I’ll send you the flight info soon as I can. You don’t have to pick me up or anything. Just tell me where to go.
I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable, Lenny Abramov, but my freckles really miss you.
Eunice
P.S. Have you been brushing like I showed you? It’s good for you and cuts down on bad breath.
P.P.S. I thought you were pretty cute on your friend Noah’s stream but you should really try to get off “101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For.” That guy with the SUK DIK overalls is just being cruel to you. You are not a “greasy old schlub,” whatever that means, Lenny. You should stand up for yourself.
9 TOTAL SURRENDER
Dear Diary,
Oh my God, oh my God, Oh My God! She’s here. Eunice Park is in New York. Eunice Park is in my apartment! Eunice Park is sitting NEXT TO ME on my couch while I’m writing this. Eunice Park: a tiny fragment of a human being in purple leggings, pouting at something terrible I may have done, anger in her wrinkled forehead, the rest of her absorbed by her äppärät, checking out expensive stuff on AssLuxury. I am close to her. I am surreptitiously smelling the garlic on her breath, diary. I’m smelling a lunch of Malaysian anchovies and I think I’m about to have a heart attack. Oh, what’s wrong with me? Everything, sweet diary. Everything is wrong with me and I am the happiest man alive!
When she teened me she was coming to NYC, I rushed out to the corner bodega and asked for an eggplant. They said they had to order it on their äppärät, so I waited twelve hours by the door, and when it came my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t do anything with it. I just stuck it in the freezer (by accident) and then went out on the balcony and started to weep. From joy, of course!
On the morning of the first day of my real life, I threw out the frozen eggplant, and put on my cleanest, most conservative cotton shirt, which became a monsoon of nervous sweat before I even left for the door. To dry off a little and gain perspective, I sat down and pondered Point No. 3: Love Eunice, the way my parents always sat down before a long trip to pray for a safe journey in their primitive Russian way. Lenny! I said aloud. You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself at all. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn. If you don’t pull this off, if you hurt this poor girl in any way, you will not be worthy of immortality. But if you harness her warm little body to yours and make her smile, if you show her that adult love can overcome childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom. Joshie may slam the door on you, may watch your heartbeat stutter to a stop in some public hospital bed, but how could anyone deny Eunice Park? How could any god wish her less than eternal youth?
I wanted to meet Eunice at JFK, but it turns out that you can’t even get close to the airport without a plane ticket anymore. The cabbie left me at the third American Restoration Authority checkpoint on the Van Wyck, where the National Guard had set up a greeting area, a twenty-foot camouflaged tarp beneath which a crowd of poor middle-class folk huddled in anticipation of their relatives. I almost missed her flight because a part of the Williamsburg Bridge had collapsed and we spent an hour trying to turn around on Delancey Street next to a hasty new ARA sign that said “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge.”
While we were pulling up to the checkpoint, my äppärät came through with another bit of wonderful news. Nettie Fine is alive and well! She teened me, using a new secure address. “Lenny, I’m so sorry if I brought you down when I saw you in Rome. My kids tell me sometimes I can be a real ‘Nervous Nettie.’ I just wanted to let you know things aren’t so bad! There’s good news on my desk all the time. There’s real change back home. The poor people thrown out of their homes are getting organized just like in the Great Depression. These ex-National Guard boys are building cabins in the parks and protesting that they don’t have their Venezuela bonuses. I can just feel a burst of bottom-up energy! Media isn’t covering it, but you go take a look in Central Park and tell me what you see. Maybe the reign of Jeffrey Otter is finally behind us! xxx, Nettie Fine.” I teened her right back, telling her that I would go see the Low Net Worth people in the park and that I was in love with a girl named Eunice Park who (I anticipated Nettie’s first question) wasn’t Jewish but was perfect in every other way.
Filled with good tidings about my American mama, I waited for the UnitedContinentalDeltamerican bus, pacing nervously until the men with the guns began to look at me funny, then retreated into a makeshift Retail space by a dumpster, where I bought some wilting roses and a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne. My poor Eunice looked so tired when she huffed off the bus with her many bags that I nearly tackled her in a rejuvenating embrace, but I was careful not to make a scene, waving my roses and champagne at the armed men to prove that I had enough Credit to afford Retail, and then kissed her passionately on one cheek (she smelled of flight and moisturizer), then on the straight, thin, oddly non-Asian nose, then the other cheek, then back to the nose, then once more the first cheek, following the curve of freckles backward and forward, marking her nose like a bridge to be crossed twice. The champagne bottle fell out of my hands, but, whatever futuristic garbage it was made of, it didn’t break.
Confronted with this kind of crazy love, Eunice didn’t withdraw, nor did she return my ardor. She smiled at me with those full, purple lips of hers and those tired young eyes, abashed, and made a motion with her arms to indicate that the bags were heavy. They were, diary. They were the heaviest bags I’ve ever carried. The spiky heels of ladies’ shoes kept stabbing my abdomen, and a metal tin of unknown provenance, round and hard, bruised my hip.
The cab ride passed in near silence, both of us a little ashamed of the situation, each probably feeling guilty of something (my relative power; her youth), and mindful of the fact that we had spent less than a day together in total and that our commonalities had yet to be determined. “Isn’t this ARA shit totally crazy?” I whispered to her, as yet another checkpoint slowed us to a crawl.
“I don’t really know much about politics,” she said.
She was disappointed by my apartment, by how far it was from the F line and how ugly the buildings were. “Looks like I’ll get some exercise walking to the train,” she said. “Ha ha.” This was what her generation liked to add to the end of sentences, like a nervous tic. “Ha ha.”
“I’m really glad you’re here, Eunice,” I said, trying to keep everything I said both clear and honest. “I really missed you. I mean, it’s kind of weird…”
“I missed you too, nerd-face,” she said.
That single sentence hung in the air between us, the insult wedded to the intimacy. She had clearly surprised herself, and she didn’t know what to do, whether to add a “ha!” or a “ha ha” or just to shrug it off. I decided to take the initiative and sat down next to her on my chrome-and-leather couch, the kind that once graced luxury cruise ships in the 1920s and ’30s and made me wish I was someone else. She looked at my Wall of Books with a neutral expression, although by now my volumes mostly stank of Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast and not their natural printed essence. “I’m sorry you broke up with that guy in Italy,” I said. “You said on GlobalTeens he was really your type.”