“Oh yeah? Where do you think baby algorithms come from?”
“You know what I mean,” Devin said, raising her foot in the air for me to massage it. “You and John are, like, comfortable with each other. But that’s hard to find.”
“That just takes time,” I said. “We’ll find you someone.”
“You don’t have to find me someone.”
“You know nothing motivates me more than being told not to do something.”
Watching the fire burn and glow and then smolder to cinders put me into some kind of trance state where I experienced time at the same rate it was happening, not sped up or interrupted by the little pings I’d been programmed to react to. I felt almost stoned, only able to think one thought at a time. Devin’s legs were a warm equal sign across my lap. John ate popcorn with one hand and scrolled through Facebook with the other, occasionally scoffing in disgust. Before he could read me the latest offense, I held up a hand to let him know I was very busy experiencing time.
“I think I’d like to stay,” I said.
Devin was delighted. “Selena Gomez took ninety days off from her phone.”
“Let’s not get crazy. I just want to take the week.”
“So I guess that means I’m driving Devin home?” John asked, actually looking me in the eye so I’d pick up his desperation.
“Quid pro quo, babe,” I said.
On Sunday night, after they finally left, I dreamed I was falling from a skyscraper and the only way to activate the parachute in my coat pocket was to press a precise sequence of numbers on my phone except that I couldn’t remember the combo and so I kept falling—the touch ID wouldn’t even recognize my thumbprint and I knew, I absolutely knew, that the phone wanted a drop of my menstrual blood, to prove my identity, but just when I started to roll the phone into the shape of a tampon, I woke with a jolt from the dream, wet between my legs.
* * *
...
On Monday, all I had was time. There were no action items I needed to follow up/circle back/close the loop/just check in on. Khadijah could keep the plates spinning without me. And for all the rest, let them get my auto-response! I thought, with a thrilling rush of indignation, especially when I thought of the pushy women who sent emails asking for status updates on things I never committed to doing, or the vague invitations to “pick your brain” over coffee when I was already so caffeinated that my brain was like a fluorescent sign. Why couldn’t they read it from a distance?
After breakfast, I didn’t brush my teeth or wash my face or put my contacts in. Who would know I hadn’t? No one. I pulled a dusty hardcover copy of Sophie’s Choice from the shelf and went back to bed. Nothing like the Holocaust to put your own life in perspective. I flipped to the first chapter: “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.” Those days were 1947. I reached for my phone to Instagram the passage, before I remembered. Was there a point to reading if I couldn’t share it? I willed myself to focus on the next few pages, but it was just the young narrator going on and on about his ambitions. Stingo reeked of white male privilege. Where was Meryl Streep?
Around the headboard, patches of the ugly yellow wallpaper were peeling off, as if someone had stuck their nails in at the seam and pulled. Underneath, there was just more wallpaper, a navy pattern with white swirls and dots.
I could have masturbated to pass the time, but Zoloft flattened my arousal and I looked forward to orgasms about as much as I looked forward to low-cal margarine spray. The most erotic moments John and I had recently shared involved watching the brothel scenes on Game of Thrones while we sat next to each other on the same couch, not touching, our fan brains completely disassociated from our bodies. Penetrative sex was a foreign country I spent some time in before the election, a beautiful backdrop for memories. I had no idea when or if I’d ever be able to return.
On Richual, we promoted a waterproof vibrator called the Overachiever that synced to an app to analyze and optimize your orgasms. We ran a popular ongoing photo series, “Healing Crystal or Dildo of Antiquity?” (Khadijah’s brilliant idea.) There were products for exercising your pelvic floor and e-courses for meditating your way to an O, sold alongside content about the orgasm gap and what it means for gender equality.
At least at work, I never had to be alone with my own thoughts. If I wasn’t writing an email or in a meeting, I was on a video conference call, watching everyone make eye contact with their own image. There was someone Slacking me. Hey, do you have a sec? I gave away all my secs, all day. She was generous with secs my tombstone would say. As overwhelmed as I felt, I didn’t know how to be unflappable like Devin, how to just say no with a smile, have everyone love you anyway.
Be more like Devin, I thought, and it felt almost subversive. A totally radical idea: what if I put myself first the way she did, every single day?
I found a perfect spot to sit on the rug in the living room where the warm sunlight hit my face. I closed my eyes and breathed in long and slow through my nose, out through my mouth, like she taught me. After just a few rounds of this, I could already feel a difference, a silencing of my brain hamsters, a softening in my belly, an unclenching of muscles I didn’t even know I was holding. Minutes passed. I counted my breaths up to ten and then started over again at one.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
I was sucking oxygen on inhale number five when I heard it. The sound came from inside the wall to my right, like the house cracking a knuckle. Old houses make sounds, I reassured myself. Watch your thoughts come and go like clouds, always changing.
I turned my attention back to the slight rise and fall of my sternum and scanned the rest of my body, noting the feeling of my butt on the rug, the yolky sun on my forehead. One of my legs was falling asleep. Shit. Should I shake it out? Watch your thoughts come and go like—oh, I recognized the click and the whir of the central heat kicking in, and the crinkle of the aluminum vent flushed with hot air. That’s all it was. The sound of heat.
But then I heard a flutter, like the rustling sound of running a hand through a row of dresses hanging in dry cleaning bags.
I opened my eyes and was about to call John’s name before I remembered.
I was no longer breathing. Turning around, I stared at the long white wall that bordered the brick hearth as if somehow the silhouette of the animal might appear, a shadow puppet.
It had to be a bird. What else could it be? The sound of desperate wings was now unmistakable, and I tried to imagine what John would do if he were here, while simultaneously berating myself for using a man as my model for taking action. At the far end of the white wall, there was a pocket door I hadn’t noticed before. I had no idea where it led—the dining room and kitchen and deck were all accessible from the opposite side of the living room. How did the bird even get on the other side of the wall? The door must slide open to a den or a study, with windows.