“What’s this?” and pressed the button. Exactly as it happened the first time. Except now I knew he was a dropout. But I was locked into the routine and couldn’t do anything different with this knowledge. The button got pressed again. And this time, in the dream, I went to the window to see buildings falling. When I woke up, I was in Star’s house, but she wasn’t there. In fact, she’d been gone for years.
NEW YORK ALKI
The city’s population swelled, drawn to its shores by viral marketing campaigns and rumors of epiphanies. Newcomers stood marveling at how thoroughly the first wave of inhabitants had adopted the personas of their ghostly forebears, circulating the blood of commerce and art through Chelsea, Tribeca, Wall Street, Harlem, Midtown. Newmans marched twenty abreast chanting conciliatory mottoes and welcoming these immigrants with promises of freedom from the stress of industrial production. Here and there a crime erupted, mostly human-on- newman violence, handled discreetly by those who’d absorbed the personas of New York’s finest. Bald eagles careened over former Bainbridge Island, orcas nudged its seawall, and from the city’s bowels screeched rats, subways, and data. The by-products of human folly seemed to have expired outside the parapets of this cathedral. Block by block the last vestiges of the former island trembled under the sky’s robotic arms and joined the urban parallelogram teeming with offices and takeout pierogi joints, galleries, and gay bars. The more immigrants who arrived at this fever dream, the easier it was for a man or woman just off the boat to cast aside his or her former self and plunge psychologically whole into one of the diminishing number of roles doled out by the newmans. The rain-raked city strained under the weight of lost memories.
Woo-jin, lying on the master bathroom floor of the penthouse, head resting on a hand towel, succumbed to dreams once dreamt by Isaac Pope, which mainly consisted of endless lines of code with the occasional appearance of a
“You’re that movie star,” Woo-jin said.
“That’s right. I’m Neethan F. Jordan.”
They shook hands. Woo-jin accidentally leaned on the flusher.
“You’re Woo-jin Kan,” Neethan said.
“Please don’t hurt me.”
“I’m not here to hurt you. Don’t you remember me? We were both in the Happy Sunset Home together. When we were kids?”
“The group home?”
“Yes, the group home. You’re my brother.”
“I have a brother?”
Neethan shrugged. “Brother in the sense that we came from the same lab. We got sent to the home because we came out not exactly to spec. They had designs for all of us. Some of us came out different from how the recipe said we’d come out. I was a false negative. They thought I was a rough draft, but they made a mistake.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The ones who pushed civilization’s RESET button. They designed me to be a movie star. Made me a descendant of an Indian tribe that got wiped out even before the FUS. They made you, I don’t know—”
“I’m a really good dishwasher,” Woo-jin said.
“There you go. I played one of those once.”
“Did you ever play a writer?”
“I did, yeah. Why? You want to be a writer?”
“I tried to write a book about how to love people but it fell apart.”
“How do you love people?”
“I still don’t know.”
“Who does?” Neethan shrugged. “By the way, when I showed up they assigned me the life of some homeless guy. You wouldn’t mind if I crashed here, would you?”
The penthouse quickly filled with characters. While Woo-jin slept they sprawled on living room furniture and helped themselves to the pantry, uncorked pre-FUS bottles of port, and confiscated art off the walls. Mornings Woo-jin shuffled in pj’s to the bathroom to piss only to be sideswiped by Neethan, who supported on his arm a woman named Sarah or Kateesha or April, pleasant enough ladies doing their panicked best to adapt to the lives they inhabited in this fabricated metropolis. A cadre of filmmakers held court on the balcony drinking brandy from to-go cups and debating the methods by which qputers cinematicized reality. A chef arrived, accompanied by a woman with one leg, a horn section in search of a band, some cracked-out bike messengers, and a newman crooner who sang spot-on versions of period show tunes. A couple times Woo-jin woke to find socialites unconscious in his bed or the bathtub. Group sing-alongs at all hours, creative uses for whipped cream, a sink bloodied by some poor bastard’s unfortunate encounter with a shattered highball. Various drugs rampantly traveled through the collected horde, with substances snorted, swallowed, injected, shoved into rectums, and illegally downloaded. A shaman of sorts—at least he looked like a shaman—danced spastically in the butler’s quarters in coils of sage smoke. Pots and pans clattering, someone going to town on a seven-piece Ludwig trap set, bowls of M&M’s and newman- human genital interactions. Vomit, assorted. This was, Neethan Fucking Jordan informed him, the party.
Every night after booklessly wandering the city in search of an agent, dragging himself through the door of his building, Woo-jin found his penthouse that much more infested with marauders high on one thing or another and their dogs and cats. Which made it all the stranger when he returned one night to find the penthouse fairly empty, just a man who looked like a fire fighter asleep facedown, snoring in the book-lined library. Then, from above, snickers. Woo-jin craned his neck to see that twenty feet up the usual rabble had ascended to the ceiling. Just kind of floating there like astronauts in zero-G. One young gentleman spilled his white Russian on Woo-jin’s shoulder.
Neethan spun around the chandelier, brushing aside a couple pairs of groping hands, encircled by cameramen standing on the ceiling. “Woo-jin!” he called down, “Take a hit off one of those balloons and join us!”
In the corner, beside the bigass FUS-era globe marked with graphic representations of fires, tornadoes, rogue glaciers, earthquake fissures, swarms of locusts, and the like was a bouquet of balloons with their strings tied to a paperweight in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Inhale the air inside it!” Neethan said. “Like you’re doing a whippit!”
“Like I’m whipping what?”
“Just open the end of it and breathe in the air.”
Woo-jin emptied the contents of a balloon into his lungs. Right away he felt a nagging absence of gravity. Some force seemed to pull his legs out from under him and he gradually rose to the ceiling, where Neethan looped an arm around him.
“How you holding up, buddy?” Neethan asked, half to the cameras.
“I think I need to start writing my book again.”
“Go for it, buddy. Hey, can I get one of those mini pizza things over here? Get this—I met this crazy couple of university professors who happen to know a lot about my tribe. They’re over there by the guy in the bear suit.”
Cut away to the Vacunins pausing their zero-G heavy petting to pinkie wave at Neethan.
“I need to go home,” Woo-jin said.
“For real?” Neethan said, pretend-disappointed. “Come on, no…”
“I can’t write the book I’m supposed to write here.”
Neethan nodded to the cameras. “You guys getting all this? Cool…” He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “Hey. Can you see me?”
“See you? Yeah?”
