Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  Cory stooped to pick up the marker’s cap, her brain spiraling. “We can put a hiatus on charity fundraising and raise cash for our event. Shit, this is hella crazy! What do you guys think?” John and Pascal were looking concerned, and Luis was angling his phone at her. “What?”

  “Your teeth,” Martina said, pointing indicatively to her own.

  “Something stuck?” Cory rubbed her teeth. Her fingertip shone with blood. She excused herself and went to the bathroom mirror: dark red channels edged her teeth. She ran the faucet cold and swished until the water wasn’t pink, then returned to the meeting. “Sorry guys, I just started flossing again. So, I was saying: a Dolores Park event. Big-big-big. How does that sound? Thoughts?”

  Luis pouted hawk-like. “Coordinating hundreds of vendors selling bougie little earrings and knickknacks. Sounds fun.”

  He had a varsity letter in sideline sarcasm, that fangless type of dissent you could only counter with unflappable sincerity. “No, Luis, it’s lots of work. That’s what you do at work. Let’s take it to a vote, okay? Who’s interested in this event, bearing in mind that we have to raise twelve thousand dollars in six months?” Everyone raised their hands except Luis, who skittered his fingernails on the table. “Great, it’s on,” Cory said, feeling his hate-squint spearing through her. “Luis,” Cory said, “if you’re not excited about the event, there’s something else I’d love you to do.”

  “Yessir?”

  “Leave.”

  “What?”

  Cory leaned over the table, supported by her fists. “You’re out of the company. Be gone by lunchtime. I’m not Taren. If you’re too good for us, if you can’t deal with a female authority figure, go shit in someone else’s hat. I’ll even lay you off so you can collect unemployment. Deal?”

  Luis’s tongue skated across his teeth to form a bitchy bulge in his cheek. He knocked his chair over as he stood, collected his headphones and Members Only jacket from the closet, and slammed the front door behind him, leaving his coworkers stricken. Cory let them adjust. It felt wrong to do Taren’s end-of-meeting cheer, where everyone joined their left hands (“Because the Left is right and the Right is crazy!”), so she dismissed them.

  “Oh and hey, good news,” Cory called out as they migrated to their desks. “Pascal and John, you’re both part-time now, if you want. Martina, you get a raise. Good job, guys.”

  That night, alone in the office, Cory yanked her body out of her chair like it was a goat on a leash. She cut the lights, armed the security system, and as she hustled out of the beeping room with her bike, she paused at the printout Taren had taped to the front door, a quote she’d never wanted to tell him was misattributed:

  First they IGNORE you

  then they LAUGH AT you

  then they FIGHT you

  then you WIN

  —MAHATMA GANDHI

  Cory was ready—fastening her bike helmet straps under her chin—to stop being ignored and laughed at. She didn’t even care if she won. She just wanted the big fight.

  III. Looks/Feelings

  Cory was awake at four A.M., with none of the tiredness she’d been defying all day long, staring out her window at the falling moon. A rumpled panel of streetlight rested on her sheets. She was failing even to lie still and be unconscious.

  She got up and went into her closet for her scale and full-length mirror. She mounted the scale, impartial but always unfair—157. So now she couldn’t even round down. She stepped off and leaned the mirror against the wall, hoping its slight inflex would flatter her. She lifted her T-shirt. In the dark her belly looked like a stack of folded dishrags. She was vegetarian and biked everywhere, so she wasn’t morbidly obese, though all obesity felt morbid. She used to be thin, with willowy arms, an uncreased stomach; could sit on people’s laps without worry; eat any and all unenlightened calories. But after her hunger strikes in college, her metabolism had imploded under the rebound of stress eating and dining hall starch.

  Now and then she could convince herself that her very body was a fuck-you to the beauty myth, but it felt cheap to politically rationalize something unintentional. Occasionally she thought she could be pretty, given enough time and money: she had large russet eyes and a straight nose. Her breasts were washably spaced. But she knew most people would call them flappy, walleyed, unfit for photographing, glum rodents creeping underfoot amid the hormone-enhanced livestock. And all of it would worsen! At twenty-four she already saw herself prematurely aging, the shrunken teeth and crinkled knuckles—middle age, which, like the Middle Ages, was a dark age. Without her youth, she’d only have her unsexy principles.

