“And what is your stance on leashes?”
She dolloped food, handed him a plate. From the other room, he could hear someone who thought his career into perpetuity was the first priority of public service. Jeremy held the plate with both hands. “We can’t get a puppy. So-So and Jill would not consent.”
“So we must have a baby for old cats’ sake,” she said, and she was smiling.
They went to the living room and turned off the television. He wanted them to love someone together, not the compromised love of children to parents but parents to a child. Their love would expand into time, a child persisting when they were gone. She would have in a jewel box the ring that Jeremy had given Alexandra the day they made promises into infinity. He looked at her lips now, careful on the fork, closing. Out loud, the logic he gave was the spices they were eating had come from around the world, the recipe had survived history, so what would be so crazy about a child?
“You don’t even like family,” she said, and he could not determine if the tone was joking. “You barely speak with yours.”
“I like family. I don’t like my family,” he said. “Yet.”
Chapter 5
Not yet, Shel had decided. Not in person. But he taught Alexandra a way to speak that was supposed to remain hidden, encrypted technology, and she was sure that what he told her of himself meant something, or that he did. And when she thought of what would happen if he was too preoccupied to notice an oncoming car or overdosed, if he raged too openly to the wrong person, it comforted her to think of her brother the way he described himself at a time she didn’t know him.
The narrative she thought of most was how he came to computers. He’d won an old Apple II in a poker game, and he hadn’t then known how to use it. But one night, he brought a girl home from a party. “I used to love that,” the girl said, drowsily running her hand over the monitor. “The turtle graphics.”
And so, he watched her type, how the keystrokes made a circle of white stars appear as though drawn with a thick white marker on the screen, graffiti produced by buttons. The material was only the stuff of regular traffic signs and candy wrappers, letters made mobile and reshaped, ordered in rows across a screen. But he had never seen such small gestures transform anything. Taps. Strokes. “Show me slower,” he had said.
The girl did not carry into his life after that evening, but sometimes when he was home and there was no one in the night, there was something mesmerizing about that wreath of stars. He’d light up and watch the stellar run forming a zero. Already then the computer had been surpassed, but it still had seemed like the future when the loop lit on the screen, and he had wanted to describe more perfect circles.
They shared that, Alexandra thought, refulgence fat in her chest. They were people who wanted to transform.
Chapter 6
To become a family, their hands filled blanks. There were the numbers that identified them and the numbers in their accounts, names and dates and copies of documents, the requirements for which were meant to weed out unfit people. As she leaned over the counter, her pen rapid, Jeremy poured a sleeve of chocolate biscuits onto a plate and something fizzy in a glass. That they were applying for a child imbued actions with the future; one day, he would prepare a snack for his daughter like this, he believed, the motion in his mind now straddling time.
Alexandra was a natural at applying. Lists came from her hands. She gave recitations of rules, organizations. And because their credentials for the future were the most presentable parts of their lives, she reminisced pragmatically. She made calls. You knew us when.
Scant was the need, he was sure, to worry about his past. There was a network of references pointing to a life in the open. Stamps, passports, degrees. The institutions believed in language. There was a good deal of faith in testimonial. Words would be delivered on behalf of them by Genevieve and Alexandra’s coworkers and Robert. And to Jeremy, their home clarified with every stratum of narration, time reorganized to reveal imminent roles, as though they were inevitable. He could believe that the lousy luck of Ireland could be held off, that some skin had grown over the liquid spread of history, containing it in the past.
He returned to the living room and touched Alexandra’s hair. He watched her mouth, soft on a cookie, and her hand, small and tense with precision. There were freckles only on one cheek, inexplicable as love.
Chapter 7
In her work, she could distill the senses therapists worried about, clean pathos, make it useful. Something that wasn’t an emotion, a directed stream, charged through her body and, blinkered, she saw only what must be done. It was a reliable need. She must convince.
Post-celebrity was the word she used when she walked into meetings. She had a handheld controller, and when she pressed a button an X appeared over stars endorsing sports drinks. She talked about the hunger of real people for real people. In better-looking people, consumers could see themselves. She said, dirt under the fingernails. She said, everyone has a story.
They are telling them.
It is time for ads to imitate life.
She shone Cathexis profiles through a projector. Look at the success of just-like-us, models in their frumpy PJs. There is a pleasure to seeing images of myself—but. As though recognized by the screen.
We are post-critic, take back the ratings, consumer-driven relevance come in thumbs north and south.
What does your neighbor have?
We call this democracy.
Let’s look at the Oscars. Based on a true story. Memoirs. This spike is personal essays. We see unfavorables on the media.
But in blogs we trust.
The woman who slept with her biological father. Those metrics nearly took down the server.
Who are you? is the only question. They are saying, I am here. My voice matters.
We are seeing unfavorables on “the system.”
They are airing laundry. Having a lifestyle is a lifestyle. They are skeptical of what isn’t ironic.
