Cult Classic(31)

“One more time?”

“Yes,” confirmed Vadis, “have been.”

I had a flash of running into Amos on the street. Hello, Stranger.

“This has been happening since Friday night,” I said.

Clive looked at Vadis, who nodded.

“It’s working a bit faster than we’d imagined, which is great.”

“And I’m the hurricane?”

“You’re the hole,” said Vadis, “the eye of the doughnut.”

“You’re our case study, our model.”

I put my head on the table and groaned. I watched the Magritte painting, waiting for all those men to move. Had I sensed them being shooed in my direction? Maybe if I was more in tune with my physiology, one of those people who quit social media because of the dopamine rush, I would’ve known.

“When did you decide I was the hole?”

“At the reunion dinner before last.”

“The jerk-chicken place?”

The memory of hot meat and scotch bonnet turned itself into acid in my throat. I caught sight of my reflection in the glass and forced myself to see beyond it, past the chandeliers, where filing cabinets were arranged like card catalogs. An Indian man in an argyle top and an older white lady with big jewelry walked by. They passed a Korean woman around the same age as the barista, wearing a white tunic and silver sneakers. They all greeted one another with a little bow, though less dramatic than the one Vadis and Errol had given Clive. The Korean woman wore gold-rimmed glasses and wheeled an AV cart with wires peeking out over the edge. None of them looked at us.

“You built this in two months?”

“Oh, no,” Clive corrected me. “I signed the lease when the magazine folded, but you try getting building permits for a temple. We were pre-revenue for a long time. Then we started taking on investors and selling memberships, mostly through referrals.”

“Who are all these people?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I signed an NDA.”

“Doesn’t mean you get to know who shot JFK,” Vadis scoffed.

Clive and I cocked our heads and squinted at her in unison.

“Fine. Why me?”

“Because we know you,” Clive said, as if I should be bowled over by simplistic reasoning. “And you have a bona fide problem that is geographically contained, easily manipulated, and romantic in nature. When it comes to the power of suggestion, we’ve found that love is the easiest frequency to tap. Every other emotion burns bright and flames out. But love leaves a network of associations. And you, my friend, have been in love a lot.”

“Infatuated,” Vadis corrected him. “A serial monogamist. A people hoarder.”

“Where do you source your facts?”

“Romantic emotion,” Clive continued, “leaves a neurological footprint. But we needed names. And data about those names. And as your friends, we’ve watched you lead a corrosive and insurmountably haunting love life for decades. You’re a ghoul for the past. You’ve been very vocal about it.”

“Well, fuck you, too. What about Zach?”

Vadis scrunched her nose.

“Who would monogomize with Zach?”

“No, I mean does Zach know about this?”

“Zach doesn’t know about any of this,” said Clive.

“Yeah, because he already thinks the rich are brainwashing the poor!”

“You have to stop thinking of it as mind control.”

“If it’s not mind control, I don’t have to do anything.”

“Lola, even if the power of suggestion were mind control, which it is not, you’re not the one being controlled. We’re just encouraging people to congregate around a five-block radius of this exact spot you’re sitting in, using the world’s first harmonious concentration of spiritual and machine learning. That’s all. One of our members is ex-NYPD. If I told you his retainer, you’d pass out. Another used to be a resource specialist at the NSA, another is IDF, another studies advertising algorithms, another is a media studies professor, another was employee number nine at a ubiquitous tech company. Did you know that former paramours are the fourth most popular search field item, below porn but above diseases?”

“I did not know that.”

“Listen, clearly it’s working. We can’t be everywhere you go, but as long as you come within a reasonable distance of this exact spot in the next two weeks—”

“I’ll run into an ex.”

“Pretty much.”

“Because you brought together a spy supergroup to disrupt my life with … vibes?”

“Not to disrupt, to help. And not with vibes. Energy and social media manipulation. If you want to get conceptually crude about it.”

“I really do. Did you guys know that Boots is going out of town?”

Clive shook his head and exhaled.

“You didn’t know?”

“We don’t keep tabs on your life, Lola,” said Vadis.

“Actually,” Clive corrected her, “it’s the only thing we do. But no, we didn’t.”

“Okay. Okay, but how did you get Eliza to pick that restaurant?”

“Eliza,” Clive repeated, as if having remembered the title of a song. “I didn’t even know she existed until Vadis texted me about her on the way over here. She seems to have been more of a meditative product than a technological one.”