Super Sad True Love Story

11 THE NUCLEAR OPTION

Dear Diary,

I learned how to say “elephant” in Korean this week.

We went to the Bronx Zoo, because Noah Weinberg said on his stream that the ARA was going to close the place down and ship all the animals to Saudi Arabia “to die of heatstroke.” I never know which part of Noah’s streams to believe, but, the way we live now, you can never be too sure. We had fun with the monkeys and “José the Beaver” and all the smaller animals, but the highlight was this beautiful savannah elephant named Sammy. When we ambled up to his humble enclosure, Eunice grabbed my nose and said, “Kokiri.”

“Ko,” she explained, “means ‘nose.’ Kokiri. Long nose. ‘Elephant’ in Korean.”

“I hab a long dose because I’m Jewish,” I said, trying to pull her hand off my face. “Dere’s duthing I can do aboud it.”

“You’re so sensitive, Lenny,” she said, laughing. “I heart your nose so much. I wish I had a nose.” And she started kissing my comma of a snout in full view of the pachyderm, going gently up and down the endless thing with her tough little lips. As she did so, I locked eyes with the elephant, and I watched myself being kissed in the prism of the elephant’s eye, the giant hazel apparatus surrounded with flecks of coarse gray eyebrow. He was twenty-five, Sammy, at the middle of his lifespan, much like I was. A lonely elephant, the only one the zoo had at the moment, removed from his compatriots and from the possibility of love. He slowly flicked back one massive ear, like a Galician shopkeeper of a century ago spreading his arms as if to say, “Yes, this is all there is.” And then it occurred to me, lucky me mirrored in the beast’s eye, lucky Lenny having his trunk kissed by Eunice Park: The elephant knows. The elephant knows there is nothing after this life and very little in it. The elephant is aware of his eventual extinction and he is hurt by it, reduced by it, made to feel his solitary nature, he who will eventually trample his way through bush and scrub to lie down and die where his mother once trembled at her haunches to give him life. Mother, aloneness, entrapment, extinction. The elephant is essentially an Ashkenazi animal, but a wholly rational one-it too wants to live forever.

“Let’s go,” I said to Eunice. “I don’t want kokiri to see you kissing my nose like that. It’ll only make him sadder.”

“Aw,” she said. “You’re so sweet to animals, Len. I think that’s a good sign. My dad had a dog once and he really took care of her.”

Yes, diary, so many good signs! Such a positive week. Progress on every front. Hitting most of the important categories. Lov[ing] Eunice (Point No. 3), Be[ing] Nice to Parents (Within Limits) (Point No. 5), and Work[ing] Hard for Joshie (No. 1). I’ll get to our (yes, our!) visit with the Abramovs in a second, but let me give you a little breakdown on the work situation.

Well, the first thing I did at Post-Human Services was march into the Eternity Lounge and talk to the guy in the red bandana and SUK DIK suit, who put me on his stream “101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For,” Darryl from Brown, who stole my desk while I was in Rome. “Hey, guy,” I said. “Look, I appreciate the attention, but I got this new girlfriend with 780 Fuckability”-I had made sure to put an Image of Eunice I had taken at the zoo front and center on my äppärät screen-“and I’m kind of, like, trying to play it real coolio with her. So would you mind taking me off your stream?”

“Fuck you, Rhesus,” the young fellow said. “I do whatever I want. You’re not, like, my parent. And even if you so were my parent I’d still tell you to go plug yourself.”

As before, cute young people were laughing at our interaction, their laughter slow and thick and full of educated malice. I was frankly too stunned to reply (I was of the opinion that I was slowly befriending the SUK DIK guy), and even more stunned when my co-worker Kelly Nardl stepped out from behind the fasting-glucose tester, her arms crossed over the redness of her neck and chest, her chin glistening with alkalized water. “Don’t you dare talk to Lenny like that, Darryl,” she said. “Who do you think you are? What, just because he’s older than you? I can’t wait to see you hit thirty. I’ve seen your charts. You’ve got major structural damage from when you were into heroin and carbs, and your whole stupid Boston family is predisposed to alcoholism and whatever the fuck. You think your metabolism is just going to keep you skinny like that forever? Minus the exercise? When was the last time I saw you working out at ZeroMass or No Body? You are going to age fast, my friend.” She took me by the arm. “Come on, Lenny,” she said.

