The Answers Read online

  Your mother is forgetting everything, she said, watching the water roil and ripple. I can’t seem to keep my head straight.

  She was shaking. It wasn’t cold. She held the side of my face to her chest and I watched the dust move in the sunlight the way tadpoles move in a creek and years later, in a biology class, a professor told us about a recent study on fetal cells, how some cells from a child in utero seep into the mother’s body and remain decades after a birth—even from aborted children or stillborns or children who grow up and go away. But the study was inconclusive. The researchers weren’t sure if those children cells helped or hurt the mother or if they had some effect that wasn’t particularly helpful or hurtful. Some scientists discovered that these children cells collected around illnesses and tumors, but they couldn’t quite tell what they were doing there, if they served any real function. It just wasn’t clear.

  Still, I wondered whether any of my cells were in that bruise and what they might have done in there. Was there anything left of me in my mother? What order, what rules, were there in the world, a body? And why did I still hope for answers that I knew weren’t coming? It could have just been a craving for the kind of certainty I’d been born into—having a user’s manual for life and an unmovable, divine love. But maybe I really did sense something vague and holy in others’ eyes, something sacred in crowds, in a bus of people staring out their windows, watching life. There should be a middle ground between believing in a certain god and believing that some mysterious third substance was between people. Like churches, I thought, there should be a place for people who just weren’t sure. There should be a place for people who see something but won’t dare say what it is. Maybe there’s something, something between people that is more than air and empty space, something holy in that nothing between one face and another.

  Sometimes it seems all I have are questions, that I will ask the same ones all my life. I’m not sure if I even want any answers, don’t think I’d have a use for them, but I do know I’d give anything to be another person—anyone else—for even just a day, an hour. There’s something about that distance I’d do anything to cross.

  Part Two

  1

  A camera watched each woman as she arrived, as she exited the elevator, as she stood on the taped X and stared neutrally and square into a lens, said her name, turned left, right, and said her name again. Mary hesitated, caught Junia in her mouth, and the others remembered past mug shots or passport photos or auditions they’d given, past faces they’d had, people they’d been or tried to be. They filled out forms and waited, filled out forms and waited, waited and kept waiting.

  A dozen dime-size sensors were applied to each woman’s body, their chests and bellies, wrists, clavicles, armpits, necks, and faces, and as they were activated, the screens in the Research Division’s office grew animate, blue and red lines worming and peaking across the graphs. The monitors showed how each woman’s heart was flexing blood, lungs pumping, nerves shimmering with electricity, voices and inflections, pores pushing up little smears of sweat, a twitch in the face, the vagus nerve pulsing between brain and chest—all of this was tracked, recorded, and archived—a file for each test subject, the analytics already running, looking for patterns, trying to find the logic of each of them.

  As Mary took a seat on a sleek white sofa in the living room, she noticed how it exhaled instead of squeaking in that doctor’s-office way, and even the air felt exotic in the lungs, as if it had been imported. Being in that room was like being inside a furniture catalog, everything so placed, all human evidence scrubbed out, the real/unreal of a photograph. The blank white walls seemed to blaze, as if covered in something more than paint, and an abstract gold statue sat high on a white pedestal in one corner while a Warhol hung high above it, watching.

  More cameras (some obvious, others hidden) were trained on each woman’s face while she waited for on-boarding to begin, facial-detection software already analyzing the quick, passing expressions that let an honest feeling out, like heat exiting from a briefly opened oven. Through the various data streams, the Research Division could track each woman’s arc from one mood to another, the steady decline they all made toward dehydration over an hour, the way their attention became concentrated or scattered, the little sway of thoughts and feelings. One woman showed signs of duplicity as she spoke to another. One was quite significantly depressed and another oddly euphoric. Some daydreamed; some were amused; one was aroused. Ashley was angry or detached in turn; another woman was sleep deprived and undernourished; one was lying in her small talk to another, who was, in turn, heavily bored. And Mary, all gangly and graceless, her activity patterns were the most erratic—breathing shallow, heart rate inconsistent, attention always fluttering. It seemed she might, at any moment, need to run away, but her background check explained this, at least partially, the way she’d come to be.

