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The Big E 2023

I’m planning my once in a lifetime affair
It’ll be the party of everyone’s year 
The beaux and the belles,
The heaviest swells,
The celebs, the smarties,
The funky, the arty, the glitterati,
The hale and the hearty,
The coy and the tarty,
Those mystery-mongers, the Illuminati,
They’ll all take their places, 
Showing us their real faces 
At my Extinction party
Count on it, everyone will be there    .

Covid was a great dress rehearsal for this 
And the way that we’ve handled it shows that we  
Have learned just how to deal with catastrophe
So should the climate just chance to get worse we’ll
All come together and briskly agree
How to put the process into reversal
We’ll then hunker down and do just what it takes 
To retreat from the brink of the threatening abyss
Re-freeze melted ice caps, refresh those dead lakes
Replant the rainforests,
And whoosh all that stinky bad air away
While rebuilding lost species from their DNA!
Do I hear some folk calling for laughter breaks? 
Hohoho! Hahaha! Yuckyuckyuck! TeeHeeHee!

I see some of you wonder
Yes, it’s easy to see,
Why planning this party so matters to me?
Why should I work as hard as this
On fun and games I’ll be certain to miss?
Well, okay, not that long ago
I also felt exactly so
I was sure I’d be well outta here
Before the bad stuff began to appear
And routinely extreme weather events
Would make almost everyone start to see sense
But that was how I felt, past tense,
Now it’s clear I got my timing wrong
We’ve passed several tipping points 
So now before long – 
But I won’t spoil the end,
Let’s get on with the song

We don’t have to go quietly when we just gotta go
So my closing party for the End of Days
Is going to be one helluva show
There’ll be massed choirs singing songs of praise
Marching bands and firework displays
We’re putting on an Extinction ballet
That’ll be quite a laugh, just to choreograph
And, of course we’ll be playing
Cool Extinction Games
The Blind Man’s Buff will be really fun stuff
The Russian Roulette? You can totally bet
That’ll be something no-one will forget
But art will be the beating heart of the show
Art throbbing with concepts, art pulsing with feelings
Will be slathered on every available wall
Sculptural tableaux? No trouble at all
And squads of nouveaux Michelangelos
Will be on hand to have a go on the ceilings

There’ll be multiple dance floors at my Extinction do
So those wishing to say goodbye two by two

Can pick a polka or a Viennese waltz
Get ’em all dancing! That is my goal
And you’ve got to admit that it does take some balls
To bring back dance from an olden time
To a time like just right now when hardly a soul
Could take to the floor and do real Rock and Roll

We’ve chosen our special modes of departure
As we think, when we bother, about what lies ahead
But thinking is boring, act busy instead
It’s a performance event as much as an art show
For most it’s a casual Extinction Trot
Should we take the science seriously? Certainly not
For others of us it’s an Extinction Stroll
Take the news calmly, that is our goal
So let’s bring things down to a leisurely pace 
We’ll give ourselves some breathing space 
We might even win the human race
Others accept it’s dead serious, so
Feel a dignified march is the right way to go
Wow! Here are some folk on Extinction Sprints
Who are these speed demons? I’ll give you some hints
They’re hard-working dudes who wholly despise
Ignorant writers who fantasise
And wicked scientists spreading pure lies
To bring about a great system’s demise 
Green’s the loveliest of colors 
When it glows from heaped dollars
Please don’t spoil our fun!
Some put up their fists for survivalist fights
Let me put this politely, God bless everyone
But soon comes the time to turn off the lights.

In such well-heeled places as Silicon Valley they say

Mega-rich dudes have been working out ways to avoid
The stuff that’s heading the rest of our way
On a ocean platform, they call that Seasteading,
Or find a safe planet, arm your own asteroid
We admire your spirit, you’d have been so missed
But you’re all going to find that you’re till on the list
So you just gotta go when you gotta go
I’ll just say Yoiks! And Tally-ho!
Pip Pip! Ta Ta! And Tootle Ooh!
And everyone’s welcome, no matter who
There’ll be no clipboard Nazis, no turnaways
From the closing night for the End of Days

Then when we’re finally all outta here
That’s just when the UFOs at last will appear
They’ll do their due diligence, plough through the data
Note our brilliant achievements, spot some silly mistakes,
Separate the real pix from hypnotic Deep Fakes
Cruise ruined museums, see breathtaking stuff,
But in such bits and pieces that they’ll find it quite tough
To see why a Happy Ending was such a non-starter,
And then when they’ve taken in quite enough
They’ll be heading right onwards past sun after sun
Searching for a world that’s not totally done.

 

The Whammy Song

She flew in the window
  They were watching the door
  She hid in a glass of
  Merlot on the floor

  Excuse me, who are you? 
  I don’t really care
  But didn’t we meet somehow
  Sometime, somewhere?

  One wall was heaving
  It panted with lust
  She lifted her legs
 As she rolled in the dust

 Excuse me, who are you?
 I just want to know
 What made you think
 You could treat me so?

 The clock squats there plotting
 It’s so on her case
 She’s on the clock’s menu
 It’ll feed on her face

 Excuse me, who are you?
 I’m feeling no pain
 Do you know who I am?
 I won’t ask you again

 The fridge and the cooker
 Are poisoning her name
 The microwave too is playing that game
 The mixer, the dryer
 They are all just the same
 She can’t understand it
 It’s so underhanded
 She loves her machines, she respects each machine
 Keeps them humming and thrumming and blindingly clean
 Why are they acting so mean, mean, mean, mean?

