Certain audience members barged their way around, pushing past me to keep up with the particular characters and plot threads they were intent on following. Sometimes, as a stationary scene was unfolding, grown men would worm their way to the front of the assembled crowd so they would have a chance of being chosen for a special interaction with one of the characters. One reviewer had been taken to a secret room made to look like a cabin in the woods by a woman in a black dress. This was something Mizuko had wished aloud would happen to her. I wandered, looking for my companions but increasingly hopeless, preferring to always be moving rather than to stand still, sometimes lost on my own for ages, going into empty rooms where people could pull out drawers and rifle through things for clues to the story. Suddenly I felt exhausted and lay down in a corner of a dark room until the lights came up and I knew it was the end.
Walter took us to supper afterwards at the NoMad. The restaurant, which belonged to the hotel, was almost as disconcertingly dark as the theatre space next door, but now everybody looked like their normal selves again rather than serial killers at Halloween. Without the smooth white plastic, each face, even Mizuko’s, looked a little too high-definition: fleshier, shinier, the features more irregular, the pores larger. I felt a throb in my chest at seeing Robin’s and Mizuko’s faces in such close proximity. The throb descended into my stomach and then slipped further down again, as if someone were very slowly unzipping me.
When we were shown to our table, Robin and Mizuko sat next to each other, with Walter on the other side of her, next to me on the end. I studied their faces again, now they were seated. They seemed to bear no resemblance to each other at first, and then gradually my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw it. A flicker fading in one and growing in the other. They looked absolutely nothing alike, but they had the same arrogance. They held space in the same way—like it belonged to them. My eyes moved back and forth between them. Mizuko deathly pale, and thin as a child. Her hair hanging over her pointy shoulders, her skinny arms and elbows. It was a rare occasion to see her not wearing black. Instead she wore a tiny blue kilt and a seventies-looking brown-and-white-striped top, with a narrow black choker around her neck. She kept rearranging her plates and glasses on the table in order to take pictures, apparently unaware of or unperturbed by the way that Walter and Robin were staring at her.
“I found it very meditative,” Ingrid said. “All that silence, having your cell locked away. I felt like I went into a kind of trance. I’d say it was quite a spiritual experience for me, actually.”
Unable to stop looking at Mizuko, Walter replaced the cap on the sparkling water and made a ng, ng sound of agreement.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Mizuko said. “That was so intense.”
It was weird seeing her in the company of people I knew rather than the people she knew.
“Thank you for inviting us,” Robin said, with an elaborately gracious gesture, as though the restaurant, or maybe the whole hotel, belonged to Walter. Ingrid glowered at him.
Hearing them discuss the play, I realised just how much I’d missed while looking for them. And though we were now all around the table together, I still felt left behind. Mizuko, I sensed, now amongst “adults,” was at pains to illustrate the gap in our maturity. She was making a very lengthy point about freedom of movement and choice and gamification, and I could see that Walter was lapping it up.
“Exactly,” he said, “that’s exactly it.”
Robin stroked his chin, suggesting his detached amusement at finding himself in the company of so many pseudo-intellectuals.
“I loved the whole random nature of it,” Ingrid said.
She was talking in a strange way I had never really seen her do before. Mizuko too seemed wired. Something about the way she was leaning forward, her hair trailing in the dish of olive oil, so she could fix her eyes directly on Ingrid as she spoke angered me. I made a face at her to say, Why are you acting weird? I couldn’t tell whether I was imagining it or she was just stoned.
I found it all totally draining. Before I had lain down, the play had been nearly two hours of walking. I wondered if it would be okay to lay my head on the nice soft tablecloth and close my eyes now. I was too exhausted to even worry about what would happen if I did. My body tried to shut down my brain, to bring it down by force onto the table. My plan had been to dissect Mizuko’s career and family history in conversation, so that Mizuko could work it out for herself, but now I felt a poison seeping into my brain every time Robin gave her sidelong glances and every time she ignored or belittled me in his company. The poison was causing a painful swelling near my heart, and near my crotch, and yet at the same time it was turning all my limbs to lead, infecting me with sleep so I was powerless to stop the conversation. Maybe I didn’t want to let this happen after all. Maybe she didn’t deserve it. I felt increasingly impotent, my eyelids drooping ever lower as I watched the conversation take turn after turn that excluded me, knowing little of the New York theatre scene. The more powerless I felt, the louder their laughter and obvious comradeship became, and the more certain I was that handing Robin to her like this would be a mistake. It would cut me out completely.
When Mizuko got up I gripped the table, pulled myself up, and followed her. “Where are you going?” I demanded, more feebly than I wanted.
“I have to pee,” she said, giggling. “Is that okay?”
I went with her. “Are you messaging Rupert?” I asked, trying to control my voice. The thought gave me a sudden surge of electricity. Renewed energy in my limbs.
“Actually, I’m not,” she said through the door. It sounded like there was something more. There was a pause. I said nothing. “Can I tell you something?” she asked slowly.
I froze, then slid down onto the floor of the bathroom, staring at the door she sat behind. It was either going to be the thing I most wanted to hear or it would be the thing I least wanted. “You can tell me anything—you know that,” I said calmly through the door, like a hostage negotiator. This might be the moment, I thought, to do a trade.
