The Startup Wife(14)

“I don’t understand Reels,” Jules said. “What is the point if everything keeps disappearing?”

“Reels don’t disappear. Stories do. Keep up.” I said.

“So I got a letter today from some people in Missouri,” Cyrus said.

I gathered the game was over. Cyrus started reading the letter aloud: “?‘My wife and I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie and we both have this yearning to kneel beside our bed at night and say some kind of prayer. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that without questioning the viability of a higher power? What if we could put our palms together, look up at the sky, and do some real talking about the day, about the things that had gone wrong, the things that we were okay with, the things we hoped might happen tomorrow? Could we do that, could we just do that and enjoy it? We don’t want to cheat on our atheism.’?”

“Jeez, Cy, if only you could give every skeptic what they wanted, some kind of believable replacement for God,” Jules said.

“Well,” I said, “I did propose that to Cyrus, but he wasn’t sure.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t sure, I said I didn’t want to be a priest.”

Jules looked back and forth between me and Cyrus. “You want to give this man his own religion?”

“I just said I could code an algorithm that would allow people to get a kind of Cyrus ritual, you know, a combination of all their things, wrapped up in a little modern package, without the sexism, homophobia, and burning in the fires of hell of actual religion.”

“You know,” Jules agreed, “that’s not a bad idea. People might actually go for that.”

I shrugged. “It’s up to Cyrus.”

“What’s wrong, Cy, you don’t want to be the new messiah?”

Outside, the snow continued to fall. Everything was blurry and quiet.

“We need marshmallows,” Cyrus said.

“Why don’t we do a little experiment,” I suggested. “I can code a mini version of the algorithm, and Cyrus, you can decide if you like it.”

“You know what I don’t like about s’mores?” Cyrus said. “The chocolate should be melted. Otherwise it’s just the marshmallow that’s warm, and they’re never hot enough to take the chocolate down.”

“Fine,” Jules said, sighing dramatically. He leaped up, darted into the kitchen, slammed a few cabinet doors, and came back with marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and metal skewers.

“Why are you so well prepared?” I asked.

“It’s the white man’s dessert. Every household comes fully equipped.”

We made the s’mores. Cyrus repeated his opinion about the chocolate. Jules suggested Cyrus squeeze a little Hershey’s syrup over his. “That’s another staple of the Caucasian larder.” He winked.

“I’ll do it,” Cyrus said.

I was surprised. “Really?”

“Anything for you.” He smiled.

“Hallelujah!” Jules said, slamming his hand on his armrest. “I always knew we were meant for great things.”

We toasted with our skewers. I promised to get to work immediately. Jules asked how long it would take to do a small release. He said we should try to get it out to a few people as soon as possible. You know, just to see what happened.



* * *



What happened was this: I started coding the platform, and Jules became maniacally attached to it. Not half an hour would go by before he’d barge into the dining room and ask how far I’d gotten, what would the features be, and should we think about beta-launching soon, and did I need a coffee? “This is genius,” he kept saying, pacing back and forth along the room, running his hands over the patterned wallpaper. “It could be huge.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by “huge,” but even though I stayed super-cool and casual about the whole thing, I found myself getting a little excited too. I was sneaking away between classes and cutting into my lab time thinking about the idea. Essentially it was a giant library. But I didn’t want to pull the information off Wikipedia or some other obviously amateur site, so after I got the scaffolding up, Cyrus had to lend us his brain. Late at night and on weekends, the three of us gathered around the twelve-seater dining table and went through the categories, trying to find ways of combining them. “You have here that it’s called The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but that’s actually a Western construct because the translator, Evans-Wentz, decided to give it that title.”

“So what’s the Tibetan book called?” Jules asked.

“Bardo Th?dol, Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State.”

Jules tapped on his keyboard.

“The thing is,” Cyrus went on, “if someone told me they were interested in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Tibetan Buddhism, I would first tell them about the Bardo Th?dol, and then I would direct them to read the larger body of work that it’s based on, which is Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation Through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones, and then I would tell them to read George Saunders.”

“Who is George Saunders?”

“He’s a novelist.”

“A Tibetan novelist?”

“American. He wrote Lincoln in the Bardo, which is about Abraham Lincoln mourning his dead son, who is in the Bardo, the transitional state. So if someone were mourning, say, a child, they might read Lingpa, but they might also read the novel.”