“No wonder we’re so afraid of you.”
“Yeah, perfumed assholes. Imagine if everyone knew how superior we were.”
Unfortunately, Buttery doesn’t make it into Utopia. But it’s summer in New York, and everything is sweet and light as whipped cream. Even living with my parents isn’t so bad. My mother packs the freezer with enormous portions of curry, and when she’s at rehearsals, we sit down at the table with my father and play cribbage using an old board he brought over from Bangladesh. Mira lives ten minutes away, and sometimes when Ahmed is working late, she and I curl up on the sofa while Cyrus talks to my father about his novel, and it’s like being a kid again, except Cyrus is there, making everything better.
* * *
“I need your priest to talk to a friend of mine,” Auntie Lavinia says. She has come to help my mother with her Fourth of July biryani. My parents insist that, unlike their neighbors who buy hot dogs from Costco, they celebrate American independence with an actual meal.
“Cyrus is not a priest.”
“Your mother said.”
“Ammoo thinks Cyrus can do no wrong.”
“He’s so clever he could have been anything!” my mother shouts from behind the biryani. “All he does is read.”
That isn’t true. Cyrus does more than read. On Mondays, he attends a meeting of the Dungeons and Dragons Ravencroft Holy Society. On Tuesdays, he goes to a weekly Al Anon meeting, although he has, as far as I know, never been affected by addiction. On Wednesdays, he attends the prayer circle of the local Gurudhwara specifically for the LGBTQ Sikh community. On Thursdays, he attends choir practice for St. Saviors Church, on Fridays, he goes to the Long Island Mosque for afternoon prayers, on Saturdays, he attends the East Ham Rabbinical Society Talmud study group, and on Sundays, not being one for rest, he attends, in turns, an Episcopalian sermon, a Catholic Sunday Eucharist, a Quaker meeting, and a Unitarian service. In between, he is in constant touch with friends who are Wiccan, Buddhist, Jain, or Greek Orthodox. He is interested in everyone and everything. He occasionally strays into Utopia, sometimes for a few hours in the afternoon, and then wanders off to some meeting or other in the name of research.
“My neighbor has cancer,” Auntie Lavinia says. “He doesn’t have long, maybe a few months, at most a year. He was a rabbi, you know, very respected, but after he got sick, he said he just wanted to be a Hindu. But you can’t convert to Hinduism. The people at the temple won’t have him. He isn’t a Hindu and he isn’t a Jew. How will we put the man to rest when his time comes? His wife died a few years ago, he doesn’t really have anyone. I told him your husband here is a religious guy, he would know.”
“He’s not religious,” I say. “He just studies religion.”
“Yes, that’s what I said.” She starts chopping an onion and our eyes water. “Can he talk to him? Help him plan? He’s restless, not knowing.”
“I’ll ask Cyrus.”
“I was married for thirty years.” Auntie Lavinia wipes her eye with the back of her hand.
I know what’s coming.
“Then my husband runs off with the girl at the King Kullen checkout.”
“Yes, Auntie Lavinia. It was terrible.”
“King Kullen! Not even Whole Foods.”
“Not even Whole Foods” is a repeated lament from Auntie Lavinia.
“I’ll talk to Cyrus, okay?” And I pick up an onion, knowing my fingers will stink up the keyboard later.
* * *
“The thing is,” Destiny says, “I don’t actually mind if we kill sex.” We are at the Utopia café drinking turmeric lattes. Rory and Marco and Jules are there too.
“Sex is natural, sex is good,” Marco hums.
“It’s time for men to start feeling some of the anxiety that we feel. Maybe it’s all natural and fun for you, but we’re thinking when we meet a man for the first time, where on the shit spectrum is this guy going to be?”
“I would put most men somewhere between a little handsy and sexual harassers,” Jules says.
Marco tells Jules not to let the side down.
“I’m not on your side,” Jules tells him. “Not if your side is protecting its own to the point where we don’t acknowledge there’s a problem.”
“You’re all missing the point,” Rory argues. “Patriarchy defeats everyone, men and women alike. But more important—much more important—our rapacious greed is destroying everything that is human about us. Unless we start seeing nonhuman animals in a different light, we are going to self-destruct.”
“Amen, brother,” Marco says. “That’s why I’m trying to disrupt the way we die.”
I ask what he means.
“My app, Obit.ly—it’s going to make the whole process of dying more intentional. You’re going to get to curate your own death on social media.”
“Do we really need to curate death?” Destiny asks.
“Do we really need to police our sex lives?” Marco counters.
“I know a lot of women would enjoy sex a hell of a lot more if they felt safe.” Destiny chugs the last of her latte and leaves a line of pale yellow foam on her upper lip.
“None of this will matter when mass agriculture collapses,” Rory says, trying to broker a truce. “We all have good intentions, but our efforts are futile.”
“I know, let’s get the priest in here, he can tell us what’s kosher.”
I’ve had it with Marco’s smug Grim Reaper act. “Cyrus is not a priest. And anyway, why does a man have to adjudicate? We’ve stated our position, which is that consensual sex is what we need and deserve. If you’re not into that, you can piss off.”
Destiny leans over and squeezes my hand. Her fingers are cold, so I give the back of her hand a good rub and then I say, “He may be the priest, but Jules and I are the gods. Come on, Jules, let’s get back to work.”
* * *
While Cyrus is out getting to know every faith-based system in the greater New York area, Jules and I spend all our daylight hours at Utopia. When we leave, only Rory’s lab is illuminated, and we can see him moving around in there, alone in a white coat, tending to his souped-up plants. By the time summer is over and autumn is starting to bite, I have finished coding v2 of the WAI platform.
“We have to raise money,” Jules says. I knew this was coming—we can’t live on his allowance forever, and we don’t have the money to launch—but neither of us knows how to do this, not even Jules, whose amniotic fluid was probably flecked with gold. I’ve gone as far as leafing through copies of Harvard Business Review, and subscribing to daily updates from various websites that promise to tell me how to do it, but all I can see is funding for self-driving cars, for putting stuff up in the cloud like it’s one giant safe-deposit box in the sky, and subscriptions to everything from dye-free tampons to vegan protein powder. There’s fintech, biotech, oiltech, real estate, bento boxes of skin care, and tiffin carriers of meat-free protein. There are no funds for quasi-religious platforms. We are not solving a problem, at least not one that anyone has identified as important or, crucially, an opportunity to get rich.
I ask Li Ann. She’s launched apps before, and she knows how to raise money—after all, she’s the one who got all those bigwigs to fund Utopia’s endowment in the first place. Aside from running the selection committee, she spends her time on little side projects—“The afterworld is going to need a few frills,” she tells us. Right now she’s working on something she calls Spoken, a filter that scans emails to make sure the language isn’t accidentally triggering or offensive. “Everyone can sound woke,” she says. “No matter how old they are.”
Li Ann’s office faces west, with a full bank of windows overlooking the water. She sits behind a glass-topped desk looking like Nefertiti while two young men in identical polo shirts code furiously beside her.
When I knock on her door, she looks up and waves. “Please, come in, Asha. How’s the platform?”
“Slow, but we’re making progress.”