Bookmarker tag: meh/style (83 notes)

My male friends proved that hunch right. They were everything I thought they’d be and more. Nothing prepared me for the contagious ecstasy of their pubescent masculinity—not previous experience nor avid reading nor extravagant daydreams. They were perfect human beings to me, godlike because they were limitless, meaning they acknowledged no boundaries or rules. And they were cute, unbearably cute, even—especially—when they were wasted, when they slurred and doled out emphatic affection, put their arms around my shoulders and leaned in heavily, murmured unintelligible words against my ear as they staggered toward another blackout. When the night wound down and we clumped together like littermates on floors or beds, I hoped the next day would never come.

This was a life I’d hardly dared to dream of, one suffused with tribalism, freedom, and exultant chaos. I was like a burr snagged in the fur of a running wolf, swept away at an exhilarating gallop. I would have done anything to be near the boys because when I was, anything could happen—bad things, good things, things I’d never seen or done or thought of before. I loved when things happened. I didn’t feel capable of making things happen on my own, but I hoped to be present when they did.

In a panorama around me, the sky is melting: reds and oranges into inky blue and nighttime. I stare through the surely colour-distorting, anti-UV-tinted, floor-to-ceiling window-walls. Out past the skyscrapers and into the blurred green-grey horizon beyond. My fingers feel numb but my face is hot, and prickles. I log out of my workstation, pack up my handbag and head towards the lifts.

A buzz. He’s at the station already.

Nearly there, I send back.

“My guests!” said the host, now standing once more. There was another empty chair to his right. Who had been there? A man with a mustache or a woman with a braid. Someone with a gleaming emerald ring. I drank more wine. “You are far too polite!” the host said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of songbirds for you, and hundreds more waiting in the kitchen! Try the goldcrest. Try the warbler. Don’t leave until you’ve tasted the regent bowerbird. The Gouldian finches are purple, turquoise, black, and blue. How can you argue with that?” he said. “Enjoy them while you can because they’ll be gone before you know it.”

What the host meant is that we were running out of the birds not on the table but rather: on the Earth. True, just that morning we had lost the yellow-bellied gecko, the North American mountain lion, the Tunisian hunting rat, the African nutria, and the Japanese water rhinoceros. The week before went the spotted dolphin, the reddish arctic leopard, and the subterranean crow. It was a tragedy, but we were growing used to it every day. I sighed to think that I had never tasted any of them.

All eyes turned to plump Tracy as she walked away with their boss, her head bowed a little. The second she disappeared past the door, half a dozen people stood up in their cubicles, some grinning while others shook their heads. Tracy had started working here long before Tian. He liked her, a good-natured thirty-something, though she talked too much. Others had warned her to keep her mouth shut at work, but she’d never mended her ways.

A few minutes later Tracy came out, scratching the back of her ear, and forced a smile. ‘Got the axe,’ she told her colleagues, her eyes red and watery. She slouched into her cubicle to gather her belongings.

The door always creaked like it was in pain when you opened it and slammed shut when you closed it. It made the small break room feel extra quiet and empty. He stood a moment in the echo of the door and tried to think about what he could have done better. Might have done better. He tried to think about what sort of person he wanted to be in this world and how he might bring that about. His doctor told him that he could only control his actions and not the feelings of others. But the kind of person that Per wanted to be was the kind of person who elicited from other people predictable, good feelings.

The cart had some poetry on it too, things picked up, read snickeringly and then set aside. Some people confused reading and literature – they supposed that these two things had a great deal to do with each other. This made for a lot of confusion because it prompted people to believe that reading was somehow the sort of behavior that was inherently good in a moral sense. When in fact the moral value assigned to reading had to do with the creation of the idea of literature, which some people imbued with all the solemnity of the holy when in fact it was a middlebrow bourgeois anachronism created in universities and retroactively applied to some of the greatest works of human history. In that way, reading and literature were the same. Yet in today’s world, reading had diverged even from these modest middlebrow origins and had sunk into some horribly populist activity.

A modern bookstore was perhaps the greatest example of this kind of fallacy. There were no true believers of this new religion, only empty-headed evangelists flogging the idea that all reading was good reading and that anything could count as reading, and anything could be literature, and that any reading was in fact reading literature and therefore morally unassailable, and in this way not merely morally good but also aesthetically good. There could never be a true faithful to such an empty string of logical transformations. Who could ever earnestly go on their knees in the quiet and the dark of their human soul and raise their face up and say to the vast and unknowable gods of that quiet inner darkness, Any reading is good reading.

That weekend, Jamie and I went camping. He had been in the office all month—no fieldwork—and said he wanted to get outdoors. I wasn’t sure that car camping counted, but it was the best we could do, so we drove to a campground, set up our tent on a pre-groomed square of dirt, built a fire in the premade fire pit, and grilled some steaks that we had purchased at the grocery store down the road—steaks that were decidedly not local or organic or grass-fed but came in a Styrofoam tray, bloody and absurdly cheap, the product of farm subsidies that we paid for with our tax dollars because farmland fit our vision of America as a place of plenty.

