Dear Diary,
Here’s a message from Joshie that popped up on my äppärät right after my ordeal at JFK:
DEAR RHESUS MONKEY, U BACK YET? LOTS OF POSITIVE CHANGES AND CUTBACKS HERE; FEEL FREE TO REMAIN ROME AS YOU FEEL NEED; FUTURE SALARY amp; EMPLOYMENT = LET’S DISCUSS.
What the hell was this? Was Joshie Goldmann, employer and ersatz papa, about to fire me? Had he sent me to Europe just to get me out of the way?
I still have an old Mead Five Star notebook from when I was a child, which I’ve been dying to put to good use. So I ripped out an actual sheet of paper from it, put it on my coffee table, and started writing this out by hand.
STRATEGY FOR SHORT-TERM SURVIVAL AND THEN IMMORTALITY FOLLOWING RETURN TO NEW YORK AFTER EUROPEAN FIASCO
BY LENNY ABRAMOV, B.A., M.B.A.
1) Work Hard for Joshie-Show you matter at the workplace; show you’re not just a teacher’s pet, but a creative thinker and Content Provider; make excuses for poor performance in Europe; get raise; lower spending; save money for initial dechronification treatments; double own lifespan in twenty years and then just keep going at it exponentially until you gain the momentum to achieve Indefinite Life Extension.
2) Make Joshie Protect You-Evoke father-like bond in response to political situation. Talk about what happened on the plane; evoke Jewish feelings of terror and injustice.
3) Love Eunice-Even if she’s far away, try to think of her as a potential partner; meditate on her freckles and make yourself feel loved by her to lower stress levels and feel less alone. Let the potential of her sweetness enhance your happiness!!! Then beg her to come to New York and let her become, in short order, reluctant lover, cautious companion, pretty young wife.
4) Care for Your Friends-Meet up with them right after you see Joshie and try to re-create a sense of community with BFFs Noah and Vishnu.
5) Be Nice to Parents (Within Limits)-They may be mean to you but they represent your past and who you are. 5a) Seek Similarities with Parents-they grew up in a dictatorship and one day you might be living in one too!!!
6) Celebrate What You Have-You’re not as bad off as some people. Think of that poor fat man on the plane (where is he now? what are they doing to him?) and feel happy by comparison.
I folded the paper up and put it into my wallet for easy reference. “Now,” I said to myself, “go make it happen!”
First, I Celebrated What I Have (Point No. 6). I began with the 740 square feet that form my share of Manhattan Island. I live in the last middle-class stronghold in the city, high atop a red-brick ziggurat that a Jewish garment workers’ union had erected on the banks of the East River back in the days when Jews sewed clothes for a living. Say what you will, these ugly co-ops are full of authentic old people who have real stories to tell (although these stories are often meandering and hard to follow; e.g., who on earth was this guy “Dillinger”?).
Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. And yet, in preparation for the eventual arrival of Eunice Park, I decided to be safe and sprayed some Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast in the vicinity of my tomes, fanning the atomized juices with my hands in the direction of their spines. Then I celebrated my other possessions, the modular-design furniture and sleek electronica and the mid-1950s Corbusier-inspired dresser stuffed with mementos of past relationships, some pretty racy and scented with nether regions, others doused in the kind of sadness that I should really learn to let go. I celebrated the difficult-to-assemble balcony table (one leg still too short) and had a pretty awful non-Roman coffee al fresco, looking out on the busy downtown skyline some twenty blocks away from me, military and civilian choppers streaming past the overblown spire of the “Freedom” Tower and all that other glittering downtown hoo-hah. I celebrated the low-rise housing projects crowding my immediate view, the so-called Vladeck Houses, which stand in red-brick solidarity with my own co-ops, not exactly proud of themselves, but feeling resigned and necessary, their thousands of residents primed for summer warmth, and, if I may speculate, summer love. Even from a distance of a hundred feet, I can sometimes hear the pained love-cries their residents make behind their tattered Puerto Rican flags, and sometimes their violent screams.