“It’s just because he used to be a buddy of Joshie’s,” Darryl shouted after us. “You think that gives you a right to defend him? I’m going to tell on both of you to Howard Shu.”

“He didn’t used to be a buddy of Joshie’s,” Kelly growled at him, and how delightful she looked when enraged, those fierce American eyes, the forthrightness of her tremendous jaw. “They’re still friends. If it weren’t for Original Gangsters like Lenny, there would be no Post-Human Services and you wouldn’t have your fat salary and benefits, and you’d probably be getting an M.F.A. in so-called art and design at SUNY Purchase right about now, you little turd. So be thankful to your elders or I will fuck you up.”

We both left the Eternity Lounge proud and confused, as if we had stood up to some crazed, violent child, and I ended up thanking Kelly for half an hour, until she kindly told me to shut up. I worried that Darryl would tell Howard Shu, who would tell Joshie, who would get upset that Kelly was stressing Darryl out, the stressing out of Darryl types a big no-no in our organization. “I don’t care,” she said, “I’m thinking about quitting anyway. Maybe I’ll move back to S.F.” The idea of leaving Post-Human Services, of giving up on Indefinite Life Extension and eking out a small hairy lifetime in the Bay Area, seemed to me tantamount to plunging off the Empire State Building with such mass and velocity that the myriad of safety nets would snap beneath you until your skull knew the pavement. I massaged Kelly’s shoulders. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t even think about it, Kel. We’re going to stick by Joshie forever.”

But Kelly never got reprimanded. Instead, when I walked into our synagogue’s main sanctuary one humid morning, Little Bobby Cohen, the youngest Post-Human staffer (I think he’s nineteen years old at the most), approached me wearing a kind of saffron monk getup. “Come with me, Leonard,” he said, his Bar Mitzvah voice straining under the profundity of what he was about to do.

“Oh, what’s all this?” I asked, my heart pumping blood so hard my toes hurt.

As he led me to a tiny back office where, judging by the sweet-briny smell, the former synagogue’s gefilte-fish supply was stored, Little Bobby sang: “May you live forever, may you never know death, may you float like Joshie, on a newborn’s breath.”

My God! The Desking Ceremony.

And there it was, surrounded by a dozen staffers and our leader (who hugged and kissed me)-my new desk! As Kelly fed me a ceremonial garlic bulb, followed by some sugar-free niacin mints, I surveyed all the pretty young people who had doubted me, all those Darryls and friends of Darryls, and I felt the queasy, mercurial justice of the world. I was back! My Roman failures were near-erased. Now I could begin again. I ran out into the synagogue’s sanctuary, where The Boards were noisily registering my existence, the droning but comforting sound of the letters “LENNY A.” flipping into place at the very bottom of one of the boards, along with my last blood work-not so hot-and the promising mood indicator “meek but cooperative.”

My desk. All three square feet of it, shiny and sleek, full of text and streams and Images rising up from its digital surface, a desk probably worth the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I still owed Howard Shu. Ignoring the Eternity Lounge as if it were now beneath me, I spent the bulk of my working week at my desk, opening up several data streams at once so that I resembled a man too busy to bother with socializing.

Affecting a god-like air-my Eunice-kissed proboscis pointed toward the ceiling, both hands caressing the data in front of me, as if ready to make man out of clay-I scanned the files of our prospective Life Lovers. Their white, beatific, mostly male faces (our research shows that women are more concerned with taking care of their progeny than with living forever) flashed before me, telling me about their charitable activities, their plans for humanity, their concern for our chronically ill planet, their dreams of eternal transcendence with like-minded yuan billionaires. I guessed that the last time they had been so painfully dishonest was when they penned their applications to Swarthmore forty years earlier.

I picked out the profiles that appealed the most to me, some for the usual financial, intellectual, or “durability” (health) reasons, but others because they could not keep the fear out of their eyes, the fear that, for all the wealth and sinecures they had amassed, for all their supplicating children and grandchildren, the end was irreversible, the lapse into the void a tragedy before which all tragedies were scandalously trite, their progeny a joke, their accomplishments a drop of fresh water in a salty ocean. I scanned the good cholesterol and the bad, the estrogen buildups and the financial crack-ups, but mostly I was looking for the equivalent of Joshie’s funny limp: An admission of weakness and insignificance; an allusion to the broad unfairness and cosmic blundering of the universe we inhabit. And an intense desire to set it right.

