by Nell Zink
He had the loft to himself during the day, because Pam remained loyal to RIACD long after business had ceased. Yuval reduced housekeeping to once a week. The kitchenette smelled. The consultants arrived in time to go to lunch. After lunch, they played multiuser online games until time to start drinking in the conference room. Pam spent long hours at her desk tinkering with video caching, one of those pointless programmer hobbies like the open-source BeOS.
In mid-2009 the moment arrived when Yuval’s bank officer made clear that his credit line wouldn’t cover payroll. At the next weekly staff meeting—four o’clock vodka on a Wednesday—he solicited revenue-generating and cost-saving ideas. There were suggestions to start charging for drinks; to double up desks and sublet half the office space; to accept salary cuts in exchange for shorter hours; and to solve streaming video caching without a hardware component (Pam’s idea).
“No viable suggestions,” he said. “You’re all fired. I wish you good luck.”
“California, here I come,” a consultant said.
“Not me,” Pam said. “I’ll work for free. Call it a startup if you want, Yuval. I owe it to you.”
He said, “Any more takers for RIACD’s relaunch as a performance art project?”
“Come on, people!” Pam said, addressing the room. “It’s going to be a shitload easier for you to find work if you have jobs!”
Several hands went up.
“Okay,” Yuval said. “You’re not fired. The rest of you are fired, effective immediately.” He really could say that, because New York was an at-will employment state.
Soon business took off again. Banks absorbing other banks had to reconcile their databases and record keeping, and RIACD began to profit from the crisis like a lean, mean school of jaded piranha.
IN ITS EAGERNESS TO SAVE THE PLANET FROM ITSELF, THE CATHEDRAL HIGH SCHOOL Class of 2010 was of one mind. Education for Sustainable Development had functioned as planned. The girls were facing the end of the world with their eyes open.
Most of them aspired to careers in teaching and media, where they would spread the word that the planet was at risk. Flora’s preference was for direct intervention in its pattern of compulsive self-harm. But the homepages of environmental engineering programs left her confused. Stanford and MIT sounded as though they were training people to be mad scientists. Their students were designing technologies to alter the chemistry of major geological features, including mass fertilization of the oceans, with the resulting algal biomass somehow sequestered in mine shafts for the win. She had envisioned a more behavioral-therapeutic approach to planetary neuroticism. But she couldn’t get into those colleges anyway. She had started out thinking top-tier schools were prizes in a lottery. The more she learned, the more they seemed like real estate—titles available in trade for assets she did not possess. Her high school wasn’t challenging enough. Her extracurricular activities were violin and badminton. Her test scores were good, but she had stopped math at calculus and science at chemistry.
She applied for early decision to George Washington University (GW). It was a private, upscale, but not Ivy League, school conveniently located near the Farragut North stop on the red line. She would get a commuter exemption to the on-campus residency requirement (the District of Columbia required colleges to house their students, so they wouldn’t clog up the rental market) and stay in her Cleveland Park bedroom. There would be no stuffy cell or grungy showers to share with strangers. She was confident of a scholarship, since private colleges seldom charged domestic students sticker price, and she anticipated a generous aid package. Her parents lived in poverty. Grandparents were considered irrelevant.
She saved the financing conversation with Pam and Daniel for an autumn weekend visit to their chilly hovel. It turned awkward fast. Shamefacedly produced and quickly packed away, their tax returns told a story she had never dreamed.
She wondered whether her grandparents had known how rich her parents were when they encouraged her to apply to a private college. They could not possibly have suspected. They had been paying all her expenses half her life for no reason.
“I always assumed you would go to a cheap in-state school,” Pam said.
“I don’t live in a state!”
“What about UDC?”
“That’s a historically black college with open enrollment. It would not be the best degree for getting a job.”
“Don’t they teach the same stuff there as everywhere else?”
“Mom!”