With love in mind, I decided to celebrate the season. For me the transition from May to June is marked by the radical switch from knee to ankle socks. I slapped on white linen pants, a speckled Penguin shirt, and comfy Malaysian sneakers, so that I easily resembled many of the nonagenarians in my building. My co-ops are part of a NORC-a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community-a kind of instant Florida for those too frail or poor to relocate to Boca in time for their deaths. Down by the elevator, surrounded by withered NORCers in motorized wheelchairs and their Jamaican caregivers, I counted the daily carnage of the Death Board by the elevators. Five residents of the NORC had passed in the last two days alone. The woman who had lived above me, eightysomething Naomi Margolis in E-707, was gone, and her son David Margolis was inviting her eclectic neighbors-the young Media and Credit professionals, the old widowed socialist seamstresses, and the ever-multiplying Orthodox Jews-to “celebrate her memory” at his house in Teaneck, New Jersey. I admired Mrs. Margolis for living as long as she did, but once you give in to the idea that a memory is somehow a substitute for a human being, you may as well give up on Indefinite Life Extension. I guess you can say that, while admiring Mrs. Margolis, I also hated Mrs. Margolis. Hated her for giving up on life, for letting the waves come and recede, her withered body in tow. Maybe I hated all the old people in my building, and wished them to disappear already so that I could focus on my own struggle with mortality.
In my trendy old-man’s getup, I ambled with easy grace down Grand Street toward the East River Park, stepping on each curb with the profound “oy” that is the call-and-response of my neighborhood. I sat on my favorite bench, next to the stocky, splay-footed realism of the Williamsburg Bridge’s anchorage, noticing how part of the structure looked like a bunch of stacked milk crates. I celebrated the teenaged mothers from the Vladeck Houses tending to their children’s boo-boos (“A bee touched me, Mommy!”). I relished hearing language actually being spoken by children. Overblown verbs, explosive nouns, beautifully bungled prepositions. Language, not data. How long would it be before these kids retreated into the dense clickety-clack äppärät world of their absorbed mothers and missing fathers?
Then I caught sight of a healthy-looking old Chinese woman ripe for celebration and, at the speed of half a furlong an hour, tailed her down Grand Street and then East Broadway, watching her feel up exotic tubers and slap around some silvery fish. She was shopping with suburban abandon, buying everything that came within her grasp and then, after each purchase, running over to stand next to one of the wooden telegraph poles that now lined the streets.
My fashion friend Sandi in Rome had told me about the Credit Poles, yapping on about their cool retro design, the way the wood was intentionally gnarled in places and how the utility wire was replaced by strings of colored lights. The old-fashioned appearance of the Poles was obviously meant to evoke a sturdier time in our nation’s history, except for the little LED counters at eye level that registered your Credit ranking as you walked by. Atop the Poles, American Restoration Authority signs billowed in several languages. In the Chinatown parts of East Broadway, the signs read in English and Chinese-“America Celebrates Its Spenders!”-with a cartoon of a miserly ant happily running toward a mountain of wrapped Christmas presents. In the Latino sections on Madison Street, they read in English and Spanish-“Save It for a Rainy Day, Huevón”-with a frowning grasshopper in a zoot suit showing us his empty pockets. Alternate signs read in all three languages:
The Boat Is Full
Avoid Deportation
Latinos Save
Chinese Spend
ALWAYS Keep Your Credit Ranking Within Limits
AMERICAN RESTORATION AUTHORITY
“TOGETHER WE’LL SURPRISE THE WORLD!”
I felt the perfunctory liberal chill at seeing entire races of human beings so summarily reduced and stereotyped, but was also voyeuristically interested in seeing people’s Credit rankings. The old Chinese woman had a decent 1400, but others, the young Latina mothers, even a profligate teenaged Hasid puffing down the street, were showing blinking red scores below 900, and I worried for them. I walked past one of the Poles, letting it zap the data off my äppärät, and saw my own score, an impressive 1520. But there was a blinking red asterisk next to the score.
Was the otter still flagging me?
I sent a GlobalTeens message to Nettie Fine, but got a chilling “RECIPIENT DELETED” in response. What could that mean? No one ever gets deleted from GlobalTeens. I tried to GlobalTrace her but got an even more frightening “RECIPIENT UNTRACEABLE/INACTIVE.” What kind of person couldn’t be found on this earth?
Back in Rome, I used to meet Sandi for lunch at da Tonino and we’d talk about what we missed the most about Manhattan. For me it was fried pork-and-scallion dumplings on Eldridge Street, for him bossy older black women at the gas company or the unemployment office who called him “honey” and “sugar” and sometimes “baby.” He said it wasn’t a gay thing, but, rather, that these black women made him feel calm and at ease, as if he had momentarily won the love and mothering of a complete stranger.
I guess that’s what I wanted right now, with Nettie Fine “INACTIVE,” with Eunice six time zones away, with the Credit Poles reducing everyone to a simple three-digit numeral, with an innocent fat man dragged off a plane, with Joshie telling me “future salary amp; employment = let’s discuss”: a little love and mothering.