One of my Intakes, let’s call him Barry, ran a small Retail empire in the Southern states. He looked suitably cowed by what Howard Shu must have told him before he was handed over to me. We accepted, on average, 18 percent of our High Net Worth applicants, our dreaded rejection letter still sent out by actual post. The Intake lasted a while. Barry, trying to subdue any remaining trace of his Alabama drawl, wanted to sound knowledgeable about our work. He asked about cellular inspection, repair, and reconstruction. I painted him a three-dimensional picture of millions of autonomous nanobots inside his well-preserved squash-playing body, extracting nutrients, supplementing, delivering, playing with the building blocks, copying, manipulating, reprogramming, replacing blood, destroying harmful bacteria and viruses, monitoring and identifying pathogens, reversing soft-tissue destruction, preventing bacterial infection, repairing DNA. I tried to remember how enthusiastic I had been upon first joining Joshie’s enterprise as an NYU senior. I used my hands a lot, the way the faded Roman actors had done at da Tonino, the restaurant where I had taken Eunice and fed her the spicy eggplant. “How soon?” Barry asked, visibly excited by my excitement. “When will all this be possible?”

“We’re almost there,” I said, despairing. The 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed Howard Shu would be deducted on the first of the next month. That money was supposed to be my deposit for the first of many beta dechronification treatments. Forget my name on The Boards. The train was pulling out of the station and I was running behind it, my suitcase half open, white underwear spilling comically along the platform.

I took Barry all the way over to the wasteland of York Avenue to our research center, the ten-story slab of concrete that once served as an adjunct to a large hospital. It was time for him to meet out Indians. We have this Cowboys and Indians theme going on at Post-Human Services. At the Life Lovers Outreach division we call ourselves Cowboys; the “Indians” are the actual research staff, mostly on loan from the Subcontinent and East Asia, housed at an eighty-thousand-square-foot facility on York and at three satellite locations in Austin, Texas; Concord, Massachusetts; and Portland, Oregon.

The Indians keep things pretty simple. There really isn’t much to see in the areas to which visitors are allowed-basically the same thing you see in any office-young people with äppäräti, immune to the rest of the world, maybe the occasional glass cage filled with mice or some kind of spinning thingamabob. Two of our most sociable guys, both named Prabal, came out to greet him from the cancer and viral labs and burdened him with yet more terminology while letting out a few practiced promos: “We’re past the alpha testing, Mr. Barry. I’d say we’re definitely at the beta stage.”

Back at the synagogue, I gave Barry the willingness-to-live test. The H-scan test to measure the subject’s biological age. The willingness-to-persevere-in-difficult-conditions test. The Infinite Sadness Endurance Test. The response-to-loss-of-child test. He must have sensed how much was at stake, his sharp WASP-y beak aquiver as the Images were projected against his pupils, the results streaming on my äppärät. He would do anything to persevere. He was saddened by life, by the endless progression from one source of pain to another, but not more than most. He had three children and would cling to them forever, even if his present-day bank account would not be able to preserve more than two for eternity. I entered “Sophie’s Choice” on my intake äppärät, a major problem as far as Joshie was concerned.

Barry was exhausted. The Patterson-Clay-Schwartz Language Cognition Test, the final barometer for selection, could await another session. I knew already that this perfectly reasonable, preternaturally kind fifty-two-year-old would not make the cut. He was doomed, like me. And so I smiled at him, congratulated him on his candor and patience, his intellect and maturity, and with a tap of my finger against my digital desk threw him onto the blazing funeral pyre of history.

I felt shitty about Barry, but even shittier about myself. Joshie’s office was crammed with people all day long, but during a quiet moment I found him by the window, staring quizzically at a sky of untrammeled blue, just a fat lone military helicopter trudging toward the East River, its armored beak pointed downward as if it were a predatory bird hunting for food. I sidled up to him. He nodded, not unfriendly, but with some tired reserve. I told him the story of Barry, stressing the man’s innate goodness and his problem of having too many children, whom he loved, and not enough money to save all of them, which elicited a shrug on his part. “Those who want to live forever will find a means of doing so,” Joshie said, a cornerstone of the Post-Human philosophy.

“Hey, Grizzly,” I said, “do you think you can put me in for some of the dechronification treatments at a reduced rate? Just basic soft-tissue maintenance, and maybe a few bio years shaved off?”

