Anyway, I feel so totally, like, weird opening up my heart like this to you, because what I feel for YOU and for YOUR FAMILY IN FORT LEE AND THEIR WELL-BEING, is so strong and without reservation, that I fear it might make you run away from me. I’m sorry if that’s the case. But if it’s not, please let me know and we’ll just do some drawing together, no strings attached. Better than hanging out at miserable 575 Grand Street, right? Ha ha ha.
Love,
Your Joshie
22 FIVE-JIAO MEN
Dear Diary,
My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect.
It’s been almost a month since my last diary entry. I am so sorry. But I can’t connect in any meaningful way to anyone, even to you, diary. Four young people committed suicide in our building complexes, and two of them wrote suicide notes about how they couldn’t see a future without their äppäräti. One wrote, quite eloquently, about how he “reached out to life,” but found there only “walls and thoughts and faces,” which weren’t enough. He needed to be ranked, to know his place in this world. And that may sound ridiculous, but I can understand him. We are all bored out of our fucking minds. My hands are itching for connection, I want to connect to my parents and to Vishnu and Grace, I want to mourn Noah with them. But all I have is Eunice and my Wall of Books. So I try to Celebrate What I Have, one of my prime directives.
Work has been good. Kind of a blur, but even a blur is better than the slow churn of reality. Mostly I work alone at my desk with a half-turned bowl of miso by my side. I haven’t really spent time with Joshie since The Slap. He’s off somewhere, negotiating with the IMF or the Norwegians or the Chinese or whoever still gives a damn. Howard Shu, dork that he is, has become the standard-bearer for the few of us still left at Post-Human. He walks around with an old-fashioned clipboard and actually tells us what to do. Before the Rupture, we would never have stood for anything so hierarchical, but now we’re just glad to have instructions, even barked ones. My job for the time being is to send out Wapachung emergency frequency messages to our clients, making sure they’re safe, but also subtly checking up on their businesses, their marriages, their children, their finances. Making sure we’re safe and that our monthly dues keep coming.
It’s not going to be easy. No one’s working. The teachers aren’t getting paid, is what I hear. No school. Children set loose and free into the difficult new city. I found a Vladeck House kid, maybe ten or twelve, sitting by the Arab bodega, licking out the inside of an empty bag of something called “Clük,” which the packaging warned was “inspired by real chicken flava!” When I sat down next to him, he could barely lift his eyes up to mine. Out of instinct, I took out my äppärät and pointed it at the kid, as if that would make things right. Then I took out a brown twenty-yuan note and set it at his feet. Immediately, his hand darted for it. The bill was scrunched into his fist. The fist was hidden behind his back. His face slowly turned to face mine. The brown-eyed look he gave me was not one of gratitude. The look said: Leave me alone with my newfound fortune or I will lash out at you with the last strength I have. I left him there with his fist behind his back, his eyes on my departing feet.
I don’t know what’s going on. The city is either completely finished or already shooting for redemption. New signs are going up. “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?”
As far as I can tell, the most significant forms of employment around Manhattan are the “Staatling-Wapachung Works Progress” sites promising “One hour honest labor = 5-jiao coin. Nutritious lunch served.” Rows of men cracking open asphalt, digging ditches, filling in ditches with cement. These five-jiao men roam the city, hands in pockets, useless vestigial äppäräti plugs in their ears, like a pride of voiceless lions. They’re middle-aged to younger, sparse hair bleached by the sun, tyrannical sunburns on their face and neck, expensive T-shirts bought in happier days, new Antarcticas of perspiration spreading down to the stomach. Shovels, picks, loud exhalations, not even grunts anymore, to save energy. I saw Noah’s old friend Hartford Brown, who only a few months ago was getting reamed on a yacht in the Antilles, working a five-jiao line on Prince Street. He looked cracked, half of him bronzed, the other half peeling, that slightly pudgy face of his devoid of all texture, like a thick slice of prosciutto. If they can make a fabulous gay man work like that, I thought, what can they do to the rest of us?
I went up close to him as he swung his pick, felt his rank odor battering its way into my nostrils. “Hartford,” I said. “It’s Lenny Abramov. Noah’s friend.” A terrible exhale from a terrible place inside him. “Hartford!” He turned away. Someone with a megaphone was yelling, “Let’s do get back to work, Brownie!” I handed him a hundred-yuan note, which he accepted, also without thanks, and then he went back to swinging his pick. “Hartford,” I said. “Hey! You don’t have to work now. A hundred yuan is two hundred hours of work. Take it easy. Get some rest. Get some shade.” But he just went on swinging mechanically, avoiding my presence, already back into his world, which began with the pick behind his shoulder and ended with the pick in the ground.
Back home, Eunice took charge of organizing the relief efforts for the older people. I don’t know why. The stirrings of her Christian background? Sorrow over not being able to help her own parents? I’m just going to take it at face value.
She went from floor to floor in each of our four co-op buildings, a total of eighty floors, knocked on each door, and if there were older people she took down their food and water needs and made sure the supplies were brought down the next week in one of Joshie’s Staatling-Wapachung Service convoys. Why is he helping us? I suppose he feels guilty about Noah and the ferry, or maybe about The Slap. In any case, we need what he’s got.
She delivered the water herself-with my sporadic help-to each apartment, she made sure all the windows and doors were open to improve circulation, she sat there and listened to the old people cry about their children and grandchildren who were scattered around the country and for whom they feared the worst, she asked me to interpret certain Yiddish words (“that farkakteh Rubenstein,” “that shlemiel Rubenstein,” “that little pisher Rubenstein”), but mostly she sat with them and hugged them as their tears pollinated the dusty throw rugs and embattled last-century carpets. When the older women (most of our aged residents are widows) smelled particularly bad, she would clean their dirty bathtubs, help the shaky old ladies inside, and wash them. It was a task I found particularly repulsive-how I feared one day having to care for my parents in so thoughtful and tactile a manner, as Russian tradition expected of me-but Eunice, who despised any alien smell coming from our refrigerator or the rankness of my toenails after several missed pedicures, did not flinch, did not turn away from the sunken, splotched flesh in her hands.