Super Sad True Love Story (20 page)

I smiled when I read Nettie’s missive. A woman in her sixties was still active, still trying to shape our country in the right way. Surely there was
some
hope. As if to confirm my thoughts, CrisisNet pinged with a new announcement: “LIBOR
RATE RISES
32
BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR HIGHER BY
0.8%
AGAINST YUAN AT
1¥ = $4.92.” Could the markets be right? Was the Central Park massacre really a turning point? Would it backfire on Rubenstein and his friends?

I re-read Nettie Fine’s message. It was inspiring, but there was something off about the wording.
The real action is in Tompkins Square
. I tried to picture the words “real action” leaving Nettie’s careful, intelligent lips. What had happened to her?
The otter
. I teened Fabrizia in Rome. “
RECIPIENT DELETED
.” Okay, I had to stop worrying. There was a real massacre in front of me. Forget the Old World. I was not responsible for what happened to either Nettie or Fabrizia. I was responsible only for Eunice Park.

Meanwhile, at the Cervix, the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales. All I remember is feeling a little hot around the temples and wanting to be closer to Euny. Things had been rocky between us since I had relapsed and picked up a book, and she had caught me reading, not just text-scanning for data. With the violence just a few miles to our north, I wanted nothing to separate me from my sweetheart, certainly not a two-brick tome of Tolstoy’s
W&P
.

Noah started streaming right away, but his girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, was already live. She lifted up her blouse to show the negligible roll of fat that crowned her perfect legs and spilled from her perfect jeans, her so-called
muffintop
, slapped at it, and delivered her signature line: “Hey, girlfriend, gots muffintop?”

“It’s Rubenstein time in Central Park,” Noah was saying. “It’s Harm Reduction, giving away the store, everything must go, ‘our prices are insane’ time in America, and R-stein won’t feel good until all the niggers and spics are cleared out of our city. He’s dropping bombs on our moms like Chrissy Columbus dropped germs on the redman,
cabróns
. First the shooting, then the roundup. Half the mamis and papis in the city are going to end up in a Secure Screening Facility in Utica before the week is over. Better keep your äppäräti away from those Credit Poles.…” He paused to look over the raw data streaming at him. And then he turned his tired, professionally animated face to us, unsure of what emotion to muster next but unable to contain the visceral thrill. “There’s eighteen people dead,” he said, as if he had surprised himself. “They shot eighteen.”

And I wondered about the excitement in his voice: What if Noah was secretly pleased that all this was happening? What if we all were? What if the violence was actually channeling our collective fear into a kind of momentary clarity, the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association? I could already envision myself excitedly proclaiming the news of how I had seen this dead Aziz bus driver in Central Park, had maybe even exchanged a smile with him or an urban
whassup
. Don’t get me wrong, I felt the horror too, but I wondered, for instance, what
were
these Secure Screening Facilities that Noah always talked about? Were people really shot in the back of the head without a trial? Once, I reminded Noah about how
The New York Lifestyle Times
used to have actual correspondents who would go out and report and verify, but he just gave me one of those “Old man, don’t
even
,” looks and went back to hollering Spanish slang into his camera nozzle. But, then again, Nettie Fine followed his stream
religiously
, so maybe I was missing something. Maybe Noah was as good as it got these days.

“Eighteen people dead!” Amy Greenberg was shouting. She put her hand on her make-believe muffintop, over the negligible waistline and the pretty serious musculature above, as if to scold Rubenstein and the administration, but this maneuver also allowed the outline of her left breast—which a random poll had publicly declared to be the better one—to spill out of her décolletage and frame the center of the shot. “Huge riot in Central Park, National Guard just shooting everyone, smashing up their little shacks, and I am so glad my man Noah Weinberg is right over my shoulder, because I
just cannot handle this anymore
. I mean, hello, stop me before I snack again. Noah, I am so blessed to have you in my life at this terrible moment, and I know I’m not perfect, but, okay, and this is like
total cliché alert
, but you mean the world to me, because you are so kind and sensitive and man-hot, you are
so
Media, and”—her voice started to shake, she started to blink voluntarily in a way that always hastened the tears—“I don’t know how you can go out with a fat loser like me.”