 Excuse me, who am I?
 Do you truly not know?
 I knew you quite well
 A long time ago
 I might be more forgiving
 If I were still living
 But me? Just who am I?
 That’s my dilemma 
 That’s my double whammy
 I think you should go

 

The Secret History of Modern Art: The Plot is Hatched

Our story begins with Gustave Courbet
 Who was a Communard by the way
 He knew just which painterly button to push
 A slap in the face with a big girl’s bush
 So it’s goodbye, Boldini, Bougereau,
 Winterhalter, James Tissot
 The Last of the Masters have had their day
 And the War Against Beauty was underway

 It’s a muddy road to Paul Cezanne
 If you like awkward, Paul’s your man
 Inedible apples, unbeddable nudes
 Nature in one of her nastier moods
 If a carpenter made a table like that
 He’d be out of a job in ten seconds flat  
 Your school friend, Zola, thought you’d gone mad*
 But you made it okay to paint real bad 
 And that was your part in the anti-art plan

 So let’s catch up with Vincent Van Gogh’s
 Provencal idyll with Paul Gauguin
 Then that field of corn, those threatening crows
 In the sullen glare of a clouded sun
 Take that yellow chair and lend me an ear
 Madness has entered the picture here
 And Modernism has truly begun

 George Seurat’s stuff looks placid at first  
 But he’s painting a world that’s ready to burst
 Ahead lie Bridget Riley and Op
 And the spots epidemic of Damien Hirst
 They applaud Seurat as a Pointilliste
 Did you know he was also an anarchist
 Like his bomb-maker pal, Felix Feneon?
 Top hats in the park? They’ll soon be gone!
 Those particle clusters were only the start
 Of a negative force-field too strong to resist
 That would tear apart beauty and art
 
 Pablo Picasso, a giant among men,  
 Said he painted like Raphael when he was ten
 Came La Vie en Rose, then his whole world blued
 Did someone say kitsch? That’s really quite rude!
 Witchdoctors to the rescue! Picasso plunged on
 To Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
 Catch a whiff of the girls’ Barcelona pong!
 He shut it away. Sadly, not for long
 Then he and Braque sliced and diced and glued
 Some called it “Cubism” which sounded crude**
 So as -isms go it was quite a good fit
 
 Matisse couldn’t make heads or tails of it***
 Luxe, calme et volupte
 That was Henri’s way and Henri would say
 That a businessman after a long hard day
 Should treat his work like an easy chair
 Picasso ripped through styles like a man possessed
 And as if in some eerie way he guessed
 The needs, and the greed, the hungers he’d feed
 Of collectors to come, a predator breed 
 It was Picasso wheeled out the shopping cart
 And created the Supermarket of Art
 Becoming art’s first true celebrity
 But when Gary Cooper and Chaplin dropped by
 His English embarrassed him, and that’s
 Why he pulled silly faces and wore silly hats
 It was David Douglas Duncan’s pix
 In Life that cured his celebrity fix****
 When Picasso grew old, this giant amongst men,
 Didn’t paint like Raphael but a child of ten
 
 Raymond and Jacques really painted quite well
 Better by miles than their brother Marcel
 But it’s Marcel who’s the toast of the crème de la crème.
While Raymond and Jacques have dropped out of the frame
 They’re goner than gone, buster than bust
 While Marcel is eating Pablo’s dust
 Do you want to know the reason for this?
 Those painful puns, LHOOQ,
 Make people feel cool, like nobody’s fool
 He saw the importance of taking the piss!

 Cocteau said the trick to being a star
 Is knowing just how far to go too far
 Now the Picassoid garden has long gone to seed
 While Duchamp Inc. makes much of product we need
 So anyone can be a belle at the art world ball
 With one half-smart idea, a huge helping of gall
 And no visible art-making talent at all

  (To be continued with Chapter II, The Plot Sickens)

*     Clear from reading Zola’s “The Masterpiece”
**     Louis Vauxcelles both came up with the phrase “Les Fauves” in 1905 and applied the word “cubism” to a Braque in 1908. He meant it as a compliment in neither case.
***    As Matisse told Michel Georges-Michel, quoted in From Renoir to Picasso.
****    Told to me by John Richardson 

amsterdam crimes 3-19

I got rich off inflation
quantitative easing blackrock
bull market create loads bullshit
alphacomp blatant localism
razorpits in th blood
5 month friendaversary
selena gomez’ mom’s favorite 
movie is gummo   boat names
such as th stugotz   this guy’s
singing opera upstairs  enrico caruso
friendocracy  solstice party
6 month mikeaversary
he thinks my name is mike
th love you live = th love
you give   staying overnight
away in a field sleeping in
central park  how many 
people have you fucked in yr life
mommy & daddy taking you
out for lunch in minnesota 
vikings jersey taylor swift
sitting btwn steven spielberg
& sarah palin at th snl 
40th anniversary episode
still will read annie ernaux
on th plane  I play myself
at all ages of childhood
slammers pogs on concrete front stoop
th trees of woodhill & bike trail
less youth w distance
mangry crab feet
fantasy baseball draft
th afterlife of our youth
in th city   cheat a little
to th right  neocon poetry
vaporizes th humanities
th market specimen eats
god particle in my antarctic
hadron collider accelerator
can’t seem to find my way home
bloodshot in one eye

link wray 4/20

sarah silverman gave bryan fernandez
her joint last night passing in front
of st marks comedy club w/ todd
barry before th other side of comedy
show which I performed on  janeane 
garafalo had passed by earlier as brian
had been stationed out front barking

