Cult Classic(33)

“Up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per experience.”

“So you can put a price tag on closure.”

“We have to keep the lights on! Your package alone has taken months.”

“But let’s say I’m a rich person and I’ve already given all the money I’m gonna give to buy my kids into Harvard. Even then, am I going to pay for this?”

“Think about how much people pay for therapy over the course of a lifetime. The answer kept Modern Psychology in business for a quarter of a century. We’re offering people a chance to confront their demons in the span of minutes.”

“Unless one of them boards a flight to Tokyo.”

“Prototype!”

My phone vibrated. It was a text from Boots: ETA?

It was bizarre, this tendril of reality, this missive from the outside world. I felt as if I’d climbed Everest with my house keys in my pocket. I texted him back, saying I’d be home soon but Vadis was having a personal crisis—so believable a lie, it was probably true.

“What’s mine called?”

Clive flipped the sheet for me and pointed: The Classic.

“Because you’re the first,” he said, “the first monkey in space. The first dollar taped to the wall. Our canary into the coal mine.”

“As I understand it, the canary generally dies.”

“You’ll be the original after we go global.”

“Don’t you have to wait to see how this goes? Like, don’t you need more funding before I’m the first of anything?”

“Let me worry about that. Ideally, you’ll report back after each encounter. The more data we have, the better this will work.”

“What if I don’t do it?”

Clive considered this idea. Rather, he put a showman’s effort into making it seem as if he were considering it.

“Then you won’t grow.”

“You mean this won’t grow,” I said, swirling my finger. “Your little cult.”

“It’s not a cult.”

I saw the lady with the big jewelry again, in the opposite hall. I could see only the top half of her as she passed a hunched man, his cane bobbing alongside him. They were already bent, but still they bowed to each other. I made a face.

“Vadis and I care about you. Whatever comes next, we want you to make the best decision possible.”

“There it is! I can’t believe we’re talking about me getting married.”

“There’s no desired outcome. This is about figuring out what you want.”

“Don’t do that. You’re not a shrink just because you play one on TV.”

Clive pried the menu from my hand and shoved it back in the drawer like a cadaver being slid back into the wall. Below, the garden fountain made a plangent sound. He leaned in close. He smelled like the world’s most overpriced citronella candle. I thought he might do something truly repellent like kiss me.

“No one gets this, Lola,” he whispered, “not in the history of the world.”

I stared at his face, searching for motive. Then he nodded to Errol, who had manifested in the hall behind me.

“Have you been here this whole time?” I asked.

“Only the tail end,” Errol said.

“Then how’d you know it was the tail end?”

Clive nodded at him once more and I followed him to the elevator. Once inside, all that could be heard were the squeaks of Errol’s feet shifting in their leather coffins. He screwed up his brow at a spot on the glass, removed his pocket square, and wiped. I saw a single decapitated pussy willow at my feet, like a furry bug, and picked it up.

“Where’d Vadis get off to?” I asked.

“Juice bar.”

“You guys have a juice bar.”

“She ran out to Chaste Greens,” he corrected me, smiling. “Why would we have a juice bar in here? That’s insane.”





5




The gum-speckled blocks rushed beneath me as I walked home. I couldn’t get back on the train. I couldn’t be in a tin can packed with strangers. Above ground was hardly a neutral space either. Like having something stuck in your eye, it hurts to blink, it hurts to not blink. Everywhere were memories encased in glass and concrete. Clive had picked up the globe and shaken it. He had changed my vision to romance, turning everything else into black and white. And now this color, an alchemy of memory and nostalgia was all I could see.

Here is the art gallery where I met a man who would then jerk me around for years, both of us gaslighting the other as if awaiting a third-party verdict. Here is the lingerie store where I spent a fortune on underwear that clipped to other underwear, wasted on the underemployed gentleman of my youth. Here is the bookstore café where my boyfriend broke the news that he’d met someone new. Except I never called him my boyfriend. I just took a disastrous road trip to Montreal with him once. I’d planned poorly for my period that day but I sat there, nodding and bleeding until he left. Then I went to the bathroom, rolled my underwear in paper towels and stuffed it in the trash.

I had not seen this person since. Maybe I would see him tomorrow.

The city was a parade of places shut down, left early from, arrived late to, sat in front of, met to say goodbye at. This is how it was for everyone. If you wait long enough, anyplace will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs. But would all my bombs go off at once? The past is never dead, it’s not even the past. Most of the guys I knew detested Faulkner. Self-hating Americans, they preferred the Russians. I could see their worn copies of The Brothers Karamazov. I could hear the hum of their refrigerators, smell the stale sweat on their pilled sheets. And here is the stoop where I broke up with one of these men on New Year’s Eve, convincing myself this was the humane thing to do. Don’t take him with you, I thought. Wound him before the portal shuts. This was before I knew that the timing of a cruel thing does not make it more or less cruel, before I knew the only good way to hurt someone is never.