Who are you to tell me?
We have an ethos. Unfiltered stories. These markets are amenable to narrative. They are desirous of life.
They are afraid of being tricked, but they are more afraid of missing out. We are seeing the possibilities of bottomless stories.
Chekhov said the gun hung over the mantle must go off.
And of course, she thought, standing in that loveless office room, their daughter would come, and then she and Jeremy would be comprehensively a happy story. Her daughter would not feel that family in her life always tended to fall away into silence and disappearance. She would not worry that she could not persuade into being intimacy that persisted. They would give the girl beautiful picture books and bears, nighttime tuck-ins and advice, and their daughter would always know she belonged.
Chapter 8
Because he no longer belonged to an organization, in the long, empty days he accumulated notebooks full of hearsay, collected situations. Lyle had a sense of time spreading out, looked for how whispered hunches became history. There were index cards limning city councilmen, things he heard in bars, on buses. Rumors jotted. On the wall, a city map stabbed with colored pushpins marked unsolved crimes, meeting places. He knew his precincts, seedy bars. He memorized the names of people too successful to be innocent.
Still, fists of crumpled paper accumulated by the waste bin. There were leads gone nowhere, notes that never added up. Words went uncorroborated. Situations didn’t become stories. The sweep of big ideas furnished him with hope, but he couldn’t make the granules build an arc. He abided rejection, exhausted more index cards. A headache formed from the construction below, a new bar being drilled and hammered where once was a pawn shop. He pushed at his temples, couldn’t think.
Except of course, without the constraints of a workday, he was thinking quite a bit. He was thinking of things he hadn’t had time to think of for some time. He thought, for
example, of Ingrid, how when he’d met her over the dollar bin at the thrift store, her eyes were angry, which he had taken to mean intelligent. They had gone to a filthy place around the corner where half the jukebox songs wouldn’t play. They’d discovered they worried about child labor. They worried about the strife in countries other people forgot about. They knew other people forgot about everything that mattered. Death was new then to her, or rather to her father, and on her behalf he was angry that the insurance company had denied exactly who needed treatment, her father, the coverage he needed to live. As she kissed him, the Polaroid around her neck had hit his chest. Even through closed eyes, he could sense the white flash of light like how people described near-death.
“Cheese,” he’d said.
And she had said, “Or love.”
When, later, she’d asked for the annulment, she’d said that the marriage was an accident of grief, and he did not say that it wasn’t to him. He’d said he was, at least, good for something. Good riddance.
But there were other worries now.
And so, on his phone, Lyle looked at pictures of family and ex-girlfriends, former colleagues and people he’d met once at prestigious parties. To thumb through beautiful acquaintances on Cathexis, to see the sheer regularity of them, made him angry enough not to break down, sink.
Alexandra Chen, he noticed, stayed light in posts. He thought of how women like her were never disappointed. Success came to them like oxygen.
He could see it in the sheer volume of validation visible on her profile.
Chapter 9
A red dot was someone approving of some limb of her life on Cathexis, but Alexandra did not answer her phone. She was searching so this time she would not fail him.
Once, she’d predilected secrets. The way they protected you from yourself, your own shame. Or sometimes just the contained thrill that carried through the day, all that tabloid inside. But now there was diagnosis. There was typing Shel’s symptoms. There was checking results. There was seeing the overlap, the match, and there was seeing the names explode out into more websites, dissenting opinions. She moved through variations of the body. She was, for her brother, finding an illness with a cure.
Stress or depression was always the least dangerous. Or the most. She wanted to differentiate in language, zip up a disease, because if a formless wrong broad as time crushed her very small, a rattled little thing with an overheating phone, it stood to reason the certainty of a name would invert it, would give her something to stand on.
Alexandra thought of their last conversation. She’d asked him if he needed money, and he’d laughed, continued with his inexplicable speech. He’d told her people ardent for numbers sometimes needed to be reminded that zero had to be invented. But zero was intractable. Logic slipped off its rounded form. Its multiplication of another digit diminished the value, yet it adhered to each. It was a clingy void once feared by the West. Boethius concluded evil was nothingness, but that was before A-bombs, weaponized planes. Shel said he refused to make the mistakes of his hemisphere. It was the East that saw zero’s value, the cipher bridge between debt and plenty. Muslim conquerors carried the uncountable to the West from India, where the word then was sunya, empty. And now, Shel said, he’d found a way to teach America to fear the nobodies, to take inventory of the void, so in all the numbers they cleaned and crunched, the bytes of data grown tera, they would not seek to find the nothing yet in everything. He would hold ransom all their irreproachable numbers. Shel had laughed again then. No, he did not need her fucking money. He had sounded insane.
She turned off her phone and shifted into the living room. Jeremy sat on the couch with a textbook, his neck both bent and stretched. It was a reassuring shape, his. She kneeled nearby, seconds swelling with silence until he looked at her.
