Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  “Let me set the scene,” said Louis, licking his lips and entering the present tense, as he usually did for story time. “It’s the 1980s. We’re in Rio de Janeiro.” Seeing Anja’s arched eyebrows, he laughed—that laugh was the real elevator pitch, she thought. That laugh could soften you into agreeing to anything.

  “Like I said, we’re in Rio, okay? So there’s this guy who runs a french fry stand on Copacabana Beach. He sells the fries for a few bucks and makes a living, just like everyone else. He’s normal. Okay. But then something happens. One day something falls on his head, I don’t know, a volleyball or something, and he suddenly changes. He keeps making fries, but he starts giving them away for free to anyone who asks. He won’t take money. He just wants to give all his food away. And he’s actually pretty poor, but he just can’t help himself. It just makes him so happy to see people’s faces when he gives them free fries from his stand. Then he realizes he can give other things away too, and soon he starts giving away all his possessions and his money. His family and friends try to stop him, but he can’t stop. It’s like he’s high off his own generosity. Something has happened to the reward centers of his brain and generosity gives him insane pleasure. People take advantage of him and he runs up a huge debt. Nobody knows what to do with him—until some researchers from LA hear about it, fly down immediately, and get him into an MRI machine. When they look at his brain, they see that one spot is damaged, this little tiny risk-and-reward region. It’s like his reward centers have been rewired and now the reward he used to feel from earning money, from getting stuff, he only feels by giving things away.”

  Anja took a deep breath. “I think I get where this is going.” She looked at the giant purple capsule on the screen. “The pill turns you into the french fry man.”

  “Yes. Or, sort of.”

  “Through brain damage.”

  The laugh again. “Obviously we’re not advocating any permanent changes in brain chemistry yet. The compound is designed to pass through your system in maximum eight hours.”

  “So for eight hours, you feel artificially high when you give things away for free?”

  “No, there’s no artificiality to it. It just removes a barrier. That’s the important thing about the french fry story. Generosity is already in the brain, just waiting to be unlocked. It takes the tiniest change to make giving feel better than taking.”

  “But taking feels good because we’re self-preserving animals. We evolved this way for a reason.”

  “Yeah, and look where that got us.” He waved a hand around himself in a circle, indicating the entire failing planet. “Survival of the richest. Endless selfish consumption, climate change. This is the end of the line if we keep going like we are. Obviously we’re going to have to evolve in a new direction if we’re going to survive for another generation. We’re going to have to undergo an actual physical change. Capitalism—it’s in the brain.” He pointed to an area near the front of his skull where she supposed the capitalism was sequestered. “But it can be changed.”

  “So you take it and it turns off your . . . capitalism?” She laughed in spite of herself.

  The earnestness in his face read like an autocorrect mistake that accidentally formed a double entendre.

  “Eventually, I hope.” He nodded. “But for the period of influence you just feel really amazing when you do something generous, especially something financially generous. Over time you might start to associate those things: being nice and feeling good. Brain training. Like one of those mindfulness apps, but actually effective. The implications of that small rewiring . . . over time you could start to realize there’s another way of living and exchanging.”

  She thought of young Eric at the bar, idiotically arguing that the cultural-capital app would create a new friend-based economy beyond hard capital. Another way of living and exchanging.

  “Who’s supposed to be taking this pill?” she asked. “Who’s going to voluntarily turn off the capitalist part of their brain?”

  “Everyone. We do it all the time.” His eyes were shining. “Think about it. Everyone we know takes drugs every weekend in order to do some version of exactly that. We take drugs to change the reward centers of our brains. Touching people, being around people, exchanging experiences, that’s why you do drugs. Aren’t you always complaining about how much money you spend when you’re high?”

  She shifted from foot to foot. She had indeed often complained about it, rolling in bed hungover, recounting lost cash. “So it’s like MDMA or something.”

  “Nope. Nope, nope. It’s highly selective. This thing is focused very specifically on the economic centers of the brain. The spendy bits. We found the main money spot, it’s in the hippocampus or something, this little groove of risk and reward, gain and loss, a pressure point of financial risk in the something cortex. If you activate—or I guess deactivate—that spot, then people become temporarily generous, especially with their money. Boom.”

  Anja was silent, ordering her thoughts. What good would it do to loosen up people’s wallets at a club? What was the point?

  Glancing around the room, she remembered what building they were in. Who Louis worked for. The file name. “Oh, god. Are you trying to get clubbers to donate to charity?”

  He was prepared for this, excited. “No! It’s about people, not causes. It’s concrete, not abstract.”

  “Come again?”

  “That’s the most important part. The generosity doesn’t work on an abstract level. It’s person-to-person.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the point of getting generous at the Baron?”

  “Think about it,” he said again. She was thinking about it. “You leave the club at six a.m. Who do you see? Who’s also out on the street at that hour?”

  “Joggers?”

  “Homeless people. People who really need your generosity.”

  She was on the verge of understanding, but there was still too much in the way. “Getting high will make you want to give spare change away . . .”