  Jesus, was this really how it had to be for women, this constant dwelling upon crampy, jiggly, gassy uglinesses? Or, equally depressing, was she worse, an anxious caricature of the feminized vulnerability she’d educated herself against? She felt run down by the mystifying hetero economy of looks. You wanted looks from the good-looking; looks were nonscarce, but unfairly apportioned to the good-looking. It felt awful to be leered at, and awful to be invisible. A luxury commodity that, for all its exclusivity, sure did a lot of advertising.

  Cory pondered this, how it all came down to packaging, to look and feel, as she lay awake, hoping her brain would assign her partial credit.

  The next day, Henrik surprised her with a phone call, in typical fashion talking without identifying himself or saying hello. Did she want to get dinner? Of course she did, and she said yes, but she didn’t want to risk asking if this constituted a date. She left work early and went home to repair herself. Tonight she would perform a burlesque of gender. In the shower she used Roopa’s conditioner until her knotted hair felt like something that fingers could conceivably run through. She plucked her eyebrows into neat circumflexes and borrowed Roopa’s kohl and foundation. Her leg razor paused over her bush—she hated the idea of shaving, so she wavered between feminism and optimism before choosing the former. She chose a short-brimmed gray cap to cast a strategic crescent of shade over her raccoon eyes, and her blue shift dress, black heels, a dark lip, prink, sniff-check. In the mirror she looked both acceptable and not at all herself.

  A half hour late for dinner, she vaulted off her bike to meet Henrik, who was leaning against the restaurant’s facade in a white fleece, and they hugged over her saddle. She locked her bike to a streetlamp and entered the restaurant with the serenity of a dryad, feeling herself slip into a dangerous reverie in which they were already dating, with synchronized schedules, plans to move to a bigger place with a rooftop garden, back rubs, adopted children . . . though she’d settle for an open relationship. Or just sex. Even once. Surely Linda’s claim on Henrik had expired after these two years, and really, since she’d dumped him rather spectacularly, she had no claim to begin with. It’d been years since Cory had been close to Linda anyway; Cory loved her but didn’t necessarily owe her anything, and by now she’d probably had a million boyfriends; it’d be selfish of her not to forgive Cory for doing something good for herself by dating Henrik, which hadn’t even happened yet and probably wouldn’t, so whatever.

  They were seated and the waitress came. This was that vegan restaurant where you had to order in a humiliating way. “I Am Transformed,” Henrik told the waitress.

  “I Am Vibrant,” Cory said, “without guacamole.”

  She added a carafe of sangria, feeling girdled with anxiety about renegotiating friendship boundaries, but Cory would not let herself be ashamed about feeling things and saying how she felt. She mustered an ice cap of poise. “Your hair’s getting so long!” she said, reaching across the table to tug on the curls grazing his shirt collar.

  “Just the back part I can’t cut myself,” Henrik said. “Hereditary mullet.”

  She caught Henrik up on her work at Socialize. He listened comfortably, wiping his blond brow and sipping water. The sangria made her feel like she was in a revolving restaurant, a sweet slow headswirl. Her high heel grazed Henrik’s sneaker under the table and she glanced under the table to signa
l that it was an accident but wished she hadn’t. She laid out her Dolores Park event idea.

  “Sounds fun. I’d go,” Henrik said. “What are you fundraising for?”

  “Everything. Any worthwhile cause.”

  “Isn’t that spreading things kind of thin?”

  Did she need to defend her eclectic politics? You were expected to wave only one flag: fighting for animal rights meant you really loved animals, but fighting for animal rights and trans rights and green energy and the homeless and single-payer health care implied an agenda. But you couldn’t care only about what directly affected you, or about “major” causes. Individuals, after all, were minor causes. Educated middle-class white Americans had every opportunity to spin multiple plates. In a sense she did support a single cause: consciousness-raising, rerouting the torrents of devotion misspent in partisanship and narco-entertainment. Why start somewhere when you could start everywhere?

  “No such thing as too thin,” Cory said, “as they say. Can you help me brainstorm?”