I stalked up and down the eastern part of Grand Street, trying to get my bearings, trying to re-establish my hold on the place. But it wasn’t just the Credit Poles. The neighborhood had changed since I left for Rome a year ago. All the meager businesses I remember were still there, decayed linoleum places with names like the A-OK Pizza Shack, frequented by poor patrons who pawed at the keyboard of an old computer terminal while smearing their faces with pizza oils, a moldy 1988 ten-volume edition of The New Book of Popular Science stacked in the corner, awaiting customers who could read. But there was an added aimlessness to the population, the unemployed men staggering down the chicken-bone-littered street as if drunk off a pint of grain alcohol and not just a bevy of Negra Modelos, their face blunted beneath the kind of depressive affect that I usually associate with my father. An angelic seven-year-old girl in braids was shouting into her äppärät: “Nex’ time I see her ass I’m gonna punch that nigga in the stomach!” An old Jewish woman from my co-ops had fallen on the sun-baked asphalt, and her friends had made a protective scrim around her as she spun around like a turtle. By the razor-wired fence delineating a failed luxury-condo development, a drunk in a frilly guayabera shirt pulled down his pants and began to evacuate. I’ve seen this particular gent publicly crapping before, but the pained expression on his face, the way he rubbed his naked haunches while he shat, as if the June heat wasn’t enough to keep them warm, the staggering grunts he spat at the direction of our city’s cloud-streaked harbor skies, made me feel as if my native street was slipping away from me, falling into the East River, falling into a new time wrinkle where we would all drop our pants and dump furiously on the motherland.
An armored personnel carrier bearing the insignia of the New York Army National Guard was parked astride a man-sized pothole at the busy intersection of Essex and Delancey, a roof-mounted.50-caliber Browning machine gun rotating 180 degrees, back and forth, like a retarded metronome along the busy but peaceable Lower East Side streetscape. Traffic was frozen all across Delancey Street. Silent traffic, for no one dared to use a horn against the military vehicle. The street corner emptied around me until I stood alone, staring down the barrel of a gun like an idiot. I lifted up my hands in panic and directed my feet to scram.
My celebrations were turning sour. I took out the list I had written by hand and decided to make immediate use of Point No. 2 (Make Joshie Protect You). By a recently shuttered Bowery scones-and-libations establishment called Povertea, I found a cab and directed it to the Upper East Side lair of my second father.
The Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation is housed in a former Moorish-style synagogue near Fifth Avenue, a tired-looking building dripping with arabesques, kooky buttresses, and other crap that brings to mind a lesser Gaudí. Joshie bought it at auction for a mere eighty thousand dollars when the congregation folded after being bamboozled by some kind of Jewish pyramid scheme years ago.
The first thing I noticed upon my return was the familiar smell. Heavy use of a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener is encouraged at Post-Human Services, because the scent of immortality is complex. The supplements, the diet, the constant shedding of blood and skin for various physical tests, the fear of the metallic components found in most deodorants, create a curious array of post-mortal odors, of which “sardine breath” is the most benign.
With one or two exceptions, I haven’t made any work-time buddies at Post-Human Services since I turned thirty. It’s not easy being friends with some twenty-two-year-old who cries over his fasting blood-glucose level or sends out a GroupTeen with his adrenal-stress index and a smiley face. When the graffito in the bathroom reads “Lenny Abramov’s insulin levels are whack,” there is a certain undeniable element of one-upmanship, which, in turn, raises the cortisol levels associated with stress and encourages cellular breakdown.
Still, when I walked through the door I expected to recognize someone. The synagogue’s gilded main sanctuary was filled by young men and women dressed with angry post-college disregard, but projecting from somewhere between the eyes the message that they were the personification of that old Whitney Houston number I’ve mentioned before, that they, the children, were de facto the future. We had enough employees at Post-Human Services to repopulate the original Twelve Tribes of Israel, which were handily represented by the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. How dull we looked in their ocean-blue glare.
The ark where the Torahs are customarily stashed had been taken out, and in its place hung five gigantic Solari schedule boards Joshie had rescued from various Italian train stations. Instead of the arrivi and partenze times of trains pulling in and out of Florence or Milan, the flip board displayed the names of Post-Human Services employees, along with the results of our latest physicals, our methylation and homocysteine levels, our testosterone and estrogen, our fasting insulin and triglycerides, and, most important, our “mood + stress indicators,” which were always supposed to read “positive/playful/ready to contribute” but which, with enough input from competitive co-workers, could be changed to “one moody betch today” or “not a team playa this month.” On this particular day, the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating-a droning ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka-to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from “overcoming loss of loved one” to “letting personal life interfere with job” to “doesn’t play well with others.” Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues, including my fellow Russian, the brilliantly manic-depressive Vasily Greenbaum, were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELED.