I became a cost center
nobody wants to talk abt it
I wasn’t earning enough money
people wanted me to leave
my comedy sets are only funny
later privately to myself
like all tragedy plus time
charges have been dropped
one of th olds
in th ffvii sound font

pepper’s ghost 4/23

even after you realize it
gertrude stein is telling owen
wilson  who creates agi
lookin half cyborg already  like data
other forms of deployment   panic window
mall injection pink post-it note
th lightning comes from th ground
mango vodka evolving non-binary
train derailment season popping
chinese spy balloons start
reading my mind copy & paste
into description  write my throat
wages have not gone up inflation
has gone up  th credit industry has
accounted for that leaving it worse
than they found it   my books go back
& forth across continents  minneapolis
is close to venice  which will affect
drinking water & crops in this land
a megaton is a million tons of tnt
vacant mcmansions in th hamptons
we’ve got a show tmrw
th destruction wd be indescribable
4 miles in every direction
25 lbs per sq inch  winds of 200 mph
south st seaport just making conversation
but you got mad  th blossoms were
already down  aidan watson likes
whit stillman damsels in distress
we are animals in a zoo
directed by brian de palma
th consumption ballast of today
zoomers are the smallest generation
    abt 30% smaller than
th millenials  to conquer antarctica
operation hijump thrives on chaos
no parking lots neurodivergent
ancient galaxies like xmas
lights from th beginning of time as we
know it  nearly 40% of tv/film 
actors working in th industry are
privately educated  time is not 
rent so it doesn’t matter if I stay
up til 3am writing this   hi iq
people are messy keeping things
in stacks & th best thinking 
is had at night  itching from croissant
is art compressed information
as prophecies foretold  raining on
th limousine glass  big announcement
to make tmrw  which is tonight
to be young & broke  full of 
megaton vitamins  kingdom hearts

on assignment

yes thanks for asking
throwing water from a sysco
systems bucket into a plant
bed how cd they do this
to me  revenge of th fomo
brooklyn vs. manhattan
poetry wars of 2023
big two hearted river
split in two  what’s in
it for me   stay on target
playing a mental movie
therapy’s just a fad
cabaret intimacy shoot
th piano player
frolicking thru th ramble
rambling thru th roam
a midsummer night’s sex comedy
I think I’m doing it wrong
but can’t stand it when
you correct me  springing
cannister of weightless lightmusik

        smile brevity outload

    gerard malanga’s film notebooks

Birds and dogs and babies

and mothers and lonely men

and girls eating ice cream,

saying they wish they didn’t

have to work today.

Avenue A shut ups and fuck

offs and where are you

goings, sound kind of sweet

and the honking cars feel

like my calling. We are all practicing

meditation and I have no one

to see or anywhere to be.

Watching the tree’s shadow

move and come back, I forgive

my fathers, grandfathers, and great

grandfathers. I can be forgiving sometimes.

Who are these men eternalized in statue?

Where are the women?

The women are here, alive in the park.

And this sandwich wrapped in paper, cut diagonally—

this is what my life could be, this is what my life wants.

Fat ugly pigeons near the West 4th St movie theater love extending their whole heads. They latch onto crust with their beaks and flail it about whirling a full 360 in their faggotry.

I watch and I miss you, inhaling the pizza of others.

Similarly migratory, the ice cream trucks
of Bushwick play their song nonstop
for at least three months in heat. The
only way out of it is through. Mr. Softee
fated to his inceldom, is damned and unkissed.

Your fan is pulling bad spirits into your room, convincing you to delete and remake.
Which you start to, but I took you on, stoned, pointing up at the ceiling, telling the boys that the chandelier is so clear a girl,

sad, with her hair hanging down limp.

You play the summer like truth or dare.
I ask, “Are you crying because it’s a dead dog
in the street or your dead dog in the street?” Your dog. I slap you across the face. I get better each time.

I forgot to flip the calendar. June hung
for all of July. Then, when a mousedoor appears, at the foot of a brick wall, unwilled? Love.
It has a physics learned only after it unfurls.

The heirloom tomato I handed you at peak
was my heart, Yours now on the bus home,
its red against city blues and cautionary yellows.

I am ingesting the rainbow, downing Lucky Charms on a night astrologically best for manifesting, hoping for compounding eect.

The dryer sheet box copy demands, “Surround yourself with softness!” But remember the desert? Remember Top of The World? Now I can’t
look at the cacti.

So I run in a human washing machine to techno in Mexico City in lieu of a classic rock boyhood, for all I say I want an armchair, a fireplace,
a big mug. My footing was fucked. Someone had to teach me the twostep.

I am riding in a van called Tus Sueños. Your dreams. Dreams you say you are having in snowpiles and
with all your bones gone. Air conditioning runs
at constant during the city heatwave. Idiot! All chill is false.

Our company’s founder who can be quite eccentric at times began almost a year ago now a system whereby once every fortnight she will step down as Chief Innovation Officer for a 24-hour period and be replaced by someone telecommuting-in from a developing nation. I do not know how she goes about finding worthy candidates but she must have a friend working in international aid or a service she subscribes to for our 24-hour CIOs have been to a person quite friendly and professional and not at all rude or culturally dissonant in that way that language barriers will sometimes make people seem less polite than they actually are.

When the system was first introduced I think we were all a bit hostile to it. After all it can be irritating to have to take orders from a 19-year boy old in Rabat or respond to emails in imperfectly translated Hausa, to execute (or pretend to execute) on some well-meaning but risible corporate strategy only to have it walked back in 24 hours’ time when the normal CIO regains control of the corporate reins. Not to mention the connectivity problems that our 24-hour CIOs will sometimes have depending on how deep in the countryside their village is and whether they are running their computer off a generator or what.

But Madison (our founder) was the sole owner and shareholder at the time and so not subject to anyone’s oversight or anything like that, and she believed earnestly that her system while at times vexing to us on the bottom was helping teach leadership and competency to people in these developing countries. It is only lately I believe that she has begun to question her decision/framework, since the company became embroiled in a legitimacy crisis and is now technically headquartered in Goa and certain employees at the new CIO’s behest have begun a coerced relocation to Goa in order to retain their roles and keep their pensions and benefits intact, which has led to a lot of tearful goodbyes and recriminations obviously here at the Duluth office.

The young woman who now owns our company is named Kashfiya and goes by Kash. She is a student at the National University at Goa. She has sparkling intelligent eyes which she hides behind very big thick frameless eyeglasses, giving her the appearance of a rather beautiful dark-haired owl. She has two younger siblings, for whom she is the sole caretaker. Kash is fluent in Urdu, Hindi, English (obviously) and Portuguese since Goa until the 1960s was a colonial holding of Portugal. I suppose I ought to confess to you now that secretly I am in love with her and that in my hidden heart I long for a day in the future when Kash sends me a formal Requisition to Relocate to Goa. But the sad truth I think is that I am too pathetically low down in the company hierarchy to merit such attention and so fear that the day will never come.