Joshie regarded the nine-foot fiberglass Buddha that furnished his otherwise empty office, its blissed-out gaze emitting alpha rays. “That’s only for clients,” he said. “You know that, Rhesus. Why do you have to make me say it out loud? Stick with the diet and exercise. Use stevia instead of sugar. You’ve still got a lot of life left in you.”

My sadness filled the room, took over its square, simple contours, crowding out even Joshie’s spontaneous rose-petal odor. “I didn’t mean that,” Joshie said. “Not just a lot of life. Maybe forever. But you can’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a certainty.”

“You’ll see me die someday,” I said, and immediately felt bad for saying it. I tried, as I had done since childhood, to feel nonexistence. I forced coldness to run through the natural humidity of my hungry second-generation-immigrant body. I thought of my parents. We would all be dead together. Nothing would remain of our tired, broken race. My mother had bought three adjoining plots at a Long Island Jewish cemetery. “Now we can be together forever,” she had told me, and I had nearly broken down in tears at her misplaced optimism, at the notion that she would want to spend her idea of eternity-and what could her eternity possibly comprise?-with her failure of a son.

“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?

A paunched, goateed muzhik in a camouflaged helmet scanned my äppärät with an unhappy display of teeth and a gust of morning breath that had lasted well into the afternoon. “Malicious pervision of data,” he barked at me in an accent that I placed somewhere between Appalachia and the deeper South, the word “data” now a three-syllable wonder. (How did this faux-Kentuckian become a New York National Guardsman?) “What the heck, son?” he said.

I deflated immediately. The world momentarily retreated into its contours. More than anything, I was scared to be scared in front of Eunice. I was her protector in this world. “No,” I said. “No, sir. That’s being fixed. That’s a mistake. I was on a plane from Rome with a seditious fat man. I told the otter ‘Some Italians’ but I guess he thought ‘Somalians.’”

The soldier held up a hand. “You work for Staatling-Wapachung?” he asked, mispronouncing the complicated name of my employer at at least four junctures.

“Yes, sir. Post-Human Services division, sir.” The word “sir” felt like a broken weapon at my feet. Again I wished my parents were nearer to me, even though they were less than two miles away. I thought of Noah for some reason. Could he really be collaborating with the ARA, as Vishnu had suggested? If so, could he help me right now?

“Deny and imply?”

“What?”

The man sighed. “Do you deny the ex-istence of our conversation and imply consent?”

“Yes. Of course!”

“Fingerprint here.” I grazed the pad of his thick brown äppärät with my thumb.

A flick of the wrist. “Move along.” And as I did so, a legend on the armored personnel carrier caught my eye: “WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EQUIPMENT LEASE/OWN.” Wapachung Contingency was the frighteningly profitable security branch of our parent company. What the hell was going on here?

We took a cab to my parents’ house, passing various examples of modest two-story capes covered with aluminum siding, New York Yankee pennants streaming from every other door-the kind of striving neighborhood where all the money goes into the forty-by-hundred-foot lawns, which even in the overripe heat of the East Coast summer bristle with carefully cultivated greenness. I felt a little embarrassed, because I knew that Eunice’s parents were much better off than mine, but I was pleased at how things had worked out with that twanging National Guardsman, at the appearance of power and grace that had been bestowed upon me as an employee of the mighty Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, which was now apparently arming the National Guard. “Were you scared back there, Euny?” I asked.

“I know my kokiri isn’t some deviant criminal,” she said, rubbing my nose and leaning forward so that I could kiss her brow, celebrate the fact that she could make jokes in these difficult times.

In a few minutes we reached the corner of Washington Avenue and Myron, the most important corner of my life. I could already see my parents’ brownish half-brick, half-stucco cape, the golden mailbox out in front, the faux nineteenth-century lamp beside it, the cheap lawn chairs stacked on the island of cement that passed for the front porch, a black horse-and-carriage motif across the steel screen door (I do not mean to besmirch their taste; all this junk came with the house), and the gigantic flags of the United States of America and SecurityState Israel billowing in the hazy breeze from two flagpoles. The flavorful husk of Mr. Vida, my parents’ neighbor and my father’s best friend, waved from the porch across the street, and shouted something encouraging at me and possibly salacious at Eunice. Both my dad and Mr. Vida had been engineers in their homelands reduced to working-class life: big callused hands, small horny bodies, clever brown eyes, a thickly landscaped conservatism, and striving, hustling children, three for Mr. Vida to my father’s one. His son Anuj and I went to NYU together, and now the little bastard was a senior analyst at AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup.

