Absurdistan (31 page)

Avenue A was ablaze with sordid colors. A tectonic shift, an influx of Eurotrash and computer money, had taken place in the past two decades, turning the neighborhood into a roaring volcano of hipness beneath which the cute multicultural citizens of the Lower East Side cowered like the Pompeians of yore. Soon the disaster would be complete, and the whole of Lower Manhattan would be covered by a lava slide of laptops and lattes, 1’s and 0’s standing in for the
khuis
and
pizdas
that once kept this ’hood pumping, the nights punctured by the wails of newborns hungry for nipples the size of caramels.

I swiveled my Nana around Sixth Street, past First Avenue, and up a flight of stairs. “Tell me,” she said.

“ ‘It’s always Christmas’ at this reliable Curry Row standby lit up ‘like your stomach after a bad vindaloo.’ While dissenters call the cooking ‘uninspired’ and the harried atmosphere akin to ‘life during wartime,’ the cheap tabs and free mango ice cream make sure ‘the party never stops.’ Food—18, Decor—14, Service—11.”

“Tell me more.” She clutched me tight. One of my kneecaps, a solitary outpost of bone amid flesh, was wedged provocatively between her loins. I decided to walk her westward, pushing my knee into her moistness even as I chanted my singsong:

“ ‘Painfully long lines’ take the ‘Zen’ out of this garden spot, but with sushi so fresh ‘it water-skis down your tongue’ and a sake selection as ‘long as Japan,’ even the ‘most jaded downtown samurai’ will scream ‘Banzai!’ Food—26, Decor—9, Service—15.”

“More,” Nana said. I rubbed my knee inside her, but she did not encourage my gathering lust. “More,” she said. I walked her along the breadth of the city to the edge of the West Side Highway; I gave her everything I knew, Food, Decor, Service; I recited from memory, and when memory failed, I reached into imagination, cobbling together restaurants that didn’t but should exist, bustling places where the tablecloths were a little dirty, the waiters a little dodgy, but the food was cheap and good and meant to fill you up through and through. And then, once the bill was settled, once the need of both toilet and bidet pressed into you from all sides, you would take a taxi back to your flat high up in the sky, falling asleep in your loved one’s arms even before the elevator sounded its bell tone, announcing your arrival to the empty gray corridors, the churning waste-disposal system, the solid anonymous door with the apartment number you would so proudly write, with vestigial Cyrillic curlicues, on the back of envelopes bound for less fortunate lands.

The doorknob turned, the lights clicked, the cable television came on with a roar. And wouldn’t you know it, Nana, my sweet brown rider. Just…like…that. We were home.

27

The Men from SCROD

I was feverishly filing my nails when there was a knock on the door.
A knock on my door!
The last two weeks on the town with Nana had convinced me I was in a sexy full-bodied thriller, but all that awaited me on the other side of the door was Larry Zartarian’s balding head and that of his mother peeking out from behind an ice machine a few paces back. “We’ve got to talk,” he said.

I offered him a bucket of buffalo wings, which he spurned. “Are you popping Nana Nanabragovna?” Larry asked me.

“Her body’s mad ripe,” I said in my defense. “I’m having dinner with her family tonight. All the SCROD bigwigs are going to be there.”

The hotel manager walked over to the window and shoved the curtains aside. “Something’s going on,” he said.

“What now?”

“The airlift. Those Chinooks that landed at the Exxon. I thought they were evacuating everyone, but they were
bringing
people, too. Eighty-five foreign nationals, mostly U.K. and U.S.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Even Josh Weiner got his little ass out of here.”

“They airlifted out the embassy personnel and most of the oil majors—Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron,” Zartarian said, “but now I’ve got eighty-five
new
guests. And they’re all…” He motioned me to come closer. He leaned over and whispered into my ear, “KBR.”