Grace and Vishnu were leaning in to each other as if they were two parts of an ancient ruin, while new death tolls appeared in the air around us, the numbers swelling. I recalled Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, and again my friends were the ones who took care of
me
. Noticing me standing alone next to Eunice, who was deep into AssLuxury (was she too shocked by the violence to stop shopping?), they reached out and brought me into their circle, so that I could feel the warmth of their hands and the boozy comfort of their breath.

Noah and Amy were loudly streaming a few feet apart from each other, straining to be heard over the din of the bar.

“Rubenstein’s making a point to Li,” Noah was saying. “We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we’re not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we’ll go fucking
nuclear
on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips. Keep the credit
rolling, chinos
.”

Amy Greenberg: “Remember Jeremy Block, the guy I broke up with last Passover?” A stream of a naked, masturbating guy who resembled Noah was projected next to Amy’s äppärät, and she scowled at the Image of his generous penis, her pretty post-bulimic face betraying the beginnings of a muzzle. “Remember how I couldn’t count on that jerk-off when there was, like, trouble in the world? Remember how he wouldn’t
explain
anything to me, even though he worked for LandOLakes? Remember how he made me
weigh
myself every morning? Remember how he …” Big pause, and then a bright, smiley face.
“… didn’ respect the muffintop?”

CrisisNet: RUBENSTEIN BLAMES CENTRAL PARK RIOT LEADER FORMER BUS DRIVER AZIZ JAMIE TOMPKINS FOR RIOTS. QUOTE: “ARA REPORTS IDENTIFIED ‘AZIZ’ AS HAVING TRAINED WITH HEZBOLLAH FORCES IN SOUTHERN LEBANON.” QUOTE: “WE ARE DEALING WITH FRONTLINE ISLAMOFASCIST TERRORISM.” QUOTE: “NOW IS THE TIME FOR SPENDING, SAVING, AND UNITY. ONE PARTY, ONE NATION, ONE GOD.”

Vishnu had gone to get us more beer, and Eunice and Grace were doing AssLuxury together. Grace said something that made Eunice smile, and then they talked back and forth, Grace’s eyes on Eunice, Eunice’s eyes mostly on her äppärät, but occasionally, shyly, on Grace. I though I heard some words in Korean—“Soon-Dooboo” (however it’s spelled) is a tofu stew that Grace had ordered a lot on 32nd Street. I wanted to join their conversation, but Grace gently pushed me away. Eunice was FACing a little with three of the other Asian girls in the room, and her
FUCKABILITY
, I noticed with pride and a little worry, was 795, although her
PERSONALITY
just 500 (maybe she wasn’t extro enough). But one very young Filipina Mediawhore in a suburban cardigan, big clunky orthopedic-type shoes, and Onionskin jeans streamed quietly by the jukebox rated several points higher on the
FUCKABILITY
. “That girl has the perfect body,” I heard Eunice saying to Grace. “God, I hate twenty-one-year-olds.”

I looked sadly at my own rankings. Most of the men tonight were wearing cool Mr. Rogers–like V-neck sweaters and were appraising me coldly at best. Someone had written about my stubble, “That dude next to the cute Asian spermbank has like pubic hair growing out of his chin,” and I was ranked fortieth out of the forty-three guys in the room. Did Eunice care? I noticed that when I put my arm around her my
MALE HOTNESS
shot up by a hundred points, and I ranked a respectable thirty out of forty-three men. But what did that say about me? That I needed Eunice just to be acknowledged in the greater world? For one thing, I resolved to shave my stubble tomorrow. It only worked for a certain kind of very attractive guy.

Amy Greenberg, pointing to the little flaps of skin hanging between her armpits and breasts: “I’ve got wings! Thirty-four and I’ve got wings like an angel. I can’t believe
any guy
would want to feel me up with all this
bra goo
! Look at me! Look at me!”

Noah Weinberg: “Thirty-three casualties in the Low Net Worth riots as of nine-oh-four p.m. EST. And the Guard is still shooting up in Central Park. But we’ve lost four hundred National Guardsmen in Ciudad Bolívar
alone
in the last two months. That’s the Rubenstein strategy: The more Americans die, the less anyone cares. Redefine the normative down. Start digging the graves.”