I heard his footsteps retreating down the hallway, down the stairs. I lifted the next item out of the box, a gray wool skirt suit. The fabric felt soft and luxe, a subtle pinstripe running top to bottom. But when I held up the matching jacket, I could tell that something about it was no longer right, theshoulders too big, the lapels too wide. This had probably been my mother’s nicest suit, the one she wore to court when she argued a big case. I held the jacket and I pictured her standing in front of judge and jury. She had been so full of life, so full of joy. How was it possible that I still had this jacket, and yet I didn’t have her?

We entered a vast windowless space, seemingly a ballroom, though who would want to host a ball in this windowless space was a mystery. The room was filled with hundreds of booths, each with a table and a sign, a salesperson or two shilling product that was at least tangentially related to happiness. A guard at the door checked our badges; only conference attendees were allowed in.

But Nicole couldn’t explain, not even to Ruby, who was her closest friend at the store. (Never mind that Ruby was forty-­eight, the same age as Nicole’s mom, and of a different race. Who cared? Nicole’s fiancé Marcus was black too.) Still, if she told Ruby how happy leaving Meredith hanging had made her, she’d sound like she needed to get a life.

“It’s not that,” said Milo irritably. (Jokes by people other than himself tended to grate on his nerves.) “Meredith ignores me, and I’m as white as can be.” He held up his arm, as if the others might not have noticed his skin color before now. “She doesn’t even say hello to me. It’s as if I’m not even a person to her, as if the truck just throws itself.”

At this, Milo laughed.

She might once have had other aspirations, but her life had taken a decisive turn when she was seventeen. She had run away from home. For a while, she’d lived in her car. Even after she’d gotten on her feet—­found a job, a place to live—­she had struggled. For years, she had been both depressed and wild, self-­destructive. It wasn’t until Val met Liz in her mid-­twenties that everything changed. In the past five years, Val had gotten married, gotten her GED, had a baby. She’d reconciled with her grandmother—­now she and Liz took care of her and lived in her house. Val even saw her mom sometimes—­without her dad’s knowledge. He was the reason she’d left home in the first place. He was the kind of person who’d get drunk with his buddies and go out to the coop and shoot his own chickens. For fun. He also didn’t like gay people.

After she’d left Town Square yesterday, she had spent hours thinking about the group manager job. If she got it, she’d be able to pay her back bills—­she still owed for heat last winter, among other things. She’d also be able to buy for her son, so he’d be provided for when he got out of prison, ready to make a fresh start, train for a career like he should have done years ago (he was smart, perhaps the smartest of her three kids).

Corporate wasn’t playing when it came to unions. The year before, someone in Harvest—­the team responsible for fresh produce and perishables—­was fired for “time theft” after he’d been spotted talking briefly to a union organizer during his shift.

It wasn’t like there was any rush, no matter what her mom said. As Nicole had tried to explain to the union organizer who’d cornered her outside the store a few months ago—­after her shift was over or she’d never have risked talking to him!—­Town Square wasn’t so bad. It was a lot better than the job Nicole had before, in fast food. Her boss was a dirtbag who hit on her all the time, promising to promote her to assistant manager if she’d sleep with him. It was gross—­and more than a little bit scary when she was alone with him. One thing about Town Square was that it didn’t tolerate that kind of shit. (Nicole appreciated Big Will’s thing about keeping his office door open—­it set the right tone.) Really, the worst thing about this job was Meredith, her micromanaging, the constant threat of being written up, her whole irritating energy, the way she ruined their goddamn fucking chill.

He was bothered by what she’d said the other night about his still being hung up on Steph, his ex. It complicated the narrative he wanted to hold on to: that he was the aggrieved party and she was wholly at fault. But he knew there was truth in what Cristina said, although Raymond would probably say what he wasn’t over was the idea he’d long had of Steph, and about him and Steph as a couple and the life they were going to have together.

“I hear what you’re saying,” she said. “I do. But there’s just one problem. All these boxes are going to get broken out by Monday anyway. Remember? What’s the point of organizing them right before we break them out. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic when the boat is about to sink.” She giggled at her own analogy. It was a mean giggle, the laugh of a popular girl after fake-­complimenting an unpopular one.

Val was the type who’d have a hard time accepting that when you’re a low-­ or even a mid-­level manager at a large corporation like Town Square, you have to be flexible. Ordinarily that might be enough to tilt the scale toward Diego, but there were things that made Val an especially attractive candidate. Group manager of Movement was usually a guy. That Val was a woman was good, especially because this wouldn’t be the kind of thing where she was getting the job because she was a woman, the way Meredith putting in for Logistics was kind of cute because it was so unexpected, given Meredith’s girly, fashionista vibe. Val was far more suited to Movement than she was to more traditionally feminine areas of the store, like Customer Experience.