  For an hour they whacked around fundraising ideas and a name for the event, until Henrik suggested “Recreate.”

  Cory kittened at the back of his hand with her fingertips. “That’s so clever! Recreate ’08. It acknowledges that things are bad without being a bummer. It’s an imperative, like Socialize. And it fits with the park concept. Henrik, you’re amazing.”

  “What’s amazing is how amazing I’m not.”

  “Hey.”

  You could never tell Henrik to lighten up because he was already “just kidding,” and flattery only goaded him to deeper self-deprecation and made him suspect you were being disingenuous, though he’d never accuse you to your face, and if you tried to preemptively assure him you weren’t being disingenuous, it just proved to him that you knew you were. Henrik, she wanted to say, I like you, just be yourself, you can’t screw this up. If only he held a certain color and size of feeling for her in his chest. Of course, having dated Linda, he’d have to downgrade lookswise, and men were oh-so-loath to. Though there had to be Good Men, smart allies with sane body standards. Henrik was Good, probably. Pushing back her forlornness, she asked how he’d been.

  Cory hadn’t stopped grinning once during this entire meal, which made it hard for Henrik not to grin back. If he were honest he’d tell her how he’d been sliding, having to take bigger doses of medication that he didn’t have the insurance to pay for anymore. Was scared. But he couldn’t take it there, not in a vegan restaurant playing MC Solaar, with Cory in flattery mode. When you accepted a hollow compliment you validated a misperception. All compliments came freighted with uncertainty, along axes of sincerity, accuracy, intention, rhetoric. Trust was an arms race: facial expressions were supposed to circumvent lying, but faces could be concealed, so you went to kinesics and paralinguistics, and still voices were misconstrued, gestures mistaken, even silence misheard. At every word you were judged by what you had the least control over: everything. Most people went with gut-feel, but that was just cognitive priming. Even total honesty didn’t remain true for long, nor, if he was honest, did it mean anyone would understand or care. He wanted to say he was miserable, jobless, and frightened, but the best she could do for him was to treat him as if he weren’t, so there was no point in saying so.

  Cory was twisting her napkin into a stiff wand, waiting for Henrik to speak. “How’s grad school?”

  “I left, sort of.”

  Judging that they were close enough to bypass the decorum of what and how come, Cory nodded and said, “It must’ve been tough being stuck on campus.”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t—yeah.”

  Finishing sangria three, Cory asked if he was living in the city. Yeah, he was staying with a friend in SoMa. Same as Cory! Cross streets? Seventh and Brannan? Whoa, they were neighbors! Who was the friend?

  “This girl I’m seeing,” Henrik said.

  Cory felt a surprise warp in her inner ear, as if an elevator she was dozing in had stopped. She emptied the sangria carafe into her glass, then drank it and chewed the wine-sodden fruit. “A girl? Are you two . . .”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Uh, well. She’s Indian. Lots of piercings and bracelets. Dropped out of Oberlin.”

  Cory’s eyeballs moved forward. “Indian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Long hair? Knife tattoo here?” Cory pointed at her chest.

  “You know her?”

  “Roopa?”

  “Oh. Hmm.” Henrik spoke through his napkin as he blotted his face with it. “I’m not sure what her real name is.”

  Cory sputtered a triphthong of confusion. She looked at Henrik like she’d discovered a colony of insects inhabiting his mouth. “What?”

  “We, uh, just met. How do you know her?” Henrik said in pacifying tones.

  “She’s my roommate. Excuse me.”

  Cory left for the bathroom and returned ten minutes later, eyes throbbing and pink, picking a chalky pastel mint from the dish at the bar before returning to the table. A funny breathtaking sadness tickled at her solar plexus. She looked at Henrik’s right cheek, smiled with most of her face, and laughed. “Um,” she said, “so that’s weird. We’re roommates. And you’re dating Roopa.”

  “We haven’t called it dating. Cory, are you all right? You seem kind of—”

  “Yeah, drunk. Sorry,” Cory said.

