“Want to microdose?” Craig asks, removing a small vial from his pocket. I shake my head, but Cyrus doesn’t, so Craig passes him the vial and Cyrus casually tips the contents into his mouth. Cyrus and I have never done drugs and never really talked about doing drugs, and I wonder if there was a time before he met me when things like Molly were regularly on the menu.
Within a few minutes we’ve lost Craig’s interest, and he has disappeared into the crowd. “Let’s wander,” Cyrus says, taking my hand. The house is shaped in a giant U, and in the middle of the U is a swimming pool. More cuddle puddlers are in the pool, their bodies bobbing gently in the water.
Again I tell Cyrus I want to go home. Cyrus suggests we take one more round of the house and then leave. I am offered another drink; this time I accept it and down it quickly. Cyrus strikes up a conversation with a man who introduces himself as Quinn and tells us he’s been a member of WAI since the first month it launched. “When my wife had a late miscarriage,” Quinn says, “your site was the only thing that helped us. No one knows what to do with a tiny body.” Cyrus is unruffled by the abruptly personal account; he’s used to people telling him things, secrets they’d never reveal to anyone else. And I know he’s taking mental notes which he will dispense later. What are we doing to protect people who lose pregnancies? And who was it again, ah, that’s right, Saint Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of fertility. Must make a note of that for later. And saints in general. Have we taken a close enough look at saints? The two of them wander off together, Cyrus’s hand on the man’s back.
A woman emerges from the pool. Her body is long and entirely unaffected by the laws of gravity. I stare and stare as she towels off. She gets a drink from the pool bar and sits down beside me. She’s just as improbable up close. “I’m Eleanor,” she says. “You’re wondering where I came from, aren’t you?” She pauses, smiling. “You were thinking escort agency.”
“I totally wasn’t,” I lie, trying not to rest my gaze on her breasts, or her ass, or any other part of her that she has neglected to cover up but probably should have. “Why, do you get that a lot?”
“I didn’t mean to sound defensive—it’s a bit of a fishbowl in here.”
“So what are you?”
“An associate at Pemberton.”
“The Pemberton?”
“The very one.”
“God gave you brains too?”
“It’s not fair, I know.”
“What about all the other women?”
She looks around. Points to a couple with their arms entwined. “She’s a partner at Believe Capital. That one over there is a corporate lawyer, and my friend Adrienne—in the swimming pool with the bald guy—just raised seven million in Series A funding.”
“You guys do this a lot?”
“My third time. I’ve gone to other things, similar vibe. I find the small talk at receptions painful. At least we all know why we’re here.”
“Why are we here?”
“To put our shoulders to the wheel of the patriarchy.”
“But seriously. Why? Did someone tell you you had to come?”
“It’s not that obvious,” she says. “They just invite you, and if you don’t come, it’s like everyone else is in on a joke and you’re left out. Then the next time, you hear them whispering around the coffee bar, and maybe they give you one more shot. And see if you show up.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“But we’re disrupting everything,” she says with an exaggerated laugh. “Surely we can disrupt the mono-normative sexual rules we inherited from the Victorians?”
I nod. “Totally. Tech is here to set us free from all that.” Eleanor’s drink is finished. She glides away, and I’m left thinking I probably imagined her.
Someone taps my shoulder. It’s Cyrus. “Hey, I’ve been looking for you.”
“Oh, hello.” My voice quivers.
Cyrus kneels down beside me. “I’m really, really sorry,” he says.
I start to cry. “Whatever.”
“We shouldn’t have come. I will talk to Craig, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I was… I was curious.”
“Curiosity killed the Cyrus,” I say, sniffing.
He cups my cheek, brushes my tears away. “Look, we have three options here. We can go upstairs, find an empty room, and have sex like everyone else. Or we can keep watching to see if there’s anything else on the agenda, like maybe a movie or a late-night buffet. Or we can go home.”
“But the cuddle puddle is strictly non-penetrative,” I say.
“There are other things we could do.”
“Do you wish you had more sex before you married me?”
“No.”
“How much sex have you had?” I ask, wondering why we have never had this conversation.
“I would say a medium amount.”
“Me too,” I offer, even though he hasn’t asked. “Medium to small. Although I guess it’s all relative. What do you mean by medium? Under ten or under a hundred?”
“Under ten,” he says.
I’m relieved. We link arms, pick our way back through the house, passing another bar, a vinyl library, a man stirring a giant vat of paella, a circle of people chanting om, and finally, through the double doors in front. Our cab is here; we get in and fall asleep on opposite corners of the backseat in the hour it takes to return to our hotel.
Thirteen
BFFS
On the surface, Marco is a normal person. He can make eye contact and have perfectly ordinary conversations about things that other people might be interested in, say, the weather, or how lovely it is that we have our own nondairy mixologist called Mylkist at the cafeteria now. But a few sentences in—and I check this multiple times to make sure I’m not just being judgmental—Marco will always steer the conversation in such a way that he ends up telling a story about someone, or something, or all of humanity, dying. At times the transition is so subtle that you wouldn’t even notice it, but occasionally, it’s obvious that while he’s commenting on your shoes, he’s really thinking death/apocalypse/end times thoughts. Let’s say the conversation starts like this in the stairwell:
“Hey, Asha, how’s it going?”
“Going great, how’re you?”
“I was just heading to the seminar on work-hobby balance.”
“Work-hobby?”
“Yeah, you know, if you love something enough, it doesn’t even feel like work, so you call it a hobby, but really, it’s taking all your time and you’re totally obsessed.”
“I know what that’s like. Anyway, see you around—”
“The thing is, we talk about people working themselves to death, but we never say ‘He hobbied himself to death.’ Still, there must be a lot of people who do that.”
“Oh, okay.”
“My uncle Gennaro had this thing for gardening, I mean, he just loved all kinds of exotic plants, and so he set up a business selling seeds online.”
“And did he? Work himself to—? I’m sorry.”
“No, heart attack. But everyone said he worked too hard. I think he hobbied too hard.”
Or this:
“If a pandemic wiped out ten percent of the world’s population, as a society, would we become inured to the loss of our loved ones? Would we just care about them less?”
Or this:
“I’m setting up a probabilities algorithm for all the ways humans are going to get wiped out, and I think climate change is definitely winning. Closely followed by antibiotic resistance.”
Cyrus does not see a problem because Cyrus and Marco have become instant best friends.
They’re together all the time, eating lunch at the café, hanging out on the rooftop among Rory’s Popeye plants, booking out the meeting rooms so they can close the door and hatch secret plans. Gaby and Jules are tasked with getting under the hood of Obit.ly’s financials. Ren and I look at the tech. Since Marco is always around, it’s difficult to get Cyrus on his own. He gives off a kind of hummingbird vibe, flapping wildly while appearing to stand perfectly still.
* * *
I try to warn Cyrus. “I think Marco is unstable.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He can’t stop talking about the end of the world.”