She did not flinch from my ridiculous assault. She sat down and put me on her lap, held my tiny nine-year-old hands, and let my cry upon the tanned infinity of her scented neck. “I’m sorry, Missus Nettie,” I wailed in a Russian accent, for although I was born in the States my parents were my only confidants, and their language was my sacred, frightened one. “I think they die in car!”
“Who died in the car?” Nettie asked. She explained to me that my father had called and asked her to watch me for an hour because my mother was held up at her office. But knowing they were safe would not stop my tears.
“We all die,” Nettie told me, after she had fed me a powdered-cocoa-and-fruit concoction she called “the chocolate banana,” whose ingredients and manner of preparation I still don’t understand. “But someday you’ll have children too, Lenny. And when you do you’ll stop worrying about your parents’ dying so much.”
“Why, Missus Nettie?”
“Because your children will become your life.” For a moment at least, that made sense. I could feel the presence of another, someone even younger than myself, a kind of prototypical Eunice person, and the fear of parental death was transferred upon her shoulders.
According to the records of the Ospedale San Giovanni in Rome, Nettie Fine died of complications from “pneumonia” only two days after I had seen her at the embassy, after we had talked loudly in the hallway about the future of our country. She was perfectly hale when I saw her, and the records of her treatment were scant enough to appear satirical. I do not know who sent me those GlobalTeens messages from a “secure” address, including the one asking me which ferry Noah had boarded, seconds before it was destroyed. Fabrizia DeSalva died in a supposed motorino accident one week before the Rupture. I never had children.
2.
Since the first edition of my diaries and Eunice’s messages was published in Beijing and New York two years ago, I have been accused of writing my passages with the hope of eventual publication, while even less kind souls have accused me of slavish emulation of the final generation of American “literary” writers. I would have to disabuse the reader of this notion. When I wrote these diary entries so many decades ago, it never occurred to me that any text would ever find a new generation of readers. I had no idea that some unknown individual or group of individuals would breach my privacy and Eunice’s to pillage our GlobalTeens accounts and put together the text you see on your screen. Not to say that I wrote in a vacuum, entirely. In many ways, my doodlings presage the diaristic flood of contemporary Sino-American writers-for example, Johnny Wei’s Boy, Is My Ass Tired (Tsinghua-Columbia) and Crystal Weinberg-Cha’s The Children’s Zoo Is Closed (Audacious, HSBC-London)-that appeared after the People’s Capitalist Party issued its “Fifty-one Represents” four years ago, the last of which shouted to the masses: “To write text is glorious!”
Despite the abuse heaped upon me in my former homeland, I am heartened by some of the reviews in the People’s Republic itself. Writing in the Farmers’ Daily, the levelheaded Cai Xiangbao anoints my diaries as. That is precisely right. I am not a writer. And yet what I had written was, as Xiangbao put it, “a tribute to literature as it once was [emphasis mine].”
But as the Stateside critics have unanimously agreed, the gems in the text are Eunice Park’s GlobalTeens entries. They “present a welcome relief from Lenny’s relentless navel-gazing,” to quote Jeffrey Schott-Liu in whorefuckrevu. “She is not a born writer, as befits a generation reared on Images and Retail, but her writing is more interesting and more alive than anything else I have read from that illiterate period. She can be bitchy, to be sure, and there’s the patina of upper-middle-class entitlement, but what comes through is a real interest in the world around her-an attempt to negotiate her way through the precarious legacy of her family and to form her own opinions about love and physical attraction and commerce and friendship, all set in a world whose cruelties gradually begin to mirror those of her own childhood.” I would add that, whatever one may say about my former love, and whatever terrible things she has written about me, unlike her friends, unlike Joshie, unlike myself, unlike so many Americans at the time of our country’s collapse, Eunice Park did not possess the false idea that she was special.
3.
After I left New York, I lived in Toronto, Stability-Canada, for the better part of a decade, where I changed my worthless American passport to a Canadian one and my name from Lenny Abramov to Larry Abraham, which seemed to me very North American, a touch of leisure suit, a touch of Old Testament. In any case, following my parents’ death, I could not stomach the idea of bearing the name they had given me and the surname that had followed them across the ocean. But eventually I crossed that ocean myself. I cashed in my remaining Staatling preferred stock, gathered all the yuan I had, and moved to a small farmhouse in the Valdarno Valley of the Tuscan Free State. I wanted to be in a place with less data, less youth, and where old people like myself were not despised simply for being old, where an older man, for example, could be considered beautiful.
A few years after my final immigration, I heard that Joshie Goldmann was coming to the fractured Italian peninsula. Some jerk from Bologna had made a documentary about the heyday of Post-Human Services, and the medical school of the university had flown in whatever was left of Joshie.
“We’re all going to die,” Grace Kim once said to me, echoing Nettie Fine. “You, me, Vishnu, Eunice, your boss, your clients, everyone.” If any part of my diaries yields anything resembling the truth, it is Grace’s lament. (Or perhaps it is no lament at all.)
Onstage, my ersatz papa’s face, initially contorted into a serious academic expression, quickly fell apart, and he began to twitch from the recently discovered Kapasian Tremors associated with the reversal of dechronification. Drooling magnificently over his interpreter, he told us, without preamble or apology: “We were wrong. The antioxidants were a dead end. There was no way to innovate new technology in time to prevent complications arising from the application of the old.
“Our genocidal war on free radicals proved more damaging than helpful, hurting cellular metabolism, robbing the body of control. In the end, nature simply would not yield.”
And, like an idiot, I started to feel sorry for him. When the clients began to die, when the tremors started and the organs failed, the Staatling-Wapachung board of directors fired Joshie. Howard Shu took over Post-Human Services and made of it what he’d always imagined, an enormous lifestyle boutique doling out spa appointments and lip-enhancement surgery. Eunice left Joshie even before the decline began. I know little about the young man she left him for, but what information I have points to a person of perfectly decent temperament and controlled ambition, a Scotsman. For a time, at least, I know they made a home together outside of Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their relationship was the only product of the one semester she had spent at Goldsmiths College in London proper, where she had attempted to study art or finance with Joshie’s encouragement.