The Answers Page 9
But ever since he began organizing the GX, insecurities had crept in. What if this army of girlfriends began to take over tasks that belonged to Matheson? What if Kurt grew to prefer their company to his? (He’d long believed himself to be irreplaceable, that he and Kurt had been through so much now that there was no chance of their ever parting, but when he’d first read the responsibilities of the Emotional Girlfriend, he felt something in his body drop and spill.) Or what if the Intellectual Girlfriend replaced Matheson as a consult on The Walk? Or what if the Maternal Girlfriend took over all his domestic tasks? Or what if he hired a girlfriend who ran his social life?
The screening process for hiring all these women had become even more time-consuming and stressful than Matheson had anticipated, and though he’d hired a temporary assistant, Melissa, even her presence began to unnerve him after a few days. Melissa—an acting MFA student, twenty-two, new to the city—came to work each day wearing a dramatic trompe d’oeil of makeup, and dresses bought on credit, worn with the tags hidden. And though he first thought her to be as harmless as any young person trying to seem older, he soon found her youth somewhat intimidating. She reminded him, horrifyingly, of the young man he’d once been, the young man he’d probably been when Kurt hired him, that early-twenties eagerness that radiates, potent and impermanent. He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing. Matheson tried (and succeeded) in making sure Melissa never crossed paths with Kurt, but his anxiety that she might permeated his every interaction with her.
Just before on-boarding began, Matheson stopped by the Research Division’s office to watch the live video of the women coming in, Melissa going through the check-in protocol with each woman, imitating an authority she didn’t have. No one in the Research Division paid him any mind at all. He looked over their shoulders as they worked, typing and clicking and occasionally murmuring to each other as they pointed at one of the screens of moving numbers or lines squiggling across a graph.
The members of the Research Division—six men and four women, a somewhat androgynous bunch, a range of skin tones, all of whom wore glasses, some of whom were of average height and some of whom were slightly shorter than average, all lacking any particularly defining characteristics—were almost always silent. They often whispered to one another as they passed handwritten notes or clipboards thick with documents, but to Matheson they said nothing aside from what was absolutely necessary, and even then they were slow to actually begin sentences, as if they were always waiting on someone else to jump in with an answer. They had no obvious leader but seemed to take turns speaking for the group.
Where had they even come from? They had just shown up one day.
Kurt had given Matheson only a week’s warning before they appeared, never revealing how they’d been selected. Suddenly they were setting up their office full of screens and odd machines, arriving by nine or earlier, covertly lunching at their desks, hard at work all day. Some would sit at computers, typing an endless script of numbers and abbreviations, while others read and reread documents, made notes, drew and erased and redrew diagrams on their massive whiteboard. Matheson noticed how, when they spoke to one another, they leaned together, as if for warmth.
Individually there was nothing imposing about the Research Division but taken as a whole their authority filled the room many times over. In their first week Matheson had stopped by their office with some regularity, saying he was just checking in on them, to see if they had everything they needed, but he soon realized they wanted nothing to do with him. They wanted to be left alone. They were here to complete a goal that Matheson would in no way affect, it seemed. His role in the GX was administrative and he felt this meant they didn’t take him seriously. And of course they didn’t take him seriously. The Research Division knew they were the ones doing the real work of the GX: designing the study, giving assignments, providing their custom-designed sensors that measured everything occurring within Kurt and the women during Relational Experiments, analyzing the data, producing reports. Matheson was merely a liaison between them and Kurt and the girlfriends. Anyone could have done this job. Matheson didn’t even understand what the sensors were measuring, and as he stood at the center of their office, watching the Research Division’s machines and monitors fill and flash with information, he felt much less crucial than he once had.
One of the displays was zoomed in on Ashley’s face as a series of dotted lines made triangles over it, a shifting geometry measuring the distance between cheekbone and chin, between pupil and brow, outer edges of her mouth, tracking each infinitesimal expression. Beneath this image, a ticker tape of information went by, and Matheson watched the numbers and words for a while before giving up and leaving. From her data the researchers knew Ashley was physically fatigued and digesting a large amount of protein. They could also see that the part of her brain associated with deep memories was extremely active and that her baseline of cortisol appeared higher than average. A little sweat clung to her forehead just below the hairline.
