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.”
“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.”
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