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Utter nonsense. The children are our future only in the most narrow, transitive sense. They are our future until they too perish.
The phrase “I live for my kids,” for example, is tantamount to admitting that one will be dead shortly and that one’s life, for all practical purposes, is already over. “I’m gradually dying for my kids” would be more accurate.
I will need to re-grow my melting liver, replace the entire circulatory system with “smart blood,” and find someplace safe and warm (but not too warm) to while away the angry seasons and the holocausts.
and in the flowering of my own intelligence some 1032 years hence, when our universe decides to fold in on itself, my personality will jump through a black hole and surf into a dimension of unthinkable wonders,
“Oh, Lenny,” she said, a little sadly, for she must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death’s anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth.
Don’t get pissed at me, now. Remember, I started out just like you. Acting. The humanities. It’s the Fallacy of Merely Existing. FME. There’ll be plenty of time to ponder and write and act out later. Right now you’ve got to sell to live.”
I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I’m not in love with him.
When we were walking down this pretty street in Rome I noticed Lenny’s shirt was buttoned all wrong, and I just reached over and rebuttoned it. I just wanted to help him be less of a dork. Isn’t that a form of love too?
Speaking of money, I went to my HSBC on East Broadway, where a pretty Dominican girl with a set of dying teeth gave me a rundown of how my financial instruments were performing. In a word, shittily.
“If you want to be patriotic, you should take out a loan and buy another apar’men’ as an inves’men’.”
I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.
Joshie’s right about one thing: Good relationships make you healthier. And the point is not just being cared for, but learning to return that care.
I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity.
But, honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn’t I have been born to a better world?
An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.”
Men in civilian clothes zapped our bodies and our äppäräti with what looked like a small tubular attachment of an old-school Electrolux vacuum cleaner and asked us both to deny and to imply consent to what they were doing to us.
These parts of Staten Island, St. George and Tompkinsville, were once completely off the grid. Immigrants used to wash up here from Poland, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and especially Mexico. They worked the storefronts of their respective ethnic restaurants and also ran dusty groceries, check-cashing places, and twenty-centavo-a-minute phone booths.
Now, of course, the Sri Lankan place, the roaches, the somnolent minorities were gone, replaced by half-man, half-wireless bohemians ramming their baby strollers up and down the hump of Victory Boulevard, while kids from nearby New Jersey cruised past the outrageously priced Victorians in their Hyundai rice rockets, wishing they could work Media or Credit.
I wished that our crude words and endless posturing were code for affection and understanding. In some male societies, slang and ritualistic embraces form the entire culture, along with the occasional call to take up the spear.
The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons—it was systemic and it was complete. I
National Guardsmen were checking the äppäräti of the diverse crowd, Salvadorans and Irish and South Asians and Jews and whoever else had chosen to make this corner of central Long Island the rich, smelly tapestry it has now become.
Both my dad and Mr. Vida had been engineers in their homelands reduced to working-class life: big callused hands, small horny bodies, clever brown eyes, a thickly landscaped conservatism, and striving, hustling children, three for Mr. Vida to my father’s one.
He laughed, happy to demonstrate that, before he was forced to be a janitor in America, he had served as a quasi-intellectual and minor dandy on Moscow’s Arbat Street.
As for me, I have never been to Russia. I have not had the chance to learn to love it and hate it the way my parents have. I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
“WE ARE DEALING WITH FRONTLINE ISLAMOFASCIST TERRORISM.” QUOTE: “NOW IS THE TIME FOR SPENDING, SAVING, AND UNITY. ONE PARTY, ONE NATION, ONE GOD.”
That’s the Rubenstein strategy: The more Americans die, the less anyone cares. Redefine the normative down. Start digging the graves.”
I prefer the wintertime, when all is dead around me, and nothing buds, and the truth of eternity, so cold and dark, is revealed to the unfortunate acolytes of reality. And most of all I hate this particular summer, which has already left a hundred corpses in the park.
When will the Bipartisans realize that killing Low Net Worth Individuals will not reverse this country’s trade deficit or cure our balance-of-payment problems?”
“The ARA has tried a dozen different economic plans in as many months. Privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs. And the net result: bupkis. ‘The economy has still not achieved traction,’ to quote our beloved Fed chairman. As
A smart man, she had said proudly, but then the dead smile came on, as if to say, See how little “smart” means to me?
Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie! Accept your thoughts! Accept your desires! Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work—learn to choose. You are good enough, you are human enough, to choose!”
He spat a few more things, then became quiet, so quiet that he appeared to have deflated before my eyes, leaving behind only the dense, poisoned marrow of those whose entire lives are reduced to the acts of hurting and being hurt.
You know, he is so FULL of himself sometimes. He has this American white guy thing where life is always fair in the end, and nice guys are respected for being nice, and everything is just HONKY-dory (get it?).
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful.
I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.
I could feel her family inside her—rude, snide, unsupportive, yet getting the job done, acting appropriately, making sure there was room for my genitals, saving face.
I wondered, heretically, if he would ever miss being older, if his body would ever long for a history.
“Do what feels right,” I glibly told him, advice from an era when the first Boeing Dreamliner, still flying under the American flag, lifted off the soil and broke the leaden Seattle skies.
How far I had come from my parents, born in a country built on corpses, how far I had come from their endless anxiety—oh, the blind luck of it all!
“My friends,” I said. “Will they be okay if they stay on Staten Island?” “It depends,” Joshie said. “On what?” “Their assets.”
The booms, big and small, faraway and close, the pounding in my head, tracer rounds against the overcast moon, tracer rounds lighting up the secret, hidden parts of the city, an entire building of crying babies, and, even scarier, the temporary absence of those wails.
I put on a shirt and pants, feeling both scared and celebratory. The air conditioner had gone out and I had been living in my underwear, which made the pants feel like armor and the shirt like a shroud.
White people don’t really care about old people, except for David who tried to help everyone. And then they shot him like a dog.
Central Park was filled with people of at least two castes, tourists and occupiers, enjoying the day.
Howard Shu had told me that more than once: The truly powerful don’t need to be ranked.
My mind turned away from what Joshie was saying, and I pondered my father’s humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.
Whenever I tried to picture my parents’ souls I thought of these perfectly white Russian snowbanks I saw in history books on the Second World War, all those arrows being drawn into Russia’s heart along with the names of German panzer divisions.
unlike her friends, unlike Joshie, unlike myself, unlike so many Americans at the time of our country’s collapse, Eunice Park did not possess the false idea that she was special.
“We’re all going to die,” Grace Kim once said to me, echoing Nettie Fine. “You, me, Vishnu, Eunice, your boss, your clients, everyone.” If any part of my diaries yields anything resembling the truth, it is Grace’s lament. (Or perhaps it is no lament at all.)
