Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  “Cass,” Robert said. “Her auntie died. She went down with Wally for the service, said I should stay and work. Not established enough to take time yet. It’s no matter to her. She doesn’t need me to distribute her grief. She’s well-adjusted. She has a shelf for white socks and a shelf for black socks. She talks about the man upstairs. She says, ‘You just keep on trucking until the man upstairs calls your number.’”

  “And you?” she said.

  “I’d have taken an excuse for a day off,” he said, then, quickly, “not that it isn’t sad. I know it is. I just never met the woman.”

  A certain blurty quality, puppyish in its stops and starts, made him easy to be around. She forgot to eat and let him talk. She gave her card to the bartender and put her hand around a glass hot with the shaking flame of a burning votive. When he went outside to smoke—the drinking secret of boring men, he called it—she laughed a little. She waited, and she thought of how the place was arranged to feel like a memory, so you were seeing time refract back at you, the future memory already hinted in the deliberately worn patina.

  He came in rubbing his hands.

  “Place is nice,” he said. “So nice it almost makes me feel guilty.”

  “But then?”

  He gripped the bar. It had been epoxy-finished with newspaper clippings, and Robert’s hand rubbed a black-and-white print of a mushroom cloud shyly. “But then I’m drunk,” he said, “and you’re here, and I think we in my profession yodel on about self-care, so maybe I’m just a role model.”

  “How is the clinical work?”

  “Used to bum about the failures. Now, I go to work, and I think plug in,” he said. “That’s what Cass told me. Just plug in. It’s up to them to flip the switch, but you can set up the conditions for the work to work.”

  “Just plug in.”

  “I set the scene.”

  He took a chubby little box from his pocket and looked at it. “When’s the last time you saw one of these?”

  “Stone Ages must be,” she said.

  “My stone says eleven-seventeen.”

  “I guess it’s time for you to get a new phone,” Alexandra said. “Unless this was your way of saying good night.”

  Robert shrugged. “I’m not allowed the doodads anymore. Cass said it was making me an angsty teenager in my middle age.”

  “Because.”

  “Because I’d Cathect and then watch my own Cathexis. Because I’d check every ten minutes, and if a day later I only had two Favors, I’d be asking her if I should delete what I Cathected.” Robert trailed off and stared at the tower of glass coupes behind the bar.

  “Worried people didn’t like you as much as you thought or that everyone could see people didn’t like you as much as you thought?”

  “Both,” Robert said. “More.”

  Without any why behind it, she reached out and spun the mint garnish poking out of his drink. “I’m interested in more.”

  “My sister and I, we’d argue. We’d be at it all day over an article about Afghanistan. She’d be saying I didn’t understand, I’d never been to war, you can’t be on here starting offensives when you’ve never seen combat. And I’d be angry all day. I’d be asking Cass why Marissa didn’t see we could’ve lost her.”

  “And the Connections couldn’t make up for that.”

  “The Connections are pure hypocrites. When my parents lost their house in the subprime crisis,” he continued, “I didn’t see people in the streets. Instead, online my friends say war’s appalling, banks are appalling, system’s appalling, but all I see on Cathexis is wealth and empty words. I couldn’t stop noticing. Paris. Tokyo. Cruises. Vacations three times a year. My parents are good people. They didn’t want me or Marissa’s money. They wanted to do it themselves, be old people their children didn’t fret over. They wanted to do it right, and they did,” he said. “If it could happen to them.”

  “Then how is this fair.”

  “How is any of it.” Robert paused. “I’d see the private school graduations. I’d see the elaborate birthdays. Everything’s appalling, but what are they doing? Buying new shoes. And I know what this sounds like. What I do. But the only thing that makes me bitter and not like everyone else is I don’t believe that it’s taking it personal. I believe everything’s personal.”

  “Cassandra isn’t bothered?”

  “She’s well-adjusted.”

  “The socks,” Alexandra said.

  “Right,” he said. “She thinks I’m crazy. I’m saying, the world can fuck off but I can’t stop looking, and she’s saying, very calm, very skeptical and pitying, fix your blood pressure with a flip phone. She says half my problem is it’s easier to see evil than to fix it.”

  “If not fixing, what’s the social work?”

  “My sister goes to war so they can ski in Aspen on family money and my parents can buy two-for-three cereal boxes, but I’m the one deranged by my device, and jealous.”