I took Eunice’s arm and led her over my parents’ pristine lawn. At the door my mother appeared in her usual outfit-white panties and utilitarian bra-a woman who since taking her retirement had committed herself to intensive housebound living and whom I haven’t seen in proper dress for years.

She was about to throw her arms around my neck in typically overblown fashion when she noticed Eunice, let out some Russian garble of amazement, and retreated inside the house, leaving me, per the usual, with the visuals of her thick gravity-pulled breasts and white little round of belly. My father, shirtless, in stained beige shorts, soon took her place, also gaped at Eunice, ran his hand against his naked muscular breasts perhaps out of embarrassment, said “O!” then hugged me anyway. There was hair against my new dress shirt, the gray carpet that my father wore with an odd touch of class, as if he were a royal in some tropical country. He kissed me on both cheeks and I did the same, feeling the flood of intimacy, of sudden closeness with a person who usually orbited so far away from me. The instructions, the Confucian-like code of Russian father-son relations, spooled in my mind: Father means I have to love him, have to listen to him, can’t offend him, can’t hurt him, can’t bring him to task for past wrongs; an old man now, defenseless, deserving of all I can offer.

My mother reappeared in shorts and a wife-beater. “Sinotchek” (“Little son”), she shouted, and kissed me in the same meaningful way. “Look who’s come to us! Nash lyubimeits” (“Our favorite”).

She shook Eunice’s hand, and both of my parents swiftly evaluated her, affirmed that she was, like her predecessors, not Jewish, but quietly approved of the fact that she was thin and attractive with a healthy black mane of hair. My mother unwrapped her own precious blond locks from the green handkerchief that kept them safe from the American sun and smiled prettily at Eunice, her skin gentle and pale, aged only around the frantically moving mouth. She began talking in her brave post-retirement English about how glad she was to have a potential daughter-in-law (a perennial dream-two women against two men, better odds at the dinner table), filling in the contours of her loneliness with rapid-fire questions about my mysterious life in faraway New York. “Does Lenny keep clean house? Does he vacuum? Once, I came to college dormitory, okh, awful! Such smell! Dead ficus tree! Old cheese on table. Socks hanging in window.”

Eunice smiled and spoke in my favor. “He’s very good, Ms. Abramov. He’s very clean.” I looked at her with endearment. Somewhere beneath the bright suburban skies I felt the presence of a.50-caliber Browning gun swiveling toward an incoming Long Island Rail Road train, but here I stood, surrounded by the people who loved me.

“I got Tagamet from the discount pharmacy,” I said to my father, taking five boxes out of the bag I’d brought.

“Thank you, malen’kii” (“little one”), my father said, taking hold of his beloved drug. “Peptic ulcer,” he said to Eunice gravely, pointing at the depth of his tortured stomach.

My mother had already grabbed hold of the back of my head and was madly stroking my hair. “So gray,” she said, shaking her head in an exaggerated way, as if she were an American comedic actress. “So old he gets. Almost forty. Lyonya, what is happening to you? Too much stress? Also losing hair. Oh my God!”

I shook her off. Why was everyone so concerned about my decline?

“You are named Eunice,” my father said. “Do you know where it come from, such name?”

“My parents…” Eunice gamely began.

“It from the Greek, yoo-nee-kay. Meaning ‘victorious.’” He laughed, happy to demonstrate that, before he was forced to be a janitor in America, he had served as a quasi-intellectual and minor dandy on Moscow’s Arbat Street. “So I hope,” he said, “that in life you will be victorious also!”

“Who cares about Greek, Boris,” my mother said. “Look at how she is beautiful!” The fact that my parents admired Eunice’s looks and capacity for victory brightened me quite a bit. All these years, and I still craved their approval, still longed for the carrot and stick of their nineteenth-century child-rearing. I instructed myself to lower the heat of my emotions, to think without the family blood bursting at my temples. But it was all for nought. I became twelve years old as soon as I passed the mezuzah at the front door.

Eunice blushed at the compliments and looked at me with fear and surprise, as my father began to lead me to the living-room couch for our usual heart-to-heart. My mother rushed over to the couch with a plastic bag which she draped over the place where I was about to sit in my compromised Manhattan outerwear, then took Eunice to the kitchen, chatting gaily to the potential daughter-in-law and ally about how “guys can be so dirty, you know,” and how she had just built a new storage device for her many mops.

