Absurdistan

boil me down to my essential desires—a girl, a city, a libertine but tender way of life.

I thought I was Differrent and had a Special Story to tell but I guess I’m not and I dont.

Oh, my poor sweet baby.

37 The End

I found myself at a party at Nana’s house. With drugs, no less. A cauldron of black infinity smelling like the back of a public bus. This was lanza, the local drug that had inspired Saint Sevo the Liberator to his visions of Sevo brotherhood and Svani annihilation, the trip that launched a thousand trips, mostly to the grave.

We were in Nana’s bedroom, sitting around the cauldron, which was perched atop a hot pot, waiting for the miniature shrubs to boil over so that we could all breathe in the fumes. When a thin mist appeared, I started inhaling with gusto. I was trying to forget the electronic message I had just received from Alyosha-Bob, telling me to stay the hell away from the Nanabragov family and to get out of Absurdistan now. A disaster was imminent, according to him. I decided not to worry myself too much. One of the teenage True Footrest Posses had just plundered the Emporio Armani. How much worse could things get?

Nana had invited her best friend, Sissey, who had recently watched us make love, and Anna, the mediocre Russian blonde who worked at the American Express office. The girls were in a brilliant mood. They were doing their best Gorbigrad accents, pretending they were hookers trying to pick up KBR workers at the Hyatt’s Beluga Bar. “Golly Burton! Golly Burton!” they hooted. “You buy me Coke! You have lucky lady back home? I better. I wear thong-g-g. Thong-g-g. I wear thong-g- g. Up my ass I have thong-g-g.”

I tried to imitate a swashbuckling American oilman. “Up your ass?” I said. “I know somethin’ else I can put up there!”

The girls exploded with mirth. They lifted their legs in the air like dying bugs and convulsed rhythmically. As they were all lying on the same bed, opposite the one that supported me, I could see their young asses, all in jeans, forming a tight row: in this pantheon, Nana’s was the biggest, spilling over and beyond the Miss Sixty label, then came that of her dark-haired friend Sissey, with a passable half-moon, then the pert, tiny cantaloupe of the Russian’s behind. “Fat Uncle on the bed,” Sissey shouted to me. “Fat Uncle on the bed! Come on over and visit us, Fat Uncle!”

I rolled right over and into their waiting arms, and they grasped me the way young girls tackle a puppy. “Fat Uncle loves you,” I croaked, and we all started giggling. I eased into the mass around me; there were breasts and a piece of earlobe, not Nana’s. We breathed in and out together. The breasts were warm and the earlobe needed sucking. It struck me: we were high.

The idyll was interrupted by a knocking. I looked up. Faik the manservant had pressed his ugly mug to the windowpane. “Oh, go give him some money,” Nana said.

It was a terrible imposition, and yet I could hardly care less. Doing one thing was as good as doing another. I decided to put on my legs, but they were already attached, rather roundly, to my thighs. Now it was time for my feet. There they were! “There’s a lucky break,” I said. “I have two feets and two leggies.” The girls started giggling once more, their laughter dissipating into breathy French sentences that I could not understand.

Man, was I high.

Outside, Faik was perched on a unicycle. A tuba was attached to the handlebars in place of a horn, and his sailor’s cut had given way to a spotted leopard’s scalp. In fact, he may have been a leopard-man of sorts, Faik. Who knows with the Moslems—they really are different from us. “I saw you and Nana and Sissey and the Russian girl, and you were all touching each other,” he said.

“Oh, God,” I said, “you’re right. We were touching each other. Ears and breasts. It was so loving and tender. I wish the rest of this fucking country were more like that. Those girls are just so great. You’re so great, Faik. Yes, you are. A great, great leopard.”

“I want three hundred dollars,” Faik said.

“See, that’s great, too,” I said, ladling out the money. “Other people would have asked for four hundred.”

“Are you drunk?” Faik asked. “Did you and the girls smoke lanza? Then I want another hundred dollars.”

“That’s absolutely fair,” I said in English. “I can do business with a leopard-man like you.”

I noticed, in a kind of roundabout way, that I was losing verticality. “Are you following me?” Faik said. I looked around. I had apparently walked him down the stairs and into the inner courtyard.

“Oh,” I said. There was a palm tree and a plane tree in the courtyard. Which tree would win in a race? I wished I were an environmentalist. “Hey, Faik,” I shouted, but he was quickly pedaling away on his unicycle. “Where are the girls? I want to go back to the girls. Where are you going, you leopard? Take me with you!”

“Wow,” I said to myself. “This is turning into one Sergeant Pepper’s kind of day.” I whistled a few bars of “Lovely Rita.” Maybe I was back in the States already, but this time armed with a journalist’s visa. Now I just needed to write everything down and file my story before the deadline. “I wonder where the grown-ups are, anyway?” I said to the palm tree. “You can talk to me. I won’t use your real name.”

The palm tree wasn’t talking. Probably protecting the plane tree. “I want girls,” I said, and with the fair sex in mind, I started knocking on the heavy wooden doors around the courtyard. No one answered. I walked into one of the rooms and saw a dying middle-aged woman spread out over a golden duvet. It was my mother. “Oh, poor girl,” I said. “Poor girl.” I couldn’t believe I was calling my mother a girl, but there it was, the feeling that she was younger than me and in need of my help. I cradled her face, trying to make out the familiar features, but her entire head was covered by a giant tube sock, two blue stripes around where her mouth should have been. “Good,” I said. “You got the American socks. The search is over.” My mother put her cool white fingers between my neck folds and made a quizzical sound through the tube sock. “Last eighteen years?” I said. “Many things happened. First, communism died. Then Papa got rich. We went to the Alps. I got circumcised something bad. Then they put Papa into the ground. A pretty Jewess brought gardenias. Then I ended up here.” The alabaster hand wiped my mouth and skirted the edges of my lonely nose. A gust of sock air emerged out of my mother’s neck and formed a series of inverted Cyrillic letters, like when Americans try to learn Russian. “What?” I said. “Sure, I’ve got a girl, but she’s nothing like you, Mommy. I mean, it’s like you always said: you get what you pay for.”

My mother snorted her assent. I tried to cradle her head in my hands, remembering how, as a five-year-old, I used to braid her hair while she napped, trying to make her look like a little girl whom I could cuddle and kiss with impunity. I noticed that her smells had changed, that there was a lustier, dirtier aroma about her: the scent of an unclean kitchen. And it wasn’t a tube sock over her face, but rather an onion skin, beneath which an alien face hissed and contorted. She started speaking in a coarse Southern tongue. A thin ribbon of hate flitted through my heart. Why didn’t you protect me from him? The frying pan! Nothing made sense. Why did you feed me so much? Bowls of condensed milk for breakfast, midnight snacks of raw pig fat spread over black bread, cold veal and mayonnaise salads in the hot afternoons, poppy seed cakes crowned with clotted cream, rounds of cervelat smoked sausage and cheese squares atop slices of butter as thick as my thumbs. Why did you let me get so fat, Mommy? So that he wouldn’t roll around with me anymore? So that he would stop loving me? I was all alone after you died.

Saddened, I left the mysterious Mother Room. The sun burned me like an ant under a telescope. Tired of stalking the premises, I let the house do the walking—it pivoted around me, dozens of empty, sunlit rooms flashing past, until I was standing by the front gate, nudging it open with two disembodied hands. I was free!

I walked down the street. The two imbecilic boys assigned to me, Tafa and Rafa, were sitting in my Volvo station wagon soaking up precious air-conditioning. I knocked on one of the windows. “Vy or ty?” I shouted to the boys. “Polite or familiar? Ach, I ought to knock your heads