[...] Ruby felt bad that the teacher had taken the trouble to find “early literacy” materials for her—­but she’d just started at Town Square, was still getting used to the early hours. It wasn’t the right time. Besides, deep down, Ruby suspected she’d never be able to learn, no matter how hard she tried. When she was a girl, she got lead poisoning. A lawyer who’d filed a suit on behalf of the residents of a building Ruby had lived in when she was little said this was likely the reason some things were hard for her.

Over the years, Milo had gotten so much advice about women. Diego, for example, said not to worry so much, that if you didn’t care too much or try too hard, they’d find you attractive—­but what did Diego know about being Milo? Milo had tried every single approach—­acting aloof, acting nice, negging, complimenting—­and he still had been dumped and cheated on and rejected more times than he cared to count. He had thought Callie was different—­almost a reward for his patience, for everything he’d been through. But he had been wrong, again. After a few days’ reprieve, a few days of happiness and hope—­he was back in a landscape both familiar and bleak. In his head, he heard, Hello darkness, my old friend. (His dad’s Christian rock band covered that song, except they altered the lyrics to make it about Satan.) Milo knew people thought he was a happy-­go-­lucky sort of guy because he did comedy, but as he tried to remind them, people had probably thought that about Robin Williams too.

The first part—­about the store looking good—­he had followed, but Meredith’s interviews were remarkably good? She had learned from past mistakes? Mentor and role model? Beacon of kindness? What the fuck? Had Ryan gotten confused? It was possible. Ryan’s success in climbing the ranks at Town Square was not generally attributed to any particular quickness or skill, but rather to his having graduated from a more prestigious university than most people in the management training program. (For all its talk of egalitarianism, corporate had a fetish for people with Ivy League degrees, no matter how unexceptional many of them proved to be in practice.)

Katherine was the highest-­ranking person at the table. She had a master’s degree in psychology from an even more prestigious university than the one Ryan had attended as an undergrad. A retail trade magazine had recently profiled her, calling her a rising star and bright new talent. She’d made her reputation at Town Square by designing policies that were worker-friendly but cost-­neutral, and she spent a great deal of time traveling to stores around the country, talking to managers about the importance of praise in worker retention—­how much it means to employees to be complimented, how it’s often as valuable, if not more valuable, than raises when it comes to keeping workers happy. She called her approach the “well-­crafted carrot.” The idea was not to puff employees up so much that they up and quit, but to “make store-­level workers feel that Town Square is a place where they are seen and valued.” She had also formalized the policy of throwing storewide pizza parties at stores where union organizers were afoot and personally approved the language used in the flyers that were distributed at these parties, in which corporate’s case against unionization was laid out in friendly, upbeat terms, with only the subtlest insinuation that any union agitation would force corporate to curtail some of the generous benefits it currently gave to employees voluntarily. She was active, too, in arguing for the company to be a leader in terms of issues around inclusivity and equal treatment. “Especially for our team members who are people of color or LGBTQ+, or for women who’ve dealt with sexual harassment,” she explained to store managers, “working for a company that operates according to progressive values is its own kind of nonmaterial employee benefit.” Then she’d smile. “Of course, these policies also reflect what we believe is right.”

The men with Upstairs Eddie were making a lot of noise. They looked, Bunny noted with amazement, like seniors just graduated from Stanhope, the boarding school where she and her older brother, John, would return in the fall: gorgeous in the aggregate if not individually, white boys with gently shaggy hair, bronzed, golden-furred legs in khaki shorts and dirty running shoes. They were drinking Heinekens fished from a cooler full of lukewarm water, from where Bunny had earlier fished her own tepid Coke.

[...] Some stares were simply from interested people who could tell immediately that Bunny was not from Azerbaijan. Some were pointed but mostly playful: “Hello, beautiful girl!” Some scared her, boys who followed her until she could walk fast and resolutely to a safe and crowded distance. “Monica Lewinsky! Monica Lewinsky!” one of them had yelled, cracking up. Bunny cursed the slutty intern as she broke into a humiliating jog.

Her father considered for a moment. “His view is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s been a gold rush for resources, and that a lot of unscrupulous people are making money in very corrupt ways. Which is true.” When the Glenn parents were together, she sometimes heard her father lament the quality of men with whom he was now expected to engage, and the variety of work he was expected to do. Bunny, despite her sense of alienation from her father, knew he was a very smart man. His bookshelf was filled with forbidding books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Bunny sometimes tried and failed to read.

Bunny had heard again and again of the Contract of the Century, without knowing exactly what it was. Something about oil, different companies working together, revitalizing decrepit wells, blah blah blah. It was as impenetrable to Bunny as the warren of pipes and factories that ran through the Black City, the industrial east of Baku where she had been told not to go. [...]

After they had finished Lale’s food, they watched several of the Friends episodes from the tape Bunny had been given. Bunny loved Rachel’s and Monica’s outfits—so sleek and put-together. [...]