On the couch, my father draped his arm around my shoulders-there it was, the closeness-and said, “Nu, rasskazhi” (“So, tell me”).

I breathed in the same breath as he did, as if we were connected. I felt his age seep into mine, as if he were the forward guard of my own mortality, although his skin was surprisingly unwrinkled, and he bore an odor of vitality on his skin, along with an afterthought of decay. I spoke in English with the tantalizing hints of Russian I had studied haphazardly at NYU, the foreign words like raisins shining out of a loaf. I mentally recorded some of the harder words for consultation with my non-digital Oxford Russian-English dictionary back home. I spoke about work, about my assets, about the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed Howard Shu (“Svoloch kitaichonok” [“Little Chinese swine”], my father rendered his opinion), about the most recent, fairly positive valuation of my 740-square-foot apartment on the Lower East Side, about all the monetary things that kept us fearful and connected. I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him that I was unhappy and humiliated and often, just like him, all alone.

He held up the pendant of my new äppärät. “How much?” he said, turning the thing over, varicolored data pouring over his hairy fingers. When I explained that the device was gratis, he made a happy snort and said in pure English: “Learn new technology for free is good.”

“How’s your Credit?” I asked him.

“Eh.” He waved the thought away. “I never go near those Poles, so who cares?”

The floor beneath my feet was clean, immigrant clean, clean enough so that you understood that somebody had done their best. My father had two old-fashioned televizor screens stapled to the walls above my mother’s fanatically waxed mantelpiece. One was set to a FoxLiberty-Prime stream, which was showing the growing tent city in Central Park, now spreading from the backyard of the Metropolitan Museum, over hill and dale, all the way down to the Sheep Meadow (“Obeyziani” [“Monkeys”], my father said of the displaced and homeless protesters). On the other screen, FoxLiberty-Ultra was viciously broadcasting the arrival of the Chinese Central Banker at Andrews Air Force Base, our nation lying prostrate before him, our president and his pretty wife trying not to shiver as a bleak Maryland downpour scoured the heat-cracked tarmac.

When I asked my father how he was feeling, he pointed at his heartburn and sighed. Then he began to talk about the news on “the Fox.” Sometimes when he spoke I surmised that, at least in his own mind, he had already ceased to exist, that he thought of himself as just an empty spot cruising through a ridiculous world. Speaking in the complicated Russian sentences that English had denied him, he praised Defense Secretary Rubenstein, talked about all that he and the Bipartisan Party had done for our country, and how, with Rubenstein’s blessing, SecurityState Israel should now use the nuclear option against the Arabs and the Persians, “in particular against Damascus, which, if winds are properly positioned, s bozhei pomochu [‘with the help of God’], will carry poison clouds and fallouts in direction of Teheran and Baghdad,” as opposed to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

“You know I saw Nettie Fine in Rome,” I told him. “At the embassy.”

“And how is our American mama? Does she still think we are ‘cruel’?” He laughed, somewhat cruelly.

“She thinks the people in the parks are going to rise up. The ex-National Guardsmen. There’s going to be a revolution against the Bipartisans.”

“Chush kakaia!” (“What nonsense!”) my father shouted. But then he thought about it for a few moments and spread his arms. “What can be done about someone like her?” he finally said. “Liberalka.”

I felt my father’s breath against my cheek for twenty minutes as he talked about his complex political life, then excused myself, unwound from his humid embrace, and went to the upstairs bathroom, as my mother shouted to me from the kitchen: “Lenny, don’t take your shoes off in upstairs bathroom. Papa has gribok” (“athlete’s foot”).

In the contaminated bathroom, I admired the strange blob of plastic with wooden spokes that kept my mother’s serious mop-collection in ready-to-access mode. Although my parents never had a good word to say about HolyPetroRussia, the hallways were hung with framed sepia-toned postcards of Red Square and the Kremlin; the snow-dusted equestrian statue of Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy, founder of Moscow (I had learned just a bit of Russian history at my father’s knee); and the gothic Stalin-era skyscraper of prestigious Moscow State University, which neither of my parents had attended, because, to hear them tell it, Jews were not allowed in back then. As for me, I have never been to Russia. I have not had the chance to learn to love it and hate it the way my parents have. I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