Madison of course is furious and very distressed and has written several intemperately worded communiqués to the Indian Consulate in Chicago demanding that they take control of the situation and figure out a way to reprimand or prosecute Kash or else get her formally expelled from the National University. Madison has frequently accused the Consular Apparatus of Greater India of being “flat-footed” or “feckless” in the Press as well as writing our congressional representative to describe Kash’s ruthless takeover of the company and refusal to deed back her (Madison’s) ownership stake. The congressional representative in question is up for reelection next year and has sniffed a primary opponent on his right flank and so last I checked had started advocating the wholesale annexation of Goa, which Madison says she does not support but cannot take back the press conference she did alongside him this Summer.

I do not want you to get the wrong impression of me. I am not one of those people who is quick to love, by nature. I have never been quick to much anything, to be honest. Teachers when I was growing up told my parents that I was developmentally vague and that my life’s potential would be capped by some low-hung ceiling inside myself. My mother when she received the news became tight-lipped and terribly mournful. Eventually it became evident that the prognostications had been off and I became after my own fashion an O.K. enough student. But my mother’s terrible mournfulness stayed-on, the perplexing funereal atmosphere in my house remained, and it so heckled her that she is now dead from a heart attack.

Perhaps because of that childhood I have always been a fairly phlegmatic person. I have never been very interested in romance or love because both seem to require people to muster a great deal of unnecessary courage, to step outside of themselves, to possess and be possessed etc.

Publicly the Consular Apparatus of Greater India refuses to respond to our (former) CIO’s heated rhetoric but on conference calls when Madison begins to rage the nonplussed bureaucrats do not fail to point out that Madison did not have to legally sign-over full ownership of company, shares, patents, and trademarks all to some unknown girl, just for a 24-hour philanthropic stunt. Madison, in response, says that she considers this to be vital to the whole philanthropic act, since without it, handing over the corporate reins to this person would feel an empty or symbolic gesture, rather than a lived reality.

“Well, it seems you are living the reality,” the man from the Indian Consulate remarked rather dryly, which sent Madison into throes of apoplexy forceful enough that several of us were forced to duck beneath our desks or behind potted plants to remain safe (she later apologized and bought us all lahmacun from Taste of Gallipoli as a repentance gesture suggested by our office’s conflict mediator) so it seemed on the ownership front she was at least temporarily without recourse.

Kash is trying to get to know all the staff gradually, to get a handle on the culture of the company while simultaneously getting people settled in the Goa office which is obviously a lot to have on one’s plate especially being that she is just 24 years old and still must juggle a full course load at her university and conduct independent research for her thesis. Madison will rarely speak directly with Kash because of the bad blood between them but still sits in fuming silently on Roundups and Budgets and will stare daggers if she sees some former member of the Duluth office appear on screen next to Kash looking tanned and well-adjusted to their new life in Goa. Madison is being retained on payroll in a consulting capacity by Kash who seems unconcerned about any sort of counter-insurrection.

“I think what Anna said is quite profound.” Kash is intoning. Next to her on the video call is our Head of Human Resources (Anna) who since relocating to Goa has left her husband and cut her hair very short and now only seems to wear linen.

I give a start.

“I’m sorry.” I chime in. “I missed that Anna. Bad connection.”

Kash who is staring out through a screen and so seems as if she could be staring at any one of us or no one at all coughs and then says

“Who is speaking right now.”

I flush.

“Sorry David sorry.”

“Sorry David sorry.” She says. “What precisely is your role on this call?”

“Just David. Minutes. I’m taking.”

“Minutes.”

“Descriptions of things said at the meeting, basically.”

Kash flicks one earring back and forth with her index finger, raises her eyebrows very high.

She says: “I do not need minutes of meetings at which I am bodily present. If my brain is a faulty recorder, there is no sense in having its amnesias perverted through a second, faulty recorder.”

It seems through the low pixelated fuzz of her camera that she is smiling, if not at me, then at her joke of me. “What do you think, David? How does that strike you?”

“I suppose that is true.”

“O.K. then.”

A couple of people on the call laugh.

Blood and shame crown my head shouting down all thought. How does it always feel like I am being run circles around when I am just trying to do correct things and be safe? How could I ever be worthy of the love of this person, who is so brilliant and quick where I am so slow?

“Let’s see your face, David.”

My mouth is very dry. I am sure it must sound unpleasant, compressed via the tinny microphone of my office laptop, funneled at high volume into the ears of my coworkers. The dull, arid smacking of cheek against tongue.

“Sorry?” I say.

“Sorry, sorry.” She repeats softly. “Your face, I said. I got mine from my mother. Eyes in my head to look. Ears in my head to listen. But I look for you on my screen and where there would be eyes that look is just a name, David, and a void, and where there would be ears that hear there is a faulty connection, apparently. Let’s see your face, I said.”

The call is quiet except for someone’s phone buzzing in the background. My camera is off. I reach over and turn the image on and appear.

“Oh dear.” Kash says, her eyes sparkling. I say nothing, shift in my chair. “Poor thing.”  She is a square on a screen full of squares. She could be staring at anyone or no one or herself but I know that she is staring at me.

“Alright. We’ll have a meeting soon to ascertain how your role can be modified to best suit company operations. Until then.”

She turns to some perfunctory matters, brings the meeting to a close. My face is still red. Anna of H.R. is stretching her spine on an ergonomic ball in the background, her fingers wiggling, extended to brush blue carpet.

“Bye.” says our new CIO.

I privately dread the summons I will receive later in the week. I walk around the office breathing slowly, barely agitating the air particles around me.

Some of my coworkers try and commiserate over my embarrassment. One of them, Ludlow, who is a very funny triathlete comes over.