  “I don’t think you’re deranged,” Alexandra said. “I think for you, high-def television isn’t enough.”

  “But I love my friends too,” he said. “It’s simple as maybe they don’t care if they benefit from something rotten and think my life’s a knock-knock joke, but we turned each other onto bands in college, got stoned, and ate the same vanilla instant pudding.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “You want taste in common to mean something more than coincidentally owning albums.”

  “That simple.”

  “I was in advertising,” she said. “Which essentially means I have a doctorate in pop psychology.”

  “Cass, she says, so what if there’s a system. Be happy playing along because if you really believe there’s a system, you can’t change it anyway. At least enjoy it.”

  “How does that work?”

  He scrunched over her shoulder and whispered. “In the system, you don’t think about it.”

  “Except now, when you say it,” she said.

  “I undercut myself.”

  “But you do it so well you nearly make a point,” she said.

  “Cass says I need to hunker down on what I can control. She sends me blog posts about it. She tapes notes in the bathroom so when I’m brushing my teeth, I get the message.”

  “What do they say?”

  “I am the change the world needs,” Robert said.

  “That all?” They shared a little laugh and she pulled the zipper of his jacket, a quick smooth motion, ending with her hands leaned against his knees. She did it before she thought of doing it. She watched him drop his gaze.

  “And I am loved.”

  “Oh,” she said, easing back perpendicular in her seat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a neat lady. I don’t want you to feel bad.”

  She went for her wallet and tossed bills down on the bar, one, two, three. It was late, and there was no home to go to. Alexandra stood, looked back at him, already a memory.

  “Spaghetti thrown against the wall doesn’t feel anything, Robert,” she said.

  Chapter 4

  Faces erased in their appearance as he walked, time overlaid with time. He was today after work and he was stepping into the future and he was looking at Alexandra, newly disabused of the notion she’d live through only one terrorist event in her own city; and he was deadening his face as One Rock declared that Gunner had been killed; and he was playing the market on both ends to fade away from Belfast; and he was a boy who couldn’t change the rules. All the clumps of flowers and glassy-costumed dancers and Alexandra’s face intent on a menu, small wigs of tinsel on trees and their boy spinning in the kitchen and sprays of parsley on her plate and pale file folders shut forever and the gray Irish sky—the arbitrariness dizzied him, the to be of everything everywhere sliding on invisible scal
es of probability.

  Were he his own client, he would say, when you made the choice, when you listened to yourself, you got better. Slowly, yes. But better. He did not want to keep listening to himself.

  He did not want to listen to himself fail to convince Alexandra’s voice mail that she must return to the apartment to fetch her things, for example. He did not want to listen to himself say he needed to see his son.

  Too much time away was supposed to quell the insistence of hurt. He was not quelling the insistence of hurt. He was walking.

  Someone like Robert would say look at the sky; see the beauty of size. But it frightened Jeremy, the infinity of it. He was only a man.

  A man who had a streak of failure that followed him, merciless as a spy.

  But of course, Wright had disappeared as soon as it didn’t matter anymore if he appeared, and somehow Jeremy had persisted long enough to be early to see the professional.

  The professional had a private practice in a building with frosted glass windows inside. Jeremy pushed a button and a rattling meant that the door was unlocked. Inside, the professional shook his hand. He invited Jeremy to sit on a hard, cold couch.

  Jeremy waited. He looked between man and ceiling. He looked at the man, and he waited. The man wore a blue oxford, like Jeremy. His leg was crossed, and he sat in a chair with a small side table topped with a box emitting a tuft of tissue. Jeremy looked again at the ceiling, a matte, flat white like her face on the operating table that day.

  “I don’t know why I am,” he said. “Insert any factual clause or full stop.”

  The truth was he had thought he existed to repair smaller and smaller things until nothing was left. It had started with the largest way he could conceive of home and ended with the most discreet. When he was young, he thought fixing was simple as losing innocence. He signed up for it. He thought it would be the Berlin Wall raining down forever, until the globe was seamless. He did not know that sometimes you ruin your health. Your friends drop off with death or degrading minds. You are supposed to grow wiser with years. Instead you grow bulky with fear, autobiography thickening in veins, gluey and slowing. Sometimes it is difficult to lift your arms. You sit with men and drink Guinness and keep on because many lives are at stake. Eventually, when life is the best woman you know, you think yours is at stake too. It is. You think you can repair it, and then you don’t.