I raised my shoulders and let out a heavy sigh to indicate that I had no knowledge or interest in the affairs of the ubiquitous Golly Burton. There was a civil war going on, or a cease-fire, or something—I was interested in
that,
in the ethnic strife and the killing, and in my own possible role in making things better for Nana’s sweet absurdist people.

“There’s a KBR rooftop luau planned for next week,” Zartarian said, nodding meaningfully.

“A luau sounds like fun,” I said.

“It’s to celebrate the Figa-6 Chevron/BP oil fields coming online.”

“Even the whores in the lobby have been talking about the Figa-6,” I said.

The hotel manager poked a stubby thumb at the tinted windowpane. “That’s Figa-6,” he said, inviting me to look inside his thumbprint. I scanned the distant horizon until I made out another inevitable skyline of oil rigs. “That’s the future of the Absurdi oil sector,” Zartarian said.

“Looks good to me,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t look good at all,” Zartarian said. “There hasn’t been activity on those rigs for months. It’s a Chevron/BP concession, but most of the Chevron and BP oil monkeys flew out with the airlift. And now there are all these empty KBR trucks all over the place. KBR’s buying trucks left and right, even the crappiest Russian Kamaz models. And they’re just
sitting
there.”

“The cease-fire is holding,” I said. “They’ll reopen the airport soon and get this Figa-6 thing going. This luau is a positive sign, Larry. Don’t be such a worrywart. You’re letting your mother affect your mood. I know what that’s like, to have a parent. It’s not easy.” I gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“Do me a favor, willya?” Zartarian said. “Nana’s father pretty much runs the SCROD. See what he thinks about all this. Try to get a handle at dinner tonight.”

“Okay, Larry,” I humored him. “I’ll try to
get a handle.
You try to get some rest. You’re working too hard.”

“Hey, if I survive this war, they’re going to post me someplace big.”

“If,”
I said, maliciously.

Zartarian’s cell phone rang, and the Armenian mumbled something in the local tongue. “The SCROD men are here to pick you up,” he said. “Remember, Misha, we’re all in this together.”

“Hey,” I said. “How did you get your phone to work?”

“You can still dial inside the country,” Zartarian explained. “It’s the rest of the world that’s verboten.”

“Ah, so we’re back in the USSR.”

The SCROD men were actually two teenage boys in adjutants’ uniforms. They were over by the glass elevator playing with a pair of submachine guns, pretending to mow each other down, then falling on the floor and grasping their stomachs, moaning in English, “Officer down, officer down.”

“Boys, don’t shoot anything,” Zartarian admonished them. “We’ve got important guests here.”

I was hoping for a BTR-70 armored personnel carrier, but the boys drove a Volvo station wagon, rusty around the edges. Feeling like an American high school student departing for the senior prom, I waved goodbye to Zartarian and his mother, who looked sternly at her watch, her bewhiskered countenance reminding me to return at a decent hour and to keep my nose clean.

We drove at an ungodly speed down the Boulevard of National Unity—jammed with sweaty bodies on a summer Friday night—and then plummeted down to the Sevo Terrace. The boys sat up front, chattering in their language and occasionally leaning out the Volvo’s windows to shoot rounds into the still night air, a fearsome rat-a-tat that almost made me dip into my Ativan stash. “Boys,” I said. “Act a little cultured, why don’t you?”

“Sorry, boss,” one of the lads mumbled in a farcical Russian. “We’re just happy it Friday night. Everybody go dancing. Maybe you dance with a Sevo girl?” The other boy hit him lightly with his submachine gun and told him to shut up.

“I don’t know how it is in your language, but when you talk to your elders in Russian, it is important to use the polite
vy
form of address,” I instructed them. “Or at least you should ask if it’s possible to switch to the familiar
ty.
”

“May we switch to the familiar
ty,
boss?”

“No,” I said.

