“No, jerk-face,” Eunice said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in those jeans. They make normal dresses too.”
“Oh,” I said. The fantasy came to an end, and I found myself oddly happy with the conservative girl by my side. We wended our way through a half-kilometer of racks and hit upon the Onionskin outlet. True enough, there were several racks of cocktail dresses, a bit revealing around the bosom, but certainly not see-through. Women, tired and aggrieved, were plowing through the brand’s signature transparent jeans, hanging like rigid, empty skins in the center of the Retail space.
As Eunice started clicking through the dresses, a Retail person came over to talk to her. My äppärät quickly zoomed in past the data outflows spilling out from the customers like polluted surf falling upon once-pristine shores and focused on McKay Watson. She was beautiful, this Retail girl. A tall, straight-necked creature whose eyes, clear and present, spoke of native-born honesty, as if to say, With a background like mine, who needs self-invention? I caressed McKay’s data, even as I took in the Onionskin jeans that clung to her slight if bottom-heavy body—she wore the semi-translucent kind that partly obscured her nether regions and gave them an impressionistic quality, the kind you had to step back to admire. She had graduated from Tufts with a major in international affairs and a minor in Retail science. Her parents were retired professors in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she grew up (baby Images of an oblivious but affectionate McKay hugging a container of orange juice). She didn’t have a boyfriend at present but enjoyed the “reverse cowgirl” position with the last one, an aspiring young Mediastud from Great Neck.
Eunice and McKay were verballing each other. They were discussing clothes in a way I couldn’t fully appreciate. They were discussing the finer points of a particular dress not made of natural fibers. The waists, stretched, unstretched. Composition—7 percent elastane, 2 percent polyester, a size three, 50 percent rayon viscose.
“It’s not treated with sodium hydroxide.”
“I bought the one with the slit to the left and it stretched.”
“Coat the inside of the hem with petroleum jelly.”
Eunice had put one hand on the shiny white arm of the Retail girl, a gesture of intimacy I had seen only extended to one of her Elderbird friends, the plump, matronly girl with the low Fuckability ranking. I heard some funny retro expressions like “JK,” which means one is “just kidding,” and “on the square,” which means one is not. I heard the familiar “JBF” and “TIMATOV!” but also “TPR!” and “CFG!” “TMS!” (temporary motion sickness?), “KOT!,” and the more universal “Cute!” This is just how people talk, I thought to myself. Feel the wonder of the moment. See the woman that you love reaching out to the world around her.
She bought two cocktail dresses for 5,240 yuan-pegged dollars, of which I covered three thousand. I could feel my debt load groaning a little, shedding a few points, immortality slipping a few notches into the improbable, but nothing like the 239,000-yuan-pegged-dollar punch I had recently taken in the balls from Howard Shu.
“Why didn’t you ask that girl if she could get you a job at Onionskin?” I asked Eunice when we had walked away from the Retail space.
“Are you kidding?” Eunice said. “Do you know what kind of grades you have to have to work UNRC? And she had the perfect body too. A nice round butt, but a totally boyish top. That’s so hot right now.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Your grades or looks aren’t any worse than hers,” I said. “Anyway, at least you could have gotten her Teens address. She seems like a good friend to have.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Eunice said.
“I mean—”
“Okay, shhhh … It’s your turn to shop. Breathable fabrics are going to do wonders for my kokiri.”
We hit the glowing, mahogany-paneled insinuation that was the JuicyPussy4Men store. “You have a weak chin,” Eunice told me, “so all these shirts you wear with the huge, high collars just showcase your chin and accentuate how weak it is. We’re going to get you some V-necks and some solid-colored tees. Striped cotton shirts a bit on the roomy side are going to make your flabby breasts less noticeable, and do yourself a favor, okay? Cashmere. You’re worth it, Len.”