Maryellen spoke again after a few minutes. “Sue found out she had some kind of inner ear thing, vertigo. She had to quit.” She turned down Poirot. “I felt so bad for her; she was devastated. But then she did this travel-booking certificate program they had instead, and she ended up managing a high-end guest house in Bora Bora for years,” said Maryellen. “She married an Australian guy out there. Now she’s retired. Never had any children,” she said, the matter finished. Bunny admired the way that Maryellen and Ted knew so many people with very interesting lives.

Bunny had even come to love the long Repro nights and their time-and-a-half pay, the way she imagined an athlete would love an away game at a distant stadium. When she looked at her bank account every two weeks and saw that $1,072 was deposited there, she felt a miserly happiness. She spent money on nothing but gas, Zumba, Starbucks, and her share of groceries. She packed spartan and sensible lunches, sating afternoon hunger with salted almonds and La Vache Qui Rit. She was always slightly hungry, the hunger forming a slender iron rebar that held up the habitual laxity of her character and flesh. She ate her peanut butter sandwiches with smug slowness while her colleagues went to Buffalo Wild Wings. Her bank account fattened as her body attenuated.

Bunny was surprised at this. Obama was heroic to her, a symbol of the victory of good over evil. And he had gotten Osama bin Laden, whatever that was worth—although after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, it did seem a little beside the point. Frank Turnbridge had said, “Finally, something good out of Obama-nation,” and Bunny bristled within.

“Please get in,” she said. “I can drop you somewhere.” Gulbahar had been beautifully hostessing all day, and Elizabeth hated to keep her longer. She knew little of Gulbahar’s life outside of her work. She assumed she was unmarried—no ring—but she didn’t know for sure. Elizabeth had been amazed to learn that the receptionist in the BP office, a very young woman, had two small kids. Their photos were on her desk; she had first assumed they were her younger siblings. Elizabeth was constantly being surprised by the revealed information of people’s lives.

Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??

After the blows came kicks sometimes. With mud-caked boots. Drawing blood from a broken nose that never repaired right, from split lips and knocked-out teeth. She should have feared death but she didn't. In the moments when Daniel appeared ready to kill her, all thought ceased, and she retracted into the shell of her arms, saw splinters of light, spinning walls, felt like a child on a merry-go-round thrust off and ready to hit the floor. Sometimes, at the crescent of raw fear, she felt free, like she soared. The pain came later.

How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she'd seen her father's face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.

[...] You're not like other girls, he says, and I wind the words tight around me, a cape. The world is full of other girls - shiny-haired, giggle-glowing, simultaneously pure and sex-enthralled, groups of them, worlds of them, walking in community, writhing under club lights, running through parks. But if he says he doesn't like other girls, if I am not an "other girl," he will be mine, not theirs.

Except that I know deep down that I am other girls. They spin in me and around me. I am of them: my coworker who has been wearing the same lipstick shade, Barely Legal, every day since some guy leaned over the counter and complimented her on the color. [...] Sasha who is no longer my best friend, because her boyfriend told her he thought she should dress more like me [...] and so she realized I was not an other girl to him or that she was not a special girl, a chosen girl, or that all the categories collapse at the behest of the men who make them and that it is just easier to pretend that we have any control in the first place. Control is pushing me away.

[...] It wasn’t just Handler’s politics that repelled her, it was the entire ideology these life-hacking white boys espoused. Unable to explain their privilege by any other means, they had convinced themselves and others that everything that had landed in their laps had landed there not through basic structural imbalance but through some sort of philosophy. Tech-bros weren’t overpaid and over-lauded because they’d had everything handed to them on a plate, went the accepted wisdom, but because they’d focused, or lived their vision, or actualised. Because they’d done it, anyone could do it. Because anyone could do it, anyone who didn’t do it had only themselves to blame.

‘OK,’ said Hugo as the car eased up to the kerb and he took in the scene, ‘I’m seeing an ambulance.’

Teddy didn’t look at the ambulance but instead checked his tablet for news of it.

‘I’m not seeing anything that would suggest an ambulance,’ he said.

‘I’m literally looking at the ambulance, Teddy.’

Teddy tapped around. ‘Looking at it doesn’t tell us anything,’ he said.

‘It tells us it fucking exists,’ said Hugo.

‘Right. An ambulance exists. I could have told you that without seeing one, no? It’s irrelevant. That ambulance could just be there as a matter of protocol. Visual confirmation of its presence is, like, literally useless at this point.’

‘Maybe we should briefly speculate,’ said Hugo.

[...] “How are you with positive feedback? Because I don’t give it.” That’s fine: I had a Korean piano teacher who was not one for positive reinforcement; plus, my mom’s Chinese. I avoided alluding to Amy Chua because I did not believe I had a tiger mother; not once did Mom (or Dad) ask to see my report card. (Although they did find a way to comment on all other parts of my life—how I chewed at the wrong pace or smiled at the wrong width—I was determined to excel at everything so they would have méi huà jiǎng, a phrase used when something was so good, there would be no words speak.) [...]

