Super Sad True Love Story

Courtesy of the Debt Bomber, three wheaty beers, high in triglycerides, were smacked on the table. I began my debriefing, trying to entertain the boys with stories of my funny, dirty, crosscultural romance with Fabrizia, drawing with my fingers the outlines of her bush. I sang lyrical about the fresh garlic tang of old-world ragu and tried to inculcate them with a love of the Roman arch. But the truth was, they didn’t care. The world they needed was right around them, flickering and bleeping, and it demanded every bit of strength and attention they could spare. Noah, the one-time novelist, could probably think of Rome in nonimmediate terms, could conjure up Seneca and Virgil, The Marble Faun and Daisy Miller. But even he seemed unimpressed, glancing impatiently at his apparat, which was alive with at least seven degrees of information, numbers and letters and Images stacked on the screen, flowing and eddying against one another as the waters of the Tiber once did. “We’re losing hits,” he whispered to me. “Ix-nay on the Rome-ay, okay?” And then, in a really low voice: “Humor and politics. Got it?”

I cut short a description of the Pantheon’s empty space drenched with early-morning sunlight, as Noah pointed the clumped remains of his frontal hair at me and said: “All right, here’s the situation, Nee-gro. You have to fuck either Mother Teresa or Margaret Thatcher…”

Vishnu and I laughed just the right amount and smiled at our leader. I raised my hands in defeat. This is the only way men could talk anymore. This is how we told one another that we were still friends and that our lives were not entirely over. “Maggie Thatcher if it’s missionary,” I said. “Definitely Mother Teresa from behind.”

“You are so Media,” Noah said, and we smacked fists.

From there the conversation moved on to Threads, a cult BBC nuclear-holocaust film, then over to the music of early Dylan, then a new way of fighting genital warts with a kind of smart foam, Secretary of State Rubenstein’s latest bungling in Venezuela (“nothing more oxymoronic than a Jewish strongman, am I right, pendejos?” Noah said), the near collapse of AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit, the ensuing failed bailout by the Fed, our faltering portfolios, the “wah-wuh” sound of the doors closing on the 6 train versus the resigned “sheeesh” sound on the L, the life and bizarre death of the deviant comic known as Pee-wee Herman, and finally, inexhaustibly, the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.

“I could eat, like, a dozen of those ThaiSnak Issan larb chicken salads right about now,” Noah said, in deference to one of his sponsors.

As the retro sound system went into an old Arcade Fire tune, I let myself get cozy with another glass of foaming ale, observing the boys on a meta-level. Noah had aged worst of all. The weight had seemingly trickled from his thick, brainy forehead down into his jowls, where it jiggled inopportunely, giving him an afterglow of anger and dissatisfaction. At one time he was clearly the most handsome and successful of our number, he had introduced us to half the girlfriends we ever had (not that many, to be sure), had given us our edgy racial vocabulary, and had kept us updated with a dozen messages an hour on how we should act and what we should think. But with every year it was getting harder to keep me and Vishnu in check. The almost-forties, once the fulcrum of adulthood, was now a time of exploration, and each of the boys had struck out on his own.

Vishnu was settling into the life of a smart, fancy loser, the SUK DIK bodysuit and vintage Bathing Ape sneakers that must have cost five hundred yuan, an overeagerness to laugh too hard at others’ jokes with a strange new honking sound that had developed in my absence-ha-huh, ha-huh- a laughter born of a life of diminishing returns that, I’ve been told, would miraculously end in marriage to a loving, forgiving woman named Grace.

As for me, I was now the odd man out. It would take a while for my boys to get used to my return. They glanced at me strangely, as if I had unlearned English, or repudiated our common way of life. I was already something of a weirdo for living all the way out in Manhattan. Now I had wasted an entire year and a good chunk of my savings in Europe. As a friend, a well-respected member of the technological elite, and, yes, a fellow “Nee-gro,” I needed to reclaim my prime position among the boys as a kind of alternate Noah. I needed to replant myself on native soil.

The three things I had going for me: an inbred Russian willingness to get drunk and chummy, an inbred Jewish willingness to laugh strategically at myself, and, most impressively, my new apparat. “Damn, cabron,” Noah said, eyeing my pebble. “Whuddat, a 7.5 with RateMe Plus? I’m going to stream that shit fucking close-up.”

