Dear Diary,
The otter came for me in a dream. Not the cartoon otter that interrogated me in Rome, not the graffito otter I saw on Grand Street, but a true-to-life otter, a high-definition mammal, whiskers, fur, the dampness of the river. He pressed his wet plush black nose into my cheek, into my ear, kissing me with it, blessing my hungry face with his hot familiar and familial salmon breath, his little muddy paws destroying the clean white dress shirt I had put on for Eunice, because in my dreams I wanted her to love me again, because I wanted her back. And then he spoke to me in Noah’s voice, in that edgy, improper, but basically humane voice, the voice of a thwarted scholar. “You know Americans get lonely abroad,” he said, pausing to gauge the look on my face. “Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born.” Staring me up and down to see if I found him entertaining. “Did you meet any nice foreign people while you were abroad.” Not a question, but a statement. Noah had no time for questions. “I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny.” I felt my dream mouth move to betray Fabrizia yet again, but this time I couldn’t pry it open. The Noah-otter smiled as if he knew exactly what kind of man I was and wiped his whiskers with a human paw. “You said ‘DeSalva.’”
Noah. Three days after the Rupture. Instead of mourning, instead of grief, shallow memories of us sharing a joint on the gravel mounds of Washington Square, our early friendship as tenuous and goofy as a young love affair. Politics on our tongues, girls on our minds, just two guys from the suburbs, freshmen at NYU, Noah’s already working on one of the last novels that will ever see print, I’m working on being the friend of someone like Noah. Are these memories even real? This is my life now. Dreams, nothing but dreams.
I’ve been sleeping on the couch. Eunice and I have barely spoken since I dragged her home and away from her goddamn Tompkins Park, from whatever or whomever she thought she could save. Her mysterious male friend? Her sister? What the hell would Sally be doing in the middle of a battlefield?
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I had told Eunice of our relationship after she had sulked in the bedroom for the better part of that blood-soaked day. “If we can’t take care of each other now, when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to make it? Eunice! Are you even listening to what I’m saying? I’ve lost one of my best friends. Don’t you want to, like, comfort me?” No response, dead smile, retreat to the bedroom. E basta.
The booms, big and small, faraway and close, the pounding in my head, tracer rounds against the overcast moon, tracer rounds lighting up the secret, hidden parts of the city, an entire building of crying babies, and, even scarier, the temporary absence of those wails. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. You can see the magenta flashes even against the fully closed curtains, you can hear them on your skin. At night, the sound of metallic scraping coming off the river, like two barges slowly crashing against each other. When I open a window, the strange bloom of flowers and burnt leaves hits my nose-a sweet, dense rot, like the countryside after a storm. Oddly enough, no car alarms. I listen for the comfort-food sounds of ambulances presumably rushing to keep people alive-every few minutes the first day after the Rupture, then every few hours, then nothing.
My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect. No one’s äppäräti are working anymore. “It’s an NNEMP,” all the thirtysomething Media wizards hanging out in the lobby of our building are saying with finality. A Nonnuclear Electromagnetic Pulse. The Venezuelans must have detonated it high above the city. Or the Chinese. Like anyone knows. Like there’s any difference between the quality of “news” since the Media’s gone out.
Venezuelans detonating something other than an arepa.
Whatever, as Eunice would say, if she still spoke to me.
I point my äppärät out the half-opened window, trying to catch a signal. I can’t reach my parents. I can’t connect to Westbury. I can’t connect to Vishnu. I can’t connect to Grace. And nothing from Nettie Fine. Complete radio silence since Noah’s ferry exploded. All I have is the Wapachung Contingency emergency scroll. “SECURITY SITUATION IN PROGRESS. REMAIN IN DOMICILE. WATER: AVAILABLE. ELECTRICITY: SPORADIC. KEEP ÄPPÄRÄT FULLY CHARGED IF POSSIBLE. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS.”
In the next room, she’s crying.
I’m so scared.
I have no one.
Eunice, Eunice, Eunice. Why must you break my heart, again and again?
Five days after the Rupture, instructions.
WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE: SECURITY SITUATION LOWER/MID-MANHATTAN IMPROVED. PLEASE REPORT TO YOUR DIVISION HEADQUARTERS.
I put on a shirt and pants, feeling both scared and celebratory. The air conditioner had gone out and I had been living in my underwear, which made the pants feel like armor and the shirt like a shroud. Eunice was sitting by the kitchen table, staring absently at her nonfunctional äppärät. I have never smelled unwashed hair off her, but there it was, as strong as anything in the half-dead refrigerator. And that softened me for some reason, made me want to forgive her, to find her again, because whatever happened between us had nothing to do with me. “I have to go to work,” I said, kissing her on the forehead, not afraid to inhale what she had become.
