Oval

by Elvia Wilk

“You need to eat.” He moved his eyes around her midsection. Was there anyone who didn’t feel fit to comment on her weight loss? Was this what it would be like to be pregnant, people constantly asking about your body, reaching out to touch your stomach, gauging your degree of expansion? “Along the lines of parenting, though, you definitely don’t need to be working with that kid.” He jerked his head in Michel’s direction. “Let’s see you get your own team, yeah?”

  She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m fine where I am.”

  “He seems pretty immature.”

  “He’s fine. But you know the guys who work up there, in the middle? Daniel and the other guy?”

  He laughed. “Maybe you finally appreciate my being the go-between, huh? Now you see what it looks like in there.”

  “You’re right. You’re the lesser evil.” He shrugged, assenting. “Are you here to hassle me more about the Best Western?”

  “No, not today. As long as you’re fine and safe and have somewhere to sleep. You’re busy, Louis is busy, you’re both fine. I overreacted.”

  An admission that he’d contacted Louis. Now was the moment to ask him point-blank about the email she’d seen on Louis’s tablet. Feedback. Now was the time. She opened her mouth and closed it again, like a fish at the edge of the tank. But any question about it would be an admission that she didn’t know everything already. Having Howard think she knew what he and Louis were talking about was more important to her than actually knowing it.

  “By the way,” he said before leaving, “tell your friend the footwear study’s already been done. O’Reilly, like five years ago. Conclusively against open-toe. Look it up.”

  15

  HEAD HELD HIGH, CHIN TILTED BACK, CREAMY CHIFFON GOWN parted at the knee, lovely lower leg exposed and foot delicately resting upon on a wedge of hay, Snow White gestured toward the ninety-nine glass cylinders pendulating on chains from the ceiling of the brutalist church. Inside each transparent cylinder burned a small blue flame. Anja thought of Potsdamer Platz.

  Snow White opened his mouth. “These handmade, 3D-printed un-icons represent the spirits of the ninety-nine O’Reilly ambassadors living around the world.”

  His voice echoed in the darkened cavern of fossilized architecture. Not so long ago, the church had housed a traditional commercial gallery that hosted rotating exhibitions of sellable objects. One month they’d be made of cloth and paint, the next rocks or video monitors or flashing lights. Sometimes all the objects were made by one person and other times there was a jumble of contributions from different artists, united by a theme. The reason the particular selection of objects had been chosen was always explained in a press release printed on an A4 sheet at the front desk, like a menu at the entrance to a buffet. Next to the press release, there would be another sheet with CVs of the artist or artists whose work was on display, so visitors could guess how old and famous they were and how much the items on offer were likely worth.

  Things got sold, but it was understood that the buyers were buying into the artist’s whole brand via the object. The object stood in for something: a share of the artist’s sum total life’s worth. The object was a token for speculation on that life’s worth. Over time, the objects had begun to seem more and more incidental to that speculation. Sponsors realized that using artists as object-makers was a waste of resources. The artists’ true value was their proximity to the vanguard, that is, the future, that is, the next niche for market expansion. A corporate lobby may have been full of art objects, but management realized it needed artists inside the building to keep a finger on the pulse.

  Most of the artists Anja had met had made their real money working for companies—even way back before most of the commercial galleries had transitioned into venues for product launches and release parties and initial coin offerings. It wasn’t that objects didn’t still show up at these events; sometimes they would decorate the launch, or even constitute the launch. But those objects were not for sale. They were a priori the property of the company or the investors who had invested in the artist. The investor providing the artist’s tenure was logically the owner of anything made during the time period. Having a tenure was infinitely more stable for most artists than object-by-object sale had ever been.

  If there was a formal device signaling continuity between the old and the new systems (which weren’t really so different, Anja thought), it was the press release. The press release was ever-present; you still needed an explanation for what was going on. Anja had one explaining the meaning of Snow White’s current actions folded in her purse.

  Snow White’s voice was being amplified through a tiny flesh-colored microphone Anja could see taped to his face. The flesh tone of the microphone was several shades lighter than Snow White’s skin, which, according to the press statement, was meant as a critique of the racialized standards of the beauty industry at large. Snow White’s self-proclaimed role as O’Reilly consultant—ambassador, as they called it—was to overturn those standards by bringing diversity into the mix.

  “Set free from the brittle shells of their physical bodies,” he went on, chanting, “their spirits are able to finally transcend the vanity inherent in the cosmetic industry that they are struggling to change from within.”

  Anja lifted up on her toes and craned her neck around, searching the crowd of faces in the audience for Michel, who was supposed to be meeting her there. She’d pressured him to come, convincing him it would be a perfect opportunity for footwear research—all the O’Reilly higher-ups would be congregated there, undoubtedly wearing shoes of some kind. She had felt a desperate need to go to Andy’s performance, probably to prove to herself and the world that she could go anywhere she wanted without Louis leading the way—but she was definitely not capable of going alone.

  A low hum started to build up in the room. Andy’s voice rising, incantatory.

