Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

“Let’s fuck,” Vishnu said, pointing in their direction.

“Jeez, cool it, Nee-gro,” I said, already slurring my words. “You’ve got a little cutie at home.” I looked directly into the camera nozzle of Noah’s äppärät: “’Sup, Grace. Long time no see, baby girl. You watching this live?”

The boys laughed at me. “What an idiot!” Noah cried. “Did you hear that, beloved cocksucking audience? Lenny Abramov thought Vishnu Cohen-Clark just said, ‘Let’s fuck .’”

“It’s F-A-C,” Vishnu explained. “I said, ‘Let’s FAC.’”

“What does that mean?”

“He sounds like my granny in Aventura!” Noah was bellowing. “‘FAC? What’s that? Who am I? Where’s my diaper?’”

“It means ‘Form A Community,’” Vishnu said. “It’s, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.” He took my äppärät, and slid some settings until an icon labeled “FAC” drifted onto the screen. “When you see FAC, you press the EmotePad to your heart, or wherever it can feel your pulse.” Vishnu pointed out the sticky thing on the back of my äppärät that I thought could be used to attach it to a dashboard or a fridge. Wrong again.

“Then,” Vishnu continued, “you look at a girl. The EmotePad picks up any change in your blood pressure. That tells her how much you want to do her.”

“All right, Mediastuds and Mediawhores,” Noah said. “We’re streaming live here as Lenny Abramov tries to FAC for the first time. This is a future-reference event, folks, so widen your bandwidth. This is like the Wright brothers learning to fly, except neither of them was mildly retarded like our boy Lenny here. JBF, Nee-gro. Tell me if I’m going too far. Or wait. There’s no such thing as too far in Rubenstein’s America. Too far is when you’re shot in the back of the head somewhere Upstate and the National Guard burns your body to a crisp and flushes the ashes down a cold winter’s port-a-potty at some Secure Screening Facility in Troy. Lenny’s looking at me like What are you talking about? Here’s the breakdown on what you’ve missed during your ‘junior year abroad,’ Lenny-boy: The Bipartisans run the American Refund Agency, or whatever the fuck it’s called, the ARA runs the infrastructure and the National Guard, and the National Guard runs you . Oops. Not supposed to mention that on GlobalTeens. Maybe I have gone too far!”

I noticed Vishnu moving his head out of the frame of Noah’s äppärät’s camera nozzle at the mention of the ARA and the Bipartisans. “Okay, Nee-gro,” he said to me. “Set up your Community Parameters. Make it ‘Immediate Space 360’-that’ll cover the whole bar. Now look at a girl, then press the pad to your heart.” I looked at the pretty brunette, at the hairless crotch glowing from within her see-through Onionskin jeans, at the lithe body crouched imperiously atop a set of smooth legs, at her worried smile. Then I touched my heart with the back of my äppärät, trying to fill it with my warmth, my natural desire for love.

The girl across the bar laughed immediately without even turning my way. A bunch of figures appeared on my screen: “FUCKABILITY 780/800, PERSONALITY 800/800, ANAL/ORAL/VAGINAL PREFERENCE 1/3/2.”

“Fuckability 780!” Noah said. “Personality 800! Leeeetl Lenny Abramov’s got himself a beeeeeg crush.”

“But I don’t even know her personality,” I said. “And how does it know my anal preferences?”

“The personality score depends on how ‘extro’ she is,” Vishnu explained. “Check it out. This girl done got three thousand-plus Images, eight hundred streams, and a long multimedia thing on how her father abused her. Your äppärät runs that against the stuff you’ve downloaded about yourself and then it comes up with a score. Like, you’ve dated a lot of abused girls, so it knows you’re into that shit. Here, let me see your profile.” Vishnu slid some other functions, and my profile shimmered on my warm pebbly screen.

LENNY ABRAMOVZIP code 10002, New York, New York. Income averaged over five-year-span, $289,420, yuan-pegged, within top 19 percent of U.S. income distribution. Current blood pressure 120 over 70. O-type blood. Thirty-nine years of age, lifespan estimated at eighty-three (47 percent lifespan elapsed; 53 percent remaining). Ailments: high cholesterol, depression. Born: 11367 ZIP code, Flushing, New York. Father: Boris Abramov, born Moscow, HolyPetroRussia; Mother: Galya Abramov, born Minsk, VassalState Belarus. Parental ailments: high cholesterol, depression. Aggregate wealth: $9,353,000 non-yuan-pegged, real estate, 575 Grand Street, Unit E-607, $1,150,000 yuan-pegged. Liabilities: mortgage, $560,330. Spending power: $1,200,000 per year, non-yuan-pegged. Consumer profile: heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious, non-Bipartisan. Sexual preferences: low-functioning Asian/Korean and White/Irish American with Low Net Worth family background; child-abuse indicator: on; low-self-esteem indicator: on. Last purchases: bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact, 35 northern euros; bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact, $126 yuan-pegged; bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact, 37 northern euros.

“You’ve got to stop buying books, Nee-gro,” Vishnu said. “All those doorstops are going to drag down your PERSONALITY rankings. Where the fuck do you even find those things?”

“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!” Noah cried. And then, staring directly into his äppärät’s camera nozzle: “We’re FACing pretty hard now, people. We’re getting Lenny’s RateMe on .”

Streams of data were now fighting for time and space around us. The pretty girl I had just FACed was projecting my MALE HOTNESS as 120 out of 800, PERSONALITY 450, and something called SUSTAINABILIT¥ at 630. The other girls were sending me similar figures. “Damn,” Noah said. “The prodigal Nee-gro Abramov is getting creamed here. Looks like the chicas , they no likey that big Hebraic snorkel our boy was born with. And those flabby Hadassah arms. Okay, rank him up, Vish.”

Vishnu worked my äppärät until some RANKINGS came up. He helped me navigate the data. “Out of the seven males in the Community,” he said, gesturing around the bar, “Noah’s the third hottest, I’m the fourth hottest, and Lenny’s the seventh.”

“You mean I’m the ugliest guy here?” I ran my fingers through the remnants of my hair.

“But you’ve got a decent personality,” Vishnu comforted me, “and you’re second in the whole bar in terms of SUSTAINABILIT¥.”

“At least our Lenny’s a good providah ,” Noah said. I remembered the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed to Howard Shu and became even more depressed by the prospect of being deprived of them. Money and Credit was about all I had at this point. That, and my sparkling PERSONALITY.

Vishnu was pointing at the girls with his index finger, interpreting the data streams that were by now the sum total of our attention: “The one on the left, with the scar on her ankle and that little landing strip on her muff, Lana Beets, she went to Chicago Law, now has a Retail internship at Saaami Bras, making eighty thousand yuan-pegged. The one with the labia stud, name’s Annie Shultz-Heik, works in Retail, she’s got the smart foam for the genital warts and is on the pill, and last year she gave three thousand yuan to the Bipartisan Party’s Young Future Leaders of America Together We’ll Surprise the World Fund.”

Annie was the girl I had FACed first. The one who had been allegedly abused by her dad and ranked my MALE HOTNESS a meager 120 out of 800.

“That’s right, Annie,” Noah said into his äppärät. “Vote Bipartisan and your warts will melt away faster than our country’s sovereign debt rating. They’ll disappear like our troops down in Ciudad Bolívar. Rubenstein time in America, folks. Rubenstein time.”