She made me close my eyes and feel different fabrics. She dressed me in nontight JuicyPussy jeans and stuck a hand down my crotch to make sure my genitals had room to breathe. “It’s about comfort,” she said. “It’s about feeling and acting like a thirty-nine-year-old. Which is what you are, last time I checked.” I could feel her family inside her—rude, snide, unsupportive, yet getting the job done, acting appropriately, making sure there was room for my genitals, saving face. Beyond the mountains, according to the old Korean proverb Grace had once told me, were more mountains. We’d only just begun.
When I went into a changing room, one of the teenaged sales clerks said to me, “I’ll tell your daughter you’re in there, sir,” and instead of taking offense at being mistaken for Eunice’s presumably adoptive father, I actually felt in awe of my girl, in awe of the fact that every day we were together she ignored the terrible aesthetic differences between us. This shopping was not just for me or for her. It was for us as a couple. It was for our future together.
I left JuicyPussy with the equivalent of ten thousand yuan’s worth of goods. My debt load was blinking frantically with the words RECALCULATION IN PROGRESS, which scared off the swarms of Debt Bombers looking to give me more money. When I walked by a Credit Pole on 42nd Street, I registered a ranking of 1510 (down ten points). I may have been poorer, but you couldn’t confuse me for the overaged faux-hipster that had entered the UNRC three hours ago. I was what passed for a man now.
There was more. I looked healthier. The breathable fibers took about four years off my biological age. At work, Intakes asked if I was undergoing dechronification treatments myself. I took a physical, and my statistics started flapping on The Boards, my ACTH and cortisol levels plummeting, my designation now “a carefree and inspiring older gent.” Even Howard Shu came down to my desk and asked me to lunch. By this point, Joshie was sending Shu down to Washington on his private jet every week. Rumor had it Shu was bound for the White House or even higher up than that. “Rubenstein,” people hiccupped, covering their mouths. We were negotiating with the Bipartisans themselves! Over what, though, I still couldn’t tell.
But I was no longer scared of Shu. At our lunch meeting, I stared him down as I played with the cuffs of my striped cotton shirt, which indeed gave cover to my incipient man-breasts. We sat in a busy canteen drinking Swiss water we had alkalinized ourselves at the table and eating a few pellets of something fishy.
“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot when you came back from Rome,” Shu allowed, his full-bore eyes floating through the data fog of his äppärät.
“No big,” I said.
“I’m going to tell you something for your ears only.”
“Whatevs,” I said. “Verbal me, friend.”
Shu wiped his mouth as if I had just spat in it, but then resumed his collegial air. “There’s a good chance there’s going to be a disturbance. A realignment. Bigger than with the last riots. Not sure when. It’s what we’re picking up from Wapachung Intelligence. Just playing out some war games.”
“Safety first,” I said, looking bored. “What’s going on, Shu-ster?”
Shu descended into another äppärät reverie. I did the same, pretending it was something serious and work-related, but really I was just GlobalTracing Eunice’s location. She was, as always, at 575 Grand Street, Apt. E-607, my home, deep into her own äppärät, but subconsciously saturated by the presence of my books and mid-twentieth-century-design furniture. It pleased me, in a parochial way, the fact that I could always count on her being there. My little housewife! She tracked me moment by moment as well, getting suspicious if I veered off course from the daily set of my life, an impromptu meeting at a bar with Noah or Vishnu or a walk in the unbloodied part of Central Park with Grace. The fact that sh
e was suspicious of me, the fact that she cared—that pleased me too.
“Let’s not talk about what might happen,” Shu said. “I just wanted you to know that Post-Human Services values you.” He swallowed too much water and coughed into his hand. He had had the same educational and work background as I had, but I noticed the callused tips of his fingers, as if he volunteered at a knitting factory during the weekends. “And we want you to be safe.”
“I’m touched,” I said, and I meant it. A high-school memory resurfaced, the day I found out that a wispy freshman girl whom I fancied, complete with an attractive limp and a penchant for poetry, liked me as well.
Howard nodded. “We’ve updated your äppärät. If you see any National Guard troops, point your äppärät at them. If you see a red dot, that means they’re Wapachung Contingency personnel. You know”—he tried to smile—“the good guys.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to the real National Guard?”
