My poker face melted, and my brow furrowed for an instant as I considered his strange and unexpected emotional effusion. “Uh...I appreciate that, Mark,” I quickly replied, reestablishing my smile.
“I’m being serious,” Mark said, leaning in closer, his eyes dripping with earnestness. “I’ve spent the last two years watching you because I believe in you. I know you don’t like it. I know you think of me like a pesky glorified babysitter. But you have to understand, I don’t enjoy it either. I watch over you because I want to see you get where you’re supposed to go.”
“I’m sorry, Mark. I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said sincerely. “I guess I hadn’t considered how taxing it must be for you.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You have no idea.”
Mark’s house appeared from out of the gray nothingness, as though it had just been imagined by God. My car rolled to a stop outside of the large, black gate. Mark grinned and patted my leg reassuringly, then stepped out of the vehicle.
He turned back to the car and leaned down to the window, his earnest expression returning. “For all your genius, you really have no idea how important you are,” he said. “The whole company is depending on you.” He smiled again. “Heck, when you really think about it, the whole world is depending on you.”
3
“Drop me off at the front entrance,” I told the car as we neared my building.
“Okay. I will drop you off at the front entrance. Shall I park myself in the underground garage?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I will park myself in the underground garage.”
The door opened the moment the car came to a full stop and I stepped out immediately. I slipped my aug glasses back on.
“Goodbye, Professor.”
The door of the car closed behind me as the front door of my building opened, triggered by the location software in my aug glasses. “Where’s Kali?” I asked.
“Kali is home,” my glasses responded as the elevator door slid open to allow for my entrance before efficiently closing behind me. The light for the PH button illuminated automatically as I leaned against the chrome railing that ran along the mirrored walls of the elevator. I briefly considered my image in multiplicity, one reflection echoing infinitely and I was reminded of a Hall of Mirrors.
When the door opened to my penthouse apartment, Kali was waiting for me, her eyes bright and beautiful, though unable to hold my attention. My gaze immediately dropped—automatically, primally—to devour the tan, moisturized skin on abundant display. She was wearing a peekaboo nightie that revealed her enticing red lace bra and matching panties that barely covered her remarkable assets. She was making things difficult.
“Surprise!” she exclaimed as she threw her arms around my shoulders.
“I’m surprised,” I replied. “What’s the occasion?”
“We’re celebrating your keynote, obviously!” she announced, rolling her eyes and shaking her head as she grabbed my hand and pulled me into our shared apartment. Only a few paces to the left, she’d left an open bottle of champagne to chill in a bucket of ice and two glasses were already filled and waiting. She sat me on the barstool and deftly grasped both flutes, then handed me one and placed a warm, delicious kiss on my mouth. It was a long kiss, and there was something behind it that pulled me in like gravity—there was purpose behind it—strategy. When she finally pulled her lips away from mine, her eyes were earnest and close. She sipped the champagne, her other hand over my shoulder, gently on my back. “We’re gonna have a great night tonight, okay? Just you and me. What do you say?”
Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents screamed in my ears. This was it—I’d reached it. This was the moment when I had to give my reason precedence over my bodily urges. I can’t lie: it was not easy. Kali was as gorgeous a woman as I had ever seen in my life. Her hair was jet black, her skin brown and smooth, and her eyes adorned with flecks of jade that seemed to light up like an LED screen. However, even those attributes weren’t the most irresistible, the most desirable. Her curves—they were absolute perfection. She had a sway in her hips and breasts that only men (and the very few women who have it) understand for its intoxicating power. She made women that could have been lingerie models cry themselves to sleep in envy.
Still, there I was, trying to break it off with her...for science.
She seemed to be able to sense the conflict churning inside me, even if she had no idea how serious it was or how close she was to coming out on the losing end. The corner of her lip curled into a mischievous grin. “Oh no. There’s no way you’re gonna blow me off for work, gorgeous.” She stepped back and flicked the delicate spaghetti strap off one of her shoulders, allowing her bra to drop dangerously close to revealing a nipple.
I stood immediately, convinced that the appearance of a fully exposed breast would spell the end of my ability to put mind over matter. “Kali, no. I...can’t. We have to talk.”
“Talk is boring,” she purred. “So much more can be accomplished without words,” she teased, still smiling as she stepped closer and brushed her smooth skin against mine.
“I’m serious, Kali.”
She stepped back half a step and wrinkled her brow. “What is it?”
I stepped back myself, putting more distance between myself and her temptation. “I want to end our relationship,” I finally said, bluntly. I instantly felt relieved.
The smile on Kali’s face melted in an instant. Her eyes seemed to glaze over, tracking me one minute, the next sitting fixed and deadened. There was no disbelief, no hope, no assumption that I could possibly be joking. She simply looked...vacant.
“Kali?” I asked after several moments of silence. “Kali. I know this is hard, but you have to say something.”