She looked up at me for the first time in a hundred hours, eyes crusted over. “To see Joshie?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. She nodded. I stood there like a Japanese salaryman in my overwarm pants and stifling shirt, waiting for more. But it wouldn’t come. “I still love you,” I said. No response, but no dead smile either. “I think we both really tried to make this work. But we’re just too different. Don’t you think?” And then, before she could summon an emotion and deny it in the same breath, I left.
Outside, the streets were nearly empty. All the cabs had fled to wherever cabs come from, and that absence of moving yellow made Manhattan feel as still and silent as Kabul during Friday prayers. The Credit Poles were burned up and down Grand Street, and they looked like prehistoric trees after the glaciers retreated, their colored lights sagging down in a row of inverted parabolas, the racist Credit signs atop them torn down and ripped apart, coating the windshields of cars like old washrags. An old Econoline van with a bumper sticker that read “My Daughter Is a U.S. Marine in Venezuela” had also been torched for some reason-it lay on its back in the middle of the street, imitating a dead water bug. The A-OK Pizza Shack was open but had boarded up its windows, as had the local Arab bodega, the words “WE ACCEPT ONLY YUAN SORRY BUT WE ALSO HALF TO EAT” stenciled along each bit of cardboard. But, otherwise, the neighborhood looked remarkably intact, the looting minimal. The deep hush of the morning after a failed third-world coup seeped up from the streets and coated the silent towers. I was proud of New York, now more than ever, for it had survived something another city would have not: its own rage.
The F train entrance was stuffed with garbage, the subways clearly out. I walked up Grand, a lone man feeling the density of August along with the strange hunger of being alive, wondering what would come next. For one thing, I needed real money, not dollars.
Outside my Chinatown HSBC branch, a dragon’s tail of poor middle-class Chinese folk waited to hear the verdict on their life savings. I wondered if these ruined older men and women, the Tai Chi practitioners of Seward Park with their three-yuan trainers and mottled bald spots, could find a way to repatriate to the now wealthier land of their birth. Would they even be welcomed back? Would Eunice’s parents be if they decided to return to Korea?
I stood in line for an hour, listening to a Caribbean man dressed in head-to-toe denim, his cracked skin glistening with patchouli, sing to us his take on the world. “All these Wapachung people, all these Staatlin people, they takin the money and runnin. They messin up the economy, they messin up our pockets. This is extortion. This is Mafia doin. Why they shoot that ferry down? Who control who? That’s what I askin you. And you know we never fine out the answer, because we little people.”
I wanted to give the man an answer he could live with, but my throat remained blank, even as my mind was running. Not now, not now. Save the questions for Joshie.
My bank account was still big enough to warrant a special teller, an old Greek woman imported from a ransacked Astoria branch, who laid it all out for me. Everything I owned that had been yuan-pegged was relatively intact, but my AmericanMorning portfolio-LandOLakes, AlliedWasteCVS, and the former conglomeration of cement, steel, and services that had once formed an advanced economy-no longer existed. Four hundred thousand yuan, two years of self-denial and bad tipping at restaurants, all gone. Together with the Eunice-related expenditures of the past month, I was down to 1,190,000 yuan. From the standpoint of immortality, I was already on the mortuary slab. From the standpoint of survival, the new gold standard for all Americans, I was doing just fine. I took out two thousand yuan, Chairman Mao’s solid face and remarkable hairline staring back at me from the hundred-note currency, and hid the bills in my sock. “You’re the richest man in Chinatown,” the teller snorted. “Go home to your family.”
My family. How were they surviving? What had happened on Long Island? Would I ever hear the warble of their anxious birdsong again? On a street corner I saw a man flagging down a car, then bargaining over the price of a ride. My father had told me this is how he used to get around Moscow when he was young, once even flagging down a police car, its captain looking to make a ruble. I stuck out my hand, and a Hyundai Persimmon decked out in all things Colombian pulled up to me. I negotiated twenty yuan to the Upper East Side, and for the next few minutes the city slid past me, demure and empty against the outrageously joyous salsa that colored the inside of the Hyundai. My driver was something of an entrepreneur and on the way over sold me a hypothetical bag of rice that would be delivered to my apartment by his cousin Hector. “I used to be scared of things before,” he said, pulling down his sunglasses to show me his sleepless eyes, their brown orbs swimming in the colors of the first and last bars of the Colombian flag, “but now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing. So now I’m going to live my life. And I’m going to make some money. Real money. Chinese money.” I tried to be his friend and economic confidant for the duration of the ride, saying, “Mhh-mm, mhh-mm,” in the usual noncommittal tone I use with people I have nothing in common with, but when we got to my destination, he hit the brakes. “Salte, hijueputa!” he shouted. “Out! Out! Out!” I clambered out of the car, which squealed immediately in the opposite direction, the fare left uncollected.
