“You’ll see me extinguished,” I told Joshie.
“That would be a big heartbreak for me, Lenny,” Joshie said, his voice broken with exhaustion, or maybe just boredom.
“Three hundred years from now, you won’t even remember me. Just some flunky.”
“Nothing is guaranteed,” Joshie said. “Even I can never be sure of whether my personality will survive forever.”
“It will,” I said. A father should never outlive his child, I wanted to add, although I knew Joshie would disagree on principle.
He put his hand on the side of my neck and squeezed lightly. I leaned in to him a little, hoping for more of his touch. He massaged softly. There was nothing special in that; we Post-Human staffers massage one another regularly. Still, I soaked in his warmth and believed it was only for me. I thought of Eunice Park and her pH-balanced body, healthy and strong. I thought of the warm early-summer day gathering in force outside the bay window, the New York of early summers past, the city that used to hold so many promises, the city of a million IOUs. I thought of Eunice’s lips on my nose, the love mixed in with the pain, the foretaste of almonds and salt. I thought of how it was all just too beautiful to ever let go.
“We’re only getting started, Lenny,” Joshie said, his strong hand squeezing like a clamp at my tired flesh. “For now, diet and exercise. Focus on the work to keep your mind busy, but don’t overthink or give in to anxiety. There’s going to be loads of tsuris ahead. Trouble,” he clarified, when I didn’t catch on to the Yiddish word. “But also loads of opportunities for the right kind of people. And, hey, be happy you got your desk back.”
“The LIBOR rate’s fallen fifty-seven basis points according to CrisisNet,” I said knowledgeably.
But he was looking into my äppärät, at an Image of Eunice flashing hard above the other data streams. She was pictured at a wedding of one of her ridiculously young Elderbird College friends in southern California, wearing a black polka-dotted dress that clung to her frame, desperately trying to coax out the preliminaries of an adult woman’s body. Her skin glowed in the warm afternoon sun, and her look was one of coy pleasure. “That’s Eunice,” I said. “That’s my girl. I think you’ll really like her. Do you like her?”
“She looks healthy.”
“Thank you,” I said, beaming. “I can forward you an Image of her if you’d like. She’s like a poster child for eternity.”
“That’s okay,” he said. He looked at the Image some more. “Good boy, Lenny,” he said. “Well done.”
The next day, Eunice and I took the Long Island Rail Road to Westbury, Long Island, to meet the Abramovs. The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons-it was systemic and it was complete. I knew Eunice was not ready to meet my parents, but she was doing it anyway, and she was doing it to please me. This was the first major kindness she had shown me, and I was drowning in appreciation.
My sweet girl was nervous almost to the point of quaking (how many times could she reapply her lip gloss and wipe the shine off her nose?), which showed that she cared about me. She was dressed for the occasion, an extra pinch of conservatism in her outfit, a sky-blue blouse with a Peter Pan collar and white buttons, pleated wool skirt reaching down below the knees, a black ribbon tied around the neck-from certain angles, she looked like one of the Orthodox Jewish women who have overrun my building. The usual Korean elder-worship and elder-fear brought out a strange immigrant pride in me. With Eunice sweating so handsomely on her orange pleather commuter-train seat, I could project the natural longevity of our relationship, and, for a moment at least, the feeling that we were fulfilling our natural roles as the offspring of difficult parents from abroad.
There was something else too. My first love for a Korean girl developed on the Long Island Rail Road some twenty-five years ago. I had been a freshman at a prestigious math-and-science high school in Tribeca. Most of the other kids were Asian, and although technically you had to live within the confines of New York City to attend, there were more than a few of us who faked our residency and commuted from various parcels of Long Island. The ride to Westbury amidst dozens of fellow nerd-students was a particularly difficult one, because it was public knowledge at the science high school that my weighted average was a dismal 86.894, while at least 91.550 had been recommended for entry into Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania, the weakest of the Ivy League schools (as immigrant children from high-performing nations, we knew our parents would slap us across the mouth for anything less than Penn). Several of the Korean and Chinese boys who took the railroad with me-their spiky hair still haunts my most literal dreams-would dance around me singing my average, “Eighty-six point eight nine four, eighty-six point eight nine four!”
“You won’t even get into Oberlin with that.”
“Have fun at NYU, Abramov.”
“See you at the University of Chicago! It’s the teacher of teachers!”
But there was one girl, another Eunice-a Eunice Choi, to be exact-a tall, quiet beauty, who would pry the boys away from me while shouting, “It’s not Lenny’s fault he can’t do well in school! Remember what Reverend Sung says. We’re all different. We all have different abilities. Remember the Fall of Man? We’re all fallen creatures.”
And then she’d sit down with me and, unbidden, help me with my impossible chemistry homework, moving the strange letters and numbers around my notebook until the equations were, for some reason, deemed “balanced,” while I, utterly unbalanced by the magical girl next to me, her silken skin glowing beneath her summer gym shorts and orange Princeton jersey, tried to catch a brief smell of her hair or a brush of her hard elbow. It was the first time a woman had risen to defend me, had given me the inkling of an idea that I should actually be defended, that I wasn’t a bad person, just not as skilled at life as some others.
At Westbury, Euny and I disembarked before an armored personnel carrier sitting by the squat station house, its.50-caliber Browning gun bouncing up and down, tracking the departing train as if waving a fond, spirited farewell. National Guardsmen were checking the äppäräti of the diverse crowd, Salvadorans and Irish and South Asians and Jews and whoever else had chosen to make this corner of central Long Island the rich, smelly tapestry it has now become. The troops appeared angrier and more sunburned than usual; perhaps they had just been rotated out from Venezuela. Two men-one brown-skinned, one not-had been taken off the line and were being pushed into the APC. All you could hear were the whirs and clicks of our äppäräti being downloaded and the competing chirping of the cicadas emerged from their seven-year slumber. And the looks on the faces of my countrymen-passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion. I almost teened Nettie Fine a message, begging her to lend me some of that sparkling native-born hope. Did she really think things were going to get better?