As for me, I wasn’t even listed.
I positioned myself in the middle of the sanctuary to a spot beneath The Boards, trying to make myself a part of the soft jabber around me. “Hi,” I said. And with a splash of the arms: “Lenny Abramov!” But my words disappeared into the new soundproofed wood paneling while various configurations of young people, some arm in arm, as if on a casual date, swooped through the sanctuary, headed for the Soy Kitchen or the Eternity Lounge, leaving me to hear the words “Soft Policy” and “Harm Reduction,” “ROFLAARP,” “PRGV,” “TIMATOV,” and “butt-plugging Rubenstein,” and, attendant with female laughter, “Rhesus Monkey.” My nickname! Someone had recognized my special relationship to Joshie, the fact that I used to be important around here.
It was Kelly Nardl. My darling Kelly Nardl. A supple, low-slung girl my age whom I would be terminally attracted to if I could stand to spend my life within three meters of her nondeodorized animal scent. She welcomed me with a kiss on both cheeks, as if she were the one just returned from Europe, and took me by the hand toward her bright, clean wedge of a desk in what used to be the cantor’s office. “I’m going to make you a plate of cruciferous vegetables, baby,” she said, and that sentence alone halved my fears. They don’t fire you after they feed you flowering cabbage at Post-Human Services. Vegetables are a sign of respect. Then again, Kelly was an exception to the hard-edged types around here, Louisiana-bred for kindness and gentility, a younger, less hysterical Nettie Fine (may she be alive and well, wherever she is).
I stood behind her as she dotted golden cress along steppes of Siberian kale. I rested my hands on her solid shoulders, breathed in her sour vitality. She leaned her hot cheek against one of my wrists, a motion so familiar it seemed to me we had been related even before this lifetime. Her pale, blooming thighs spread beyond a modest pair of khaki shorts, and I remembered again to celebrate, in this case, every inch of Kelly’s imperfection. “Hey,” I said, “Vasily Greenbaum’s train got canceled? He played the guitar and could speak a little Arabic. He was so ‘ready to contribute’ when he wasn’t totally depressed.”
“He turned forty last month,” Kelly sighed. “Didn’t make quotas.”
“I’m almost forty too,” I said. “And why isn’t my name up on The Boards?”
Kelly didn’t say anything. She was parsing cauliflower with a dull safety knife, moisture beading her white forehead. Kelly and I had once shared an entire bottle of wine-or “resveratrol,” as we Post-Humans like to call it-at a tapas bar in Brooklyn, and after walking her to her violent Bushwick tenement I wondered if I could one day fall in love with a woman so unobtrusively, compulsively decent (answer: no).
“So who’s still around from the old gang?” I asked, voice atremble. “I didn’t see Jami Pilsner’s name. Or Irene Po. Are they just going to fire all of us?”
“Howard Shu’s doing fine,” Kelly told me. “Got promoted.”
“Great,” I said. Of all the people still employed, it had to be that sleek 124-pound bastard Shu, my classmate at NYU who had bested me for the last dozen years in all of life’s gruesome contests. If you ask me, there’s a little something sad about the employees of Post-Human Services, and to me brash, highly functional Howard Shu is the personification of that sadness. The truth is, we may think of ourselves as the future, but we are not. We are servants and apprentices, not immortal clients. We hoard our yuan, we take our nutritionals, we prick ourselves and bleed and measure that dark-purple liquid a thousand different ways, we do everything but pray, but in the end we are still marked for death. I could commit my genome and proteome to heart, I could wage nutritional war against my faulty apo E4 allele until I turn myself into a walking cruciferous vegetable, but nothing will cure my main genetic defect:
My father is a janitor from a poor country.
Howard Shu’s dad hawks miniature turtles in Chinatown. Kelly Nardl is rich, but hardly rich enough. The scale of wealth we grew up with no longer applies.
Kelly’s äppärät lit up the air around her, and she was plunged into the needs of a hundred clients. After the daily decadence of Rome, our offices looked spare. Everything bathed in soft colors and the healthy glow of natural wood, office equipment covered in Chernobyl-style sarcophagi when not in use, alpha-wave stimulators hidden behind Japanese screens, stroking our overactive brains with calming rays. Little framed humorous hints scattered throughout. “Just Say No to Starch.” “Cheer Up! Pessimism Kills.” “Telomere-Extended Cells Do It Better.” “NATURE HAS A LOT TO LEARN FROM US.” And, fluttering in the wind above Kelly Nardl’s desk, a wanted poster showing a cartoon hippie being whacked over the head with a stalk of broccoli:
WANTED
For electron stealing
DNA killing
Malicious cellular damage
ABBIE “FREE RADICAL” HOFFMAN
WARNING: Subject may be armed and dangerous
Do not attempt to apprehend
Call authorities immediately and increase intake of the coenzyme Q10
“Maybe I’ll go to my desk,” I said to Kelly.
