“I’m sorry if I let you down by going to Rome for so long,” I near-whispered. “I thought maybe I could understand my parents better if I lived in Europe. Spend some time thinking about immortality in a really old place. Read some books. Get some thoughts down.”
Joshie turned away from me. From this angle, I could see another side to him, the slight gray stubble protruding from his perfect egg of a chin-the slight intimations that not all of him could be reverse-engineered into immortality. Yet.
“Those thoughts, these books, they are the problem, Rhesus,” he said. “You have to stop thinking and start selling. That’s why all those young whizzes in the Eternity Lounge want to shove a carb-filled macaroon up your ass. Yes, I overheard that. I have a new beta eardrum. And who can blame them, Lenny? You remind them of death. You remind them of a different, earlier version of our species. Don’t get pissed at me, now. Remember, I started out just like you. Acting. The humanities. It’s the Fallacy of Merely Existing. FME. There’ll be plenty of time to ponder and write and act out later. Right now you’ve got to sell to live.”
The floodwater was rising. The bill had come due. I was unworthy, always unworthy. “I’m so selfish, Grizzly Bear. I wish I could have found some more HNWIs for you in Europe. Jesus Christ. Do I still have a job?”
“Let’s get you readjusted here,” Joshie said. He touched my shoulder briefly as he headed for the door. “I can’t get you a desk right away, but I can assign you to Intakes in the Welcome Center.” A demotion from my previous position, but tolerable, as long as the salary stayed the same. “We need to get you a new äppärät,” he said. “You’re going to have to learn to surf the data streams better. Learn to rank people quicker.”
I remembered Point No. 2: Evoke father-like bond in response to political situation. Talk about what happened on the plane; evoke Jewish feelings of terror and injustice. “Joshie,” I said. “You should always have your äppärät on you. This poor fat man on the plane-”
But he was already out the door, throwing me a brief look that commanded me to follow. The hordes of Brown-Yonsei and Reed-Fudan graduates were upon him, each trying to outdo the others in informality (“Joshster! Budnik!” “Papi chulo!”), each holding in his or her hands the solution to all the problems of our world. He gave them tiny bits of himself. He tousled hair. “G’wan, you!” he said to a Jamaican-seeming guy who, when you cut right down to it, was not Jamaican. I realized we were heading downstairs, over to the untamed oasis of Human Resources, straight to Howard Shu’s desk.
Shu, a goddamn relentless immigrant in the mode of my janitor father but with English and good board scores on his side, was dealing with three äppäräti at once, his callused fingertips and spitfire Chinatown diction abuzz with data and the strong, dull hope that he was squarely in control. He reminded me of the time I went to a conference on longevity in some provincial Chinese city. I landed at a just-built airport as beautiful as a coral reef and no less complex, took one look at the scurrying masses, the gleaming insanity in their eyes, at least three men by the taxi ranks trying to sell me a sophisticated new nose-hair trimmer (was this what New York had been like at the start of the twentieth century?), and thought, “Gentlemen, the world is yours.”
To make matters worse, Shu was not unhandsome, and when he and Joshie high-fived each other, I felt the pureness of envy, an emotion that numbed my feet and shorted my breath. “Take care of Len here,” Joshie said to Howard Shu, with just a thimble of conviction. “Remember, he’s an OG.” I hoped he meant Original Gangster and not Old Guy. And then, before I could laugh at his youthful demeanor, at his easy ways, Joshie was gone, headed back into the open arms that would receive him wherever, whenever he felt the need of their embrace.
I sat down across from Howard Shu and tried to radiate indifference. From behind the helmet of his lustrous black hair, Shu did the same. “Leonard,” he said, his button nose aglow, “I’m pulling up your file.”
“Please do.”
“You’re being docked 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars,” Shu said.
“What?”
“Your expenses in Europe. You flew first-class everywhere. Thirteen thousand northern euros’ worth of resveratrol?”
“It was no more than two glasses a day. Red wine only.”
“That’s twenty euros a glass. And what the hell is a bidet?”
“I was just trying to do my job, Howard. You can’t possibly-”
“Please,” he said. “You did nothing. You fucked around. Where are the clients? What happened to that sculptor who was ‘in the bag’?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone.”
“And I don’t appreciate your inability to do your job.”
“I tried to sell the Product, but the Europeans weren’t interested. They’re totally skeptical about our technology. And some of them actually want to die.”
The immigrant eyes glared at me. “No free pass, Leonard. No hiding behind Joshie’s goodwill. You get your act together or we’ll be conducting exit interviews. You can keep your previous salary level, we’ll put you in Intakes, and you’re paying for every last meatball you ate in Rome.”
I looked behind me. “Don’t look behind you,” Shu said. “Your papa’s gone. And what the fuck is this?” A red code was flashing amidst the steady chrome äppärät data. “American Restoration Authority says you were flagged at the embassy in Rome. Now you got the ARA on your tail? What the hell did you do?”
The world took another spin and then a tumble. “Nothing!” I cried. “Nothing! I didn’t try to help the fat man. And I don’t know any Somalians. I slept with Fabrizia only a few times. The otter got it all wrong. It’s all a scam. The guy videotaped me on the plane and I said ‘Why?’ And now I can’t contact Nettie Fine. Do you know what they’ve done to her? Her GlobalTeens address is deleted. I can’t GlobalTrace her either.”
“Otter? Nettie what? It says here ‘malicious provision of incomplete data.’ Fuck it, another mess for me to clean up. Let me see your äppärät. Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?” He spoke into the cuff of his shirt: “Kelly, bring me a new äppärät for Abramov. Bill it to Intakes.”
“I knew it,” I said. “It’s my äppärät’s fault. I just told Joshie that he should always have his on him. Fucking Restoration Authority.”
“Joshie doesn’t need an äppärät,” Shu said. “Joshie doesn’t need a damn thing.” He stared at me with what could have been unimaginable pity or unimaginable hatred, but in either case involved perfect animal stillness. Kelly Nardl came huffing up the stairs with a new äppärät box that was itself a rainbow of blinking data and noise, a nasal Mid-Atlantic voice somehow embedded in the cardboard promising me “Duh berry ladest in RateMe tech-nah-luh-gee.”
“Thanks,” Shu said, and waved Kelly away. Seven years ago, before the mighty Staatling-Wapachung Corporation bought Joshie out for a grotesque sum of money, Kelly, Howard, and I used to occupy the same rung of what was then called a “flat organization,” one without titles or hierarchies. I tried to catch Kelly’s eye, to get her on my side against this monster who couldn’t even pronounce the word “bidet” properly, but she fled Howard’s desk with nary a shake of her friendly backside. “Learn how to use this thing immediately,” Shu told me. “Especially the RateMe part. Learn to rate everyone around you. Get your data in order. Switch on CrisisNet and follow all the latest. An ill-informed salesman is dead in the water these days. Get your mind in the right place. Then we’ll see about putting your name back on The Boards. That’s all, Leonard.”