hand from his T-shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Oh my God. I can’t believe I did that. It’s the stress. I’m stressed. My cortisol levels. Jesus. Trying to put on a brave face. But of course I’m scared too.”

I backed off. Moved to the edge of the room like a punished child, felt the alpha rays of Joshie’s fiberglass Buddha stroking my being. “Okay, okay,” Joshie was saying. “Go home for the day. Give my love to Eunice. Tell Joe Schechter outside I can take him back at half-pay, but Darryl is finished. Come back tomorrow. We’re got so much work ahead. I need you too, you know. Don’t look at me like that. Of course I need you.”

I stopped by the A-OK Pizza Shack, and cleared out the few things they had left, three precious pizzas and calzones warm to the touch, all for sixty yuan. As I stepped outside, the light hit me, the Noah light, the light that floods the city and leaves nothing but itself, the urban rapture. I closed my eyes, thinking that when I opened them the last week would simply fall away. Instead, what I saw was that abominable creature. That fucking otter, right in the middle of Grand Street, chewing on something in the asphalt. I grabbed a heavy calzone, ready to club my furry antagonist. But no, it wasn’t an otter. It was just someone’s escaped pet rabbit enjoying the new solitude, feasting on his street meal while spasmodically brushing back his ears with one paw, reminding me of Noah enjoying the fullness of his hair. The clouds came, and Noah’s urban light turned to shadow the density of slate. My friend was gone.

A pair of shoe-filled suitcases awaited me by the door, but Eunice herself was in neither the living room nor the bedroom. Was she finally moving out? I searched 700 of the 740 square feet that constituted my nest-nothing. Finally, I was clued in by the running water in the bathroom and, once I strained my hearing beyond the whir of a passing helicopter, the soft wailing of a broken woman.

I opened the door. She was shuddering and hiccupping, two bottles of spent Presidente beer by her feet and the remainder of a half-drained bottle of vodka. Do not give in to pity, I told myself. Hold the anger of the past week, hold it tight in your chest. Rise above the ritual humiliations. You’re the richest man in Chinatown. She has done nothing for you. You can do better. Let the world fall apart, there is more to be gained in solitude now. Untether yourself from this eighty-six-pound albatross. Remember how she wouldn’t comfort you after Noah had died.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to drink anything grain-based,” I told Eunice, nodding at the spent alcohol, the most I have ever seen her drink.

The “fuck you” I had expected didn’t come. Her shaking continued, steady as a dying animal thumping against the cheaply tiled bathroom floor. She was whispering in English and Korean. “Appa, why?” she beseeched her father. Or maybe it was merely her non-functioning apparat. I never realized the similarity between the device that ruled our world and the Korean word for “father.” The T-shirt she was wearing, an ironic “Baghdad Tourist Authority” tee, was my own, and that strange connection-Eunice covered in my own garb-made me want to fold my own arms around her, made me want to feel myself on her. I picked her up-even the small weight of her pinched my prostate, but the rest of me felt blessed-and carried her to our bed, catching a whiff of her alcohol breath along with the strawberry integrity of her just-washed hair. She had washed for me. “I brought pizza,” I said. “And spinach calzones. That’s all that’s out there right now. Nothing organic.”

She was shuddering with such intensity that I grew worried from a medical standpoint. Her body, that nothing, shook in little round motions of spent energy. I touched her blazing forehead.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Have some Motrin. Eat a pizza. Drink water. Alcohol makes you dehydrated.”

“I know that,” she whispered in between shudders, and I hoped that maybe it was a sign of her displeasure returning. But she continued to quiver, her face a pale freckled mask twisted to the left as if by seizure. A child, just a child. “Len,” she spoke. Water pooled inside the dimple of her chin. “Lenny. I’m…” She was sorry. Just like Joshie. A decision was drawing upon me. A final one. My lips pursed to form the first words of a fateful sentence. I held them pursed for now. I suppose I could have started telling her about all the different ways in which she needed to change in order for us to be happy together, but it would be pointless. I had either to accept the girl cradled in my arms, or to spend the rest of my time searching for something else.

Her trembling increased, and she turned around in my grasp, letting me feel the heavy beating of her spine against my chest. I could see her bones draped within my T-shirt, and in her convulsions I made out the dynamic aspects of her skeleton. She wailed from a place so deep that I could only connect it with somewhere across the seas, and from a time when our nations were barely formed. For the first time since we’d met, I realized that Eunice Park, unlike others of her generation, was not completely ahistorical. I cradled the softness of her behind, her one concession to being a woman. It steadied her, my open-palmed touch. I moved down and popped off her