“You could live with us and go to CUNY.” That was the downscale, inexpensive public university run by New York City. “It’s a great school.”
Flora’s frown was stiff and stern.
“What’s wrong with CUNY?”
“Can’t you declare your independence and get financial aid that way?” Daniel interrupted.
“How? By getting married, or by having a kid? Those are my options until I turn twenty-four!”
“I knew people who did it in Madison,” he said. “But I guess it was a long time ago.”
“So now I have to wait until I’m twenty-four to start college?”
“You could just get over your racism and go to UDC,” Pam suggested sweetly.
“I’m not a racist!” Flora rose from the kitchen table.
“You can get a good education anywhere that has a library.”
“But not a degree that gets me good jobs so I can pay back the loans I wouldn’t need if you weren’t rich!” She had assumed they were so poor that she would get free money.
The discussion did not go well. Flora took her backpack from the row of milk crates by the door and ran down the stairs and out the door of Video Hit. She walked west on Delancey, dodging handcarts and bicycles, until she found a place to get a cinnamon cake doughnut and sit and think.
She began with wounded thoughts about dishonesty. Her faith in truthfulness was deeply ingrained, in part because of her school’s honor code, but mostly because of Joe. Her honesty started with him, and his honesty had never ended for her. The honor code merely made it seem like an ideal rather than the defining feature of a patsy.
She thought about how poorly she’d negotiated. Surely there was manipulation or persuasion she could have tried with adequate setup time. But she had never thought of trying. She was ill prepared to lie. She knew little about how to go about it, and her naïveté might be costing her an education. But she hadn’t told the truth either, in the sense of presenting arguments in its favor. She had simply assumed the advantages of a prestigious college, letting the name speak for itself, while her parents had no idea what she was talking about.
If she was honest, she had to admit that she didn’t have arguments. What she had were prejudices, which seemed like enough, since they were shared by the people she hoped would hire her someday.
She pondered her options. She bought four more doughnuts to take home with her—an insane extravagance, at two dollars per doughnut—emphasizing her parents’ supposed favorite kinds. Personally she found them revolting. Pam and Daniel claimed to like doughnuts with sweet, gluey fillings, because in real life they didn’t even like doughnuts.
As Daniel ate his syrupy jelly doughnuts coated with a white powder resembling laundry starch, he felt embarrassment on behalf of all involved. But it wasn’t his place to determine what would transpire. He was broke. His financial power was nil. Almost all of his savings had been earned by his wife. Also he couldn’t quite understand Flora’s allergy to UDC and CUNY, or why she wanted to do environmental engineering in the first place instead of enriching her mind with nonvocational studies, as he had.
Pam ate her equally ironic, repellent, slimy Boston creams, sobbed a little, slept on it, and agreed to pay Flora’s tuition and fees at GW or wherever else she got in. She saw that she had no alternative but to cofound a successful startup and cash out. Otherwise her Holiday-style early retirement plan would not survive her daughter’s education.
FRESHMAN ORIENTATION MADE FLORA SAD, IMAGIN
ING THE ELITE AND DISTANT schools she would have applied to, had she known her parents were loaded. But she dressed up, knuckled down, and got to work as a land management specialist-in-training, drawing for strength on youthful visions of Lake Chad.
Her life was to be a continual struggle to distinguish career goals from the other kind. A career goal should be personal and practicable. Its variables should fall within realistic limits. Its success should depend as much as possible on factors under the individual’s control. Her career goal was to hold global warming to under two degrees Celsius. The appropriate college major for that would have been World Domination.
Many students at GW were majoring in World Dom by another name—international relations, political science, government. Entire academic departments had been designed to equip them to command and lead. Professors encouraged them to think big, since it was freshman year. Armchair quarterbacking global politics was low risk. At worst, it was pointless, and pointless was like having a black zero on the balance sheet.
