I really don’t want to think about that. “Gross.”
“Men have orgasms all the time. That’s why they walk around looking like they own everything.”
“They do own everything.”
“What’s the third use case?”
“Thanksgiving.”
I’m starting to feel queasy. “That is just wrong.”
“If your family is anything like mine, you need a little something to get through the holidays.”
“So you’re telling me you would just have an orgasm in front of everyone.”
“If you can keep a straight face, yes. Because Flitter is totally noiseless. It doesn’t even really vibrate. It uses centrifugal force to tug on your—”
“Okay, that’s it,” Destiny says. She plucks the box from Li Ann’s hand and strides toward the Disabled toilet. Li Ann and I talk about other things, trying not to look at our watches to see how long it will take for Destiny to return. After approximately seven minutes, she reappears. “I’ll be keeping this,” she says, putting the little case in her pocket.
Li Ann squeals. “I told you! I told you!”
And with that, one of our many problems is solved.
* * *
“We won’t need to replace Destiny,” Cyrus says. “I’m going to run marketing.” He turns to Eve. “Eve will help. She’ll schedule everything and I’ll make the decisions.”
Everyone agrees Cyrus has an excellent eye for marketing. Those changes he made to the platform—the redesign—have proved successful. Our user base is going up, and our surveys have come back positive. Cyrus starts drawing and writing copy and booking digital ad campaigns. People start to wonder if there’s anything he can’t do.
There are two hundred and forty-four employees on our payroll. We have hired programmers and designers and creators of apps, and also, historians and anthropologists and graduates from seminaries and madrassas and astronomers and psychologists and futurists. Jules knows everyone by name—he prides himself on walking past the rows of desks and calling out individualized hellos to Lydia, James, Sachin, Brian, Murtaza, Sophie, Selina, Richard—and he has promised not to stop until we get to three hundred. He takes everyone out to baseball games and throws parties on boats floating in the Hudson and keeps employees feeling like they work more for the sheer fun of it than for the paycheck. Cyrus still does his WAICast, but the production values have gone up significantly, and instead of standing against a bare brick wall, he has a purpose-built VR studio so that people with headsets can be right there in the room with him. The whole thing lasts about an hour, so Cyrus has to get to the office by six a.m.
I enjoy being alone in the apartment in the mornings. Sometimes I take a long bath, and other times I just pad around and allow myself to be surprised by the very white walls or the very tall windows. I marvel at the kitchen, how effectively it gleams. Boiling water out of a tap. Ice cubes on demand. Cyrus has his own study/meditation room, which is immaculate and smells like patchouli. I think of that room as the Old Cyrus room, the tatami mats, the calligraphy on the walls, framed photographs of his mother. I have a room to myself too, an office that looks like a meth lab. We talk a lot about inviting people over, but we never do; we are always working.
My mother told me a story once about the first time her parents had an indoor bathroom installed in their house. Before that they used an outhouse built against the back boundary wall outside, and before that they lived in one third of her grandparents’ ancestral home and shared a toilet with her cousin’s family, and before that, before my mother was born, people like her grew up in villages where the women walked out into the fields early in the morning and didn’t piss again until after sundown.
For this reason, my mother hates camping. Not because of the tents or the inconvenience of cooking outdoors but because of having to pee in the woods. Plumbing is one of her life’s great pleasures, and therefore, because we inherit these things, it is also one of mine. I take that bath every morning and listen to the splashy sounds of my limbs arranging themselves in the warm, soapy water, and I try to enjoy it while also reminding myself of the vast distance between the me I might have been and the me I have become. Am I me? I ask myself. Yes, you’re still you.
In the midst of it all, Cyrus conducts a funeral for Auntie Lavinia’s neighbor Jed, the lapsed Jew who wanted to convert to Hinduism. His long battle with cancer finally lost, Jed’s final wish was to find a way to honor his split faith, as he liked to call it.
The service takes place at the cremation chapel in West Babylon. Jed has no surviving relations; his wife died ten years before, and they’d never had children. It is just me, Cyrus, Auntie Lavinia, and a handful of Jed’s former colleagues and students from the Rabbinical College of Long Island.
Cyrus stands up against the cheap plywood paneling. “Jed often told me his right side was Jewish and his left side was Hindu, but his whole self was a Nets fan—on that matter he had no ambivalence at all.”
We laugh softly.
“What does it mean,” he says, “to devote one’s entire life to a faith only to discover, at the end, that this faith does not sit solidly in the body, that it has shifted like the sands on a seashore?
“Those of you who remember him from his student days know that when Jed was in rabbinical college, he was fascinated by the Urtext—the uniform text that some believe preceded all the known versions of the Hebrew Bible. Although the text is now thought not to exist, Jed carried the idea of this mythical first testament with him. Perhaps this is why he was drawn to the earliest Hindu scriptures, the Vedas. These texts, recited over centuries, written down three thousand years ago, are so unlikely they seem almost fabled. It was through the lens of the Urtext that Jed interpreted the earliest Hindu scriptures, almost as if what the biblical scholars were looking for was right there all along, if they only knew to look beyond their own traditions. I read to you now from Jed’s favorite passage in the Rigveda:
‘Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
He only knows, or perhaps He does not know.’?”
Cyrus speaks in his lowest, softest voice, a voice that seems to contain everything that can be known and so many of the things that cannot, until we are all dabbing at the corners of our eyes.
“Did you know Jed?” I ask him later.
“He sometimes texted me in the middle of the night. He had trouble sleeping because of the chemo.”
I had no idea. I still can’t quite get my head around the sheer number of people Cyrus cares about. Cyrus is a circuit board, lines of connection stretching far beyond what I can see. There are the people he knows or has met in real life, like Jed or Mrs. Butterfield, and then there are the others, the millions who are having relationships with Cyrus through the platform, asking him questions about how they should live their lives, receiving small coded versions of him on their phones every day. I have done this. I have expanded Cyrus’s reach to encompass everyone, and people everywhere are now getting a little piece of him, and he is expanding, like a cloud, covering the whole world. In the meantime, he is also my husband. And he is also my boss. How have I managed to make it all so complicated, and how have I managed to put myself on the margins of this story? There is no way to answer that, at least not without questioning the very bones of our life, and so I don’t, I just let Cyrus’s presence wash through me, and that, as ever, is enough.
* * *