by
Tahmima Anam
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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.
what?????
But really, it was none of those things. There was both a very good reason and no reason at all for Cyrus and me to get married within a few weeks of meeting again. The good reason was that we were in love, or at least we believed ourselves to be in love, and for me the feeling was so strong that it felt like the first time I had ever believed in anything. But also, doing something so irrational both fit into who I wanted to be—a person who chooses her own destiny—and yet told me something entirely new about the world, which is that things that seemed impossible and out of my reach, like marrying a man I had teenage dreams about—were actually within my grasp, and all I had to do was stretch out my greedy little hands and take what was mine.
ok this is nice
[...] Right now she was in rehearsals for Chitrangoda, a musical play about a warrior princess. I figured that’s why she reacted to my news like I was challenging her to a dual.
i'm sorry but lol
“I did consider Dante, but the whole point of laying someone to rest is that he goes somewhere, even if we don’t know exactly where that is. That’s the only knowable thing about it.” He closes the book, reaches for me. I feel that lurch in my stomach every time I’m near him. It’s been over a year, and I sometimes wonder when this particular feeling will fade—it has to, I’ve read too many novels to imagine it won’t—but right now I’m still in the swell of it, strange noises escaping my lips as he pulls at my sweater, all the time wondering what I would do if this feeling were ever taken away from me, if he stopped wanting me, if I stopped wanting him, if we turned into ordinary people who got tired of each other or simply decided to love each other in ordinary ways.
kinda sweet
None of us has ever had real power. Jules has been smacked down by his family for as long as he can remember; Cyrus hasn’t even had a family. As for me, even though I’ve never thought of myself as a symbol, I can’t help but feel like every little success is a small fuck-you to all the people who glanced ugly at my mother in her sari in Walmart, or mispronounced my name even though it was only four letters long, or said something casually racist and then said, “But I don’t mean you.” I feel like I’m coming for all those people, and that fills me with a kind of satisfaction I didn’t even know I needed. I understand my sister a little more now, how she always insists that everything means something bigger than it seems. But instead of getting angry, I’m doing something about it. I’m knocking the air right out of the argument, me and my algorithmic genius.
omg so boring
“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.
this is petty but i hate this
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.
ok this doesn't even make sense
Craig rubs his chin. I wonder if he thinks this gesture makes him look older. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it’s great, I mean, I think it’s fantastic. But the question is: are you going to kill everyone?”
Cyrus, Jules, and I glance at each other. Is it the liberal thing again? Is he worried we’re a bunch of socialist murderers?
“I mean, are you going to kill everyone?” Craig asks again.
“We’re not sure—” Cyrus begins.
“You gotta be sure. You gotta be one hundred percent abso-fucking-lutely sure you are going to totally crush-kill everyone out there.”
“We really don’t have any competitors in the marketplace,” Jules says.
“You have to crush the church, and you have to kill Facebook. You’re like a church/Facebook mash-up. You gotta kill both of those guys.”
“I think, realistically, we would get a decent amount of growth even if we didn’t try to compete with Jesus or Zuckerberg.”
Craig springs toward Cyrus and eyeballs him. “I always check for the killer in everyone. The assassin. Are you an assassin?”
I see Jules give Cyrus an imperceptible nod. “I most certainly am, sir,” Cyrus pledges.
“Fuck yeah!”
“I will kill everyone and anyone.” Cyrus’s tone is like the EKG of a dead person. “I will assassinate all my enemies, and I’ll even kill a few friends while I’m at it.”
“I knew it!” Craig says. “You look like a hippie, but you’re a fucking ninja.”
ok this is almost funny
Now that we have a steady source of revenue, investors want a piece of WAI. Woke VC is only one of the funds that come calling, except they don’t call, they send texts, emails, emissaries, and sometimes flowers. One offered to set up a meeting with the pope. Would Cyrus be interested in meeting His Holiness? The only His Holiness Cyrus is interested in is the Dalai Lama, and they will be appearing onstage together in two months, at a conference in Aspen. We have been offered money at sky-high valuations, and when people cotton on to the fact that Cyrus is not swayed by money, they start bigging up their other forms of cred. We are now up to 2 percent, Woke VC tells us proudly. A full 2 percent of their funds go to minority women. They donate to Black Lives Matter. They’re all Democrats. Some of them are even socialists. Would Cyrus like to meet AOC?
i feel like the politics here are somewhat muddled but there are parts of this that are almost funny
I had no idea. I still can’t quite get my head around the sheer number of people Cyrus cares about. Cyrus is a circuit board, lines of connection stretching far beyond what I can see. There are the people he knows or has met in real life, like Jed or Mrs. Butterfield, and then there are the others, the millions who are having relationships with Cyrus through the platform, asking him questions about how they should live their lives, receiving small coded versions of him on their phones every day. I have done this. I have expanded Cyrus’s reach to encompass everyone, and people everywhere are now getting a little piece of him, and he is expanding, like a cloud, covering the whole world. In the meantime, he is also my husband. And he is also my boss. How have I managed to make it all so complicated, and how have I managed to put myself on the margins of this story? There is no way to answer that, at least not without questioning the very bones of our life, and so I don’t, I just let Cyrus’s presence wash through me, and that, as ever, is enough.
ok some pathos here