“You’ve got to stop buying books, Nee-gro,” Vishnu said. “All those doorstops are going to drag down your PERSONALITY rankings. Where the fuck do you even find those things?”
“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!” Noah cried. And then, staring directly into his äppärät’s camera nozzle: “We’re FACing pretty hard now, people. We’re getting Lenny’s RateMe on.”
Streams of data were now fighting for time and space around us. The pretty girl I had just FACed was projecting my MALE HOTNESS as 120 out of 800, PERSONALITY 450, and something called SUSTAINABILIT¥ at 630. The other girls were sending me similar figures. “Damn,” Noah said. “The prodigal Nee-gro Abramov is getting creamed here. Looks like the chicas, they no likey that big Hebraic snorkel our boy was born with. And those flabby Hadassah arms. Okay, rank him up, Vish.”
Vishnu worked my äppärät until some RANKINGS came up. He helped me navigate the data. “Out of the seven males in the Community,” he said, gesturing around the bar, “Noah’s the third hottest, I’m the fourth hottest, and Lenny’s the seventh.”
“You mean I’m the ugliest guy here?” I ran my fingers through the remnants of my hair.
“But you’ve got a decent personality,” Vishnu comforted me, “and you’re second in the whole bar in terms of SUSTAINABILIT¥.”
“At least our Lenny’s a good providah,” Noah said. I remembered the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed to Howard Shu and became even more depressed by the prospect of being deprived of them. Money and Credit was about all I had at this point. That, and my sparkling PERSONALITY.
Vishnu was pointing at the girls with his index finger, interpreting the data streams that were by now the sum total of our attention: “The one on the left, with the scar on her ankle and that little landing strip on her muff, Lana Beets, she went to Chicago Law, now has a Retail internship at Saaami Bras, making eighty thousand yuan-pegged. The one with the labia stud, name’s Annie Shultz-Heik, works in Retail, she’s got the smart foam for the genital warts and is on the pill, and last year she gave three thousand yuan to the Bipartisan Party’s Young Future Leaders of America Together We’ll Surprise the World Fund.”
Annie was the girl I had FACed first. The one who had been allegedly abused by her dad and ranked my MALE HOTNESS a meager 120 out of 800.
“That’s right, Annie,” Noah said into his äppärät. “Vote Bipartisan and your warts will melt away faster than our country’s sovereign debt rating. They’ll disappear like our troops down in Ciudad Bolívar. Rubenstein time in America, folks. Rubenstein time.”
I went to get some beers, passing the girls on the way, but they were too busy looking at rankings. The bar was filling up with Senior Credit guys in tapered chinos and oxfords. I felt superior to them, but my MALE HOTNESS was swiftly falling to last place out of thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty males. Walking past Annie, I clicked on her Child Abuse Multimedia, letting the sound of her screaming vibrate my eardrums as a pixelated disembodied hand hovered above an Image of her naked body and the screaming segued into what sounded like a hundred monks chanting the mantra “He touched me here, he touched me here, he touched me here, he touched me here.”
I turned in Annie’s direction with my left lip crinkled in sadness and my brow heavy with empathy, but the words “Look away quickly, dork,” appeared on my äppärät. “Hair-transplant time for RAG?” another girl wrote. (“Rapidly aging geezer,” according to my electronic pebble.) “I can smell the DO from here.” (“Dick odor,” my äppärät helpfully told me.) And the slightly consoling: “Nice ¥¥¥, Pops.”
The bar was now utterly aflash with smoky data spilling out of a total of fifty-nine äppäräti, 68 percent of them belonging to the male of the species. The masculine data scrolled on my screen. Our average income hovered at a respectable but not especially uplifting 190,000 yuan-pegged dollars. We were looking for girls who appreciated us for who we were. We had absent fathers, who sometimes were not absent enough. A man ranked uglier than me walked in and, ascertaining his chances, turned right around. I wanted to follow his bald, creased head out of the bar into the all-forgiving summer air, but instead got a double whiskey for myself, along with two Leffe Brunes.
“After getting his ass handed to him by the RateMe Plus, Lenny Abramov is turning to drink,” Noah intoned. But upon seeing the deep hamster funk of my expression, he said, “It’s going to be okay, Lenny. We’ll get you all fixed up with the bitches. You’ll find the mercy in this rude data stream.”
Vishnu had his hand on my shoulder and was saying, “We really care about you, buddy. How many of these Senior Credit assholes can say that? We’ll get your rankings up, even if we have to slice an inch off your nose.”
Noah: “And add one to your Johnson.”
“Ha-huh,” Vishnu laughed, sadly.
I appreciated the sentiments, but I felt bad receiving their kindness. The point was for me to care for them. That would help lower my stress profile and do wonders for my ACTH levels. Meanwhile, the double whiskey and the slow triglyceride death it portended had sunk into the last compartment of my stomach, and the world was projecting at me in an angry way. “Eunice Park!” I wailed into Noah’s äppärät. “Eunice, honey. Can you hear me out there? I miss you so much.”
“We’re streaming these emotions live, folks,” Noah said. “We’re streaming Lenny’s love for this girl Eunice Park in real time. We’re ‘feeling’ the many levels of his pain just as he feels them.”
And I started to blabber about how much she meant to me. “We were sitting in this restaurant in Via Giulia, or someplace…”
“Losing hits, losing hits,” Noah whispered. “No foreign words. Cut to chase.”
“… And she just. She really listened to me. She paid attention to me. She never even looked at her äppärät while I was speaking to her. I mean we were mostly eating. Bucatini all’…”
“Losing hits, losing hits.”
“Pasta. But when we weren’t eating, we were saying everything about ourselves, who we were, where we come from. She’s an angry girl. You’d be too if you were her. All the shit she’s had to put up with. But she wants to get to know me better, and she wants to help me, and I want to care for her. I think she weighs, like, seventy pounds. She should eat more. I’ll make her eggplant. She showed me how to brush my teeth.”
“Streaming these emotions live,” Noah repeated. “You’re the first to hear them, patos. Straight from the Abramov’s mouth. He’s verballing. He’s emoting. But I’m getting a message from a hoser in Windsor, Ontario. He wants to know, did you fuck her, Lenny? Did you stick your thingie inside her tight snatch? Fifteen thousand souls absolutely need to know right now or they’ll get their news elsewhere.”