The boys lapsed into a quiet moodiness for a few minutes and then went back to their barbarian chatter. I was not unhappy to be left alone. The rolled-down windows permitted a delightful breeze to enter the Volvo’s cabin, thankfully skirting the young brutes up front with their leather-and-semen odors and instead tickling my nostrils with the smells of ocean and tropical trees—the tang of jacaranda, say. I took out my Belgian passport and, as I often did these days, pressed it to the hard nipple that stood sentinel over my heart. I was happy at the chance to see my Nana in her parents’ house. For reasons all too complex and murky, the sight of children and their parents together aroused me.

The Sevo Terrace esplanade was ablaze with the flash and fizzle of makeshift fireworks aimed at the broad front of the Caspian. Most often these missiles failed to reach their watery target and fell instead upon the crowds of Sevo who had assembled by the edge of the sea and who now beat a panicked retreat from the aerial assault, children and elderly strapped to the backs of the working-age. “There’s a war on,” I said, “and these people gather to be shelled by fireworks. Unbelievable!”

“They just want to have fun, boss,” one of my escorts told me. “We Sevo people like to roast the lamb and have a good time.”

“There are many ways to spend an enjoyable evening,” I said, “without getting maimed. In my day we drank port wine and talked well into the night about our hopes and dreams.”

“We only
hope
and
dream
of moving to Los Angeles one day, boss. So what’s there to talk about?”

“Yes—mm,” I said, but I could not come up with an equally damning reply.

We circled the floodlit octopus of the Sevo Vatican and took a narrow road that led beneath the so-called Founders’ Wall and into the oldest part of the city. Each terrace had its own Old Town, built at the time of either the Persian occupation or the Ottoman incursion, I cannot remember which. On the Sevo and International terraces, these were settled by the original Moslems whose beehive baths and stubby minarets had created two miniature Istanbuls quietly removed from the rest of the city.

But the Sevo Old Town was free of Moslems. Rising on a slight ridge, it was trellised by a set of winding roads, each charting a route between mountain and sea, and each eventually leading to a dead-end bluff upon which a formidable old house, squatting on timber chicken legs, reproached the driver for disturbing its solitude. The choicest homes were bored directly into the ridge and wore the frippery and ostentation of two centuries past. Their exteriors paraded soft colors, pale yellows and greens, and a ghostly azure that may have once mirrored the now-gray sea below. The houses were graced by long wooden balconies, intricate apertures that often hung from all three sides and were engraved with the lions and fishes of Sevo mythology. They were as beautiful as anything I had seen since landing in the country.

We were headed for a house that eclipsed the others in scale, a broad white structure punctured by the occasional skylight, while some of its neighbors were dilapidated to the point of lacking windows and roof tiles. As we neared the Nanabragov manse, it became clear that the house had been built of poured concrete. It was merely an expensive parody of the traditional Sevo home, a shell of cement that had grown balconies and winding staircases with the same cold resolve as it had sprouted the satellite dishes lining its roof.

My escorts had gone silent and slack as we pulled up to the house. They touched their weapons and breathed slowly through their noses. They craned their heads to better see the satellite dishes on the roof. They thought in tandem of their Los Angeles destiny, a fate that could not be articulated in words, only in gunfire and the hot-tub embrace of naked women.

A circular driveway surrounded a copy of Bernini’s
Fontana del Moro,
the portly Moorish sea god at its center made out of marble several grades too shiny. I saw my Nana run out of the house, dressed in her usual fashion—tightness and youth, puckered flesh and hoop earrings, the hood of her clitoris clearly visible inside a pair of black sweatpants.

“Hey you,” she said.

I trembled in response. “Hi-hi.”

“Don’t you look nice?” she said. I was wearing my tent-sized polo shirt and a pair of khaki pantaloons that I had bought on Dr. Levine’s advice. “Yum,” she said. “Gimme that sweet face.” She kissed me long and hard, squeezing the nonentity of my ass, the pleats of my khakis billowing like two zeppelins in response. I glanced back at my stunned escorts as if to say, “See, this is what happens to cultured people who use the
vy
form of address.”

“Come in,” Nana said. “My pops is dying to meet you. Dinner’s ready. They just shot three lambs.” She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.