The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

  “I dunno,” Ethan says to Maddy now. “L.A. is weird.”

  She shrugs. “Or who knows, I might even decide to stick around this stupid town. Arlo says that after he gets his recreational license, he’s going to start an apprentice program for new growers. So maybe I’ll get really rich farming weed.”

  He tries to imagine running into Maddy on Main Street—the Coffee Depot in the morning, maybe, as she heads off to work at an Apple Store that doesn’t sell anything electronic.

  Maybe it’s not fair, but he hopes she’ll stay away.

  Ethan sits quietly, listening to Alex’s voice from some distant corner of the house: she’s moved on to singing a mash-up of Wicked and her pyroclastic-flow rap.

  Vesuvius erupts!

  It’s defying gravity

  Ash fills the air!

  It’s defying gravity

  Everyone, everywhere!

  Defying gravity!

  Ethan looks out the window. The sun is already down below the hills, the light everywhere growing gray, too quickly, like a slow-mo version of what those fuckers in Pompeii must have seen.

  After a while, Maddy says, “I didn’t have a choice. Just for the record.” Her voice is still flat, but less hostile. “I know you think it’s super-crummy or whatever, but it’s not like I knew what the guy was doing. I was hired to say a single sentence, that’s all I knew. Whole thing took about twenty seconds. I didn’t know what it would be for.”

  He nods. Lets that sink in. “Did you know who he was?”

  She shrugs. “I mean, I’d heard of him.”

  “Well,” Ethan says. “Anyway, I don’t think there’s any convincing Zo.”

  “Zo’s a bitch,” Maddy says.

  “But ten dollars, Mad.” The words don’t quite come out as he intends them. The specific amount of money isn’t the point. The point is…well, it has something to do with what he experienced last night, the way all those boundaries between people, between categories—self, others; past, present; here, out there—just sort of disintegrated.

  “It wasn’t the ten bucks, Ethan,” Maddy insists. “It was the algorithms.”

  And when he doesn’t understand, she explains. “If I break a contract even once, it tanks my ratings. Those ratings feed the algorithms, which means I fall off the list. Just like that, I’m not a Verified Ten-Spotter anymore, which means I don’t appear on the first page of search returns, I don’t appear on the second page, I don’t show up anywhere. My whole profile gets fucking buried, and nobody ever finds me, and that’s it. I vanish, might as well not even exist as far as the site goes. And, poof, there goes my income.”

  “You could have explained to them why you needed to break the contract.”

  “Them? Who’s them, Ethan?”

  “The people who run Ten-Spot. Customer service, I don’t know.”

  “There is no them. There’s no 1-800 number with sites like this. There’s no contact information for anyone, no human resource departments, what world do you think we’re living in here? You think I can explain to computer code that sure, I broke a contract, but hey, my reasons were righteous? The algorithms don’t give a shit about right and wrong. They’re soulless, that’s their whole point.”

  “Well, then get off Ten-Spot, Mad.”

  “Right. Sure, okay, thanks for the tip, Dad.”

  The sarcasm. The condescension. Dismissing him like that. Pointing out, what? That he’s old? Like old is something you choose, something you are, instead of something that happens to you against your will? As if Maddy and everyone she knows won’t someday look around and, like Rip Van Winkle, no longer recognize the world they see?

  “You know what?” he snaps. “All that stuff people say about your generation? They’re not wrong.”

  “Whatever, bro.”

  “You have all these expectations, like life’s just gonna—”

  Maddy snaps, “What are you talking about, Ethan? What are you even saying? ‘My generation,’ as you call us, expect nothing, we’ve never been able to expect anything. Not to be able to go to school without being shot in the fucking face, or to learn anything that wouldn’t appear on a standardized test. We didn’t expect to be able to pay for college without racking up a quarter of a million dollars in student loans that everyone knew we’d never be able to pay back, or that anyone in power will ever listen to us unless we happen to work for Monsanto or Bank of America. We expect floods and wildfires and endless wars and dystopian hellscapes, and that’s it.”

  Floods and wildfires and endless wars and dystopian hellscapes. Ethan thinks about the moment last night, when he understood—or convinced himself—that humans wouldn’t be around much longer. He wonders now: Is this what it looks like when people lose their faith? Is this the world that emerges when a society, a nation, a species, gives up on itself?

  “I’m serious,” Maddy says. “You laughed when I told you I was never going to settle down. But you know what? It’s not a choice, because I’m never going to be able to afford to settle down. You think I’m going to be able to afford a house? Or to have kids? I’m twenty-six, I’m more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt for a degree I never got and that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Back in Colorado, I sold plasma for cash. Ten-Spot helps. It gives me back a tiny bit of control. So, yeah. I accepted a contract to say one sentence, and by the time I understood what it was for, it was already too late. You want better? Then maybe your generation should have left a world that’s a little less fucked.”

