Super Sad True Love Story

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

SEPTEMBER 5

Dear Diary,

My apparat isn’t connecting. I can’t connect.

It’s been almost a month since my last diary entry. I am so sorry. But I can’t connect in any meaningful way to anyone, even to you, diary. Four young people committed suicide in our building complexes, and two of them wrote suicide notes about how they couldn’t see a future without their apparati. One wrote, quite eloquently, about how he “reached out to life,” but found there only “walls and thoughts and faces,” which weren’t enough. He needed to be ranked, to know his place in this world. And that may sound ridiculous, but I can understand him. We are all bored out of our fucking minds. My hands are itching for connection, I want to connect to my parents and to Vishnu and Grace, I want to mourn Noah with them. But all I have is Eunice and my Wall of Books. So I try to Celebrate What I Have, one of my prime directives.

Work has been good. Kind of a blur, but even a blur is better than the slow churn of reality. Mostly I work alone at my desk with a half-turned bowl of miso by my side. I haven’t really spent time with Joshie since The Slap. He’s off somewhere, negotiating with the IMF or the Norwegians or the Chinese or whoever still gives a damn. Howard Shu, dork that he is, has become the standard-bearer for the few of us still left at Post-Human. He walks around with an old-fashioned clipboard and actually tells us what to do. Before the Rupture, we would never have stood for anything so hierarchical, but now we’re just glad to have instructions, even barked ones. My job for the time being is to send out Wapachung emergency frequency messages to our clients, making sure they’re safe, but also subtly checking up on their businesses, their marriages, their children, their finances. Making sure we’re safe and that our monthly dues keep coming.

It’s not going to be easy. No one’s working. The teachers aren’t getting paid, is what I hear. No school. Children set loose and free into the difficult new city. I found a Vladeck House kid, maybe ten or twelve, sitting by the Arab bodega, licking out the inside of an empty bag of something called “Cluk,” which the packaging warned was “inspired by real chicken flava!” When I sat down next to him, he could barely lift his eyes up to mine. Out of instinct, I took out my apparat and pointed it at the kid, as if that would make things right. Then I took out a brown twenty-yuan note and set it at his feet. Immediately, his hand darted for it. The bill was scrunched into his fist. The fist was hidden behind his back. His face slowly turned to face mine. The brown-eyed look he gave me was not one of gratitude. The look said: Leave me alone with my newfound fortune or I will lash out at you with the last strength I have. I left him there with his fist behind his back, his eyes on my departing feet.

I don’t know what’s going on. The city is either completely finished or already shooting for redemption. New signs are going up. “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?”

As far as I can tell, the most significant forms of employment around Manhattan are the “Staatling-Wapachung Works Progress” sites promising “One hour honest labor = 5-jiao coin. Nutritious lunch served.” Rows of men cracking open asphalt, digging ditches, filling in ditches with cement. These five-jiao men roam the city, hands in pockets, useless vestigial apparati plugs in their ears, like a pride of voiceless lions. They’re middle-aged to younger, sparse hair bleached by the sun, tyrannical sunburns on their face and neck, expensive T-shirts bought in happier days, new Antarcticas of perspiration spreading down to the stomach. Shovels, picks, loud exhalations, not even grunts anymore, to save energy. I saw Noah’s old friend Hartford Brown, who only a few months ago was getting reamed on a yacht in the Antilles, working a five-jiao line on Prince Street. He looked cracked, half of him bronzed, the other half peeling, that slightly pudgy face of his devoid of all texture, like a thick slice of prosciutto. If they can make a fabulous gay man work like that, I thought, what can they do to the rest of us?

I went up close to him as he swung his pick, felt his rank odor battering its way into my nostrils. “Hartford,” I said. “It’s Lenny Abramov. Noah’s friend.” A terrible exhale from a terrible place inside him. “Hartford!” He turned away. Someone with a megaphone was yelling, “Let’s do get back to work, Brownie!” I handed him a hundred-yuan note, which he accepted, also without thanks, and then he went back to swinging his pick. “Hartford,” I said. “Hey! You don’t have to work now. A hundred yuan is two hundred hours of work. Take it easy. Get some rest. Get some shade.” But he just went on swinging mechanically, avoiding my presence, already back into his world, which began with the pick behind his shoulder and ended with the pick in the ground.

Back home, Eunice took charge of organizing the relief efforts for the older people. I don’t know why. The stirrings of her Christian background? Sorrow over not being able to help her own parents? I’m just going to take it at face value.

She went from floor to floor in each of our four co-op buildings, a total of eighty floors, knocked on each door, and if there were older people she took down their food and water needs and made sure the supplies were brought down the next week in one of Joshie’s Staatling-Wapachung Service convoys. Why is he helping us? I suppose he feels guilty about Noah and the ferry, or maybe about The Slap. In any case, we need what he’s got.

She delivered the water herself-with my sporadic help-to each apartment, she made sure all the windows and doors were open to improve circulation, she sat there and listened to the old people cry about their children and grandchildren who were scattered around the country and for whom they feared the worst, she asked me to interpret certain Yiddish words (“that farkakteh Rubenstein,” “that shlemiel Rubenstein,” “that little pisher Rubenstein”), but mostly she sat with them and hugged them as their tears pollinated the dusty throw rugs and embattled last- century carpets. When the older women (most of our aged residents are widows) smelled particularly bad, she would clean their dirty bathtubs, help the shaky old ladies inside, and wash them. It was a task I found particularly repulsive-how I feared one day having to care for my parents in so thoughtful and tactile a manner, as Russian tradition expected of me-but Eunice, who despised any alien smell coming from our refrigerator or the rankness of my toenails after several missed pedicures, did not flinch, did not turn away from the sunken, splotched flesh in her hands.

We saw a woman die. Or Eunice did anyway. I think it was a stroke. She couldn’t get the words out of her mouth, this withered creature, sitting beside a coffee table littered with unusable remote controls, a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe showing off his beautiful beard framed behind her. “Aican,” she kept saying, arcing spittle across Eunice’s shoulders. And then, more emphatically: “Aican, aican, aican!”

Did she mean to say, “I can”? I left the apartment, because I couldn’t bear to rekindle the memories of my own grandmother after her final stroke, in a wheelchair, covering up the dead parts of her body with her shawl, worried about looking helpless in front of the world.

I feared the old people, feared their mortality, but the more I did so, the more I fell in love with Eunice Park. I fell for her as hopelessly and thoroughly as I had in Rome, where I had confused her for a different, stronger person. My problem was that I couldn’t help her find her parents and sister. Even with my Staatling connections, I couldn’t find out what had happened to her family in Fort Lee. One day Eunice told me she could feel that they were still alive and doing well-a sentiment that floored me with its almost religious naivete, but also made me wish I could believe the same thing about the Abramovs.

Aican, aican, aican.

So many things have happened since I’ve last written in you, diary, some of them awful, most of them mundane. I guess the main thing I can think of is the fact that things are getting better with Eunice, that through our mutual depression over what’s happened to our city, our friends, and our lives we’ve become closer. Because we can’t connect to our apparati, we’re learning to turn to each other.

Once, after a long weekend of scrubbing and watering our elderly, she even asked me to read to her.

I went over to my Wall of Books and picked up Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, whose cover I had caught Eunice examining once before, tracing with her finger the depicted bowler hat flying over the Prague skyline. There were laudatory quotes for the author and his work on the first page of the book from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times (the real Times, not the Lifestyle Times), even something called Commonweal. What had happened to all these publications? I remember reading the