The street was full of National Guard.
I had not seen any military on the streets since I left my apartment, but the Post-Human Services synagogue was entirely surrounded by armored personnel carriers and Guardsmen, whom my äppärät cheerfully identified as Wapachung Contingency. (In fact, upon closer inspection, the National Guard flags and insignia were almost completely scraped off their vehicles and uniforms; now these men were pure Wapachung.) They were protecting the doors of the building from a riotous horde of young people, apparently our just-fired employees, our beautiful Daltons, Logans, and Heaths, our Avas, Aidens, and Jaidens, who had tormented me in the Eternity Lounge and were now massed against Joshie’s synagogue, the very source of their identity, their ego, their dreams. My nemesis Darryl, the SUK DIK guy, was jumping around like a locust on fire, trying to get my attention. “Lenny!” he shouted to me, as I walked up to the Guardsmen at the door, had my äppärät scanned, and was curtly nodded admission. “Tell Joshie this isn’t fair! Tell Joshie I’ll work for half-salary. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings! I was going to stand up for you at the Miso Pig-Out in November. Come on, Lenny!”
I glanced at them from the top step of the synagogue’s entrance. How perfect they looked. How absolutely striking and up-to-the-minute and young. Even in the middle of calamity, their neuro-enhanced minds were working with alacrity, trying to solve the puzzle, trying to get back in. They had been prepared from an evolutionary perspective to lead exalted lives, and now civilization was folding up around them. Of all the rotten luck!
And then I was inside, the main sanctuary jammed by further Guardsmen in full battle regalia. The Boards were ticking madly as the bulk of our staff were getting their TRAIN CANCELED. The sound of flaps turning on five boards at once made it sound as if gangs of pigeons had flown into our headquarters to engage in winged combat. I stood before one of the stained-glass windows depicting the tribe of Judah, represented here by a lion and crown, and for the first time considered the fact that to several thousand people this had once been a temple.
A small remnant of our staff still haunted the offices, but their conversations were funereal and dense. No mention of pH levels or “SmartBlood” or “beta treatments.” The word “triglyceride” did not echo in the bathroom where we Post-Human Services men took our lengthy organic shits, straining to be free of whatever greenery tormented us. On the way up to Joshie’s, I stopped by Kelly Nardl’s desk. Empty. Gone. I reached instinctively for my äppärät to shoot her a message, but then realized all outside transmissions had ceased. Apropos of nothing, I felt scared for my parents again.
Two National Guardsmen stood outside Joshie’s office. The emergency feed of my äppärät must have alerted them to my importance, because they stepped aside and opened the door for me. There he was. Joshie. Budnik. Papi chulo. Under siege in his minimalist office as the young voices outside brayed for his SmartBlood. I made out the uncreative and juvenile “Hey, hey / Ho, ho, / Joshie Goldfuck’s gotta go,” and the much more hurtful “Our jobs are gone, / Our dream’s been sold, / But one day, jerk, / You will get old.” Joshie was wearing a gold yuan symbol around his neck, trying to look young, but his posture looked embattled, the skin of his earlobes sagged in a peculiar way, and a Nile delta of purple veins ran down the left side of his nose. When we hugged, the slight tremor of his hands beat against my back. “How’s Eunice?” he said immediately.
“She’s upset,” I said. “She thinks her sister may have been in Tompkins Park, for some reason. She can’t get in touch with her family in Jersey. There’s a checkpoint at the George Washington. They’re not letting anyone pass. And she’s angry with me. I mean, we’re actually not speaking to each other.”
“Good, good,” Joshie mumbled, staring out the window.
“What about you? How are you taking all this?”
“Minor setback,” he said.
“Minor setback? It’s the fall of the Roman Empire out there.”
“Don’t be dramatic, chipmunk,” Joshie said. “I’m going to pay off these young bucks with preferred stock, and when we’re back on our feet I’ll rehire them all.”