  Maddy’s not wrong, he knows. But she’s also not entirely right either. It’s like Zo saying she was arrested for speaking up without explaining the context. Like Mr. McCuttle saying that Alex was struggling at the Rainbow Seed School, without mentioning that Shreya Greer-Williams was pressuring him to kick her out, to make room for some other, easier kid. Like Ethan telling Jarrett at the UPS Store that Elastic Waist didn’t exactly like him, without explaining more about how they knew each other. Like Dr. Ash promoting some studies over others. Or Evie Emerling’s audition tapes. These things aren’t untruths, but they aren’t exactly truths, either. They’re truth twisted inside out, turned into whatever evidence you need in the Choose Your Own Reality game that the world has become.

  And, sitting here with Maddy screaming at him, he realizes: he’s got some of his own half-truths too.

  * * *

  —

  He remembers a different hotel. This was years before, when Bränd was still based in New York, when Ethan’s life felt like pure possibility. They were pitching an indie movie studio way the hell out in Irvine, California. Randy had flown the whole team out—by this point, the staff included a receptionist, a graphic designer, a PR assistant, and a crusty old office manager, in her fifties and thrice-divorced, named Flo—to make Bränd look bigger than it actually was.

  They’d pitched a marketing campaign for a new horror film. A stupid movie, set in an eerie forest of living dolls. Randy had dazzled the studio with Bränd’s plans. Sure, Bränd would do the usual branded billboards and web ads, that’s fine, anyone could do that. But they’d also prime the market by creating six straight months of unbranded creepiness: Unexplained air drops of plastic baby-doll parts, pink limbs and blinking eyes raining down from the sky. Ancient dolls with missing limbs appearing mysteriously on hundreds of doorsteps with no explanation (they’d target celebrities, influencers, folks with unusually large platforms). Performers dressed as giant dolls wandering the sides of highways, or metropolitan train stations.

  All of these things would happen before the movie was announced, so that by the time anyone saw the trailer, the world was ready for full doll horror.

  By the end of the pitch, the studio was drawing up the paperwork.

  The campaign would turn out to be a disaster: one of the doll parts that fell from the sky would smack a sixty-six-year-
old woman on the head; there was a dubious concussion, and an all-too-real lawsuit. Several of the influencers Bränd had targeted with dolls had previous run-ins with stalkers; they’d taken the dolls on their stoop to mean that these stalkers had returned. One of the doll performers turned out to have been on the newly formed sex-crime registry, something it hadn’t even occurred to Randy or Ethan to check.

  But that night, celebrating in the hotel room, the only thing they knew was this: Bränd had done it. They’d landed their first movie studio. They were, at last, on their way.

  Randy had ordered room service, and gathered the Bränd team into his suite for a toast. He was freshly showered, wearing only a pair of shorts, talking a mile a minute about leveraging the deal, catapulting forward, infinity and beyond, he was already looking at leases, they’d be on the West Coast next year, maybe even by fall, Bränd’s sensibilities are more Hollywood than Madison Avenue anyway. When room service arrived, it was Ethan who answered the door. He greeted the hotel staffer—a young woman, in slacks and a black vest, her hair pulled back into a bun. The woman handed Ethan the bill and wheeled the tray in.

  Ethan had barely put pen to paper to sign his name before she was rushing out the door. No thank you, no goodbye. She hadn’t even stopped to take the receipt.

  Ethan turned around, confused, and there was Randy: standing on the sofa, shorts around his ankles, nothing underneath. His arms were spread wide like Jesus on the cross. “Behold the new kings!” he bellowed after the departed hotel worker, the same phrase he loved to shout in college.

  The others were laughing—everyone, even the women. Flo had thrown a pillow at Randy’s naked form. “You asshole,” she’d said as Randy hopped to the floor and began doing a stumbling victory lap around the hotel suite, shorts still at his ankles. Everyone agreed: yes, Randy was an asshole. He was a hilarious, unpredictable asshole who was going to make them all really fucking rich.

  Now, two decades later, Ethan sits on Maddy’s bed, her words turning over in his ears. You want better? Then maybe your generation should have left a world that’s a little less fucked.

  Ethan imagines Starkfield post-Maddy: no more evening walks, no more feeling whatever it is he’s been feeling lately. Alive, maybe. Distracted from his own tedium, his lonely slog.

  “I liked having you here,” he says. And it strikes him that maybe that’s as true as anything ever gets. You meet someone, you connect with them. They brighten your world for a little while. They shake you up, wake you up, make you laugh when you need it, remind you that you’re alive. And then they’re gone, and you’re left alone with your own life.

  Which isn’t, it turns out, how you had hoped.

  * * *

  —

  The ones who tell themselves stories, and believe them. The good guys, the affable ones, the ones whom everyone loves. The ones for whom it is enough to not be one of the Worst.

  The ones who aren’t wrong about that. It is enough, nearly every time.

  Ethan and Zo take Alex out for dinner—anywhere she chooses. She picks Dunkin’ Donuts, so the three of them huddle together in a plastic booth, under too-bright lights, eating egg-and-cheese sandwiches wrapped in foil. Alex tells Zo about meeting Evie. Zo doesn’t ask what they were doing up at the Humphrey. She doesn’t say much at all. Ethan looks over toward the bright racks of bulging donuts, more like a pop-art painting than anything edible.

  If Maddy’s there when they get home, she doesn’t make any noise. Her door remains closed.