Flora vacillated between biochemistry and geochemistry. Media and politics seemed to her like departments in Earth’s marketing division, where the planet was advertised, packaged, and sold. She wanted instead to focus on its core business of keeping her alive.
Not living in the dorms, she never got into the student partying scene. She met boys by day while sober, never at night while drunk. By and large, she was not impressed, and they barely noticed her. She was serious and businesslike about her work, and her clothing style remained nonbinary. By putting on girlie things like mascara and tighter tops, she could have made the soft boys in her courses seem manly by comparison, but instead she arrayed herself in opposition to men—meaty, hairy personages of intimidating authority—in the androgynous garb of a child.
She was a closeted heterosexual of a type uncommon in modernity. She entertained childish romantic fantasies about instructors she found attractive, such as an Australian linear algebra teaching assistant who went by his first name, Grady. But she didn’t love him, despite his kindness, attractive appearance, and manly beard. Her soul burned for her lecturer in environmental biology, Mr. Mntambo, a tall, clean-shaven, muscular person from an upwardly mobile family in Pretoria.
When there’s only one guy over twenty-two in the room, and his task is to supervise the others, a woman can be forgiven for noticing him. Competition for academic positions was fierce, with explicit discrimination in favor of social ease, liveliness, looks, and charm. She never noticed that her affections were being played by a system. The system presented her with charismatic lecturers, average classmates, and laughable internet suitors and told her the lecturers were off-limits. The system was handcrafted to fail.
ON A WINTER MONDAY IN EARLY 2011, SHE HEARD FROM SHANAYA THAT IAN MACKAYE would be playing secretly the next day with a band called the Evens. The show was all ages, five P.M., admission four dollars, venue the Potter’s House, a vaguely churchy café bookstore in the Adams Morgan section of Washington. Immediately she made plans to attend. She told Ginger that she would be playing chamber music at Shanaya’s house after her lab. The Adams Morgan business district was diverse and mostly bars, and she didn’t want her worrying. Plus she wanted to shock her mother with the news.
The café had too many tables and too few chairs. She waited a long time at the counter for an order of hot chocolate, her eyes on the band members seated nearby. There were only two of them. She knew teen idol Ian from photocopies stark with contrast, so the middle-aged man of blurred outlines shocked her a little. His hair had come in curly. The frenetic skinhead skater boy was balding now, not bald. It was strange to imagine him screaming, “I don’t drink! I don’t fuck!”
It was strange to imagine anybody doing that. Where had the thuggish tenderness gone in her generation? Boys now were the other way around, stylish and selfish.
They performed sitting down. He strummed fast and sang high and gentle. His imagistic lyrics reminded her of Joe. The man himself reminded her of Joe. Had he lived, he would be almost that age, and if he had lived straight-edge (she found the richly detailed online discourse about his suicide more believable than her parents’ vague lies), he would be debuting mild-mannered new material at an all-ages show, surrounded by friends at a café. It made her blink back tears and smile.
She bought an Evens CD for ten dollars. She walked to the bus stop singing their song “Around the Corner” with hand motions. She hummed it on the Metro. That night as she fell asleep, she imagined Ian coming to tuck her in.
SHE TOOK THE CD UP TO NEW YORK ON THE WEEKEND, GIFT-WRAPPED IN LAST SUNDAY’S comics, keeping it hidden in her bag. She presented it to Pam over coffee just before she left.
“Thanks,” she said, surprised. “Where’d you find this?”
She confessed her deed in detail, urging her mother to repeat it with her sometime. “It would be the ultimate bonding experience,” she said. “Mother-daughter punk rock!”
“I don’t think so,” Pam said. “I would die of embarrassment if he even saw me.” She meant it. Far from attending an Evens show voluntarily, she would have crossed the street to get away from Ian MacKaye. The thought of his knowing she had refused salvation—her gifts forsworn, her jagged edge—her proximity to Joe, how she had condoned his alcohol use, his promiscuity, his corporate career—everything shamed her. Ian was not someone she wanted to be in a room with.