  Mary had woken up that morning with a swollen throat, every swallow scorched and meaty. Her right ear and jaw throbbed. The pain fenced her from the room, separated her from the other women as their heels staccatoed across the hardwood, as they spoke to each other with ease, some even shaking hands as if this were really the beginning of something. They laughed, leaned toward each other. Some wore their sensors with the unbothered cool of a model in haute couture, though others didn’t seem so calm, kept touching the tape. Did anyone know what these things were doing? No one did.

  But on-boarding—as Matheson called it, as if this were the sort of job that would come with business cards, a stapler, a phone extension—was no stranger than all the interviews that they’d all been through. They had acclimated to the weird, curiosity and nerve and need carrying them through. They thought of their rents, their debts, their ailing parents, their families and their constant bills, tuitions, payment plans, groceries, all those endless appetites. Some had expensive habits: motorcycles, children, drugs, obscure bodywork treatments, lingerie, high-end kitchen appliances, and a few still had that youthful habit of daring life, of running toward risk, of wanting to do something wild before (or because) something wild was done to her. Some of them were excited, hopeful, optimistic, though most held some skepticism beneath the optimism, and some had genuine fears beneath the skepticism and some had a good deal of rage beneath the fear. A few women carried Mace disguised as lipstick or hot-pink Tasers and Ashley had her fists and Mary thumbed a smoky quartz from Chandra. At least one of them believed rage was her most reliable bodyguard, and often that is true, and Ashley could dislocate a person’s arm in three different ways and Vicky could torque a man’s nut nearly off if she ever needed, and even Mary, who hardly even looked at men anymore, even she remembered the moves learned in those self-defense classes with Chandra, years ago. None of them knew how those defenses, here, would be useless.

  2

  Was Ashley really going to take a job as someone’s Anger Girlfriend? And what the fuck was that? They’d been vague with her in the interviews except about the money and assuring her it had nothing to do with sex, but she knew better than to take them at their word. Still—she wasn’t afraid.

  She’d worked, for a while, as the desk girl (the boss literally called her the desk girl) at the massage parlor where she’d met Vicky, who took Ashley out for dim sum twice before realizing she was straight, which embarrassed Vicky enough for her to apologize four times before the end of the night, though Ashley hadn’t been offended as she’d often wondered, like almost every other woman living in this late patriarchy, if that kind of life might be available to her. Not being gay felt like a failing, somehow, less evolved. But they still shared an undeniable comfort, an innate understanding. Both had immigrant mothers and New York–born fathers, whom they’d both lost at the same age. Both had ambition—Ashley wanted to be a pro fighter and Vicky wanted to make films or maybe plays, she wasn’t sure. Conspiring, they quit the massage place the same week, Vicky to go into domming full-time and Ashley because she got more shifts at that overpriced restaurant in NoHo
where she hid behind thick-rimmed glasses that men who claimed to be agents (they never said what of) were always asking her to take off so they could get a look at her eyes. (Nah, I’m good.) Some nights after her shift she’d walk down to Vicky’s dungeon to hang out in the dressing room to complain about work, and one night there Vicky had told her about this weird job she was taking, something called the GX, which wasn’t really sex work and wasn’t really not sex work. They just want me to sit around this guy’s apartment for a few hours, and the money is crazy.

  Two weeks later Ashley had, herself, made it to the final interviews, albeit for a different role.

  I’m not stupid, she said to Matheson as he explained the responsibilities of the Anger Girlfriend.

  —Sorry?

  I said I’m not stupid. Anger Girlfriend? I know what a dominatrix is, so you don’t have to call it something else.

  Okay, Matheson said, so, it’s actually not, but I do like that tone. We really think you’d be great at this, and he passed her an envelope of cash and began explaining the scheduling system and nondisclosure agreements, and though Ashley still had more questions than answers, she said yes. Anything was worth the chance to quit waitressing and start training full-time—all she’d ever wanted.

