Absurdistan

live in the Orient. It’s a fact.” Finally, the Sevo Terrace, the traditional home of the minority Sevo people, was composed of art nouveau mansions built for turn-of-the-century oil barons forming a precise grid around what I later learned was called the Sevo Vatican—“Oooh, that thing looks like an octopus!” I cried to Sakha—a vast white dome with an octet of arches spreading in each direction, which, at least in my mind, resembled a pale tentacled sea creature washed up on the beach. A six-meter Sevo cross gleamed from the octopus’s head, its footrest facing in the wrong direction.

Next to the Sevo Vatican, an esplanade ran toward a small container port that quickly gave way to the real business of the city. And here it became obvious that the city formed no more than a footnote to what actually had rendered these Sevos and Svanis first into a Soviet republic and then into a cantankerous modern state. Absurdistan was the Caspian Sea, and the Caspian was the oil it held in abundance. The oil derricks began as soon as the last speck of humanity ended. The oil refused to give the city even the briefest of respites; it denied its inhabitants the chance to look into the waters and see their own reflection. The humble derricks of Soviet construction, cheap yellow rust buckets in the ruined sea, quickly surrendered to behemoth Western oil platforms, their warning lights flashing from thirty-story rigs, their floating enormity forming a second skyline that rivaled the skyscrapers of the International Terrace. With its three descending terraces, Svani City rushed out to meet the Caspian, and the Caspian turned it back with an oily slap of the waves.

“Don’t look at the oil industry so much,” Sakha said, following my gaze. “Look at the city. Try to imagine the sea completely free of petrol and the city standing proudly above it.”

I shifted my gaze from the oil rigs to the Sevo and Svani terraces beneath me. I hummed John Lennon’s useful ditty “Imagine.” I imagined flying over the city in a helicopter, absorbing its many architectural flourishes and dramatic natural features, but the chopper just kept flying in a northwesterly direction until it reached the southern tip of Manhattan island, spread its helicopter shadow over the asphalt conglomerations of downtown and midtown, then streaked past the gables and dormers of the Dakota Apartments on New York’s Central Park, where Mr. Lennon once lived and died.

And then I was on an IRT train headed north to East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. It was wintertime, the heat had been turned up, and in my rabbit-lined coat, I could feel the sweat gathering between the second and third folds of my neck, which, taken together, formed a fleshy sieve. I could feel the cool water dribbling down to my breastbone and irrigating the curly hairs of my groin. I was hot and cold, anxious and in love. The citizens on the trains bound for New York’s outer boroughs far exceeded the dimensions of the white people lounging around downtown. My fellow fatties were stoic, multicultural, dressed in billowing down jackets that could save an astronaut from the asphyxiation of space. They leaned against the doors for balance as they pried apart chicken wings and fried oxtails with their teeth, spitting bones and gristle into waiting plastic bags. Who were these Amsterdam Avenue Atlases? These Cypress Hills Caligulas? If I weren’t such a priss about getting my hands greasy, I would have joined them in consuming a small Saran-wrapped mammal here amid the bright deoxygenated glare of the 5 train.

And the girls! Oh, how they disturbed me. Each with a little bit of my Rouenna in her—a plushy nose, a gangsta-shaved eyebrow, a plump lower lip glistening beneath a mound of gloss—each yelling and laughing at her school friends in the Bronxian patois I was just beginning to understand. It was February, and the young ladies may have been clad in heavy down jackets, but somehow, with a warm Southern flair, they managed to be half naked at the same time, flashing me their pubic bones, the Y-shaped pre-crease of their deep posteriors. And every once in a while, in an answer to most of my dreams, their thick, fleshy armpits came into view and I squinted to discern a trail of shaved crinkly hair, the phantom of a formerly rich tuft, for I belong to the school that equates armpit hair with untrammeled sexuality.

By the Third Avenue–149th Street stop, I could already glimpse the light-handed winter sun slipping its rays down the station’s stairways. A second later, we were free of the subway tunnel and the Bronx was around us, the subway car flooded with so much brightness it seemed a second sun had been pressed into service.

