Super Sad True Love Story

AN EXCLUSIVE TRIPLEX COMMUNITY FOR NON-U.S. NATIONALS

By Staatling Property

Seven TRIPLEX Living Units priced to move from 20,000,000 northern euros / 33,000,000 yuan

“Twenty million euros!” I said to Eunice. “That’s fifty years of my salary. Even foreigners don’t have that kind of money anymore!”

“Isn’t this the place where that guy shits all the time?” Euny said nonchalantly, evidently inured to the vagaries of my quartier. I continued to read:

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“EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance”? Beg pardon? You had to prove you were worthy of cheating death at Post-Human Services. Like I said, only 18 percent of our applicants qualified for our Product. That’s how Joshie intended it. Hence the Intakes I was supposed to perform. Hence the Language Cognition tests and the essays on outliving your children. Hence-the whole philosophy. Now they were going to bestow immortality on a bunch of fat, glossy Dubai billionaires who bought a Staatling Property “TRIPLEX Living Unit”?

I was about to start a healthy diatribe on the Subject of Everything (I think Eunice likes it when I teach her new stuff) when I noticed a familiar squiggle on the corner of the sign.

In a stenciled, bleeding-edge style that had been cool at the turn of the century, I saw-no, it couldn’t be!-an arty reproduction of Jeffrey Otter, my inquisitor at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, in his stupid red-white-and-blue bandana, a smudge of what could have been a cold sore on his hairy upper lip. “Oh,” I said, and actually backed away.

“Kokiri?” Eunice asked. “What’s up, nerd-face?”

I made a breathing sound. “Panic attack?” she asked. I put up my hand to indicate a “time-out.” My eyes ran up and down the graffito as if I were trying to scrub it into a different dimension. The otter stared back at me: curved, oddly sexual, pregnant with life, the fur smoothed into little charcoal mounds clearly warm and soft to the touch. It reminded me of Fabrizia. My betrayal. What had I done to her? What had they done to her? Who had drawn this? What were they trying to tell me? I looked at Eunice. She was using my forty-second pause to bury her head into her apparat. What was I even doing with this sleek digital creature? I felt, for the first time since her arrival in my life, truly mistaken.

But the day wasn’t finished with me yet.

When we got to the Cervix, my friend Grace was the one to object.

“She’s too young for you,” she whispered to me after Eunice had turned away from us and started AssLuxury shopping. There wasn’t anything particularly antisocial about this-the boys were watching Chinese Central Banker Wangsheng Li’s visit to Washington on their own apparati, and Noah’s girl, Amy, was setting up hand lotions and other sponsored products for a live stream of the “Amy Greenberg Muffintop Hour.”

For a second I thought Grace was jealous of Eunice, and that was more than fine with me, because, to be honest, I’ve always had a crush on Grace. She wasn’t particularly pretty, the eyes too widely set apart, her bottom teeth like an interstate pile-up, and she was, if it’s at all possible, too thin from the waist up, to the point where she looked bird-like doing any activity, even walking up the stairs or passing a plate of Brie. But she was kind-so kind and forthright, and so well educated and serious about life, that when I thought I was in love with Fabrizia in Rome, all I had to do was think of Grace talking about her complex wintry childhood in the farthest reaches of Wisconsin State or the German artist Joseph Beuys, her passion, to know that everything about my relationship with poor, doomed Fabrizia was transitory and a lie.

“Why don’t you like Eunice?” I asked Grace, hoping she would stutter and painfully confess her love for me.

“It’s not that I don’t like her,” Grace said. “It just feels like she’s got a lot of things to work out.”

“I got a lot of things to work out too,” I said. “Maybe Eunice and I can work them out together.”

“Lenny.” Grace rubbed my upper arm and flashed me her lower yellows (how I relished her imperfections). “If you’re attracted to her physically, that’s fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. She’s hot. Have a good time with her. Have a fling. But don’t tell me, ‘I’m in love with her.’”

“I’m worried about dying,” I said.

“And she makes you feel young?” Grace said.

“She makes me feel bald.” I ran my hand through what was left.

“I like your hair,” Grace said, gently pulling at the clump standing armed sentinel over my widow’s peak. “It’s honest.”

“I guess in some ridiculous way I think Eunice will let me live forever. Please don’t say anything Christian, Grace. I really can’t handle it.”

“We’re all going to die, Lenny,” Grace said. “You, me, Vishnu, Eunice, your boss, your clients, everyone.”

The boys were now hooting over their apparati, and Grace and I joined them. They were watching the stream of Noah’s friend Hartford Brown, who did a political commentary show intermixed with his own hardcore gay sex. The esteemed Li-officially the Governor of the People’s Bank of China-Worldwide, unofficially the world’s most powerful man-was first shown chatting up our clueless Bipartisan leaders on the White House lawn. There was my father’s idol, Defense Secretary Rubenstein, bowing from the waist, his bumbling incoherent rage turned to quiet obedience, his trademark white handkerchief flashing out of his suit pocket like a cheap surrender. Rubenstein presented Li with some sort of golden fish, which flopped into the air and miraculously opened up into an approximation of China’s bulbous shape, a sign that America could still produce and innovate.

Then the positively ripped Hartford was mounted on top of what was announced as a yacht near the Dutch Antilles, fresh spray rainbowing his sunglasses, two hairy dark arms massaging his marbled chest and shoulders as his lover’s thrusts pushed him into the frame of his apparat. “Fuck me, brownie,” he crooned to his sailing buddy, his lips so louche yet masculine, so full of life and heat that I found myself feeling happy for his happiness.

Then cut to Li and our youthful puppet leader Jimmy Cortez at the White House, the American President seated stiffly, the Chinese banker more at ease, impervious to the microphone booms crowding the air before him. “I totally love what the Chinaman is wearing,” Hartford was saying over the White House visuals, intermittently groaning from being fucked by the Antillean. Viewers were reminded that Li had been picked the best-dressed man in the world by an informal multinational poll, with respondents particularly taken by “the simplicity of his suits” and “the glammy oversized glasses.”

“We wish China to become a nation of consumers and not otters,” President Cortez begged the banker.

Wait, what? A nation of otters? I replayed the stream on my own apparat. “We wish China to become a nation of consumers and not savers,” the president had actually said. Jesus Christ, I was losing it. “The American people need China-Worldwide to become a savior of our last manufacturers, large and small. China is no longer a poor country. It is time for the Chinese people to spend.” Mr. Li nodded distractedly and smiled his great big nothing of a smile. President Cortez then said some words in Chinese, which were interpreted as “O.K. to spend now! Go have fun!”

“Oh, shit,” Vishnu said, pawing frantically at his apparat. “Something’s happening, Nee-groes!” We could hardly hear him above the roar of the bar. The young people were drinking more, and some women were getting nervously naked, even as Eunice Park tightened a light sweater around her shoulders, rubbing her nose from the air conditioning. “There’s a riot in Central Park,” Vishnu said. “This black dude is getting his ass kicked by the Guard and all these LNWIs are getting seriously whaled on.”

News of the Central Park slaughter was spreading through the bar. No one was streaming live yet, but there were Images coming up on our apparati and on the bar’s big screens. A teenager (or so he seemed, those awkward