  “And eventually you’ll make a connection between person-to-person charity and goodness. Eventually. When you start to associate generosity with pleasure, you’ll choose, on your own, to care about the world. Start local, act global.”

  “And the target group is our friends.” She shook her head.

  “Think about them, the people we know. The art world, whatever it is. Think about how hermetic we are, how apolitical. We spend all our time at parties, trying to get on the guest list, being completely selfish. Making money and spending it on ourselves. Imagine what would happen if we turned outward and started giving a shit about the rest of the world.”

  “But most people we know don’t make much money.”

  “Most of them have a lot more than they admit.” She looked down, reddened. He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “It’s fine, it’s what we’ve been taught to do. Not to show off. Not to talk about it. But there’s actually a lot of money tied up in the culture class, I’ve got a lot of data on that. We just have to change the culture. The issue is, we all think we’re doing enough good just by being creative or whatever. We think if we exist for ourselves—we’ve talked about this before, remember, babe? Everyone thinks they’re transgressive, but actually they’re just fucking selfish.”

  She remembered their last walk up the mountain, his tirade on behalf of politeness.

  “It still seems like you should be starting at the top,” she said. “Like where the structural problems are, corporations and stuff. Not with us, the people we know.”

  “No, it has to start with us. Bottom up. Artists used to show the world what ethics looked like. Now everyone’s a consultant. The ones on the bottom are as corrupt as the guys at the top. We’ve all sold ourselves. If the only way to get some compassion and political responsibility back is chemical, so be it. We have to lead by example. We’re the last hope.”

  She looked to Belinda, rolling around on the floor, and then out the window, at the roofs
and windows wet with rain and shining with sunlight. “But the giving won’t be real,” she said quietly. “It’s about feeling good, not about doing the right thing.”

  “That’s how humans work. You have to incentivize them. Moral commitment is always selfish, on some level.”

  She chewed a whip of hair, realized she was doing it, and pulled it out of her mouth. “I don’t think so. Giving money away because it feels good is not the same thing as actual kindness.”

  “I know, babe. But on the receiving end, does it make any difference?”

  Belinda’s voice wafted over. She had taken off her shoes and was dancing by herself near the window, singing at full volume. This is the perfect time . . . a worthy climb . . . Some song from the radio that Anja had heard in a cab. Good is here and bad is done . . . we’re running running running straight into the sun . . .

  Anja snapped back to attention. “How is Basquiatt letting you do any of this?”

  “So far, they think it’s all a PR project. Speculative design.” He laughed, genuinely amused. “They’re so used to consultants making up abstract provocations that don’t go anywhere, they never considered I would actually try to do something real.”

  “At some point you’ll have to tell them.”

  “Obviously. The real artwork, though, in my opinion, is going to be my selling the idea to them. I’ve got someone coming in this week to help me do that.” He ruffled his own hair. “I need consultation on how to sell my consultation—this is the world we live in.”

  “What happens if they don’t take it?”

  “I’m almost positive they’ll bite. Basquiatt has been wanting to get the creative class to care about humanitarian shit for years, but the people allocating the cash couldn’t manage to switch their focus away from Africa.”

  “Isn’t Africa their whole reason for existing?” She had, in fact, learned to look down on the concept of philanthropy—learned of its colonial legacy, learned how it functioned as a form of money laundering—from Louis.

  “Of course. But they’re misguided. So let’s take their resources and set up our own peer-to-peer version of charity instead. We need to start helping the people directly around us. Maybe charity is corrupt, maybe political activism is dead, but that doesn’t mean we have zero responsibility. It’s time to invent something better.”

  “With money from Basquiatt . . .”

  “Unless someone else comes along to pay for it.” He smiled quizzically at her, and she couldn’t tell if he was seriously implying something. She ignored it.

  “This whole time I’ve been here,” he said, “I’ve thought of humanity as some abstract concept, while the homeless guy sitting out front of this building is starving to death. Have you seen the numbers? Homelessness in Berlin has tripled this decade. There’s no reason for me to have this job if I go on being decorative, playing the role of the artist for the investors to fetishize and make them feel like they’re doing something abstractly good by investing in me. I finally realized I have to follow through on this project if I ever want to actualize something—actual. Actually good.”

  The membrane between actual and virtual. The Before and the After.

  She stepped back and examined him. “When did you decide to go through with this?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime in the last weeks.”

  Her mouth screwed up into a tight pucker and her eyes narrowed, skewing the coordinates of her face. Pity filling the gaps.

  “No, no.” He shook his head and sighed. “Come on. It’s not about her.”

  Anja unscrewed her mouth. Silence persisted. She was pathologizing him again. Howard had gotten into her head with the therapy stuff.

  “Why does trying to do good always have to be about something?” he insisted. “If you think everything is about something, you’ll never do anything.”

  Anja lifted her hand to reach out to him, unsure of what to do other than make physical contact. He asked her: “It’s worth trying, don’t you think?”