“Oh god. Okay, wait there.” There was a flush, during which I began to shake. I felt as if my legs might never walk again. Finally the door opened. I looked up at her, tugging at her skirt and staring over my head at her reflection in the mirror.
“So guess who I just matched with?”
22
* * *
The cordless phone never stops ringing. I am in Silvia’s apartment. Silvia is not there. I open and shut cutlery drawers and cupboards with fancy glasses from days when Silvia must have hosted parties, not knowing what I am looking for.
My face feels rubbery. I am certain the skin has become thicker, or my fingertips are completely numb. Far below my skin, like an underground stream faintly trickling, I am sure there is blood. But I do not feel one hundred per cent alive. I do not feel like the same person I was when I woke up yesterday, which feels like the same day because I have not been to bed.
Answer the phone, that’s all you have to do to make it normal. Otherwise you are just standing there with that noise and that’s what makes something about this scene feel not quite right.
You need to know that you are overreacting. This does not correspond in any way with the reality of what happened. All that happened is that you went to a strange play and you spent the whole time walking around on your own, and then to a hotel, or to its restaurant, and you could have fallen asleep on the table you were so tired, but then you couldn’t have slept because you were full of adrenaline, and then you went to a party and Mizuko left without you and then—and then—you walked home all the way from wherever they took you and then you came here to where Silvia isn’t but in every other respect it is still the same as when you were last here. Before.
So there is a before and there is an after. That isn’t made up. But it’s just a passage of time, no big change that changes everything.
I let the cordless phone ring. It goes to the machine. The people from Silvia�
��s home leave a message with no information in it, just to call back. I keep checking my phone. Nothing. Her last picture was taken at the party—her in the middle with two friends.
It was my fault. The nearness. I guess it was inevitable.
Everyone, Dwight said, was on it.
Less than one mile away, the screen said.
When she had come out of the toilet stall in the NoMad, she had said she was always getting slightly older white couples like that sending her messages. Or guys who were into lolicon. She couldn’t give me a reason why she had the app, except for why not? It existed; she’d seen the ads. Rupert, she said, had always wanted to try it. A threesome. It seemed like the easiest way to keep him interested in her.
She wouldn’t show me if any messages had been sent between them. She only flashed me the profile: it was Ingrid’s hand in one picture. Her stack of raw diamond rings. The face had been cropped.
I could not hide it, but nor could I get up off the bathroom floor, so I told her, in as calm a voice as I could, that it made me feel “weird.”
She made a face and nudged me out of the way to wash her hands. “Knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, you should. It’s fine.”
“Why weird? How close are you to them really, anyway? Don’t tell them I told you, obviously.”
I suggested we make excuses and leave, even though our food had just arrived.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’ll necessarily reply . . . Not if it bothers you this much. But you need to remember, Alice, I’m much older than you. It would be different if one of them were coming on to you.”
I could only open and shut my mouth.
“They sound pretty open-minded if he changed his name to his wife’s.”
“What? Who told you that?”
“You told me that. Last night. I’m not talking about it anymore. Not after the way you just reacted. They’re not that old, not compared to me, remember. Why do you look so grossed out? Get up.”
“How do you know how old they are?” I asked, still from the floor.
“Duh. It says. Thirty-six and fifty-six. I don’t think you can lie about your age on it because it’s lifted from—oh, well, I guess you could.”
“Can we just go?”
“I left my purse at the table.”
“Go get it—just tell them I’m not feeling well. It’s morning sickness, but just say I’m feeling sick. Say I’ve been sick.”
She gave me a hand, and I staggered towards the reception area.
I sat in a high-backed black velvet armchair. She seemed to be taking a long time. I sent a message telling her to hurry up. I was worried she had sat down with them again, that Walter might have persuaded her to stay. Finally she appeared. “Car’s here,” she said.
My nausea intensified in the car. I tried to look at the road ahead and pretend I was driving to make it better; it’s odd that even imagining being in control of the car can do that. After a few minutes I realised that the driver was not going where I had thought, and where I was mentally steering his car. We were going down, not up.
“Aren’t we going back to yours?”
“No.”
“What address did you put in?”
“There’s a party Rupert might be at, in Brooklyn.”
The driver and Mizuko talked to each other while I sat in silence. He complimented her on her shoes and asked if she was a foot model.
“Do they slip off easy? That’s what they ask the foot models to do—slip half the foot out so you can see the arch.”
I made a face at her like who the fuck is this guy?
“How much you pay for them?” he persisted.
“Aren’t you supposed to be driving?”
“Chill,” Mizuko said firmly. “My rating.”
We picked our way to the front door of the building.
“Lots of them will be anarchists.”
“Right.”
“And the people whose place this is own this amazing bakery called Bird and Daughter.”
I kept nodding as we entered the hallway and descended a staircase towards the noise of people.
“And they’re pretty much all poly.” I glanced at her. “Polyamorous,” she added, seeing my confusion. “It’s all pretty incestuous, actually.”
I felt like I’d missed the bottom step.
