Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (19 page)

“Let’s go,” I said to Eunice. “I don’t want
kokiri
to see you kissing my nose like that. It’ll only make him sadder.”

“Aw,” she said. “You’re so sweet to animals, Len. I think that’s a good sign. My dad had a dog once and he really took care of her.”

Yes, diary, so many good signs! Such a positive week. Progress on every front. Hitting most of the important categories. Lov[ing] Eunice (Point No. 3), Be[ing] Nice to Parents (Within Limits) (Point No. 5), and Work[ing] Hard for Joshie (No. 1). I’ll get to our (yes,
our
!) visit with the Abramovs in a second, but let me give you a little breakdown on the work situation.

Well, the first thing I did at Post-Human Services was march into the Eternity Lounge and talk to the guy in the red bandana and
SUK DIK
suit, who put me on his stream “101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For,” Darryl from Brown, who stole my desk while I was in Rome. “Hey, guy,” I said. “Look, I appreciate the attention, but I got this new girlfriend with 780 Fuckability”—I had made sure to put an Image of Eunice I had taken at the zoo front and center on my äppärät screen—“and I’m kind of, like, trying to play it real coolio with her. So would you mind taking me off your stream?”

“Fuck you, Rhesus,” the young fellow said. “I do whatever I
want. You’re not, like, my parent. And even if you so
were
my parent I’d still tell you to go plug yourself.”

As before, cute young people were laughing at our interaction, their laughter slow and thick and full of educated malice. I was frankly too stunned to reply (I was of the opinion that I was slowly befriending the
SUK DIK
guy), and even more stunned when my co-worker Kelly Nardl stepped out from behind the fasting-glucose tester, her arms crossed over the redness of her neck and chest, her chin glistening with alkalized water. “Don’t you dare talk to Lenny like that, Darryl,” she said. “Who do you think you are? What, just because he’s older than you? I can’t wait to see you hit thirty. I’ve seen your charts. You’ve got major structural damage from when you were into heroin and carbs, and your whole stupid Boston family is predisposed to alcoholism and whatever the fuck. You think your metabolism is just going to keep you skinny like that forever? Minus the exercise? When was the last time I saw you working out at ZeroMass or No Body? You are going to age
fast
, my friend.” She took me by the arm. “Come on, Lenny,” she said.

“It’s just because he used to be a buddy of Joshie’s,” Darryl shouted after us. “You think that gives you a right to defend him? I’m going to tell on both of you to Howard Shu.”

“He didn’t
used
to be a buddy of Joshie’s,” Kelly growled at him, and how delightful she looked when enraged, those fierce American eyes, the forthrightness of her tremendous jaw. “They’re
still
friends. If it weren’t for Original Gangsters like Lenny, there would be no Post-Human Services and you wouldn’t have your fat salary and benefits, and you’d probably be getting an M.F.A. in so-called
art and design
at SUNY Purchase right about now, you little turd. So be thankful to your elders or I will
fuck you up
.”

We both left the Eternity Lounge proud and confused, as if we had stood up to some crazed, violent child, and I ended up thanking Kelly for half an hour, until she kindly told me to shut up. I worried that Darryl would tell Howard Shu, who would tell Joshie, who would get upset that Kelly was stressing Darryl out, the stressing out of Darryl types a big no-no in our organization. “I don’t care,” she
said, “I’m thinking about quitting anyway. Maybe I’ll move back to S.F.” The idea of leaving Post-Human Services, of giving up on Indefinite Life Extension and eking out a small hairy lifetime in the Bay Area, seemed to me tantamount to plunging off the Empire State Building with such mass and velocity that the myriad of safety nets would snap beneath you until your skull knew the pavement. I massaged Kelly’s shoulders. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t even think about it, Kel. We’re going to stick by Joshie forever.”

But Kelly never got reprimanded. Instead, when I walked into our synagogue’s main sanctuary one humid morning, Little Bobby Cohen, the youngest Post-Human staffer (I think he’s nineteen years old at the most), approached me wearing a kind of saffron monk getup. “Come with me, Leonard,” he said, his Bar Mitzvah voice straining under the profundity of what he was about to do.

“Oh, what’s all this?” I asked, my heart pumping blood so hard my toes hurt.

