Because it couldn’t hurt, I dressed up before leaving the house. Or, if I was working from the office, before leaving for work. I wore shoes with heels and applied makeup using tips I’d acquired from shame-watching Chantal’s YouTube tutorials, her pupils eclipsed by the reflection of a ring light. The trick was to curl your eyelashes firmly and close to the base, right where the robot spiders get in. I tweezed, I scrubbed, I dusted, I blended. I did interesting things with belts. My younger coworkers, with whom I’d never really bonded enough to categorize our small talk as negative or positive, took notice. “You look nice today” expanded to “You look nice this week” which expanded to “What are you eating?” Potato chips and hard liquor, mostly. A surprisingly fast-acting diet if you really put your back into it.
After work, I’d zigzag through the streets of Chinatown, admiring the intersections of lettering I’d never understand, buying beverages significant enough to merit dome tops, then having to sweet-talk my way into salon bathrooms. I’d sit on the benches on concrete islands or on the biscotti-shaped stoops painted municipal red. I’d watch my reflection warp in the stainless steel doors. Or else I’d suggest drinks meetings be held in the area, dragging publicists to me under false pretenses, ostensibly to discuss Radio New York’s coverage of their productions and publications. I went in the evenings because I assumed it would increase my chances. Most of my exes were grown-ups now. They had responsibilities from which no amount of subliminal battering could distract them. They were no longer waking up at noon, still drunk, for instance.
I avoided Boots within reason or else I called him before I went (went hunting, went to be hunted), but only after a relatively normal day had passed. It was in this window that I could convince myself nothing out of the ordinary was happening and thus convince him, too. This is how people must conduct affairs, I thought, by hitting the “refresh” button each morning, lying to themselves before they lied to anyone else. That was the secret, to put your denial mask on first before helping others. Most of the time, I got voice mail. Sometimes I got sent there on purpose. The time difference put him in afternoon meetings. When Boots and I did speak, I dodged the topic of myself with the kind of balletic skill that gets confused for curiosity, asking such detailed questions about glassware, it prompted him to offer me a job. Or else I interviewed him about the weather.
“You know what Mark Twain said about San Francisco?” I asked.
“‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’”
“Yup, that’s it. That’s what he said.”
“Did we get something for Jess and Adam?”
“I keep forgetting. I’m sure the only thing left on the registry is a sleigh bed.”
“Seriously?” he said, annoyed at this symbol of my warped priorities. “What else have you been doing?”
“Taking a shit? I don’t know. Can’t you just send them a vase?”
“I’m not The Giving Tree, Lola.”
“They’re your friends,” I said, eyeing the glassware shelves. “I thought you’d prefer to send them something you made.”
“You just told me you forgot.”
“That’s true. But there’s really no way I could have predicted this reaction.”
“I feel like I’m talking to Vadis.”
“Well, you’re not.”
One night, I got a twofer. At first, I thought there would be no sighting. I tried to conceal my stakeout by luxuriating in the reflections of people in the windows of lighting stores and rubber emporiums, pretending to inspect the merchandise (If it’s in rubber, we have it!) or else looking out the corner of my eye while examining the panes of glass circles in the pavement. The glass was centuries old, predating the lightbulb. These were vault lights for the downtown factory workers toiling away in the basement. It would only take a few people to stop, their shoes covering the glass, and it would be a blackout below.
Every face I picked out from the crowd looked normal in that it looked unfamiliar. Perhaps Amos, Willis, and Dave had been coincidences and Jonathan had been a fluke, manifesting only because he came as a matched set. Two consciousnesses are better to manipulate than one?
But then I saw Howard, crossing Mott. At first, I couldn’t be sure it was Howard. It was dark out by then. Plus the Howard I knew had a full head of hair and a pear-shape bottom that one rarely sees on a man. This guy had neither of those things. But I could tell by the gait. Howard sashayed, which was unfortunate because Howard very much wished not to sashay. When we met, he was a pudgy adjunct professor of linguistics on Long Island, cloaking his bulges, dreaming of tenure. If Howard were a woman, he would’ve been categorized as “basic,” but as a man, the expectation of surface individuality was lower while the pressure for conformity was higher. Howard’s curiosity was limited to whatever happened to physically cross his path. He stopped for every street canvasser, tried every cookie sample and squirt of lotion. If he saw a billboard for a movie, he’d go see that movie. His sister was the most creative person he knew. She was an artist who painted woodland scenes on plaster casts of her own face. He owned a dozen of the masks, hung proudly across one wall, staring down at us with hollow sisterly eyes.
Now here was Howard again. Had I thought about this man? I didn’t think I had. Did I miss Howard or compare Boots to him or associate him with a feature of the world? I didn’t think so. In fact, if I’d assumed anything about Howard, it was that I’d never see him again. The only remnant of Howard in my possession was a postcard he’d once given me for his sister’s art show. On the back, he’d written, “please cum?” which he quite sincerely meant as slang for “attend?”
Not the most cunning of linguists, our Howard.
