The horror, I tell you, the horror!
Serena’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, who is visiting from Seattle, joins us at the restaurant, as well. Interestingly, while Serena stands over six feet tall in heels and is always dressed in couture, Olivia is short, soft, and round, practically hidden inside a baggy sweater—of all things in this sweltering heat—loose-fitting pants, and combat boots. The poor girl barely says a word upon sitting down, and Serena is practically oblivious to her, not once including her in our conversation. She even goes so far as to redirect a question I ask the girl into a lecture about how she got into business.
In medical school, Serena used to wake up at dawn to day-trade on the NASDAQ. When the market closed, she’d spend a few hours doing research in preparation for the next day. She always joked that beating the market is really very simple. All one has to do is buy low and sell high—easy as that.
One semester she had a class that conflicted with this routine, so she brought her laptop to the lecture hall and traded from there. It was no secret that the professors at school despised her. Serena, they thought, made a mockery of medicine. I can recall many a time during our lectures that some professor, seeing Serena engrossed in her trading, and hoping to humiliate her, would call on her to speak, but no matter the question, Serena replied as nonchalantly as if she’d known the answer from birth. Whenever I asked how she did this, a look of pure boredom would envelope her face as she changed the subject, usually to sex or sports.
After Serena completed residency, she practiced medicine for only one year before giving it up. By then she’d amassed a fortune on the market and was looking for new frontiers. While I was slaving over an oncology fellowship, for instance, she busied herself building apartment complexes. By thirty-five, she was a millionaire, hundreds of times over. In 2025, seething with envy, I followed her lead by investing nearly half my net worth into a luxury condo complex in Livermore, a town in the hinterlands of Oakland, only to see the real estate market crash to its lowest point since the subprime mortgage atrocity of 2008. Of course while Serena managed to escape the mess unscathed, Rachel and I lost every last cent.
This is when Serena went into the healthcare business. She started a PPO called Serena Health, which became a nationwide leader in managed care. The company expanded to include a network of over 3,500 doctors. Just before National Healthcare became federal law, she sold the business to the hospital chain I work for now, for an undisclosed sum of money. As part of the deal, she was made CEO. Three years into her new position, she’s a two-time National Hospital Administrator of the Year recipient. While the rest of the industry is floundering to control costs, we’re experiencing record profits.
Serena has been characteristically vague about the circumstances of Olivia’s stay, but a gram-search this afternoon led me to an article that revealed the sordid details. Apparently, Olivia is some sort of prodigy-turned-cautionary tale in the art world. From the story, I learned that last year, during Olivia’s freshman year of high school, she had discovered the pleasures of ingesting drugs, especially LSD—a drug that fell out of mainstream popularity after the 1970s but made a resounding comeback in the early 2030s, when psychologists started prescribing it to teens suffering from gram-induced psychosis.
Olivia and her friends began experimenting with daily micro-dosing, taking 30ug each morning, administered orally in liquid form, before attending class. For six months this went on, until one sticky summer night, while her father and step-mother were off on holiday, Olivia decided to increase her dose to 120ug. At first she experienced little more than expansive elation. But an hour in, she started seeing ripples of light that intensified until instead of merely synthesizing color visually, Olivia experienced it with her other senses, as well. She described, for example, how the color violet took on the flavor of salted almonds and sounded like a virtuoso bowing a low E on cello. She also began to see complex geometric patterns. Her couch, bedroom walls, and the framed autographed photo of Elon Musk she kept by her bedside, all took on a brand-new significance, almost religious in nature. She was convinced that when she closed her eyes, she could see the pathways that join time and space. At some point she stumbled upon a trove of old magazines in her parents’ basement. Her father had been a long-time collector of National Geographic and her step-mother a hoarder of decades-old fashion and gossip rags. Inspired by the thousands of images before her, Olivia set out to create art. She took scissors to paper, cutting out countless pictures of exotic animals, foreign and remote locations, new-fangled machinery, faces both gorgeous and repulsive, body parts, and everyday objects. Naked, then—she had stripped off her clothing and hid each item in a different place—skirt in the oven, blouse behind some volumes of Dostoevsky, bra and underwear in the toaster, sandals on the roof—Olivia glued her cutouts onto every inch of the ceiling, walls, and floors of her home. The result: one of the most magnificent collages since Matisse’s use of the form in the 1940s. When she posted photos of her work on her gram, a media frenzy ensued. The world’s most well-esteemed art critics made such bold exclamations as “A Star is Born!” and “The 21st Century’s Picasso Has Been Discovered!”
