34 The Situation Worries Me

Dear The Guest,

Please Your attention. Due to the worst-ening political situation, we are sad to inform You that many items on the Sushi/Sashimi menu will no longer be possible for You. (In particular we are out of mackerel.) We humbly beg You—forgive us!

Your Faithful Slave, Larry Zartarian, General Manager, Park Hyatt Svanï City.

I didn’t want to admit it, but Zartarian was right. And not only about the mackerel. The political situation was “worst-ening.” I couldn’t get from one terrace to another in Nana’s Navigator without getting stuck in a crush of Gorbigrad refugees. The faces of the blighted brushed up against our windows—I tried to spot members of the intelligentsia among them, maybe to offer them a ride, but all were coated with the grime of several days’ travel, while the tinted windows of the Navigator erased any discernible signs of intelligence. The men, women, and children in front of me were tied to one another by invisible strings of kin and clan; they were stoic in their exile and loss, but they moved forward hand in hand as if their destinations were fixed, elders hanging on to the backs of their sons, sons cradling little daughters, the war veterans and the demented crouched ferally within wheelbarrows.

“It’s just a temporary situation,” I whispered to them. “Soon the international community will step in.”

But I wasn’t so sure. Panic was slowly creeping up the Boulevard of National Unity. Cases of Ghettomän aftershave from the 718 Perfumery and boxes of scruffy-looking Muppets with excited American googly eyes from the Toys “R” Us superstore were being pillaged left and right, squeezed into armored personnel carriers and waiting jeeps. For the first time since my arrival in Absurdistan, the armed forces actually seemed involved in their duties, officers calmly directing the looting, jotting dollar figures upon clipboards, and shouting at their inferiors to hurry their black asses up and load the fucking APCs already. A slow-motion military retreat seemed to be taking place, set to the occasional roar of GRAD missiles departing the roof of the Hyatt, followed by patches of rising gray dust and smoke at the line of the horizon. Only the KBR trucks stood silent and empty along the boulevard.

But mostly I was concerned about the gang activity. They called themselves the True Footrest Posses and they seemed to be on every street corner, hanging loosely like their Compton counterparts, some of them armed with sausage-thick Makarov pistols and AK-47s, others with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and light mortars that they listlessly dragged behind them, like some bothersome cleaning chore their parents had pressed upon them. They were kids, few over the age of consent, sunburned, depressed, malnourished, dressed in jerseys and sweatpants bearing the logos of the National Basketball Association. One had a blue Crips bandanna around his neck, another sweated terribly beneath a wool ski cap, a third had capped most of his teeth with gold and was bleeding around the gums. Almost all had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along with buzz haircuts that spoke of either nationalism or retardation. Occasionally I would hear them rap in English about the violent, sexy life they wanted to lead in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and about what they would do to their Svanï or Sevo counterparts once their enemies were disarmed and bent over. One popular ditty I heard on the Sevo Terrace started like this:

Rollin’ down Sunset

What do I see?

A bunch of hoey-ass bitches

Lookin’ at me.

They got Christ’s footrest all wrong

’Cause they asses are Svanï.

I’m like, “Wassup, ho?”

She like, “My name is Lani.”

That’s an American name,

’Cause she got no pride.

Nut-draining Svanï bitches,

They livin’ the lie.

I line ’em up in front

O’ they brothers

Put a gun to they head.

Svanï bitch, you betta give it up anal

Or your brothers be dead.

The brothers cryin’ like girls

While they sistas I’m fuckin’

I’m, like, slippin’ and slidin’

They, like, flippin’ and buckin’.

All this talk about forced anal sex worried me. This was not how you gained market share on MSNBC or even on the FOX network, and certainly not how you won the love of the world. It was time to take action. It was time to “talk to Israel.”


And then a modern miracle happened. Nanabragov’s men finally installed a high-speed Internet connection in my office. I whipped out my laptop, jammed its little dickey into a wall socket, and powered up the World Wide Web.

Reams of information eagerly floated onto my screen. Several dull websites demonstrated rather clearly what a grant proposal looked like. I learned about the soul-searching expeditions of contemporary American Jews from the banks of Poland’s Vistula River to the extinguished shtetls of Bessarabia. I learned about the average American Jew’s curious if misplaced interest in something called “kabbalah.” As for the Holocaust, few genocides were better documented. I drank some coffee, touched myself, and began my duties as the Minister of Multicultural Affairs.

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