“I would shudder to perform so poorly on a work call.” he says.

“Was I very bad.” I ask.

“Worse still.” He says kindly. “We were embarrassed for you. Hanz of legal was saying do you know what schadenfreude is.”

“Sure.” I say.

“Hanz would you mind coming over and explaining the thing you were saying about schadenfreude.”

“Yah.” Hanz crosses the room. “Schadenfreude is a word we have for a dread you feel for another outside yourself, so profound that it can make you physically ill.”

“Right.” I say.

“So that you feel a kind of joy, almost. For the terrible humiliation the other person is provoking inside of you.”

“Sure.” I say.

“Anyway.” says Ludlow. “That is what myself and Hanz were feeling basically, on the call.”

“I’m sorry.” I say.

“No it’s O.K.” Hanz waves a hand looking mournful “It can be enlivening, the feeling.”

“I was enlivened.” Volunteers Ludlow.

Madison is the only person who was present who seems happy with my performance.

“Don’t let yourself or your role be degraded, David.” She says.

“Right.”

“You are exactly where you belong, right here.” She gives me a strange sideways hug.

I begin taking Urdu and Portuguese in a language school at night despite my feelings of abjection. I buy copies of the Lusiades and The Book of Disquiet. Stare at the words willing them to yield something. Comb them over with my eyes that see. The sentences do not yield. They lay flat and dead on the page.

I anticipate my one-on-one meeting with the new CIO, my only love, with displaced dread. If she has no need of faulty recorders I cannot ascertain what use I can be to her. The same must be occurring to Kash. Still, I toil at my night classes. I arrange my desk in an orderly way in anticipation of some great project. The day comes and I am summoned to attend a video call.

“David.”

“As-salamu alaykum.” I say full of false brio.

“Um.” Says Kash, positioned in front of a white background with our new company logo.

“I have been taking Urdu.” I explain.

“Have you?” She looks surprised. “I think you will like Urdu.”

“Why is that.” I ask.

“It is practically impossible to abuse someone in Urdu. We almost don’t have the words for it.”

She is wearing a sweater that matches the logo of the company. Her hair is held back in a ponytail.

“Anyway, I have been thinking.” She begins, flattening her affect, scratching a cheek “Are you being used, David?”

She must see on my face that I don’t understand the question because she presses on.

“Do you feel that in your current capacity you are made useful?”

I say nothing.

“Or, I’ll put it like this: do you crave to be of use? Does it occupy you?” she purses her lips 
“The place I’m from has known brutal occupations. The British, the Portuguese, both gone now. It is by definition a state of violence. So, is your heart occupied David? Are you occupied?”

“Well.” I say.

“It seems to me you are a pain that rages without hurting.” She says. “That you cannot hardly decide for yourself whether it would be superior to quit yourself of the pain or avail yourself of the hurt. That that’s a rather pathetic way to have to go about living.”

“Yikes.” I say.

She sits, inclined slightly backward, peering at me. I tap my larynx with an index finger, watch a fat black fly zip across the open floor plan and adhere his little pulvilli to the side of a particle board wall mounted on Allen screws fused to the brackets by rust.

“Yes.” I say finally.

“Yes what.”

“Yes, I want to be of use. Above all else, it is what I want, have wanted, yes.”

“O.K.” she says slowly, “Then, I have a job for you.”

I straighten.

“A job.”

“A new job. I need, how do you say it, an honest broker.”

“A…sorry, what.”

Kash nods as if this accords with some previous impression she’d had of me.

“I am restructuring. I’m going to create a board and issue shares to the employees. And each share I issue will come with a vote, and all the votes totaled up will be equal to my vote, to the accumulation of my shares. And then.” She purses her lips. “There will be you.”

“You want to promote me from an entry level position to chairman of the board.”

She plows ahead as if she has not heard my question.

“I have already sat down with a lawyer to draw up the arrangement. It is quite simple. One hundred and forty-one shares issued. Seventy distributed.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand why.” I say.

“You don’t have to understand. But you do need to be of use, David. You need to for once avail yourself of a useful agony. Do you think you can do that for me?”

“For you?”

She appears to be only half-paying attention, her eyes wandering around the unseen reaches of the Goa office.

Finally, because it seems I am expected to speak, I say: “Why me?”

“Candidly?” she says looking back at the screen. “You seem hardly to exist. I have a feeling if you were murdered, you would feel some modicum of loyalty to your murderer. You are a nonperson David. Honest broker, the term could have been created with you in mind.”

“Ah.” I say. “O.K. Well, give me some time to think about it.”

“Imagine,” her eyes widen, “you were to find a person drowning. That you threw them a life raft and that the drowning man looking at the raft says to you ‘give me some time to think about it.’”

“Would I have to relocate.” I say.

“No.” She shakes her head. “You would be my extension. My remotest sensibility. My ghost in America. How does that sound?” Her eyes bore into me. “I need your answer. You cannot sleepwalk into this next part. I need you to open your mouth and tell me.”

I open my mouth and tell her.

Word gets around rather quickly and I am waylaid en route to my new office by Hanz and Ludlow.

“Hark.” Says Ludlow

“If it is not Le Grand Poobah.” Hanz says.

“The Large Camembert.” Ludlow says.

“In Spanish they say El que corta el bacalao, or he that cuts the codfish.” Hanz says.

“On his way to the C-Suite, I expect.”

“Hello.” I say.

“I hope you know this doesn’t change the way we view you.” Ludlow says.

“Of course.” I say.

“The way Ludlow and I are viewing you is basically like: we are all equals here, none better than the rest.” Hanz explains.

“Right.” I say.

“Still what a thrill.” Ludlow says. “And really unexpected.”

“An unexpected and improbable thrill.” Hanz concurs. “And we are right behind you the whole way, obviously.”

“Putting shoulder to the wheel for you, boss.” Ludlow says giving a crisp salute.

“Thanks to you both.” I say nervously.

