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and mommy need me. I’m such a fuck-up.
    EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally? Hello? You’ve probably left. It’s one o’clock your time.
    EUNI-TARD ABROAD: Sally, I love you.

JUNE 4

    LEONARDO DABRAMOVINCI
TO
EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
    Oh, hi there. It’s Lenny Abramov. You might remember me from our little time in Rome. Thanks for brushing my teeth! Hee hee. So, anyway, just got back to the US of A. I’ve been practicing my abbreviations. I think you said ROFLAARP in Rome. Does that mean “Rolling On Floor Looking At Addictive Rodent Pornography”? See, I’m not that old! Anyway, been thinking about you. Coming to NYC anytime soon? You’ve got a place to stay here. I’ve got a nice place all set up, 740 square feet, balcony, view of downtown. Can’t compete with da tonino, but I make a pretty mean roasted eggplant. I can even sleep on the couch if you want me to. Call or write anytime. It was really, really, REALLY great to meet you. I’m committing the constellation of your freckles to memory as I write this (hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable).
    Love,
    Leonard

THE OTTER STRIKES BACK

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

    JUNE 4
New York City
    Dearest Diary,
    I saw the fat man at the first-class lounge at Fiumicino. There’s a special terminal for flights to the United States and SecurityState Israel, the most dilapidated terminal at the Roman airport, where everyone who is not a passenger is basically carrying a gun or pointing some sort of scanning gizmo at you. There aren’t even seats for the economy-class passengers by the gates, because they can scan you better standing up, get between your folds of flesh and light you up like a six-hundred-watt bulb. Anyway, life’s a lot better in the first-class lounge, and that’s where I went to see if I could find some last-minute High Net Worth Individuals, some potential Life Lovers who might be interested in our Product. I could see myself strolling into boss man Joshie’s office and saying, “Look at this! Even when he’s traveling, your Lenny’s looking for prospects. I’m like a doctor. Always on call!”
    First-class lounges aren’t what they used to be. Most Asian HNWIs fly private planes these days, but my äppärät picked up on some scan-able faces, an old-time porno star and a slick guy from Mumbai just starting out on his first worldwide Retail empire. They all had some money on them, if not the twenty million northern euros in investable income that I’m looking for, but there was this one guy who registered
nothing
. I mean he wasn’t there. He didn’thave an äppärät, or it wasn’t set on “social” mode, or maybe he had paid some young Russian kid to have the outbound transmission blocked. And he looked like a nothing. The way people don’t really look anymore. Not just imperfect, but awful. A fat man with deeply recessed eyes, a collapsed chin, limp and dusty hair, a T-shirt that all but exposed his large breasts, and a gross tent of air atop where one imagined his genital would be. No one would look at him except me (and then only for a minute), because he was at the margins of society, because he was without rank, because he was ITP or Impossible to Preserve, because he had no business being mixed up with real HNWIs in a first-class lounge. Now, in hindsight, I want to imbue him with some heroism; I want to place a thick book in his hands and perch even thicker bifocals on his nose. I want him to look like Benjamin Franklin. But, then, I promised you the truth, dear diary. And the truth is that from the moment I saw him
I was scared
.
    With his hands clasped at his crotch, the Impossible to Preserve fat man stared out the window, his head moving forward and backward contentedly, as if he were a half-submerged alligator enjoying a sunny day. Ignoring the rest of us, he watched, with an enthusiast’s abandon, the sleek new dolphin-nosed China Southern Airlines planes taxiing past our peeling UnitedContinentalDeltamerican 737s and some