“We missed it,” Noah said. “It was late in June.”
“Next year then,” I said.
And then, like a perfect Media drama queen, Noah told me he expected to be dead by the next year. Something about the Restoration Authority, the Bipartisans, the price of biofuel, the decline of the tides-who can keep up anymore? That kind of ruined the effect of what he was saying about the light hitting the avenues just so. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to strain for me, that I liked him exactly as he was: perfectly above average, angry but decent, just smart enough. I thought of Sammy the Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, his calmly depressive countenance, the way he approached extinction with both equanimity and unobtrusive despair. Maybe this was what Noah was jabbering about when he followed the light across the city. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our apparat screens, beautiful.
Speaking of the light, I had one luminous moment with Eunice this week. I caught her looking at my Wall of Books with some curiosity, specifically at a washed-out old cover of a Milan Kundera paperback-a bowler hat floats over a Prague cityscape-her index fingers raised above the book as if ready to tap at the BUY ME NOW symbol on her apparat, her other fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness. When she saw me approach she slid the book back on its shelf and retreated to the couch, smelling her fingers for book odor, her cheeks in full blush. But I knew she was curious, my reluctant sentence-monger, and I chalked up yet another victory-the second after what I thought was a very successful dinner with her parents.
Life with Euny has been okay. Exciting, sometimes upsetting. We argued daily. She never backed down. A fighter to the very last. This is how a human being is forged after an unhappy early life. This is the independence of growing up, of standing up for yourself, even if against a phantom enemy.
Mostly we fought about social commitments. She’d be fine with her Elderbird friends who just moved back to New York. They seem like decent girls, effervescent but unsure of themselves, lusting after big-ticket items and some measure of identity, confusing one for the other, but basically in no great hurry to grow up. One girl who actually ate food scored only in the low 500s on her Fuckability, so the other girls would give her tips on how to lose weight. They’d reach over and pinch her all the time, coat her in creams until she glowed sadly on my living-room couch, and weigh her as if she were a prized albacore hanging over a Tokyo wharf. Another girl was going for that new Naked Librarian look, very little covering her body except glasses as thick as my storm windows, which I thought was funny because even a fine institution like Elderbird had recently closed its physical library, so what the hell was this girl even referencing? Then they’d get trashed on rose out on our (our!) balcony, those cute, bloated, drunken faces of theirs, as they told these long, circular stories that were supposed to be funny but instead proved highly disturbing, narratives of a cheap, ephemeral world where everyone let everyone down as a matter of course and women sometimes got pissed on in front of others. I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.
I had told Eunice, offhandedly and wearing my cutest platypus grin, that the next two weeks would prove busy on the social front. Joshie had been begging to meet her and expected us on Saturday at his house. Grace and Vishnu were having a party in Staten Island on the Monday after that to officially announce Grace’s pregnancy. “I know you’re not, like, the biggest socializer,” I said.
But she had already turned away from me, the angry spires of her shoulder blades staying my comforting hand.
“Your boss,” she said, “wants to meet
“He loves young people. He’s turning into a teenager himself.”
“That bitch Grace wants us over? Why? So she can laugh at me some more?”
“Are you kidding? Grace loves you!”
“Probably wants to be my big sister. No thanks, Len.”
“She does care about you, Eunice. She wants to find you a job in Retail. She said her Princeton roommate might know of an internship at Padma.” The three times we had briefly, tangentially, touched upon the subject of Eunice procuring employment and helping out with the escalating air-conditioning bill ($8,230 unpegged, just for the month of June), she had mentioned working in Retail. All her Elderbird friends wanted the same. No big surprise there.
“You don’t under
The phrase I hate the most in the world. I
“What?”
“I have nothing to wear. And my butt is fat.”
“You weight eighty-three pounds. Everyone on Grand Street stares at your ass in wonder. You have three closets’ worth of shoes and dresses.”
“Eighty-six. And I have nothing for the
We fought some more. She went to the living room and started teening, legs crossed, the dead smile on her face, forceful sighs, my entreaties rising in pitch. Eventually we reached a kind of compromise. We would go to the United Nations Retail Corridor and buy new clothes for the both of us. I would contribute 60 percent of the cost of her outfits, and she would cover the rest with her parents’ Credit. Like I said, a compromise.
I’d never been to the UNRC. I’ve always been intimidated by Retail Corridors, and this one was supposed to be the biggest yet. When I went to the Corridor they carved out of Union Square two years ago, everyone looked better and way younger than I did. I love going to these little offbeat boutiques in Staten Island with Grace, even if the clientele is older and grayer, folks who came of age in the grand Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and who have now been forced to retreat to Staten Island.
I started panicking the moment we got to the UN: the crush of humanity pouring out of the seven layers of underground parking; the floor samples emitting info that flooded my apparat with impulsive data; the Debt Bombers singling me out for my impressive Credit ranking; the giant ARA “America Celebrates It’s [sic] Spenders” banners, which now featured this girl Eunice actually knew from high school who finagled all these Credit lines and managed to buy six spring collections and a house.
The afterglow of the setting sun rushed through the glass roof of the UNRC, the steel trellises hundreds of feet above us gleaming like the ribs of a fearsome animal. I think this is where the Security Council used to meet, although I could be wrong. Since my sabbatical in Rome, it seems that America had learned her lesson on overhead, had shuttered her traditional malls. These thrifty Retail Corridors were supposed to mimic North African bazaars of yore, their only purpose a quick exchange of goods and services, minus the plangent cries of the sellers and the whiffs of tangerine sweat.
Eunice didn’t need a map. She led and I followed past the merchandise crowding the endless floor space in haphazard fashion, one store running into another, rack after rack after rack, each approached, surveyed, considered, dismissed. Here were the famous nippleless Saaami bras that Eunice had shown me on AssLuxury and the fabled Padma corsets that the Polish porn star wore on AssDoctor. We stopped to look at some conservative JuicyPussy summer cocktail dresses. “I’m going to need two,” Eunice said. “One for your boss’s party and one for that bitch Grace.”
“With my boss it’s not really a party,” I said. “We’ll drink two glasses of wine and eat some carrots and blueberries.”
Eunice ignored me and set about her task. She did some apparat work to get a sense of how things were selling around the world. Then she went over to a circle of black, identical-looking dresses and started clicking through them. Click, click, click, each hanger hitting the preceding one, making the sound of an abacus. She spent less than a full second on each dress, but each second seemed more meaningful than the hours she spent on AssLuxury viewing the same merchandise; each was an encounter with the real. Her face was steely, concentrated, the mouth slightly open. Here was the anxiety of choice, the pain of living without history, the pain of some higher need. I felt humbled by this world, awed by its religiosity, the attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all
