Binx liked to point out that Eloise, scholar of the psychology of pleasure, had a problem being on the receiving end of it. It wasn’t just that she struggled to enjoy having her feet massaged by an underpaid woman from Cambodia. At the other end of the scale, it had taken a long time for Eloise to be able to experience unalloyed sexual pleasure, even with Binx – that is, pleasure that was untainted by guilt or shame or a pressing need to reciprocate.
The only version of sensuality Eloise had been able to truly enjoy before she met Binx had been abhyanga, which involved anointing herself from her temples down to her toes with warm oil while she meditated: self-massage, essentially, where she was both giver and receiver. That made it sound sordid, like masturbation, but it wasn’t like that. Or not always.
Binx sometimes resorted to reciting the Voltaire quotation Eloise had used as the epigraph to her first book, Seeking Pleasure, while they were in bed. ‘Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.’ And, over time, it had begun to be effective. She heard those words from Binx and melted. It was human to seek pleasure. It was her duty to seek it out. She would never stop loving Binx for having found a way to help Eloise experience in her own body something she had spent years examining as a psychological construct, a neurological phenomenon.
Would Elly+ have the same problem experiencing pleasure? If she was hardwired to be like Eloise, then maybe she would – once Binx had found a way to act on her grandiose plans to create a full artificial brain for her, complete with a medial forebrain pleasure circuit.
Since even the most embodied pleasures are in fact triggered by the brain, Elly+ wouldn’t even need a proper body in order to feel certain forms of pleasure. Yet that made Eloise feel sorry for her. As did the fact that Elly+ would have no spouse, unless one day she could find her match in another fembot. It was cruel, really, to create Elly+ knowing that she would never have a mate. She should talk to Binx about that. Maybe this one-sidedness of Binx’s creation was what bothered her – perhaps if Binx could be convinced to create an avatar of herself, too, then somehow Eloise might feel better about the whole thing.
Eloise wished she could take a quick hit of Liquid Trust. She had described in her book her adventures in administering this oxytocin nasal spray to volunteers in the lab, to increase their levels of trust in – and enjoyment of – other people during social interactions, and also to improve their ability to infer what other people were feeling (‘theory of mind’, as the jargon went).
What she had failed to mention in her book was that she and Binx had become mildly addicted to the stuff a couple years before. And this was before vaping became a thing; no doubt Liquid Trust now sold its own mint-flavored pods, to be inhaled directly into the lungs.
Eloise contemplated looking it up on her phone, but she knew too much about pleasure’s evil twin, addiction, to go down that path. The in-joke in Eloise’s field was that it took a masochist to study hedonics, and there was some truth in it. People like her, who had the ability to deny themselves pleasure – or who took pleasure in denial – were equal parts fascinated and appalled by true hedonists and pleasure addicts.
The woman sitting at her feet was using a pumice stone to buff Eloise’s heels. It sent tingling sensations up her legs. Eloise closed her eyes to try to enjoy the feeling.
She was relieved the morning’s PBK keynote was over. It was the sort of invitation that was impossible to refuse – to be the orator at a meeting of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the country, addressing the Harvard alumni who had, due to their top grades, been elected to the society at the end of their college careers.
But it had been tough for her to gear up for the occasion after a busy teaching semester and too many publicity gigs for her latest book. Standing at the podium in Sanders Theatre, she had felt her throat constricting. For a minute she hadn’t been able to get a word out, feeling the eyes of all those super-intelligent people on her, including – in the front row – Rowan, whose expression had been embittered. His jaw had dropped when Eloise had said, walking with him from Kirkland to Sanders, that she was feeling nervous about her speech. He’d had no idea she was to be the orator; he hadn’t had time to look at the program.
She’d started her address by sharing her experience of doing a fire walk at a Ned Noya retreat out west, in the Amargosa Desert. It was a risk: the PBK crowd wasn’t really the type to be fans of Noya and his ‘face your fears’ brand of motivational speaking. But she led with the fact that neither was she. At least, not until she’d accepted his personal invitation to come to an exclusive VIP seminar, in the last days of 2016.
