too.
“Let’s not talk about what
“I’m touched,” I said, and I meant it. A high-school memory resurfaced, the day I found out that a wispy freshman girl whom I fancied, complete with an attractive limp and a penchant for poetry, liked me as well.
Howard nodded. “We’ve updated your apparat. If you see any National Guard troops, point your apparat at them. If you see a red dot, that means they’re Wapachung Contingency personnel. You know”-he tried to smile-“the good guys.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to the
But Shu never answered me. “That girl you have on your apparat,” he said, pointing to an Image of Eunice I had floating all over my screen.
“Eunice Park. My gf.”
“Joshie says to make sure you’re with her in any emergency.”
“Duh,” I said. But it was nice that Joshie remembered I was in love.
Shu picked up his glass of alkalinized water and made a jokey toast with it. Then he leaned back and drank it down in such forceful gulps that our veined marble table shook, and the business people who shared the premises looked at this small brown almond of a man in their midst and tried to snicker at his display of strength. But they too were afraid of him.
After my Shu lunch, I walked from the Essex Street F stop to my far-flung riverside co-op with a renewed sense of grandeur. Since Eunice had picked out my new duds, I had started obsessively FACing every girl in sight: pretty, average, thin, skeletal, white, brown, black. It must have been my confidence, because my PERSONALITY was hitting the 700s and my MALE HOTNESS skirted into the 600s-so that, in an enclosed space like the M14 bus, with its small herd of trendoids grazing amidst the dying old people, I could sometimes emerge in the middle range of attractiveness, say the fifth-cutest man out of nine or ten. I would like to describe this utterly new feeling to you, diary, but I fear it will come out in purely evangelical terms. It felt like being born again. It felt like Eunice had resurrected me on a bed of cotton and wool.
But getting Eunice to meet Joshie was not easy. On the night before we were to go over to his place, she couldn’t sleep. “I don’t know, Len,” she whispered. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
She was wearing a long satin twentieth-century sleeping gown, a gift from her mother that left everything to the imagination, instead of her usual TotalSurrenders.
“I feel like you’re making me do this,” she said.
“I feel like I’m being pushed.”
“I feel like things are moving too fast.”
“Maybe I should move back to Fort Lee.”
“Maybe you need to be with a real adult.”
“We both knew I was going to hurt you.”
I gently pawed her back in the dark. I did my patented cornered-rat-tapping-his-foot-in-distress noise against the mattress and made an ambiguous animal sound.
“Stop that,” she said. “The zoo is closed.”
I whispered what was required of me. Various pop-psych gems. Encouragements. I assumed the debt and the blame. It wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was just an extension of her father. The night was dedicated to her sighs and my whispers. We finally fell asleep just as the sun rose over the Vladeck housing projects, an exhausted American flag slapping itself in the summer wind. We awoke at 5 p.m., having nearly missed the car Joshie had sent to help us ascend to the Upper West Side. We dressed in silence, and when I tried to take her hand in the sparkling new Hyundai Town Car, possibly on its maiden voyage, she flinched and looked away. “You look beautiful,” I said. “That dress.”
She said nothing. “Please,” I said. “It’s important for Joshie to meet you. It’s important for me. Just be yourself.”
“What’s that? Dumb. Boring.”
We cut through Central Park. Armed choppers were making their weekend rounds above us, but the traffic below was light and easy, the humid breeze rocking the tops of the immortal trees. I thought of how we had kissed in the Sheep Meadow on the day she moved in with me, how I had held her tiny person to me for a hundred slow beats, and how, for that entire time, I had thought death beside the point.
Joshie’s building was on a street between Amsterdam and Columbus-a twelve-story Upper West Side co-op, unremarkable save for the two National Guardsmen who stood on either side of the entrance, shunting passersby off the sidewalk with their rifles. An ARA sign at the mouth of the street urged us to deny its existence and imply consent. Joshie had told me these men were keeping tabs on him, but even I understood they served as protection. A red dot appeared on my apparat, along with the words “Wapachung Contingency.” The good guys.
The tiny lobby was filled by an affably heavy Dominican man in a faded gray uniform and the difficult breath coming out of him. “Hello, Mr. Lenny,” he said to me. I used to see him all the time when Joshie and I were more regular friends, when our work was not yet all-consuming and we would think nothing of sharing a bagel in the park or catching some exhausting Iranian flick at Lincoln Center.
“This is where the Jewish intelligentsia used to live, a long, long time ago,” I told Eunice in the elevator. “I think that’s why Joshie likes it here. It’s a kind of nostalgia trip.”
“Who were they?” she said.
“What?”
“Jewish intelligentsia.”
“Oh, just Jews who thought a lot about the world and then wrote books about it. Lionel Trilling and those guys.”
“They started your boss’s immortality business?” Eunice asked.
I could have almost kissed her cold, rouged lips. “In a sense,” I said. “They came from poor, hardy families and they were realistic about dying.”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to come,” Eunice said. “Because I don’t know any of this stuff.”
The old-fashioned elevator doors opened symphonically. By Joshie’s door, a muscular young man in T-shirt and jeans was dragging out a heavy garbage bag with his back to me, the dull interior light of the Upper West Side glistening off his shaved head. A cousin, if I remembered correctly. Jerry or Larry from New Jersey. I stuck out my hand as he began to turn around. “Lenny Abramov,” I said. “I think we met at your dad’s Chanukah party in Mamaroneck.”
“Rhesus Monkey?” the man said. The familiar black pelt of his mustache twitched in greeting. This was no cousin from Matawan. I was looking at dechronification in action. I was looking at Joshie Goldmann himself, his body reverse-engineered into a thick young mass of tendons and forward motion. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Someone’s been hitting the Indians. No wonder I haven’t seen you at the office all week.”
But the rejuvenated Joshie was no longer noticing me. He was breathing both heavily and evenly. His mouth opened slowly. “Hi-ya,” the mouth said.
“Hi,” Eunice said. “Lenny,” she started to say.
“Lenny,” Joshie echoed, absently. “Sorry. I’m-”
“Eunice.”
“Joshie. Come in. Please.” He examined her as she passed through the door, preyed on the lightly tanned shoulders beneath the black cocktail-dress straps, then looked at me with numb understanding. Youth. A seemingly untrammeled flow of energy. Beauty without nanotechnology. If only he knew how unhappy she was.
We passed into the living room, which I knew to be as humble as the rest of the apartment. Art Deco couches in blue velvet. Posters from his youth-science-fiction films with big-haired women and deep-jawed men-framed conservatively in oak, as if to say they had withstood the test of time and emerged, if not masterpieces, then at least potent artifacts. The names alone.