ALL I WANTED when I was a child was for my parents to pay attention to me. They did not have time to play with me, certainly never during the week, so I spent my time playing by myself, flipping through my mom’s GRE books, doing logic puzzles, reading, planning, and waiting for Saturdays. I would beg my parents to take me out. Anywhere. I did not care—laundry, groceries, post office, though something preferably not errands. I loved our local zoo and children’s garden. “Saturday I’ll take you,” Mom would sometimes reply at night after an extra-long day, during which she cooked, cleaned, worked, studied, and often sewed new clothes for me from fabrics she had bought on sale. Saturday morning would come. I’d jump out of bed.

“Mommy! What time are we going to the zoo?”

Silence.

“Mommy?”

Silence.

“Mom? You said you would take me to the zoo today—”

“We’re not going.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“No reason.”

“But why don’t you want to?”

“No reason!” I could not understand why she was getting mad and shouting at me when she was the one who broke her word. “Stop bothering me!”

Not a day went by at Carbon when I wouldn’t have a fleeting thought about how I had achieved a childhood dream of mine. Mom’s and Dad’s tongues were sharper than knives, and often I felt like their honing steel, but their hearts were—and have always been—softer than tofu: they put everything into giving me a shot at the American dream, the one and only way I saw and felt their love. Even when I did not have the time or appetite to eat lunch, which was most days, and even during the period in which I was bingeing, I needed the psychic comfort of having the dumplings there at my desk, just in case. My orders expanded to include shumai and hargow and jiaozi but no wontons. Hated wontons. I kept ordering and ordering and wasted a lot of food. I had gone from free to reduced to regular to overindulgent lunch. I would think of my mom, whose father’s rule at mealtime was never to leave a grain of rice uneaten on the plate; and of my dad, who would stay out past midnight delivering Domino’s pizzas during icy, snowy Midwest winters, in hopes of more quarters in tips; and of myself, again, my thoughts returning as guilt and self-loathing, so nauseating were the emotions they would only make me want to binge more.

[...] Spending time with open, optimistic people reminded me that it might be possible to fix some of what was broken in our country - particularly the deep divisions between the rich and poor and between those at the center at those at the margins. I felt renewed and excited. I remembered why I loved tech. When I got home I felt, more than ever, committed to making a difference through my work.

The train took forever. I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel to shower. At last, we were off the train and walking to the hotel. Hotel shower, here I come, I thought.

During our courtship, I was traveling to China for Kleiner all the time. So we could spend time together, Buddy joined me. We were so in love. One night after dinner, just six weeks after we’d met, he took me to the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Shanghai. A band was playing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” How funny, I thought. That’s one of our favorite songs. And then Buddy was getting down on one knee and opening a ring box.

For years, I’d tried to believe in the story of Kleiner as a place where we were really trying to help entrepreneurs to build awesome companies and products. I’d believed that we were this team of people working together and that we were trying to be missionaries, not mercenaries. But eventually I’d come to see all that talk as a big lie. My parents raised me to believe that the world was a meritocracy, that if you worked hard enough you could get ahead. But that wasn’t true at Kleiner. It just wasn’t fair.

In the wake of the verdict, I just wanted to hide, but in the months after the trial, I knew it would be good for reddit if I did a little bit of press. In April, Katie Couric sat down in our offices to interview me, even though I’d turned her down at first. Initially I didn’t want to do any video, but Katie was visiting her daughter at Stanford and asked to meet with me, and we got along well. She seemed so nice and genuinely empathetic, and she even shared some of her personal experiences with bias in journalism across her entire career. She was warm and professional, so I agreed to my first on-camera interview. I was very tightly wound and found it hard to relax, but she was fair and professional. I respected her and thought the interview went well.

And so we left town on our first trip for fun in ages. For the first time in years, there were no calls scheduled, no emails to return, and no emergencies to handle. We went to Maui to see Lori, my old friend from Google. Our daughter loved Hawaii so much—from her first taste of shave ice to sunset hikes on the beach—and Buddy and I loved being on the beach, watching her frolic in the surf. The stress of the trial, the miscarriage, and all the other crises of the past few years had taken a toll on our marriage. I didn’t know what would happen with us. But I did know that, whatever happened, sitting together on the sand watching our little girl laughing in the sun would give us a wonderful memory.

Upstairs in my tiny apartment, I pull a small bag of cocaine from the freezer and cut out a line, then suck the powder up my nostrils. The drugs lace into my blood. I lean back on my cheap blue sofa and stare at the white ceiling. For a moment, just a moment, the man on fire is gone and there is nothing in my mind at all. For a moment, I am cold, still, a cadaver on a silver autopsy table.