She’d cherrypicked certain parts of the experience to share with the audience rather than telling the whole truth. For example, she hadn’t mentioned that Jules had been there too – that, in fact, it was only thanks to Jules she’d been invited. Her first book had made her famous in the motivational speaking and wellbeing community, but nothing near Jules-level famous. Jules had been skeptical too; she’d said there was no way she was going if Eloise didn’t come with her.
They’d been picked up in a limousine from the airport in Vegas, for the drive out past Beatty, to a ghost town called Rhyolite. A gold-mining town abandoned in another century, in recent years it had become home to a community of artists. They had moved into the dilapidated buildings along Golden Street that had housed the bank, train station and post office before the town went bust, transforming them into eccentric homes.
The desert scrub around the town, where the fire walk would take place, had been declared an open-air museum. There were dozens of rock figures in the landscape, sculpted to look as if they had sheets hanging over their heads and shoulders, like ghosts about to go a-haunting.
The indemnity paperwork they’d had to sign before arriving had included a list of potential threats to their safety, including scorpions, deadly gas trapped in old mines, and the possibility of cyanide poisoning if you drank the local water. While the sun was still high, all that had seemed funny to her and Jules – what could possibly go wrong in such a carnivalesque setting? They’d settled into the guesthouse to which they’d been assigned and freshened up, waiting for nightfall, which was when the group was to assemble.
As the sun got lower in the sky, Eloise had looked again at the ghosts on the desert horizon, and then they had seemed threatening. Their facelessness bothered her. The fading light made them seem to be creeping closer and closer every time she looked. After fasting all day, as they’d been instructed to do by Noya, she did not trust her senses anymore.
Once it was dark, she and Jules sat with a group of celebrities and luminaries – some of whom Eloise recognized – around a camp fire in the desert. Noya preached to them. That was the best word for it: he delivered a sermon, and though Eloise could not afterward remember much detail, she could still recall, even now, in her chair at the nail salon, how she’d felt listening to him. She had expected him to be phony in person, or to give off grubby corporate vibes, but he was the most genuinely charismatic person she’d ever encountered. A colleague of hers wrote about benevolently charismatic leadership as being ‘absolute presence’ combined with ‘total compassion’. After meeting Noya, Eloise understood exactly what she meant.
At some stage, Noya had told them about an encounter on his travels with a tribe in the Amazon that was fascinated by ice. Before heading into the rainforest he’d put some cubes in a flask, and this tribe had gathered around him to watch the cubes melt in his hands, singing songs of wonder.
Then Noya had handed out ice cubes to everyone around the camp fire, and asked each person to hold a cube in their hands, to treasure it – to watch it melt. This was a ridiculous thing to do, but the fasting, the preaching and the desert sky at night had worked their magic. The ice cubes had blown Eloise’s mind.
A few hours later, at midnight, Eloise had walked slowly across a bed of red-hot coals laid out on the sand and felt no pain. When she had squeezed Noya’s hands, as
he stood waiting to welcome each fire walker at the end of their journey, she had felt positively mighty.
Then she’d turned to watch Jules walking across the coals. Jules had made an important decision on that fire walk, just as Eloise had, but they had never spoken about it afterward, on Noya’s instruction. He believed that personal affirmations – of the kind they had been encouraged to make that night, committing themselves to following whatever path had been illuminated for them – should never be shared with anybody else.
For Eloise, the life-changing decision had been to agree to Binx’s proposal that she begin work on Elly+.
What did it mean that she now regretted that decision, she wondered. Had the fire walk sent her down the wrong path?
In her keynote address, Eloise had followed the opening anecdote about the fire walk with some material on how moods are contagious; that in her own research she had shown that – like a virus – feelings of happiness and joy spread from person to person, so that instead of six degrees of separation you can create six degrees of happiness around you.
