Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (31 page)

Speaking of, I’ve been going to Tompkins Square with more supplies, doing some odd ends at
CLOTHES WASHING AND SANITATION
and just hanging out with David. He’s so funny. He just grabbed me at one point and threw me over his shoulder and carried me around the whole park so that I could wave to everyone. It felt good to have a strong guy taking charge of me, and David is SO strong, and not just because he was a soldier in Venezuela. And he keeps his little hut so NEAT (not like you-know-who, ha ha), which is something he said he learned in the army. He’s getting ready for when the Guard comes to clear them out, which is making me nervous. If you have any old äppäräti or even laptops, please send them to me, because these people are really desperate. I tried to get him to just have some lunch with me, but he won’t leave the park. He’s as dedicated
to his people as my father is to his patients, and I guess I really admire that. I’ve been looking at his mouth, and there’s something charismatic about him having lost some teeth. He’s a rugged man who knows when to be physical and when to be smart. Anyway, I bet if he had Healthcare he could look even more handsome. Sometimes when he talks about what it’s going to be like after the Bipartisans are overthrown, I’m like hmm, that doesn’t sound bad. He’s against the Credit people, but he thinks Retail is always going to be a part of our lives and that Retail girls can be Creative. His ideas are a little out there, but at least he believes in something, right?

Sigh. Okay, Princess P, I’m off to swiffer the balcony, which is covered with bird doo 24/7. This is New York and everyone always shits all over you. Ha ha.

GRILLBITCH
TO
EUNI-TARD:

I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you right away, Panda. Something really BAD is happening here. These LNWIs ran into my father’s factory when it was closed and took it over and they phased out the LAPD last month and the National Guard won’t do anything and now it’s like we’re going to lose the business or something? I heard my mother and father just VERBALLING VERY QUIETLY in their bedroom and I got so scared, because I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to help. Usually they tell me everything but the look on my father’s face was like uhhhhhhhhhhhh and they were even talking about going back to Korea for a while. I tried to go to Padma and there was a road block on the 405 and they had people with their hands behind their heads, so I just turned off into a service station and sat there with the motor running and then I just started HITTING AND HITTING AND HITTING the steering wheel. WTF??????????? How can they not protect our business? How can they just let this Aziz’s Army do what it wants? It’s like they don’t want us to feel safe anymore. I don’t think you should hang out with this David guy, Eunice. He sounds like one of those dicks who’s destroying my
family. And I don’t want to be with Gopher either because he’s not one of us and he understands NOTHING and his parents have old-school money and it’s all just a JOKE to him. I told him about my dad’s factory and he was like “good let the poor people take over.” I think this is the time for us to forget who we are and to be a part of our families and everything else is just that weird noise you hear when people you don’t know are verballing. It’s true, everyone is a ghost around me, except when I’m on the äppärät with you. This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I’m sorry you had a sucky dinner with your parents and I’m glad you’re loving Lenny more than ever, but you should take into consideration what your parents say, because they’ve been around for so long. I’m not saying don’t date Lenny, just balance in your mind what you feel for him and what you’ll eventually have to do. I love you, sweet potato.

EUNI-TARD:
Hi, Sally. Did you hear LNWIs took over the Kang’s plunger business?

SALLYSTAR:
No. That’s terrible.

EUNI-TARD:
That’s all you have to say?

SALLYSTAR:
What do you want me to say?

EUNI-TARD:
Do you want to get burgers? You can have a little red meat if you promise to just do vegetables and yogurt for a week.

EUNI-TARD:
Hello? Earth to Sally Park.

EUNI-TARD:
You must be busy. You still haven’t told me what you think of Lenny.

SALLYSTAR:
Everyone’s concerned about you.

EUNI-TARD:
They’re CONCERNED? That’s really nice.

SALLYSTAR:
Mommy and Daddy just don’t want you to rush into anything.

EUNI-TARD:
And you’re their Media spokeswoman now?

SALLYSTAR:
We’re not a perfect family but we’re still a family, right?

EUNI-TARD:
I don’t know. You tell me.

SALLYSTAR:
We have to get new carpeting for the living room and new runners for the stairs. Do you want to come to NJ and help us pick it out?

EUNI-TARD:
Can I bring Lenny?

SALLYSTAR:
You can do whatever you want Eunice.

EUNI-TARD:
I was kidding.

SALLYSTAR:
So you’ll come?

EUNI-TARD:
I’ll come. But I’m not going to sit next to Dad or say anything to him. Lenny uses the word truculent. Dad’s like a truculent child, it’s best to ignore him.

SALLYSTAR:
Cut him some slack. He’s trying. He’s not completely well inside and that means we have to forgive him.

EUNI-TARD:
Whatever.

