My desk. All three square feet of it, shiny and sleek, full of text and streams and Images rising up from its digital surface, a desk probably worth the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I still owed Howard Shu. Ignoring the Eternity Lounge as if it were now beneath me, I spent the bulk of my working week at my desk, opening up several data streams at once so that I resembled a man too busy to bother with socializing.
Affecting a god-like air-my Eunice-kissed proboscis pointed toward the ceiling, both hands caressing the data in front of me, as if ready to make man out of clay-I scanned the files of our prospective Life Lovers. Their white, beatific, mostly male faces (our research shows that women are more concerned with taking care of their progeny than with living forever) flashed before me, telling me about their charitable activities, their plans for humanity, their concern for our chronically ill planet, their dreams of eternal transcendence with like-minded yuan billionaires. I guessed that the last time they had been so painfully dishonest was when they penned their applications to Swarthmore forty years earlier.
I picked out the profiles that appealed the most to me, some for the usual financial, intellectual, or “durability” (health) reasons, but others because they could not keep the fear out of their eyes, the fear that, for all the wealth and sinecures they had amassed, for all their supplicating children and grandchildren, the end was irreversible, the lapse into the void a tragedy before which all tragedies were scandalously trite, their progeny a joke, their accomplishments a drop of fresh water in a salty ocean. I scanned the good cholesterol and the bad, the estrogen buildups and the financial crack-ups, but mostly I was looking for the equivalent of Joshie’s funny limp: An admission of weakness and insignificance; an allusion to the broad unfairness and cosmic blundering of the universe we inhabit. And an intense desire to set it right.
One of my Intakes, let’s call him Barry, ran a small Retail empire in the Southern states. He looked suitably cowed by what Howard Shu must have told him before he was handed over to me. We accepted, on average, 18 percent of our High Net Worth applicants, our dreaded rejection letter still sent out by actual post. The Intake lasted a while. Barry, trying to subdue any remaining trace of his Alabama drawl, wanted to sound knowledgeable about our work. He asked about cellular inspection, repair, and reconstruction. I painted him a three-dimensional picture of millions of autonomous nanobots inside his well-preserved squash-playing body, extracting nutrients, supplementing, delivering, playing with the building blocks, copying, manipulating, reprogramming, replacing blood, destroying harmful bacteria and viruses, monitoring and identifying pathogens, reversing soft-tissue destruction, preventing bacterial infection, repairing DNA. I tried to remember how enthusiastic I had been upon first joining Joshie’s enterprise as an NYU senior. I used my hands a lot, the way the faded Roman actors had done at da Tonino, the restaurant where I had taken Eunice and fed her the spicy eggplant. “How soon?” Barry asked, visibly excited by my excitement. “When will all this be possible?”
“We’re almost there,” I said, despairing. The 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed Howard Shu would be deducted on the first of the next month. That money was supposed to be my deposit for the first of many beta dechronification treatments. Forget my name on The Boards. The train was pulling out of the station and I was running behind it, my suitcase half open, white underwear spilling comically along the platform.
I took Barry all the way over to the wasteland of York Avenue to our research center, the ten-story slab of concrete that once served as an adjunct to a large hospital. It was time for him to meet out Indians. We have this Cowboys and Indians theme going on at Post-Human Services. At the Life Lovers Outreach division we call ourselves Cowboys; the “Indians” are the actual research staff, mostly on loan from the Subcontinent and East Asia, housed at an eighty-thousand-square-foot facility on York and at three satellite locations in Austin, Texas; Concord, Massachusetts; and Portland, Oregon.
The Indians keep things pretty simple. There really isn’t much to see in the areas to which visitors are allowed-basically the same thing you see in any office-young people with äppäräti, immune to the rest of the world, maybe the occasional glass cage filled with mice or some kind of spinning thingamabob. Two of our most sociable guys, both named Prabal, came out to greet him from the cancer and viral labs and burdened him with yet more terminology while letting out a few practiced promos: “We’re past the alpha testing, Mr. Barry. I’d say we’re definitely at the beta stage.”
Back at the synagogue, I gave Barry the willingness-to-live test. The H-scan test to measure the subject’s biological age. The willingness-to-persevere-in-difficult-conditions test. The Infinite Sadness Endurance Test. The response-to-loss-of-child test. He must have sensed how much was at stake, his sharp WASP-y beak aquiver as the Images were projected against his pupils, the results streaming on my äppärät. He would do anything to persevere. He was saddened by life, by the endless progression from one source of pain to another, but not more than most. He had three children and would cling to them forever, even if his present-day bank account would not be able to preserve more than two for eternity. I entered “Sophie’s Choice” on my intake äppärät, a major problem as far as Joshie was concerned.
Barry was exhausted. The Patterson-Clay-Schwartz Language Cognition Test, the final barometer for selection, could await another session. I knew already that this perfectly reasonable, preternaturally kind fifty-two-year-old would not make the cut. He was doomed, like me. And so I smiled at him, congratulated him on his candor and patience, his intellect and maturity, and with a tap of my finger against my digital desk threw him onto the blazing funeral pyre of history.
I felt shitty about Barry, but even shittier about myself. Joshie’s office was crammed with people all day long, but during a quiet moment I found him by the window, staring quizzically at a sky of untrammeled blue, just a fat lone military helicopter trudging toward the East River, its armored beak pointed downward as if it were a predatory bird hunting for food. I sidled up to him. He nodded, not unfriendly, but with some tired reserve. I told him the story of Barry, stressing the man’s innate goodness and his problem of having too many children, whom he loved, and not enough money to save all of them, which elicited a shrug on his part. “Those who want to live forever will find a means of doing so,” Joshie said, a cornerstone of the Post-Human philosophy.
“Hey, Grizzly,” I said, “do you think you can put me in for some of the dechronification treatments at a reduced rate? Just basic soft-tissue maintenance, and maybe a few bio years shaved off?”
Joshie regarded the nine-foot fiberglass Buddha that furnished his otherwise empty office, its blissed-out gaze emitting alpha rays. “That’s only for clients,” he said. “You know that, Rhesus. Why do you have to make me say it out loud? Stick with the diet and exercise. Use stevia instead of sugar. You’ve still got a lot of life left in you.”
My sadness filled the room, took over its square, simple contours, crowding out even Joshie’s spontaneous rose-petal odor. “I didn’t mean that,” Joshie said. “Not just a lot of life. Maybe forever. But you can’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a certainty.”
“You’ll see me die someday,” I said, and immediately felt bad for saying it. I tried, as I had done since childhood, to feel nonexistence. I forced coldness to run through the natural humidity of my hungry second-generation-immigrant body. I thought of my parents. We would all be dead together. Nothing would remain of our tired, broken race. My mother had bought three adjoining plots at a Long Island Jewish cemetery. “Now we can be together forever,” she had told me, and I had nearly broken down in tears at her misplaced optimism, at the notion that she would want to spend her idea of eternity-and what could her eternity possibly comprise?-with her failure of a son.