Jules and I prepare the statement. Cyrus and I avoid looking straight at each other, but otherwise he’s careful to be super-nice to me, and I’m careful to be, well, normal.
He’s still wearing his wedding ring. Small mercies. I distract myself by doing a few calculations of what would happen to the platform if we suddenly got a surge of users for AfterLight.
“Jules,” Cyrus says, “can you write to the board and tell them we’ll be suspending all membership dues until this thing passes? We’re all agreed, right, that it would be wrong to benefit in any way?”
Jules and I nod. Craig won’t mind. By the time this is over, so many people are going to be hooked on AfterLight that we can more than make up the difference.
“I’m going to put some more devs behind Obit.ly,” I volunteer. “Make sure the security is extra-tight.”
“I’ll do a special WAICast,” Cyrus says.
We run through the details, then get up to go. We have to start planning, call our families. Cyrus asks to speak with me for a moment, and my breath stops in my chest. Will he fall on his knees and beg me to forgive him?
But no.
I can’t help myself, so I say, “I guess Marco called it. He said bad things were coming.”
Cyrus nods. I look at him and I realize what he wants. He wants me to tell him he’s right, that AfterLight is going to give something real and important to people in the coming months. He wants me to apologize and ask for things to go back to the way they were. Every cell in my body bellows to be reunited with Cyrus. Can I change my mind to get what I want so very badly? I ask myself what I would do if something happened to Mira. Would I want a little glimmer of her to remain?
Of course I would. But that is precisely why we shouldn’t do it. “Just because the world is ending doesn’t mean it’s no longer wrong,” I say.
Cyrus’s face softens and hardens. He is that very worst thing, an intimate who is also a stranger. My legs go all watery.
“The difference between us,” he tells me, “is that I have lost someone and you have not.”
He puts the cap back on his little pen. I am dismissed; he is the boss, after all.
* * *
I can’t tell anyone my heart is broken, because if I did, I would have to admit that Cyrus isn’t coming back. I haven’t even had the guts to tell my parents. So on the days when I wake up with puffy eyes and feel like my stomach collided with a kettlebell, I ignore it. And when I catch sight of Cyrus, when I search his face for something, some sign that he regrets leaving me as much as I regret his leaving, I tell myself it’s just habit; after all, I’ve spent my whole life in love with this man.
I veer between remorse and self-righteous anger. I was right to stand my ground. He owes me an apology, and so much more, an admission that all of this has gotten to his head and that he’s changed, and he needs to ask me whether I can live with this new person who wants to take over the world. But I also said some terrible things, things that keep going around and around in my mind. And I miss him. God, do I miss him.
I drink, but I’m still too much of a control freak to drink enough to numb myself. I borrow one of Li Ann’s marijuana sticks and spend twenty-four hours eating the entire contents of my fridge. Destiny invites me over and takes me out as much as any friend can reasonably be expected to, but nothing can fill the Cyrus-shaped hole in my life.
What Li Ann has told us is coming to pass. Within a few weeks, death ritual requests are up 22 percent on the WAI platform, and Rory has been hired by the CDC to start mapping the virus’s genetic code. The mood at the office is somber as we start making plans for people to work remotely, and even Jules is solemn as he leads the morning team meetings; there is no more singing or cheering, just a growing awareness of what’s to come.
The constant knots of people standing outside the entrance to Utopia are making Li Ann anxious. “They’re creating a viral load,” she explains. “You have to get rid of them.” But the situation is making Cyrus more of a symbol than ever. The fans carry signs. WAI IS THE WAY. FIND YOUR WAI. WE ARE THE WAI. We’ve gotten to know some of them. I wave to Rick, a tall, waifish man with silver dreadlocks; Trinity, who arrives with a different dog every week; Stephen, a bright-eyed young man who showers us with questions about Hindu scripture as we pass by. Cyrus stops and talks to everyone, especially Stephen, with whom he exchanges detailed views about Krishna, Ram, and the Bhagavad Gita; on especially cold days, he goes down and serves everyone hot chocolate in paper cups. But he is far from the humble, approachable man he seems to be. Up in his glass-walled office, he has charts and graphs showing the exponential growth of WAI. All his plans, his plotting with Craig and Marco, are coming to pass. With the help of Obit.ly and AfterLight, WAI has the potential to become the biggest social media platform in the world.
Jules tells me that Cyrus was destined to become this way, WAI or no WAI. We are on the roof of Utopia, where Rory has set up a low-watering greenhouse. There is a narrow path through the foliage, but otherwise every inch of the space is filled with his genetically modified, high-nutrient Popeye leaf. He’s got it tasting great now, sort of like kale but without the hard-core chewing requirements of kale. And it grows everywhere—all you have to do is scatter a few seeds and water it sporadically. I have some at home I haven’t managed to kill yet.
“You’re telling me he was always like this?” I ask Jules.
“Not exactly. He didn’t have millions of people telling him what a genius he was. But he was always entitled as fuck.”
“Why have you put up with him? All these years?”
“You’ve met my family, Asha.”
I have settled on a story that I can live with. I love Cyrus, but we are no longer together because I turned him into a terrible person. I didn’t do it alone, but it has happened, and it has happened because of me and because of WAI. Cyrus, my sweet, mellow, not-priest has turned into a shallow, narcissistic man-child. This way I can blame Cyrus (for becoming a terrible person) while taking some responsibility (for making it super-easy for him to become a terrible person).
Many times I try to trace back to the moment when Cyrus morphed into his current form. Was it when people started camping outside our offices? Was it when multiple “Cyrus Is the Messiah” fan sites popped up online, something that caused Jules and me and Destiny to laugh and Cyrus to scroll for hours, reading what people were saying about him?
Right now Cyrus is in Washington, DC, giving a TED Talk entitled “Death: A Manual.” There are currently several hundred thousand people all over the world waiting for him to tell them how to die. After the TED Talk there will be interviews, and after the interviews someone will transcribe the talk, and then there will probably be a book.
“How’s the warning system?” Jules asks.
“For WAI or for the world?”
“The world is fucked anyway.”
Jules is asking about the risk register that Ren and I have devised. It aggregates all the rituals produced by the platform and gives us a sense of where things are at, how heated up the community is. Elections usually raise the risk profile, as do major environmental disasters, like cyclones or the hurricane that caused one of the Hudson Yards buildings to close down last year. And this new thing, which is about to be declared a pandemic. “I would say we’re somewhere on the orange to dark orange spectrum.”
“How many death ritual groups are there?”
I check the latest stats on my phone. “Twenty-three thousand.”
“Any particularly weird ones?”
“They’re all weird. I mean, take your pick. The Cremation Club. The Ship Burial Society. There’s one guy who keeps asking questions about sati.”
“What is that?”
“It’s when a woman is burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.”