My bedroom was nearly empty; all the traces of my habitation, the posters and little bits of crap from my travels, my mother had stowed away in carefully labeled boxes in the closets. I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house, the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naïve again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth. I cannot begin to tell you how much the purchase of this house, of each tiny bedroom, had meant to my family and to me. I still remember the signing at the real-estate lawyer’s office, the three of us beaming at one another, mentally forgiving one another a decade and a half worth of sins, the youthful beatings administered by my father, my mother’s anxieties and manias, my own teenage sullenness, because the janitor and his wife had done something right at last! And it would all be okay now. There was no turning back from this, from the glorious fortune we had been granted in the middle of Long Island, from the carefully clipped bushes by the mailbox (our bushes, ABRAMOV bushes) to the oft-mentioned Californian possibility of an aboveground swimming pool in the back, a possibility that never came true, because of our poor finances, but which could never be decisively put to bed either. And this, my room, whose privacy my parents had never respected, but where I would still find a summer’s hot sanctuary on my glorified army cot, my little teenaged arms doing the only nonmasturbatory thing they were capable of, hoisting aloft a big red volume of Conrad, my soft lips moving along with the dense words, the warped wood-paneled walls absorbing the occasional clicks of my tongue.

Out in the hallway, I caught sight of another framed memento. An essay my father had written in English for the newsletter of the Long Island scientific laboratory where he worked (it had made it onto the paper’s front page, to our family’s pride), and which I, as an undergraduate NYU English major, had helped to proofread and refine.

THE JOYS OF PLAYING BASKETBALL

By BORIS ABRAMOV

Sometimes life is difficult and one wishes to relieve oneself of the pressures and the worries of life. Some people see a shrink, others jump in a cold lake or travel around the world. But I find nothing more joyful than playing basketball. At the Laboratory we have many men (and women!) who like to play basketball. They come from all over the world, from Europe, Latin America, and everywhere else. I cannot say I am the best player, I am not so young anymore, my knees hurt, and I am also pretty short and this is a handicap. But I take the game very seriously and when a big problem comes up in my life and I feel like I do not want to live, I sometimes like to picture myself on the court, trying to throw a ball from a great distance into the hoop or maneuvering against an agile opponent. I try to play in a smart way. As a result, I find that I am often victorious even against a much taller or faster player, from Africa or Brazil, let’s say. But win or lose, what’s important is the spirit of this beautiful game. So if you have time on Tuesday or Thursday at lunchtime (12:30), please join me and your colleagues for a good, healthy time in the physical education center. You’ll feel better about yourself and the worries of life will “melt away”! Boris Abramov is a custodian in the Buildings and Grounds division.

I remember trying to get my father to take out the part about being “pretty short,” and the bit about the pained knees, but he said he wanted to be honest. I told him in America people liked to ignore their weak points and to stress their incredible accomplishments. Now that I think about it, I felt guilty about being born in Queens and having lots of nutritious food on my plate, food that allowed me to grow to a semi-normal height of five feet and nine inches, whereas my father had barely scraped the five-and-a-half-foot mark. It was he, the athlete, not I, the soft and stationary one, who needed those extra inches to sail the basketball past some Brazilian pituitary giant.

The familiar cry of my mother resounded downstairs: “Lyonya, gotovo!” (“Lenny, dinner is ready!”)

Down in the dining room, with the shiny Romanian furniture the Abramovs had imported from their Moscow apartment (the totality of it could be squeezed into one small American room), the table was laid out in the hospitable Russian manner, with everything from four different kinds of piquant salami to a plate of chewy tongue to every little fish that ever inhabited the Baltic Sea, not to mention the sacred dash of black caviar. Eunice sat, Queen Esther-like in her Orthodox getup, at the ceremonial end of the table, upon a fluffed-up Passover pillow, frowning at the attention, unsure how to deal with the strange currents of love and its opposite that circulated in the fish-smelling air. My parents sat down, and my father proposed a seasonal toast in English: “To the Creator, who created America, the land of free, and who give us Rubenstein, who kill Arab, and to love which is blooming in such times between my son and Yooo-neee-kay, who [big wink to Eunice] will be victorious, like Sparta over Athens, and to the summer, which is most conducive season to love, although some may say spring…”

While he went on in his booming voice, a vodka shot glass of some weird garage-sale provenance shaking in his troubled hand, my mother, bored, leaned over to me and said: “Kstati, u tvoei Eunice ochen’ krasivye zuby. Mozhet byt’ ty zhenishsya?” (“By the way, your Eunice has very pretty teeth. Maybe you will marry?”)