She spoke symptoms, let the container of a few syllables close around the weedy tangle of what Shel had done, said he had. She enumerated what was factual as though hypothetical. She spoke about Shel without saying his name, and she was not sorry.
She became impatient. Jeremy was explaining the difference between a prodrome and a regular symptom. A prodrome was a precursor symptom before an acute onset of an illness, but sometimes what looked like a prodrome was only a precursor to a healthy life. You would find that it was an aberrant event, he said. He said and he said and he said.
“And what do you do if someone you know has it?” she said, when finally he ventured an illness.
“Stay far, far away.” Jeremy winked.
He returned to reading, and she closed her laptop. She crossed the room and slung one buttock over the arm of the couch, so that her left foot touched his. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Once,” he said, laying down his book, “I had a friend like that. He was very dear to me, and then he wasn’t. This man clamped on to anything he didn’t know and saw murder in it. And there were many things he didn’t know. So no more, I decided.”
“But what if this person was lodged deep in your life?”
He looked over his reading glasses. “Then I would have gotten rid of every part of my life he was in until he was eradicated.”
“What if it was most of your life?”
“Then I’d have started over,” he said. And when she didn’t say anything, he put his eyes back behind his reading glasses.
She remembered now a story he’d told her once about his first merger arbitrage deal. Rumors had made their way to him that Vodafone, the British mobile company, would make an unsolicited bid on the German mobile company Mannesmann. Mannesmann’s chairman might play angry at first, might even be angry. But he’d know it was accept the offer from the English raiders or suffer total stock carnage. Jeremy’s job had been simple: Push to take a fifty-million-pound position long on Mannesmann and short Vodafone. Work the spread. Prepare for windfall. He had told her this, and she’d thought it meant he was a man who understood what must be done. But now it seemed callous.
She went to their room and turned on Stravinsky. As a college student, Alexandra had thought this was what collected people did to mollify their nerves: lie in bed listening to classical music. She had not known the hopped-up urgency of Stravinsky, the near doom. People who’d grown up with violin lessons told her it was strange, and still she listened, still to her it was not doom but imminence, and it was the sound she turned to when she needed to brace up whoever she was to be strong as she ought to be. There was something very true and beautiful to it that Stravinsky, this dead man who’d never known her, could fix a clear note of anticipation to her life, and if that was possible, of course it was possible, too, that she could bring Shel to haven.
Chapter 10
As she packed, it was difficult to differentiate whose was whose, though the chargers were not precisely the same. One charger had been lost. One was in her hand.
“It could just be ours now,” Jeremy said.
“I do not want to be one of those women who can only talk about a weekend by beginning ‘We,’” Alexandra said.
Jeremy took her in his arms. “I wouldn’t dream of calling it anything but your weekend,” he said. “But I want you to be able to call. Take it.”
“You are giving me what might already be mine because of what you would want, so we don’t need to discuss whether you lost your charger.”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. “That’s empathy.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “Let’s not fight before I leave. Don’t go to bed angry, or on an airplane, right?”
“Then I guess you can’t leave.” He smiled. “Or maybe I need to come with you, strictly to continue the conversation, of course.”
“You mean the fight.”
“A square is a type of rectangle,” Jeremy said. Then: “You will call me if you need anything.”
She turned from him. “I won’t need anything.”
“Except for better plane foo
d,” he said.
She conceded to homemade frittata before the flight. There were fresh-cut flowers arranged between them, white and short blooms, plush almost to the touch. For her, he knifed a mango so that it resembled a dome covered in an armor of golden cubed fruit flesh.
“Oh, Jeremy,” she said, like it was an emotion.
“You like it?” he said.
“Where did you learn to do that with a mango?”
“It’s called the hedgehog technique.”
“This table would make a very good advertisement for marriage.”
“You’re the expert,” Jeremy said.
“I know you don’t mean on marriage, Jeremy.”
“And hard on yourself.”
“And late. Kiss me like you like me.”
“But I love you,” he said, bringing her face to him.
He leaned back and held her shoulders between his hands. He angled his face down to see hers in the shadow.
“You’re nervous,” Jeremy said.
A twist of lip. A shrug. “It is an important presentation.”
She left, and he dawdled with his books. From a bowl on the counter, Jeremy took his keys. And then he saw it: Alexandra had forgotten her briefcase by the door. And he felt odd, baffled. He went for a walk, and as he thought of all the possible things that could be out of place, maybe it was an impulse— he took out his other phone.
To Wright: Shop much in Germany?
Response: Good value.
To Wright: Seen that friend in London around?
Response: I don’t kiss and tell.
To Wright: Didn’t think the romance was that serious.
Response: Only three wee visits.
Jeremy replaced the phone in his bag. It was not supposed to have gone that far, if he was correct in his reading of Wright’s text.
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