The Startup Wife(65)
“The thing is, we talk about people working themselves to death, but we never say ‘He hobbied himself to death.’ Still, there must be a lot of people who do that.”
“Oh, okay.”
“My uncle Gennaro had this thing for gardening, I mean, he just loved all kinds of exotic plants, and so he set up a business selling seeds online.”
“And did he? Work himself to—? I’m sorry.”
“No, heart attack. But everyone said he worked too hard. I think he hobbied too hard.”
Or this:
“If a pandemic wiped out ten percent of the world’s population, as a society, would we become inured to the loss of our loved ones? Would we just care about them less?”
Or this:
“I’m setting up a probabilities algorithm for all the ways humans are going to get wiped out, and I think climate change is definitely winning. Closely followed by antibiotic resistance.”
Cyrus does not see a problem because Cyrus and Marco have become instant best friends.
They’re together all the time, eating lunch at the café, hanging out on the rooftop among Rory’s Popeye plants, booking out the meeting rooms so they can close the door and hatch secret plans. Gaby and Jules are tasked with getting under the hood of Obit.ly’s financials. Ren and I look at the tech. Since Marco is always around, it’s difficult to get Cyrus on his own. He gives off a kind of hummingbird vibe, flapping wildly while appearing to stand perfectly still.
* * *
I try to warn Cyrus. “I think Marco is unstable.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He can’t stop talking about the end of the world.”
“I thought that’s why you liked this place. Because we’re preparing for the afterworld?” He circles his arm around to indicate the rest of Utopia and to remind me that I’m just as weird as Marco.
As far as I’m concerned, I am doing a great job of adjusting to the new situation. Craig has joined the board, and I’ve stopped trying to make the big decisions. Cyrus has a vision, and the WAIs are so devoted to him, they’ll follow him anywhere. I’m starting to think about other things—a mentorship program I might kick off to help young women get ahead in tech. I might even ask Cyrus if I can spend some of our WAI money on building a lab for the Empathy Module. Jules is encouraging me to stay in stealth mode. “Just let him do what he does best—talk to the brethren—and the rest of us can enjoy being mortal,” he says. Jules is also busy keeping the team steady; the talk of acquisition has made everyone a little jittery.
Jules’s advice is all well and good, except I have to go home with Cyrus every night, and lately, the office Cyrus and home Cyrus are starting to sound like the same person. I find myself organizing more and more of his life, even though he now has two assistants. I answer the door when the dry cleaner comes to take his shirts, and I run through his calendar to make sure Eve is scheduling his meetings in the right order, and Jules and I coordinate when to give him little bits of bad news, like if someone quits or posts a Glassdoor review about how Cyrus is a controlling micromanager with a God complex.
We argue about money. Cyrus deals with having money by spending it fast, before it can accumulate. He sends checks with multiple zeros to multiple charities and monasteries and GoFundMe campaigns. He clicks on every Indiegogo film, travel pillow, and illustrated book project. He funds a school in Bangladesh. He pays a company called Green Taxi a huge amount of money to send him the same driver, a man called Daniyal, to take him anywhere beyond a five-block radius because he has developed an allergy to the subway.
The truth is, there isn’t enough money that we can’t burn through it. At this point, the millions are still imaginary. I want to pay off our mortgage and start a college fund for Gitanjali and buy my parents the kind of end-of-life insurance that means they will never have to worry about paying their medical bills when they get really old. Cyrus wants to send our money to Bangladesh, and I want to buy end-of-life insurance, and this of course means he’s a hero and I am a Grinch.
Still, we have our moments. I see the person I married inside the person in front of me. In some ways the new confidence, the swagger, is powerful. I love what we’ve created together, this world of people who suddenly find themselves with a center, something they never imagined they’d have—a social network that goes beyond selfies and humblebrags. We are woven together by these strangers who appear at once distant and intimate.
In the meantime, Cyrus has set up a giant easel in his office, and right now he is holding a palette of paints and a little knife with a triangular point. A landscape is starting to come into view, a blur of blues, grays, and whites. Along with painting, Cyrus has taken up capoeira. A large man named Gil comes to our apartment every morning to yell energetic things at Cyrus.
“It’s far healthier to confront death than to avoid it,” Cyrus says. “Ancient civilizations were obsessed with death.”
“Our civilization is obsessed with never having to think about death,” I say.
“The Anthropocene is corrupt.”
“I’m concerned about bringing Marco on board.”
“We’re developing a great working relationship,” Cyrus says, scooping up a dollop of paint from his palette. “Marco respects what we’re doing, and he agrees that we could bring the two companies together for everyone’s benefit.”