I stood behind her as she dotted golden cress along steppes of Siberian kale. I rested my hands on her solid shoulders, breathed in her sour vitality. She leaned her hot cheek against one of my wrists, a motion so familiar it seemed to me we had been related even before this lifetime. Her pale, blooming thighs spread beyond a modest pair of khaki shorts, and I remembered again to celebrate, in this case, every inch of Kelly’s imperfection. “Hey,” I said, “Vasily Greenbaum’s train got canceled? He played the guitar and could speak a little Arabic. He was so ‘ready to contribute’ when he wasn’t totally depressed.”
“He turned forty last month,” Kelly sighed. “Didn’t make quotas.”
“I’m almost forty too,” I said. “And why isn’t my name up on The Boards?”
Kelly didn’t say anything. She was parsing cauliflower with a dull safety knife, moisture beading her white forehead. Kelly and I had once shared an entire bottle of wine-or “resveratrol,” as we Post-Humans like to call it-at a tapas bar in Brooklyn, and after walking her to her violent Bushwick tenement I wondered if I could one day fall in love with a woman so unobtrusively, compulsively decent (answer: no).
“So who’s still around from the old gang?” I asked, voice atremble. “I didn’t see Jami Pilsner’s name. Or Irene Po. Are they just going to fire all of us?”
“Howard Shu’s doing fine,” Kelly told me. “Got promoted.”
“Great,” I said. Of all the people still employed, it had to be that sleek 124-pound bastard Shu, my classmate at NYU who had bested me for the last dozen years in all of life’s gruesome contests. If you ask me, there’s a little something sad about the employees of Post-Human Services, and to me brash, highly functional Howard Shu is the personification of that sadness. The truth is, we may think of ourselves as the future, but we are not. We are servants and apprentices, not immortal clients. We hoard our yuan, we take our nutritionals, we prick ourselves and bleed and measure that dark-purple liquid a thousand different ways, we do everything but pray, but in the end we are still marked for death. I could commit my genome and proteome to heart, I could wage nutritional war against my faulty apo E4 allele until I turn myself into a walking cruciferous vegetable, but nothing will cure my main genetic defect:
My father is a janitor from a poor country.
Howard Shu’s dad hawks miniature turtles in Chinatown. Kelly Nardl is rich, but hardly rich enough. The scale of wealth we grew up with no longer applies.
Kelly’s äppärät lit up the air around her, and she was plunged into the needs of a hundred clients. After the daily decadence of Rome, our offices looked spare. Everything bathed in soft colors and the healthy glow of natural wood, office equipment covered in Chernobyl-style sarcophagi when not in use, alpha-wave stimulators hidden behind Japanese screens, stroking our overactive brains with calming rays. Little framed humorous hints scattered throughout. “Just Say No to Starch.” “Cheer Up! Pessimism Kills.” “Telomere-Extended Cells Do It Better.” “NATURE HAS A LOT TO LEARN FROM US.” And, fluttering in the wind above Kelly Nardl’s desk, a wanted poster showing a cartoon hippie being whacked over the head with a stalk of broccoli:
WANTED
For electron stealing
DNA killing
Malicious cellular damage
ABBIE “FREE RADICAL” HOFFMAN
WARNING: Subject may be armed and dangerous
Do not attempt to apprehend
Call authorities immediately and increase intake of the coenzyme Q10
“Maybe I’ll go to my desk,” I said to Kelly.
“Honey,” she said, her long fingers around my own. You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
“Oh God,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
“You don’t have a desk. I mean, someone’s taken it. This new kid from Brown-Yonsei. Darryl, I think.”
“Where’s Joshie?” I said automatically.
“Flying back from D.C.” She checked her äppärät. “His jet broke down, so he’s going commercial. He’ll be back around lunchtime.”
“What do I do?” I whispered.
“It would help,” she said, “if you looked a little younger. Take care of yourself. Go to the Eternity Lounge. Put some Lexin-DC concentrate under your eyes.”
The Eternity Lounge was crammed full of smelly young people checking their äppäräti or leaning back on couches with their faces up to the ceiling, de-stressing, breathing right. The even, nutty aroma of brewing green tea snuck a morsel of nostalgia into my general climate of fear. I was there when we first put in the Eternity Lounge, five years ago, in what used to be the synagogue’s banqueting hall. It had taken Howard Shu and me three years just to get the brisket smell out.
“Hi,” I said to anyone who would listen. I looked at the couches, but there was hardly a place to squeeze in. I took out my äppärät, but noticed that the new kids all had the new pebble-like model around their necks, the kind Eunice had worn. At least three of the young women in the room were gorgeous in a way that transcended their physicality and made their smooth, ethnically indeterminate skin and sad brown eyes stretch back to earliest Mesopotamia.
I went to the mini-bar where the unsweetened green tea was dispensed, along with the alkalinized water and 231 daily nutritionals. As I was about to hit the fish oils and cucrumins that keep inflammation at bay, somebody laughed at me, a feminine laugher and thus all the more damning. Casually scattered atop the luxuriant couches, my co-workers looked like the characters from a comedy show about young people in Manhattan I remembered watching compulsively when I was growing up. “Just got back from a year in Roma,” I said, trying to pump the bravado into my voice. “All carbs over there. Need to stock up on the essentials like a cuh-razy person. Good to be back, guys!”
Silence. But as I turned back to the supplements, someone said, “What’s shaking, Rhesus Monkey?”
It was a kid with a small outbreak of mustache and a gray bodysuit with the words SUK DIK stenciled across the breast, some kind of red bandana strung around his neck. Probably Darryl from Brown, the one who had taken my desk. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I smiled at him, looked at my äppärät, sighed as if I had too much work ahead of me, and then began to casually leave the Eternity Lounge.
“Where you going, Rhesus?” he asked, blocking my exit with his scraggly, tight-butted body, shoving his äppärät in my face, the rich organic smell of him clouding my nostrils. “Don’t you want to do some blood work for us, buddy? I’m seeing triglycerides clocking in at 135. That’s before you ran away to Europe like a little bitch.” There was more hooting in the background, the women clearly enjoying this toxic banter.
I backed away, mumbling, “One thirty-five is still within the range.” What was that acronym Eunice had used? “JBF,” I said. “I’m just butt-fucking.” There was more laughter, a flash of pewter chin in the background, the shine of hairless hands bearing sleek technological pendants full of right data. Momentarily, I saw Chekhov’s prose before my eyes, his description of the Moscow merchant’s son Laptev, who “knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he was conscious of his ugliness all over his body.”