But out here, out west, there are endless hours of commuting, constant emails and notifications, top secret projects, impossible deadlines. Whether you’re a Believer or not, the very pressure of the atmosphere in San Francisco changes you, molds you, shapes you into a new breed of worker. It has changed me.

I pull out my phone and press a few buttons. Two minutes later, a black car with tinted windows pulls up. I slide into the back seat, and the driver navigates the steep hills of the city. The black hole hangs above the seat beside me.

Outside, the fog is heavy, dark, thick. I still haven’t gotten used to it. The mist makes the streets look eerie, haunted, unreal.

Today I write a report on how to capture and keep people’s attention online: how to leverage techniques first used on gamblers and how to appeal to our human love of games to encourage a user to click the buy button for increased gratification and keep them coming back again and again and again. I write about the colors of buttons, the optimal utilization of text, where the eye tends to land on a screen, how to subtly scam the human into being tracked, into the sales funnel, as if through a chute, like a cow on the way to slaughter, to the right place, to the right action, at the right time.

“Cassie?” she says in a soft tone, her accent making my name sound more beautiful than it is.

My shoulders tense. I can’t have a single moment of peace in this office, no place is safe.

The door swings shut behind her. A wave of nausea hits me. I’d spent weeks on the project. The work was good, I know it was. But for an instant, my reality wavers: maybe I am terrible, maybe I don’t deserve to be here, maybe I am a nothing.

Above us, the very galaxies rotate and collide. Stars are born and die. The whole of the universe breathes and expands. Suddenly I can see the disparity so clearly—the men bathing in the river, and me in the bathroom, holding a porcelain plate, always failing.

Once, walking the path along the bay, I saw a family of ducklings paddling after their mother. I stopped and watched as they neared the water’s edge. For a moment, I felt chosen by a greater force, as if a hand of light had reached through the clouds to reveal this miracle of life specifically to me. I couldn’t take my eyes off those baby ducks, their small hearts beating new and wild in the world.

Out of nowhere a crow descended and snatched one of the babies. It didn’t look real, but it was: the duckling in that black beak, in the air, then slammed against a rock until it went limp, the ruthlessness of nature horrifying me.

The office churns on around me. The receding water reveals: the bones of fish, rotting wood, empty chip bags, bright crushed soda cans. It feels good to see ugliness on the otherwise immaculate campus, where everything is polished to a sheen. The truth of the world bares itself when the tide goes down: devoured, used, rotting.

Now, meaningless conversations buzz around me about softball leagues, Pilates, bridal parties, tee times, electric cars, protein powders, stock options.

I pull out my pen and paper. In most meetings with the CEO, we are forbidden from looking at phones or laptops. We are only meant to gaze upon each other, our minds bursting with new and innovative ideas, data exchanging through the air between us.

Jealousy reared up in my chest at a series of scenes my mind created of him with this woman: mornings in bed together, drinking coffee in the kitchen, him with his arm wrapped around her waist. A woman with an eyeless swirling whorl for a face perched on a lithe body with perfect breasts. I hated the thought of their intimacy.

The city wears away at all of us, wrenching open mouths full of a rage that explodes out of us, turns us into self-immolators or sacrifices to commuter trains or people who relentlessly scream our pain into the night.

“Right,” I said politely, going into the kitchen and pouring myself a huge vodka. [...]

She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor.

[...] The spring of his sophomore year, he began to read from feverish loneliness, a loneliness he began to fear would be permanent. After all, if someone like him, wasn't happy in college, where and when would he be happy? His disappointment and isolation made him bitter, and he judged the world around him harshly, with the too-broad strokes of a crank. [...]

[...] He had wondered if everybody took the quality they had and treated it as the most important thing - used it as a basis for feeling superior to others.

[...] She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her hands on. Maybe, it struck her, the issue all these years had been purely linguistic, maybe her mother had shut down her attempts at conversation only because they were expressed in a language that she could, at best, speak haltingly, a language in which she inevitably appeared less intelligent than she really was.

