Irina turns a laugh into a snort. “Thanks.”
Sober now, Maya says, “Seriously, what I am for you is your friendly little helper who’s always there on the other end of the line. I play the clown when you need it, and cheer you up when I can. I’m also the one who helps you monetize your intelligence, which is prodigious, and, as you well know, a bit more than human, but hard for the uninitiated to appreciate, much less value properly. No one else is as good at talking to AIs, which means no one else really gets how good you are at talking to AIs, unless I buttonhole them and spend fifteen minutes praising you to the skies, which I assure you, my dear, is my god-damn stock in trade.”
“Thanks again.”
“Come on, what else are you going to do? Live in a garret and write a novel about your hurty little feelings?”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. Proust’s madeleines have got nothing on me. It’s madeleines all the way down.” She had tried to write, once. It had been almost eerie, every sentence she wrote eliciting thousands of parallels from everything she’d ever read, as though they were just a continuation of conversations between old books for which her presence was barely welcome, or even necessary.
“I get that! The rush-of-memory thing. Cute. Anyway, stick with me and you’ll be in a much better class of garret. And speaking of, well, money, it’s that Mayo Clinic time of year again. After the Water and Power gig, you should have enough saved up for this year’s longevity treatment. You want me to book you?”
“Do you ever suppose we should just grow old gracefully?”
“Totally. We should also get fat, have some brats and watch a lot of TV. Maybe wear sweatpants when we leave the house to go shopping. Add a cat-ear hat and you’ve really got a look.”
“Please book me.”
Typing sounds. “Done.”
“Always a pleasure, Maya.”
“Hang in there, I. Let me know about that hooker. Or hookers. Don’t be shy, now.”
“Goodbye, Maya,” she says, and ends the call.
While she was talking, Philip sent another text—they have a reservation at Fant?me, in SOMA, but not for hours, which makes the afternoon a long stretch of dead time. She could probably go hang around his offices but it would be pitiful to be seen to have nothing to do. Tempting to nap there in the back of the cab, like it’s a tiny hotel room, endlessly in motion; she’d run up a bill, but the cost would be minute compared to what she’s getting from Water and Power, and compared to the cost of the Mayo would scarcely count as loose change.
She remembers her last visit to the Mayo, now ten months past, the long road to the clinic weaving through the green shadows of the wooded plain. Expensively unobtrusive, the clinic, like a boutique hotel in the prairie style. The staff’s fathomless politeness and oddly uniform beauty was chilling, somehow, and she never set eyes on another patron, as they call them, supposes they’re paying for discretion as much as longer life (and how they pay, and exponentially more as they get older). But however flocculent the towels, however luminous the marble of the tubs, the fulcrum of the trip is the succession of injections that preface the narcotized haze and the febrile days in bed hallucinating mandalas on the whitewashed walls as the tailored retroviruses knit up her frayed DNA, overwriting all the past year’s errors and erosion. When she’d packed her bags with shaky hands a girl of the most vivid youth and vitality took her arm and guided her, still nodding, out into the daylight and down the manicured gravel path to the waiting town car and as she helped Irina maneuver her inert limbs into the air-conditioned dark the girl said, “Go in good health, and we hope to see you next year!” the same thing they said every year, and even in her fog Irina sifted her tone for irony, as the only choices are to come back or to decay, and to miss even a single year is to pass the point of no return.
She remembers the TV blaring in the first class Alitalia lounge in London Heathrow—willowy blond Keri Kendrick, last year’s cinema darling, faced an unseen interviewer, pale blue eyes widening with passionate sincerity as she said, “It was a deeply spiritual decision. For me, life is a succession of seasons, and right now it’s the season of motherhood. I finally realized that I don’t need the Mayo to be happy, and I don’t care if my decision is quote-unquote ‘terrible and irrevocable.’” Put another way, she could no longer open a movie and her alcoholic husband-slash-manager had squandered most of her wealth. That’s me, Irina thinks, the first time I have a bad year, and the cab and its pointless motion start to feel like a prison and a metaphor for the vanity of her life. She thinks of all the flights leaving SFO, and how she’s now constrained to linger.
Rain starts pattering on the roof of the cab. She’s lost track of where they are but knows the favelas are nearby, as though she can feel their penumbra.
A girl hurries by wearing a man’s long dark coat with the sleeves rolled up; it looks like it’s expensive, or once was—she probably got it from the ebays or a thrift store. She has a frayed ammo bag for a purse, and there are dark rings under her eyes, though she can’t be more than twenty, like she’s hungover but too young to mind it, and somehow Irina knows that though the girl lives in the favelas she is not of them, a daughter of the upper middle class out having an adventure, and she thinks of her own youth—still there, perfectly preserved—and of her months in Singapore, her own brief withdrawal from living cities and the world.
The girl disappears into the crowd, and now it’s raining harder. “You wouldn’t believe it, sweetie,” she says, “but I used to be punk,” then worries the cab will interpret this as new instructions. She checks the time on her phone, though she knows she has hours, and then, indulgently, lets her months in Singapore rise up in her memory.
At the time, the experience had seemed to be one of singular importance; now she preserves the memory, in all its vastness, out of a careful respect for her past selves. Straining a little, she can hold all that summer in her mind at once, as a sort of porous, four-dimensional solid, she and her friends streaks of color twining among the ponderous hypervolumes of the buildings, the sinuous masses of the changing tides. But this isn’t how a person should see the world, she reminds herself, and lets the days of that summer play over her in sequence.