Cult Classic(50)

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I made enough noise to scare the rats. We’d come to an understanding: I would not kill them on purpose and they would not kill me by accident, by making me jump and slam my head on a beam. Once folded into Jin’s chair, I licked the suction cup and reported on the nothing of my evening, on how the nothing made me feel. I tried not to lie to the needle about my feelings or to manufacture them. I found it a challenge to experience emotions in the moment and hold on to them at the same time. The blank I drew was genuine. It was fine, seeing Howard and Cooper, just fine. Perhaps, I thought, this was why, whenever I had doubts about Boots, I tried to just concentrate on appreciating him instead.

Vadis left the room in a huff when I told her I’d spoken to neither man, that I’d even gone so far as to avoid one.

“This is why you can’t have nice things!” she shouted.

“I don’t even want this nice thing!”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Do you know what that word means? Or is your brain too stuffed with adaptogen powders?”

After she slammed the door, I wondered, aloud to Jin, if my biofeedback was really helping. What good was my heart doing anyone, in any sense?

“It’s an information continuum,” Jin said. “We just want to know how your psyche is faring from every possible angle, and then we present our findings to Clive, who presents them to our investors.”

I knew better than to push too hard with her. Jin was all in. Not only was she like Errol, newly enamored of Clive, but people like her, who invested this deeply in spiritualism, had a history of desperation when it came to technology (ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Ouija Board, the Dream Catcher, the Voodoo Doll). It hadn’t worked yet. Was Clive Glenn, inventor of a DSM drinking game, really going to crack a code that had stumped humanity dating back to ancient Egypt?

“So what do you think,” Jin asked, “that there will never be anything new because it hasn’t existed before?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying cold fusion will never be new because it hasn’t existed before. The impossible and the inevitable are not the same.”

“I hope this doesn’t offend you,” she said, wrapping a blood pressure monitor snugly around my arm, “because you seem like an aware person and Vadis speaks highly of you—”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“—but it’s crazy to me how you think you’re smarter than Clive.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“You question everything, you argue with everything, when everything you see here is for you.”

“Not everything,” I said, pointing through the wall, at the meditation room. “And maybe I have questions because we’re sitting in a temple for a religion founded on debate. Why don’t you question it?”

“I already did,” she said, tightening the hug of the Velcro. “And I understand that you need to go on your own journey. But all these people, coming to this place, it’s because of Clive. Clive is the answer. Your package is working. Come on, you don’t see why people will pay for this? Clive has created a chance for them to fix their lives.”

“Jin, what’s your day job? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I founded an online payment-processing company but I sold it.”

“Like a big company?”

“Depends on your definition of big,” she said, shrugging.

“You ran it?”

“Sure.”

“And you quit to do this?”

“This data isn’t gonna map itself,” she said, stroking her monitor with a trace of the maternal. “Errol quit his job, too. He used to do advance for a senator. He’s very organized. But it sounded off-the-charts soulless. I think everyone here had hit a wall with how we were using our skills, but we didn’t know it until Clive. Until Clive found me. Like what’s the point in doing research for global markets when you can do it for human emotion?”

“Money?”

“Sure, but follow the trail. People want money so they feel in control, and they want to feel in control so they feel happy. Love makes people happy.”

From CEO to “love makes people happy.” This man needed to be jailed.

“So Clive, he’s paying you guys?”

“No,” she said, as if the notion were a bug to be flicked.

“But you’re in on the ground floor, then? Like stock options?”

“Oh, no, Lola. This work will change the world. I’d do this for free.”

“But you do do this for free.”

“That’s what I said.”



* * *



Clive was standing in the middle of the atrium when I left the interrogation room, talking on the phone, sipping coffee, speaking rapidly but trying to keep his voice down. He sounded agitated, maybe not for a mogul but certainly for a guiding light. Not to mention the fact that an atrium seemed like a profoundly stupid place for a private call. He must have been caught off guard by it.

I hid behind the garden so that neither he nor the baristas would see me. Was this what it had come to, me hiding behind potted palms? I picked up a few words: transfer, funding, projection, scalable, astral projection. The woman who looked like a kindergarten teacher passed and gave Clive a little bow as she did. So did a man in clear Lucite glasses. He was wearing a fleece vest even though it was summer, as well as an expensive-looking watch. This must have been the single-digit tech company employee. When they were all gone, I emerged, casually, as if having stopped to smell the moss.