Cult Classic(54)

Jin appeared behind us, leaning on the door frame of the interrogation room, arms crossed. She had on expensive-looking sneakers with puffy tongues.

“May I borrow her, Mr. Glenn?” asked Jin, with a hint of a curtsey, one tongue behind the other.

“You make people call you Mr. Glenn?”

“I don’t make people do anything, Lola.”

“One day, you and I are gonna sit down and have a conversation about the semantics of ‘free will.’ The bowing is gross.”

“The bowing is organic.”

“Wow.”

“It’s a gesture to the Golconda more than me.”

“Just wow.”

“Barry called me Shepherd Glenn for like a week,” he said, playing at embarrassment, “but I asked him to stop. I don’t think it was catching on anyway.”

“Who the fuck’s Barry?”

“The barista,” he said, as if I’d forgotten my own mother’s name.

“Be right there!” Clive shouted to Jin, and then to me: “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“How you’re monetizing my personal failings?”

“Sure, but also how it’s actually working. We’re united by our shared humanity, but somewhere along the way, we get orphaned by our individual history. The Golconda will fix this by offering personal salvation as well as a new paradigm for larger emotional understanding.”

Clive’s recapitulative blather was starting to prick at me in new ways, ways in which I found myself more depressed than outraged. I longed for the days when he would’ve skewered this type of new age word salad, cigarette dangling from his lips, ice still rattling around his first drink as he signaled for a second. Thinking of it made me want to light up right now, in front of him, to blow smoke in his face. Actually, it made me want to put a cigarette out in here, to watch the ashes swirl across the pristine marble.

“A new means to personal salvation,” I said. “That’s the definition of a cult.”

“If anything, it’s the definition of a religion.”

“Let no one accuse you of aiming low.”

“Give me some credit, Lola.”

“Oh, I would,” I said, gesturing around us, “but you’re all stocked up.”

“It’s not a religion and it’s not a cult. Not in the traditional sense.”

“Why does it have to be a cult in any sense?! What do you have against starting a podcast empire like a normal person?”

“Because this is the most important mission I’ll ever be a part of. Lola, we were so blind all those years at the magazine. Fumbling around, trying to figure out who was fixing people and how, what was wrong with them to begin with. Like if any of it worked, why put out another issue and another and another? It’s indulgent to look inward and find out nothing about yourself, but it’s groundbreaking to do it and find out everything. Using tailored scenarios, we can put your past into a cohesive whole in an abbreviated time frame, thereby setting an actual course correction for closure. And it starts with people like you”—he poked me right between the eyes, pressing the bridge of my nose—“telling us all about people like Oscar.”

“Should we not wait until she’s hooked up?” asked Errol, as gently as could be.

“Absolutely,” Clive agreed. “We wouldn’t want valuable data being lost to idle chitchat.”





11




Over the next few days, a routine emerged. Each evening, I’d have an interaction and then I’d walk over to the Golconda, where Errol would greet me. Then I’d report to Vadis and Jin, the two of them coming just shy of shoving a thermometer up my ass. Errol began escorting me everywhere I went, which seemed more than a little Pyongyangy. Each time, I was told the meditation room was off-limits, under construction, or no “chaperone” was available. This, despite the fact that Errol was standing right in front of me. Meanwhile, if Clive was around, he’d breeze through, confer with his staff, and thank me for my participation as if I’d signed up to taste-test gum. Then he’d take his leave, off to some event requiring cuff links.

Soon I knew this stretch of Chinatown better than my own neighborhood. I could draw every street corner, reproduce the font on every window. I knew which buildings were diligent about breaking down their boxes and which weren’t, which had window ledges wide enough for me to put drinks on.

But the repetition was chipping away at me. Instead of dressing up in anticipation of the past, I began dressing down for it. So what if someone I used to sleep with no longer entertained the idea? Who cared what these men thought of me? There would be another one of these jokers along at any minute. I felt like a human Etch-A-Sketch—all I had to do was blink and a new chapter of my past would be waiting for me. They say you only hurt the ones you love, but it turns out you can hurt lots of people you only moderately like. I began to feel like my dating life had been some elaborate logic proof, showing me how to wind up with someone not for the one person he is but for all the people he isn’t. If human partnership was founded more on trait elimination than trait gravitation, what were all those years of heartbreak for?

There’s an acceptable degree of slovenly that anyone can attain, the point at which one’s sex appeal still shines through and becomes more appealing for the challenge. I blew past this point quickly. I wore different combinations of the same set of clothing, which I did not wash. I stopped tucking, tweezing, or shaving anything. I decided that moisturizer was unnatural. The cavewomen didn’t have moisturizer and some of them made it to forty. My scalp began to itch. Ponytails were painful to the touch when released. I gnawed at my cuticles until they bled. When I bathed, I did so poorly. Waxy flakes of soap would lodge themselves in the hair at the base of my neck and I’d still be picking them out at noon, sniffing to confirm they were soap.