They rested against each other for a minute, and then she said, “What if you didn’t have to pull out?”
“You want to go on the Pill?”
“No, no—I mean, you know, what if we gave one of these little guys a chance?”
“Are you . . . do you mean that? Are you serious?”
Saina thought for a minute. “We’d make some cute babies.”
He nodded, wary. Lifted her over his lap and sat her down next to him. Patted down the skirt of her dress so that it fell correctly. Zipped up his jeans. Buckled himself into them. Draped a heavy arm around her, and said, “We’d better go—you’re going to be late.”
Leo was right, but that didn’t make it any better. By the time they’d parked closer to the red warehouse and made their way towards the crowd, the ceremony had already begun. As they got closer, the weight of Leo’s nonresponse started to grow, pulling her off-kilter, sinking the buzz she might have drawn from the waiting crowd, but also dulling her fear.
Someone Saina vaguely recognized was talking now, a woman in black-framed glasses, a fake mustache, and an asymmetrical haircut—a decade of Williamsburg trends distilled. The speaker tugged at the mustache and talked in metered verse about it being some sort of symbol of fidelity to the self, to the artist within. As she ended her allotted minute-long speech, she ripped it off and screamed, and the students all screamed with her. Internally, Saina rolled her eyes.
This wasn’t like going back to her world, exactly. It was more of a purgatory. A series of simulacrums, promises being held out to these students of the lives that could be theirs. She saw now that she was here as an emissary from one of those lives, though not quite the same one as the woman with the fake ’stache, thank god. Her name was next on the program, so Saina stepped into place in front of the mic. Saina looked out at the audience. They were backlit, too. The warehouse had been transformed into a gallery for the end of the year show and light spilled out the open doors, casting all of their faces in shadow. It was still easy to pick out the parents. Even in repose, they hovered, nervous. The students were also nervous, but in a different sort of way. They tried harder to hide it, behind giant scarves and aggressively mismatched articles of clothing. They downed their wine steadily and draped themselves over one another, facing forward and paying attention to the speakers even as they stroked and scratched and pawed one another like genderless clumps of grown-up kittens, emanating an unfocused heat.
All these graduates had somehow paid around $100,000 to Become Artists. An extravagant ticket price that some people were brave enough or stupid enough to avoid. Would it work out for any of them? Would they get to be the people that they wanted to be? Out of Saina’s class of twenty-six at Columbia, only a few were still making art in any serious way. It had only been seven years since graduation, but most of them were working as graphic designers or teachers. But maybe, for some of them, that was alright. Not everybody wanted a big life.
Behind her, someone coughed conspicuously.
Saina looked down at her cards, but everything written on them seemed blurry and useless.
Everyone in the audience looked up at her.
She looked out at them.
They kept on staring.
The depilated speaker stared, too, sympathetically.
The professors flanking the cheese table stared, less sympathetically.
Was the clock already ticking?
These poor kids who were, some of them, older than she was, but probably on the whole quite a bit poorer. Their parents were starting to look uncomfortable. This wasn’t what they had paid for. Saina wondered how many of the students recognized her. If she didn’t say a word, if she just stood up there for sixty full seconds without making a single sound, would there be reports of it on the Internet the next morning?
She remembered lifting a slat of the blind in her gallerist’s second-floor office as angry women on Twenty-sixth Street picketed her Look/Look show. That moment had felt like this.
Grayson leaving her the first time, but not the second.
Her father’s everything-is-gone phone call.
That bleak blank minute after she first entered her house in Helios.
All those moments where the bottom of the world drops away and we’re left untethered, a cosmonaut lost in oxygenless space.
Behind her, the emcee didn’t try to hide his panic. “Fifteen seconds, Saina, fifteen seconds!” he hissed.
Well. She might as well say something. “You don’t need a whole speech or a performance from me. All I’m going to tell you is that if you’re going to be artists, then you have to ask yourselves, do you rebuild the world or do you destroy it? That is the question.”