He filmed my apparat with his apparat, while I swallowed another mug of triglycerides. Some Staten Island girls had shown up, wearing trendy retro clothes from some point in my youth, looking very Media in their sheepy Ugg boots and rhinestone-encrusted bandanas, a few of them mixing the old-school duds with Onionskin jeans which clung transparently to their thin legs and plump, pink bottoms, revealing to us all of their shaven secrets. They were also looking our way, scrolling their devices, one of them a pretty brunette with beautiful sleepy eyes.

“Let’s fuck,” Vishnu said, pointing in their direction.

“Jeez, cool it, Nee-gro,” I said, already slurring my words. “You’ve got a little cutie at home.” I looked directly into the camera nozzle of Noah’s apparat: “’Sup, Grace. Long time no see, baby girl. You watching this live?”

The boys laughed at me. “What an idiot!” Noah cried. “Did you hear that, beloved cocksucking audience? Lenny Abramov thought Vishnu Cohen-Clark just said, ‘Let’s fuck.’”

“It’s F-A-C,” Vishnu explained. “I said, ‘Let’s FAC.’”

“What does that mean?”

“He sounds like my granny in Aventura!” Noah was bellowing. “‘FAC? What’s that? Who am I? Where’s my diaper?’”

“It means ‘Form A Community,’” Vishnu said. “It’s, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.” He took my apparat, and slid some settings until an icon labeled “FAC” drifted onto the screen. “When you see FAC, you press the EmotePad to your heart, or wherever it can feel your pulse.” Vishnu pointed out the sticky thing on the back of my apparat that I thought could be used to attach it to a dashboard or a fridge. Wrong again.

“Then,” Vishnu continued, “you look at a girl. The EmotePad picks up any change in your blood pressure. That tells her how much you want to do her.”

“All right, Mediastuds and Mediawhores,” Noah said. “We’re streaming live here as Lenny Abramov tries to FAC for the first time. This is a future-reference event, folks, so widen your bandwidth. This is like the Wright brothers learning to fly, except neither of them was mildly retarded like our boy Lenny here. JBF, Nee-gro. Tell me if I’m going too far. Or wait. There’s no such thing as too far in Rubenstein’s America. Too far is when you’re shot in the back of the head somewhere Upstate and the National Guard burns your body to a crisp and flushes the ashes down a cold winter’s port-a-potty at some Secure Screening Facility in Troy. Lenny’s looking at me like What are you talking about? Here’s the breakdown on what you’ve missed during your ‘junior year abroad,’ Lenny-boy: The Bipartisans run the American Refund Agency, or whatever the fuck it’s called, the ARA runs the infrastructure and the National Guard, and the National Guard runs you. Oops. Not supposed to mention that on GlobalTeens. Maybe I have gone too far!”

I noticed Vishnu moving his head out of the frame of Noah’s apparat’s camera nozzle at the mention of the ARA and the Bipartisans. “Okay, Nee-gro,” he said to me. “Set up your Community Parameters. Make it ‘Immediate Space 360’-that’ll cover the whole bar. Now look at a girl, then press the pad to your heart.” I looked at the pretty brunette, at the hairless crotch glowing from within her see-through Onionskin jeans, at the lithe body crouched imperiously atop a set of smooth legs, at her worried smile. Then I touched my heart with the back of my apparat, trying to fill it with my warmth, my natural desire for love.

The girl across the bar laughed immediately without even turning my way. A bunch of figures appeared on my screen: “FUCKABILITY 780/800, PERSONALITY 800/800, ANAL/ORAL/VAGINAL PREFERENCE 1/3/2.”

“Fuckability 780!” Noah said. “Personality 800! Leeeetl Lenny Abramov’s got himself a beeeeeg crush.”

“But I don’t even know her personality,” I said. “And how does it know my anal preferences?”

“The personality score depends on how ‘extro’ she is,” Vishnu explained. “Check it out. This girl done got three thousand-plus Images, eight hundred streams, and a long multimedia thing on how her father abused her. Your apparat runs that against the stuff you’ve downloaded about yourself and then it comes up with a score. Like, you’ve dated a lot of abused girls, so it knows you’re into that shit. Here, let me see your profile.” Vishnu slid some other functions, and my profile shimmered on my warm pebbly screen.