As he led me to a tiny back office where, judging by the sweet-briny smell, the former synagogue’s gefilte-fish supply was stored, Little Bobby sang: “May you live forever, may you never know death, may you float like Joshie, on a newborn’s breath.”

My God! The Desking Ceremony.

And there it was, surrounded by a dozen staffers and our leader (who hugged and kissed me)—my new desk! As Kelly fed me a ceremonial garlic bulb, followed by some sugar-free niacin mints, I surveyed all the pretty young people who had doubted me, all those Darryls and friends of Darryls, and I felt the queasy, mercurial justice of the world. I was back! My Roman failures were near-erased. Now I could begin again. I ran out into the synagogue’s sanctuary, where The Boards were noisily registering my existence, the droning but comforting sound of the letters “
LENNY A
.” flipping into place at the very bottom of one of the boards, along with my last blood work—not so hot—and the promising mood indicator “meek but cooperative.”

My desk. All three square feet of it, shiny and sleek, full of text and streams and Images rising up from its digital surface, a desk
probably worth the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I still owed Howard Shu. Ignoring the Eternity Lounge as if it were now beneath me, I spent the bulk of my working week at my desk, opening up several data streams at once so that I resembled a man too busy to bother with socializing.

Affecting a god-like air—my Eunice-kissed proboscis pointed toward the ceiling, both hands caressing the data in front of me, as if ready to make man out of clay—I scanned the files of our prospective Life Lovers. Their white, beatific, mostly male faces (our research shows that women are more concerned with taking care of their progeny than with living forever) flashed before me, telling me about their charitable activities, their plans for humanity, their concern for our chronically ill planet, their dreams of eternal transcendence with like-minded yuan billionaires. I guessed that the last time they had been so painfully dishonest was when they penned their applications to Swarthmore forty years earlier.

I picked out the profiles that appealed the most to me, some for the usual financial, intellectual, or “durability” (health) reasons, but others because they could not keep the fear out of their eyes, the fear that, for all the wealth and sinecures they had amassed, for all their supplicating children and grandchildren, the end was irreversible, the lapse into the void a tragedy before which all tragedies were scandalously trite, their progeny a joke, their accomplishments a drop of fresh water in a salty ocean. I scanned the good cholesterol and the bad, the estrogen buildups and the financial crack-ups, but mostly I was looking for the equivalent of Joshie’s funny limp: An admission of weakness and insignificance; an allusion to the broad unfairness and cosmic blundering of the universe we inhabit. And an intense desire to set it right.

One of my Intakes, let’s call him Barry, ran a small Retail empire in the Southern states. He looked suitably cowed by what Howard Shu must have told him before he was handed over to me. We accepted, on average, 18 percent of our High Net Worth applicants, our dreaded rejection letter still sent out by actual post. The Intake lasted a while. Barry, trying to subdue any remaining trace of his Alabama
drawl, wanted to sound knowledgeable about our work. He asked about cellular inspection, repair, and reconstruction. I painted him a three-dimensional picture of millions of autonomous nanobots inside his well-preserved squash-playing body, extracting nutrients, supplementing, delivering, playing with the building blocks, copying, manipulating, reprogramming, replacing blood, destroying harmful bacteria and viruses, monitoring and identifying pathogens, reversing soft-tissue destruction, preventing bacterial infection, repairing DNA. I tried to remember how enthusiastic I had been upon first joining Joshie’s enterprise as an NYU senior. I used my hands a lot, the way the faded Roman actors had done at da Tonino, the restaurant where I had taken Eunice and fed her the spicy eggplant. “How soon?” Barry asked, visibly excited by
my
excitement. “When will all this be possible?”

“We’re almost there,” I said, despairing. The 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed Howard Shu would be deducted on the first of the next month. That money was supposed to be my deposit for the first of many beta dechronification treatments. Forget my name on The Boards. The train was pulling out of the station and I was running behind it, my suitcase half open, white underwear spilling comically along the platform.

I took Barry all the way over to the wasteland of York Avenue to our research center, the ten-story slab of concrete that once served as an adjunct to a large hospital. It was time for him to meet out Indians. We have this Cowboys and Indians theme going on at Post-Human Services. At the Life Lovers Outreach division we call ourselves Cowboys; the “Indians” are the actual research staff, mostly on loan from the Subcontinent and East Asia, housed at an eighty-thousand-square-foot facility on York and at three satellite locations in Austin, Texas; Concord, Massachusetts; and Portland, Oregon.