  She’d started boxing as a teenager, her father’s idea. Self-defense, he reasoned to her mother, who just said, Be careful with your face, to which Ashley said nothing, already exhausted of this lie, that the best thing a woman could become was a magazine page, motionless, silent, shreddable.

  Even years after that winter morning her father didn’t wake up, she could still hear him shouting angry encouragement at her in the gym, could feel him holding the strike bag still, counting the reps. Every hour in her day bent toward her training, muscles quivering and knuckles going raw under the wraps. She was twenty the year he died, but when she fought, she felt a thousand and zero and alive and nonexistent at once.

  Eventually she switched from just boxing to MMA, planned to go pro next year, but next year was always next year as time and money and injuries kept thwarting her schedule. Every job she took—waitress, bartender, desk girl, maid, receptionist—was supposed to just be the thing she did to support her real work, but if she didn’t get bored and quit, she got angry and was fired. Too often she injured herself from overtraining and sometimes she’d give up for months at a time, wonder if she might waitress her life away, but she always returned to her dream—training and protein shakes and ice packs. Nearly a decade passed this way and all that stopped her from giving up was the belief that only incredibly boring people have lives that go the way they expect.

  She was the first to arrive to on-boarding, ten minutes early after a morning of training at the old boxing gym that had persisted through this neighborhood’s gentrification, from back when these streets were a better place to get a gut shot than a single-origin espresso. A new girl in a hot-pink sports bra and volleyball shorts had come in, insisted on sparring with her.

  You don’t want to do that, she said, eyeing Hot Pink’s yoga-toned and yogurt-fed arms, but the chick just asked if Ashley was scared, and seriously—who the fuck did this woman think she was? Just stupid or still coked up from the night before? She was used to men doubting her, but when another woman failed to recognize Ashley as a fighter clearly out of her league, the insult was sharper. Guys at the gym sometimes looked at Ashley as if she were someone’s daughter, someone’s little princess, and even when they saw how brutal she could be they still grunted at her hooks (half-astounded, half-aroused) and some of them still had the fucking nerve to call her girl after it was over. She ignored them usually, but after that one dude slapped her ass, she spun around and knocked one of his teeth loose. Word got around not to fuck with her. These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs—didn’t they know being a woman meant being at war?

  Hot Pink fought as if she’d once impressed herself in a kickboxing class and thought that meant something, so the spar took less than a minute. Ashley returned to her drills with an easy strength, rhythmically pummeling a punching bag. Serves her right. Everyone should know where they belong.

  But it was this—knowing where you belong—that made her suspicious of being someone’s Anger Girlfriend. Ever since Jason she’d openly disdained actors, as it seemed to her that the more a man wanted fame, the weaker he became, that craving external approval atrophied inner strength. (Nothing was dumber than people en masse, she knew. Our worst impulses live there.) So as she walked from the gym to the loft for on-boarding—for this job that would either buy her the time she needed or cost it again—she steeled herself for what she couldn’t see.

  3

  Before the women began showing up, Matheson had been enjoying the near silence in the loft, staring at his pint of seltzer, listening to the bubbles chime against the glass. Then the first elevator arrived. Ten minutes early. The nerve of some people. He moved to his office and closed the door.

  Matheson was unaccustomed to so many people being around, and though he’d always been told he worked well with others, that he was a natural leader, blah blah blah, he didn’t actually like having people answer to him. Sure, once or twice a year Kurt would host a party that required Matheson to manage the florists and waiters and bartenders and security and catering teams, and of course the maids came a few times a week, but they all knew the drill by now, and the in-house chefs would just as soon never talk to anyone, communicate entirely in notes taped on the fridge. Bless them. Otherwise it was just Matheson and Kurt in the penthouse (which sometimes felt, a little, like their home).