Howard was talking animatedly into his phone. He looked as if he was in a hurry. This gratified me as, during the months we dated, he was always blinkered by insecurity, jockeying to be needed, creating micro-situations in which I might depend on him, such as safekeeping our tickets or not telling me the letter of our row, even as we searched for it. Or withholding the address of a party so that I’d have to rely on him for navigation. I’m on it, Lola, don’t you worry. I wasn’t worried, I was annoyed. Perhaps Howard no longer needed to do this. Perhaps he was dealing with real problems, eliminating the desire to manufacture his own. Departmental drama. Arguing with a wife. Scheduling a surgery. Whatever the source of the animation, I was glad for it.
I hung back and watched, as if from the inside of one of his sister’s masks, trying to put as much distance between us as possible without losing him. I didn’t feel the need to interfere with Howard’s evening. I waited for him to hail a cab and for the cab to disappear over the Manhattan Bridge.
I was en route to report this sighting to the Golconda, defenses down, quota met, when I ran into Cooper, exiting the subway. Cooper came at me like a dart, cutting through space in that Brancusiesque way he had, the photonegative of a sashay. Cooper was deep in the closet when we were together. His father was the first Black reverend at a Baptist Church in Alabama, and his mother managed a Walmart. She wouldn’t speak to him for six months after learning he’d applied for financial aid at a college “up north” (UVA). I very much doubted the topic of premarital sex was on the table in that house, never mind with whom. For a while, I told myself that just because these were the kind of parents who might not rejoice in the sexual orientation of their only child, that didn’t mean there was anything for him to reveal. Maybe whatever elements of himself Cooper was concealing were more aspects than elements. More curiosities than elements. Maybe he hid himself when he went home because he didn’t want to seem too permeated by the northeast, not because he didn’t want to seem too gay.
But Cooper only wanted to have sex with the lights out, from behind, with me lying perfectly still. It felt clinical. Or as if we were role-playing a bank heist during which my sole job was to avoid being detected by lasers. In theory, this should’ve been a flag, but I’d dated Cooper right after Dave and, more important, after I’d spent a lifetime absorbing the idea that women wound up sublimating their sexual needs for men. It was therefore refreshing, relatable even, to be with two men in a row who needed something more narrative than friction to get off, whose sexuality slid like an abacus. This did not last long.
A magnificent knot of contradictions, Cooper had United Colors of Benetton ads framed in his bathroom, a catalog of musical soundtracks in his living room, and a vanity full of specialized products. He also owned a black leather couch, never had any food in the house, and worked in the merchandising department of the NBA. One day, I asked him: Why this sport and not all other sports? And with the straightest of faces, he told me that in other sports, at least the ones with leagues and federations, you couldn’t see the exertion of the players’ bodies. You couldn’t see the way their muscles shifted from the back to the biceps, from the thigh to the knee.
There was really no bouncing back from that one.
Cooper didn’t flinch when he saw me. I was a memory for him, enough for the power of suggestion to get him here, but I was not a life event. Not compared with everything that came after me. I was excited to talk to him, as there was no risk of entanglement. I was not going to cry in front of, slap, or grope Cooper.
But Cooper only grinned, pivoted his phone away from his face, and pecked me on the cheek.
“Cute,” he mouthed, gesturing at my outfit.
He was gone before I uttered a word.
I didn’t think either of these men was significant enough to write home about. But their presence provided the news that they thought about me, however minimally. Their surfaces could be scratched. Perhaps, I thought, closure was not achieved by exhausting oneself with analysis, but via carrot, through the ego’s feeble need for confirmation. There is a membrane of pride that surrounds the heart and I found that when that area got damaged, it was hard to figure out what took the hit. Sometimes it was the heart; often it was only the cellophane.
Seeing these people was a reminder that I had not been through all this by myself. This was a frequently employed tactic among men I knew, to knock you down and then ask what you’re doing on the floor. The adult iteration of Why Are You Hitting Yourself? Except most of them sincerely wanted to know. Causation was Greek to them. But I was starting to sense that some of them had grasped the truth of what had happened all along. Some of their hands had been extending down this whole time or vice versa as we wiped the dirt from our butts and waited for the nerves to stop throbbing.
Think you’ll live? Good. Then back into the game you go.
I made enough noise to scare the rats. We’d come to an understanding: I would not kill them on purpose and they would not kill me by accident, by making me jump and slam my head on a beam. Once folded into Jin’s chair, I licked the suction cup and reported on the nothing of my evening, on how the nothing made me feel. I tried not to lie to the needle about my feelings or to manufacture them. I found it a challenge to experience emotions in the moment and hold on to them at the same time. The blank I drew was genuine. It was fine, seeing Howard and Cooper, just fine. Perhaps, I thought, this was why, whenever I had doubts about Boots, I tried to just concentrate on appreciating him instead.
Vadis left the room in a huff when I told her I’d spoken to neither man, that I’d even gone so far as to avoid one.
“This is why you can’t have nice things!” she shouted.
“I don’t even want this nice thing!”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“Do you know what that word means? Or is your brain too stuffed with adaptogen powders?”