As he spoke, his energy returned, his earlobes actually tightened up and moved into position. “Hey, listen, Rhesus!” he said. “I bet this is going to be good for us in the long run. This is a controlled demise for the country, a planned bankruptcy. Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate everything but real estate. Rubenstein’s just a figurehead at this point. The Congress is just for show: ‘Look, we still have a Congress!’ Now more responsible parties are going to step in. All that stuff about Venezuelan and Chinese warships is all bunk. Nobody’s going to invade. But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly to Singapore or Beijing, and then they’re going to make an IMF recovery plan for America, divide the country into concessions, and hand them over to the sovereign wealth funds. Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, all that jazz.”
“No more America?” I asked, not really caring about the answer. I just wanted to be safe.
“Fuck that. A better America. The Norsemen, the Chinese, they’re going to want returns on their investment. They’re going to want to clear out our trophy cities of all the riffraff with no Credit and make them real lifestyle hubs. And who’s going to profit from that? Staatling-Wapachung, that’s who. Property, security, and then us. Immortality. The Rupture’s created a whole new demand for not dying. I can see StatoilHydro, the Norwegians, getting together with Staatling. Maybe a merger! Yeah, that’s the way to do it. The Norwegians have euros and renminbi to burn.”
“What do you mean, get rid of all the riffraff with no Credit?”
“Relocate them.” He took an excited sip of green tea. “This town’s not for everyone. We have to be competitive. That means doing more with less. Balancing our ledgers.”
“A black man at my bank said it’s all Staatling-Wapachung’s fault,” I said, trying to tap into the liberal hierarchy of “a black man said.”
“What’s our fault?”
“I don’t know. We bombed the ferry. Three hundred dead. My friend Noah. Remember what you told me right before the Rupture. That Vishnu and Grace were going to be okay. But you said you didn’t know who Noah was.”
“What are you saying?” Joshie leaned in, elbows on his desk. “Are you accusing me of something?”
I kept quiet, played the role of the hurt son.
“Look, I’m sorry that your friend is dead,” Joshie went on. “All these deaths were tragic. The ferry, the parks. Obvi. But at the same time, who were all these Media people, what did they bring to the table?”
I coughed into my hand, a painful chill across my body, as if an iceberg had stabbed me in the anus.
I had never told Joshie that Noah was Media.
“Spreading useless rumors. Secure Screening Facilities Upstate. Yeah, right. Rubenstein’s government couldn’t organize a clambake on a mussel shoal. Lenny, you know the score. You’re not dumb. We’re working on something important here. We’ve put so much into this place. You and I. And look at it now. It’s a real game-changer. Whoever’s in charge tomorrow, Norwegians, Chinese, they want what we got. This isn’t some stupid äppärät app. This is eternity. This is the heart of the creative economy.”
“Fuck the creative economy,” I said, without thinking. “There’s no food downtown.”
One instant. His hand. My cheek. The parameters of the world moving sixty degrees to the left and then buzzing into stillness. I felt my own hand rising to my face without knowing I had moved it.
He had slapped me.
I suppose the memory of the first paternal slap surfaced somewhere in the back pocket of my soul, Papa Abramov’s hand parting the air before it, the wide boxer stance of his feet as if he were going after a two-hundred-pound bruiser and not a nine-year-old kid, but for some reason all I could think about was that I would turn forty in November. In three months I would be a forty-year-old man who had just been slapped by his friend, his boss, his secondary father.
And then I was upon him. Across the desk, its sharp ridges slicing at my stomach, the scruff of his silky black T-shirt in both of my hands, his face, his humid, scared face thrust into mine, the gentle brownness of his eyes, the expressiveness, that funny Jewish face that could turn sad on a dime, everything we had done together, all those battle plans hatched over trays of safflower-oil-fried vegan samosas.
One hand let go of his T-shirt, a fist was cocked. I either did this or didn’t. I either chose this final path or put my fist down. But what did I have other than Joshie? Could he still pull this together after everything that had happened? Didn’t the Renaissance eventually follow the fall of Rome?
Could I really punch this man?
I had waited too long. Joshie was gently removing my remaining hand from his T-shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Oh my God. I can’t believe I did that. It’s the stress. I’m stressed. My cortisol levels. Jesus. Trying to put on a brave face. But of course I’m scared too.”
I backed off. Moved to the edge of the room like a punished child, felt the alpha rays of Joshie’s fiberglass Buddha stroking my being. “Okay, okay,” Joshie was saying. “Go home for the day. Give my love to Eunice. Tell Joe Schechter outside I can take him back at half-pay, but Darryl is finished. Come back tomorrow. We’re got so much work ahead. I need you too, you know. Don’t look at me like that. Of course I need you.”