But anyone paying enough attention to her could see Ashley was packed away in her head. Her legs throbbed from her morning drills and the aches had triggered a memory of a story she’d once heard of a man who had irrationally wanted both his legs amputated. The man had gone to doctor after doctor and all were shocked, then disgusted by his request. He should be happy, the doctors told him. He had a body that still worked and he should appreciate the years he had, but these doctors, the man thought, they weren’t listening to him so he asked again—Just, you know, theoretically, what would need to happen for a man to have both his legs amputated? The doctors still refused his questions, suggested psychologists, suggested religion, a purpose, a hobby, anything. Even the plastic surgeons, accustomed to delusion, had him escorted from their buildings. This was a true story, Ashley thought. She still couldn’t remember where she had heard this story but she could imagine the man so clearly, looking down at his legs, good legs, strong legs, but somehow sure that a legless life would be better, in a wheelchair, half his body gone. Ashley felt she understood him, in a way, though he was a stranger, or maybe a fiction. It was just a different version of the way she hated her own face, that burdening inheritance from her mother, the reason, she was told, she got groped three times on the subway and once on the bus before she was even fifteen. No one knows, her mother said in halting English, how it costs so much to be beautiful, though Luisa never said what prices she’d paid, just as Ashley didn’t tell anyone she’d heard all this before: Tits like that, face like that, the man had whispered before leaving the train, disappearing into a terrible crowd. She wished for invisibility, wished she could just move around the world on her own, unnoticed, and that last night at Jason’s house, she had wished he’d hit her hard enough to break her jaw or nose—maybe that would have imbalanced her enough to be invisible—but all she’d gotten were some bruises and a lump on her scalp, hidden. For years she waited to get busted in a spar, to chip a tooth or crook her nose, but it never happened. She was too fast, too graceful, and eventually it became a point of pride—that you should fear the scarless fighter more than those who’ve taken enough to be changed—but she still resented her looks in the street. Men would just stare at her sometimes, women, too, maybe thinking she didn’t notice, but she did—her peripheral so wide and trained. Sometimes she’d sense a gaze boring into her from behind, and when she turned, some man was always there. Anyway, that guy who hated his legs, in the end he packed dry ice around them until the flesh was ruined, frozen and burned at the same time, and one of the doctors who’d said, No, absolutely not, never—he was tasked with the surgery, and while sawing through the man’s femur, he couldn’t help but notice the smell that came with this ending, like chalk but burning.
As Ashley stared out the window, Mary noticed her, felt comforted that at least one other person here wasn’t trying to make small talk with the others. Beginning conversations with strangers had always seemed
nearly impossible to Mary, a limitation that often caused her problems, especially abroad when she’d become lost and be unable to ask directions, and at its worst she would sometimes rather go hungry than go into a restaurant and have to ask for something. But soon Vicky had come in and noticed Ashley, the two of them embracing, making Mary, again, the only loner.
It had been fifteen days, she now realized, since she had seen or even heard from Chandra and she couldn’t recall ever going that long before. As Matheson began his presentation about the sensors, handbooks, Relational Experiments, and Research Division, Mary felt increasingly puny in herself, dipping in and out of attention. Perhaps she should not be a person’s Emotional Girlfriend. Perhaps she shouldn’t allow her neurological and psychological activity patterns to be analyzed. Perhaps she shouldn’t sign this one last waiver. She tried to make herself get up and leave and she tried to imagine what advice Chandra might give her in this moment, but that was just the problem—she couldn’t give herself what Chandra would have given her. She could not be Chandra to herself. Only Chandra, it seemed, could be Chandra to Mary.
The GX is fully committed to uncovering the mysteries of limerence, and your participation is the first step toward a more emotionally evolved future, Matheson said, seeming sure this experiment would generate practical, usable, real information about love, making love last, decoding the mysteries of limerence—which was, he said, the psychological and physiological state of a body as it falls in love. (Paul had said this word to her on a few occasions—limerence—naming the feeling between them in those early days, and she’d first thought Paul had invented the word, since the feeling she had around him felt so incredibly new that it seemed impossible that there could already be a word for it—this heat high in the chest and bone deep and above her head at once—but later, when Paul had brought up this idea of limerence again, she became frightened because if this feeling had already been defined, then it was possible someone might be able to prove or disprove whether she actually loved him. It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn’t in love, wasn’t in limerence, but was in some unnamed place, alone.)
And by conclusions, Matheson continued, I don’t mean some sort of bogus self-help pseudoscience or truisms—far from it. The ultimate objective of the GX is to devise a scientifically proven system for making human pair bonding behavior more perfect and satisfying, to make the benefits of limerence persist over the long term. This system will involve technological therapies that we cannot yet explain to you, but the GX is a crucial first step—really more of an exploration than an experiment—toward this goal. You are at the forefront of the creation of truly innovative technological solutions to emotional and psychological problems that were previously thought to be just part of the human condition.
The handbooks were distributed and Matheson explained them, page by page, the wardrobe and makeup requirements, the topics they should never bring up with Kurt, the prohibited words, prohibited actions, how they should never mention the existence of the other women in the GX, how they should say nothing to Kurt about his career unless he brought it up first, how they should never reference any part of his history or life that he hadn’t told them directly.
I realize some of you know more about Kurt than others, but for the purposes of your work with him in the GX, we will need you to pretend, and be actually convincing, that you’ve never heard of him or seen him before.
There was a Pre-session Protocol, the sensor application with the Research Division, wardrobe and makeup, the guided meditation with Kurt’s meditation counselor, Yuri. Then there was the Post-session Protocol—the exit interviews with the Research Division, sensor removal, and Yuri’s compartmentalization exercises that would, as Matheson explained, prevent any emotional bleed-over into your real lives.