But Shu never answered me. “That girl you have on your äppärät,” he said, pointing to an Image of Eunice I had floating all over my screen.
“Eunice Park. My gf.”
“Joshie says to make sure you’re with her in any emergency.”
“Duh,” I said. But it was nice that Joshie remembered I was in love.
Shu picked up his glass of alkalinized water and made a jokey toast with it. Then he leaned back and drank it down in such forceful gulps that our veined marble table shook, and the business people who shared the premises looked at this small brown almond of a man in their midst and tried to snicker at his display of strength. But they too were afraid of him.
After my Shu lunch, I walked from the Essex Street F stop to my far-flung riverside co-op with a renewed sense of grandeur. Since Eunice had picked out my new duds, I had started obsessively FACing every girl in sight: pretty, average, thin, skeletal, white, brown, black. It must have been my confidence, because my PERSONALITY was hitting the 700s and my MALE HOTNESS skirted into the 600s—so that, in an enclosed space like the M14 bus, with its small herd of trendoids grazing amidst the dying old people, I could sometimes emerge in the middle range of attractiveness, say the fifth-cutest man out of nine or ten. I would like to describe this utterly new feeling to you, diary, but I fear it will come out in purely evangelical terms. It felt like being born again. It felt like Eunice had resurrected me on a bed of cotton and wool.
But getting Eunice to meet Joshie was not easy. On the night before we were to go over to his place, she couldn’t sleep. “I don’t know, Len,” she whispered. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
She was wearing a long satin twentieth-century sleeping gown, a gift from her mother that left everything to the imagination, instead of her usual TotalSurrenders.
“I feel like you’re making me do this,” she said.
“I feel like I’m being pushed.”
“I feel like things are moving too fast.”
“Maybe I should move back to Fort Lee.”
“Maybe you need to be with a real adult.”
“We both knew I was going to hurt you.”
I gently pawed her back in the dark. I did my patented cornered-rat-tapping-his-foot-in-distress noise against the mattress and made an ambiguous animal sound.
“Stop that,” she said. “The zoo is closed.”
I whispered what was required of me. Various pop-psych gems. Encouragements. I assumed the debt and the blame. It wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was just an extension of her father. The night was dedicated to her sighs and my whispers. We finally fell asleep just as the sun rose over the Vladeck housing projects, an exhausted American flag slapping itself in the summer wind. We awoke at 5 p.m., having nearly missed the car Joshie had sent to help us ascend to the Upper West Side. We dressed in silence, and when I tried to take her hand in the sparkling new Hyundai Town Car, possibly on its maiden voyage, she flinched and looked away. “You look beautiful,” I said. “That dress.”
She said nothing. “Please,” I said. “It’s important for Joshie to meet you. It’s important for me. Just be yourself.”
“What’s that? Dumb. Boring.”
We cut through Central Park. Armed choppers were making their weekend rounds above us, but the traffic below was light and easy, the humid breeze rocking the tops of the immortal trees. I thought of how we had kissed in the Sheep Meadow on the day she moved in with me, how I had held her tiny person to me for a hundred slow beats, and how, for that entire time, I had thought death beside the point.
Joshie’s building was on a street between Amsterdam and Columbus—a twelve-story Upper West Side co-op, unremarkable save for the two National Guardsmen who stood on either side of the entrance, shunting passersby off the sidewalk with their rifles. An ARA sign at the mouth of the street urged us to deny its existence and imply consent. Joshie had told me these men were keeping tabs on him, but even I understood they served as protection. A red dot appeared on my äppärät, along with the words “Wapachung Contingency.” The good guys.
The tiny lobby was filled by an affably heavy Dominican man in a faded gray uniform and the difficult breath coming out of him. “Hello, Mr. Lenny,” he said to me. I used to see him all the time when Joshie and I were more regular friends, when our work was not yet all-consuming and we would think nothing of sharing a bagel in the park or catching some exhausting Iranian flick at Lincoln Center.