“Oh do not hardly mention it.” Ludlow says smiling.

I have more and more meetings with Kash to prepare for the final announcement. She looks very tired all the time.

“Restructuring has been a bear.” She confesses. “And the thesis committee says my topic is derivative.”

“You should cut yourself some slack.” I say.

“I don’t have time for slack.” She remarks. Then smiles unexpectedly.

“But I’ve liked meeting with you.” She squints past her lenses at me on the screen. “Spending time with you feels like cutting myself slack.”

“Oh.” I say.

Kash laughs.

“Bye.”

The general mood around the office following this week’s announcement is one of elation and boundless potential. Having a 49% say in how the company is run, a sense that as the fortunes of the company rise so do the fortunes of the individual employees, has generated an enormous quantity of good will, both towards Kash as CIO and her decision to appoint me, as board chairman. Even Madison was issued one share, one vote (though it provoked in her rather the opposite reaction) just as everyone else.

“I just would like to say there are absolutely zero hard feelings around here.” One coworker tells me in the elevator. “I could not be happier that you have found your niche, finally.”

I thank her and in my nervous state neglect to get out on the correct floor.

“How are things around the office.” Kash asks during our next check-in.

I tell her that the mood is unusually chipper. “Good, I’m glad.” She says.

“What is next.” I say.

She begins to tell me but her connection goes out. I receive a text that there’s been a brown-out in Goa covering half the metropolitan area, and that they should be back online in a few hours.

I receive a knock on the door and our old founder enters without waiting.

“David we must talk.” Madison says smiling.

“O.K.”

“What an extraordinary gift you’ve been given.”

“Thanks.” I say.

“No one is more deserving than you.” She says.

“Wow.” I say.

“Here is the thing.” she says.

“Yeah.” I say.

“We have, in this office, some fifty odd shareholders, including myself, with another twenty over there in Goa.”

“Correct.” I nod.

“Now David.” Madison traces her hand along the front of the desk. “That means if we, the new shareholders can band together, and call a vote of No Confidence regarding the current CIO, that she could be replaced effective immediately depending on which side you, the chairman, came down on.”

“Oh.” I say.

“David, if we can get those twenty-some people in the Goa office on board, I feel very confident we could persuade everyone here in Duluth, and finally claw our company back.”

I rearrange my hands in my lap.

“Do you think so.” I ask, making my voice perfectly even.

Madison punches me playfully on the arm.

“This is a matter of people acting in rational self-interest. I guarantee you the two of us can concoct an agreement that would be acceptable to every last rational, self-interested employee here at the company. If you make an announcement, people will trust you. They will follow your leadership.”

She smiles. I do not say anything right away.

“David.” she says, “I am not exactly getting the collaborative, yes-and energy that I desire from you, right this second.”

“Do we not maybe think we as shareholders should let Kashfiya continue to try her hand at corporate stewardship.”

Madison’s face becomes very still and pale.

“What.” she says.

“Just.” I say, trying surreptitiously to toe my rolling chair away from her low-hung face. “Ought we not perhaps extend Kash the same generosity that she herself displayed here, in making us shareholders.”

“It is not often that total unfuckability is paired with this caliber of dim-wittedness.” Madison says.

“Well.” I say taken aback.

“Do you have no idea why you’ve been promoted.”

“I am an honest broker.” I say.

“You are a U.S. citizen.” She says. “You are a walking liability shield. When she wants to extract some regulatory benefit, you have standing here in America. The moment someone sues, it is your name atop the marquee, in big, bold letters.”

“Is that true.” I ask slowly.

“For me, I made mistakes. I built everything myself, depended wholly on myself. Mine was the vision, mine was the gumption, and perhaps as a result you all got the sense that I saw you as vassals or something. That was a mistake.” She says.

“I don’t think she would have promoted me if she did not believe in me, in my judgment.” I say.

“Oh dear. Oh” Madison says her eyes alighting softly on something. “You love her.”

“I would not say that exactly.” I object, my face reddening.

“That is it. You are in love with her.”

“Well.”

“David, do you realize how strange it is that the Chairman of the Board should be appointed by the CIO, as opposed to voted-on by the shareholders.”

“Well.” I say again.

“Do you even know what your duties are, to the shareholders, the company, regulatory bodies. Do you understand basic roles and responsibilities?”

“Um.” I say. “I am reading up on a lot. I have put my language classes on hold, to more fully focus.”

She purses her lips, says sympathetically: “You are a cowish fuck-up David. Now you have failed stratospherically upward to become king of all the cowish fuckups. And it could be,” she nods “extraordinarily, that this girl saw some beautiful, buried thing in you, that no one else can see. That could be. Or it could be that this person, who has never met you, invited you to dinner and now is asking you to sit on a bed of lettuce.”

Madison smiles and it is like her old smile from when she was our boss, our old CIO, and would beneficently purchase lahmacun for us all following some conflict mediation. Her eyes are fixed on mine.

“Which, do you imagine, is more likely David?”

My computer begins making a noise. The power has come back on in Goa, apparently.

“I choose love.” I say, but the words sound hollowed out and lame.

Madison laughs meanly, then excuses herself with a fake curtsy.

“Sorry.” Kash says into a microphone as she reappears.

“I was thinking.” I say. “What if I relocate to Goa.”

“This is, as we’ve already covered, a nonstarter.”

“O.K.” I say.

“Are you alright.” She says. “You sound strange. Turn on your camera.”

I reach forward and touch the camera and so doing appear.

“Here you are.”

“Here I am.”

From the Goa office our Chief Innovation Officer smiles and she is looking at me I know for there is no one else on the screen.

