Absurdistan

drunk. Myself timid yet curious. We would stay up all night. We would ignore Mommy’s threats. Who could think of a school day in the morning when you could drop your trousers and pee all over the neighbor’s anti-Semitic dog? I could feel my father’s vodka breath in my mouth, in my nose, in my ears, my pasty body pressed to his prickly one, both of us sweating from the ghetto heat of a Leningrad apartment in deep winter, drowning in that strange atavistic stirring, shame and excitement in equal measure.

I ordered a batch of the Central Asian flatbread called lipioshka, using it to soak up the sturgeon juices shimmering on my plate. The beer and Black Label were gone; fresh cantaloupe had replaced them. The fruit was as bright and orange as the fish kebabs, only bursting with sugar instead of salt. I let the wedges chill against my inflamed gums, then breathed in the cantaloupe, which coated my throat with orange lather before dissolving into the center of my body, gone forever, like everything else I’ve ever eaten.

I looked up at Nana. She was shivering with delight. Her big, tough, cracked homegirl’s lips were purple and flecked with all the juices on offer, except for mine. She was more alive than anything around her, and her aliveness distorted the oil derricks behind her and the Sevo octopus and the dingy esplanade and the Turkish bumper cars, and that made it all real and lovely and true. “There is a new seafood restaurant,” she said.

“On Tenth Avenue,” I said.

“Not far from—”

“—that new boutique hotel—”

“—they’re gonna build.”

“The one with the portholes—”

“—next to the Belgian place.”

“The one thing you can’t find—”

“—in New York?”

“Right—”

“—is a good paella.”

“You need a very big skillet—”

“—the tapas bar.”

“The one on Crosby—”

“—with the sherries.”

“The boquerones—”

“—the olives.”

“Zagat-rated—”

“—twenty-three for food.”

“I went on a date—”

“—there?”

“Everyone does.”

“Even you?”

“Me?”

“I wish.”

“I wish right now.”

“I wish I was—”

“Me, too.”

I eased my elbows onto the fish-stained tabletop, sneaked my head into the crook of my arm, and let loose with the sadness. I felt Nana touch my soft wavy hairs with her hand, which was slow and methodical in its ministrations. Unconcerned about the snickering waiters, she was quiet and dry-eyed, a professional tour guide comforting her charge after he was robbed of his wallet and passport. “Sorry,” I said.

“Sorry for nothing,” she said, which may not have been her best English, but I understood what she meant.

“I’m drunk,” I said, which was only partly true.

She settled the bill and we walked slowly, unevenly, at last hand in hand, down the pier toward the teeming esplanade. A SCROD billboard hung along the pier, a Communist-era-looking tableau of three middle-aged local men beneath an exclamatory slogan in the local language. All three had hooded gray eyelids, reminding me of a parade of turtles sauntering down toward the tide. One looked like a tired intellectual. He and another were distinguished by poorly made silver teeth, the third by a thick, feminine mouth and a daring young man’s expression. A wheezing loudspeaker beneath them blasted the techno music of five years ago interrupted by snippets of angry Sevo oratory. “What does it say?” I asked, pointing at the billboard.

“ ‘The Independence of the People Will Soon Be Realized!’”

“I like that funny-looking guy with the girlie mouth,” I said. “He looks like an Odessa singer. He must be the junior dictator of the bunch. ‘Don’t hate me. I’m not Stalin. I’m only in training!’”

“He’s my father,” Nana said.

I did not register what she had said at first; per the usual, I had been lost in thought about some aspect of myself. “Oh,” I said finally. I stopped to examine my palms, the prominent green veins trying so desperately to bring blood to the fingers.

“I have something to tell you, Misha,” Nana said in Russian, dispelling what was left of my Belgian identity. “My papa knew your papa well. They were in business together. He was a very dear man. When he came to Svani City, to our house, he would bring me sugar cubes and mandarin oranges. As if there were still shortages, like in the Soviet days. As if I were starved for vitamins and sweets.”

“Oh,” I repeated in English.

I closed my eyes, trying to think of Papa, but what happened next trumped his memory. The ripe green papaya smell beneath the perfume, the feathery but strong feel of arms against my side hams, the soft kiss of downy lips against my forehead. Beneath the picture of her own father exhorting passersby to violent rebellion, my Nana was holding me close.

26 Food, Decor, Service

The next week I spent in love—with her, with the distant American city we held in common, and with myself for being able to so quickly recover from the post-traumatic stress of Sakha’s murder and Alyosha-Bob’s flight. We had sex practically on the same day we met; the myth of the conservative Eastern girl dispelled with a few slutty poses struck over a shared bottle of Flagman vodka at the Hyatt’s Beluga Bar, followed by a trip up the glassed-in elevator, a five-minute bout of red-lipped fellatio, and then the sloppy application of a South Korean condom. These all proved fun activities, and I was able to stay hard for a while, even though I find condoms repellent, another attempt to smother and belittle my khui, only this time at the hands of the South Korean rubber barons.

She approached lovemaking as would many a big girl (and I mean big, not fat), with a sense of duty and equality and full-bodied joy that smaller, more rodentlike women do not possess. She giggled and playacted. She pushed me onto the bed, and I pretended to tip over, when in actuality that was exactly what I did, nearly snapping my fine Hyatt bed in two. “Come here, sweetie,” I said, American to a fault. “Come to daddy.”

“Whatchoo got for me, daddy?” she said, arms on her hips, young face shining with sweat, dark brown eyes glazed over with sexy drunkenness. “Show me whatchoo got.”

“Yeah, you wanna see, sugarplum?” I said. “You wanna see what I got?” And for the first time since the Hasids snipped me, I was not afraid to bring it out to the light—the long scar, the patches of skin stapled to the stem, the general look of a rocket that had failed reentry. Nana was not interested in the particulars. She shrugged, smiled, then went at it progressively—putting it in her mouth, turning it around, withdrawing it with a popping sound, some laughter at that, wiping her mouth with the inside of her elbow, then stuffing my thing back into the warmth of her oral cavity.