WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE:
Sender: Joshie Goldmann, Post-Human Services, Administrative
Recipient: Eunice Park
I have to say I was a little hurt by your last message. If you didn’t want to pursue a relationship, then why did you go home with me? I think you don’t fully comprehend how I feel about you, Eunice. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it, and I think I’ve sort of come to some conclusions. You’re very beautiful, but that doesn’t really matter to me in the long run. Everything about you is so perfect, so squared away (from the way you dress to the minimum amount of words you use to express yourself), but that doesn’t matter either. What matters to me is that I KNOW you are capable of love, that you cannot hide forever from the truth of being a full emotional human being with a need to connect, with a need to be with someone who can understand you and where you come from, respect you, and take care of you. And that’s what I want to do, Eunice, to take care of you, forever and ever. I want to help you become a full-fledged artist, even if that means you have to spend time away from me, studying Art amp; Finance at HSBC-Goldsmiths in London. I want to get you a job in Retail, if that’s what you want, once New York becomes a full Lifestyle Hub and we start to get back on our feet. And yes, I want to help your family to resettle in the city, but please just give me some time to see what I can do. The situation is still very fluid.
You say Lenny is your boyfriend. I’ve known Lenny since he was a young adult like you. He’s not a bad person, but he’s also very conflicted, impotent, and depressive. Those are not the qualities you want to look for in a serious partner, not today, not with the world in the shape it’s in. I want you to consider all these things, Eunice, and to know that, whatever you decide, I will always love you.
Joshie (never Joshua) G.
P.S. Just a heads-up, but there is going to be some activity in your area in a month or so, what the ARA used to call “Harm Reduction,” in the Vladeck Houses. Nothing I have any control over, believe me, but there might be violence. I want you and Lenny to be safe. I’m thinking maybe that’s when I’ll send him to Long Island to see his folks and you and I can have a slumber party.
24 DEAF CHILD AREA
Dear Diary,
Please forgive another month-long absence, but today I have to write in you with the greatest of news. My parents are alive. I found out five days ago, at 5:54 p.m. EST, the precise time Telenor, the Norwegian telecommunications giant, restored our communications and our äppäräti started whirring with data, prices, Images, and calumny; 5:54 p.m. EST, a time no one of my generation will ever forget. My parents’ voices filled my ears immediately, the baritone insanity of my father’s happy booms, the titter and laughter of my mother as they shouted: “Malen’kii, malen’kii! Zhiv, zdorov? Zhiv, zdorov!” (“Little one, little one! Alive and well? Alive and well!”). I hollered in such a way (“Urá!”) that Eunice became scared. She moved to the bathroom, where I could hear her verballing into her äppärät in a monotone English mixed together with an endless procession of passionate Korean honks directed at her mother: “Neh, neh, umma, neh.” And so the two of us celebrated with our parents, reconnected to them so strongly that when Eunice came into the bedroom and we faced each other, there was almost nothing to say in our common tongue. We found ourselves laughing at our stunned, merry silence, me wiping my tears, her with her hands pressed to the hardness of her chest.
The Abramovs. Surviving, scavenging, setting up their own roadblocks with Mr. Vida and the other neighbors while the world came undone around them, being hard-boiled working-class immigrants, designed by an angry God for a calamity of precisely this magnitude. How could I have doubted their tenacious hold on life? According to the stressful GlobalTeens messages they sent me right after we finished verballing, the security situation in Westbury was relatively normal, but the pharmacy had been ransacked and the heavily guarded Waldbaum’s supermarket was out of Tagamet, my father’s remedy against heartburn and his chronic peptic ulcers. So it was a happy surprise when I got a note, a handwritten note, from Joshie:
Rhesus Monkey! Be a good son and go visit your parents. I’m reserving some crack Wapachung security people for you on Monday. They’ll escort you out to Long Island. Stay away from those boiled Russian meats! And don’t get too excited, okay? I’m looking out for your epinephrine levels like a hawk.
I was met outside the Post-Human Services synagogue by two armored Hyundai Persimmon jeeps sporting enormous hood-mounted weaponry, probably leftovers from our ill-fated Venezuelan adventure. Our expedition leader seemed to be of Venezuela vintage as well, one Major J. M. Palatino of Wapachung Contingency, a small but powerfully put-together man smelling of middle-class cologne and horses. He surveyed me with professional eyes, quickly concluded that I was soft and in need of protection, slapped his sides militarily, and introduced his team of two young armed guys, both remnants of the Nebraskan National Guard, one missing the better half of his hand.
“Here’s the game plan,” Palatino said. “We follow the major arteries and hope there haven’t been any flare-ups along the way. We’re talking about I-495 here, the old Long Island Expressway. Don’t expect much trouble there. Then we swing over to the Northern and Wantagh Parkways. That could be trickier, depending on who’s in charge at this point in the day.”
“I thought that would be us,” I said.
“There’s still sporadic enemy-combatant activity after Little Neck. Nassau warlords fighting Suffolk warlords. Ethnic stuff. Salvadorans. Guatemalans. Nigerians. Got to tread lightly. Anyway, we’re armed to the teeth here, so no worries. We’ve got a heavy.50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun on the lead vehicle and AT4 anti-armor on both. Nothing even comes close out there. Expect we’ll be in Westbury at 1400 hours.”
“Three hours to drive thirty miles?”
“I didn’t create this world, sir,” Palatino said. “I’m just along for the ride. We’ve got Oslo Delight sandwiches for you in the back. You cool with lingonberry jam? Enjoy.”
At the entrance to the expressway, Wapachung troops were screening cars for weapons and contraband, throwing unlucky five-jiao men on the ground, and prodding them with weapons, the whole scene oddly quiet and methodical and reminiscent of the near-distant past. “It’s like the American Restoration Authority out here,” I said to the major. “Nothing’s changed but the uniforms.”
“You don’t just disband a force overnight,” Palatino said. “We’d have a situation like out in Missouri.”
“What’s in Missouri?” I asked.
He waved his hand at me as if to say: It’s better not to know. We turned our backs on Manhattan and rolled past the ugly gigantism of LeFrak City, a collection of buildings that, with their rows of balconies on both ends, resembled soot-covered accordions. These housing projects were riddled with Russian immigrants, and my parents had always thought that one more step down on the economic ladder would bring us directly to LeFrak, where, according to my mother, we would all be killed. She was something of a seer, Galya Abramov.
The grounds of the LeFrak development were littered with homemade tents. People were lying on mattresses on a pedestrian overpass, the acrid smell of bad meat being grilled wafting down below. As we passed LeFrak City (“Live a Little Better” its heartfelt mid-twentieth-century motto), the Manhattan-bound side of the Long Island Expressway became an endless jumble of cars slowly maneuvering around men, women, and children of all possible persuasions compliantly carting their belongings in suitcases and shopping trolleys. “Lots of folks going west,” Palatino said, as we crawled forward past a gaggle of poor middle-class cars, tiny Samsung Santa Monicas and the like, children and mothers huddled over one another in back. “The closer to the city, the better. Even if you have to work a five-jiao line. Work is work.”