Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online Page A

everything else besides.
     

     
    After her shift was over, I took her down the street to visit my outsize loft and, in ridiculous Russian fashion, immediately told her that I loved her.
    I don’t think she heard me, but she was impressed by my lifestyle.
    “Dang, jumbo,” Rouenna said, her husky voice bouncing off the hangar-sized living space. “I think I finally made it.” She looked around my small collection of artworks. “Why you got all these giant dicks around the house?”
    “Those sculptures? Oh, I guess they’re all part of a Brancusian motif.”
    “You a fudge-packer?”
    “A what? Oh, no. Although homosexuals do number among my friends.”
    “What did you just say?”
    “Homosexuals—”
    “Jesus Christ, man. Who
are
you?” She laughed and punched me full-on in the gut. “Just kidding,” she said. “I’m playing hard to get with you, is all.”
    “Keep playing,” I said, smiling and rubbing my stomach. “I like to play.”
    “Where ya sleep, jumbo? You mind if I keep calling you that?”
    “At college they called me Snack Daddy. Here are stairs that go up to my bed.”
    My bed was a kind of muscular Swedish plank that grudgingly accommodated my bulk à la carte but grunted pathetically when both Rouenna and I tumbled upon it. I wanted to explain to her yet again, though this time in detail, that I loved her, but she was immediately kissing me on the mouth and rubbing my breasts and bellies with both hands. She unbuckled my pants, letting out a gust of stale trapped air. She drew back and looked at me sadly.
Oh, no,
I thought. But all she said was “You sweet.”
    “I am?” I lay down on the bed completely. I was sweating and jiggling obscenely.
    “A heartbreaker,” she said.
    “No, I’m not,” I said. “I’ve never even really been with a girl before. At college I only got a few hand jobs. And I’m twenty-five, almost.”
    “You a nice, nice man, that’s what you are. You treat me like a queen. I’m gonna be your queen, that all right, Snack Daddy?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Show me what you got for mommy.” She started to pull hard on the billowing square sail I used as underwear.
    “No, please,” I said, holding on to my goods with both hands. “I have a problem.”
    “Your boy too big for me?” Rouenna asked. “It’s never too big for mommy.” I tried to explain to her about the zealous Hasids and their low-paid proxies at the public hospital, the butchers of Crown Heights. Tell me, please, who in their right mind circumcises a fat eighteen-year-old man-child in an operating room reeking of mildew and fried rice?
    I fought with all my mass, but Rouenna overpowered me. My underwear ripped in two. The crushed purple insect shyly drew its head back into its neck.
    It would seem to the untrained eye that the
khui
’s knob had been unscrewed from its proper position and then screwed back into place by incompetents so that now it listed at an angle of about thirty degrees to the right, while the knob and the
khui
proper were apparently held in place by nothing more than patches of skin and thread. Purple and red scars had created an entire system of mountain-ridge highways running from the scrotum to the tip, while the bottom had been so eviscerated by post-op infection that instead of being smooth, taut skin, it looked like a series of empty garbage bags fluttering in the wind. I suppose the crushed-insect comparison had worked best when my
khui
was still covered with blood on the operating table. Now my genitalia looked more like an abused iguana.
    Rouenna bent forward with the globe of her stomach and rubbed my
khui
with that soft surface. I thought maybe that was the only way she was capable of touching it, but I was wrong. She bent down with her open mouth and breathed on it for a while. My
khui
straightened out and crept toward her waiting orifice.
Stop it!
I told myself.
You’re a disgusting creature. You don’t deserve this.
    But Rouenna didn’t put my
khui
in