SALLYSTAR:
Seriously. You will feel so much better if you forgive him, Eunice. Then you can focus on what’s happening on the rest of the planet. Maybe you can help me set up a food distribution committee for the tent cities we’re doing with Columbia and NYU. Things are getting really bad at Tompkins Square.

EUNI-TARD:
How do you know I’m not helping out already?

SALLYSTAR:
Huh?

EUNI-TARD:
Nothing. I’ll forgive Dad when he’s 70 years old and Uncle Joon has gambled all his money away and he’s this raving homeless man who turns to me and Lenny for help. Then I’ll be like, you treated me and Mommy and Sally like shit, but now here’s some money so you don’t starve.

SALLYSTAR:
That’s so horrible. I can’t believe you would even think that.

EUNI-TARD:
Hey, I’m kidding. Sense of humor?

EUNI-TARD:
Sally, are you still there? I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I really miss Myong-hee. Last time I was in LA I tried to braid her and she was squealing “No, Eunice emo!” like leave me alone, you’re not the boss of my hair!!! She’s such a cute little oinker. I bet next time we see her she’ll be like four inches taller. I don’t want her to grow up.

EUNI-TARD:
Sally? Come on! Was it the thing I said about dad?

EUNI-TARD:
Fine. My BOYFRIEND is almost home and we’re going to make a branzino together.

EUNI-TARD:
Sally, do you love me?

SALLYSTAR:
What?

EUNI-TARD:
I’m serious. Do you really love me? I mean like a person. Not just an older sister you’re supposed to look up to.

SALLYSTAR:
I don’t want to talk about this. Of course I love you.

EUNI-TARD:
Maybe I didn’t do enough.

SALLYSTAR:
What are you talking about? Would you please just SHUT UP ALREADY. I’m so sick of you. THE PAST, THE PAST, THE PAST!!!

SALLYSTAR:
Hello? Eunice.

SALLYSTAR:
Eunice?

SALLYSTAR:
Hello.

ANTI-INFLAMMATION

JULY 20

Dear Diary,

Noah told me there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day. He made it sound like an urban rapture, his aging face taking on a careful glow, as if he was borrowing some of the light of which he spoke. I thought he was emoting when he said it, but his äppärät was at standby, he wasn’t streaming: This was real enough. We were sitting in some crappy St. George café, oddly moved by the fact that there were still cafés out in the world, much less on Staten Island. “I’d love to see that,” I said. “When does it happen exactly?”

“We missed it,” Noah said. “It was late in June.”

“Next year then,” I said.

And then, like a perfect Media drama queen, Noah told me he expected to be dead by the next year. Something about the Restoration Authority, the Bipartisans, the price of biofuel, the decline of the tides—who can keep up anymore? That kind of ruined the effect of what he was saying about the light hitting the avenues just so. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to strain for me, that I liked
him exactly as he was: perfectly above average, angry but decent, just smart enough. I thought of Sammy the Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, his calmly depressive countenance, the way he approached extinction with both equanimity and unobtrusive despair. Maybe this was what Noah was jabbering about when he followed the light across the city. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful.

Speaking of the light, I had one luminous moment with Eunice this week. I caught her looking at my Wall of Books with some curiosity, specifically at a washed-out old cover of a Milan Kundera paperback—a bowler hat floats over a Prague cityscape—her index fingers raised above the book as if ready to tap at the
BUY ME NOW
symbol on her äppärät, her other fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness. When she saw me approach she slid the book back on its shelf and retreated to the couch, smelling her fingers for book odor, her cheeks in full blush. But I knew she was curious, my reluctant sentence-monger, and I chalked up yet another victory—the second after what I thought was a very successful dinner with her parents.

Life with Euny has been okay. Exciting, sometimes upsetting. We argued daily. She never backed down. A fighter to the very last. This is how a human being is forged after an unhappy early life. This is the independence of growing up, of standing up for yourself, even if against a phantom enemy.

Mostly we fought about social commitments. She’d be fine with her Elderbird friends who just moved back to New York. They seem like decent girls, effervescent but unsure of themselves, lusting after big-ticket items and some measure of identity, confusing one for the other, but basically in no great hurry to grow up. One girl who actually ate food scored only in the low 500s on her Fuckability, so the other girls would give her tips on how to lose weight. They’d reach over and pinch her all the time, coat her in creams until she glowed
sadly on my living-room couch, and weigh her as if she were a prized albacore hanging over a Tokyo wharf. Another girl was going for that new Naked Librarian look, very little covering her body except glasses as thick as my storm windows, which I thought was funny because even a fine institution like Elderbird had recently closed its physical library, so what the hell was this girl even referencing? Then they’d get trashed on rosé out on our (our!) balcony, those cute, bloated, drunken faces of theirs, as they told these long, circular stories that were supposed to be funny but instead proved highly disturbing, narratives of a cheap, ephemeral world where everyone let everyone down as a matter of course and women sometimes got pissed on in front of others. I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.