“Daxter’s assistant said the car is parked,” Sloane said, pulling up the e-mail. “Aisle thirty-seven. Level B.”
Roman’s eyes went wide. “It’s just parked?”
Sloane shrugged. Yes, the prototype of one of the first self-driving vehicles was parked in a commuter lot—in between a rusted Ford Explorer and a Honda Civic, as it turned out.
• • •
Sloane had been inside autonomous vehicles before, but only ones whose comfort level had been modeled on a golf cart’s. In focus groups, Mammoth found that target consumers of self-driving cars still wanted to feel like they were being driven, which meant: invisible driver up front, passengers in the back. There were spotlights in the car’s ceiling on individual dimmers, an onyx-tinted privacy divider and massaging leather seats. Best of all, the car had a name. After sitting for an instructional video that outlined both the benefits and limitations of the car’s lidar technology, the ceiling lights brightened and the car powered to life.
“Good morning, Ms. Jacobsen, good day, Monsieur Bellard,” the car said in a crisp voice, “I am Anastasia, and I will be your driver. Please, you will notice the location of the ‘emergency’ buttons and also your seat belts?”
Anastasia, Sloane thought, smiling to herself. They’d be transported not through the Midtown Tunnel, but across the Russian steppes.
“Do we talk back?” Roman whispered urgently, interrupting her daydream of horses and white fur.
Sloane leaned forward, her voice aimed at the dash.
“It’s nice to meet you, too.”
“But the pleasure is all mine!” Anastasia answered with pronounced enthusiasm. “Was your Air France flight 9773 from Charles de Gaulle to airport JFK comfortable?” she continued.
“Errgh, yes.” Sloane noted that Mammoth had some conversational aberrations to sort out. “It was.”
“I’m so pleased to hear that. And we will still be heading to East Ninth Street and Avenue C in Manhattan?”
Beside her, Roman did the cluck-cluck tongue thing that French people used to communicate exasperation. When Mammoth said they’d rent Sloane an apartment anywhere she wanted, Roman had been gunning for the Upper West Side, but his comprehension of New York real estate was mostly informed by early Woody Allen films—he didn’t realize that the area had changed since Annie Hall.
Sloane relied on signs and cues to do her trend work: she observed the way people behaved, shifted likes and dislikes, the way they talked and dressed. It was possible to monitor the undercurrents of new behaviors in big-box stores, but it wasn’t preferable. There was only so much she could discern about humanity by noting that Costco was running a big sale on smoked trout.
Which is why Sloane wanted to live in the Alphabet City neighborhood of the East Village, a place that was, for the most part, chain store and froYo free. As an affluent white person, Sloane knew it was sanctimonious to think of Alphabet City as the “real” New York. “Real” New York didn’t exist anymore. It certainly wasn’t in Brooklyn—recently deemed “the least affordable place in America.” Brooklyn wasn’t so much a borough as a category now, like imported cheese.
But still—with its riot of smells, treasured community gardens, the trashcans overloaded with paper plates stained by ninety-nine-cent pizza slices and six-dollar ristrettos, there was a confluence that moved her. Alphabet City wasn’t perfect—their new place was only two blocks from the site of the Tompkins Square Park riot where hundreds beseeched the yuppie scum to die—but at least it wasn’t torpid. Because it was bloodlessness that frightened Sloane more than community tension: the insipidness of luxury apartment buildings with gyms and dry cleaning services and in-building convenience stores with chia seed green smoothies that encouraged—even celebrated—that everyone be one thing, strive to be one thing.
The last time Sloane had lived in the East Village, she’d been in a fetid one-room walk-up with a women’s studies concentrator named Ramona and their de facto third roommate, her sister, Leila, a senior in high school then who visited a lot. How she’d loved those crowded, easy times when too much of someone else’s hair in the tub drain qualified as a problem. Aside from globalization fatigue, nostalgia, too, was pulling Sloane back to Alphabet City. It necessitated constant masking, her sentimental side.
