“Nick returned home from time to time as I became an old woman. He spoke of a glorious new age. He barked and paced, drunk on philosophy and the future of man.
“I just wanted to protect my little boy. I didn’t want—please, I didn’t want those horrible words to be true. Please don’t let them be true.”
As the little girl sobbed, Abby quietly retreated from the shack, rattled, convinced in her gut that this testimony was not hers to witness. Why had she, of all people, been privy to the story of the onset of the FUS? And what ever became of the recording she’d made at the Seaside Love Palace? Rather than illumination, all this information about Luke, Nick, and Star promised an ever-encroaching darkness. It was as though the very thing preventing her from acting on these stories was her inability to remain herself. She kept slipping, lightly superimposed over her own body, the borders of her self and her physical form not quite jibing. While snooping on other people’s lives, her own had come under increasing, unnerving, and invisible scrutiny.
Eo was gone. Up ahead, through the trees, came street noises, honks, a river of rubber and asphalt. Between the trunks of trees materialized the gray faces of buildings. Abby stepped from the woods onto Broadway, across the street from Lincoln Center, and rubbed her eyes.
Later, at home with bouillabaisse and a sandwich purchased from a deli around the corner from her apartment, Abby watched some early films by Thomas Edison on Sylvie’s ancient television set. A man played a violin for fourteen seconds. An elephant, electrocuted. A steam train charged the camera, sending early-twentieth- century audiences scurrying for cover. Rightly, she thought.
In Central Park Abby watched children. Gleefully unaware that they inhabited a simulation of a once-vibrant city, the children appeared to understand that this was their world to take. The adults, far less so, as they meandered paths and contemplated the skyline from benches and hills, enraptured by the illogic of it all. Abby overheard gossip about some of the older people, folks who’d actually lived in or visited the original Manhattan, reduced to inconsolable weeping, begging to be returned to Seattle, away from this reminder of the greed and weaponry and genocides that had once infected the world. These elderly visitors to the city were doubly troubled at the sight of newmans busily at work, the former enemies of human beings now rebuilding and making amends. That the newmans had developed a sense of altruism struck them as a colossal hoax. Abby sat on a bench with a bag of popcorn and watched one FUS survivor go insane in front of her eyes, clawing at his face and screaming of terrors inexpressible. A couple citizens representing police officers escorted him from the park.
Woo-jin, meanwhile, found himself in a penthouse on Park Avenue, in one of the homes of Isaac Pope, a residence the late billionaire had never even actually visited. The closet was stocked with wing tips, French-cuffed dress shirts, tailored suits, and a row of pressed fantasy-themed T-shirts shrugging on wooden hangers. In the bathroom various scented things in bottles stood on polished marble shelves. After a shower of confusing shampoos, Woo-jin found a suit that fit and did the best he could to make his face look like a real face. Clothed, back in the master bedroom, he nudged a door that opened onto a hallway lined with art he didn’t have the patience to glom on to brain-wise. In a library, hardback techno-thrillers squatted in exotic hardwood bookcases. A couple of replicated contracts sat unsigned on the desk. Woo-jin wandered to the kitchen, where he paused to eat some things like sandwiches and puddings, then into a living area with an enormous movie screen. He thought of how less cramped Patsy would have been in here. Patsy growing eyeballs in her armpits, braying for gingersnap cookie dough. Smushing his face to a window and watching cars far below, Woo-jin whispered her name. After a while he pulled his face from the glass, leaving two dripping patches of tears, then wearily pushed his cart laden with the pizza box manuscript to the elevator.
On the street buildings moaned, harboring their captive ghosts. Woo-jin passed the Met, its doors open to a psychic blast furnace. Disturbed, he jogged across the street to get out of range of all the art howling from inside. Finally he found what he suspected he was searching for, a lonely and molested-looking phone booth. For some reason this one had been allowed to remain standing, an upright coffin reminder of how people used to conduct conversations while immobilized in public. A Yellow Pages sandwiched in a taco-like plastic shell dangled from the low shelf. He picked it up and looked for the Ls. Here: Literary Agents: See Agents, Literary. He found the Agents, Literary. Was anyone else going to need this section? Guiltily, Woo-jin tore the pages out of the book and stuffed them inside his coat, then hustled as fast as he could from the scene of his theft, pushing his rattly cart, until he was sure no cops were on his tail.
