Absurdistan

42 Saltines and Fresca

We left a few days later. It was September 9. The day was light and airy and spoke of deliverance from the summer’s heat. The train station was on the Svanï Terrace, but we didn’t bother with any precautions. The SCROD and federal checkpoints had disappeared completely, and Svanï and Sevo citizens staggered around without hindrance, free to die on any terrace they chose.

We stood in the waiting room beneath a fading picture of the Svanï dictator Georgi Kanuk, upon whose grave octogenarian visage one commentator had written #1 TERRORIST and another FATHER OF THE NATION. Nana’s mother had sneaked out of the house to say goodbye to us. Removed from the courtyard and the kitchen, she was a surprisingly different creature, feisty and emotional. The afternoon sun had touched her pale homebound cheeks. While she wept prodigiously at her daughter’s departure, she did so with an almost reticent delight. “God will bless you,” she kept saying to me and Nana. “In Brussels, in New York, wherever it is that you go, God will follow your footsteps with a father’s eye.”

“Tell Papa my heart is breaking,” Nana said. “Tell him I’ll come back as soon as the war is over, so maybe they should try to wrap it up by the Christmas break. By the way, is there any money in the Citibank account? I still haven’t paid the bursar.”

Mrs. Nanabragovna wiped her tears. “Now you’re with Misha,” she said, pointing to the general area around my wallet. “Misha will be your father, and there will always be water in his well for you to drink.” Mother and daughter smiled and embraced each other.

I was angry and disgusted with the Nanabragovs, but I couldn’t help being moved by their parting. “Be careful, little mother,” I said to Mrs. Nanabragovna. “The Russians are planning to bomb the city next week. You must take shelter in your basement.”

“Oh, they’ll never bomb our house,” Mrs. Nanabragovna said with a dismissive wave. “They’ll just make a loop around Gorbigrad.”

We were escorted onto the train by an army of men wearing homemade fatigues with the words AMERICAN EXPRESS RAPID REACTION FORCE. Our self-appointed protectors handled us roughly, like the soldiers they were, banging our laptops against the gravel and pulling us by our sleeves. We cursed their mothers under our breath and yet rejoiced at the presence of their formidable armaments, in particular the tank-busting cannon being dragged ahead of us.

The platforms were deserted. All the rail lines had been bombed into torqued ellipses of the kind made popular by a certain American sculptor, save for one upon which the American Express locomotive and two wagons idled. They were old wide-gauge Soviet cars brought up to gleaming Western snuff. The locomotive sported a silk-screened AmEx logo. Absurdi children had painted the wagons with scenes of a better life for themselves, earnest depictions of dark-haired boys and girls wearing Svanï and Sevo crosses, flying happily between the Eiffel Tower, the Houses of Parliament in London, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. YOU’VE GOT TO PLAY TO WIN, the children had written in large green English letters beneath their impossible fantasies. The roofs of the train cars were occupied by more members of the American Express Rapid Reaction Force nailing down their RPG launchers and waving a Colorado’s worth of small arms at the sky.

We were handed over to a relatively pleasant group of Nana’s former American Express colleagues, who immediately told us that the soldiers were merely “volunteers” and not affiliated at all with the American Express company. We were given a stack of documents to sign, denying the company’s responsibility for our likely deaths at the hands of desperate starving folk marauding along the train tracks.

One of the wagons had been converted into a plush Irish pub called Molly Malloy’s, a branch of which used to service multinational oil execs on the International Terrace (its taps, in retrospect, had gushered better than the oil wells). The wood paneling had been artificially aged and warped; only the authenticating smells of piss and meat pies were missing. The bartender, an imported Tatar in a jolly green hat, bade us to return for happy hour at six, when top-shelf drinks were reduced to US$20.

I sent Timofey off to bed down in the service quarters, then retired to our compartment. The comforters and pillows were plush and hypoallergenic, the overhead racks had a built-in DVD player, a plasma screen, and a docking station for our laptops with Internet access that actually worked. “This is better than the Hyatt!” I told Nana as we fondled each other beneath a tasteful print of Svanï City at the turn of the last century, a wooden tram running past an onion-domed church, men in crisp czarist uniforms bidding each other good morning.

I had nearly removed her bra and liberated one nipple when the conductor meekly came a-calling. “I’m paying for both of us,” I told the old man trembling in his AmEx regalia and visored cap. “And for my manservant, too.”

“Three persons, all told,” the conductor said, showering us with his spittle. He was yet another aficionado of the local breakfast favorite, sheep’s head and trotters dunked in garlic broth. “Er, all told, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, please, sir.”

I proffered my American Express card, and the conductor excused himself to run it through the system. “Just slide it under the door when you’re finished,” I told him, and went back to sampling my Nana’s sugar and sweets.

She had blessed the entire train crew with the sounds of her tumultuous nine-part orgasm when the locomotive whistled and our train sprang into belated motion. Nana dismounted, licked her fingers, then pressed her plush nose to the window. “Are you sad to be leaving your homeland, sweetie?” I asked, pulling on my underpants and giving a last tussle to my still-swollen organ.

