All Our Wrong Todays(14)
It was both the greatest kiss of my life and also made me feel like until that moment I’d been kissing all wrong.
Penelope broke the kiss, glanced back up at the sky, and walked away. For a moment, I didn’t think I’d be able to take it, the heartbreak, if I had to spend the rest of my life trying to re-create what that kiss felt like with other people.
But then she looked back at me.
“Come on,” Penelope said.
21
When I was growing up, I used to threaten to run away a lot. There was only the most hackneyed, blunt reason for it—I wanted my parents to pay more attention to me, or a different kind of attention, more expansive and impressed with my meager adolescent achievements. I’m not saying this made me special. I’ve never thought I was special. That’s why I wanted to run away.
But one time, and this is maybe the key moment of my childhood, my father actually responded to my threat. He was stuck on the thorny question of how the unpredictable path of a magnetically charged asteroid might affect a time traveler’s reverse trajectory if they came into near contact, which was enervated by the fact that the asteroid might have long since ceased to exist. So he was looking for something else to focus on and, for what felt like the only time in my life, he chose me.
I told him I was going to run away.
“You should,” he said.
I had no frame of reference for this reply. My father was always too busy to deal with me. But now he looked me in the eye like he’d picked this random moment to take my measure. He noticed I was there and so he wanted to know who his son really was.
What could I do? I packed a bag and ran away from home.
I was twelve years old. I was gone for nineteen days.
22
Before I went to work for my father, I had a few other jobs. It was always the same. The company would get in touch with me because whatever proprietary employment algorithm they used spat out my name and a ripple of interest would shiver through them when they realized who my father was. They’d wonder if maybe I was also a genius and could revolutionize their product or service or system. In the meetings, they’d mistake my sheepish ambivalence for cocky nonchalance. I’d get the job—I always got the job—and it would take them a couple of weeks to realize their error. I was not a genius. I was just a guy with a last name.
Most recently, I worked for this advertising agency that specializes in perceptual marketing. They ensure that whatever ads you see in your everyday life are geared to your specific taste, style, demographic, purchasing history, and countless other interwoven criteria. If you walk by a billboard, it shows you something you actually want or an upgrade to something you already have. They use real-time rolling data feeds, so you might see a different ad depending on your mood before versus after lunch, if you were running late or had time to linger, whether you had sex that night or argued with your spouse that morning. Following a negative experience with some company’s wares, they’d give a competitor a shot at shifting your brand loyalty.
My big idea was that clients could pay a monthly fee to see no ads at all. Instead of individualized niche marketing, you could experience a world blissfully emptied of promotional clutter. It was a total failure.
Because it turns out people like ads. Especially when they’re targeted to warp the visual environment around you to emphasize your needs above all others, as if you’re the indispensable center of the global economy. Nobody wanted to pay for the privilege of being irrelevant to commercial interests. Except me. I essentially got my employer to launch an expensive new product solely for my use. An industry of one.
Before that, I worked for a company that dealt in microtrends—fashion fads that can emerge, spike, and dissolve within a day, even within a few hours. Sometimes they’d be global, but usually hyperlocal, thousands of people in a certain neighborhood sporting identical shoes or jackets or haircuts on the way to work, and by lunchtime, none of them would be caught dead wearing that style.
With portable clothing recyclers, the frequency of fashion evolution is dizzying. You can deconstitute and reconfigure your apparel at will or whim. But if you care about that kind of thing, and billions did, it can be stressful to keep your appearance protocols constantly updated. Some people found it easier to wear a uniform-tone bodysuit with marking dots and have their outfit digitally projected onto them, so they could keep their look as fluid as possible.
The company I worked for crunched tremendous amounts of data to predict and manage accelerated fads for the major design labels, and they hoped I could help amplify their business. The problem is I don’t like to stand out, so fashion makes me testy. I set my home clothing recycler to generate minor random adjustments to my outfits just so people who notice that kind of thing will leave me alone, but otherwise I wear pretty much the same thing every day. My employers initially thought I was being deliberately inscrutable with my appearance to keep them off-balance, but by the end of my first week they became suspicious.
I actually managed to boost profits almost immediately, until they clued in that all I’d done is the same thing I did at home—set their prediction algorithms to random. Millions of people were wearing a certain style of pants or cut of shirt or thickness of belt because the system told them to. But it was chance, not aesthetics. I had a contract, so they couldn’t fire me. I got transferred to a side project involving pets.