Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online Page B

her mouth. She turned it over, found the most hideous spot on its underbelly—a vivid evocation of the bombing of Dresden—and, for the next 389 seconds (a handy clock helped me count), imparted upon it a single, silent kiss.
    My gaze traveled beyond the dark mound of her hair, past the Brancusian dicks lining the walls of my loft, and right out my double-pane windows.
    I floated above the city, glancing generously in each direction. The careless hooks and crags of Queens and Brooklyn, slivers of industry, quadrangles of brown-bricked terraced flats; the fanatic middle-class hopes of already half-darkened New Jersey tendering their resignation for the night; the carpeted grid of Manhattan sinking into the flat horizon, the garlands of yellow light—sharp, overreaching—that form the facades of skyscrapers, the garlands of yellow light—diffuse, flickering—that form the sprawl of tenements, the garlands of yellow light—swerving, opportunistic—that form the headlights of taxi caravans: the garlands of yellow light, aye, in their horizontal and vertical arrangements that form a final resting place for the collected hopes of our civilization.
    And to my father, I say:
I’m sorry, but this floating feeling, this yellow city at my feet, those full lips around what’s left of me, this is my happiness, Papa. This is
my
pierogi.
    And to the generals in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who have been patiently reading this tale of the Bronx mixed-race girl and the overweight Russian, I ask:
In what other country could we have found succor together? In what other country could we have even existed?
    And after getting down on my knobby knees, I say to the INS generals:
Please, sirs.
    I say to them like a child:
Please, please, please…

 
    5

    Among the Merry Mourners
    On the way home from the Russian Fisherman, my heart broken with news of Papa’s death, I squeezed in on the Rover’s back bench with Alyosha-Bob and wept into his neck, wiping my nose against his Accidental College sweatshirt. He draped both arms around my head and tickled the willowy hair around my bald spot. From afar it may have looked like an anaconda strangling a rodent, but it was really just my love spilling out over a dear friend. There was even something compassionate about Alyosha’s smell that evening—greasy summer sweat, the sharp pungency of fish highlighted by alcohol—and I found myself wanting to kiss his ugly lips. “
Nu, ladno, nu, ladno,
” he kept saying, which could be translated as “It’s going to be okay” or “So there it is” or, if you’re a less charitable translator, “Enough already.”
    To be honest, I wept not for my father but for the children. On the way home, we passed by a corner of Bolshoi Prospekt, where last winter I’d had a little breakdown for the stupidest of reasons. I had seen a dozen kindergarten pupils trying to cross the boulevard, each bundled in a jaunty collection of misshapen coats, their
shapkas
falling off their tiny heads, their feet encased in monstrous hand-me-down galoshes. A boy and a girl, one at the front and one in the back, held aloft giant red flags to warn motorists that they were deigning to cross. A young, pretty teacher was on hand to help them ambulate in the right direction. Who knows why—primordial memory, a sudden reprise of my stunted conscience, a big man’s evolutionary compassion for anything small—but I wept for the children that day.
    Diminutive, cherubic, Slavic, they stood by the teeming Bolshoi Prospekt with those idiotic red flags, their puffy faces producing small steam clouds that looked like little child-thoughts struggling in the monumental cold. The cars kept passing them, the rich man’s Audi and the poor man’s Lada. No one would pause to let them past. As we waited for the light to change, I opened my window and leaned out, blinking like a great Northern turtle in the chill, trying to read their faces. Were those smiles I saw?