“Look me in the eyes,” I say to Jules, “and tell me you’re sure.” We both know that if we can get Cyrus to agree, there’s no turning back. Jules doesn’t hesitate. He stares right back at me and says yes. Like me, he has no idea what’s going to happen if Cyrus takes charge, but that’s what I love about Jules—he always wants to plow forward into the unknown. We argue briefly about who should be the one to convince Cyrus, and after I lose three straight rounds of rock/paper/scissors, the task falls to me.
Against the wisdom of the No Touch twins, we shake hands.
* * *
At home, Cyrus is reading the Talmud, a leather-bound copy that lies open on his lap. “Whatcha doing?”
“I’ve been thinking about Auntie Lavinia’s neighbor,” he says. “A person who has left his community, tried to adopt another.”
“He’s between worlds?”
“Being in between is one of the best things about being alive,” he says. “It makes us yearn. It makes us uncomfortable, and that is the most human thing possible. But death—death requires certainty.”
“Purgatory?”
“I did consider Dante, but the whole point of laying someone to rest is that he goes somewhere, even if we don’t know exactly where that is. That’s the only knowable thing about it.” He closes the book, reaches for me. I feel that lurch in my stomach every time I’m near him. It’s been over a year, and I sometimes wonder when this particular feeling will fade—it has to, I’ve read too many novels to imagine it won’t—but right now I’m still in the swell of it, strange noises escaping my lips as he pulls at my sweater, all the time wondering what I would do if this feeling were ever taken away from me, if he stopped wanting me, if I stopped wanting him, if we turned into ordinary people who got tired of each other or simply decided to love each other in ordinary ways.
Later, we are lying on the floor among the books Cyrus has checked out from the library. I get up to fill my water bottle and decide this is the moment. “Jules and I were wondering if you would come to Utopia tomorrow. There’s something we need to ask you.”
“I think I know what it is,” Cyrus says. His cheeks are flushed and his forehead is shiny with sweat. It’s always warm in here; even when my parents are hot, they’re worried they’ll get cold, so the thermostat is set permanently to 85 degrees. Also: the carpets are too thick. It’s like walking on a trampoline. My irritation at being here, in my childhood home with its overly plush carpets and tropical air, is mounting by the day.
“You need to lead the party, Cy.”
A beat. “I thought we agreed I was only going to be the Researcher.”
“We thought that might work. But it doesn’t. You need to run things.”
“It’s just—it’s not what I imagined for myself.”
He leans against the bedframe and his hair flops over his forehead. His eyes are guarded.
“I know you don’t want to do it. But Jules and I think you’d be great. Even the weird VC guy could tell it should be you, just from looking across the room.”
“It was the martini, wasn’t it?”
I laugh. “It was you. You and WAI just belong together.”
He sighs. “I don’t know.”
“What did you think you were going to grow up to be, Cyrus?” I’ve never asked him that. I guess my life has been so straightforward—there was no question I was going to make something of myself. It’s the brown person’s code: achieve something; make it matter that your parents left their home and everything they loved on your account. I had never imagined it any other way. But Cyrus and I were from different worlds.
Did I regret Cyrus’s whiteness? Truth be told, sometimes I did. If Cyrus was Bengali, I wouldn’t have to explain why chewing on the end of a drumstick was perhaps the best part of a meal, or why there were outside clothes and inside clothes and in-between clothes that you wore when you got home but weren’t ready for bed. I wouldn’t have to explain all the complicated rules about where you can and can’t put your feet, and that he could maybe kiss me in front of my parents but not on the mouth and certainly never with tongue.
But what I found infinitely worse was trying to gauge whether a man had just the right amount of brown in him. He had to know about drumsticks and shoes and not hate himself, but he also couldn’t be too in love with his mother or imagine that I would change more diapers than him or ever, ever be charmed by the thought of me in a hijab. He had to be three parts Tagore, one part Drake, one part e e cummings, and that’s not even getting into whether I got a rise from smelling his face. So no, I didn’t want to ponder Cyrus’s whiteness, I just wanted to enjoy his scent and his perfectly sized dick and the fact that, of all the people I had ever met in my whole life, he felt the most like home.
Except he isn’t feeling so much like home now. “My mom and I talked about starting a school where we just read to the students all day.”
I sit down between Cyrus and a copy of Don Quixote and curl my fist around a tuft of powder-blue carpet. My irritation shifts to Cyrus’s mother. Why didn’t she teach her son the basic life lesson of having dreams that were life-size instead of random and impossible?
“Um-hm. Tell me more,” I say. He talks for a few minutes about the things they would read at this school. Proust. The Bhagavad Gita. Ulysses. Toni Morrison. Maybe, as he tells it, the story—his own fantasy about what he might someday do—sounds as remote to him as it does to me. We sit for a moment in silence; as he weighs the image he’s held on to with the future I am proposing. After a long time he starts leafing through Don Quixote, and then he reads, “?‘Having thus lost his understanding, he unluckily tumbled upon the oddest fantasy that ever entered into a madman’s brain; for now he thought it convenient and necessary, as well as for the increase of his own honor, as the service of the public, to turn knight errant.’?”
Convenient and necessary. I’ll take that.
“Don’t worry, Cyrus,” I say. “You’ll still be you. Just with a new title.”
* * *
The next day, as I’m getting ready, I see Cyrus out in the driveway, shoveling snow in a purposeful, steady rhythm, and I know he’s going to take his place at the head of the table. I’m excited—thrilled, really—and at the same time, I have a small inkling of what’s to come—I can almost see him flexing his muscles through the thick lining of his jacket, the way his mouth is firmly set—and despite what I said to him last night, I know that everything is about to change.
* * *
Cyrus takes the train with me and wanders around Utopia as if he’s meeting everyone for the first time. He spends an hour in Rory’s lab, picking apart the vegetables and getting a lecture on various forms of seaweed. He tests Li Ann’s oxygen sticks and gets lessons from Destiny on how to draw an anatomically correct vulva. He is delighted by all the new things, learning everyone’s first names, making little inside jokes with them about their pets or their weird eating habits. “So you’re allergic to anything that grows underground except carrots. But you just hate the taste of carrots?” Once he’s been suitably entertained, Jules and I run through the details of the pitch. Cyrus nods and nods. “Okay,” he says finally, “I got it. I’m ready.”
“The speed-dating thing is tomorrow. Should we do a run-through together?”
Cyrus is holding open a large notebook. He starts to draw with a Sharpie. “Nope,” he says.
“You don’t want to practice?”
“It’ll be better if it’s fresh,” he says. He draws a series of concentric circles. The Sharpie makes a squeaking sound on the paper. I look at Jules. Jules shrugs.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Cyrus says, not looking up from his notebook. “I’m going to go in there alone, and you two can wait at the bar across the street. And when I come back, we are going to have an investor.”
I can’t decide if that would delight me or annoy the shit out of me. “Jules and I have been working twenty-four/seven, and it’s really not that easy.”
He stops drawing and looks at both of us. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I don’t mean to make light of all the things you’ve already tried. That’s why I’m so confident—the pitch is amazing, the platform is great, I just have to sell it. I was hesitant at first, but then I realized I just have to talk about it in a slightly different way.”
“You’re the golden goose,” I say.
“The champion prizefighter,” Jules nods.