Absurdistan

together.” To my surprise, my adjutants actually did have hairy brown coconuts on their shoulders. “I ought to buy myself a hovercraft,” I opined to them rather loudly. “New technology. Gonna invest in.”

The road followed a curvy downward path toward the sea, past the pretty Sevo houses with their carved balconies, their overgrown front gardens rustling with barberry shrubs and creamy milk flowers. I caught sight of a broken rosebush peering out of a chain-link fence and was swiftly dispossessed of all my fundamental worries. “It’s like being back in Yalta,” I shouted. “With my mamochka!” The winds of that particular resort town, with their Chekhovian overtones, side-swiped my ass. I hopped and skipped down the road (not really possible, but so it seemed at the time) until I found myself at a kind of border crossing. Armed men in tight sweaters stitched with the word DYNCORP were blocking the path. I imagined what it would be like to try to tear the assault rifles out of their hands, hundreds of bullets piercing me, ouch, ouch, ouch a hundred times over. “Watchoo doing?” I asked them.

“Protecting the neighborhood,” they said in these South African–sounding accents. “From the looters. You live here?”

“I’m Nana Nanabragovna’s boyfriend.”

“Really? What are you called?”

“Fat Uncle. Snack Daddy. Misha Vainberg. Call me what you like, but please let me through.”

“Be careful out there, sir. The people have lost their senses.”

“That’s the people for you.” I pressed on toward a gallery of heat and sound. After a few solitary meters, I was accepted into a crowd of around a million persons gang-pressed into the dust bowl of the Sevo Terrace. Hands burrowed into me; little hands, big hands, sea-wet hands, sun-dried hands. Everyone was looking for my wallet but kept coming up with my balls. “They look and feel almost alike,” I hinted to my friendly assailants. “Keep looking. Ooh, you’re very warm. No, no, no. I don’t like tickling.”

The crowd passed me around, squeezing and poking. This is what Jesus must have felt like on a good day. I was relayed under the tentacle-arches of the Sevo Vatican and toward the sad greenery of the waterfront. There was rumbling above us. A deep groaning sound. Then a couple of pop-pop- pops. Small-arms fire. I looked up, hoping to catch sight of my favorite GRAD missiles. Nothing doing. The teenage members of one of the True Footrest Posses were scrambling up a hill with their mortars and surface- to-air missiles. Good luck, kids! I hit something hard and stony. An old woman was laid out on an enormous marble conch shell, part of some defunct art nouveau fountain. Her whole family was crying over her, children by her feet, grown-ups at the head. “Is she dead?” I asked them.

“We’ll never forget her,” the relatives wailed.

“Don’t be so sure,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “What may seem like a terrible loss today may be just an uncomfortable memory tomorrow. She was old. Hard to carry. Use this opportunity to move to America.” But after I spoke, the sobbing only increased. A fist waved through the air attached to some glandular epithets. I moved away, shaking my head. The people had lost their senses. It was all just jungle emotions now. They couldn’t wait to start mourning one another. That was the one thing they knew backward and forward. Death from above, death from within. Tyrants and heart attacks. The three most popular words in the Russian language: “Stalin. Gitler. Infarkt.”

What the hell? Everyone was screaming at me now. I turned this way and that, toward the sea, away from the sea, and wherever I turned, I saw gleaming gold teeth and infected tonsils ululating in hatred and terror. “I didn’t do anything,” I said, looking at my feet. “Just let me be,” I told them. But the screaming only grew louder. And then the deep groaning sound resumed, and I heard a steel drum played over a second-rate loudspeaker. Pop, someone said. Pop pop pop. Shhhheeeeeouuuuuuu!

I looked up. The people had put up their fists and were crouching fearfully on the ground. And then I understood. They weren’t angry with me. I wasn’t the problem. I looked into the people’s eyes. Their eyes, it would seem, were watching God. I followed them up to the Svani Terrace. Nothing. Then upward to the International Terrace. Nothing still. No, wait. Something. Something unusual was happening up on the International Terrace. Something not quite right but beautiful still.