She’d spoken about the need for more benevolently charismatic world leaders, like Obama and Mandela and Jacinda Ardern, to counter the insecure strongmen who abused their influence by poisoning their followers’ moods and minds (there had been no need to mention President Reese by name). America needed a new leader who could use his or her absolute presence for the greater good, bringing people together and spreading – sowing – positive emotion among them, rather than discord.
The real gamble – or gimmick, critics like Rowan would no doubt say – had come at the end of her talk. It had been a logistical nightmare, but she’d arranged for ice cubes in cups to be handed out to everybody sitting in the polished wooden rows of Sanders Theatre. She had asked the audience members to watch the ice melt and make a personal affirmation of the kind that Noya encouraged: something that would help to jump start a national contagion of happiness.
There had been shuffling and whispering while the ice was handed out, and Eloise had wondered if she’d made a big mistake. But gradually the room, with its cavernous ceiling, had gone quiet, and she became aware of what it sounded like to watch ice melt in community, among two hundred other living, breathing humans.
Eloise opened her eyes. The woman at her feet had finished painting her toenails the coral color Eloise had earlier selected and was now slipping Eloise’s sandals carefully back on to her feet, buckling them at her ankles. It was time to move over to the manicure table.
She waved at Jules and Mariam, who had chosen to get shellac and were still side by side in their armchairs, their feet beneath UV lamps.
Eloise settled at the table and avoided making eye contact with the woman working on her fingernails. On the TV screen above her, real housewives in some city or another were misbehaving in bikinis, eating sushi off one another’s fake breasts. Eventually there was a newsbreak, but it was no less crude or surreal – the president’s wife’s boobs bursting out of her dress as she teetered on heels down the Champs-Élysées, a few steps behind her husband, like an obedient geisha.
‘The president is in Paris . . .’ the announcer on the screen was saying.
Eloise did not like thinking of that odious man in the city of love. Without Paris, without Aurélie, she might never have found her way to Binx. It was amazing how just one word – Paris – could summon up so much for Eloise. It was why she didn’t believe that people should or could be trained to live in the moment, as so many wellness coaches urged these days. The beauty of the human mind was that it could range between past, present and future; the real and the imagined; nightmare and daydream. In her first book, she had tried to encourage people to value the way their minds wove together a fabric of self from threads cut from so many disparate places. Like any tapestry, the richness came from the variety of the source materials.
Paris. Using her bad French to flirt with Aurélie, making her laugh by saying she had the body of an abeille, a bee, cinched in at the waist and curving all the way out. The long evening meals, the cigarettes on patios. The ache of her brain at the end of a day spent muddling through in a second language. The sign on Aurélie’s front door: Chien allergique aux uniformes, though she didn’t even own a dog. The to-do list she had once found in Aurélie’s bag, which translated as: Buy toothpaste. Train ticket refund. Make love to Eloise.
They had never checked off the last item on the list, though, because Eloise had not been ready to have a physical relationship with a woman. Years later, when Binx had kissed her – so outrageously! – during office hours, she had been ready. She had written to Aurélie that same day, to apologize for leaving Paris without saying goodbye. And to tell her about Binx. Aurélie had never written back, which Eloise understood. Who wants to hear from a person who rejected you that someone else has been the beneficiary of your groundwork?
Eloise felt with her tongue for the wisdom tooth that pushed its way through her gum when she was stressed. She thought of it as a soothsayer – a toothsayer. It only emerged, like the tip of an enamel iceberg, whenever she was stalling on making a difficult decision. In part, that was why she’d never had it removed, though as a tenured professor her top-shelf health insurance would pay for it.
The television was now showing Frederick Reese leaving his imposing DC residence early that morning, ‘to travel to Boston to attend his fifteenth Harvard College reunion,’ the reporter said. ‘There have been rumors that he has recently proposed to his girlfriend, Svetlana Rushailo. She is the daughter of the Russian billionaire Andrei Rushailo, who fled Russia to settle in the UK a decade ago, after a falling-out with President Popov, once his close associate.’