We made a circuit and Mizuko decided Rupert wasn’t there, so we found a corner and she bowed her head over her device, her hair falling around it so I could not see what she was doing. I had to look at her and appear to be engrossed in whatever it was she was doing; otherwise I was standing there staring without anyone to talk to.
“Who are you messaging?” I asked dumbly.
“R—” She broke off, reading a reply that had just come in, overhanging the one she was writing.
“Rupert?” I checked.
“Mm.”
When Mizuko did eventually introduce me to people at the party, she said the same things she’d said with conviction in the Italian restaurant—“Meet my new friend Alice,” or “I’ve adopted her,” or “It’s love”—but more absentmindedly, like she was only going through the motions, after which she faded away somewhere, leaving me to fend for myself. The only person I distinctly remember talking to was a guy with plus and minus tattoos on his knees who had a six-month probation job for a tech company and said he knew Dwight. We sat next to each other on a sofa where people were passing around brownies. I assumed they were hash brownies, so I had only a tiny bite of one. “It is moreish,” I said politely, “but actually, you don’t want too much. Thank you.”
Plus and Minus told me that the government was tracking him. “They’re probably tracking you too,” he said when I laughed nervously. “What do you do?”
“Me? Nothing. I just graduated.”
He made a surprised face. “Oh. Well, they probably are anyway, if you’re coming to parties like this. Most people here are on a list.”
I must have looked blank.
“Agitators,” he said. “But even if you just sit tight, be good, and buy shit, your identity is being traded all the time, and with your permission. It’s like dust—tiny specks of your skin and hair.”
The one bite of brownie was perhaps stronger than I had realised, because my skin had started crawling.
“So what do you actually do? You stop phishing scams and stuff like that?”
He looked offended. “Not exactly. The kinds of company that want to hire me are the security firms and defense contractors that make software for the government.”
“What do they do?”
“Track people’s movements, predict future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites. You can get a really intimate picture of a person’s entire life—their friends, the places they visit.”
“I know,” I said. “I mean, I imagine that they can.”
I don’t remember choosing to get so completely high that I burst out of my own skull and became a kind of mist, a fresh dew on every face, but I remember the command Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and I remember someone holding my lips back, exposing my gums, and someone else holding my head and stroking me, and then the bitterest thing I have ever tasted, and then someone else asking me how I knew Mizuko and me saying dreamily, again and again, “She’s adopted me. It’s love.” And then I lay back like a sleepy child having its clothes taken off. Arms aloft, my feet liberated from their shoes. “Skin a rabbit!” I said sleepily, like I felt sure Silvia had said to me years ago when she got me ready for bed. Then I let myself be borne along in a primordial blur of limbs, keeping my eyes shut against the light overhead. Two couches had been pushed together to make a padded playpen. Outer layers were draped or thrown over the sides. I was not certain if voices addressed themselves to me, so I mainly did not answer them. I felt my mouth colliding with hard objects and heard myself shout “I’m falling!” which gave rise to a wave of laughter and stroking. “Okay.” I giggled sheepishly, stro
king my own arm.
I could feel my spine turning to fuzz. I became bodiless. I’ll never forget that feeling, but when I try to picture the scene now, I have nothing. No faces, maybe vague shadows, protuberances and depressions like faces in the moon. I end up picturing a simulation we were shown at school the first year our notion of science was separated out into three—biology, chemistry, and physics—of what the universe supposedly looked like moments after the Big Bang.
When the police arrived at the party, I didn’t immediately put two and two together. Everyone started yelling, “Feds! Feds!” The word meant nothing to me, but they began corralling us in the basement. I put on clothes—a man’s.
Some people climbed out of a small window up onto street level and escaped that way. It didn’t occur to me to try to do this myself, but I watched with detached interest as Plus and Minus made use of a leg up. Someone passed around a cupped handful of pills. “Quick, swallow them.” Obediently I took what felt like three. There were black spots in front of my eyes. A ringing in my ears: sirens or music, or something else. Maybe because I did not try to leave, or because I did not recognise the officers as representing any danger—or because the large and sweaty denim jacket I had put on had mysterious origami squares of powder in the pockets—I was one of a handful of guests taken away in a van. When we got out we were taken for fingerprinting and photos, and I smiled until my jaw ached the whole way through. When they were done I could not stop staring at my hands, which now looked like cartoon paws. I wanted to show Mizuko and have her hold them, squeeze them: How cuuuuuuute. How cuuuuuuuuuuuuute.
The concrete cell was small, and a quarter of it was taken up with a toilet without a partition, but despite this I remember thinking the room had a really nice vibe. Slowly it occurred to me that I was happier there, and more at home, than I had ever felt anywhere in my life. I spoke at length with my cellmates, whose lives I understood instantaneously and as profoundly as if I had lived them—was living them—myself. I lived all of them not one by one but simultaneously. Of course I now understand that I was under the influence of a psychoactive drug consumed primarily for its euphoric and empathogenic effects and was not in fact having a vision of agape. Someone told me I needed to drink water, and so, to reassure them and show my appreciation for their concern, I kept calling out for water, but no one came.
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