The skyscrapers were dancing.

Not with each other, but with each other in mind, like flirtatious poor folk sizing up each other’s hips across an equatorial dance floor. The Hyatt danced. The Radisson danced. So did Bechtel. BP was practically making a fool of itself. Only ExxonMobil stood aloof, nodding its head a fraction, tapping its feet, barely keeping up with the beat.

And then the Hyatt decided to cut loose. She—for there was a slender femininity about her—lowered her hazel eyes, ignored the spaghetti strap that had fallen promiscuously off her pretty shoulder, and then, in a move of such dazzling brilliance that the enraptured sun turned rainbow every glittering piece of her broken heart, she jumped across the sea.

38 My Mother Will Be Your Mother

Someone was fondling me, and I didn’t like it at all. I turned over on one side and felt a moist clam crunch beneath me. A disgusting male mouth, all turmeric and bad teeth, was breathing down my nose. “My hand!” the mouth said. I opened my eyes to face a man I can only describe as polluted. And in pain.

“Sorry, fellow,” I said. I rolled off his hand and he clutched it, crying and trying to unbend the fingers, which, in my dazed state, seemed as green and squirmy as the legs of a grasshopper. “Ooofah,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my intact pale squishies. Was I still on the Sevo Terrace? What the hell had happened? The lanza, for one thing. And then…Some strange memories swished about, filling my head with vapor trails. But the trails all led to one place: to the tentacles of the Sevo Vatican unfurling outward, as if to embrace me, one orange clump of stucco in particular somersaulting toward my happy, stoned, unflinching face. I raised my hand toward the bridge of my nose and felt a dark, deep, caved-in nasal pain. A hump had swollen on one part of it, but there was also a new emptiness underneath, a concavity, making me feel, in some ways, like a gentile. I stopped playing with my nose and looked upward at the city around me.

The city was finished.

The skyscrapers of the International Terrace were still standing, but their facades had been entirely stripped of glass, leaving only the joist-and-girder skeletons underneath. In their new incarnations, the buildings looked like charred model showrooms for disposable Western furniture. The Hyatt was no longer a magical destination for the city’s priciest hookers, but rather, an open-faced checkerboard of five hundred squares, each marked by an identical queen-size bed, cherry-wood dresser, and marble-topped desk. The office towers, on the other hand, were a complex geometry of scrambled workstations and blasted modular units, a dizzying white-collar crush akin to the world’s most difficult flowchart. But beneath this sophistication lay a simple, exposed fact: the West, when stripped bare, was essentially a series of cheap plastic components, pneumatic work chairs, and poorly framed motivational posters. The towers that had risen over the city as a watermark of Euro-American civilization were work hives and nothing more. As quickly as they had been put together, they could be taken apart. Already, teams of adventurous local alpinists were mounting the shorn facades of the towers and hauling down flat-screen televisions and gleaming Hyatt toilet fixtures by means of an ingenious pulley system they had rigged up in a matter of hours.

Beneath the International Terrace, the Svani Terrace had taken the brunt of the falling debris, the Moorish- style opera house covered in glistening shards of green glass and splattered dark blue by an infinity of exploding toner cartridges. Six Svani churches had been set on fire and were smoldering evenly across the terrace like the smokestacks of some previously undiscovered industry. On the Sevo Terrace, the dome of the Sevo Vatican resembled an egg cracked down the middle by means of the world’s heaviest spoon. The tentacled columns had crumbled entirely; from this day forward, the church’s storied octopus shape would exist only on the pages of Soviet-era guidebooks and the reverse side of the hundred-absurdi (US$.001) note.

I got up and walked toward the waterfront, thinking, improbably, of washing the blood from my face amid the oily swirls of the Caspian. I moved along carefully, for there were people everywhere in various stages of injury and distress. I didn’t know it yet, but the Hyatt and the office buildings had been evacuated completely before being hit