“Honey,” she said, her long fingers around my own. You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
“Oh God,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
“You don’t have a desk. I mean, someone’s taken it. This new kid from Brown-Yonsei. Darryl, I think.”
“Where’s Joshie?” I said automatically.
“Flying back from D.C.” She checked her äppärät. “His jet broke down, so he’s going commercial. He’ll be back around lunchtime.”
“What do I do?” I whispered.
“It would help,” she said, “if you looked a little younger. Take care of yourself. Go to the Eternity Lounge. Put some Lexin-DC concentrate under your eyes.”
The Eternity Lounge was crammed full of smelly young people checking their äppäräti or leaning back on couches with their faces up to the ceiling, de-stressing, breathing right. The even, nutty aroma of brewing green tea snuck a morsel of nostalgia into my general climate of fear. I was there when we first put in the Eternity Lounge, five years ago, in what used to be the synagogue’s banqueting hall. It had taken Howard Shu and me three years just to get the brisket smell out.
“Hi,” I said to anyone who would listen. I looked at the couches, but there was hardly a place to squeeze in. I took out my äppärät, but noticed that the new kids all had the new pebble-like model around their necks, the kind Eunice had worn. At least three of the young women in the room were gorgeous in a way that transcended their physicality and made their smooth, ethnically indeterminate skin and sad brown eyes stretch back to earliest Mesopotamia.
I went to the mini-bar where the unsweetened green tea was dispensed, along with the alkalinized water and 231 daily nutritionals. As I was about to hit the fish oils and cucrumins that keep inflammation at bay, somebody laughed at me, a feminine laugher and thus all the more damning. Casually scattered atop the luxuriant couches, my co-workers looked like the characters from a comedy show about young people in Manhattan I remembered watching compulsively when I was growing up. “Just got back from a year in Roma,” I said, trying to pump the bravado into my voice. “All carbs over there. Need to stock up on the essentials like a cuh-razy person. Good to be back, guys!”
Silence. But as I turned back to the supplements, someone said, “What’s shaking, Rhesus Monkey?”
It was a kid with a small outbreak of mustache and a gray bodysuit with the words SUK DIK stenciled across the breast, some kind of red bandana strung around his neck. Probably Darryl from Brown, the one who had taken my desk. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I smiled at him, looked at my äppärät, sighed as if I had too much work ahead of me, and then began to casually leave the Eternity Lounge.
“Where you going, Rhesus?” he asked, blocking my exit with his scraggly, tight-butted body, shoving his äppärät in my face, the rich organic smell of him clouding my nostrils. “Don’t you want to do some blood work for us, buddy? I’m seeing triglycerides clocking in at 135. That’s before you ran away to Europe like a little bitch.” There was more hooting in the background, the women clearly enjoying this toxic banter.
I backed away, mumbling, “One thirty-five is still within the range.” What was that acronym Eunice had used? “JBF,” I said. “I’m just butt-fucking.” There was more laughter, a flash of pewter chin in the background, the shine of hairless hands bearing sleek technological pendants full of right data. Momentarily, I saw Chekhov’s prose before my eyes, his description of the Moscow merchant’s son Laptev, who “knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he was conscious of his ugliness all over his body.”
And still the cornered animal in me fought back. “Duder,” I said, remembering what the rude young man on the airplane had called me when he complained about the smell of my book. “Duder, I can feel your anger. I’ll take a blood test, no prob, but while we’re at it, okay, let’s just measure your cortisol and epinephrine levels. I’m going to put your stress levels up on The Boards. You’re not playing well with others.”
But no one heard my righteous words. The sweat glistening off my caveman forehead spelled it all out for them. An open invitation. Let the young eat the old. The SUK DIK guy actually pushed me until I felt the cold of the Eternity Lounge wall against the sparseness of my hair. He shoved his äppärät into my face. It was flashing my open-sourced blood work from a year ago.
“How dare you just waltz back here like that with that body mass index of yours?” he said. “You think you’re just going to take one of our desks? After doing fuck-all in Italy for a year? We know all about you, Monkey. I’m going to shove a carb-filled macaroon up your ass unless you skedaddle right now.”