  Bitterness was slipping out in little sighs from the side of her mouth. Smart, kind, self-aware Henrik, dating Roopa. Probably fucking. Well, Cory had staked no claim, hadn’t even spent any time courting him. She stopped talking. Someone would die if she spoke again. It would take someone’s head off.

  They paid and stepped out into the round white zones of streetlights. It had rained, and the strengthening wind made droplets shiver on the hoods of parked cars. “Want to get a drink?” Henrik asked, and Cory didn’t respond. She gaped at her bike. “What’s wrong?”

  She turned around, eyes streaming with icemelt. “Someone stole my bike saddle.”

  “Shit.” Henrik looked around and patted his pockets as if hoping to find a surprise gift. “This neighborhood doesn’t seem like—”

  Because she’d already lost, and because she couldn’t feel any worse, Cory leaned and pressed in and found herself kissing against the most unwilling face her lips had ever touched—scrunched, unconverted. He didn’t even push her off. She turned back to unlock her bike. She’d been wrong: she could feel worse. “Let’s talk for a minute,” Henrik said.

  “No, I’m going home.”

  “We’re going to the same place.”

  Cory mounted her seatless bike, balancing on the pedals in heels as she skimmed away in low flight. The night wind made a blue commotion inside her dress. It felt better to go helmetless.

  CHAPTER 7

  Transfer to Transfer

  Nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear.

  —Leonhard Euler

  I. Mode of Failure

  Because it was absolutely urgent to secure new project funding right away, Henrik was procrastinating by deciding whether to call Lucretia. The sex had been terrible, but that was sex’s fault; she was still the only interesting thing that had happened to him in years. Plus he still had the unemployment check she’d forgotten at his house.

  His phone battery had been dead for a month, and when he plugged it in, he found he’d missed a call from Will, probably accidental. He bloodily extracted an ingrown thigh hair before dialing her number. The other end answered, jump-kicking Henrik’s ear with noise.

  “Hey, Lucretia? This is Henrik, from a while ago? How—”

  “Ben! Why aren’t you here?” Her voice was monotone with shoutedness.

  “It’s Henrik.”

  “Spencer?”

  “Henrik!”

  “SPENCER!”

  “I’ll text you!”

  Henrik hung up and was not interested in theoriz
ing about Spencer. He hummed the Davy Crockett theme as he sent his text: Hey you left an envelope at my place when you visited. I think there’s money in it. Let me know how you want to handle. Free all week.

  She replied, lol awsome ill come tomorrow at 8? can’t wait.

  He dropped his phone and capsized onto his couch, which smelled like stale popcorn and cream of broccoli, and he stayed there until tomorrow evening, when Lucretia jiggled at the doorknob as if she’d assumed it would be unlocked. Henrik let her in. She was jingling with bracelets and wearing a black dress involvingly woven with gold thread. Henrik handed her the envelope.

  “Oh!” she said. “This is my roommate’s. I brought the mail in that day and forgot to give it to her. Gah! Flakiness abounds.”

  “What did you think you were coming for?”

  “I thought you were speaking code. You know, an envelope with money in it? Ha!” Lucretia touched Henrik’s arm. “I don’t suppose?”

  “Sorry,” Henrik said, jazz-handsing. “Money’s weird.”

  “Dang! You sure?”

  “Sorry for making you drive down here,” Henrik said, by which he meant Please leave.

  “No, it’s fine. I love the view on 280. Sweeney Ridge looks like big cellulite butts. Oh god, I’m being so random. I skipped lunch and I’m all low-blood-sugary.”

  Henrik never could ignore a complaint, always suspected they were accusations. Though his worried accommodations only came across as flyover-state politeness. “Do you want to get something to eat?”

  Lucretia dimpled her cheek with an index finger. “I’m weird with dietary stuff. Cheese makes my hands bleed.”

  He suggested Mexican, and at Lucretia’s bright affirmative, they walked to a taqueria on El Camino and collaborated on a vegan burrito the size of a rolled-up newspaper. Lucretia could talk without breaking her jaw’s stride; the subject of food allergies led to health, which led to death, which Lucretia argued didn’t strictly exist since consciousnesses were interconnected. Henrik asked whether that meant murder was morally trivial. She asked Henrik how he was doing. “Do you graduate soon?”