Absurdistan

“The Amazon Rain Forest Experience.” The words in Russian were becoming progressively harder and inane-sounding, so I was particularly happy when the college campus exhausted itself and we found ourselves deep in the impoverished countryside that ringed Accidental. “Cornfield,” I said. “Cow barn. Mechanized tractor. Grain depository. Poultry shed. Pig corral.”

We wandered through several kilometers of agriculture, onto the highway that led into the nearest big city. The sun was rising over a nearby strip mall when we decided to stop and turn back. A phalanx of local police cars, sirens ablaze, streamed past us on the way to campus. We assumed, correctly, that the officers were heading for Alyosha-Bob’s dormitory to arrest Girshkin and Shtenyfarb for vandalism and defilement of college property. Excited by this knowledge, we laughed and shouted into the subzero morning air until our frozen throats failed us. I hugged Alyosha-Bob’s shivering body, wedging him within my folds to show him what real friendship meant in Russian.

I thought we would never be apart.

22 My Nana

I was wrong.

Back in Absurdistan, scared and all alone, I crawled under my bed and wept.

When Beloved Papa found out that his own father had been killed fighting the Germans in a battlefield near Leningrad, he reportedly hid under his bed and cried for four days, refusing bread and kasha, nourished only by his own tears and the memories of his dead father’s caress. I resolved to do the same, although there were some obvious differences between our situations. Papa had been three years old, while I was thirty. Papa had been staying out the war with distant relatives in some awful village in the Ural Mountains, while I was the sole occupant of a penthouse in a Western hotel in Absurdistan. Papa had only his tears, while I had my Ativan. But I felt a kinship with him nonetheless. I had lost a mother, a father, and now, with Alyosha-Bob gone, a brother. I had been orphaned one more time. Thrown helter-skelter into a world that had no use for me.

Worse yet, something was wrong with my mobilnik. The Absurdis must have shut down telephone coverage in some misguided move to control information coming out of the country. Every time I dialed Alyosha-Bob’s number, I got a recorded announcement: “Respected mobile phone user,” a hoarse Russian woman said, “your attempt to make a connection has failed. There is nothing more to be done. Please hang up.”

My attempt at connection had failed. What more could be said, really?

I didn’t last for four days under my bed, as Beloved Papa had in 1943. In a matter of hours, hunger got the best of me, and I crawled out to order buffalo wings and a bottle of Laphroaig from room service. The world felt empty and silent around me. I turned on my laptop, but apparently the authorities had shut down the Internet as well. I was left with nothing more than television. The foreign news channels, having decided that the plight of the Absurdsvani Republic seemed to the average viewer quite smelly and unpronounceable, had moved on to the warm Mediterranean waters off Genoa, where the G8 summit was under way, and sexy Italian protesters hurtling Molotov cocktails at the abusive carabinieri proved a great deal more photogenic. Even the Russian networks had decided to give Absurdistan a rest. The correspondents for the three main government channels could be seen half asleep by the Hyatt swimming pool, slumped over rows of Turkish beer bottles as early as ten in the morning. They, too, wanted to go to Genoa to swim with the dolphins and admire President Putin’s compact, sportsmanlike physique and the happy impertinence of his American counterpart, Bush.

I looked down at the terraces beneath me. The morning glare of foam and pollution rising off the remains of the sea had coated the city in the bruised pink color of corned beef. With the cease-fire in effect, citizens, Sevo and Svani, went about their lives, burrowing into the ready maw of the 718 Perfumery or gathering around taxis and failed minibuses to spontaneously drink Turkish coffee and spit sesame seeds at the sun. Armored personnel carriers bristling with armaments and antennae idled listlessly next to cafes, looking like the empty shells of dead insects.

I found a notecard from Larry Zartarian:

Dear the Guest,

Please Your Attention. Federal and SCROD forces are seiging the city. Airport is closed. Whilst the political Situation in our country is resolving ourselves, You may enjoy the historical beauty of Svani City (which Frenchman Alexander Dumas calls “Pearl of Caspian”—Ooh la la!). Adjacent to Hotel is American Express Tour Company. It is only just for You.

I once asked Zartarian about the funny English he used in his letters to the hotel guests, and he confessed he was trying to represent himself as a wily local and not some middle-class brat from the San Fernando Valley. Poor Zartarian. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see his corpse laid out next to his mother’s, ready for repatriation to Glendale.

I looked over the note and asked myself: What would Alyosha-Bob do in this situation? He would always do something. I put on a pair of gigantic square sunglasses and slipped into my roomiest vintage tracksuit, the one that prodded my stomach forward and held it prominently in place, so that altogether I resembled the infamous North Korean playboy Kim Jong Il.

It was time, as Dr. Levine would say, to go for a walk.

At the American Express office, two girls, one white and blond, the other sweetly brown and local, were lolling about their desks, applying nail polish and speaking quietly in English and Russian, their tongues clicking and clacking over all the right terms (“chick lit,” “chill-out room,” “Charing Cross station”).

I warmed to them immediately, these sweet Western-minded creatures. I even managed to forget Alyosha- Bob’s absence for a moment. “Hey,” I said to the girls en anglais. “Whassup?”

“Good afternoon,” the blonde chirped. “Bienvenue. Welcome to the American Express.” She smiled genuinely, and the other—the dark one—cast her eyes down and grinned with her very full red mouth. The blonde was clearly an ethnic Russian; her name tag read Anna Ivanovna or something similar. I couldn’t tell if I liked her or not. The way she huddled herself over her full bosom, she was neither particularly alluring nor entirely ignorant of the art of making young men suffer.

When I looked at the dark one, however, my thoughts immediately started to wander down below. She was dressed in a tan T-shirt and denims much too tight for her Southern hips. Often when I am compelled by a woman, my fantasies begin not with the brilliance of her smile, or the way she brushes back tendrils of her own curly hair, but rather, with the “great unknowable”—the way her reproductive complex looks when white workaday underwear is pulled over it in the morning, and whether or not certain hairs stray from the fold. For all this I can blame the collected works of Henry Miller, which I read during my internment at Accidental College and which coincided with my induction into hairy American multiculturalism.

“I’m a Belgian interested in the history of your country,” I said, words that would have rung especially true if “Belgian” had been substituted with “Russian” and “country” with “vagina.”

The blond girl started squealing about the different kinds of tours they had. Arts, crafts, churches, mosques, beaches, volcanoes, caves, stork habitats, oil fields, fire temples, “the world-famous Museum of Applied Carpet Making”—few cities could rival the Absurdi capital for the range of nonsensical crap on offer.

“The only problem with making a tour,” said the blond one, “is that my grandmother is Svani, so I cannot go to the Sevo Terrace, and Nana is Sevo, so she cannot go to the Svani Terrace.”

“What?” I said.

“As part of the cease-fire, there are restrictions on travel for Sevo and Svani citizens,” the blonde said. “As a foreigner, of course, you are completely exempt.”

I noticed a large cutout of a locomotive bearing the American Express logo, upon which somebody had written, All American Express luxury trains out of Republika Absurdsvani are canceled by order of federal government and SCROD. It seemed that I was left with nothing but stork habitats and the graces of two pretty women.