NEW YORK ALKI
The city’s population swelled, drawn to its shores by viral marketing campaigns and rumors of epiphanies. Newcomers stood marveling at how thoroughly the first wave of inhabitants had adopted the personas of their ghostly forebears, circulating the blood of commerce and art through Chelsea, Tribeca, Wall Street, Harlem, Midtown. Newmans marched twenty abreast chanting conciliatory mottoes and welcoming these immigrants with promises of freedom from the stress of industrial production. Here and there a crime erupted, mostly human-on-newman violence, handled discreetly by those who’d absorbed the personas of New York’s finest. Bald eagles careened over former Bainbridge Island, orcas nudged its seawall, and from the city’s bowels screeched rats, subways, and data. The by-products of human folly seemed to have expired outside the parapets of this cathedral. Block by block the last vestiges of the former island trembled under the sky’s robotic arms and joined the urban parallelogram teeming with offices and takeout pierogi joints, galleries, and gay bars. The more immigrants who arrived at this fever dream, the easier it was for a man or woman just off the boat to cast aside his or her former self and plunge psychologically whole into one of the diminishing number of roles doled out by the newmans. The rain-raked city strained under the weight of lost memories.
Woo-jin, lying on the master bathroom floor of the penthouse, head resting on a hand towel, succumbed to dreams once dreamt by Isaac Pope, which mainly consisted of endless lines of code with the occasional appearance of a Star Trek character asking for instructions on how to fuck. Woo-jin woke to a shoe tapping his wrist. He couldn’t see the man’s face from this angle; and the lunar eclipse of the heat lamp cast the face in shadow. The guy smelled of shoe polish and breath mints. He extended his hand and pulled Woo-jin up so that he could sit on the toilet. Then the man took a seat on the edge of the tub. Woo-jin tried to reset his eyes but the guy’s face seemed to come out of an obscure memory.
“You’re that movie star,” Woo-jin said.
“That’s right. I’m Neethan F. Jordan.”
They shook hands. Woo-jin accidentally leaned on the flusher.
“You’re Woo-jin Kan,” Neethan said.
“Please don’t hurt me.”
“I’m not here to hurt you. Don’t you remember me? We were both in the Happy Sunset Home together. When we were kids?”
“The group home?”
“Yes, the group home. You’re my brother.”
“I have a brother?”
Neethan shrugged. “Brother in the sense that we came from the same lab. We got sent to the home because we came out not exactly to spec. They had designs for all of us. Some of us came out different from how the recipe said we’d come out. I was a false negative. They thought I was a rough draft, but they made a mistake.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The ones who pushed civilization’s RESET button. They designed me to be a movie star. Made me a descendant of an Indian tribe that got wiped out even before the FUS. They made you, I don’t know—”
“I’m a really good dishwasher,” Woo-jin said.
“There you go. I played one of those once.”
“Did you ever play a writer?”
“I did, yeah. Why? You want to be a writer?”
“I tried to write a book about how to love people but it fell apart.”
“How do you love people?”
“I still don’t know.”
“Who does?” Neethan shrugged. “By the way, when I showed up they assigned me the life of some homeless guy. You wouldn’t mind if I crashed here, would you?”
The penthouse quickly filled with characters. While Woo-jin slept they sprawled on living room furniture and helped themselves to the pantry, uncorked pre-FUS bottles of port, and confiscated art off the walls. Mornings Woo-jin shuffled in pj’s to the bathroom to piss only to be sideswiped by Neethan, who supported on his arm a woman named Sarah or Kateesha or April, pleasant enough ladies doing their panicked best to adapt to the lives they inhabited in this fabricated metropolis. A cadre of filmmakers held court on the balcony drinking brandy from to-go cups and debating the methods by which qputers cinematicized reality. A chef arrived, accompanied by a woman with one leg, a horn section in search of a band, some cracked-out bike messengers, and a newman crooner who sang spot-on versions of period show tunes. A couple times Woo-jin woke to find socialites unconscious in his bed or the bathtub. Group sing-alongs at all hours, creative uses for whipped cream, a sink bloodied by some poor bastard’s unfortunate encounter with a shattered highball. Various drugs rampantly traveled through the collected horde, with substances snorted, swallowed, injected, shoved into rectums, and illegally downloaded. A shaman of sorts—at least he looked like a shaman—danced spastically in the butler’s quarters in coils of sage smoke. Pots and pans clattering, someone going to town on a seven-piece Ludwig trap set, bowls of M&M’s and newman-human genital interactions. Vomit, assorted. This was, Neethan Fucking Jordan informed him, the party.