“But why?”
“Because one of them might be better.”
He is right. One of them might, indeed, be better. We won’t know unless we try. Cyrus wants to try everything. In the same way that he wants to meet the three people on the planet who have written PhD theses on the Japanese goddess Ame-no-Uzume, and then he wants to go to Japan and have the original texts recited to him while someone simultaneously translates them into his ear, and then he wants to learn a few characters so he can check his own interpretation against the translations, Cyrus wants to know absolutely everything. The more he knows, the more he believes he can know. He is constantly entering new data into the algorithm and teaching it new ways to think, new connections between seemingly disparate threads. This is how he approaches everything these days, with a maniacal need to try every available option before making a single decision. And that leaves the rest of us—well, it leaves the rest of us in what we have started to call the Cyrus wake, the dizzying, turbulent, stirred-up waters that follow wherever he goes.
Twelve
THE CUDDLE PUDDLE
Cyrus and I go to Sicily. We eat a lot of ice cream and we have a lot of sex without a care in the world because I had an IUD put in after spending one terrible night with Gitanjali. We rent a car and visit a necropolis, graves carved into limestone hills, where Cyrus tells me about the Mycenaeans, and at a Greek amphitheater on the edge of the sea we reenact the final scene in Antigone. Cyrus plays Antigone and I play her brother’s corpse. By the pool at our hotel, we hold hands and doze side by side. Away from the office, the loud static of New York, in sweet, unhurried moments, Cyrus is warm, familiar, and mine again. We have long, unfocused conversations about important and totally not important things, and we play multiple rounds of Old Before My Time.
“I don’t understand Keanu Reeves,” Cyrus confesses.
I gasp. “That’s not being old before your time, that’s not having a heart.”
“I’m being honest. Don’t judge.”
“I suppose there are people who don’t understand you.”
“Me?” he says with a shudder. “No way. That is impossible.”
“Only really terrible people who do terrible things.”
“True. There are some really awful people out there.”
“I don’t understand dick pics.”
“Hm, yes.”
“I mean, at any given moment in time, there must be hundreds of thousands of dick pics flying around the world, and why? It seems to me the demand is not really that high. A penis out of context is not a beautiful thing.”
“You really think there are people who don’t get me?”
Cyrus receives equal amounts of fan mail and hate mail. Some months the fan mail outweighs the hate mail, but other months, like this one, the hate is especially thick. Last Monday, he received a letter from a man whose daughter had decided to read a passage from The Handmaid’s Tale at her bat mitzvah, and on Tuesday a woman had written to say she had singed her eyebrows while attempting to cremate her novel-in-progress with the hope that it might be reborn into something she could actually get published.
Jules and I almost never share these letters with Cyrus; once, after receiving a message from a lapsed Catholic who was now trying to rewind two decades of atheism, the last year of which was on account of WAI, Cyrus spent several days corresponding with his friend Father Douglas so that he could find a scripturally appropriate response to the lapsed Catholic, and then he invited this man to meet Father Douglas, who agreed to rebaptize him and formally absolve him for twenty years of denying the existence of God.
Since we don’t share the hate mail, Cyrus has reason to believe there isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t think he’s totally amazing.
We also have a new game called Should I Go to This?
Cyrus reads an email from Eve listing out his invitations. “Founders First Forum?”
“Where is it?”
“Vegas.”
“Are you serious? No.”
“You’re right. How about a month at Bellagio to work on my memoir?”
“You’re writing a memoir?”
“Started it last week.”
“I’d miss you.”
“You’re right. No. How about Davos, should I go to Davos?”
“Sure,” I say. “Rub shoulders with your people.”
He texts Eve with the results of our survey, and the holiday ends with twenty minutes of hot Mediterranean making out, a late checkout, and one last, perfect scoop of lemon gelato.
* * *
When we return to New York, Eve has moved us into the new apartment. Our sad little clothes, which are dry-cleaned and hanging in the walk-in closet, have come with us. But our furniture, our dishes, our pots with scratched bottoms, our disgusting excuse for a rug, our dead plants, all have been discarded. In their place, there are things in sets. A dining set, which is an oval table framed by six very upright chairs. A sofa set, which is an L-shaped sofa with a matching armchair. There are clusters of things that look good together, like bookshelves and curtains and potted plants. Color schemes. Ideas. Everything is easy on the eye, and when it isn’t, like the jagged, angry abstract painting in the hallway, it is meant to be there, like a sprinkle of salt on a slab of chocolate. Cyrus and I bounce on the bed, sprawl out on the sofa, press buttons on the remote control and find that it opens and closes the blinds and not the television, hunt around for the television remote and find that it responds to voice requests, and then, about an hour later, after pressing buttons on the coffeemaker and the ice maker and the lighting and the sound system, we unpack our suitcases, shower, and head to the office.
At Utopia, the first thing I have to do is congratulate Destiny on her funding from Manishala and graciously accept her resignation.
“I’ll be right downstairs,” she says. “Like literally two floors away.”
“Do you still have the inflatable doll?”
“Von? Hell, yeah. I just need a bike pump to bring that baby back to life.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Hire two engineers, beta-launch in November. See what happens. Why, you need a job?”
“Would you hire me?”
“In a heartbeat. In the meantime, don’t worry, I’ll be sure to find a replacement before I go.”
Li Ann bounds up to us. “I have something for you,” she whispers, taking what appears to be a pillbox out of her handbag.
I tell her I can’t do drugs. “It would interfere with my genius.”
“Shut up, no one does drugs anymore.” She opens the box, and inside there is a tiny pink hair clip. “Meet Flitter,” she says.
“It’s a vibrator, isn’t it,” Destiny says.
“We are going to need a lot of orgasms in the afterworld.” Li Ann lifts it out of the box and holds it up for us to see. “You just clip it to your clitoris.” She presses on the sides and it opens its tiny mouth.
I tell her it looks painful.
“It’s a hundred percent not painful.”
“I can’t believe you made a sex toy,” Destiny says.
“It’s not a toy. It’s a handbag essential.”
“You’re going to carry it around in your handbag?”
“As far as I can see, there are three distinct use cases for this product. Number one, you have sex with your partner, and he comes and you don’t. What are you going to do? Run an entire bath just so you can hump your showerhead? No, you just clip Flitter on and lie there, and boom. You can rest peacefully beside him instead of tossing and turning because his tongue got tired.”
“I hate men,” Destiny says.
“Use case number two. You have a stressful meeting at work. Your colleagues are repeatedly ignoring you and backslapping each other. ‘Excuse me,’ you say, and you run to the bathroom, get your Flitter out, and while they’re congratulating each other on the size of their dicks, you can have a totally silent orgasm.”
“You want me to come in the office bathroom?”
“It is called Utopia.” Destiny laughs.
“You don’t think the guys are jerking off constantly at work?” Li Ann says.