by Lucy Ives
Maybe it was even true. Maybe I was airlifted out. I stopped freelancing and obtained healthcare. My groceries went organic. It’s the same old story of the same old success in the same old floating world, or ukiyo (浮世), which, if you’re interested, is another name for urban lifestyle in Edo-era Japan (1603–1868), a time of bewildering quantities of sumptuary laws. In the/a floating world, elaborate forms of luxury come into existence because it is necessary that landless persons have something low-key to spend their money on. I mean, here I’m just talking about housing being prohibitively expensive, which is not exactly the same thing as legally organized restriction, but some of the effects are similar. I was also working a lot in that guy’s company, which gave me almost no time. I needed the new money I earned to pay for new services I was no longer able to use my own uncompensated labor to obtain. Here I am talking about cashew-violet-kale smoothies, for example, and laundry. But it went beyond this. When I rode the subway, which was every day I didn’t take a car due to exhaustion brought on by constant access to email, I carried a little notebook, and in this little notebook I recorded the enviable qualities of other people’s shoes. Using this information, I later scoured the Internet. I got really into it. I had whole outfits. I had zero friends but got plenty of joy from mimesis. My posts did pretty well. To the outside world I appeared bright and fluid and ageless.[39]
In reality, the company, a.k.a. TK Industries, LLC, henceforth, TK, had an open-plan office. If for some reason you do not already know, these are the worst. Everyone is surveilling everyone, it’s not just a powerful-on-weak sort of situation. You’d think that at the end of the day this would make things more democratic, nonhierarchical, and so on, but the outcome is actually ambient terror. And the wages of ambient terror in business relations are: elastic factions, pointless miniature power grabs, bursts of autocratic rule, ugh. By far the worst of it was we knew so much about him, our guy, Andrew, a.k.a. Andy, a.k.a. A. We knew when he started sleeping with the twenty-three-year-old who was helping out during tax season, and we watched as she was kept on beyond her initial contract, and we were mesmerized as it continued and slowly but surely she began to lose her mind. Now the twenty-three-year-old floated into the office. She was a mannequin dangling from the ceiling by a wire. “Oh God,” said someone, once it was assumed she was out of earshot. On the subway home we’d all attempt to talk it out. We were still pretty sure we were doing something revolutionary at TK and, pursuant to this, that A. and his partner must have an open relationship. People went to great lengths to explain it to themselves. A.’s partner, a widely admired immigration lawyer, had to know and had to be OK with it. If the twenty-three-year-old was in such bad shape, it had to be the twenty-three-year-old’s fault, issues with her dad and so on, because everyone else’s behavior was definitely aboveboard. Or maybe we didn’t try that hard to convince ourselves. I’m not exactly sure what we said. Maybe we said nothing. Maybe we talked about how thrilling all our opportunities at TK were and how we ought to try our darndest not to fuck this astonishing life-work situation up. The twenty-four-hour access kitchen contained: a lifetime supply of “naturally” flavored Perrier, leaky espresso machine donated by somebody’s parents, miscellaneous takeout cutlery, plus endless packets of SUGAR IN THE RAW and early-industrial silverfish civilization.[40]
I’d go to lunch with A. He was actually kind of a weirdo, with gentle, immature leanings, and I liked him for this. I enjoyed the references to his suburban childhood and the obscure collecting practices that had made him into the relentlessly successful autodidact that he was. I thought: It’s nice not to be lost in the desert. I was now on a road to the new New Arcadia, and A. was my compass.[41] A. was also the road, the wheels on my low-emission vehicle; he was the lush encampment, its verdant bower, the most enlightened thought leader known to man, and here I was at his feet, a clean animal free of disease. Did I dream of killing him, sometimes? Did I aspire to sip his warm blood from a pliable SOLO cup? Num num. It would be pointless to pretend that I did not. This, as everyone knows, is the nature of the civilizing impulse; you understand that someone has to die for any new politics to be born. You just have to have the stomach for it. You should additionally bear in mind that, if successful, you may be next.
I was not the murdering kind, as it turned out, but I did have something of a death wish. I also was very interested in other people’s blind spots: it’s this altruistic part of me that’s meanwhile sort of evil. It might have something to do with problems in my own family. A. and I were eating lunch all the time and I was all the time talking to my colleagues at TK on the subway. Slowly but surely, inexorably even, I came to see that there was somebody at TK who did not know. By this I mean, there was somebody who did not know what A. and the twenty-three-year-old were getting up to in the backs of taxicabs and in karaoke hall bathrooms and in the office’s emergency stairwell and the like, that telltale raspberry flush she wore, his candied, whiskered smirk. This unknowing person was an advocate of the twenty-three-year-old and this unknowing person was also the second-most-powerful person at TK. Let us call him B. B. was (1) extremely ambitious and (2) very clever, but (3) self-effacing to the point of practical self-annihilation, and what this combination made him was (4) certifiably insane. There was a part of B. that was capable of laughing long and hard and even (5) semi-orgasmically at other people’s grief, although he never flushed, ever. All of the above I found sympathetic and adorable, = on my part, an enormous error. It was also proof of how deeply involved I had become with TK, which was increasingly resembling an American family, along with the predictable heteronormative drama, rolling of eyes, gnashing of teeth, constant deployment of irony to circumvent honest, useful conversation. I guess you could say my tastes were changing. B., I thought, is wonderful.
