Super Sad True Love Story (9 page)

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.”