[...] The obvious issues with her outfits started coming up, that her bra straps were visible beneath the straps of her tank top, that the pants she wore when going out were too low-rise, but what bothered her mother often had less to do with how revealing her clothes were than with the strange ideas of style they seemed to involve, for example the ripped, intentionally distressed jeans she’d begun wearing, which her mother found especially offensive. Her mother would claim the jeans made her look poor, like she didn’t have anyone to take care of her, and her insistence that what her mother found ugly or ridiculous was in fact stylish only seemed to confirm her sense that her daughter was drifting away from her, falling under the sway of powerful, obscure, occult influences in the outside world. The only clothing her mother was still buying for her by the time she graduated from college was underwear⁠—maybe she assumed there was no such thing as style when it came to underwear⁠—and even after Navini had started working full-time her mother would furtively inspect her bras and panties whenever she did the laundry, taking note of all the fraying pairs she saw and then going out later to buy replacements, leaving them for Navini to find on her bed or dresser. Navini had found the heart to halt this practice only after the end of her first year in New York, confessing finally that she hardly wore the underwear her mother got her, that it wasn’t the kind of thing she or her friends wore these days. Her mother took the rejection in stride, but in retrospect the disclosure had come to seem needlessly cruel, and maybe it was for this reason, seeing all the tourists with their shopping bags in Midtown a couple of days earlier, that she’d decided to take her mother shopping during her visit, not just because it would be a way to spend time indoors, away from the cold, but also because it felt like a way of making amends, especially if it was her money they spent this time. She would help her pick out a few nice, stylish, more expensive items, some trousers and sweaters, an elegant coat to replace the ugly parka with the Scotiabank logo she’d gotten for free years before, things she could take back to Scarborough and wear proudly around the neighborhood, telling people they were gifts from her daughter in New York. It was true that her mother had never liked receiving gifts from her children, that she considered them a waste of money, but the more Navini considered it, the more drawn she was to playing the role of the hardworking, magnanimous daughter, the grown-up child who bought her working-class mother things she’d never been able to afford. She’d shared the idea hesitantly and her mother had, after some resistance, seemed genuinely moved, taking her by the hand and telling her she’d accept the gift proudly, that she’d be so happy to wear something that her daughter had bought her with her own hard-earned money.

[...] The most beautiful woman in the world had become, after some years, the woman she found most beautiful, and the woman she found most beautiful had become, after a while, merely beautiful, merely nice-looking, turning, eventually, around the time Navini was sixteen or seventeen, into just another middle-aged Tamil woman in the neighborhood, just another aging immigrant whose appearance was unworthy of remark.

The metamorphosis was this: I was no longer the awkward new kid at school with the smelly lunchbox. I had taken the heaviness of my childhood—the story of my parents and their exile and those years above the pharmacy and all the striving I had to swallow—and I had turned it into fire-breathing. I was clever and awesome and, despite my less than stellar performance in Dr. Stein’s lab, beginning to understand my powers. [...]

The wedding was two hours outside of Boston in a bookshop that used to be a sawmill. We rented a car and Cyrus drove and we listened to Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” which put me in a very somber mood even though I was wearing my most cheerful outfit, a red tunic which was one half of a matching set my mother’s cousin had sent from Bangladesh. Cyrus was dressed in a not dissimilar shaped shirt with a small round collar and a navy waistcoat.

We pulled over at a rest stop and Cyrus unpacked two triangular-shaped rice balls he called Onigiri. He was always making me taste things—mostly Japanese things—I’d never heard of. He unwrapped one and showed me how to put the seaweed around it so it looked like a large samosa. It was delicious, filled with pickles and sour plums. As I plucked off a piece of rice that had stuck to the corner of my mouth, I felt his hand cradling the back of my neck, and then he was hovering over me, and I can’t remember which of us leaned in first, but soon we were kissing, and a little sound escaped from my mouth, a noise that appeared to originate elsewhere, deep down inside where my brain couldn’t reach.

“If we’re not spending anything on customer acquisition or marketing, why is our burn so high?” Cyrus asks.

“Burn is better than churn,” Rupert says.

Churn, I am told, is just not the latest fad in cultured butter but the number of people who sign up, then abandon, the platform. In our case, once they’ve asked the platform to give them a ritual, they’re hooked, perpetually asking it more questions, coming back daily and sometimes multiple times a day to see what their friends are doing, posting photos, commenting on other people’s rituals, and in general just hanging around like they have nothing better to do than to sit around not worshipping God.

She spends marketing dollars we don’t have on T-shirts for the whole team. WAISER, they say, with the three-circle logo underneath. I wear mine till it nearly dies. Destiny is magnificent; just looking across the room at her gives me a thrill. We stick to our eleven a.m. donut habit and high-five each other all day long.

Cyrus is prepared for this request, and he knows how to play to his audience. “Well, we created rituals for seven hundred funerals yesterday,” he says. “Thousands of weddings, birthdays, initiations, baptisms, commitment ceremonies, graduations. Every part of the human life cycle is touched by WAI.”

“Sayonara, church,” Craig says, waving his hand and bidding farewell to millennia of organized religion.

“I wish I could, but I have to get to class. I’ve done maybe half the reading. The only thing I have going for me is my punctuality and attendance.”

“I doubt that,” Sam said. Sadie was one of the most brilliant people he knew.

Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.

But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?

It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.

Martin exits I-89 before he needs to and progresses town by town. He keeps pulling over to eyeball a fiery spruce or an outcropping of mica, admire quaint inns with ivy wreathed around their VACANCY signs and crumbling breweries offering hard apple cider tastings. He’s eager to reach Tunbridge, but knows anticipation is the greatest pleasure. He stops to buy a mason jar of corn whiskey from a sweet old man on a porch, thinking how happy he’ll be once he reaches Lola and Dot’s barn. Then, realizing his spirits are at that peak where they’re in danger of toppling over into confusion or sadness, he drinks two beers in a gloomy pub. The people here are not part of the world of ivied inns and apple cider tastings; they’re leathery and anonymous, faces raised mutely to the TV, and Martin feels comfortable among them: alone and unseen.

