Absurdistan

lean, athletic body (especially for someone who did nothing all day), interrupted only by a swatch of shiny, hardened skin running along one hip and dipping toward her genitals, where a relative had set fire to her when she was twelve. Beloved Papa had always claimed that this was the part he kissed most gently, but it was hard to tease this simple image—Papa’s fish lips puckered atop Lyuba’s disfigurement, his everyday rage tempered by compassion— out of my already put-upon imagination.

Events were taking place that made me feel somehow peripheral. Lyuba was lying down on the bed once more, her legs hanging in the air, her pizda a cozy brown-fur pelt between them. “I have to prepare myself,” she said. She took out a plastic tube and, with a most unpleasant sound, squirted something onto her fingers. She then inserted the fingers inside herself. “This makes it easier for me,” she explained.

It was impolite to just sit there and stare. I began to take off my pants so that I could present my purple half-khui, my abused iguana, to Lyuba. It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you. And so I was compelled to act like a man, though in reality I had long ago floated right through the ceiling, past the ocher jumble of Leninsburg roofs, over and around the golden prick of the Admiralty, and onto the dark blue expanse of the Gulf of Finland, where I used to believe my dead mother’s essence hovered about in a happy, cultured limbo above the topiary of one of the czars’ summer palaces (though, as I’ve said before, nothing of our personality survives after death).

Meanwhile, in a surprise move, my mercurial genital had already engorged itself and was positioned for love, proof that one doesn’t actually have to be present to consummate the sex act. It dawned upon me that Lyuba had set “Busting My Nut Tonight” on repeat play, and that Humungous G’s urban missive was helping me focus on the task at hand. Busting my nut when? Why, tonight, of course. I crawled on my knees along the orange comforter toward Lyuba, bringing the khui toward her.

“My khui,” I announced sadly.

“Yes, it’s your khuichik,” Lyuba said, tilting her head for a better view.

“It is possible to touch it now,” I whispered, letting Lyuba tug at my much-maligned khui- knob with a cold hand. I turned it sideways so that she could see the long scar running along its underbelly, the clumps of skin attached at improvised angles like the fragmented bits of a car bumper following a head-on collision.

“Ai, what happened?” Lyuba asked.

I took a deep breath and blurted out my story in one long sentence, digressing only to explain the words “mitzvah mobile.”

She put the purple thing in her mouth to silence me. No matter how often it happens, it is always surprising to find a woman’s wet mouth drawing tight around my khui.

“Mm,” she said.

“What?” I said.

She took the khui out. “It tastes fine,” she said. “You’re very clean.”

“Well, I’m not worried about the taste,” I said.

“Lie down on me,” Lyuba said.

I did as she said. Her body was cold underneath mine, and even the inside of her pizda was barely at room temperature, probably because she had overlubricated with what must have been a very cold gel. I kept slipping out and getting angry, but I used the anger to poke her all the harder. We were in the traditional baby-making position, and from my vantage point I could barely make out the contours of her small Slavic breasts. Lyuba’s eyes were closed, and she seemed to be moving her hips from left to right to the sound of Humungous’s phat beats, which was not the rhythm I had in mind. “We should be either dancing or fucking,” I complained.

Either dancing or fucking. That was pure Beloved Papa. I even had that idiotic Odessa gangster accent he used when he thought he was being suave.

“Sorry,” she said, and moved her hips in a more accommodating up-and-down fashion, cupping her breasts to give them more shape. I dutifully tucked into each sturdy nipple with my big American-made teeth, then moved my face up to look into Lyuba’s. She was wincing in rhythm to our quiet humping (my weight is an impossible thing to bear), her eyes wet and focused on the ceiling. She squeezed my ass, perhaps to encourage me. She seemed to want me to say something. To commiserate with her. But it’s hard to know what to say when you’re khui-deep inside your father’s young wife.

So instead I tried to be gentle. I looked deep into the hollows beside her nose, where a herd of teenage orange freckles once roamed. The surgery that had removed them was not perfect, and I could still see, beneath the initial layer of skin, the afterimage of the burnt-out orange spots. I kissed these blemishes, her childhood’s last bequest, drawing a forced smile from Lyuba. I carefully touched the hardened skin where her relative had charred her. It was the consistency of warm cellophane, and it was frightening.

“Ai,” she said. “You’re tickling me. Will you finish soon?”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I was sweating all over her. The room was stale and tropical, filled with the odor of an unhealthy male body suddenly pressed into service.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s this lubricant—”

“No, it’s my fault,” I said. “I’m taking all these medications, so it’s hard to—Oh! Ah, wait, Lyubochka! Oofa!”

And so it was over. I pulled out of Lyuba and looked at my wet knob. One of my testicles was missing. It had apparently risen up into my abdomen. “Fuck, Lyuba,” I said. “I’m missing an egg here. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“You’re not satisfied with me,” Lyuba said.

I poked around there for a bit, worried that the nonexistent God was taking His Freudian revenge on me. The testicle descended. My hands were shaking. Humungous G was still singing “I’m Busting My Nut Tonight.” Never in my life had I found hip-hop to be so detestable. Plus there was something else to consider. Lyuba. Intercourse. Nature’s remorseless path. “Oh, the devil take it,” I said. “We didn’t use a prezervatiff.”

“It’s Monday,” Lyuba said. “I never get pregnant on a Monday.”

She was making a fort for herself out of the fringes of the comforter, sinking her whitish body into its orange ramparts with many postcoital sighs, preparing herself for a fine afternoon nap. What did she say? No pregnancies on Mondays. Wonderful. Now, why was Humungous G still rapping? I went over to the stereo and punched it with my big, squishy hand, but the fat urban motherfucker just kept on bangin’.

“You’re not satisfied with me,” Lyuba repeated, clicking off the stereo with a remote control. “Boris usually made a special sound. Like he was happy.”

“No, it was very nice,” I said. I tried to think from a goal-oriented perspective, just as they taught us at Accidental College. “I finished inside you.”

I looked up at the photograph of my father happily unveiling the Nokia-phone tombstone, three Soviet-era gold teeth glinting in the sun, a combed-over black curl forming a Spanish ? across his forehead. I felt myself losing my precarious hold on consciousness and set myself down on the bed. Lyuba yawned widely, and I smelled her lamb-tongue breath once more, which reminded me quickly of every Russian person I had ever known—from my dead grandmothers, who took me for stroller rides along the English embankment, to Timofey, my loyal manservant, who was presently waiting for me with the Land Rover on the very spot where I was once strolled. All of us had enjoyed a lamb’s tongue in our lifetime. How droll!

“Let’s get some sleep, then,” Lyuba said. “Our bed is very comfortable. It’s like staying at the Marriott in Moscow.”

Our bed, indeed, was very comfortable. Her zhopa rubbed at me from behind, the way Rouenna’s used to rub me when I couldn’t fall asleep during anxious nights. Lyuba seemed to want me to put my arms around her little body. Her hair smelled musty and yet artificial, like nothing I had encountered before. I imagined Lyuba as a woman in her thirties, her hair hennaed a popular aquamarine color, her posture stooped like that of so many of our premature babushkas. Would she even be alive then?

“I hope we make lots of love together, little father,” she whispered.

I tried to go to sleep, but there was nothing to dream about, except the usual Eastern European nonsense about a man sailing an inflatable Fanta bottle around the world looking for happiness. But one thought remained and would not be extinguished.