After she slammed the door, I wondered, aloud to Jin, if my biofeedback was really helping. What good was my heart doing anyone, in any sense?
“It’s an information continuum,” Jin said. “We just want to know how your psyche is faring from every possible angle, and then we present our findings to Clive, who presents them to our investors.”
I knew better than to push too hard with her. Jin was all in. Not only was she like Errol, newly enamored of Clive, but people like her, who invested this deeply in spiritualism, had a history of desperation when it came to technology (ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Ouija Board, the Dream Catcher, the Voodoo Doll). It hadn’t worked yet. Was Clive Glenn, inventor of a DSM drinking game, really going to crack a code that had stumped humanity dating back to ancient Egypt?
“So what do you think,” Jin asked, “that there will never be anything new because it hasn’t existed before?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying cold fusion will never be new because it hasn’t existed before. The impossible and the inevitable are not the same.”
“I hope this doesn’t offend you,” she said, wrapping a blood pressure monitor snugly around my arm, “because you seem like an aware person and Vadis speaks highly of you—”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“—but it’s crazy to me how you think you’re smarter than Clive.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“You question everything, you argue with everything, when everything you see here is for you.”
“Not everything,” I said, pointing through the wall, at the meditation room. “And maybe I have questions because we’re sitting in a temple for a religion founded on debate. Why don’t you question it?”
“I already did,” she said, tightening the hug of the Velcro. “And I understand that you need to go on your own journey. But all these people, coming to this place, it’s because of Clive. Clive is the answer. Your package is working. Come on, you don’t see why people will pay for this? Clive has created a chance for them to fix their lives.”
“Jin, what’s your day job? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I founded an online payment-processing company but I sold it.”
“Like a big company?”
“Depends on your definition of big,” she said, shrugging.
“You ran it?”
“Sure.”
“And you quit to do this?”
“This data isn’t gonna map itself,” she said, stroking her monitor with a trace of the maternal. “Errol quit his job, too. He used to do advance for a senator. He’s very organized. But it sounded off-the-charts soulless. I think everyone here had hit a wall with how we were using our skills, but we didn’t know it until Clive. Until Clive found me. Like what’s the point in doing research for global markets when you can do it for human emotion?”
“Money?”
“Sure, but follow the trail. People want money so they feel in control, and they want to feel in control so they feel happy. Love makes people happy.”
From CEO to “love makes people happy.” This man needed to be jailed.
“So Clive, he’s paying you guys?”
“No,” she said, as if the notion were a bug to be flicked.
“But you’re in on the ground floor, then? Like stock options?”
“Oh, no, Lola. This work will change the world. I’d do this for free.”
“But you do do this for free.”
“That’s what I said.”
Clive was standing in the middle of the atrium when I left the interrogation room, talking on the phone, sipping coffee, speaking rapidly but trying to keep his voice down. He sounded agitated, maybe not for a mogul but certainly for a guiding light. Not to mention the fact that an atrium seemed like a profoundly stupid place for a private call. He must have been caught off guard by it.
I hid behind the garden so that neither he nor the baristas would see me. Was this what it had come to, me hiding behind potted palms? I picked up a few words: transfer, funding, projection, scalable, astral projection. The woman who looked like a kindergarten teacher passed and gave Clive a little bow as she did. So did a man in clear Lucite glasses. He was wearing a fleece vest even though it was summer, as well as an expensive-looking watch. This must have been the single-digit tech company employee. When they were all gone, I emerged, casually, as if having stopped to smell the moss.
“Problem?” I asked, approaching Clive with exaggerated stealth.
He tucked his phone into his pocket like he was getting rid of evidence.
“No, not really. How’s it going, Lola?”
“Umm, fine, I guess? You know, standard. You’re asking me this like I started a new diet.”
“Maybe I’m just calm, knowing you’re benefiting already, accessing the depths of your romantic consciousness…”
“You know…”
“What? Speak.”
“We spent the better part of a decade telling people the only way to get over anything was to put in elbow grease, that medication alone would never work without therapy. You hated the quick fixes. At least drugs have science behind them.”
“You’re our drug,” he said, as if making a mental note to jot that one down.
The chandeliers were on a slight dim and I could see the reflection of the elevator gears, shrunken and liquidy, in Clive’s eyes. No woman, not me, not Chantal, not Clive’s first wife, would capture his heart as Soren Jørgensen had. Clive would never get behind a woman the same way, never refashion his world with her in mind. He could give to others, that was true enough. And it kept him from being a sociopath. But he could never need.
“Every last one of you sounds the same, you know that? Rather, everyone sounds like you.”
He smiled even though he knew he shouldn’t.
“It’s not a compliment. You’re turning smart people into mush-for-brains.”
“I am? Me? Do you know that eighty percent of New Yorkers own smartphones? The city itself has become more machine than human. For the first time in history, we are the ones who need to be tested for signs of independent thought, but I’m brainwashing people?”
“You’re frightening.”
“Awww, no, I’m not,” he said, ruffling my hair just as Willis had done.