B. did not take the subway. This fact alone suggests that I should have had to specially seek him out in order to make the revelation I was so hell-bent on making. But the thing is, I didn’t. I didn’t even have to try! Space and time were, as it turned out, curved in this org, and for this reason, our occult relativity, B. blithely came to me. I’m not trying to say that B. was a good person, by the way. He wasn’t. Neither was A. Neither was I, or, “I.,” as I could call myself, a true “company man.” What I’m trying to say is, people can begin to care for one another in the strangest of fashions. I have heard that the distinction between geometry and physics is: theoretical versus actual infinity—and subsequent events may have had to do with a category mistake like that. They also had something to do with everyone at TK using language in strange and mesmerizing ways. They always said exactly what they meant, and what they meant was whatever they wanted what they said to mean. A job was “a practice.” Money was “a concern.” Meanwhile, a lot of allegedly unrelated activity went on.
B. and I. went out of town together one spring. Or, I mean, he and I did. We even drank a glass of wine at a special hilltop location. I was discovering in these moments that I really didn’t care too much about my life. I may not have been, ahem, alone in this, but it’s still not a particularly pleasant finding. Usually, the way you deal with it is by finally accepting that gift of MDMA at a professional function. B. confined himself to staring at my legs. He was a superb driver. I waited until we were about to return the rental, a tender moment idling on a sagging stretch of BQE, to let him know my suspicions regarding the twenty-three-year-old and A.[42]
Post revelation, B. surprised me by bursting into tears. I mean, he sniffled a little, which, for him, was the equivalent. B. gazed at me—his long-legged colleague—with a mix of hatred, lust, and fear. He must have gone home and vowed revenge and masochistically shoved a random $2K into his IRA, unforced austerity being his sole vice. It was not many weeks before the twenty-three-year-old was mysteriously admitted to a prestigious graduate program in the applied arts and, with calculated lament, diligently let go.
This should have been the end of the story, but sadly it was not. There were a bunch of lo
ose ends, including my prurient interest in others’ blind spots and the mingled rage and gratitude B. now felt toward me because I had so casually pointed out his vision troubles in sluggish traffic. There was, B. had come to feel, something about him only I could see. And, although I really didn’t know him at all, B. was convinced I had lately joined him at the secret center of his life—a psychic locus analogous to QuickBooks.[citation needed]
I, meanwhile, watched A., who had no idea I—or, I.—was the one responsible for his deprivation. There was no doubt about it, anodyne although the event had seemed, the loss of the sweet-faced twenty-three-year-old, along with her fuchsia flushes, was a blow. A. acquired those physical tics popular culture associates with zombies or tame deer fed on Hostess cakes.[43] He began to treat the office like it was his living room. We saw a lot more of his socks and smelled a lot more of some sort of gluten-free casserole. Maybe A. hadn’t been aware of the strength of his feelings. Subway gossip shifted. Fewer people confessed.
I., meanwhile, if only to avoid the weeping casseroles, began going out to lunch with B. I. and B. had a lot of brilliant ideas together. B. even wanted I. to replace A. I mean, it’s getting tragic pretty quickly now. I. can’t fathom B.’s desires. B. would like I. to dance continuously on a pedestal. I. should dance as well as is humanly possible. While I. is dancing so admirably well and receiving inhuman quantities of adulation, B. is going to run off at a certain distance and get a very big gun, which he is planning to train on her. It’s unlikely that he’ll pull the trigger but, hey, this is New York, and, as they say, you never know. Should I. jump, or must she maintain her meticulous shimmy? Turn to page 231 if you choose life. If you don’t choose life, what kind of person are you?
By now, you should be able to hear A. chuckling in the background. Once he gets control of himself, you can make out his soft and buoyant words. He’s muttering something about how most people never see it coming. For my part, I’m whispering that he’s right, A.’s very right, and, by the way, if he’s still planning on stopping by my desk at noon, can he please deliver a sack or two of miscellaneous opiates, plus some sort of blood-staunching device? A. isn’t the worst guy, after all. He forgave me pretty quickly for having to abruptly quit my job.
See also[edit]
But the story does not end here.
A. called me once, recently, now that we are truly adults, or trying to be adults again, while I was out of town on a vacation slash exile, and he wouldn’t stop talking about this one thing, about how when he walks by a mirror sometimes it will give no reflection. This seemed like a bizarre cliché to me, vampires etc., and I tried to change the metaphor to one about passivity, but I quickly realized A. wasn’t joking. Something had happened since we’d stopped working together, and this something wasn’t good. Nervous now, I hastily recommended A. read that very old novel about the Princess de Clèves. I admit it felt like a funny suggestion, since it goes against gender norms and also reminds you of high school French. A guy wouldn’t read that book! But I. wanted A. to. More seriously, this might be the only thing that can help A. see who he is becoming.
In La Princess de Clèves two people never consummate their passion for each other. I. didn’t mention this novel because it has anything to do with the two of us/them in that sense—rather, I. mentioned it because it is a novel that describes what happens when it seems like nothing does. I. wanted A. to see that not all passivity comes at the expense of action.[44]
Anyway, I’m just observing things: the incredible sociability and complexity of this guy’s life; my love for him and his strange, macho androgyny, which, in spite of all that I have written above, still seems genuine—the love, I mean, not the machismo.[45] I couldn’t save A. and, perplexingly, he couldn’t save me, either. So sometimes we’re on email. We’ll go out for a platonic dinner and I’ll permit myself to look at his hands.
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