“This is where the Jewish intelligentsia used to live, a long, long time ago,” I told Eunice in the elevator. “I think that’s why Joshie likes it here. It’s a kind of nostalgia trip.”
“Who were they?” she said.
“What?”
“Jewish intelligentsia.”
“Oh, just Jews who thought a lot about the world and then wrote books about it. Lionel Trilling and those guys.”
“They started your boss’s immortality business?” Eunice asked.
I could have almost kissed her cold, rouged lips. “In a sense,” I said. “They came from poor, hardy families and they were realistic about dying.”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to come,” Eunice said. “Because I don’t know any of this stuff.”
The old-fashioned elevator doors opened symphonically. By Joshie’s door, a muscular young man in T-shirt and jeans was dragging out a heavy garbage bag with his back to me, the dull interior light of the Upper West Side glistening off his shaved head. A cousin, if I remembered correctly. Jerry or Larry from New Jersey. I stuck out my hand as he began to turn around. “Lenny Abramov,” I said. “I think we met at your dad’s Chanukah party in Mamaroneck.”
“Rhesus Monkey?” the man said. The familiar black pelt of his mustache twitched in greeting. This was no cousin from Matawan. I was looking at dechronification in action. I was looking at Joshie Goldmann himself, his body reverse-engineered into a thick young mass of tendons and forward motion. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Someone’s been hitting the Indians. No wonder I haven’t seen you at the office all week.”
But the rejuvenated Joshie was no longer noticing me. He was breathing both heavily and evenly. His mouth opened slowly. “Hi-ya,” the mouth said.
“Hi,” Eunice said. “Lenny,” she started to say.
“Lenny,” Joshie echoed, absently. “Sorry. I’m—”
“Eunice.”
“Joshie. Come in. Please.” He examined her as she passed through the door, preyed on the lightly tanned shoulders beneath the black cocktail-dress straps, then looked at me with numb understanding. Youth. A seemingly untrammeled flow of energy. Beauty without nanotechnology. If only he knew how unhappy she was.
We passed into the living room, which I knew to be as humble as the rest of the apartment. Art Deco couches in blue velvet. Posters from his youth—science-fiction films with big-haired women and deep-jawed men—framed conservatively in oak, as if to say they had withstood the test of time and emerged, if not masterpieces, then at least potent artifacts. The na
mes alone. Soylent Green. Logan’s Run. Here were Joshie’s beginnings. A dystopian upper-class childhood in several elite American suburbs. Total immersion in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The twelve-year-old’s first cognition of mortality, for the true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it. The self-love. Not wanting to die. Wanting to live, but not sure why. Looking up at the nighttime sky, at the black eternity of outer space, amazed. Hating the parents. Wanting their love. Already an anxious sense of time passing, the staggered bathroom howls of grief for a deceased Pomeranian, young Joshie’s stalwart and only best friend, felled by doggie cancer on a Chevy Chase lawn.
Eunice stood there, in the middle of the living room, blushing intensely, the blood coming in waves. I did something I hadn’t quite expected of myself. I breached decorum, came over and kissed her on the ear. For some reason I wanted Joshie to understand just how much I loved her and how that love was not just predicated on her youth, probably the only thing he appreciated about her. The two people who formed my universe looked away from me, embarrassed. “I’m so glad,” Joshie muttered. “I’m so glad to finally meet you. Jeez. Lenny talks so much about you.”
“Lenny just talks a lot,” Eunice successfully joked.
I put my hand around her shoulders and felt her breathe. Joshie straightened up and I could see the muscle tone, the deep-veined reality of what he was becoming, the little machines burrowing inside him, clearing up what had gone wrong, rewiring, rededicating, resetting the odometer on every cell, making him shine with a child’s precocious glow. Among the three of us in the room, I was the one who was proactively dying.
“Okay, let’s get some of that yummy good wine,” Joshie said. He laughed with uncharacteristic fakeness, then ran off into the well-stocked galley kitchen.
“I’ve never seen him like this,” I said to Eunice.
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