I foraged through my last omelet, lapping up chunks of delicious hormone-free Absurdi egg, and breathing in the salty freshness of the sturgeon. “At least I’m helping people,” I whispered.
We sat there without uttering a word until Sakha returned with a concoction that resembled a frigate parked on top of an aircraft carrier. “The banana I skipped,” he said, giving me an accounting. “I can get a banana anywhere. These here are Oreo-cookie clusters.”
“Eat, eat,” I said, patting him on the sleeve. “I want you to be happy.” After the sundae was finished and its various juices slurped up, our group made haste to disband. Josh Weiner and I barely looked at each other as we committed the standard urban smack of the palm (“high-five”) and knock of the fist. We even failed to shoot an imaginary finger gun at each other in parting, unthinkable for a Multicultural Studies major and a former resident of Ghetto Fabulous House. All in all, it was not a proud day for Accidental College.
“Walk behind me,” Sakha the Democrat told me when my fellow alumni had gone. “I’ve roused your manservant from his shed behind the pool. Monsieur Lefèvre is waiting for us behind the McDonald’s on the Svanï Terrace.”
“Where’s that?” I asked, but Sakha was already headed for the lobby.
17
King Leopold’s Belgian Congo
We had driven off the Boulevard of National Unity, with its multinational skyscrapers and chain stores, and onto a broad natural platform overlooking the city. Sakha the Democrat, glowing with the pride of a know-it-all intellectual, had asked me to come out of the car and survey the landscape with him. As we left the American SUV embellished with the Hyatt logo, my manservant, Timofey, rushed up to me and unfurled a beach umbrella above my tall frame as if I were some African ruler arriving at the airport. The umbrella didn’t help. Sweat fell from me in sheets of water and steam until I smelled like a hamburger.
We looked down upon the city. “Look, Mr. Vainberg!” Sakha said. “Have you ever seen such loveliness? Perhaps it does not match your native Petersburg, or, being a Jew, your beloved Jerusalem, but all the same—the hills, the sea, the architectural ensemble wrought over the centuries…Doesn’t your heart tremble?”
But it wasn’t trembling. The Absurdi capital looked like a miniature Cairo after it had crashed into a rocky mountain. There were three populated terraces jutting out from this mountain, little serving platters of humanity clinging to the inhospitable rock and connected by a winding road. At the top, the International Terrace was home to the multinational skyscrapers, the embassies, and the major retailers (for example, Staples, Hugo Boss, the 718 Perfumery, Ferragamo, the Toys “R” Us superstore). Farther down, the Svanï Terrace, the traditional home of the majority Svanï people, had a famous used-remote-control market, along with a part of the minaret-studded Moslem quarter snug behind an ancient fortifying wall. “I knew there were Moslems here!” I exclaimed to Sakha. “Moslems live in the Orient. It’s a fact.” Finally, the Sevo Terrace, the traditional home of the minority Sevo people, was composed of art nouveau mansions built for turn-of-the-century oil barons forming a precise grid around what I later learned was called the Sevo Vatican—“Oooh, that thing looks like an octopus!” I cried to Sakha—a vast white dome with an octet of arches spreading in each direction, which, at least in my mind, resembled a pale tentacled sea creature washed up on the beach. A six-meter Sevo cross gleamed from the octopus’s head, its footrest facing in the wrong direction.
Next to the Sevo Vatican, an esplanade ran toward a small container port that quickly gave way to the real business of the city. And here it became obvious that the city formed no more than a footnote to what actually had rendered these Sevos and Svanïs first into a Soviet republic and then into a cantankerous modern state. Absurdistan was the Caspian Sea, and the Caspian was the oil it held in abundance. The oil derricks began as soon as the last speck of humanity ended. The oil refused to give the city even the briefest of respites; it denied its inhabitants the chance to look into the waters and see their own reflection. The humble derricks of Soviet construction, cheap yellow rust buckets in the ruined sea, quickly surrendered to behemoth Western oil platforms, their warning lights flashing from thirty-story rigs, their floating enormity forming a second skyline that rivaled the skyscrapers of the International Terrace. With its three descending terraces, Svanï City rushed out to meet the Caspian, and the Caspian turned it back with an oily slap of the waves.
“Don’t look at the oil industry so much,” Sakha said, following my gaze. “Look at the city. Try to imagine the sea completely free of petrol and the city standing proudly above it.”
I shifted my gaze from the oil rigs to the Sevo and Svanï terraces beneath me. I hummed John Lennon’s useful ditty “Imagine.” I imagined flying over the city in a helicopter, absorbing its many architectural flourishes and dramatic natural features, but the chopper just kept flying in a northwesterly direction until it reached the southern tip of Manhattan island, spread its helicopter shadow over the asphalt conglomerations of downtown and midtown, then streaked past the gables and dormers of the Dakota Apartments on New York’s Central Park, where Mr. Lennon once lived and died.
And then I was on an IRT train headed north to East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. It was wintertime, the heat had been turned up, and in my rabbit-lined coat, I could feel the sweat gathering between the second and third folds of my neck, which, taken together, formed a fleshy sieve. I could feel the cool water dribbling down to my breastbone and irrigating the curly hairs of my groin. I was hot and cold, anxious and in love. The citizens on the trains bound for New York’s outer boroughs far exceeded the dimensions of the white people lounging around downtown. My fellow fatties were stoic, multicultural, dressed in billowing down jackets that could save an astronaut from the asphyxiation of space. They leaned against the doors for balance as they pried apart chicken wings and fried oxtails with their teeth, spitting bones and gristle into waiting plastic bags. Who were these Amsterdam Avenue Atlases? These Cypress Hills Caligulas? If I weren’t such a priss about getting my hands greasy, I would have joined them in consuming a small Saran-wrapped mammal here amid the bright deoxygenated glare of the 5 train.
And the girls! Oh, how they disturbed me. Each with a little bit of my Rouenna in her—a plushy nose, a gangsta-shaved eyebrow, a plump lower lip glistening beneath a mound of gloss—each yelling and laughing at her school friends in the Bronxian patois I was just beginning to understand. It was February, and the young ladies may have been clad in heavy down jackets, but somehow, with a warm Southern flair, they managed to be half naked at the same time, flashing me their pubic bones, the Y-shaped pre-crease of their deep posteriors. And every once in a while, in an answer to most of my dreams, their thick, fleshy armpits came into view and I squinted to discern a trail of shaved crinkly hair, the phantom of a formerly rich tuft, for I belong to the school that equates armpit hair with untrammeled sexuality.
By the Third Avenue–149th Street stop, I could already glimpse the light-handed winter sun slipping its rays down the station’s stairways. A second later, we were free of the subway tunnel and the Bronx was around us, the subway car flooded with so much brightness it seemed a second sun had been pressed into service.