“If you’ll allow me,” sang Anastasia, snapping Sloane back to their commute, “the thermal radar seatbacks have detected an elevated temperature in Monsieur Bellard that suggests moderate dehydration. We have a variety of refreshments in the temperature-regulated cooler underneath the seat divider, as well as a single-serve coffeemaker which I don’t recommend activating at this time for the reasons of dehydration cited.”
Sloane popped open the mini-fridge and retrieved two bottled waters.
“Bottled tap water,” she said, handing one to Roman, whose lips rarely encountered anything other than caffeine and red wine. “Welcome to the States.”
3
When Sloane was a little girl, her closest friend besides her sister (who’d been just a toddler then) was a peppy Argentinean named Marti Fernandez. Almost every Friday of their seventh year, Marti slept over at her house, and, like most girls that age, they would spend the night talking long after Sloane’s mother had told them to go to bed.
On one of these sleepovers, Sloane woke from a dream. She had seen the man whom Marti would spend her life with, clear as day. Marti was back in Argentina, in the kitchen of her adult home. The man was wide-faced, with an easy smile, a boyish fop of hair, a sharp nose, big hands. He looked funny, kind. Sloane woke with her heart racing as if exiting a nightmare, certain that she’d seen someone who existed, except she’d seen him twenty years in the future.
When Marti woke, Sloane told her that she’d seen the man she was going to marry. That she’d seen their kitchen. (She disliked its granite countertop, but she didn’t tell her that.) That she was living in Buenos Aires again with her children.
Marti giggled uncontrollably, wanting all the details about this grown-up, future life. After Sloane had shared everything she could remember, Marti collapsed against the pillow, looking dreamily at the ceiling. “Too bad I’m never moving back!”
But she did move back. Their old high school sent out frequent newsletters, and an adult Sloane had sucked in her breath when she saw the recent updates from the class of ’95. Marti had gotten married, and she had married him: the man Sloane had seen in her dream all those years ago. It was the same man, the same age he’d been in her vision, the same helpless smile and gigantic hair, much larger than little Marti; generous and kind.
Standing now in the apartment that would be hers and Roman’s, Sloane felt the same disturbing frequency growing inside her: the disconcerting feeling that she already knew how all this would turn out. She tried to shake the presentiment—told herself, instead, that everything would be great.
“Then it’s true about the kitchens!” Roman cried, setting his bags down. “New Yorkers never cook?”
Rusted fire escapes, surfaces bleached to mask the preexisting odors of old beer and floral youth: they had arrived at their new home. Sloane watched Roman investigate the tiny, sunlit kitchen set up on black and white linoleum, the paneled glass affording a view of the stately Christodora tower up the street. He opened cupboards and peered into the refrigerator while Sloane took in the hissing and popping and creaking and cracking of an apartment in New York. She’d forgotten the sheer cacophony that the plumbing systems made, the slushing rush of water shooting around the building, the clip-clop of high-heeled publicists blow-drying their hair, entire floors of renters who refused to put in carpets. Even though it was bigger, a top floor, and significantly more expensive, the energy wasn’t that different from the place she’d had in college: architecturally inhospitable, impossible to keep clean.
“Does this oven even work?” Roman called out from the kitchen she’d just left.
“Probably not!” Sloane shouted back, peering into the room that she’d hoped would be her home office, but she knew how things worked in Manhattan: she’d never be at home. She’d keep spare changes of clothing and an extra toothbrush under her desk and this sunny, perfect room would end up being Roman’s to work in on the book that he would only say was about “neo-sensualism!” every time she asked.
Her friends in Paris thought it was weird that she hadn’t pushed to find out more about the project, hadn’t read any of his pages yet. But Sloane was a protector of the creative process. She respected Roman’s rhythm and his privacy. Also, if his urban Zentai pics were anything to go on, she was pretty sure she was going to hate the entire thing.
