The Triplex was really one Triplex on top of another on top of another, each twisted at a forty-five-degree angle from the one below, like three carefully stacked bricks-essentially, a minor skyscraper-and then cantilevered over the East River, so that the destroyers of the visiting People’s Liberation Army Navy passed by at eye level, and you could almost reach over and touch the surface-to-air missile batteries glistening like tins of mint candy on their raised decks. About half of the Triplex was the living space carved out from the middle of the three Triplexes to form a busy souk-like area beneath the enormous skylight. It was roughly the size of the main hall in Grand Central Station, I was told. The space had been entirely cleared of furniture (or maybe this is how it always was), except for those frightening artworks shimmering at shoulder level and these little transparent cubes, which once you sat upon them filled with a red or yellow radiance, in deference to the Chinese flag and our guests. The place was so flooded with natural light that the distinction between indoors and outdoors no longer mattered, and at times I felt I was standing in a glass cathedral with the roof blown off.
I wanted to congratulate the artist on his work, that’s how strongly I felt about it, and to recommend a trip out to my parents’ Westbury so that he could see a different, more hopeful take on post-Rupture America. But they had this gimmicky thing going on, where, any time someone approached the artist whom he didn’t know or didn’t like the looks of, these spikes shot up from the floor all around him and you had to back away. He was actually a nice-looking guy, kind of square-jawed but with something milky, almost Midwestern, in his eyes, and he was wearing this cougar-print shirt and an old-school pinstriped Armani jacket which was festooned with random numbers made out of masking tape. He was busy talking to a wildly emotive post-American doyenne dressed in a cheongsam covered with dragons and phoenixes. The moment I approached them, the spikes shot out from the floor around him, and some of the serving girls in Onionskins who were standing next to the artist just gave me the old familiar look that denoted I was not a human being. Oh well, I thought. At least the art was great.
A lot of young Media people were hanging around one another protectively, clusters of boys and sometimes girls in proper suits and dresses, trying to impress their betters but clearly lost in the immensity of the place. Anyway, they were just so happy to be there, to be fed, to drink their rum and Tsingtaos, to be a part of society, and to avoid the five-jiao lines. I wondered if they had ever heard of Noah or knew how he had died. Like all the Media people left in the city, they were wearing blue badges handed out by Staatling-Wapachung that read “We Do Our Part.”
The Staatling-Wapachung bigwigs were dressed like young kids, a lot of vintage Zoo York Basic Cracker hoodies from the 2000s, and tons of dechronification, making me think they were actually their own children, but my äppärät informed me that most of them were in their fifties, sixties, or seventies. Sometimes I saw someone who I thought had been one of my Intakes, and I tried to say hi, but they could not really comprehend me in this glamorous context.
I noticed that none of our clients or our directors wore äppäräti, only the servants and Media folk. Howard Shu had told me that more than once: The truly powerful don’t need to be ranked. It made me feel conscious of the shiny, warbling pebble around my neck. I passed by some Media twentysomethings streaming at one another and overheard the little tidbits of verballing that always depressed me. “Did you know November is bike week?” “There’s nothing wrong with her except she’s completely fucked up.” “When they say ‘12 p.m.’ does that mean noon or midnight?”
Next to a cluster of StatoilHydro execs, ruddy elongated Norwegians and upper-caste Indians as tall as Norwegians, I spotted Eunice and her sister, Sally, talking to Joshie. As I began to make my way over to them, I passed one of the pieces showing a dead man perched upon the family couch in Omaha, a guy about my age, part Native American by the looks of him, with his face creeping slightly off his skull and the eyes eerily silenced, as if they had just been erased (“an interesting narrative strategy,” someone was saying). The picture was no less harrowing than anything else around me, the guy was mercifully dead, but for some reason I became agitated just looking at it, and my tongue went dry, sticking painfully to the roof of my mouth. I did what everyone eventually did: looked away.
I want to talk about their clothes. This seems important to me. Joshie was wearing a cashmere sport coat, wool tie, and cotton dress shirt, all JuicyPussy4Men-a slightly more formal approximation of the same clothes Eunice had chosen for me. She was wearing a French-blue two-piece Chanel bouclé suit with a faux-pearl center and knee-high leather boots, so that all of her was concealed except for the tiny glow of her sharp kneecaps. She looked less like a woman than a gift. Sally was also overdressed for the occasion, a pinstriped suit and the pinprick of a golden cross around the soft pad of her neck. I noticed the beginnings of two hard-won laugh lines, and a chin dominated by a single disarming dimple. When I approached them, both sisters stopped talking to Joshie and put their hands to their mouths. And then, apropos of nothing, I realized what was bothering me about the picture of the dead guy on the couch in Omaha. At the corner of the work, beyond a scattering of youthful personal effects heavy on string instruments and obsolete laptops, a bitch lay dead, a German shepherd shot point-blank, a lightning bolt of blood spilling across the warped living-room floor. A puppy of negligible weeks, maybe days, had staked its front paws on the dead animal’s exposed stomach, astride her still-swollen teats. You couldn’t see the puppy’s face, but you could tell its ears were alert and its tail was tucked under its rear, from either sadness or fear. Why, of all things, did this worry me so?
I blanked for a second, catching snatches of what Joshie was saying. “I met him through the skater scene…” “I come from a different budgeting culture…” “When you think about it, the capitalist system is more entrenched in America than anywhere else in the world…”
And then his arm was around me and we were walking away from the girls. I cannot recall our exact surroundings when he gave me his speech. We were lost in negative space, his closeness the only thing I could still cling to. He spoke of the seventy years in which he had not known love. How unfair that had been. How much love he had to give; how I had, in some ways, been a recipient of that love. But now he needed something different: intimacy, closeness, youth. When Eunice first walked into his apartment, he knew. He picked up my äppärät and produced a study on how May-December relationships lifted the lifespan ceilings for both partners. He spoke of practical things, my parents in Westbury. He could move them to a safer, peripheral region, like Astoria, Queens. He spoke of how we needed to spend some time apart, but how eventually the three of us could reconcile. “We could be like a family someday,” he said, but when he mentioned family, I could think only of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind turned away from what Joshie was saying, and I pondered my father’s humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.