The Startup Wife(81)
There is an East River between us now, and it’s possible that soon we won’t even be married. Marco has informed us that Wuhan is under lockdown and that it’s only a matter of time before the virus strikes New York. I realize I’ve never really believed in the apocalypse. It was a distant possibility, one that we might even avoid if people like me used our brains enough. I thought that’s why we were here, at Utopia, why we had doctors and climate scientists and AI and tech. And I certainly didn’t imagine I would have to face it without Cyrus. I had assumed that Cyrus would be beside me to answer the big questions. Mine was the realm of ones and zeros, not the space of the unknowable—that was all his, and without his sure, calm voice, I am adrift. I’m just like everyone else: my imagination fails me.
“Do you want to sleep over?” Destiny asks. Her apartment is high up on the twenty-third floor. It looks east, not toward Manhattan but away from it. It’s what she wanted. The sun on her face and the city at her back. She and Ren found it around the same time Cyrus and I bought the loft. They moved in together as friends, and somewhere along the way, I think, they’ve become more than that. They don’t say and I never ask; I just assume it’s the way she wants it, a kind of accidental blurring of roles. Nothing dramatic. No sacred rituals.
I’m tipsy now and full of raw greens, so I think about taking the guest room for the night. I could put off returning to the loft and finding empty corners and realizing there were things that were Cyrus’s that I assumed were mine. Gaps in the bookshelf. Little absences that will hurt even though I’ve made a huge effort to numb myself to a lot of things related to Cyrus.
Queens is out in front of me, industrial, squat, squares of green where someone has thought to put a park. I wonder if I too can turn my back on the city, on WAI. But I know I can’t. Jules and I have talked about it. I know he’s been approached by headhunters, that Gaby has encouraged him to leave WAI and branch out on his own. But we are bound together, and to Cyrus, by the thing we have created together. The truth is, I wouldn’t know what or who we would be without it.
I decide to go home after all. Destiny takes the elevator down with me. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.
Tomorrow is Sunday. “Why? What are we doing?”
“It’s pizza-bagel appreciation day. I’ll bring the bagels.”
“Okay.” I give her a grateful hug, even though Li Ann has told us to stop hugging.
The Midtown Tunnel takes me home. When I’m there, I press buttons on the alarm system. The apartment is dark when I enter, so I say, “Lights on.” And then I say, “Lights dimmer.” And the metal-framed windows come into view. Very slowly, I turn my head this way and that.
The boxes are gone, and so is the watercolor that Jules gave us when we first moved in, which I assured Cyrus, before he had a chance to ask, would be his. Other than that, there is a generalized sense of emptiness, a vague feeling that the space is hollow. Nothing I can quite put my finger on. I tell the TV to turn on Netflix, and I browse through a bunch of options until I retreat to Anne with an E, which is what I watch every night when I am alone. And then I fall asleep in front of the green hills of Prince Edward Island.
* * *
Later that week, Ren and I are reengineering the messaging service. Cyrus wants to turn it into a stand-alone app, and we have a few developers building a prototype. When I check the time, it’s past midnight, and I resign myself to staying over. I do that a lot these days; with the apartment empty, it’s a relief to have somewhere else to be. I’m just about to head to the nap room when the fire alarm goes off. At first no one notices—we all just assume it’s a drill—but after about a minute, people start to take off their headphones and shuffle over to the staircase.
Li Ann appears. She’s holding a mini fire extinguisher in one hand and a hardcover of Michelle Obama’s Becoming in the other. “Why are you all still here? Let’s go.”
“Is it a real fire?” someone asks.
“Of course it’s real. Come on, everyone out.” The devs grab their things and disappear down the stairs. “You stay,” she tells me. I put my hands over my ears. Finally, the alarm stops.
“There’s a man on the roof,” Li Ann says. “He’s got a can of gasoline and a lighter. Says he’s going to set himself on fire.”
In the minute it takes me to assemble this image in my mind, Jules and Gaby appear and the fire alarm starts ringing again.
I lean close to Li Ann and ask, “Is this guy—is he one of ours?”
She puts her hand on my elbow. “We don’t know yet.”
My breathing becomes jagged and loud. “Have you called 911?”
“They’re on their way. They told us to evacuate.”
There’s no way I’m leaving if someone who uses our platform is about to set himself on fire. “But we can’t.”
“I know. There’s a panic room. We can go there.”
“There’s a panic room? Why is there a panic room?”
She makes an irritated gesture which I think means Why wouldn’t there be a panic room? and leads us to the back staircase, down four flights, and then past the hydrotherapy pool and Rory’s lab. The siren continues to rise and rise. Finally, after we go through a maze of corridors, Li Ann taps her keycard and a heavy door slides open. Inside, it looks like a basement living room—there’s a sofa, a rug, a mini fridge, a television, and three desktop computers. The computers look like they’re a few years old, but otherwise everything is clean and new, and there’s even a little basket of snacks on top of the fridge.