  “The butane powering the flames corresponds to the portion of the world’s fossil fuels that each of us will consume over the course of our time on this dying planet! The flames will die at the end of the night, but O’Reilly’s commitment to sustainable practices will live on . . .” The sound of a gong struck somewhere in the room. Andy took a deep breath. “In my last hours as a part of this forward-thinking family, who has over the last four years embraced my incisive critique of its practices—leading to the recent expansion of its sustainable market worldwide, particularly in Southeast Asia—I have chosen to honor not the products but the true soul of the company, the human souls who have the power to change the course of history through consumer revolution . . .”

  She spotted Prinz across the room. Prinz was mouthing the words along with Andy. Her stomach flipped, eyes darting around the room—but of course Louis wasn’t with him. He was in the lab. He’d told her that. He had been messaging her daily with little updates, still trying to plan their trial run. She’d been feigning enthusiasm while putting him off. She assured herself that she’d somehow feel his presence if he showed up in the room. She scratched at her cheek with a fingernail.

  The gong struck again and a raging fire appeared on a huge screen behind Andy. Red words written in Comic Sans began to scroll slowly down over the flames. Snow White whispered the words in time, turning over his shoulder only once to check whether he was on-tempo.

  the water of my

  race

  walks with O’Reilly soft touch absorbent

  infallible

  pro-aging

  bamboo follicles

  who will inherit

  the earth

  misty plum

  [Gong noise]

  when your hair is on,

  you’re on

  fire

  After a final series of gongs the flames died down and snow started to fall on the screen. A trio of products appeared in the foreground on-screen: bottle, pump, tube. The product image was about three meters tall, completely dwarfing Andy. The products had matching pale yellow lids and images of Andy’s face on the labels: at t
his scale, quadruple the size of his actual face. The writing on the products was in Korean.

  Andy raised his hand in an elegant arc, and he announced the name of the line: Snow Yellow.

  Applause. A bubbling from the crowd, a surge, a press forward. An aging O’Reilly executive moved in from the sidelines to shake Andy’s hand and say some words. The noise in the room diminished to a pinging of whispers while he spoke. No one was listening to the formalities.

  “Ha!” Loudly, in Anja’s ear. “Ha!”

  She turned. “There you are.”

  “I’ve been here the whole time, unfortunately,” said Michel. He was speaking above normal volume, audible to those surrounding. “What the fuck is this? I can’t tell if the whole thing is a huge joke.”

  She took him by the elbow, using his arm like a rudder, and navigated them to a corner of the room.

  “Of course it’s a joke,” she said, once they were sheltered against the chilly stone wall of the onetime sanctuary. The black stone was slick, moist. “You think ‘Snow Yellow’ would be an accident?”

  “No one’s laughing.”

  “It’s not meant—” She sighed. “It’s funny to us, but not meant to be funny to O’Reilly. The joke’s on them.”

  “You honestly think they don’t get the joke?”

  “Of course they do, but they pretend not to, which is an even bigger joke. And Andy’s pretending he doesn’t know they’re pretending. And that just makes it an even bigger joke. And on and on forever in an endless loop.”

  “You think everyone knows this is ridiculous, but no one calls anyone’s bluff?”

  “This way both sides get to feel superior.” She shrugged. “That’s how consulting works. Each side thinks the other one is the chump.”

  He paused, as if attempting to apply this template to their own current situation, then nodded, finding a positive match. “But this particular joke is also racist,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Hush,” she said, scanning the faces around them. The congratulatory speech was wrapping up at the front of the room. As soon as the spectacle was over, the audience would group into huddles to snicker and critique in ways they thought were incisive but were actually superfluous (“the cylinders looked really good, but the screen was over the top”; “kind of self-indulgent, right?”).

  This was gossip, not critique. Prinz, for instance, whose gleaming face she could see through the bobbing heads around her, fed on such gossip like a larva absorbing feed—gorging on it as fuel for reinforcement of his own subject position, metabolically churning dissent into self-righteousness. How many times had she listened to Louis and Prinz debating some performance like this one, Louis articulating critique after critique (he got away with criticism, because he could make it sound like gossip, rather than the other way around) and Prinz gleefully blanketing it all in statements like “you have to problematize situations further to resolve them,” or “you have to go through, not around the problem,” or “you have to offend to liberate.” In group situations, though, Louis would effortlessly switch sides—he’d defend Prinz by taking the weak arguments Prinz had been gesturing toward and articulate them in compelling ways.

  That was Louis’s peculiar genius, the genius of being on both sides at once. If he were here, he’d whisper one thing in her ear, a criticism not so far from what Michel was saying, but at dinner afterward he’d defend, defend. He took neither side seriously enough to truly advocate for it; the fact that he could make arguments for both sound equally compelling was the ultimate critique. The critique was that there were no political stakes in this type of argument at all.

  She shook Louis from her thoughts, physically shaking her head like a Christmas tree losing its dead needles. “Of course it’s racist,” she said quietly to Michel. “But it’s meant as a critique of racism, ergo it’s not really racist. Or so the thinking goes.”

  “So if this is all a provocative joke, they aren’t actually going to sell these offensive products.”

  “No, of course they’ll sell the products. Not here, though. This is the concept launch. The products will probably go to stores six months from now, in Korea, I’m guessing. Andy’s job is just to invent the concept.”