I gasped at the rectangular chimneys crowned with round water tankers (lowercase i’s); at the tall housing projects forming stout consonants (uppercase L’s and T’s); at the strange Tudor-style row houses that must have wandered in from some quaint English suburb; at the faraway Gothic tower denoting several lifetimes of failed public education; at the sharp, poignant smell of cherry bubble gum and cheap shampoo; at the old man in sunglasses and earphones who boarded at Freeman Street and who sang (mostly) for his own pleasure “Ain’t no use / Cain’t help myself”; at the Moslem girls in fluorescent yellow skirts and clashing gray head scarves, huddled together for safety near the conductor’s booth; at the lives of thousands whose flats lay eye level with the elevated train like some updated Edward Hopper painting; at the budding Latina social worker who cheerlessly highlighted a textbook called But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry; at the freshly painted azure fire escapes stirring to life the faded art deco brickwork beneath; at the urban catastrophe that is the Cross Bronx Expressway (and at the trash-strewn lots that bracket it); at the 350-pound woman (my long-lost fellow traveler) who got on at 174th Street, and especially at the tube top beneath the bulletproof shell of her down jacket with the rhinestone-studded words HOT ’N’ SEXXXY; at the inquisitive child (all eyebrows and stunted teeth) who couldn’t take his eyes off the book in my lap (William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes) and who asked me, “Whatchoo be readin’, papi?”

I fell out of my New York reverie as quickly as I had once fallen into my Beloved Papa’s hazardous “new fortunes.” Sakha was still speaking and gesturing at length. I made an attempt to follow him, to return to the country around me, to make a connection with the world I now inhabited and couldn’t wait to leave. I felt the need to say something intelligent, as one frequently does around intellectuals. “So do the Sevo live on the Sevo Terrace and the Svani on their own terrace?” I asked.

“Originally, yes. The city’s geography kept us apart during the Three Hundred Year War of the Footrest Secession, and it hindered the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian conquerors. But in the last two centuries, people have generally lived anywhere they want. In Soviet times, half the population married outside their group. The distinctions between us are all but meaningless now.”

“Do you live on the Sevo Terrace?” I asked. I could barely pay attention to what I was saying. Part of me was still on the 5 train with the HOT ’N’ SEXXXY woman, but I willed that part to disappear.

“Oh, no.” Sakha laughed. “I am a very poor democrat. I can’t afford to live on the terraces. I live in Gorbigrad.” He gestured toward a distant mound of (what I thought was) an unpopulated orange rock jutting out into the bay, its coloring reminding me of the much-celebrated Grand Canyon in Arizona.

“You live alone on a barren rock?” I said.

“Look closer,” Sakha said. As I squinted and shielded my face against the sun, I made out a stacked anthill of thousands of yellowing Khrushchev-era apartment buildings, along with what looked like vast quantities of housing possibly made out of burlap and tarp. “The Gorbigrad favelas,” Sakha said. “Home to over half of the city’s population. Named after Gorbachev, the man the locals still blame for everything that happened.”

“Wait, so this is not a rich country?” I said. “What about all the oil?”

“The UN Human Development Index ranks us slightly below Bangladesh. In terms of infant mortality—”

“Oh, you poor people,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Welcome to the Norway of the Caspian.”

“I wish I could open an outpost of Misha’s Children here, Mr. Sakha. I wish I had more money and time to spare.”

“You’re a very kind man,” Sakha said. “They really gave you and Josh Weiner a priceless education at that Accidental College.”

“ ‘Think one person can change the world?’” I said in English. “ ‘So do we.’”

“What’s that?”

“The motto of Misha’s Children.”

“I wish it were my motto as well,” Sakha said. He sighed and put his hands on his hips, an unacademic and frankly surprising gesture. “I can’t complain, Mr. Vainberg,” he said. “The Americans have really been helping us out. Xerox machines, free use of the fax lines after nine P.M., discounted Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the commissary, five thousand free copies of An American Life by Ronald Reagan. We know what democracy looks like. We’ve read about it. We’ve been to Century 21. But how do we make it happen here? Because frankly, Mr. Vainberg, once the oil runs dry, who in the world is going to