Cyrus and I have maintained an Anglo-Bengali wall. At Utopia, I’m all about work, algorithms, funding, and building the platform. Every night, on the train ride home, through St. Albans, Lynbrook, and Baldwin, I dissect the day, remembering the lines of code I’ve written, the bug fixes, the tense conversations with Jules about money, and when I get to Merrick, I get on my bike and relive my childhood by speeding down Hewlett Avenue and turning in to my parents’ driveway, and by the time I take the side door to the basement and jump into bed with Cyrus, we are all about the other things, books we are reading, the terrible state of the world, and sex, daily, necessary, like an insulin injection to maintain all of what is good and alive.
Still, minor irritations pop up. It bothers me that Cyrus is not more troubled by the fact that we live with my parents or that I had to get my dad to underwrite our credit extension. I want to say something to him, but it makes it harder that he doesn’t have parents.
It has snowed—an early first snow—then rained, then snowed more, and my sister and I are clearing the driveway. As usual, she blurts out what I’ve been thinking. “He should at least help around the house more,” she complains, attacking the hard surface of the snow with the end of her shovel.
“I don’t want to make him feel like he’s not pulling his weight,” I say, defensive whenever the issue comes up. It’s been a week since the speed-dating event.
“But he isn’t,” she counters. “Why am I over here when I could be shoveling my own damn driveway?”
“You know Ammoo hates it when he hangs around the kitchen asking if he can help.”
She shakes her head. “Not super-psyched about freezing my ass off right now.”
I want to confront Mira about the real reason she’s in such a crap mood, but I know it’s because she isn’t pregnant yet. It’s been over a year, and though she never talks about it, I can tell it’s slowly breaking her heart. And she’s right, of course, about Cyrus. I say I can’t talk to him because he might be sensitive about the whole parents thing, but really it’s because I’m too much of a coward to tell him to get his act together. I’m worried he’s going to tell me that I’m the one who got us into this whole thing in the first place, and that if I don’t like it, we should possibly just go back to Cambridge and forget it ever happened.
I know I can’t do that. Despite everything, I’m thrilled by our life. I love Utopia, Destiny with her inflatable doll, Rory and his electrocuted vegetables, and the way it feels like at any moment our lives might be completely upended. I don’t miss the hush of the lab, I don’t miss the projections and the hypotheticals and the distant, untouchable future. This world is real even in its unrealness, perched on the edge of the city as if nudging something great, and that great thing could be us.
* * *
A month later, Destiny is up to three donuts a day. Her business cards have not turned up any real leads, and neither have the two hundred emails she has sent to seed investors, angels, VC funds, and other people known to drop money on ideas. She’s conspicuously reading every article and blog post available on raising funds as a woman, and proclaiming how the odds are against her.
“Only two percent of all VC money goes to female-founded companies, did you know that?” she bellows. I do know that, because she told me yesterday.
She is full of ideas to redress the imbalance. “Let’s scan all the correspondence we get from VCs through the Spoken filter,” she proposes to Li Ann. We are in the cafeteria trying Rory’s new vegan dish, faux fish pie. It’s weird, but also hard to stop eating. “That way we can get a snapshot of the problem.”
“What do you mean?” Li Ann says.
“You know, we just scan it for sexism, and then we do a whole exposé on how impossible it is to get funding if you’re a female founder. The New York Times will love it.”
“Oh, I’m not doing Spoken anymore,” Li Ann tells us, taking a delicate bite. “Is it me, or is this like baby food laced with heroin?”
Destiny puts her hand on her heart. “Why? It was such a good idea.”
“With all the data privacy issues, we’re not going to get anyone to buy a filter to read their emails.”
“And tell them what assholes they are,” Destiny says.
Li Ann nods, surprisingly upbeat. “I’m using the code to build something else, but in the meantime… ready?… cigarettes for asthmatics!”
“That was not how I thought you were going to end that sentence,” Destiny says.
“I’m serious. You guys gave me the idea when you said you wished they would bring smoking back. I’ve been asthmatic my whole life, and I’ve always wanted to smoke. People like doing things with their mouths.”
I tell her I can’t disagree with that.
“That was the whole point of actual cigarettes,” Li Ann says.
“But there was the small matter of cancer.”
“Exactly! But they were cool. I mean, everyone agrees they were cool, right?”
Li Ann is passing around a small metal case. When I open it, I see thin oblongs in various metallic shades. Like very expensive lipstick. I pick one up. It is satisfyingly heavy. “This is vaping, right?”
“No,” she says. She takes it from me and presses on the end, and when I inhale, the scent of rosemary fills my nostrils. It’s like my mouth is getting an expensive spa treatment. “Vitamin smoke,” she says. “And it comes with a microdose of pure oxygen—great for asthmatics. There are going to be way more asthmatics in the afterworld.”
Destiny nods. “True.”
“It’s got all the good stuff—vitamins C and D, a bit of collagen, some vaporized A, antioxidants—you can customize it. It’s called Breathe Life.”
“Breathe Life?”
She does a toothpaste-commercial smile and says, “Do something great with your mouth!”
Li Ann sounds crazy, but in a year we’re probably all going to have those things sticking out of our mouths.
“Rory’s doing all the testing in the lab, and we’re sourcing some great ingredients, you know, oils from the best organic farms.”
“Great!” Destiny cheers, putting her thumbs up. We polish off our faux fish and make our way upstairs.
“Well, I’ve officially forgiven her for being way hotter than me,” I say.
“Some people have it all. Every time she has a new idea, she gets to do the prototyping for free. Imagine knowing you could build anything you wanted.”
“I would put a hipster café on every street east of Bayside,” I say.
“Suburbs getting you down?”
“I had to get on my bike this morning and stand outside Starbucks till it opened. Starbucks in a strip mall. That’s what turns you on in Merrick.”
* * *
We have no leads either, despite Jules exhausting his admittedly not very long list of contacts from his Sellyourshit.com days. I have taken to borrowing money from my parents, which makes me feel like I’m permanently wearing an itchy sweater. And we haven’t been able to hire anyone, not even the person who is going to design the platform.
Then Jules walks into Utopia one day with the chinless investor. He brings him over to our desks, and I frantically try to hide the evidence of my four p.m. french fry habit. “Frank wanted to meet again,” Jules announces.
It takes me a second or two to wipe the grease from my fingertips. “Nice to see you,” I say, wondering if he can sense that I’ve been sticking virtual pins in him.
“I have to say, folks, I’m intrigued.”
“Intrigued is good,” Jules says. “We can intrigue you more.”
Frank pulls up a chair. “How do you see this thing working?”
Jules gestures toward me. “Asha’s the expert.”
I talk him through the basics of the algorithm. He asks a few not totally idiotic questions. “This is pretty impressive,” he says. “Do you have a business plan? And who’s on the leadership team?”
I tell him it’s just us.
“We’re going to build it out, of course,” Jules says. “We think a team of about twenty pre-launch, and then depending on engagement, we can grow proportionally.”
I nod as if we’ve had many meetings about team size.
“Have you thought about roles?”
“We’re all co-founders,” Jules says.
“One of you has to be CEO.”
“We assumed it would be Asha,” Jules tells him, although, again, we have never talked about it.
“Or Jules.” I shrug.