The Startup Wife(3)
“Well, that’s what we’ve been debating,” Li Ann says. “I think it would be great to offer people something to help frame their existence. Rory wants to do away with all that, but some of us still think it’s important.”
“If we are going to imagine a better world, I would prefer it to be based on science, not superstition,” Rory says.
I ask the question that’s been on my mind since the call came: “How do you pay for all of this?”
“I’ve been given a mandate,” Li Ann says. “On the one hand, we operate like any other startup incubator. But our mission is also to find solutions to the inevitable demise of the world as we know it. Our endowment is made up of tech companies, high-net-worth individuals, even some government pension funds. I think there’s a general sense that we are going to face unprecedented challenges in the future, and everyone wants to be prepared.”
What will Cyrus say? I haven’t thought about him for at least half an hour, which is the longest I’ve not thought about him since our reunion. The doomsday cult thing is definitely going to put him off. Or is it? Cyrus is full of surprises. I would never have guessed, nine months ago, that he was going to be the sort of person who would get married on a whim. I wouldn’t have thought that about myself either, but there you have it. Love. Mysterious ways.
Li Ann promises to send us her decision before the end of the day, and Jules and I are returned to the ordinary, imperfect world.
One
CYRUS JONES AND THE MAGIC FUNERAL
Cyrus and I got married exactly two months after we met the second time, which was thirteen years after we met the first time.
The first time, I was in ninth grade and Cyrus was in eleventh. I knew his middle name, what classes he took, when he had free period, and which afternoons he stayed late for swim team or jazz band practice. In other words, I was in love with him. Cyrus did not know any of my names or that I had recently moved to Merrick, Long Island, from Queens, that I had skipped fourth grade and was in possession of one friend, a girl called Huong who occasionally sat beside me at lunch, that my parents were immigrants from Bangladesh and that was why my lunchbox contained rice and curry, something I was perpetually ashamed of, not just because of the curry smell that stuck to my clothes but also because my mother never closed the Tupperware properly, so there were always little bits of chicken and rice plastered to the insides of my backpack.
For fifteen years my parents lived above the Health Beats pharmacy in a one-bedroom apartment with two narrow windows and a view of Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights. My sister, Mira, came along, and then me. They worked long hours and sent regular Western Union payments to Bangladesh, but because we ate dal and rice most nights and never went on vacation and I only got to wear hand-me-downs, they managed to save a little every year, until they could put a down payment on the pharmacy, then on another one in Woodside. By the time I met Cyrus, my parents owned a mini-chain of three Health Beats, and we had moved out of the old neighborhood and into a shiny new housing development on Long Island.
After a summer of unpacking boxes and sticking stars to the ceiling of my room in the pattern of the Messier 81 galaxy, I arrived at our new school, Washington High. Mira was a freshman at Columbia, already busy finding her new tribe, the climate activists and the radical new leftists and the Students for Yemen. I was left to fend for myself with my smelly lunches and my complete inability to engage in small talk. My only refuge was math class, where I skipped two grades and landed in AP Geometry, with Cyrus.
I spent the year gazing at the back of Cyrus’s head and wishing he’d turn around and say something to me, but he never did. I just stared and stared at that glorious blond hair, so wavy it was actively greeting me. At the end of May, when we were supposed to take our final exam, Cyrus didn’t show up for class. A week later, he handed our teacher, Mr. Ruben, a large folder, and in that folder was a graphic novel titled How to Teach Geometry. Mr. Ruben was shown standing in front of the chalkboard completing the final angle of an isosceles triangle. Chapter by chapter, the book went through every lesson Mr. Ruben had taught us that year, starting with angles and ending with architectural puzzles. There were equations and formulas, drawn-to-scale buildings with intricate detail: the Chrysler with its scalloped exterior, the columns of the Parthenon, the triangles of Egyptian tombs. Mr. Ruben displayed the pages on the walls of our classroom, and we all stared in wonder. “Freak,” someone whispered under their breath. Freak was right. Mr. Ruben didn’t know what to do, so he gave Cyrus a zero for failing to show up for his exam.
The rumor was that Cyrus failed all his classes—the AP Lit class in which he’d written a story without using the letter E, the European history class in which he made a 3D diorama of the battle of Algiers, even Drama, where he submitted a short film. Everyone in school knew Cyrus, but no one could claim to be his friend; he was always alone, and he never stayed after school or turned up in the cafeteria at lunchtime, so the mystery of his final exams remained just that.
Cyrus disappeared. He didn’t come back for senior year and he didn’t graduate. Eventually I went to college and forgot about him. I blossomed. I was miles from Merrick, a world away from high school, and I stepped into my brain like I was putting on a really great pair of sneakers for the first time. My brain-sneakers and I sprinted through courses and seminars and got me summa-cum-lauded. I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder. In the meantime, I made a friend—a girl called Lynn—and I had a handful of casual hookups and lost my virginity in my dorm room while Constance, my roommate, was at a double feature of Blade Runner and The Big Sleep.