I could see Eunice’s mind absorbing the basics of my father’s speech (Arabs-bad; Jews-good; Chinese Central Banker-possibly okay; America-always number one in his heart), while gauging the intent on my mother’s face as she spoke to me in Russian. Eunice’s mind moved so quickly through feelings and ideas, but the fear on her face reflected a life rushing by faster than she could make sense of it.

The toast put to rest, unraveled in some happy political mumbling, we shoveled in the food without reservation, all of us from countries historically strangled by starvation, none of us strangers to salt and brine. “Eunice,” my mother said, “perhaps you can answer for me this. Who is Lenny by profession? I never can figure out. He went to NYU business school. So he is… businessman?”

“Mama,” I said, letting out some air, “please.”

“I am talking to Eunice,” my mother said. “Girl talk.”

I had never seen Eunice’s face so serious, even as the tail end of a Baltic sardine disappeared between her glossy lips. I wondered what she might say. “Lenny does very important work,” she told my mother. “It’s, I think, like, medicine. He helps people live forever.”

My father’s fist slammed the dining table, not hard enough to break the Romanian contraption, but enough to make me draw into myself, enough to make me worry that he might hurt me. “Impossible!” my father cried. “It break every law of physics and biology, for one. For two, immoral, against God. Tphoo! I would not want such thing.”

“Work is work,” my mother said. “If stupid rich American want to live forever and Lenny make money, why you care?” She waved her hand at my father. “Stupid,” she said.

“Yes, but how Lenny knows about medicine?” My father lit up, brandishing a fork capped by a marinated mushroom. “He never study in high school. What is his weighted average? Eighty-six point eight nine four.”

“NYU Stern Business School rated number eleven for marketing, which was Lenny specialization,” my mother reminded him, and I warmed to her defense of me. They took turns attacking and defending me, as if each wanted to siphon off only so much of my love, while the other could stab at the crusted-over wounds. My mother turned to Eunice. “So Lenny tell us you speak perfect Italian,” she said.

Eunice blushed some more. “No,” she said, lowering her eyes and cupping her knees. “I’m forgetting everything. The irregular verbs.”

“Lenny spend one year in Italy,” my father said. “We come to visit him. Nothing! Bleh-bleh-bleh. Bleh-bleh-bleh.” He moved his body as if to imitate my walking through the Roman streets while trying to talk to the natives.

“You are liar, Boris,” my mother said casually. “He bought us beautiful tomato in market Piazza Vittorio. He brought down price. Three euro.”

“But tomato is so simple!” my father said. “In Russian pomidor, in Italian pomodoro. Even I know such thing! If he maybe negotiate for us cucumber or squash…”

“Zatknis’ uzhe, Borya” (“Shut up already, Boris”), my mother said. She readjusted her summer blouse and bored her eyes into mine. “Lenny, neighbor Mr. Vida show us you appear on stream ‘101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For.’ Why do you do it? This dick-sucking boy, he makes fun of you. He says you are fat and stupid and old. You don’t eat good food and you do not have profession and your Fuckability rankings are very low. Also he says tebya ponizili [‘you have been demoted’] at the company. Papa and I are very sad about this.”

My father looked away in some shame, while I curled and uncurled my toes beneath the table. So this was at the heart of their anger with me. I had told them so many times not to look at any streams or data about me. I was a private person with my own little world. I lived in a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. I had just learned to FAC. Why couldn’t they find a better use for their retirement years than this painful scrutiny of their only child? Why did they stalk me with their tomatoes and high-school averages and “Who are you by profession?” logic?

And then I heard Eunice speak, her straightforward American English ringing against the smallness of our house. “I told him not to appear in it too,” she said. “And he won’t anymore. You won’t, right, Lenny? You’re so good and smart, why do you need to do it?”

“Exactly,” my mother said. “Exactly, Eunice.”

I did not tell them that I had regained my desk. I did not say anything. I leaned back and watched the two women in my life look across a glossy Romanian table groaning beneath a plastic cover and twenty gallons of mayonnaise and canned fish. They were eyeing each other with a placid understanding. Sometimes mothers and girlfriends compete against one another, but that has never been my experience. It is quite easy for two smart women, no matter what the gap in their ages and backgrounds, to come to a complete agreement about me. This child, they seemed to be saying…

This child still needs to be brought up.