A gigantic sitcom cheer rose up behind him-a huge wooooo of happy anger and joyous consternation, the assertion of the tribe over its weakest member.
Two and a half heartbeats later, the hooting abruptly ceased.
I heard the murmur of His Name and the clip-clop of his approach. The boisterous crowd was parting, the SUK DIK warriors slinking away, those Darryls and Heaths.
And there he was. Younger than before. The initial dechronification treatments-the beta treatments, as we called them-already coursing through him. His face unlined and harmoniously still, except for that thick nose, which twitched uncontrollably at times, some muscle group gone haywire. His ears stood beside his shorn head like two sentinels.
Joshie Goldmann never revealed his age, but I surmised he was in his late sixties: a sixtysomething man with a mustache as black as eternity. In restaurants he had sometimes been mistaken for my handsomer brother. We shared the same unappreciated jumble of meaty lips and thick eyebrows and chests that barreled forward like a terrier’s, but that’s where it ended. Because when Joshie looked at you, when he lowered his gaze at you, the heat would rise in your cheeks and you would find yourself oddly, irrevocably, present.
“Oh, Leonard,” he said, sighing and shaking his head. “Those guys giving you a hard time? Poor Rhesus. Come on. Let’s talk.” I shyly followed him as he walked upstairs (no elevators, never) to his office. Hobbled, I should say. There is a problem with Joshie’s skeleton which he has never discussed, which makes him balance uncertainly from foot to foot, walk in segments and fits and starts, as if a Philip Glass piece were playing commandingly behind him.
His office was packed with a dozen young staffers I hadn’t seen before, all chatting at once. “Homies,” he said to his acolytes, “can I get a minute here? We’ll get right back into it. Just one moment.” Collective sigh. They trooped past me, surprised, agitated, bemused, their äppäräti already projecting data about me, perhaps telling them how little I meant, my thirty-nine-year-old obsolescence.
He ran his hand through the fullness of hair at my nape and turned my head around. “So much gray,” he said.
I almost stepped away from his touch. What had Eunice told me in one of our last moments together? You’re old, Len. But instead I allowed him to examine me closely, even as I scrutinized the sharp, eagle profile of his chest, the muscular presence of his Nettie Fine-caliber nose, the uneasy balance he held over the earth beneath him. His hand was deep into my scalp, and his fingers felt uncharacteristically cold. “So much gray,” he said again.
“It’s the pasta carbs,” I stammered. “And the stressors of Italian life. Believe it or not, it’s not easy over there when you’re living on an American’s salary. The dollar-”
“What’s your pH level?” Joshie interrupted.
“Oh boy,” I said. The branch shadows of a superb oak tree were creeping up to the window, gracing Joshie’s shaven dome with a pair of antlers. The windows of this part of the former synagogue were designed to form the outline of the Ten Commandments. Joshie’s office was on the top floor, the words “You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me” still stenciled into the window in English and Hebrew. “Eight point nine,” I said.
“You need to detoxify, Len.”
I could hear a clamor outside his door. Eager voices pushing one another aside for his attention, the day’s business spread out like the endless corridors of data sweeping around Manhattan. On Joshie’s desk, a smooth piece of glass, a sleek digital frame, showed us a slide show of his life-young Joshie dressed up like a maharajah during his short-lived one-man Off Broadway show, happy Buddhists at the Laotian temple his funds had rebuilt from scratch beseeching the camera on their knees, Joshie in a conical straw hat smiling irresistibly during his brief tenure as a soy farmer.
“I’m going to drink fifteen cups of alkalized water a day,” I said.
“Your male pattern baldness worries me.”
I laughed. I actually said “ha ha.” “It worries me too, Grizzly Bear,” I said.
“I’m not talking aesthetics here. All that Russian Jewish testosterone is being turned right into dihydrotestosterone. That’s killer stuff. Prostate cancer down the road. You’ll need at least eight hundred milligrams of saw palmetto a day. What’s wrong, Rhesus? You look like you’re going to cry.”
But I just wanted to listen to him take care of me some more. I wanted him to pay close attention to my dihydrotestosterone and to rescue me from the beautiful bullies in the Eternity Lounge. Joshie has always told Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips. My parents had been raised by Nettie Fine, why couldn’t I be raised by Joshie? “I think I’m in love with this girl,” I sputtered.
“Talk to me.”
“She’s super-young. Super-healthy. Asian. Life expectancy-very high.”
“You know how I feel about love,” Joshie said. The clamoring voices outside were switching from impatience to a deep, teenaged unhappiness.