She’d arrived at the bathroom, a crowded, grouty conglomeration of more black and white linoleum and a beautiful pink sink retrofitted to look antique. Despite the obvious renovations, there was still that fetid milk smell that Sloane remembered from her college place, an apartment so cramped and airless, they had to store their makeup in the refrigerator so it wouldn’t melt. Sloane had even kept a mug in there for her sister’s visits—top right shelf—stocked with the Wet n Wild eyeliners Leila was too nervous to wear around their mom.
God, it seemed indulgent, the fun that they had had. The three of them crowded into that tight bathroom, Ramona seated on the tub’s edge, calmly crimping her hair while Leila tried out vampy makeup looks on a pretending-to-be-cross Sloane, music blaring out of a cassette player, the treble far too high.
Sloane probably would have spent all of her college evenings at bookstore readings if it hadn’t been for Leila. Her sister lightened up Sloane’s grimness, alleviated her self-seriousness, tried to show her that not everything needed to be analyzed, some things just were fun. Like sharing margaritas the size of bathtubs at Tortilla Flats, or dancing with a stranger in between bar tables. Dancing, God, that too seemed like something that belonged to another era, like pagers and roller skates. The last time Sloane had been touched by a stranger—much less danced with one—was during a TSA pat-down. Her carry-on had signaled an alarm (the four-ounce facial mist she’d hoped to get away with promptly taken from her bag), but as she stood there with her arms out, palms facing up, a uniformed woman announcing where she was going to touch her and why, when she had felt the woman’s palm cup her shoulder and slide down with a certain firmness—it was ridiculous, really. More ridiculous than giant margaritas. Sloane had wanted to cry.
“Darling!” Roman called out from what was probably the bedroom. “There’s something wrong with the bed!”
Sloane walked in to find her partner facedown on the mattress, his palms spread and fingers arched. “It has Botox in it!” he said, lifting up one hand.
She studied the material slowly rising up around his handprint.
“Memory Foam,” she said, sitting down beside him. “It molds to your body.”
“Why?”
She knit her brow and tried not to worry. It wasn’t a chemical imbalance that was making her emotional, it was just jet lag. Normally, they would have really gotten into it—Why was Memory Foam such an aspirational mattress filling for the American consumer?—but she was too tired.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice weary and flat. “It’s just one of those things that everyone’s told they’re supposed to want and so they start to want it.”
“Well, I don’t want this bed,” Roman said, sticking his thumb into the dense cake of polyurethane foam.
“I don’t like it, either.”
They both stayed silent. It was the first time they had agreed on anything in bed in a long time. What had started to feel like disinterest in sex on Roman’s part was beginning to look like an aversion; or at least he had an aversion to the kind of sex Sloane wanted. Sloane worked incredibly hard. She was mere months away from forty. At the end of the day, she just didn’t have it in her to get into a fetish suit with no eyes.
Roman lay back and sighed with deep contentment: he’d soon fall asleep. As for Sloane, she stared around their new bedroom and realized how useless sentimentality could be. Taking an apartment near her old college haunts wasn’t going to make Ramona magically appear in her pineapple kimono, hair toweled from her bubble bath; wasn’t going to transport Leila to Sloane’s bedside where she’d contemplate a new box of Manic Panic hair dye, intoxicated with freedom.
Sloane needed a place to live during her time at Mammoth, and this apartment was it. That she happened to be within a car drive’s distance of her family for the first time in nearly two decades, that wasn’t going to change anything, and it was naïve to think it could. So, no. Sloane couldn’t just invite her sister over for a too-much-cheese-and-wine night, couldn’t tell her to get a sitter so they could see back-to-back matinees, couldn’t pull her into the bathroom while Roman was opening a second bottle to confess that she and Roman hadn’t had sex in over eighteen months.
