“Are you okay?” Jules asks, as if I am having thoughts of immolating myself. He tears off a piece of a Popeye plant and rubs it between his fingers. “It’s been over a month—I thought you guys would be back together by now.”
“Yeah, I guess I thought so too.” I don’t say more. Things between Jules and me haven’t been the same since that fateful board meeting. And it takes all the strength in my bones not to ask him where Cyrus is and where Cyrus sleeps.
Someday I know I’m going to ask myself what happened. How I put all my chips on this particular bet and allowed my life to be subsumed by WAI. And I will tell myself this: because it was the purest form of togetherness. Me and Cyrus, waking up every morning with the same purpose, walking through those doors together, dreaming the same dreams, working for the same thing—that was my joy. All the aloneness I ever felt, every dark sad thing I had inherited, disappeared in its bright light. And once I had done it, once I had fit together with Cyrus and put my thinking and my mathematics and my body’s wants all in one place, its power was so great that it was impossible to imagine taking apart even one small piece of it.
So when a piece broke off, the whole came crashing down.
I had always been ambivalent about how much I wanted to keep the work me and the me me apart. I wanted everyone to know Cyrus was my husband, but I also wanted them to recognize me and my brain-bending genius. I wanted to be a coder and I wanted to be his wife and I wanted to be his partner, but I also wanted to rule just the way he did, without a thought, without effort, as if I had been born to it.
For a while, it worked. We made something magnificent. We disrupted the very thing that was seemingly fixed—the way people handled the most intimate moments of their lives. We gave them something they didn’t even know they wanted, and once we’d given it to them, nothing was ever the same again.
We were revolutionaries. We were radicals. We had upended the order of things.
When people asked me and Cyrus and Jules about our friendship (had it survived the business, or had we changed, like a band who couldn’t stay together after four consecutive triple-platinum hits?), Cyrus made much of how close we all were. “We’re like a family,” he would say.
Except Cyrus and I were family. We had stood up in front of that woman in the pantsuit and we had said things. And try as we might, we found it impossible to keep our family together when the rest of it shattered. It was all just too connected.
“You know I love you,” Jules says.
“I know. You just love him more.”
Jules doesn’t reply to that. “It’s okay, I don’t mind,” I tell him, even though I do. Jules has no family; Cyrus is it, and that was always going to matter more than anything else.
Then he says, “Gaby and I are getting married.”
I hug him and then I burst into tears. “That’s amazing. No, don’t do that—don’t look sorry. It’s great. Marriage is great. Maybe just don’t start a business together.” My sobbing turns to laughter.
“I’m really happy,” he says. “Even though the world is ending, I’m really fucking happy.”
We link arms and dance among the Popeye plants.
* * *
When he gets back from Washington, Cyrus suggests that maybe he should come over and get a few things from the apartment. I feel a knife going into my heart. Why does he need his stuff? Is he going to wear that blue suit to dinner with some other person? Is he going to read aloud from his paperback of Ulysses, the one with the taped-together spine, to someone else? I don’t ask him what it means and he doesn’t tell me.
He arranges to come over on a Saturday afternoon, and I make plans to see an osteopath and to have lunch with Destiny at her place in Long Island City. I want to be in a totally different borough. “What if he lives in Queens now?” Destiny says when I call to ask if I can drop by. Then she says, “I don’t think he lives in Queens. He probably lives in a Zendo downtown.”
On the subway I notice a woman wearing a mask. It’s fogging up her glasses, but she keeps it on the whole way to Long Island City. I try not to touch anything while also trying not to obsess about Marco and how fucking smug this is making him.
Before I ring Destiny’s doorbell, I practice a cheerful but not too fake smile.
“How was Cheryl?” she asks, handing me a small cup.
“She cracked my back like it was a Rice Krispie treat,” I say. I take a sip. It’s warm sake. She settles me on the sofa, puts the carafe of sake by my elbow, and starts to make lunch.
Right now, as Destiny tosses a salad, Cyrus is opening and closing the doors to his side of the closet and putting his sneakers in a box and looking for a notebook he thinks might be in the sideboard. I’m putting kale and pine nuts in my mouth, and with every chew, there is less of Cyrus in the apartment, less of Cyrus in my life, less of his smell, less of his loose change and his socks stuffed between the sofa cushions, less of his voice on the other side of the bathroom door, asking when I’ll be done even though there are two other bathrooms in the apartment.
There is an East River between us now, and it’s possible that soon we won’t even be married. Marco has informed us that Wuhan is under lockdown and that it’s only a matter of time before the virus strikes New York. I realize I’ve never really believed in the apocalypse. It was a distant possibility, one that we might even avoid if people like me used our brains enough. I thought that’s why we were here, at Utopia, why we had doctors and climate scientists and AI and tech. And I certainly didn’t imagine I would have to face it without Cyrus. I had assumed that Cyrus would be beside me to answer the big questions. Mine was the realm of ones and zeros, not the space of the unknowable—that was all his, and without his sure, calm voice, I am adrift. I’m just like everyone else: my imagination fails me.
“Do you want to sleep over?” Destiny asks. Her apartment is high up on the twenty-third floor. It looks east, not toward Manhattan but away from it. It’s what she wanted. The sun on her face and the city at her back. She and Ren found it around the same time Cyrus and I bought the loft. They moved in together as friends, and somewhere along the way, I think, they’ve become more than that. They don’t say and I never ask; I just assume it’s the way she wants it, a kind of accidental blurring of roles. Nothing dramatic. No sacred rituals.
I’m tipsy now and full of raw greens, so I think about taking the guest room for the night. I could put off returning to the loft and finding empty corners and realizing there were things that were Cyrus’s that I assumed were mine. Gaps in the bookshelf. Little absences that will hurt even though I’ve made a huge effort to numb myself to a lot of things related to Cyrus.
Queens is out in front of me, industrial, squat, squares of green where someone has thought to put a park. I wonder if I too can turn my back on the city, on WAI. But I know I can’t. Jules and I have talked about it. I know he’s been approached by headhunters, that Gaby has encouraged him to leave WAI and branch out on his own. But we are bound together, and to Cyrus, by the thing we have created together. The truth is, I wouldn’t know what or who we would be without it.
I decide to go home after all. Destiny takes the elevator down with me. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.
Tomorrow is Sunday. “Why? What are we doing?”
“It’s pizza-bagel appreciation day. I’ll bring the bagels.”
“Okay.” I give her a grateful hug, even though Li Ann has told us to stop hugging.