“There’s not much of it left,” Nana said. She made an outline with her pinkie against the missing shape of the Central Mosque in the distance. The moistness of her digit against the glass left a pretty arabesque in place of the minaret’s defunct silver cupola. The train passed through a tunnel, and we reemerged on the far end of the Gorbigrad peninsula. From this vantage point, the wrecked skyscrapers of the International Terrace had lined up in such a way that you could see clear through their looted interiors to an Ottoman fortress in the background that had been cleaved more or less in two. Nana lowered the shades.

“They’ll build it anew,” I said. “Maybe USAID or the European Bank will come through after all. Won’t they, Nana?” I watched her face closely, trying to see how much she knew of her father’s exploits.

“Misha, you’re cute,” Nana said in a way that would brook no dissent. She put her head on my lap and yawned. “I hope your optimism carries me through life, little father. Want to play Food, Decor, Service?”

We did that for a while, and then I logged on to the Internet to check the weather in Brussels, my future home, and in New York, where Nana was headed to begin her NYU semester. “You’re going to have some great weather in the city,” I told her. “Wow, from the tenth to the sixteenth, we’re looking at temps in the seventies, clear skies. You’re so lucky.”

“Someday the Americans will let you back in,” Nana said, yawning again. “They’ll forget that your father killed the Oklahoman and welcome you for your money.” She burrowed into the comforter and started to snore dramatically. I most likely did the same, rocking our carriage with my sleep apnea.

Around six o’clock, I woke up and adjourned for a drink. The bar car was decorated with many Irish proverbs celebrating the wisdom and hilarity of unchecked alcoholism, the remaining space given over to large placards that said HERE CAN BE YOUR ADVERTISING. Retreating KBR men in pleated shorts and extra-large T-shirts were lounging on the tartan couch by the window while the bartender served them luscious pink lobster rolls and thick, oily American potato chips. The men were raucous and drunk. One of the Scotsmen was apparently trying to have a literary conversation with his Houston counterpart. “Evelyn Whuh?” the Texan was shouting. “Get outta here, mister! That ain’t a real name!”

The train moved slowly to make sure our protectors would not fall off the roof. Outside the window, the country people had gathered by the tracks to try to interest us in their remaining possessions—the leftovers of their mules, their wives’ silver brocade work, plumbing fixtures that looked like mud-caked saxophones, gilt-edged portraits of Georgi Kanuk in happier times presenting a drooling Leonid Brezhnev with a fist-sized diamond.

In the background, the Caspian Sea was fighting an encroaching salt bed, while in the foreground, a lake of slurry and waste butted up against a dehydrated stretch of grass; between the two, the remains of the oil industry were being minutely disassembled, sections of old nodding donkey pumps now offered for sale by the men lining the railroad tracks.

The smell of fresh excrement penetrated the bulletproof walls of our wagon, and we could hear members of the AmEx Rapid Reaction Force stomping about on the roof, threatening the dying men outside with the laser scopes of their rifles or else picking off the rare Daewoo steam iron in exchange for packets of contraband saltines and warm cans of Fresca. As the sun set, the impromptu trading lessened in tempo, and the men lining the railroad tracks began to decompose into clay shards and clumps of sand mixed with grass. Their humanity ended so swiftly that one moment I could discern the subtle glow of the whites of their eyes against the blue and black of the fading desert and sea, and in the next instant I saw only yellow on black, gray on black, black on black—nothing.

My mobilnik rang. The St. Petersburg telephone code appeared on the screen. Apparently international calls were possible this far out of the capital; we had outdistanced the Absurdi censors.

The familiar number blinked impatiently on my phone. It was Alyosha-Bob. I wanted to tell him that I was safe and leaving the country, but I was too embarrassed to go into the particulars of what had transpired—how the Nanabragovs had taken my honor and how one of them—granted, the most gentle and sympathetic—was now snoring away in my train compartment. Instead, I picked up one of the Russian papers and tried to distract myself with the news. The death toll from the Absurdi conflict was approaching three thousand, the American electorate still couldn’t find the Caspian Sea on a map, while the Russian president Putin was promising both to bomb the warring parties and to mediate between them. I put the paper down. My stomach and mouth were suddenly hurting from the beating Tafa and Rafa had given me. Or perhaps I had merely channeled the suffering of the nation around me.

I pictured my life in Brussels. The days passing slowly in that quiet European indeterminacy. The price of living amid civilization, away from the bustle and treachery of America and Absurdistan both.

The older Scots were trying to teach the Texans the chorus to one of their bagpipe songs, soused with melancholy cheer and the impossibility of ever really saying farewell. Potato chips flew out of mouths and beer steins clanked together as the Tatar barman tried to keep the beat with a pair of coasters.

The sun had set entirely, and the AmEx men were shining their flashlights at a yellow corpse stumbling alongside the tracks, its hands waving madly for a moment’s notice. We pulled down the shades before the gunshots began.