Contrary to her professional life where she was pro-confrontation, in her personal one, Sloane had a tendency to sweep things under the rug. Internally, as she went about her business back in Paris, watching people linger in front of flower stalls, sniffing hopefully at roses, she would think of what was happening with her and Roman as a phase. It was essential that it only be a phase, or at least that it distend into something that didn’t hurt her the way that it did now. The New York interlude would be good for them. A chance for realignment. At best, it would prove to be a high-paying distraction. At worst, another rug.
Sloane looked around again, felt the pull toward dreams. It would be detrimental to her jet lag—she should force herself to stay up later, but Roman was already breathing peacefully, and she didn’t really have that much to unpack. Given the alternatives, Mediterranean or otherwise, sleep seemed like the safest place left to go.
4
Sloane didn’t dream often of her father. She had to be fluish or deep (deep) into REM sleep, and she was rarely either. But jet lag was hallucinogenic, tidal. Before he died, Sloane could always count on her dad, Peter, to be there with his Dadaist pep talks (Thought is made in the mouth was a consistent favorite) before the big moments in her life, so it was only normal, or normally abnormal, that he’d show up to encourage her on her first day of work at Mammoth.
In her dream, he’d been at the piano that still stood in her mother’s house, his chestnut hair baseball-cap matted, his wiry frame leaning toward the instrument in a coiled crouch—it had been a favorite game of theirs, minor, minor minor: Peter would parse out a chord and they’d both call out accompanying emotions. Minor for the eerie sounds, and for the really arresting ones, minor minor.
“Major minor,” she’d said, because, in her dream, he’d pressed his finger to C major. “Fruit juice!” he’d added, in that enigmatic way of his, sticking his tongue out.
The off-kilter sense of humor, the shared thrill of giving attention to something most people overlooked, the respect for the way your environment could change your mood; all these things her father had inspired in her had been present in her dream. Not present: the wariness her mother seemed to have about their relationship, which made Sloane even more covetous of their weird piano game. All those times, that curious feeling in her belly when she’d look up from the keyboard to catch her mother staring at them, her expression pained and quizzical, as if she had mis-potted a plant.
Sloane had never gone in for the obvious cries of adolescent difference—she’d never worn too much eyeliner, never gotten a tattoo. But she’d been a misfit, and her father—a long man, a kind man—had been one, too. She thought before she spoke in a way that was conspicuous, but Peter had always indulged his daughter’s observation skills. As an architect, he admired consideration, patience and the weighing of all sides. In his line of work, hastily drawn conclusions meant that buildings could fall down. But Margaret Jacobsen didn’t like having two pensive people in her household. She’d always regarded her eldest like
a nut she didn’t have permission to crack.
“A professional thinker,” that’s what Peter had said once when her mom had accused Sloane of being “gloomy.” If she stayed up late enough, Sloane was always catching snippets of such conversations from her hidden perch on the staircase. Margaret wanted her daughters to be happy. Anything but happy, Margaret got real scared. Which meant that things got pretty frightening when her father died.
“Sleep well?” Roman asked, sliding by her with a perfunctory tap on his way to the living room to do yoga. He had showered, and after yoga, he’d shower again. His obsession with personal hygiene made Sloane feel contagious. She touched her strawish bed hair, maneuvered it into a bun.
“I slept pretty deeply, actually,” she said, trailing into the living room, watching him unfold his mat. Scent work was a significant part of her profession—she could track what people would want in the years ahead by what they liked to smell, and Sloane wished for the gift of already-made coffee ripping through the apartment. But they were a house divided in terms of morning beverages. Roman only liked espresso when it was prepared by a professional; at home, he drank green tea. Accordingly, Sloane was a single-capsule user and the olfactory results were disappointing. No more giant good-morning smells taking over the house.
She turned away from Roman to get ready for her first day at work. Another image came back from her dream then: her father in a dark wardrobe filled with dresses so navy they were almost black. The hangers made from earbud headphones that shone luminescent in the dark. He was gesturing at her, but not beckoning. He was pushing her away. “Build it down, Pumpkin,” he’d said, before pushing the door open with an elusive smile; the kind of advice that was just opaque enough to sound like something he would have said.
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