Christie’s and Sotheby’s fought a bitter war for the rights to sell the house. Eventually, Loic Gouzer at Christie’s won Olivia over by taking her on a shark hunting expedition. The sale price, however, was disappointing, netting just $4.35 million—Olivia’s parents, after all, had paid $4.6 million for the house several years before. The winning bid came from a Taiwanese collector who turned the house into a gallery exhibition so that the public could enjoy the work. But attendance was poor and six months later, he had the home demolished.
Since then, Olivia hasn’t sold a single piece. Unable to repay her father and step-mother for the loss of their home, relations became strained—hence Olivia’s visit with her mother, Serena, whom by her own admission, quoted in the article, no less, Olivia says she doesn’t “know any better than a stranger on the street.”
“I’m laying off the entire pharmacy department,” Serena states.
“You wouldn’t,” I say, nearly spitting up a mouthful of rosé.
“I’ve purchased robots that can store, retrieve, dispense, and package pills in a fraction of the time. More importantly, no human error. Do you know how much we lost last year in lawsuits due to pharmacists mislabeling medication?”
“I don’t know, ten million?”
“Jesus, Henri, you really are lost. It costs us nearly that amount for every suit we settle. Try a hundred and fifty!”
“What do you think it’ll cost your mom to replace all of the pharmacists with robots?” I ask Olivia.
Olivia looks up from the gram she’s been hiding in her lap. “Huh?”
“Your mom’s replacing all of the pharmacists with robots. What do you think it’ll cost?”
“The tasks pharmacists perform are relatively simplistic,” she replies after a thoughtful pause, “something a rudimentary robot could easily manage. No more than fifteen million, I’d say.”
“That’s very close,” Serena says. “Fifteen is the going rate. But I got the price down to fourteen.”
The entrees are served, three large bowls of steaming Cioppino. The restaurant’s owner, Mario, is a descendant of Italian immigrant fishermen. In the old days, each family member would add something from their catch to the communal kettle on the wharf, but today the bay is polluted, and all of the fish have to be farm raised. The soup is the restaurant’s most popular meal. Each day’s recipe is different than the last. Today’s includes halibut, Dungeness Crab, scallops, and shrimp.
“How are you enjoying your time with your mom?” I ask Olivia.
“Last night I heard her having sex,” she declares.
“I thought she was out with friends,” Serena says.
“My dad says my mom’s a nymphomaniac. Men or women, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, she has a taste for them all. My dad says she collects lovers like spoiled chil
dren their toys. She plays with them once, then puts them on a shelf. And once they’re there, she never thinks about them again.”
“He’s not wrong,” Serena says.
While we were in our final year of residency, Serena got pregnant by the captain of the school’s tennis team, whom she met at a bar while celebrating her finish in the ninety-ninth percentile on Step 2 of the National Medical Board Exams. The reason she decided to keep the child was not due to any particular desire to be a mother, but instead she claimed simply to like a “good challenge.” Three months after baby Olivia was born, moreover, Serena proposed to the father because it was easier than finding a good nanny. But it wasn’t long before Serena was fooling around, and soon her husband filed for divorce. The husband walked away with more than twenty-five million dollars and married a former professional cheerleader.
“Are you looking forward to school starting again?” I ask Olivia, desperate to change the subject.
“Not really.”
“No?” Serena asks.
“What’s the point? You’re filthy rich, and I’m your heir.”