  She avoided the voices in her head, which were saying things like Absolutely Fucking Not, Who Do You Think You Are, etc., and looked at the person standing in front of her, who was the same beloved person he had always been, who was asking for her approval although he didn’t need it, who was including her and trusting her. This was surely a kind gesture, meant to make her feel better as much as to help him. “Of course,” she said. “Anything you come up with is worth trying.” He hugged her with one arm. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and straightened her back. “So,” she asked, “how does it start? Are you going to give it to doctors?”

  “We’ll deal it in clubs. Or actually, we’ll feed it to dealers who won’t say where they got it.”

  There was no reason to poke at the weak spots in this plan. “Who gets the cash?”

  “We do, minus a cut for the dealers. Think about how much equity Basquiatt is going to make off this. It’s a double-header: we get the selfish class hooked on supporting the needy, and we make Basquiatt the main supplier of their moral high.”

  “And you’re experimenting already?” She turned toward Belinda, who was tangled in an undefinable pose on the sofa.

  He followed her gaze toward Belinda. “She volunteered. I guess I shouldn’t have let her take so much.”

  Anja nodded. She would have to process this all later, slowly. “What are you calling this thing?”

  “That’s what I thought you could help with.”

  “Me?”

  “Come on, you’re so good at this stuff. You could really be a consultant.” She didn’t remind him that this conditional had also become an actual. “We don’t have a name for on-the-ground yet. We had a title just for internal use . . .”

  “ChariteX. I saw.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we could use some kind of abbreviation—”

  “Ex? That might already be taken.”

  “Good point.”

  “Let’s look at the designs again.”

  They leaned over the monitor together, Louis with his hand on the back of Anja’s neck, and he scrolled through a long PowerPoint of design inspirations. There were no chemistry references in this folder. The nitty-gritty, he told her, was being taken care of at a lab in Düsseldorf. “No time to get a PhD, this shit is time-sensitive.”

  “Maybe you should go for form instead of content,” she said. “Like the Pill. Except that’s already taken too.”

  “I get it. Seeming transparent, but without being too transparent.”

  He continued scrolling. Sunsets and sunrises that had inspired the pastel color scheme, the light lavender, a gentle and encouraging shade. Symbols that had inspired the groove in the pill’s surface—ancient engravings in stone, concentric circles. Fairy rings, toadstools, crop circles.

  “Circles,” she said. “The shape is what’s important. Something more Judd . . .”

  “The pill isn’t a circle, though.”

  “A circle is an oval, but an oval isn’t a circle?”

  “Right, like spaghetti is a pasta.”

  “Then go for the genus, not the species.”

  “Oval?”

  She thought about it. “Oval.”

  Louis put a soccer-referee hand in the air. “Oval,” he repeated a third time.

  “It’s good.”

  “It’s beautiful.” He nodded. “It’s perfect.”

  He stood up straight, awash in the discovery. She stood, too. Her cheek was itching, the rash revving up again. She scratched at it. The pride she instinctually felt in pleasing him was hollow. Cleverness was cheap. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Magic pill has a name.”

  “You think I’m crazy,” he said. He looked, indeed, slightly crazy. “I know, it probably sounds like my ego’s out of control.” He batted her hand away from her face, like he did when she bit her nails. “But as soon as I take a few—Ovals, my ego will calm down. Self-satisfaction out the window. Problem solved.”

  Her hand returned to her cheek,
scratching vigorously now. “As soon as you take a few? How many have you tried so far?”

  “None yet. I wanted to wait until the prototype was finished. I want to sample it for the first time in an on-the-ground situation.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. In a couple weeks. With you.”

  “Just me?”

  “At a party. But we’ll be the only ones taking it. Maybe when people see us it’ll feed the hype in advance. Beef up the demand side.”

  Anja’s eyes were stinging. The rash, real or imagined, expanding hot across her face. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? You can be my guinea pig.” He reached out to run his fingers across her bumpy cheek and frowned. “A guinea pig with a bit of a cage rash. Maybe not the most accurate control group. Let’s see if we can’t get you some ointment.”

  PART TWO

  . . . biologists give cellular death an ethical inflection. Cells are said to have a proper and improper death—in a good death, a tidy death, the cell self-destructs; in an untidy death it swells, leaks, explodes . . .

  —ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI

  13

  THE GYM HAD NEVER FELT MORE LIKE WHAT IT WAS: A BODY FACTORY. Ellipticals and stair-steppers and stationary bikes were shoved together in a non-Cartesian array on a small section of newly lain imitation-hardwood floor. The greater portion of the space was still under construction, with its concrete subfloor exposed. Given the shortage of wall outlets, most of the machines were scattered across the middle of the space without power, cords trailing around them in futile loops. People circled the machines in search of a working one, dodging one another’s pumping arms and legs in the dogged pursuit of fitness.

  Anja found a rowing machine that was plugged in, but its miniature screen displayed only PRESS CTRL+ALT+DELETE. The front end of the gym’s OS had cracked open, revealing faulty code.