She remained perfectly still and said nothing.
I sighed, turned, and sat on the barstool again. I suddenly felt the urge to escape reality, to get out of my head. I wasn’t one to drink, but I knocked back the entire glass of champagne in a few gulps. When I finished, I set the stemware back on the counter, then turned back to Kali, who hadn’t moved—not even in the slightest. A chill tickled over my skin as I watched the uncanny display; it felt as though the life had left her body, yet her corpse remained upright, eyes open, face like an emotionless mask. I slowly stood to my feet and walked toward her, my eyes fixed on hers, scanning for even the slightest movement or sign of life. “Kali?” I asked again. I was suddenly terrified. Did she just have a psychotic break right in front of my eyes? I wondered. I had no idea that she’d react that way. I continued to step slowly toward her, crouching low to try to get my face directly into her line of sight, hoping I could get her eyes to start tracking mine again, at the very least. There remained no sign of consciousness, though her chest continued to slowly expand and contract as she breathed. I waved my hand in front of her eyes.
Finally, she shook her head violently, as though waking from a bad dream. She looked at me, aghast, and then turned her head to take in the apartment, as though she’d just arrived.
Unconsciously, my eyes flashed down to take in the primal pleasure of skin that was still on display.
The gesture wasn’t lost on her, and she looked down at herself, her face suddenly contorting, as though she were repulsed and ashamed of her own body. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She hurried across the room to the coatrack and wrapped herself in the longest one, pulling it over herself and tightening the belt. When she was done, clothing herself, she looked up at me with a confused, but also ashamed expression that baffled me; I could have sworn I was in the presence of a completely different person from the woman who’d greeted me at the elevator door minutes earlier in nothing but her skivvies and a ridiculously impractical negligee.
“So...what are you talking about? What’s going on?” she asked, as though she were more interested in getting my focus off of her body than onto our breakup. I had placed something ahead of her body on my list of priorities, and coming to terms with
the realization was apparently not easy for her. It was as if she’d been rebooted right before my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Kali, but I want to end our relationship. It’s time for us to go our separate ways.”
Kali stood still, her arms crossed in front of her body as she stared at me again. This time, though, it was clear that she understood; I could see her thoughts racing behind her eyes as she considered her next move. “Can we...” she began to say before quickly abandoning the request.
I shrugged. “I’m sorry. I have to do this.”
“But why?”
“My work. My work is what makes me what I am. It’s everything to me—to everyone. My work is more important than me, than my competitors—it’s more important that even a romantic relationship. My work gives my life meaning, Kali. It justifies my existence.”
Kali’s face twitched slightly, but again she was silent. Still, slight movements of her eyes assured me she was fully engaged, still contemplating her next move. She was no longer in shock. “You can be so damn insufferable,” she said, shaking her head. “Do you ever have your own unique thoughts? Or is everything you say recited straight out of a book?”
Her words terrified me. It didn’t bother me that they were hostile or derisive. What terrified me was that she was right—but she shouldn’t have been. How in the world could she possibly know? I asked myself. I bet that she was bluffing. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Yes you do,” she responded sharply. “You’re paraphrasing Freud. And I quote, ‘No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.’ End quote.”
My lips parted but my astonishment dumbfounded me. She’d just quoted Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents verbatim. It was true that I’d paraphrased it, as it had informed much of my thinking in the previous weeks while I considered ending my relationship, but I didn’t know how she could possibly know that. She wasn’t wearing aug glasses, and even if she had been, the paraphrase was so loose that it couldn’t have triggered any plagiarism detection software. While I had a photographic memory and an IQ that rendered traditional intelligence testing useless, Kali was just a normal, slightly above average intelligence human being—or at least I’d always assumed so. “How...?” I muttered.
“You’ve really annoyed me today, you know that? Do you even care?” she said, her mouth pulled into a grimace as she ignored my query, her arms remaining folded tightly across her chest. “You’re the most difficult puzzle I’ve ever had to solve.”
“I...” I couldn’t speak. For the first time I could remember, I was completely stymied.
Kali dropped her arms and sighed, looking around the spacious, luxurious interior of our apartment, her eyes finally settling on the dark, rainy day outside. “Two years. This was the farthest I’ve made it so far. I don’t want to have to start over again.”
“Kali,” I began, my tone soft, “how did you—”
“You know how I did it,” she asserted, snapping her head around to lock her stern eyes on mine. “You may be the only one of your kind with the ability to figure it out, but you can figure it out—not that it’ll do you any good.”
For the second time, her words terrified me. Indeed, a possible explanation had occurred to me, but it seemed so outlandish that I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.
She didn’t seem interested in filling me in. Rather, she focused on herself. “Tell me what I did wrong,” she suddenly demanded, stepping toward me, her eyes earnest and determined. “Help me understand what it is you want so that this doesn’t happen again.”