After dinner, we take a walk. I’ve always found that a post-dinner amble never fails to help me work through and resolve the thousand small vexations that plague me. It’s precisely these at critical mass that destroy a man. The gnats really do triumph over lions, as they say—always.
When I was a younger, I lived a life of one unique truth. I had my love for Rachel, and I had my career. My passion for each fed me, made me stronger, and with mighty force pushed me straight and narrow. I was convinced that life had a purpose—something rooted in human substance. However, now it seems I have not one but two, three, and perhaps even four truths. I am living several lives at once even as I remain a committed husband and father who wants most of all for his family to be safe, cared for, happy. And yet I also find this framework stifling. The married man lives on a set schedule—filled with obligations, commitments, chores, dinners, bedtime stories, kids’ soccer matches, and so on. Sudden whims have no place in these. As a result, I find myself dwelling on the memory of, if not an unlived life, a lost life—where opportunities were yet rife for seizing. And whenever I surface from these forays, I ache with the sense that to pursue anything beyond my given path would be traitorous and wretched.
While at heart I’m still the same man who married Rachel all those years ago, the conditions on which I strode down that path have vanished. Rachel has changed, too. I want badly to describe her any other way, but for the life of me the only fitting expression is that she’s “getting old.” My regard for her is still incredibly high, of course, but I’m afraid I can’t love her the way I used to. Perhaps that’s okay, I tell myself often. Love is supposed to change, evolve, expand. And yet why then do I constantly fall victim to the charms of women like Taylor?
In so many ways, I admire my dear friend Serena, who lives her life in a spirit of genuine excess. She conquers the world unapologetically. She feels it is her right. And anything she puts her hand to she does better than the rest. She excels not under some expectation or pressure, but because she’s driven from within to breathless heights. Nor is it merely at work that the world bows at her feet. The same unassailable vim and vigor is evident wherever she goes. When the woman eats a meal, for instance, she does so with voracity, consuming massive quantities of food, luxuriating in every bite, foregoing whenever possible utensils in lieu of her hands, unafraid, plainly, to get messy, singing the chef’s praises as she practically squeals with joy. Her pleasures of the flesh are doubly gluttonous. Mere enjoyment is never enough. She must overwhelm, subjugate, even annihilate her lovers. Not until they have committed themselves to her body, mind, and soul will she relent. It’s true—Serena is far more than special, but a paragon of humanity itself.
I emerge from these thoughts to find that we’ve entered a street of badly decrepit buildings with bars on the windows. The sun has nearly set, yet it’s still as hot as midday. There isn’t so much as the palest breeze. Where the moment before, it seems, there had been only expensive cafés, fancy boutiques, and luxury apartments, now we’re surrounded by broken bottles, fast-food wrappers, used condoms, and spat-out gum. The air reeks of urine and filth. The Futile loiter everywhere, bored and dull, the lethargy that’s swallowed them nearly a smell of its own. They glare openly at us as we pass. We can’t disguise our wealth and the symbols of it—our fine clothes, our styled hair, our clear, shiny skin, our hope. And then, somehow, we’re standing before the Anodyne.
“Drinks?” Serena asks her daughter.
“Alcohol is, like, so passé.”
Overhearing this, two bums laugh as if it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.
“You believe this generation?” Serena says.
Olivia kicks a beer can off the sidewalk, a motion that causes her sweater to cling to her body and reveal what I believe is the answer to my question. The first bum enters the bar, followed by the next, with Serena close behind. Her daughter’s hesitation is my cue.
“So you’re pregnant, huh?”
“Ew. You really are a creep.”
“Not drinking, a sweater in nearly a hundred degrees … who do you think you’re fooling?”
“At least one person.”
“But are you okay?”
“You better not tell my mom,” she snaps, and marches up the stairs.
Inside, Lydia is moderating an argument between two lesbians. One is a handsome, stoutish woman with a trace of mustache. The other is abnormally tall and thin, weak-chinned and knock-kneed, her tiny butt barely contained in the shortest skirt.
