Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Page A

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 watchingcompulsively 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