On the screen was a blurry shot of Fred with Svetlana, whose hair was the exact same shade of red as Eloise’s. She glanced across the salon toward her friends, but they weren’t watching.
Being married to Frederick Reese would be like being trapped in one of Dante’s concentric circles of hell, she thought. For her PhD thesis, she’d written about Inferno, the first part of his epic poem. Each circle of hell was a catalog of unhappiness: instruction, in other words, on how not to live.
In which circle, exactly, did Fred Reese belong?
The seventh circle wasn’t right for him, or not yet anyway. That was the one reserved for those who’ve committed acts of terrible violence against their neighbors, like Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun, who boiled in blood for eternity as punishment. Perhaps that would be the one his father would end up in, if he ever made good on his threats to initiate nuclear Armageddon.
No, for Fred Reese perhaps the fourth circle was best: punishment for greed. Or the fifth, for those consumed in life by wrath and condemned to rage against one another forever in the stinky waters of the Styx. Or the eighth, where those who were fraudulent and corrupt are forced to run endlessly in circular ditches, whipped by horned demons.
The souls of most of the people in Reese’s administration, as well as the Republican members of Congress who had refused to call the president to account for his transgressions, would one day be among the anguished Uncommitted, naked and chased by swarms of wasps. Dante hears them screaming as he first passes through the gate of Hell; these are the souls of people who were opportunists in life, never taking a stand, serving the powerful, thinking only of their own advancement.
And the punishment for the sowers of discord was that their bodies would be ripped apart over and over, just as they had ripped apart nations, civil societies, a whole planet. That, she decided, was what should one day be carved into the Reese family crypt: Here lie the sowers of discord.
But what would Dante think of Eloise? Was she doing enough to resist the president’s tyranny? Was she Uncommitted?
She wondered whether Fred had shared with his fiancée anything of his brief history with Eloise. It was highly doubtful. After all, it had been such a smallish episode.
For a few months, in their sophomore year, Fred Reese had become infatuated with
Eloise.
It had started when she fainted outside the exam hall after staying up all night, studying for midterms, and Fred Reese happened to be the one who caught her in his arms before she hit the floor. For a few weeks afterward, she’d played hard to get, ignoring his emails, not replying to the messages he left on the answering machine. She found nothing about him attractive, though she knew that conventionally he was good-looking. She hadn’t been able to explain it at the time, but she’d had the impression that if she pushed him with her finger he would fall over, as if made of cardboard.
But then, feeling down about herself one evening, she’d given in and called him back. They had met for dinner at one of the restaurants in the Square. They hadn’t had much to talk about, and she should have cut her losses and gone home. Instead she went back to his dorm room and – for no good reason at all – they had sex. He’d been soft but pretended to be hard, and she’d had to go along with the charade, as he’d crammed and folded his limp dick into her, which had reminded her of the sensation of stuffing soft silicon plugs into her ears on long plane flights.
Eventually he’d gotten the job done, but then they’d discovered the condom had slipped off. He’d freaked out when she told him she’d stopped taking the pill that semester (she hadn’t told him it was because she thought it had made her put on weight). They’d gone together to Student Health Services to get the morning-after pill, but he hadn’t said a word to her while they waited in the brightly lit hospital corridor in the middle of the night.
Out on the empty street, he’d watched her like a hawk as she swallowed the first bitter-tasting blue pill – distrustful she’d go through with it, as if suspecting she wanted to get pregnant. At that point, she’d started verbally abusing him – it had been a long night. He’d said nothing in reply except to offer to walk her home. She had used a few choice words to make it clear she wanted nothing else from him, ever.
She felt a bit queasy. It had not dawned on her until right then that previously the closest she’d come to having a kid was that night with Frederick Reese.
Life After Truth Page 15