  Years ago the loft had briefly become the headquarters for postproduction on The Walk, the film that Kurt had written, directed, produced, designed, and starred in. They had just finished an on-and-off shoot of many years and were beginning to edit, but Kurt had soon dismissed all the editors and sound people and everyone else for not sharing his vision, just as the original director, cinematographer, set designer, costume designer, lead actor, and others had been let go over the years. Though Matheson knew that all these firings just gave more work to Kurt and delayed the film’s completion yet again, he was happy to share the space and Kurt’s attention with fewer people.

  But now, here they were again, the living room filling with all these women he’d have to manage and pay and schedule and call and send e-mails to and follow up with and on and on. The Research Division had already been around for a few weeks, preparing the loft for the GX to begin. Matheson didn’t mind them, as they all kept to themselves, didn’t ask many questions, were monomaniacally focused on whatever they were doing, skittering around in their white lab coats, eyes always averted, but all the equipment they’d brought in had taken over Matheson’s office and forced him into a smaller room on a lower floor. And as if that weren’t bad enough, they’d turned the place into a complete mess for three weeks before on-boarding, with loose wires and cords and cameras and microphones everywhere, random electricians stumbling around, ladders being constantly set up, then left unattended in a room for hours. It was exhausting.

  Matheson believed in Kurt’s vision and was sure the GX would hasten a new era of emotional evolution—as Kurt called it—but all these people in the loft were a disruption, complicating the space with various smells and outfits that messed up the aesthetics and voices that echoed, shrill and grating, against the high ceilings.

  Spatial harmony had once been Kurt’s highest priority, and he’d even commissioned a minimalist sound installation for the loft a few years ago, a nearly imperceptible drone calibrated to fluctuate with the weather and time of day so that it always vibrated at the exact pitch that allowed Kurt to be his most relaxed and creative. The installation was intended to hasten Kurt’s editing of The Walk by stimulating gamma waves, but it had taken several months of trial and error to sync the correct tracks with patterns in cloud coverage and atmospheric pressure, a process that had creatively derailed Kurt to the point that his meditation counselor, Yuri, suggested Kurt
spend some time doing something repetitive and therapeutic to allow the psychological impact of the installation to set in, so Kurt spent months constantly knitting, creating yards-long scarves and hats that grew wider and wider until they had no recognizable use. He eventually gave the knittings to a Chelsea gallery, causing a minor art-world frenzy—a brilliant statement on the paralyzing results of an excess of material wealth!—when they were exhibited, prices upon request. The show sold out before the opening reception, scandalizing half the art world and dazzling the rest.

  Matheson loved the sound installation, as he loved everything that Kurt loved, and was sure that its effect on his brain waves was at least somewhat responsible for the decrease in his insomnia and less frequent migraines. It moved him to think about how enmeshed his well-being was with Kurt’s, how dependent they were on each other.

  For the last decade Matheson had been the executive assistant for all Kurt’s affairs: sorting his calendars, e-mails, appointments, financial decisions, acting as a stylist for his public appearances, responding to event invitations, and almost anything else. Sometimes Kurt would call him in the middle of the night to sleepily relay a dream while Matheson typed it into a document forwarded to Kurt’s psychoanalyst, and every weekday morning Matheson transcribed as Kurt rambled about whatever was on his mind—screenplay ideas; topics he wanted to research; studies to commission; random unfounded theories; books he might have written; love-life woes; childhood memories; complaints; inventions; career strategies; and possible structures, styles, or ideas for editing The Walk.

  The few boyfriends who had passed through Matheson’s life had all accused him of loving Kurt more than he loved them, and each time this accusation came, he would have to realize the bit of truth in it. He had more or less given up on boyfriends in the last few years and his obligations with Kurt soon filled any extra space left in his life, and even his small apartment near the Gowanus Canal began to feel more like a storage space for something that belonged to Kurt. Though this sense of possession was somewhat unconscious, a few times, in the purgatory of a stalled subway car or during those first soft minutes awake but still prone in bed, Matheson had realized that he was devoted to Kurt in such an encompassing way that there was no part of his life that he wouldn’t change for him. Not so with any boyfriend he’d ever had. Not so with his own family.