As it had been with all the bad habits that she formed in life, she had only realized her dependence when it was far too late — too late for what? her therapist asked her, and she bit her nails to avoid a response, but in essence it had been too late to be saved from it. It was ironic — was she using ironic correctly? she never knew — that she had spent her whole life worshiping feminist narratives, but the whole time she had really thought of love as surrender. Maybe it was because she grew up religious. When he came along, she told the therapist, she had unconsciously given him everything, because her anxiety about men had always surrounded the choosing of them, not the being with them, because her romanticism implied a complete loss of agency, relinquishing control to the mind of the man, his way of being. It’s that I have so many ways of being, she told her therapist, it’s that I feel like so many things at once, and so I always imagined the choice of a man to also be the final decision on everything — basically, my final identity would depend on his.

    Tell me the story from the beginning, her therapist said.

She laughed and told the therapist that she had always despised that sentence, because it always came at the end of the hero’s journey in children’s novels, as a kind of narrative device, so that adults would be informed of all the plot in just one sentence; it would go, “He told him the whole story,” as if this was easily done — no, as if there is something such as one true story.

    Maybe other children weren’t interested in those things. Maybe it was an Anna thing, said the therapist.

Oh, don’t start me on that, she said. Don’t start on that gifted child bullshit. That’s the kind of shit Thomas would always talk about — his burnout, his struggle, the limits of his previously unlimited mind. It’s fucking unbelievable. You raise a boy to think he’s the smartest person in the world, and he completely breaks down when he’s not, and that’s allowed to ruin his life? No one told me I was special, thank god. Thank god! Here I am, functioning now!

    Are you functioning? the therapist asked, and again Anna bit her nails.

I’m functioning much better than I was in Spain, she said. When I was talking to him, my entire functionality was dependent on him. It felt very real, I felt very tied to him, very under his control — and then I’m better than I thought I would be, in fact I’m objectively better on my own. Once I escaped. God. I don’t like that. Can we pretend I didn’t say any of that?

    Don’t worry about how it sounds, the therapist said, and then paused. So, tell me about how you met Thomas.

    It’s a long story.

    I’m here to listen, Anna.

    Yes, well, my parents are paying you to listen. But I do appreciate it. I don’t mean to be rude. I guess there are a few “meetings” to consider.

    That’s fine. Tell me what you remember.

    I first met him at the bar, at school. There was only one bar in the town, it was so small — it really was the middle of nowhere. A few restaurants, a bar, a post office, a church, whatever — that kind of New England town. It felt anonymous, kind of. Anyway, we met at the bar one night because we had some mutual friends — I was friends with some of his friends, they were older boys, I guess some were in my classes. I don’t remember much from that particular night, to be honest, but it was fun talking to him — notably fun, I remember my impression of him from that night.

    What was your impression?

    My impression was that he was very funny, very smart. Easy to talk to — very quick. When someone is quick like that, it’s easy to become intimate quickly, too, at least it is for me, I think. So we were kind of talking about everything from the first moment. I feel like it created the whole problem. The quickness, I mean, then the escalation. Real human connection I think is always quick, you know, zero to 100. When you’re slogging through it with someone — it’s not necessarily worthless but it does indicate something about how much intimacy will be built, I think. It wasn’t muddy with him. There was, from the beginning, a strong sense of emotional… lucidity in every conversation.

    Lucidity. How many other conversations were there?

    Hm. After the bar — before he graduated, a few more times? We met only in March, and then they all graduated in May — so maybe three more times? But he heard back from the Fulbright in March or April. I remember that night, I remember congratulating him, he was wearing a green shirt, maybe it was even St. Patrick’s Day — so then after that we started to speak a little about Spain, when we knew we’d both be there. It wasn’t really consistent, but you know, we spoke, here and there. It was always the same as the first time, the same ease, same openness.

    Did you think that you had feelings for him?

    No, no. I wasn’t attracted to him. I knew that from the first time. But it did feel like something drew me to him, there was a literal — a literal force of attraction, or I guess, a connection. But not in the traditional sense. Like, I didn’t want to sleep with him, but I wanted to solicit his opinions and to share mine — what he thought about things immediately mattered to me, I guess there was an immediate trust of his judgment as well. I’ve had that feeling before, but it’s relatively rare, still, I guess it always takes you by surprise. That feeling was much stronger when we were in Madrid. When I was there, it felt — it spiraled out of control. I became obsessive, I wanted to trace every single one of his thoughts, to download his entire brain.

    To download, the therapist repeated, laughing.

    I know, very millennial, isn’t it? But that’s what I wanted. Every single thought that he had. When I felt out of my depth, I also felt so far from everyone else — I felt that I had either adopted or built a new world with him that no one else could understand, and so when I was in it, I couldn’t imagine leaving it. Does that make sense?

    Hm. Adopted or built?

    I alternated between thinking we built it together, and that he had built it and I was a guest.

    Which do you think it was?

    I don’t know.

    Tell me more about this feeling.

        It felt like obsession. The question that hung over my head, though, was whether it was friendship or something else, a romantic obsession.

    What did you think?

    I couldn’t tell. I knew that he wanted it to be love-love, and so it forced the question, but it was something that I could ignore for long periods, too.

        Was it something – clearly physical, that dissuaded you?

        Yeah. Well, no. It was that – I mean, it just wasn’t there for me, for him, physically. He’s not – it wasn’t what I wanted. But I’d like to think I’m not superficial, I guess, and there was something else, too, like some kind of deep mismatch hidden even within all of the good.

    The therapist paused. Tell me about what it was like in Madrid.

    Do you mean Thomas — do you mean my eating? Or the depression? Anna asked, laughing.

    The therapist didn’t laugh. Tell me about everything.

    There’s that line again; I hate it.

    Maybe it would be helpful if we ignored the concept of “the whole truth” right now. Tell me about Madrid, from your perspective. I’m not here to judge you. I just want to know how you felt.

    Do you think that my feelings would be lies, like emotion and truth are totally separate? I think about that a lot actually — I read this article once that said men get off to the Enlightenment, that they eliminate the possibility of emotion and logic working together…

    I say that because you seem focused on the possibility of misleading or confusing me, and we are here to talk about you, your feelings, and your experiences. So, tell me about those things.