  Michel groaned. “I can’t believe you got me to come to this.”

  Everyone said that all the time, but Michel was the only person she knew who didn’t abuse himself by constantly attending anyway. He was fine not being part of the living, squirming mass; he didn’t need to reaffirm himself through proximity to the status quo.

  “Why don’t you infiltrate the crowd and survey the footwear,” she suggested, feeling his negativity radiating from their conversation out into the room.

  “I don’t know if I can even get close to the O’Reilly people. It’s packed in here.”

  The crowd had begun applauding once more. An enormous amoeba with a thousand wiggling nuclei. Anja had often wondered who the real nucleus of the social scene was, the truly central person who anchored the existence of the blob and kept it internally churning, gave it the life-energy it needed to continue partying and gossiping and having sex with itself and doing drugs into infinity.

  Who was the person without whom this crowd simply could not function? Where was its center of gravity, and then where was its outer limit, the membrane?

  The center was elusive, almost impossible to identify, but Anja had always been sure it was there. There was an internal logic to the social order, its mechanisms so predictable that there had to be a single actor policing its behavior.

  Or maybe, she thought now, observing the shuffle, this was actually a self-regulating organism with distributed, not centralized, intelligence, its logic irreducible to any of its constituent parts. A tensile, redundant mesh network of glances, text messages, sweat droplets, GIFs, jokes, nonjokes, payments, diseases, repulsions, attractions; from afar, everyone looked to be moving in concert, although as individuals they maintained the belief that their behavior was autonomous. Free will.

  This night would organically follow the same pattern as every other night:

  Performance finishes. Friends of performer push to the front of the crowd to make themselves known. Friends take their places beside performer and turn around, ready to receive congratulations on behalf of performer—adjacency to fame is falsely presumed equivalent to fame. Performer selects friends who will be invited to the Dinner after the event. When the first Dinner guest (Guest Zero) has been appointed, the others will rearrange themselves in proximity to Guest Zero, although Guest Zero may or may not have the ability to actually confer the invitation further—like fame, invitations are falsely presumed contagious.

  As invitations are slowly bestowed down the pageant line, the mass continues to jumble itself until a silent call is sent through to the invitees, like an electric zap only they can feel: The cars for the Dinner are leaving! Say your goodbyes!

  The invitees politely and/or condescendingly disengage from their sorry companions, casually mentioning “a dinner,” which everyone knows to be the Dinner, making promises to meet up later, kissing, kissing, then slipping off. The event is left without its lifeblood; the people who own the venue may even be gone; only the interns are left tending to the evaporating crowd. Without a Dinner the aspirational possibilities are temporarily curbed—until the wasted, makeup-smeared regrouping later at the bar or the club, when the hosts and guests of the Dinner will once again mingle with the uninvited. And so, for the time being, the people left over separate into their home groups, their friend alliances, in order to plan their own feeding—because food is going to be necessary at some point if the second, late-night round of opportunism is going to be possible—and certain friend modules will try to sync up with others, extending alliances for the evening (“us three and you four”), which necessitates excluding others (“there isn’t room in the car, so sorry”), creating makeshift hierarchies where the major, substructural one has vanished. The amoeba always keeps its shape.

 
; “Where is everyone going?” said Michel. The sifting process had begun.

  “To the front of the room. To congratulate Andy. To the Dinner, eventually.”

  “Who’s Andy?”

  “Snow White—Yellow.”

  “You know this guy?”

  The typical pride of proximity didn’t strike. The link wasn’t hers in the first place, really—it was Louis who was friends with Andy—and in Michel’s presence—Michel, who was vaccinated against the anxieties of social life—claiming proximity now seemed sort of pathetic.

  She pointed to someone she thought worked in press at O’Reilly. “Now’s your chance. Eyes on the ground. But don’t leave without me.”

  He vaulted himself into the fray, and she was left alone, unattached and exposed. It wasn’t more than thirty seconds until Sara appeared and sucked onto her side. Sascha wasn’t with her like usual, but then Sara functioned fine on her own, being the dominant gene as opposed to the recessive. Who knew how the two of them together maintained a delusion that they were social equals? (Or did functional relationships really require a pretense of equality?)

  They kissed cheeks, and Sara squeezed Anja’s shoulders warmly in what was meant to be interpreted as a gesture of intimacy, looking into her eyes and transmitting empathy. Sara knew about what was going on with Anja, the squeeze said. Sara knew the agony of male rejection and so she knew every ounce of Anja’s sadness better than Anja even knew it herself. There was solidarity in the gesture—but there was also condescension. Your pain, my pain, banal pain.

  Still, the faux intimacy felt real in the moment, and in spite of herself, Anja warmed to the touch.

  “Things are going way better with Mahatma.” Sara looked meaningfully across the room to convey that Mahatma was present, at this very moment, suggesting that in fact they had arrived together as a couple. “I think we’re dating.”

  Anja wondered how many other people Sara would tell this “secret” to tonight, effortlessly drawing them closer to her. It occurred to her that faux closeness worked because it made you realize how starved you were for actual closeness.