Then it was all over and everyone was leaving, some of the other women sharing cabs somewhere, going wherever they were going, and Mary wondered if those women were making the conscious choice to be like that, whether they had to intentionally start a conversation with someone they didn’t know, or whether they just did, without thinking, because that’s just how they were. Mary walked to the subway alone, slowly, rubbing at a strangely sore muscle in her back, anticipating her next appointment with Ed—two and a half days away.
The late-afternoon light was thick and orange and she passed four different couples taking photos of themselves on the same cobblestoned block, all their loves endlessly recorded and reviewed, ever and ever, a little archive of two. On the subway a tide of anxiety came in and her back began to ache and spasm, and as she tried to contort herself to ease the discomfort, the people standing near her inched away. She felt an urgency and a certainty that something was happening to Chandra, a kind of intuition that she’d never before felt, and when her stop came, she bolted, quickly weaving her way through the crowd though her back was still gripped by pain, and when she finally reached her apartment door, she found a note that seemed to confirm her premonitions.
Going away for a while, not sure when I’ll be back, don’t worry.
Make sure you keep going to Ed.
Love & light, xC
She couldn’t tell what hurt more: not knowing where Chandra had gone or that she had just missed saying goodbye. Was it possible that she and Chandra were so connected that they had been thinking of each other at the same moment? She sat on the cold, dirty floor of her living room and tried to justify the separation: Mary and Chandra were different people, and because they were different people, they needed different things and because they needed different things they sometimes had to be in places without the other, to go about their lives alone, and sometimes, Chandra had often reminded Mary, some people need to be unseen, to be alone, to be unreachable for a while. And there was nothing wrong with this. Everyone has a right to her secrecy. Of course they do. Of course.
4
Her first years in the city Mary still woke before sunrise each morning as Chandra slept in on the lower bunk. She went out wandering, walking in and out of grocery stores and pharmacies and all-night bodegas, trying to learn the foreign language of energy drinks and pregnancy tests and creams that could fight your age. She learned that 4:00 a.m. can bring anger or drowsy sweetness out of people and it was 4:00 a.m. when a drugstore clerk at the end of her night shift pressed a package of earplugs into Mary’s hand—Can’t sleep, can you? I use these things. Sleep good now. Mary hesitated, tried to give them back, but the woman, fatigued into a violent compassion, insisted, Take them! It’s a gift! I work crazy hours, crazy hours. That shit will fuck you up. Young thing like you shouldn’t have nothing to keep her awake.
So Mary thanked her, took the gift, thanked her again.
All this noise, the clerk shouted, laughing.
In the street Mary twisted two blue plugs into her ears and all that noise—subway cars screeching below the grates and garbage trucks chewing trash and the obliterating roar of an empty bus shooting down Broadway—all of it paled and muted and Mary could hear her lungs charge and drain, heart thudding, feel her veins flexing beneath the skin. The sun rose and the streets filled with the dusty light of another broken morning and Mary felt shielded, felt safer.
She began wearing earplugs nearly all the time, until that predawn on a narrow, dim street when this arm came out of nowhere, clamping her chest (a stranger’s heat on her back), and another arm looped her waist and this body took her body from the sidewalk and into an alleyway, beside some trash bins (banana peel, old beer, something putrid), and this body cornered her and a hand pried open her jaw (head feeling hollow) and a man’s voice made noises muffled by the earplugs and his body pushed some of itself into her mouth (and what is a mouth and what is a body?) and the body held her head like it wanted and the voice told her what to do so she did and her skull bounced against the wall (and what are walls and what do they do?) and the earplugs kept the sound of all this deep in her head (throat seizing, gurgling, head drumming on brick
) and it all felt impossible and too real and she kept her eyes shut (hard squint) and told her thoughts to swim elsewhere, and it all happened fast and slow at the same time and her skull felt it might shatter in her head (and what is anyone’s head but a history, a house for all your history) and she was erasing the memory even as it happened, even as he finished (whatever he was doing, whatever it had done) and his hand held her mouth shut till she swallowed and he thrashed her head against the metal bin (a gong, almost holy) and was gone.
She was still for a moment, then retched until she spit up bile and something.
She stayed still, tried to exit herself.
The taste in her mouth was hateful and large.
No one found her.
The streets were quiet, the nonplace between night and morning.
She walked home, slack, lacking even the energy to tremble.
Chandra was away for the weekend. Their tiny dorm room, lit by dim yellow lamps, was silent. She took out the earplugs and threw them away. She took off her clothes and threw them away. She brushed her teeth until her gums bled and scrubbed her tongue and spat in the trash and threw the toothbrush in after it. She showered in scalding water and threw the soap away. She got back in bed naked though the sun was now coming up, a terrible orange dawn, and as she slept, her period came because bodies know nothing about timing, bodies, awful bodies. They put a Rorschach between your thighs and stain your sheets to remind you that all you’re doing is bleeding and dying if you’re not making more life.