For days Woo-jin pushed his manuscript, from the Upper East Side to Tribeca, from the Financial District to SoHo to Midtown, proceeding alphabetically through the list of literary agents. In every instance, all the way into the D section, he found empty offices. Apparently the newmans weren’t in a hurry to assign anyone to represent former representatives of novelists and memoirists. He parked his cart in Washington Square Park, revising, slicing through whole sections with his Sharpie. It seemed that while he had been otherwise engaged, his book had begun to fall apart. It wasn’t that he’d accidentally shuffled the order of the pizza boxes—which, as it turned out, had actually improved the thing—but that the thoughts captured in it appeared to belong to someone far stupider than he. Overnight he’d lost confidence in his capacity to write the instructions he’d been assigned to write. Who the hell was he to tell anyone how to love people?
A parade tumbled through the park. A shambling thing, composed of salvaged clothes hanging from the angled frames of newmans, some of them playing instruments: battered brass and wind, a violin, an untuned guitar that struggled to assemble a chord. They looked beaten down, these unenthused servants of humanity, as if they’d been dry-humping existence to death. The instruments conspired to produce an off-key dirge and Woo-jin came to see that it was a funeral, with six pallbearers bearing aloft an aluminum casket. One of the newmans peeled off from the rest and slumped onto the bench beside Woo-jin. She sported a shaved head, fidgety hands, and something in her back that repeatedly clicked as if broken.
“Who died?” Woo-jin asked.
“Our great leader Stella Artaud! An old soldier from the FUS is capturing and torturing and killing my kind! Oh, how terrible, my heart can hardly bear it! Alas! A great violence has descended upon our creation! Oh, it’s horrible! I thought our races had resolved their differences. I thought we lived in peace! But still, oh! The horrors persist!” Artificial tears spurted from her ducts as from an overactive windshield washer on a car. The newman shuddered, and a piece of her face fell off. Frantically, she began picking at parts of her body, taking off a digit here, a chunk of fake flesh there, yanking wires from her gut, sensors from her skull, and in less than a minute all that remained was a grief-induced pile of components, not a single part connected to any other part.
The funeral passed and deposited in its wake a raggy heap that resolved itself into a man. As the man shuffled toward Woo-jin his very self seemed to generate garbage—a trail of soda cans and fish skeletons and fast- food wrappers and horseflies. His head looked like a giant beard with some eyeballs thrown in as a bonus. He took a seat beside Woo-jin to offer a few moments of pointless dialogue, all the while generating trash, which accumulated in piles around him, from the folds of his smelly garments. He eyed Woo-jin’s manuscript-on-wheels somewhat skeptically, as if it were a piece of public art that tested the boundaries of collective community standards. His filthy hand emerged from his rags. Woo-jin shook it. The man said his name was Glyph.
“So have you figured out the deal with this place, yet?” Glyph said. When Woo-jin shook his head, Glyph rolled his eyes. “They’re building this joint just to tear it down again, man. As soon as the last brick is laid, the whole shitty thing becomes one giant history lesson. They’re luring us humans in here so they can screw us over once again, getting it all populated and pretty as a picture before they reenact the FUS. Then they’ll rebuild it again and reenact it all over, on and on into the end of civilization. Get out while you can, brother.” A half-empty can of creamed corn fell out of Glyph’s pants and rolled along the cobbles. “What do you have going on here? Some kind of artwork?”
“It’s supposed to be a book. About how to love people,” Woo-jin said. At that moment the clouds opened overhead like they’d been gutted with a filleting knife. Desperately he pushed the cart, searching for an awning somewhere to protect the manuscript from the rain. Within seconds his fancy new clothes were soaked through. Suddenly the world went slapstick. Woo-jin slipped on a turkey bone jettisoned from Glyph’s garments and the cart teetered, then spilled its contents on the ground. On his hands and knees, Woo-jin tried to gather the pizza boxes with their words bleeding before his eyes. Here was his chapter about loving foster sisters who demand cookie- dough ice cream at two in the morning. Here were some sentences about washing dishes, about how not to eat your own tongue, about finding yourself ignored and alone in a trailer hauled into the sky.
