The Startup Wife(60)

For this reason, my mother hates camping. Not because of the tents or the inconvenience of cooking outdoors but because of having to pee in the woods. Plumbing is one of her life’s great pleasures, and therefore, because we inherit these things, it is also one of mine. I take that bath every morning and listen to the splashy sounds of my limbs arranging themselves in the warm, soapy water, and I try to enjoy it while also reminding myself of the vast distance between the me I might have been and the me I have become. Am I me? I ask myself. Yes, you’re still you.

In the midst of it all, Cyrus conducts a funeral for Auntie Lavinia’s neighbor Jed, the lapsed Jew who wanted to convert to Hinduism. His long battle with cancer finally lost, Jed’s final wish was to find a way to honor his split faith, as he liked to call it.

The service takes place at the cremation chapel in West Babylon. Jed has no surviving relations; his wife died ten years before, and they’d never had children. It is just me, Cyrus, Auntie Lavinia, and a handful of Jed’s former colleagues and students from the Rabbinical College of Long Island.

Cyrus stands up against the cheap plywood paneling. “Jed often told me his right side was Jewish and his left side was Hindu, but his whole self was a Nets fan—on that matter he had no ambivalence at all.”

We laugh softly.

“What does it mean,” he says, “to devote one’s entire life to a faith only to discover, at the end, that this faith does not sit solidly in the body, that it has shifted like the sands on a seashore?

“Those of you who remember him from his student days know that when Jed was in rabbinical college, he was fascinated by the Urtext—the uniform text that some believe preceded all the known versions of the Hebrew Bible. Although the text is now thought not to exist, Jed carried the idea of this mythical first testament with him. Perhaps this is why he was drawn to the earliest Hindu scriptures, the Vedas. These texts, recited over centuries, written down three thousand years ago, are so unlikely they seem almost fabled. It was through the lens of the Urtext that Jed interpreted the earliest Hindu scriptures, almost as if what the biblical scholars were looking for was right there all along, if they only knew to look beyond their own traditions. I read to you now from Jed’s favorite passage in the Rigveda:

‘Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;

Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,

He only knows, or perhaps He does not know.’?”



Cyrus speaks in his lowest, softest voice, a voice that seems to contain everything that can be known and so many of the things that cannot, until we are all dabbing at the corners of our eyes.

“Did you know Jed?” I ask him later.

“He sometimes texted me in the middle of the night. He had trouble sleeping because of the chemo.”

I had no idea. I still can’t quite get my head around the sheer number of people Cyrus cares about. Cyrus is a circuit board, lines of connection stretching far beyond what I can see. There are the people he knows or has met in real life, like Jed or Mrs. Butterfield, and then there are the others, the millions who are having relationships with Cyrus through the platform, asking him questions about how they should live their lives, receiving small coded versions of him on their phones every day. I have done this. I have expanded Cyrus’s reach to encompass everyone, and people everywhere are now getting a little piece of him, and he is expanding, like a cloud, covering the whole world. In the meantime, he is also my husband. And he is also my boss. How have I managed to make it all so complicated, and how have I managed to put myself on the margins of this story? There is no way to answer that, at least not without questioning the very bones of our life, and so I don’t, I just let Cyrus’s presence wash through me, and that, as ever, is enough.



* * *



In the spring, Cyrus, Jules, and I return to the Valley. This time it’s more of a victory lap. I measure it by the number of drinks people offer us when we arrive at their offices. “Can I get you anything at all? Coffee? Coconut water? Birch water? Rosemary water? Pink coconut water?”

There are no vacant faces this time, no people dipping their heads and reading text messages under the table. And no one cares about our politics. They just pay full attention to Cyrus, who tells story after story of the platform, the Viking death rituals, the Wonder Woman prayer circle in Madras, the Bhagavad Gita recital group in Dallas, the little cluster of communities that have formed around the worship of living people, Greta Thunberg, Margaret Atwood, Malala Yousafzai. What would Greta/Margaret/Malala do? These are the things the WAIs ask themselves. They do not want to try the latest skin-firming cream, they are not interested in celebrity gossip. They do not bow to influencers because we don’t give them any. They are the curious, the wondering and wandering, hungering for connection, searching for meaning. They are the best of us. And we give them a place to be those people.

The next few days are a catwalk. Woke VC shows off a diverse portfolio. Another firm claims to donate most of its profits to charity. Another has a founder who personally put millions into George Soros’s fund. They all pretend to be the good guy.

Cyrus makes everyone beg to be on our board. They would do pretty much anything. It’s beyond social media. We are creating a new category. The growth curve is only going up. There are more people on the platform, more people spending more time and recommending us to their friends and using us as their way of interacting with their screens. We are creeping onto their home pages and staying there. We are commanding their interest. We are educating and ennobling them.