Amy Greenberg: “Let me break down what I’m wearing. The shoes are from Padma, the blouse is a Marla Hammond original, and the nippleless bra is a Saaami Wing Concealer—my mother got it for me on sale at the United Nations Retail Corridor.”

Noah Weinberg: “And I’m not even talking about the LIBOR rate here. I’m talking—” He stopped and looked around. A trio of Staten Island girls were lustily humming a song whose only discernible lyric was “Mmmmmmm …” Noah started to say something, but in the end all he said was “You know what,
patos
? I—I have nothing more to say to any of you.”

Amy Greenberg: “I just want to say, my mom is freaking
amazing
. When I was breaking up with Jeremy Block, she just like made me see through all his bullshit. We looked at his rankings together and we were like, who cares about his big dick and the fact that he can bone all night. He made me give him a rim job for his thirtieth birthday, and then he wouldn’t kiss me afterwards. That really says
a lot
about a guy, when he won’t kiss his girlfriend after she’s licked out his junk. My mom, she’s so cute, she was like ‘You deserve so much better, Aimeleh. Be your
own
pimp, girl!’”

Grace took me aside. “Hey,” she said. “I think Eunice has some real problems.”

“Duh,” I said. “Her father’s a dickhead.”

“I know this kind of girl,” Grace was saying. “It’s the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is
so
shallow and money-craven. I mean even shallower than Noah’s girlfriends. At least Amy
Green
berg knows exactly what she’s doing.”

“But I love her,” I said, quietly. “And I think she shops just because our society is
telling
Asian people to shop. You know, like it says on the Credit Poles. I actually heard one guy yelling to Eunice, ‘Hey, ant, buy something or go back to China!’”

“Ant?”

“Yeah, like the ant that saves too much and the grasshopper that spends too much? Like on the ARA signs? Chinese and Latino? So fucking racist.”

“Leonard, it’s time to stop dating all these Asian and white-trash girls with serious problems,” Grace said. “You’re not doing them any favors, you know.”

“You’re really hurting me, Grace,” I whispered. “How can you judge her so quickly? How can you judge
us
?”

And right away Grace softened. The Christianity and goodwill kicked in. She teared up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “God, it’s the times we live in. I’m becoming so harsh. Maybe I can hang out with her? Maybe I can be like a big sister?” I considered turning indignant, but then I considered who Grace was, the oldest of a brood of five well-adjusted kids, the inheritor of a set of doctor parents from Seoul whose immigrant anxieties and sense of Wisconsin alienation were high, but who nonetheless dispensed love and encouragement in the manner of the kindest, most progressive native-born. How could she even begin to understand Eunice? How could she comprehend what it was like between the two of us?

I hugged Grace for a few beats and kissed one warm cheek. When I looked back, I noticed that Eunice was staring at us, her lower face covered with that amphibian smile, the grin without qualities, the grin that cut me in the softness around my heart.

“Well, that’s about it for the republic,” Hartford was saying on his Antillean stream, his young friend toweling a spent geyser of semen off his back. “Yibbity-yibbity, that’s all, folks.”

We crossed back to Manhattan in silence. The National Guard checkpoints were practically abandoned, most of the troops likely ordered up to Central Park to quell the insurrection. Back in my apartment, I was on my knees and crying again. She was threatening to move back to Fort Lee again.

“Your friends are awful,” she was saying. “They’re
so
full of themselves.”

“What did they do to you? You barely said a word to them all night!”

“I was the youngest person there. They were all ten years older than me. What did I have to say to them? They all work in Media. They’re all funny and successful.”

“First of all, they’re not. And, second of all, you’re still young, Eunice! You’ll work in Media someday. Or Retail. And I thought you liked Grace. You were getting along so well. I saw you looking at AssLuxury together and talking about Soon-Dooboo.”

“I hated
her
the most,” Eunice Park hissed. “She’s
exactly
who her parents want her to be and she’s so fucking
proud
of it. Oh, and forget about meeting my family. You’ll never meet them, Lenny. How can I trust you with them? You’ve blown it.”