Cult Classic(44)

The card featured a cartoon of a go-go dancer in white boots, music notes against a rainbow background. It read: Someone’s in the birthday groove! It still played a tune, a melody like a tiny ambulance.





8




But before I went back to the apartment, back to the box, I dropped by the Golconda. Mostly because I wanted to see if it was open, even as I knew open was not quite the word. Clive was too busy laminating prototypes to offer me practical information such as hours of operation. Was it possible the answer was “always,” like a 24-hour drugstore that happened to charge $250,000 a prescription? I paced in front of the doors, trying to catch the attention of the security cameras. People were watching and so I pretended to be frustrated with my phone, to be aghast at imaginary incompetence. I found myself unable to stomach the idea of going back to our perpetually bright apartment right away, eating a bag of chips for dinner, testing the limit of the Chip Clip springs. I was midway through composing a text to Clive—Maybe less with the surrealism and more with the—when the doors clicked.

I moved quickly, letting the building shroud me in darkness. I nearly fell when a rat decided that the best means of avoiding me was to go directly over my shoe. When I got to the second door, Errol was there to greet me, enveloped in a lemon-scented particle cloud. It was confusing how someone who emitted so much charm had wound up lending his time and talents to Clive. Though I suppose everyone wound up serving Clive eventually, and in ways that broke the boundaries of him signing our paychecks. And that, he didn’t always do. At Modern Psychology, people were hesitant to badmouth him when he stiffed them. They chalked up an unpaid invoice to a misunderstanding, an accounting delay or Clive’s personal economic philosophy bleeding into his professional one. Paychecks were fantastic but surely they only made life better, not livable. And yet those in his orbit kept bringing him more—more partnerships, more funding, more cheap labor. They recognized too late that these services were not being offered, they were being extracted.

I doubted his behavior had improved. One look at the chandeliers, those constellations of overpriced incandescence, and it was clear that, if anything, it had gotten worse. I was accustomed to this cycle of Clive-pleasing abuse, having built up a tolerance over the years, escaping only when forced. When the magazine died, the life drained out of Clive’s clutches. But Errol was new to the fanaticism. You could see it in his eyes. I had to hand it to Clive: He no longer needed a vehicle for his cult of personality, he was the cult.

Errol embraced me with his free arm, holding me to his chest in one fluid motion. He was wearing navy pajamas with white piping. They had a sheen to them.

“Do you sleep here?” I asked, concerned.

“Do I sleep here? Do I sleep here? Such a comedian!”

He escorted me inside, where there were now two baristas and still no customers. The new barista was a doe-eyed girl with a messy bun. Blond hairs fell down the nape of her neck. She looked like she belonged in a field, reaching for a farmhouse. She, too, was wearing pajamas as she arranged straws in a jar while the first barista, the boy, offered her smitten words of encouragement.

“Stay here,” Errol instructed me.

“Woof.”

“Oh my God, ha.”

He disappeared behind a seamless door in the wall. In my periphery, I saw movement overhead. Several people passed above me, their long shadows extending across the marble floor. Behold, the conductors of my fate, milling about. It was good to see the place more populated, to hear voices. I stood on the tips of my toes. They looked at me, almost as if by accident, and then quickly looked away. From Clive’s description, I’d been expecting a mix of monks and celebrities. Phrases like “pyramid scheme” and “suppressive person” had been scuttling around my brain for days. But these people looked like a cross-section of any subway car. Except, perhaps, for the monochromatic pajamas. And the bowing.

There was a Black woman with a face full of freckles telling a story to a younger redheaded man, both of them sipping on coffee. They were laughing quietly. They split to allow a desultory woman with a crown of frizz to pass. She looked like she taught kindergarten. They all bowed to one another. I coughed, trying to get their attention. This achieved nothing. The baristas spoke in hushed tones and then the doe-eyed girl offered me an espresso.

“She doesn’t want any,” the boy whispered sharply.

“Like Jonestown with lattes!” I shouted at them.

The girl started giggling. An anemic woman in a turban was tending to the birds of paradise in the corner. Was it ego to assume these people would take an interest in me? How could they be so incurious about the subject of their own experiment? Perhaps for the same reason no one likes to befriend their food before they cook it.

Vadis materialized from the hallway, an iPad in the crook of her arm.

“Hey,” I said, moving my head back in surprise, “I didn’t know you were here.”

“I had work to do,” she said. “We’re launching a line of sleep masks.”

“Huh?”

“For my job job.”

“Ah, I almost forgot you had one of those. Is that why everyone is wearing pajamas? Market research?”

“Yeah, those are ours. They’re mulberry silk.”

I smiled, relieved. When I looked around again, the woman in the turban had vanished along with the other members.