Jules agrees. “Good idea. The data will speak for itself.” He looks at me. “Everyone happy with that?”
I’m far from happy, but I don’t see that I have a choice. Gaby winks conspiratorially at me and I feel a little better.
I don’t go home for several days. I stay up all night and take naps in the sleep pods at Utopia. Ren and Destiny and I take turns playing DJ, and then the turntable breaks. We order the same thing from the diner every day, going old-school and picking it up ourselves. “Are you okay?” Cyrus asks, and I nod, tell him I’m just tired because the deadline is so tight, and he accepts that, doesn’t dig any further. I’m actually not tired, I feel rather refreshed. The sleep pods are quieter than the apartment, and I don’t have the feeling every time I go home that I should be there more often, like normal people, and keep food in my fridge. Last time I checked, there was half a bottle of sparkling water and half a lemon and half an avocado that had gone brown the week before. Cyrus and I live like wolves, but when we are at the office, it doesn’t matter; in fact, Cyrus’s desk is always spotless, and my code, I know, is uncluttered and elegant. Nothing like my bedside table, which is not a bedside table at all but a crate I once picked up on the sidewalk and on which I precariously balance a number of items, including a stash of cookies, an alarm clock, a bottle of water, birth control pills, and when it’s not under my pillow, my phone.
All this is about to change. Cyrus and I are closing on an apartment on the Lower East Side. It too contains an abundance of glass and steel and, underneath, the bones of an old building. There are two floors, multiple bathrooms, and a six-burner stove. We are going to cook meals, make our beds, and take our coffee cups to the sink. We are going to purchase furniture and flower vases. We are going to return the mugs we stole from the diner. I have visions of dinner parties, people laughing, their delighted faces reflected in our excellent choice of cutlery. And through it all, I see us, Cyrus and me, our lives entwined ever more, shrugging off the last two years and returning to the time when we had acres of things to talk about, things that weren’t related to fundraising and redesigning a website to which I have grown attached.
* * *
I can hear Mira in the baby’s room, cursing. “Oh, for the love of God, how is it possible for you to shit so much.”
She comes back, slides onto the sofa, pulls her top aside, and silences the baby. “She poops, I change her diaper, and then ten seconds later she poops again, and while I’m changing that, her pee comes out in a little arc and hits me right in the face.”
“We don’t put diapers on babies in Bangladesh,” our mother says.
Mira groans. Ammoo has been staying at her house every weekend for the last two months, making food and generally driving everyone crazy.
“Here,” Mira says, handing me the baby. “You burp her.”
I stand up and stroke Gitanjali’s back while doing a bouncy dance that just came to me the first time I held her. Her head smells so good. “I’m thinking we have heroin pods in our vaginas,” I say. “When the baby comes out, a little heroin gets sprinkled on top of their heads, and then all you want to do is sniff them instead of counting the number of times you have to wipe their butts.”
“Heroin-laced vagina! If only. My vagina feels like the Hulk stepped on it.”
“Yeah, but a baby came out of your vagina. Your vagina is magic.”
“Can you two please stop saying vagina?”
“Don’t mind me, Ma. I’m just mourning the loss of my previously perfect vagina, which is now the size of a Big Gulp.”
“I’m getting you a night nanny,” I announce.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a person who comes to your house and stays up all night so you don’t have to.”
“What kind of person?”
“Whatever kind of person you want. You get to pick them.”
Mira gives me the side-eye. “How much does it cost?”
“Don’t worry about that, it’s on me and Cyrus.”
“Like the crib, the Bugaboo, the car seat, and the baby monitor that tells you everything except when you’re going to die?”
“?‘Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.’?”
“Ammoo, please. Seriously, Asha, you have to stop paying for everything.”
“Why? Why do I have to stop paying for everything?”
“Because you’re making everyone uncomfortable.”
Gitanjali has fallen asleep in my arms. I gaze at the little face poking up out of her swaddle. She has Ahmed’s wide forehead and Mira’s and my mouth, something I am extremely proud of. Right now there is a circular rough patch on her upper lip, a milk blister that gives her a small pout. Mira has banned us from the following things: commenting on Gitanjali’s beauty, the color pink, calling her a princess, informing her there’s a thing out there called Disney, or forecasting professions that require fewer than two graduate degrees.
“Well, I’m sorry if I’ve overdone it.”
“I don’t mean to be horrible,” Mira says. “It’s just that Ahmed’s parents wanted to get her a high chair, but I overheard them saying you would probably come over and say it was toxic or ugly.”
“Why would I say that?”
She shrugs. I can see she’s fighting tears, so I walk over and hand Gitanjali back to her, and she relaxes while the baby rustles and pecks at her shoulder, a current of needs passing back and forth between them like Morse code.
* * *
The testing on Cyrus’s redesign comes back, and the results are clear. People like the old version better than the proposed new version. I turn all this data into a presentation with slides, graphics, and pie charts. Then we go back into the meeting room and deliver the results. “In our opinion,” Destiny says, “while some of the color changes are an improvement”—I told her to say that, to give something so that Cyrus could feel like he’d made it better—“the rearranging of the primary features of the site have not been considered a value add by the people we surveyed.”
“How many people?” Cyrus asks. I’ve hardly seen him this week, but now, instead of congratulating me on all my work, he’s peering at the screen like he’s left his reading glasses at home.
Destiny checks something on her computer. “Three thousand and thirty-seven,” she says.
“That’s not a good sample size,” Cyrus says.
“I guess not,” Destiny agrees. “It’s less than point one percent of our user base.”
“It’s all we could do on short notice,” I say. “They represent the demographics of the broader community.”
“Can I see the raw data?”
I was prepared for this. I take out a thick folder and hand it to him.
“These replies are not decisive,” he says, flipping through the material. “They say they prefer the old one, but they don’t say why.”
I text Jules. Do something.
“Cyrus,” Jules says, “we’ve already told the community there are going to be new features. The redesign is going to add three weeks to the timeline, and that’s if Asha and Ren and the team work around the clock.”
I wait to see how Cyrus will respond. “Couldn’t you use the same codebase? You’re doing the wireframes again anyway, right?”
“It’s not the same part of the site,” I start.
“But you are, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Then it’s probably fine.” He flips through the questionnaire again. “Yeah, I don’t buy this. See, this woman says she doesn’t like it, but she also says she doesn’t actively dislike it. I don’t even know if we asked the right questions here.” He shows Destiny.
“Right,” she says. “I mean, it’s not completely clear. I guess we were just reading between the lines.”
“I think we need to be precise in our assumptions,” Cyrus announces. He catches my eye. “Look,” he says, reverting to negotiation, “why don’t we do a little more research. Let’s create a few options, and once we’ve got a new investor, we can get the green light from the board?”
“So you want us to create entirely new designs when the old one is working fine.”
“Yes.”