My spring semester coughed on like a pre-penicillin illness. Terrifyingly, Dr. Stein said nothing to me about how I’d been slacking off, she just lost interest in me at a greater rate than I was losing interest in her lab. I told Jules and Cyrus that once we beta-launched the platform, I really had to make up for all the idling I’d been doing. On the first day of May, we sent a link to a curated group of people we had cobbled together from friends of friends, random Facebook groups, and a site called Find Your User Testers. We sent an email with lots of exclamation marks. This will be fun! Help us A/B test our product! We asked them to send us anonymous feedback, tell us if they liked it, if it spoke to them in some way. Our initial outreach was to about three hundred people.
It was Friday. We barricaded ourselves in the house with the TV on a continuous screening of The Expanse and spent the whole weekend waiting for something to happen. Every few minutes, I checked the stats. By Sunday night, about a hundred people had opened the email. About fifty had received rituals from the platform. Eighteen sent their feedback.
This was fun! Thanks for the distraction from my Insta.
Thanks! Except I accidentally drowned my cat while trying to baptize him. Just Kidding! LMAO.
Whoever invented this thing, I don’t know you personally, but I am writing to say that I’ve just had a life-changing experience. It sounds stupid to claim this from just a few minutes on your site, but my mother died last year and honestly I’ve been to every priest, therapist, grief counselor, and shaman in greater New York and this is the first time I started to feel alive again. I put my palms together for you.
This sucked.
Blowing my mind, incredible tech.
“Well, that’s that,” Cyrus said, dusting his trousers as if he’d just finished off a croissant.
* * *
On Monday, determined to make up with Dr. Stein, I spent twenty-three straight hours at the lab. Finally, toward the end when I was standing in front of the water fountain for several minutes without appearing to drink anything, she tapped me on the shoulder and told me to go home immediately. Oh! I thought, she loves me again! And I stumbled home and fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke up, Jules was waiting for me in the dining room with a cup of coffee that had been made disgusting by the addition of grass-fed butter.
“We have a decision to make,” he said. “But it’s up to you, Asha. We’ll only do it if you say yes.”
I took a sip. The butter clung to my lips. “You and Cy want to have a baby, and you want me to be the surrogate? The answer is no. I’m not giving birth to a white-on-white mash-up.”
“We’ve been invited to audition for a spot in an incubator. There isn’t any money—but it’s a space to get ourselves set up.”
I paused for a moment and let his words sink in. “You mean the platform? I thought we were just messing around.”
“We were, but you saw the demo. We could give it more time, find out what it can really do.”
“Why is this on me?”
“Because the incubator is called Utopia and it’s in New York.”
He let that sink in for a minute. Utopia. The holy grail of incubators.
“You’ve got the most to lose, Asha.”
“How did they hear about us?”
“I don’t know. But they want us to go down there and show it to them.”
I wasn’t sure. “Don’t we have everything we need right here, thanks to a generous donation from the Cabot family?” I swept my arm across the gleaming oak dining table. “And anyway, no one really liked it.”
“The sample size was too small,” Jules said. “And the UX was shit.”
“Aw, Jules, you’re hurting my feelings, calling my code all brains and no beauty.”
“Do you want to maybe just meet them, check it out, see if we like it?”
It was all happening too quickly. “I don’t know.” Then something occurred to me. “Why are you having this conversation with me and not Cyrus too?”
Jules rubbed his hand up the side of his cheek as if grating a wedge of Parmesan. “Because he would totally not let us do it.”
He was right. Cyrus would laugh, and then he would talk us out of it. “Well, you know what they say—hubs before grubs.”
“No one in the history of sayings has ever said that.”
“It means I am not crossing your picket line.”
“Oh, come on, Asha, you know you want to. I’ll even splurge on Greyhound instead of the Chinatown bus. And maybe we’ll hate it and it won’t even matter.”
“Or maybe we’ll love it and you’ll put me in some kind of moral dilemma where I have to choose between the forces of Cyrus and Jules.”
“Call it whatever you want. I know you’re flattered. I know you’re curious.”
I was both of those things. We went back and forth a few more times. Finally, I agreed, and we made up a story for Cyrus about how I was visiting my sister and Jules was going to sign some paperwork at his dad’s law firm.
And that is how we ended up auditioning for Li Ann and her band of merry Doomsayers.
Three
I AM WHAT I AM
Cyrus has been sitting in the house with his legs crossed all day, taking deep breaths with a little chime app on his phone. When the chime goes off, he stands up, walks around the room seven times to stretch his legs, then gets back on his mat, faces the wall, and sits there until the bell rings again. I might find this extremely irritating if it weren’t for the fact that after one of these sessions, he is always twice as everything I love about him. He’s tender and thoughtful and even somehow smarter. I call it Zen Face. Zen Face is my favorite of Cyrus’s faces, even better than Gazing over a Candle at Dinner Face, or another—close to the top—Freshly Shaved and Smelling like Grass Face.
When we get home, Jules and I pad around the kitchen and make sandwiches out of whatever isn’t moldy. I think of Rory and his vegan startup. Already I’m a little fond of the people we met that morning, and I’m trying not to spend too much time imagining what it might be like, walking into that building every day and calling myself a Utopian. Being surrounded by all that shiny promise and making plans for the end of the world. But then there are all the things I thought I was going to do with my life. I try not to think about my student loans and the postdoc at Stanford, which, until yesterday, was my dream job. Can I do it? Can I drop everything to chase a dream?
Eventually, Jules and I stop waiting for Cyrus and start eating our sandwiches. Outside, the night is dense and quiet. I’m picturing all the people strolling home after a late-night movie or a pizza, all the youth and the cavalier confidence of just starting out in life. I could be those things too, I suppose, but I was born with a tendency to think and overthink, a habit of picking everything apart until it came out tasting like burnt toast.
My sister, Mira, is the opposite. She knows exactly what she wants, and she makes no apologies. She also has an ability to be serious and completely nonchalant at the same time. When she decided at the age of fifteen that she was going to start wearing a hijab, my parents freaked. “Go out in a bikini!” my mother begged. “That’s what America is for.”
Mira tried to explain that she was protesting, among other things, the bombing of children in Yemen, the hypersexualization of young women in Western society, and frankly, the way our parents had somehow given us the illusion that we could do anything we wanted. Then she rocked that hijab like you wouldn’t believe, told all the well-meaning people who wanted to whitesplain the importance of modesty in Muslim culture to fuck off because she was in no way intending to be modest, told the brown boys in the schoolyard to fuck off and stop calling her sister, and told the racist shop assistant at Best Buy to fuck off when he suggested all that fabric would make an excellent guise for shoplifting headphones. I know exactly what Mira would do at a moment like this. She would not hesitate. She would not wait for anyone’s permission. She would grab it with both hands and fly like a girl on a dragon’s back.
* * *
The bells. Cyrus rounds the corner and makes his way toward me, and just from the way he does this, I can tell it’s no ordinary Zen Face. “Nice trip?” he asks, dreamy and unfocused. He leans over and takes a giant bite of my sandwich.
I blurt everything out at once. “Jules and I went to New York to check out this amazing place called Utopia and we want to move down there and turn the platform into a startup. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you but we were so sure you were going to say no that we were afraid to ask.”