Free Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart Page A

at us.
     

     
    Rouenna was no stranger to violent death, so when Papa was blown up on the Palace Bridge, she knew how to be tough and not let me fall into further melancholy. “You gotta ‘snap, crackle, pop’ out of this,” she told me, holding me forcefully by my lower chin and snapping the fingers of her other hand.
    “Like the American Rice Krispies cereal,” I said, smiling. “ ‘Snap! Crackle! Pop!’ ”
    “What I just say? Did you call your shrinkie-doodle-doo?”
    “He’s at a psychiatric conference in Rio all month.”
    “Now, what do you pay that asshole for? All right, spudster. I’m gonna have to fix you up myself. Take ’em off. Show me what you got for mommy.”
    I unzipped my Puma tracksuit, letting everything spill out in short order. I got down on the Mies van der Rohe daybed, assuming my analytic position with difficulty. Because my neck is so fatty, I suffer from terrible sleep apnea—impossibly loud snoring, constant shortness of breath. It gets worse when I lie on my back, so when Rouenna sleeps next to me, she instinctively pushes me over on the side with one of her muscular thighs, and I instinctively marshal my fat into an unconscious rollover. A night camera would probably capture something like a postmodern underwater ballet.
    “Flip,” Rouenna said. I got down on my stomach. “Thatta boy.”
    She laid her hands on what I call my “toxic hump,” a black molten peak of stilled flesh and bad circulation, a monument to inactivity grown during the two years of my Russian exile, the repository of all my anger, a kind of anti-heart on the back of me that keeps the sadness pumping. As Rouenna began to knead and contour the intractable hump with her thick fingers, I began to warble in humility and delight: “Oh, Rowie. Don’t leave me. Oh, Rowie. Oh, lovey. Don’t go.”
    The sadness poured out of my toxic hump and flooded the far-flung veins buried like transatlantic cables across my body. I recalled my mommy’s tear-stained face after she lost me at the Yalta train station one summer and thought the dastardly Gypsies had kidnapped and eaten me. “I would have killed myself if something had happened to you,” Mommy said. “I would have thrown myself off the cliff of the Sparrow’s Nest.” Of course, Mommy lied to me constantly, the way mothers in terrible societies do to keep their children from needlessly suffering. But I knew she was telling the truth just then. She would have killed herself. Her life was contingent upon mine. A nine-year-old child, I briefly foresaw my parents’ deaths—cancer ward, a ball of flame—and buried the knowledge deep in my then-tiny gut.
    “You’re not breathing right, honey,” Rouenna said. The idea of my impending loneliness had formed a chicken bone in my throat. I was slowly losing oxygen. “Do like me,” Rouenna said. She inhaled slowly, held the air in, then released it all over my left ear. The heavy incidence of sour cream and butter in the Russian diet had added a new dimension to her breath. Her breasts, tied back with a kind of wide summer bandanna, were a reassuring presence against the toxic hump and the warm, sweaty flesh that gathered around it like the foothills of Mount Etna.
    “I love you so much,” I said. “I love you with everything I have.”
    “I love you, too,” Rouenna said. “You’ll get through this all right, baby. You gotta have faith.”
    Faith was one of Rouenna’s specialties. Her family’s tiny duplex on Vyse and 173rd in the Bronx fairly burst with olive-skinned ceramic Madonnas nursing sweet baby Jesuses, just as the fifteen reproductive women of the extended household gave sustenance to their newborn Felicias and Romeros and Clydes, everywhere breast milk and obeisance and quiet American devastation. In the late seventies, when Rouenna was a toddler, their apartment building in Morrisania had been torched for insurance purposes. One afternoon a threatening anonymous note was slipped under