[...] Dot, for her part, had been cowed by Martin’s longstanding friendship with Lola, whose moods she was still trying to interpret. During their brief early breakup, Lola had sat for hours on Martin’s fire escape in the hideous frilly nightgown inherited from her hated mother, smoking like a junkie in recovery, enumerating all of Dot’s microscopic flaws: she was insecure about her grammar, she under-tipped, she made fun of the acting in Lola’s beloved Ozu films. Martin defended Dot: “She’s the only person you’ve ever dated who gets up before noon and goes to a job every day. Plus, those lips, that ass.”

“She was riding in Marge Hasselbeck’s truck,” Lola says. She pauses for a moment to stare at Dot’s back. “Did you meet her at Ginger’s birthday? Lives about a mile down the road. Our closest neighbor. And her son looks, I swear, the spitting image of Julyana: all otherworldly and translucent. Unfortunately, he’s a real moron. This little boy, I mean.” (Julyana was a drag queen, videographer, and fire eater Martin and Lola had been vaguely friends with a million years ago.) [...]

This was all a lead-up to trying to get Julie to agree to spend time with John for free. If famous Hollywood actresses were paying to see him and willing to do just about anything to fuck him, then clearly he was a sought-after man. Only the most superficial dum-dum of dum-dums focused on the glut of his gut that hung over his belt like a fanny pack, and the receding hairline, and his sunken eyes and sloping forehead and yellowing brittle nails and overall repulsive personality! Couldn’t Julie see? He was a dreamboat on the q.t.! Only a fool would decline a “free” dinner at a Michelin three-star restaurant with him.

Julie could endure being treated like a stupid child, but what she couldn’t tolerate was when these men got it into their heads that they were actually lovable. If she couldn’t bring herself to love extraordinary men who actually contributed to cultural history, who turned their creepy sexual obsessions with women into art, then what made these losers think she could love them? They who contributed nothing and were part of a power structure that benefited the rich and stole from the people—the goddamn people!—by which she meant her parents and the families she grew up with, not these men who paid for every aspect of their personality, who couldn’t get off unless there was an element of coercion. Julie loathed the class of rich, untalented men who felt entitled to purchase anything at all, including human connection, but what could she do? She couldn’t open jars on her own. She looked like someone who made a certain kind of man feel strong and capable, which wasn’t much of a feat: you just had to be skinny in that way that didn’t look like it came from deprivation or too much time at the gym and have big doe eyes and long lashes, a tiny but full rosebud mouth, rosy cheeks, and soft skin—that was it! It was nothing that couldn’t be bought or passed down genetically (and all things passed down “genetically” had to do with intergenerational consolidation and hoarding of power, money, and resources anyway). The more difficult thing was when a woman successfully adjusted her personality over time to remain interesting and intriguing and nonthreatening without ever revealing needs of her own.

The third time they met, she let him fuck her without a condom. Just pull out and don’t come inside me, okay? He came on her stomach and then told her all the things he couldn’t express the year before at a two-day ayahuasca ceremony in a hippie port town in the Olympic Peninsula. There had been so many middle-aged white people there, sobbing and speaking earnestly to an oily, lizardlike creature they had seen emerging out of their outstretched arms, but Merv couldn’t conjure up any kind of creature and could only sit there in an unnaturally stiff position, frozen with paranoia that maybe someone in the group recognized him and pitied him, for he was alone and hadn’t come with a partner or even a friend. Afterward, he decided to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife. They never got formally remarried, but they had a non-legally-binding commitment ceremony off the Amalfi Coast, and one month into being a changed man, he went back to his old standby, the online marketplace for “high-end escorts and modern-day courtesans.” He instantly went into a euphoric high followed by a flattening numbness—how many juicy tits and round bums could a guy see in a row? It all became as tasteless to him as caviar, literal caviar, he revealed to Julie. He yearned to taste something for the first time, to return to that childlike state of being guilelessly open to the world, before we armored ourselves against disappointment and danger. He wanted, essentially, to feel again.

Merv wasn’t afraid of Julie ruining him. He had gotten to his current level of notoriety without ever being stalked, without being dragged into any kind of public dispute. The worst thing that had ever been written about him, as far as Julie could tell, was a blog post on his love life: “Hopelessly Romantic or Hopelessly Grim?” It was badly written and crammed full of clickbaity sentences about Merv’s divorce and the steady stream of beautiful but unusual women he dated since her. It made him seem boyish and harmless, and the comments underneath the story were filled with young women thirsting not just after him but after what he represented—a kind of elusive cool that was easy to worship and project onto. Julie thought of herself as different from those women, but at her core she believed what they believed. If she could only walk into a place with Merv, be known as his, all her problems would go away. Other people’s envy was the only salve against inner turmoil. It was. It had to be.