  But he was a professional now. The classrooms populated with helpful hearts—he’d sat in them too. This was not a statement of power but background. He knew what the doctor would do. The construction of empathy: a still body, slow movement, gentle locution. Their scripts. I invite you to explore our relationship, what you’re feeling at the moment. Maybe something I say upsets you. Maybe you feel yourself react. I know. I am one of you. I sit there and I see my clients, and I say the theories that are supposed to be scientific fact. Insane: their confidence in knowledge of the other mind.

  Even subterfuge is compromised. The liar pretends to be a liar.

  And yet you are here, the doctor might be inclined to comment. Jeremy would say the same. They had been trained.

  The liar who says he lies. The man who admits he is in denial. The one who inflicts the wound to subvert pain. The patient who goes to the doctor who says he does not believe he can be cured. I see it. I do. I am not unaware.

  There was a time in his life Jeremy watched planes buckle buildings on television. There was no one in his flat, just a tin of biscuits, painting of a boy lost alone at sea. It was all he had expected. He had never dreamed of the family that was now gone.

  Was he suffering? Well.

  One way to answer: his entire life since they’d met was on behalf of her.

  A box of two animals more than she’d asked for. Questions for another day. What does it feel like to make someone happy?

  I have gotten better before. Once, I went to Italy with nothing to do but forget, be forgotten. A friend was newly dead. It was my fault and it wasn’t. It was me and it was what happens when everyone is like me, compliant to omens. I started over. I went to Oxford. It was all the old orphan stories. Oliver Twist. Little Nell. Did Dickens ever meet a lonely child he didn’t love?

  The hedge fund résumé was printed in minuscule font. Unserifed. Serifs extended. Serifs filled in the gaps, pulled the eyes toward coherency. The man who would hire him walked Jeremy into his glass office, explained they were just men who understood that working both ends didn’t mean zero net gain. They could go long and short at once, eat the cakes they had and get richer too. A quaint thought.

  Then he met her. He met her and thought he’d be better forever.

  Because she was so lovely, touching bookshelves and walking, her lower body so elegantly organized in forward momentum that he thought she’d lead him to perfect order. He’d thought of which bouquets he would bring Alexandra if he were braver, if adulthood had not presented a pattern of erasure.

  He supposed he was still hedging then.

  He had not then believed that one day she would stand with him and make promises, that there would be white blooms pinned in her hair. It was all early, everything left. They did not yet have their boy. They wound the world for him.

  I still receive Christmas cards from the other families, the indivisible ones. Happy holidays, with love, from the Heartland. May your family be as blessed as ours.

  Once they were. He could not see them, touch them, but sometimes he’d think: and still I’m us.

  He thought often of how she’d told them like a fairy tale the day they went to the adoption woman. It was a story he’d never thought to tell their boy, their boy who, maybe someone else might have accepted, he’d never see again. Their boy who loved to know the temperature in São Paolo, Brazil. Their boy who had made beach sand smile, cut trains through their house, so that it seemed no matter the circumstance, they’d be able to get away. Jeremy had been told he could not hide, but he’d believed in the locomotive string his boy had made around the apartment, hugging their home.

  Somewhere, a friend or enemy, someone he’d once trusted, this man who he’d once thought to become, had lit a match in Bushwick or he’d not, and no matter, he was probably still watching. He was watching, and there was no way to avert the great gaze that rattled facts until nearly every certainty had fallen off.

  But just knowing she existed, that she and their boy did—

  It was not the same as a happy ending. It was that somehow, even now, he could safely say that once they were happiest.

  Acknowledgments

  Before this book, I could not have anticipated having such fun on editorial calls. Thank you, Mark, brilliant writer and editor, brilliant mind of play and politics and poetics. There’s no one I’d rather talk to about literature. Thank you, Kirby, for bringing Quotients home. To everyone at Soho, I’m grateful to be in the fam, and for your support.

  Like any text, this novel was made possible by many conversations. I’m especially indebted to Helen Nissenbaum for opening up ethical questions around big data. Michael Chinigo helped me get a handle on coding and computers. The Columbia communications PhD program introduced me to a rich body of media research. Thank you, Ilya, for the chat on plot. Jon, Hannah, and Oskar generously read parts or all of big, fat early versions. And to Maggie, my girl since the 198 days, I owe a trip to a castle for our time in Belfast.

  Strangers who became family gave me inspiration. You know who you are.