  Ethan gets Alex to bed, and then he gets her to bed again. Alex sings. She leaps out of bed and does her Janis Joplin impression and wears him out as she always does. Ethan thinks about how, right at that moment, a grown woman is plotting against Alex, scheming to push her out of the Rainbow Seed School, and it will probably work, and the kid has no idea, because how could she? She’s an eleven-year-old with impulse-control issues, an eleven-year-old who can’t keep track of socks or complete a single math problem without distraction, an eleven-year-old who’s been definitively diagnosed as someone who will have a harder time in this world.

  He wishes he could press Pause, give Alex just a little while longer to stay safe, protected by their love, their care.

  * * *

  —

  Tonight, when Ethan enters his bedroom, Zo looks up. “So, they’re expecting a big crowd tomorrow,” she tells him. She bites her lip. “Maybe really big.”

  “That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “No. I don’t know. Honestly, I never expected the whole thing to explode the way it has. Now strangers are fighting online about my arrest. I’m either a communist or a fascist or a narcissist or a snowflake, or I should run for Senate. Also, I might not even be real. And people keep asking me to talk at the rally. To ‘speak my truth.’ ”

  A pause. “Will you?”

  “I don’t know. What would I say? I wanted to feel like I was doing something, speaking truth to power, bringing attention to a cause that matters. Or who knows. Maybe I just wanted to feel like I mattered. But you were right, Ethan: none of this should have been about me.”

  And now that Zo’s said the thing he wanted to hear—You were right, Ethan—it doesn’t feel very good at all.

  “Anyway,” she finally says. “I was selfish, and I made everything worse, and now I’m in over my head. But I’m not sure I want to say that to the crowd.”

  She glances back down at her phone, bites her lip. He checks his own phone, but the only thing on his screen is a message from Randy: FINE, FUCK YOU THEN.

  “Can I ask you something, Zo?” he asks. And when she nods, he tries to figure out how to ask the thing he wants to know. “Is there…Did something…” He wants to ask her how personal the Supreme Court accusations are to her, if perhaps there are things that happened to Zo, too, things she has never told him. But maybe the question is tautological. Maybe the mere fact of asking is proof that he cannot understand. So finally, he goes to his drawer, pulls out the scraps of paper he’d salvaged. The ones who…“What are these?”

  “Those. Oh. It was this idea I had,” she tells him. “For a book.”

  “A book?”

  She nods.

  “You want to write books?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I wanted to write this book, anyway. Except it was never really a book. Honestly, it wasn’t even an idea for a book. It was more of just…an urge. Words that kept popping into my head. So I wrote them down figuring once I saw them on paper, I’d know what to write next. But they never went anywhere. I guess they were just lists, really.”

  He takes this in. A book.

  “Stupid, I guess,” she adds. “But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. That’s what he’d said to Maddy just the other night. He’d been talking about moving to Starkfield, him and Zo. But he could have been talking about so many things: being out there with Maddy in the first place, the note to Evie, all the dubious parenting choices he’s made. And going further back: tying his own fate to Randy’s, deferring again and again to Randy’s judgment, simply because Randy was lucky enough to make everything look easy. All those moments, all those decisions, big and small, which seemed once to make sense but which unraveled with time. Maybe life is just one grand unraveling, like pulling the loose thread of a sweater until all you’re left with is a single strand.

  And then along comes one of the Fates with her scissors.

  Zo smiles. “Ethan, did you really do mushrooms with Maddy?”

  “I did,” Ethan answers. “Did you really do mushrooms with Maddy?”

  “Not with her,” Zo says. She sits up a little straighter. “But with her mushrooms, yeah. A couple of times, actually. Jackie sent around an article that said they’re good for anxiety. So a bunch of us decided to do them together. Just one more attempt to get through
these crazy times.”

  He takes that in. Zo sitting around with her witch friends, tripping her brains out by day, then going to bed with him that night without saying a word. Maybe she felt then like he does now—like something profound is fading into memory. “Where did you do them?”

  “At Vicky’s. The painter? You went to her art show last year, remember? She lives on a hundred and twenty acres out by Langford Road. We all met one morning in August and spent the day wandering the woods and just…I dunno, looking at things. Elaine—you know, the older witch?—was our guide.”

  Elaine. Elastic Waist. Her name is Elaine, and she was his wife’s psychedelic guide, and there is so much in this world that can still surprise him. “I wonder,” he says, “if in some language, there’s a word for two people having the same experience, but separately. The Sharing Room, maybe.”

  Zo smiles. “Or Marriage.”

  It’s some sort of offering, this. An acknowledgment, perhaps, of a truth that neither of them has said aloud. Maybe just that it’s hard. That marriage is hard sometimes.

  “Ethan, I have to tell you something.” Something about Zo’s voice, the pause that follows. The way she looks down, swallows, steeling herself.

  An affair. It must be.

  Ethan pictures the whole thing: some progressive activist dude more in touch with his inner Bono than Ethan is. Maybe it’s some guy she met at the Women’s March in D.C., a man so secure that he’s not embarrassed to put on a pink hat and shake those signs. Or maybe it’s not a man at all.