Luckily a rock god is not the omniscient kind, so she could go on hiding from him by keeping out of his line of sight.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Flora said. “You look great. He’s heavier and his hair is falling out.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“He reminded me of Joe. You know? Being so simple and nice, but in control of his music. It made me think about, like, what if Joe were alive? Do you think that’s what he’d be like?”
“Playing the Potter’s House for four bucks?” Pam brought her hands to her face in fists and turned her head away.
“Why not?”
“Forget it. I can’t think about it.” She couldn’t imagine a past in which Joe survived his encounter with fame, much less a future. Yet her own child thought he had been wise and brave like Ian, able to make savvy choices and protect himself. It was a gap in the world you could drive a truck through.
Flora, unlike Pam, could think about almost anything. She didn’t have no-go areas in her head where uncensored thoughts unleashed the clampdown. She said, “I’m sorry. I should have asked you before I went to that concert! It was like spying on you.”
BACK IN D.C., SHE THOUGHT UNCENSORED THOUGHTS ABOUT MR. MNTAMBO. SHE approached him after class. Disarmed by her sexless clothing, he dropped piquant hints about her mental acuity. He bought her a coffee at a snack bar on campus. He asked her to major in ecology and call him Ndu.
But he turned out to be married, despite being under thirty. His wife was a frustrated painter from Bouaké in northern Ivory Coast, and he was clearly fascinated by her. Flora was okay with that; he had a right. Her attentions refocused on Grady. He was older, in his midthirties. He had a psychosomatic medical condition that made him impotent. He was immediately devoted to her, like a slave.
She was close enough to her grandmother to tell her she had a paramour. After all, it sometimes entailed staying out all night.
Ginger was contra. She said that Flora shouldn’t be sleeping with a faculty member and, more important, that no faculty member should be sleeping with her, because in a more just world it would get him fired.
“I dropped his lecture,” she protested. “I’m not interested in the subject he teaches. He’ll never be able to help or hurt me professionally.”
Ginger didn’t retail the information to Pam. Gossiping about Flora had been much more fun when there was nothing to say.
Prospective professional advantage truly played no role in their relationship, which was confined to Grady’s bed. He was grateful for her every touch and scared of losing his job. Combi
ned, his emotions presented as craven fear. Her blushing embarrassment at being naked with him had an intensity that she mistook for arousal. He liked to outdo himself with declarations of affection that exceeded what was necessary or thinkable, officially appreciating the smell of her tampons, the musky odor of her ass before she took a shit, and many other things that she didn’t think were supposed to be sexual. He was very oral and regarded his impotence as a virtue. She wasn’t and didn’t.
After a month, she consulted Ginger about the strange sex.
Shocked at how easily a pervert had gotten through to her, but relieved that she’d hung on to her virginity, Ginger was moved most of all by her careful maintenance of her privacy. She hadn’t changed her relationship status on Facebook or—God forbid—brought the monster to dinner. Ginger said, “Listen. You don’t owe any man anywhere the time of day, especially not this creep. Drop him now!”
Flora let him drop. She blocked him from her apps.
As sexual initiations go, it was reasonably harmless. As education, it was invaluable. She sensed the tight-knit integrity of her mind, body, and spirit. She knew now that she couldn’t send any one of them out on its own and expect nonexcruciating sex. Either they’re all turned on, or none of them is.
By implication, she needed to become more outgoing. She had to talk. If she didn’t perform her mind and spirit, nothing of her would be perceived but her body. The minds and spirits she wanted would never find her.
When she next saw Daniel, she was open and communicative, offering play-by-play accounts of her academic struggles unbidden. Once vocalized, her ambitions’ clash with her existence seemed no longer depressing but amusing.
He remarked that college was doing her good. “You’re a laugh a minute,” he said. “You were always fun, but now it’s like you should have your own reality TV show, Green Girl.”