I stopped by the A-OK Pizza Shack, and cleared out the few things they had left, three precious pizzas and calzones warm to the touch, all for sixty yuan. As I stepped outside, the light hit me, the Noah light, the light that floods the city and leaves nothing but itself, the urban rapture. I closed my eyes, thinking that when I opened them the last week would simply fall away. Instead, what I saw was that abominable creature. That fucking otter, right in the middle of Grand Street, chewing on something in the asphalt. I grabbed a heavy calzone, ready to club my furry antagonist. But no, it wasn’t an otter. It was just someone’s escaped pet rabbit enjoying the new solitude, feasting on his street meal while spasmodically brushing back his ears with one paw, reminding me of Noah enjoying the fullness of his hair. The clouds came, and Noah’s urban light turned to shadow the density of slate. My friend was gone.
A pair of shoe-filled suitcases awaited me by the door, but Eunice herself was in neither the living room nor the bedroom. Was she finally moving out? I searched 700 of the 740 square feet that constituted my nest-nothing. Finally, I was clued in by the running water in the bathroom and, once I strained my hearing beyond the whir of a passing helicopter, the soft wailing of a broken woman.
I opened the door. She was shuddering and hiccupping, two bottles of spent Presidente beer by her feet and the remainder of a half-drained bottle of vodka. Do not give in to pity, I told myself. Hold the anger of the past week, hold it tight in your chest. Rise above the ritual humiliations. You’re the richest man in Chinatown. She has done nothing for you. You can do better. Let the world fall apart, there is more to be gained in solitude now. Untether yourself from this eighty-six-pound albatross. Remember how she wouldn’t comfort you after Noah had died.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to drink anything grain-based,” I told Eunice, nodding at the spent alcohol, the most I have ever seen her drink.
The “fuck you” I had expected didn’t come. Her shaking continued, steady as a dying animal thumping against the cheaply tiled bathroom floor. She was whispering in English and Korean. “Appa, why?” she beseeched her father. Or maybe it was merely her non-functioning äppärät. I never realized the similarity between the device that ruled our world and the Korean word for “father.” The T-shirt she was wearing, an ironic “Baghdad Tourist Authority” tee, was my own, and that strange connection-Eunice covered in my own garb-made me want to fold my own arms around her, made me want to feel myself on her. I picked her up-even the small weight of her pinched my prostate, but the rest of me felt blessed-and carried her to our bed, catching a whiff of her alcohol breath along with the strawberry integrity of her just-washed hair. She had washed for me. “I brought pizza,” I said. “And spinach calzones. That’s all that’s out there right now. Nothing organic.”
She was shuddering with such intensity that I grew worried from a medical standpoint. Her body, that nothing, shook in little round motions of spent energy. I touched her blazing forehead.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Have some Motrin. Eat a pizza. Drink water. Alcohol makes you dehydrated.”
“I know that,” she whispered in between shudders, and I hoped that maybe it was a sign of her displeasure returning. But she continued to quiver, her face a pale freckled mask twisted to the left as if by seizure. A child, just a child. “Len,” she spoke. Water pooled inside the dimple of her chin. “Lenny. I’m…” She was sorry. Just like Joshie. A decision was drawing upon me. A final one. My lips pursed to form the first words of a fateful sentence. I held them pursed for now. I suppose I could have started telling her about all the different ways in which she needed to change in order for us to be happy together, but it would be pointless. I had either to accept the girl cradled in my arms, or to spend the rest of my time searching for something else.
Her trembling increased, and she turned around in my grasp, letting me feel the heavy beating of her spine against my chest. I could see her bones draped within my T-shirt, and in her convulsions I made out the dynamic aspects of her skeleton. She wailed from a place so deep that I could only connect it with somewhere across the seas, and from a time when our nations were barely formed. For the first time since we’d met, I realized that Eunice Park, unlike others of her generation, was not completely ahistorical. I cradled the softness of her behind, her one concession to being a woman. It steadied her, my open-palmed touch. I moved down and popped off her TotalSurrenders. The taste was the same as always-not sweet like honey, as urban musicians may claim, but musky and thick and vaguely urinary. I put my mouth around her, and just lay there motionless, waiting for the tremors to subside, for sleep to come to both of us, forgetting the pizza-hunger gnawing at my center. I was thinking about the word “truth.” Whatever else could be said of Eunice Park, she was perfectly true.