I felt helpless, as if the whole world was a bucking bronco that had shaken me off. “Kali...” I began to stammer. “I don’t think that’s a worthwhile exercise—”
“I don’t care what you think. Answer the question,” she demanded, this time in a tone that, considering the context, seemed absurdly threatening.
Suddenly annoyed, I made a vain effort to regain control over the confrontation by giving her exactly what she wanted. “Fine. I’ll tell you. You take up far too much of my time. I want to devote my life fully to my inventions. The only reason I can possibly conceive of for staying would be if you offered me a truly loving and emotional respite so my time spent with you would be recuperative.”
“A respite? Really! What are you talking about?” she reacted, exasperated as she opened her coat to reveal her nightie again. “What do you think this is for?”
“That is not recuperative,” I replied. “It is exhausting. You’re a gorgeous woman, Kali, but you act like a porn star when we’re alone together. You’re a completely different person in the bedroom. You don’t even seem to know me, and you never take no for an answer.”
Kali stood, stunned. “Wow. So you’re telling me that I found the one man in the universe who complains that his woman wants to give him amazing sex.”
This time, Raymond Chandler’s wisdom emerged foremost in my mind: It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible. I dared not say it.
“Okay,” she said, when she realized I had no answer, nodding as she crossed her arms in front of her chest again. “What else?”
“You’re bizarrely controlling,” I said as I nodded toward an ugly, antique china cabinet that didn’t match any of our other furniture. “You won’t even let me touch the damn thing...in my own home!”
“It’s an antique,” she replied coolly, “and I don’t want you to damage it. Is it really that difficult to respect my wishes on something so trivial?”
“Actually, yes,” I replied, stepping toward the cabinet, my hand outstretched, reaching for the dark wood. My plan was to leave a nice, big hand print on the surface to show her that such a transgression would not cause the world to crumble to its instant end.
Little did I know.
“No!” Kali shrieked as she reached out for me, sending an invisible force toward me—a force so powerful that it took my feet out from underneath me and slammed me against the wall with enough power to turn the whole world black.
4
“WAKE UP,” Kali commanded. “I’m not through with you yet.”
I was considerably dazed, a sensation completely foreign to me; it felt as though something had reached into my skull and plunged its fingers deep into the gray matter. In the wake of such a traumatic seizure, I couldn’t be sure of what was real and what was not. What I thought certainly couldn’t be real was that Kali had grasped the back of my shirt collar and begun to drag me with one hand across our slate gray marble floor. It occurred to me that she was, quite literally and quite absurdly, mopping the floor with me. A moment later, she thrust me back onto my barstool. A moment after that, she slapped me hard across the face. After the slap, the haze was instantly gone.
“I want you to give me a detailed list of every trait you want me to have. I want to know exactly what you want me to be like,” she said, as though it were an order. “What is your perfect woman? I want to know so we can avoid this in the future.”
“How-how...how did you—”
“Oh, stop it,” Kali replied, cutting me off as she impatiently shook her head. “You already know how I did it. What you should be worried about it is making sure that I don’t do it again.”
“I-I really have no idea.” I looked at the china cabinet. Was it booby-trapped? I asked myself as a series of other questions flooded my mind. Had I been hit with some sort of a taser? Had it scrambled my brain enough to make me hallucinate the rest? These explanations were desperate attempts to put my w
orld back together, but it was a world that could never be the same again.
“The answer is so painfully obvious,” Kali replied. “You already know it. You talked about it today at your keynote.”
There was an answer that wouldn’t leave my brain, like an incorrect answer that won’t move aside and blocks your thinking as you struggle to conjure the correct answer on an exam. I kept pushing it aside. It can’t be right. It can’t.
Kali finally relaxed her shoulders, letting her threatening posture melt away. “You won’t even dare say it, will you?” She shook her head, and I almost sensed pity—almost. “You told the whole world today that you ‘live in the future.’ Don’t you remember?” She grinned slightly. “You thought you were being metaphorical—perhaps even poetic. What you didn’t realize was that you were being literal.”
“It can’t be,” I whispered.
“Oh, it can, and it is,” she replied. “The future you described today already exists—a future without disease, without money, without poverty. It’s almost indescribably beautiful. It’s where I live.” She placed her hand gently under my chin and raised my disbelieving eyes to hers. “It’s where I’d like to live with you someday.”
For the first time in my life, I couldn’t close my agape mouth. I felt frozen.
“Do tell me you understand what I’m talking about,” she said.
“I understand,” I answered flatly, “but I don’t believe it.”
She turned away, grunting in frustration. “And why not? You theorized about this exact possibility!”
I snapped my head toward her. “What?”
“Oh, did I forget to tell you?” she began, suddenly in the mood to mock me, “I have access to all of your files. I’ve read everything.”
I stood upright, rigid and furious. “Those files are private! The information is extraordinarily sensitive! If our investors found out—”
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