Every morning, Destiny greets me with the latest numbers. I’ve also tasked her with the job of finding the quirkiest stories from among the many rituals the algorithm has been asked to produce. “Turtle wedding in LA,” she says. “Ouija-slash-resurrection ritual by a Catholic group who loves the book Possession, which features a séance.”
“People are weird.”
“But they want a piece of you.” Destiny folds her hands on her lap. We’re at the diner, sharing our second plate of pancakes. “It’s happened, Asha. You made it.”
I’ve decided to adopt Cyrus’s line on the launch. Yes, we made a big splash. Thousands of people are signing up every day, and WAI is taking on a life of its own. But I’m too nervous to celebrate. Or maybe I’m just superstitious, like if I say it out loud, it will disappear. “We have a long way to go.”
“Try to enjoy it,” Destiny says. “Women never get to enjoy anything.”
This feels like the right moment to ask Destiny why she’s so angry with the world. “Did something happen to you?” I ask gently.
She laughs, a dry, bitter laugh. “Isn’t it obvious? Daddy issues, abandonment—my mother was desperate for male attention, my father was absent when he was present, and then one day he was actually gone—the usual cocktail of clichés.”
We sit in silence for a moment.
“I used to be a stripper,” she says. “That’s how I got my name.”
I can’t help it—a small frown crosses my face, and before I can shake it off, Destiny has seen it. “You’re judging me.”
“No, of course not. I was just—I’m surprised.”
“It was when I first moved to New York, and it was only a few months. I’d run out of money, I didn’t know anyone.” She hangs her head. “I saw some shit, did some shit. Some shit was done to me.”
She looks out the window onto Tenth Avenue, and there is an old woman on a mobility scooter and a young woman on an electric scooter, and they glance at each other and smile at the exact same time. “I love New York,” Destiny says. “Every single person in this city is in love with this city. They might hate it, but they’re also a little bit in love. You walk down the street, and you can just tell people are self-high-fiving themselves all the time, just for being here.”
“True,” I say. “It’s one of a kind.” I don’t remember loving the city as a kid—at least not this part of it. This part was remote and inaccessible to people like me, those few stops on the train like falling through the looking glass into a world of skyscrapers and people in taxis. And now here I am, totally at ease; even, in moments, feeling like I too possess a tiny piece of it.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like.”
While she’s telling me the story—of those eleven months of dancing, the back rooms, the way the dollar bills chafed against her skin, and how she did it because she had nowhere in the world she could go—I can’t help but think of all the ways this could never have been me. My mother had told me there were always uncles and cousins around when she was growing up, and it wasn’t unusual to be touched or pinched in a way that felt wrong but was always covered up with a laugh. “I will never let anything like that happen to you and your sister,” she had said, preemptively angry at the thought of it. And when I was in college and grad school, and on all the holidays in between, weekends and Thanksgivings and spring breaks, my parents always knew where I was, they were always begging me to come home; I had never walked the streets of any place because I had nowhere to go. Destiny was telling me what an extraordinary privilege that was. She was also telling me something else, and if I listened carefully, I might have heard a little warning. But I was too busy believing we had nothing in common except that she was my friend and I wanted to make things right for her. As for me, I was protected, cocooned against such violences. No, it would never, could never, be me.
“I like to look on the bright side,” she says, brandishing her fork. “My stripper name is my superhero name now.”
Eight
THE RAISE
Cyrus won’t do any interviews. He won’t speak to the press, the networks, the bloggers, the influencers. He will only talk to the WAIs. Yes, that is what they are called. It’s pronounced “wise,” of course. We didn’t call them that, they decided to name themselves. They have uploaded photos and Medium posts and TikToks about their rituals, and some of those posts have gone moderately viral. They have printed T-shirts and hats. They have authored Instagram stories and videos and clickbait.
The press is hungry. They want to know the story behind the story—how we built the platform, how the three of us met. Mostly they want to interview Cyrus, but Cyrus refuses, so Jules does it instead. Jules is made for prime time—he’s funny, self-deprecating, yet brimming with confidence as he talks about how we’re going to turn social media on its head. The tech news loves him.
Cyrus won’t talk to the media, but he will talk to his people. So every morning, at exactly seven a.m. Eastern Standard Time, he posts a five-minute video he calls the WAICast. He is always in the same place, in front of a fixed camera that’s set up against an exposed brick wall at Utopia. He dresses in the same clothes, and his hair is pulled into a ponytail behind his head. He talks about a range of things, about the state of the world, myths, stories from archives that have been covered over with dust and ignored by history. He sometimes talks about himself. One morning he tells the story of his mother’s death, how she slipped away from him over the course of that terrible year. He is responsible for a lot of tears that day.
After starting the WAICast, the following goes from passionate to obsessive. It isn’t just that the videos rack up thousands of views or that there are letters—actual letters—in the mail every day. It is the language. Life-changing, life-altering, transformative. Saved my life. It’s as if people can’t limit their experience of him to a single moment or even a period; the experience has to encompass their entire time on the planet. This troubles me more than a little, and Cyrus, to my surprise, not at all.
* * *
Gaby and Jules are busy preparing PowerPoint presentations listing the details of the business. They call them decks. These decks make frequent use of the word “engagement.” Apparently, our engagement is off the charts, and this is the thing that indicates WAI may not be just another flash-in-the-pan business that’s going to crash as quickly as it rose. The decks include graphs and charts showing the number of hours people spend on the platform, how many times a week, a month, they return. The things people say about us. The number of times they use the word “love.” We love you, Cyrus! We love being WAIs!
Ren and I start to add features to the platform. First we create a way for people to group-message one another. They start to have conversations among themselves about the rituals we have given them. They talk about wedding dresses and baptisms and rituals to mark the day they start new jobs or fall in love for the first time. They offer suggestions—I tried walking around the fire eight times but we got a little dizzy so I would cap it at four. They riff on what we send them, make their own meaning, change the order in which the ancients did things. They iterate. They create. We are infinite, they say, our possibilities are infinite.
And they talk about Cyrus. Is Cyrus a shaman or a priest? Philosopher or prophet? Friend? Charlatan? Cult leader? Visionary?
And while, on the surface, not much has changed—we spend as little time in our apartment as we did before; our diets are just as questionable; our ability to keep plants alive as poor—in some parallel world, it seems, we are rich.