The Indians keep things pretty simple. There really isn’t much to see in the areas to which visitors are allowed—basically the same thing you see in any office—young people with äppäräti, immune to the rest of the world, maybe the occasional glass cage filled with
mice or some kind of spinning thingamabob. Two of our most sociable guys, both named Prabal, came out to greet him from the cancer and viral labs and burdened him with yet more terminology while letting out a few practiced promos: “We’re past the alpha testing, Mr. Barry. I’d say we’re definitely at the beta stage.”

Back at the synagogue, I gave Barry the willingness-to-live test. The H-scan test to measure the subject’s biological age. The willingness-to-persevere-in-difficult-conditions test. The Infinite Sadness Endurance Test. The response-to-loss-of-child test. He must have sensed how much was at stake, his sharp WASP-y beak aquiver as the Images were projected against his pupils, the results streaming on my äppärät. He would do anything to persevere. He was saddened by life, by the endless progression from one source of pain to another, but not more than most. He had three children and would cling to them forever, even if his present-day bank account would not be able to preserve more than two
for eternity
. I entered “Sophie’s Choice” on my intake äppärät, a major problem as far as Joshie was concerned.

Barry was exhausted. The Patterson-Clay-Schwartz Language Cognition Test, the final barometer for selection, could await another session. I knew already that this perfectly reasonable, preternaturally kind fifty-two-year-old would not make the cut. He was doomed, like me. And so I smiled at him, congratulated him on his candor and patience, his intellect and maturity, and with a tap of my finger against my digital desk threw him onto the blazing funeral pyre of history.

I felt shitty about Barry, but even shittier about myself. Joshie’s office was crammed with people all day long, but during a quiet moment I found him by the window, staring quizzically at a sky of untrammeled blue, just a fat lone military helicopter trudging toward the East River, its armored beak pointed downward as if it were a predatory bird hunting for food. I sidled up to him. He nodded, not unfriendly, but with some tired reserve. I told him the story of Barry, stressing the man’s innate goodness and his problem of
having too many children, whom he loved, and not enough money to save all of them, which elicited a shrug on his part. “Those who want to live forever will find a means of doing so,” Joshie said, a cornerstone of the Post-Human philosophy.

“Hey, Grizzly,” I said, “do you think you can put me in for some of the dechronification treatments at a reduced rate? Just basic soft-tissue maintenance, and maybe a few bio years shaved off?”

Joshie regarded the nine-foot fiberglass Buddha that furnished his otherwise empty office, its blissed-out gaze emitting alpha rays. “That’s only for clients,” he said. “You know that, Rhesus. Why do you have to make me say it out loud? Stick with the diet and exercise. Use stevia instead of sugar. You’ve still got a lot of life left in you.”

My sadness filled the room, took over its square, simple contours, crowding out even Joshie’s spontaneous rose-petal odor. “I didn’t mean that,” Joshie said. “Not just
a lot
of life. Maybe forever. But you can’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a certainty.”

“You’ll see me die someday,” I said, and immediately felt bad for saying it. I tried, as I had done since childhood, to feel nonexistence. I forced coldness to run through the natural humidity of my hungry second-generation-immigrant body. I thought of my parents. We would all be dead together. Nothing would remain of our tired, broken race. My mother had bought three adjoining plots at a Long Island Jewish cemetery. “Now we can be together forever,” she had told me, and I had nearly broken down in tears at her misplaced optimism, at the notion that she would want to spend her idea of eternity—and what could her eternity
possibly
comprise?—with her failure of a son.

“You’ll see me extinguished,” I told Joshie.

“That would be a big heartbreak for me, Lenny,” Joshie said, his voice broken with exhaustion, or maybe just boredom.

“Three hundred years from now, you won’t even remember me. Just some flunky.”

“Nothing is guaranteed,” Joshie said. “Even
I
can never be sure of whether my personality will survive forever.”

“It will,” I said. A father should never outlive his child, I wanted to add, although I knew Joshie would disagree on principle.