“You don’t think I should get romantically involved?” I asked. “Because I could stop.”
“I’m kidding, Lenny,” he said, punching my shoulder, painfully-underestimating his new youthful strength. “Jeez, unwind a little. Love is great for pH, ACTH, LDL, whatever ails you. As long as it’s a good, positive love, without suspicion or hostility. Now, what you got to do is make this healthy Asian girl need you the way you need me.”
“Don’t let me die, Joshie,” I said. “I need the dechronification treatments. Why isn’t my name up on The Boards?”
“Things are about to change, Monkey,” Joshie said. “If you followed CrisisNet hourly in Rome like you were supposed to, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“The dollar?” I said hesitantly.
“Forget the dollar. It’s just a symptom. This country makes nothing. Our assets are worthless. The northern Europeans are figuring out how to decouple from our economy, and once the Asians turn off the cash spigot we’re through. And, you know what? This is all going to be great for Post-Human Services! Fear of the Dark Ages, that totally raises our profile. Maybe the Chinese or the Singaporeans will buy us outright. Howard Shu speaks some Mandarin. Maybe you should take some Mandarin classes. Ni hao and all that jazz.”
“I’m sorry if I let you down by going to Rome for so long,” I near-whispered. “I thought maybe I could understand my parents better if I lived in Europe. Spend some time thinking about immortality in a really old place. Read some books. Get some thoughts down.”
Joshie turned away from me. From this angle, I could see another side to him, the slight gray stubble protruding from his perfect egg of a chin-the slight intimations that not all of him could be reverse-engineered into immortality. Yet.
“Those thoughts, these books, they are the problem, Rhesus,” he said. “You have to stop thinking and start selling. That’s why all those young whizzes in the Eternity Lounge want to shove a carb-filled macaroon up your ass. Yes, I overheard that. I have a new beta eardrum. And who can blame them, Lenny? You remind them of death. You remind them of a different, earlier version of our species. 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.”
The floodwater was rising. The bill had come due. I was unworthy, always unworthy. “I’m so selfish, Grizzly Bear. I wish I could have found some more HNWIs for you in Europe. Jesus Christ. Do I still have a job?”
“Let’s get you readjusted here,” Joshie said. He touched my shoulder briefly as he headed for the door. “I can’t get you a desk right away, but I can assign you to Intakes in the Welcome Center.” A demotion from my previous position, but tolerable, as long as the salary stayed the same. “We need to get you a new äppärät,” he said. “You’re going to have to learn to surf the data streams better. Learn to rank people quicker.”
I remembered Point No. 2: Evoke father-like bond in response to political situation. Talk about what happened on the plane; evoke Jewish feelings of terror and injustice. “Joshie,” I said. “You should always have your äppärät on you. This poor fat man on the plane-”
But he was already out the door, throwing me a brief look that commanded me to follow. The hordes of Brown-Yonsei and Reed-Fudan graduates were upon him, each trying to outdo the others in informality (“Joshster! Budnik!” “Papi chulo!”), each holding in his or her hands the solution to all the problems of our world. He gave them tiny bits of himself. He tousled hair. “G’wan, you!” he said to a Jamaican-seeming guy who, when you cut right down to it, was not Jamaican. I realized we were heading downstairs, over to the untamed oasis of Human Resources, straight to Howard Shu’s desk.
Shu, a goddamn relentless immigrant in the mode of my janitor father but with English and good board scores on his side, was dealing with three äppäräti at once, his callused fingertips and spitfire Chinatown diction abuzz with data and the strong, dull hope that he was squarely in control. He reminded me of the time I went to a conference on longevity in some provincial Chinese city. I landed at a just-built airport as beautiful as a coral reef and no less complex, took one look at the scurrying masses, the gleaming insanity in their eyes, at least three men by the taxi ranks trying to sell me a sophisticated new nose-hair trimmer (was this what New York had been like at the start of the twentieth century?), and thought, “Gentlemen, the world is yours.”
To make matters worse, Shu was not unhandsome, and when he and Joshie high-fived each other, I felt the pureness of envy, an emotion that numbed my feet and shorted my breath. “Take care of Len here,” Joshie said to Howard Shu, with just a thimble of conviction. “Remember, he’s an OG.” I hoped he meant Original Gangster and not Old Guy. And then, before I could laugh at his youthful demeanor, at his easy ways, Joshie was gone, headed back into the open arms that would receive him wherever, whenever he felt the need of their embrace.
I sat down across from Howard Shu and tried to radiate indifference. From behind the helmet of his lustrous black hair, Shu did the same. “Leonard,” he said, his button nose aglow, “I’m pulling up your file.”
