Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

My father is a janitor from a poor country.

Howard Shu’s dad hawks miniature turtles in Chinatown. Kelly Nardl is rich, but hardly rich enough. The scale of wealth we grew up with no longer applies.

Kelly’s äppärät lit up the air around her, and she was plunged into the needs of a hundred clients. After the daily decadence of Rome, our offices looked spare. Everything bathed in soft colors and the healthy glow of natural wood, office equipment covered in Chernobyl-style sarcophagi when not in use, alpha-wave stimulators hidden behind Japanese screens, stroking our overactive brains with calming rays. Little framed humorous hints scattered throughout. “Just Say No to Starch.” “Cheer Up! Pessimism Kills.” “Telomere-Extended Cells Do It Better.” “NATURE HAS A LOT TO LEARN FROM US.” And, fluttering in the wind above Kelly Nardl’s desk, a wanted poster showing a cartoon hippie being whacked over the head with a stalk of broccoli:

WANTED

For electron stealing

DNA killing

Malicious cellular damage

ABBIE “FREE RADICAL” HOFFMAN

WARNING: Subject may be armed and dangerous

Do not attempt to apprehend

Call authorities immediately and increase intake of the coenzyme Q10

“Maybe I’ll go to my desk,” I said to Kelly.

“Honey,” she said, her long fingers around my own. You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

“Oh God,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”

“You don’t have a desk. I mean, someone’s taken it. This new kid from Brown-Yonsei. Darryl , I think.”

“Where’s Joshie?” I said automatically.

“Flying back from D.C.” She checked her äppärät. “His jet broke down, so he’s going commercial. He’ll be back around lunchtime.”

“What do I do?” I whispered.

“It would help,” she said, “if you looked a little younger. Take care of yourself. Go to the Eternity Lounge. Put some Lexin-DC concentrate under your eyes.”

The Eternity Lounge was crammed full of smelly young people checking their äppäräti or leaning back on couches with their faces up to the ceiling, de-stressing, breathing right. The even, nutty aroma of brewing green tea snuck a morsel of nostalgia into my general climate of fear. I was there when we first put in the Eternity Lounge, five years ago, in what used to be the synagogue’s banqueting hall. It had taken Howard Shu and me three years just to get the brisket smell out.

“Hi,” I said to anyone who would listen. I looked at the couches, but there was hardly a place to squeeze in. I took out my äppärät, but noticed that the new kids all had the new pebble-like model around their necks, the kind Eunice had worn. At least three of the young women in the room were gorgeous in a way that transcended their physicality and made their smooth, ethnically indeterminate skin and sad brown eyes stretch back to earliest Mesopotamia.

I went to the mini-bar where the unsweetened green tea was dispensed, along with the alkalinized water and 231 daily nutritionals. As I was about to hit the fish oils and cucrumins that keep inflammation at bay, somebody laughed at me, a feminine laugher and thus all the more damning. Casually scattered atop the luxuriant couches, my co-workers looked like the characters from a comedy show about young people in Manhattan I remembered watching compulsively when I was growing up. “Just got back from a year in Roma,” I said, trying to pump the bravado into my voice. “All carbs over there. Need to stock up on the essentials like a cuh -razy person. Good to be back, guys!”

Silence. But as I turned back to the supplements, someone said, “What’s shaking, Rhesus Monkey?”

It was a kid with a small outbreak of mustache and a gray bodysuit with the words SUK DIK stenciled across the breast, some kind of red bandana strung around his neck. Probably Darryl from Brown, the one who had taken my desk. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I smiled at him, looked at my äppärät, sighed as if I had too much work ahead of me, and then began to casually leave the Eternity Lounge.

“Where you going, Rhesus?” he asked, blocking my exit with his scraggly, tight-butted body, shoving his äppärät in my face, the rich organic smell of him clouding my nostrils. “Don’t you want to do some blood work for us, buddy? I’m seeing triglycerides clocking in at 135. That’s before you ran away to Europe like a little bitch.” There was more hooting in the background, the women clearly enjoying this toxic banter.

I backed away, mumbling, “One thirty-five is still within the range.” What was that acronym Eunice had used? “JBF,” I said. “I’m just butt-fucking.” There was more laughter, a flash of pewter chin in the background, the shine of hairless hands bearing sleek technological pendants full of right data. Momentarily, I saw Chekhov’s prose before my eyes, his description of the Moscow merchant’s son Laptev, who “knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he was conscious of his ugliness all over his body.”

And still the cornered animal in me fought back. “Duder,” I said, remembering what the rude young man on the airplane had called me when he complained about the smell of my book. “Duder, I can feel your anger. I’ll take a blood test, no prob, but while we’re at it, okay, let’s just measure your cortisol and epinephrine levels. I’m going to put your stress levels up on The Boards. You’re not playing well with others.”

But no one heard my righteous words. The sweat glistening off my caveman forehead spelled it all out for them. An open invitation. Let the young eat the old. The SUK DIK guy actually pushed me until I felt the cold of the Eternity Lounge wall against the sparseness of my hair. He shoved his äppärät into my face. It was flashing my open-sourced blood work from a year ago.

“How dare you just waltz back here like that with that body mass index of yours?” he said. “You think you’re just going to take one of our desks? After doing fuck-all in Italy for a year? We know all about you, Monkey. I’m going to shove a carb-filled macaroon up your ass unless you skedaddle right now .”

A gigantic sitcom cheer rose up behind him-a huge wooooo of happy anger and joyous consternation, the assertion of the tribe over its weakest member.

Two and a half heartbeats later, the hooting abruptly ceased.

I heard the murmur of His Name and the clip-clop of his approach. The boisterous crowd was parting, the SUK DIK warriors slinking away, those Darryls and Heaths.

And there he was. Younger than before. The initial dechronification treatments-the beta treatments, as we called them-already coursing through him. His face unlined and harmoniously still, except for that thick nose, which twitched uncontrollably at times, some muscle group gone haywire. His ears stood beside his shorn head like two sentinels.

Joshie Goldmann never revealed his age, but I surmised he was in his late sixties: a sixtysomething man with a mustache as black as eternity. In restaurants he had sometimes been mistaken for my handsomer brother. We shared the same unappreciated jumble of meaty lips and thick eyebrows and chests that barreled forward like a terrier’s, but that’s where it ended. Because when Joshie looked at you, when he lowered his gaze at you, the heat would rise in your cheeks and you would find yourself oddly, irrevocably, present.

“Oh, Leonard,” he said, sighing and shaking his head. “Those guys giving you a hard time? Poor Rhesus. Come on. Let’s talk.” I shyly followed him as he walked upstairs (no elevators, never ) to his office. Hobbled, I should say. There is a problem with Joshie’s skeleton which he has never discussed, which makes him balance uncertainly from foot to foot, walk in segments and fits and starts, as if a Philip Glass piece were playing commandingly behind him.