The dispute is over living arrangements. The skinny woman is adamant that they take the next step in their relationship and move in together. Her partner thinks it’s too soon—they’ve known each other just three weeks. “What has time got to do with anything when the subject is love?” the tall woman argues. It’s clear from the defeated expression on the first woman’s face that this conversation won’t be won with reasoning and good sense. She surrenders. Her new lover, she says, can move in.
The quarrel settled, Lydia joins Serena, Olivia, and me. “Three whiskeys?” Lydia asks.
“Just two,” Serena replies, “my daughter doesn’t drink.”
“Suit yourself.” Lydia pours us a round, which we shoot quickly, so she can pour another.
“It’s been that kind of night,” Lydia groans.
“You just got yourself mixed up in stage-one of somebody else’s romance,” Serena says.
“Stage-one?” I ask.
“That’s right, passion, the first of seven. Passion, coolness, indifference, boredom, mockery, contempt, and, finally, disgust.”
“That’s terrible,” Lydia says.
“It’s the world we live in,” Serena replies.
It’s politics-as-usual on the bar TV. This time it’s Tim Bradford, a former police officer who’s now the presidential candidate for a party called The Progressives. Disappointed in both the Republicans and Democrats efforts to create job growth, the disenfranchised workers from both sides of the political spectrum banded together to form a new party, focused on the rights of the worker. Disorganized in 2024, they got slaughtered. In 2028, there was still too much infighting within the party for them to stage a successful run. In 2032, the Democrats ran Martinez and almost ninety percent of The Progressives rallied behind him.
Now that Martinez’s socialist agenda has failed, The Progressives are staging a comeback, this time with a new agenda. Rather than focus on the redistribution of wealth, they want to turn back the clock on the relentless progression toward more automation. Outside of the party, everyone refers to The Progressives as The Regressives or better, obviously, The Luddites.
Their original message was framed within an intellectual paradigm—namely, too much automation causes humans to lose the ability to think and is therefore bad. The example that proponents of this ideology most often cited pertained to aviation. Due to increased c
ockpit automation, this faction claimed, pilots spent less and less time flying planes, causing their skills to erode, making flying less safe. But the facts didn’t support their case. Airplanes controlled by automated systems, it turns out, are much safer than airplanes controlled by humans. This of course did little to stop the movement. The death of the intellectual argument caused the group to resort back to its roots—populist flag-waving. Now they’re stronger than ever.
“Who the hell would make this asshole president?” Serena questions.
“He speaks to people’s hearts,” Lydia says.
“Turn it up.” I nod my head at the TV. “I want to know what form the next wave of chaos and destruction in this country is going to take.”
Bradford is a colossal white man. The pallid flesh on his face is heavy and without shape, like a hunk of soaking clay. When he turns angry and loud, which he does without fail ten seconds into every speech, debate, or interview, the white transforms into an alarming scarlet. The crowds that he draws to his rallies are setting records. And wherever he goes, disorder and lawlessness follow. At a rally last week in Cincinnati, an entire unit of robotic firefighters perished when an out-of-work plumber set a giant LED screen ablaze. The crowds cheered when they heard the news of the losses.
Today’s speech is coming from Detroit, where early polling shows Bradford has nearly unanimous support. An ill-fitting suit makes his shoulders look nearly a mile wide. His comb-over is flapping in the breeze.
“I don’t remember any part of the Constitution calling for the Divine Rights of Machines, do you?” Bradford shouts.
From the massive crowd, a deafening, “No!” erupts.
“In centuries past,” he says, “men rose up and overturned the divine rights of kings. Just like those brave men who recognized the injustices bestowed upon them, we too must stand up and revolt against our oppressors. Because who will stand for the wishes of men if not men themselves? Are you going to continue to stand idly by and watch as your livelihoods are stripped from you and given to soulless robots? Of course not! There is a hierarchy in this world that must be respected: God, man, animal, machine! For man is imperfect, and in that imperfection is virtue!”
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