“Please do.”
“You’re being docked 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars,” Shu said.
“What?”
“Your expenses in Europe. You flew first-class everywhere. Thirteen thousand northern euros’ worth of resveratrol?”
“It was no more than two glasses a day. Red wine only.”
“That’s twenty euros a glass. And what the hell is a bidet?”
“I was just trying to do my job, Howard. You can’t possibly-”
“Please,” he said. “You did nothing. You fucked around. Where are the clients? What happened to that sculptor who was ‘in the bag’?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone.”
“And I don’t appreciate your inability to do your job.”
“I tried to sell the Product, but the Europeans weren’t interested. They’re totally skeptical about our technology. And some of them actually want to die.”
The immigrant eyes glared at me. “No free pass, Leonard. No hiding behind Joshie’s goodwill. You get your act together or we’ll be conducting exit interviews. You can keep your previous salary level, we’ll put you in Intakes, and you’re paying for every last meatball you ate in Rome.”
I looked behind me. “Don’t look behind you,” Shu said. “Your papa’s gone. And what the fuck is this?” A red code was flashing amidst the steady chrome äppärät data. “American Restoration Authority says you were flagged at the embassy in Rome. Now you got the ARA on your tail? What the hell did you do?”
The world took another spin and then a tumble. “Nothing!” I cried. “Nothing! I didn’t try to help the fat man. And I don’t know any Somalians. I slept with Fabrizia only a few times. The otter got it all wrong. It’s all a scam. The guy videotaped me on the plane and I said ‘Why?’ And now I can’t contact Nettie Fine. Do you know what they’ve done to her? Her GlobalTeens address is deleted. I can’t GlobalTrace her either.”
“Otter? Nettie what? It says here ‘malicious provision of incomplete data.’ Fuck it, another mess for me to clean up. Let me see your äppärät. Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?” He spoke into the cuff of his shirt: “Kelly, bring me a new äppärät for Abramov. Bill it to Intakes.”
“I knew it,” I said. “It’s my äppärät’s fault. I just told Joshie that he should always have his on him. Fucking Restoration Authority.”
“Joshie doesn’t need an äppärät,” Shu said. “Joshie doesn’t need a damn thing.” He stared at me with what could have been unimaginable pity or unimaginable hatred, but in either case involved perfect animal stillness. Kelly Nardl came huffing up the stairs with a new äppärät box that was itself a rainbow of blinking data and noise, a nasal Mid-Atlantic voice somehow embedded in the cardboard promising me “Duh berry ladest in RateMe tech-nah-luh-gee.”
“Thanks,” Shu said, and waved Kelly away. Seven years ago, before the mighty Staatling-Wapachung Corporation bought Joshie out for a grotesque sum of money, Kelly, Howard, and I used to occupy the same rung of what was then called a “flat organization,” one without titles or hierarchies. I tried to catch Kelly’s eye, to get her on my side against this monster who couldn’t even pronounce the word “bidet” properly, but she fled Howard’s desk with nary a shake of her friendly backside. “Learn how to use this thing immediately,” Shu told me. “Especially the RateMe part. Learn to rate everyone around you. Get your data in order. Switch on CrisisNet and follow all the latest. An ill-informed salesman is dead in the water these days. Get your mind in the right place. Then we’ll see about putting your name back on The Boards. That’s all, Leonard.”
It was still the lunch hour by my calculations. I went over to the East River with the äppärät package continuously hollering under my arm. I watched unmarked boats bristling with armaments form a gray naval chain from the Triborough down to the Williamsburg Bridge. According to Media, the Chinese Central Banker was coming to take the lay of our indebted land in about two weeks, and security all over Manhattan would be profound for his visit. I sat down on a hard, wiry chair and stared at the impressive all-glass beta skyline of Queens, built way before our last dollar devaluation. I opened the box and took out the smooth pebble of the new äppärät, felt it already warm in my hand. An Asian woman of Eunice’s caliber projected herself at eye level. “Hello,” she said. “Welcome to äppärät 7.5 with RateMe Plus. Would you like to get started? Would you like to get started? Would you like to get started? Just say ‘yes’ and we can get started.”
I owed Howard Shu 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars. My first stab at dechronification-gone. My hair would continue to gray, and then one day it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I’m talking about, would be gone. And that’s what immortality means to me, Joshie. It means selfishness. My generation’s belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
There was a commotion on the water, a needed distraction. With a burble of warm white spray behind it, a northbound seaplane took off so gracefully, so seemingly free of mechanics and despair, that for a moment I imagined all our lives would just go on forever.