“Oh, no,” I said.
“Vishnu and I got permanent residency in Stability. We’re moving to Vancouver in three weeks.”
I felt the rice expanding in my throat and coughed into my hand. I beheld the terms I was given. Grace. The woman who had loved me the most. Had listened to me for the past fifteen years, me with all that melancholy and dysthymia. Vancouver. A northern city, far away.
Grace’s arms were around me, and I breathed in her conditioner and her impending motherhood. She was abandoning me. Did she still love me? Even Chekhov’s ugly Laptev had an admirer, a woman named Polina, “very thin and plain, with a long nose.” After Laptev marries the young and beautiful Julia, Polina tells him:
“And so you are married… But don’t be uneasy; I’m not going to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart. Only it’s annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one else; that what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but simply a body, good looks, and youth… Youth!”
I wanted Grace to hiss similar words at me, to confront me once again for loving someone so young and inexperienced, and to make me consider being with her instead of Eunice. But, of course, she didn’t.
And that made me angry.
“So how did you guys get Canadian residency?” I asked her, not even bothering to modulate the acidity of my tone. “I thought it was impossible. The waiting list is over twenty-three million.”
“We got lucky,” she said. “And I have a degree in econometrics. That helps.”
“Gracie,” I pressed on, “Noah told me a while ago that Vishnu collaborated with the ARA, with the Bipartisans.”
She didn’t say anything, ate her kimbap. A man and woman conversing in a rolling foreign language walked behind a dirty mountain of a Saint Bernard whose tongue was dragging along the ground from the Indian-summer heat. Behind a scrim of trees a group of five-jiao men were digging a ditch. One had clearly disobeyed, because his leader was now approaching him bearing something glinty and long. The five-jiao guy was on his knees, his hands covering his long, matted blond hair. I tried to shield Grace’s view with my plastic cup of watermelon juice and prayed there wouldn’t be violence. “I’m sure it’s not true,” I continued, picking grass off my jeans as if this were any other conversation. “I know Vishnu’s a good guy.”
“I don’t want to talk about these things,” Grace said. “You know, the three of you were always pretty strange friends. The boys. Like in books. With all that swagger and camaraderie. But that was never going to work. When you were apart you were real people, but when you were together you were like a cartoon.”
I sighed and put my head in my hands.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “I know you loved Noah. That’s no way to speak of the dead. And I don’t know what happened with the ARA and who did what. I just know that there’s no future for us here. And there’s no future for you either, when you think about it. Why don’t you come to Canada with us?”
“I don’t seem to have your connections,” I said, too roughly.
“You have a business degree,” she said. “That could put you at the front of the list. You should try to get to the Quebec border. You can take an armored Fung Wah bus. If you make it across legally, the Canadians have a special category. I think it’s something like ‘Landed Immigrants.’ We can hire a lawyer on the other side to get to work for you.”
“They’ll never let Eunice in,” I said. “Her education is worthless. Major in Images, minor in Assertiveness.”
“Lenny,” Grace said. Her face was near mine, and her vocal breathing kept pace with the exhale of the wind and the trees. Her hand was upon my cheek, and all the worries of my life were cupped and held within. A dull thud echoed behind the trees, metal connecting with scalp, but there was no whimper, just the distant, mirage-like sight of a body fully lowering itself to the ground. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re not going to make it.”
Late October. A few days after my lunch with Grace, Eunice verballed me at work and told me to come down immediately. “They’re throwing us all out,” she said. “Old people, everyone. That asshole.” I did not have time to ascertain who the asshole was. I hijacked a company Town Car and raced downtown to find my inglorious red-brick hulk of a building surrounded by flat-bottomed young men in khakis and oxfords, and three Wapachung Contingency armored personnel carriers, their crews lounging peaceably beneath an elm tree, guns at their feet. My aged fellow cooperators had filled the ample park-like grounds around our buildings with their helter-skelter belongings, heavy on decrepit credenzas, deflated black leather couches, and framed photographs of their chubby sons and grandsons attacking river trout.
I found a young guy in the standard-issue chinos and an ID that read “Staatling Property Relocation Services.” “Hey,” I said, “I work for Post-Human Services. What the fuck? I live in one of these units. Joshie Goldmann’s my boss.”
“Harm Reduction,” he said, giving me an actual pout with those fat red lips.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re too close to the river. Staatling’s tearing these down tomorrow. In case of flooding. Global warming. Anyways, Post-Human has space for its employees uptown.”
“That’s bull crap,” I said. “You’re just going to build a bunch of Triplexes here. Why lie, pal?”
He walked away from me, and I followed through the jumble of old women propelling themselves out of the lobby on walkers, some of the more able-bodied babushkas pushing the wheelchair-bound, a collective crooning, heavier on depression than outrage, forming a kind of aural tent over the exile-in-progress. All the younger, angrier people who lived in the co-ops were probably at work. That’s why they were throwing us out at noon.
I was ready to grab the young Staatling guy’s head and to start bashing it against the cement of my beloved building, my homely refuge, my simple home. I could feel my father’s anger finding a righteous target. There was something Abramovian in this buzz in my head, in the continual teetering between aggression and victimhood. “The Joys of Playing Basketball.” Masada. Grabbing the young man by one skinny shoulder, I said to him, “Wait a second, friend. You don’t own this place. This is private property.”
“Are you kidding, Grandpa?” he said, easily throwing off my almost-forty-year-old grip. “You touch me again, I swear I’ll ass-plug you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about this like human beings.”
“I am talking like a human being. You’re the one being a bitch. You’ve got one day to get all your shit out or it’s going down with the building.”
“I’ve got books in there.”
“Who?”
“Printed, bound media artifacts. Some of them very important.”
“I think I just refluxed my lunch.”
“Okay, what about them?” I said, pointing to my elderly neighbors, shuffling out into the sunlight, widows in straw boaters and sundresses with perhaps but a few years to live.
“They’re being moved into abandoned housing in New Rochelle.”
“New Rochelle? Abandoned housing? Why not just take them straight to the abattoir? You know these old people can’t make it outside New York.”
The young man rolled his eyes. “I can’t be having this conversation,” he said.
I ran into my familiar lobby, with the twin pines of the cooperative movement inlaid into the shiny, carefully waxed floor. Old people were sitting atop tied-up bundles, awaiting instructions, awaiting deportation. Inside the elevator, two uniformed Wapachung men were carrying out an old woman, Bat Mitzvah-style, on the very chair she had been sitting on, her puffy, sniffling visage too much for me to bear. “Mister, mister,” some of her friends were chanting, withered arms reaching out to me. They knew me from the worst of the Rupture, when Eunice used to come and wash them down, hold their hands, give them hope. “Can’t you do something, mister? Don’t you know somebody?”