    Fine. Madrid. Madrid. Madrid! I did a program outside of school, and I didn’t know anyone. I lived in a homestay with an abuela, in an apartment by the park. Thomas lived across the same park, in an apartment with some kids studying with Erasmus.

    What’s Erasmus?

    It’s the European study abroad equivalent, but it’s kind of one big program — I’m not quite sure of the specifics. He lived with two guys, one from Sweden and one from Italy. He intended them to be fun, I mean that he purposely chose Erasmus students because he heard they were rowdy, but they were very quiet, and kept to themselves, and ended up making him feel guilty when he drank or played music or anything.

    What was your living situation like?

    Ah, sort of awful. I mean, my host mother or grandmother cooked me three meals a day, and I was grateful, and she cleaned my laundry and hung it on the clotheslines in the courtyard of the apartment building. It was a safe, clean, middle-class apartment, and she was no-nonsense in the way I was used to at home, and so that was comforting. But we didn’t become close, she had no interest in that, and she frequently insulted me, and made me defensive, and she yelled at me like she really was my grandmother, which was fine and sometimes not fine, because she wasn’t, and she didn’t love me.

    Can you give me an example — a typical fight?

    Once I went out with Thomas, clubbing, and we stayed out pretty late in the cold, and I caught the flu. I came home with flu medicine from the pharmacy the next morning — pharmacies are different in Spain, they’re more like doctors, you just have to tell them your symptoms, it’s crazy, they’re just everywhere and so cheap. Anyway, I came into the kitchen to tell her about it, and I was wearing old boxer shorts, not Thomas’, I don’t know whose, I did use to sleep around but I have two brothers, so who knows whose, anyway, and so I came in the kitchen to tell her I had the flu in the shorts, and barefoot, which is practically against the law in Spanish homes, and she yelled at me and said, of course you got the flu, you go out on the street wearing no clothes at night, what did you think was going to happen?

    Ah, I see.

    It’s true, though, it’s a fair question, and I think one that can only really be asked woman to woman, it applies to so many circumstances: what did you think was going to happen? If a man said it, I’d call him a misogynist, but I’ve asked myself about Thomas so many times, what did I think was going to happen? It applies to the eating, too, doesn’t it? I could tell myself a thousand times that I had it under control, but I was inching myself forward, you know, I made that decision again and again, and it is like, eventually, what did I think was going to happen?

    Not everything that you ask yourself is a fair question, Anna.

    How do we know what’s fair?

    We don’t always know. But tell me about how things went with Thomas in Spain.

    We started hanging out almost immediately, that’s something I regret. It was so early that I didn’t make many friends. With guys it’s different, of course, he had a group almost automatically, and Spain is one of the biggest Fulbright programs, so he taught English with a few others who he really liked. I liked them, too, they were great, and they became my friends as well, and I give them credit, they wholly accepted me into the group. We both wanted to get out of our apartments, and we loved talking to each other, and so we spent hours, sometimes almost every day, walking together and drinking, at cafés or on park benches.

    It sounds romantic, that image you just created. Did it feel romantic?

    Sometimes it felt so romantic I felt dizzy, and like an enormous fraud, like a really disgusting tease, the kind that everyone hates. Sometimes it was so nice and I felt so safe and cared for that I didn’t ask myself any further questions. I really felt an overwhelming tenderness towards him, and I still do now — which is horrible, I know I shouldn’t, but I do… my secret is that I miss him. I wonder — if you asked many people in the world, what’s your biggest secret? I wonder how many would just say, “I miss him.” Like there’s one ubiquitous “him.” He who left you. He who loved you. He who was undeserving, and unkind.

        That’s a beautiful, painful thought, Anna.

        Anna shifted in the chair.

        How did you know that he had feelings for you — or, why did you think that?

    We drank a lot. It came up.

    How much were you drinking?

    A lot. I don’t know. Often a bottle of wine a night, when I was with him.

    How much were you eating?

    As little as possible. Oysters and things that were oyster-sized.

    You said your host mom cooked for you?

    Yes, but we watched the Big Bang Theory while we ate, or the news, every night. I preferred the news, the Big Bang Theory was dubbed over in Spanish with these really grating voices. When we watched the American news, they spoke about the election, and she would point at the TV and talk about the viejo, el viejo. It was funny to me because, well, wasn’t Hillary old, too? So I wondered if I was misunderstanding, but it wasn’t worth it to cause a fight. At the end, she told me I was worse at Spanish than I had been when I arrived. Anyway — she wasn’t watching me eat, and I ate just enough, didn’t I — that’s how it starts.

        Anna shifted her body again. So, many other nights I ate out with Thomas. Dinner is cheap in Spain, so we could eat together for ten or fifteen euros, minus the wine, and I had enough money saved that I could afford that quite frequently. I didn’t eat much at dinner, but I think Thomas didn’t notice or didn’t care. I know that he loved how small I was, it was something he frequently commented on, and I think he must have noticed I got tinier and tinier. I wonder if he liked it, because I was easier to capture and contain. Anyway, yes… that’s the eating. I know this is supposed to be the session about Thomas, and the food comes next. I know it’s interrelated; I know. I’m just telling you now.

    Yes. But right now, I want to get clarity on Thomas, because we couldn’t really speak for very long last session without his name coming up, and I think it’s important. An important piece of the puzzle. So. I’d imagine you got quite drunk, if you weren’t eating as much?

    Yes.

    When you said that his feelings “came up,” a few minutes ago, what did you mean?

    I mean that… I never know if we’re allowed to say that we know when someone wants to sleep with us, or likes us, or whatever. But isn’t it sometimes obvious, just in the way someone looks at you? That they want to push you over and…?

    Push you over?

    I don’t know.

    Is that how you think about sex?

    No.

    Women — we’re told certain stories about our own feelings. There’s an implicit understanding of nuance, or confusion, for men, I often think — maybe that’s even the basis of depth we ascribe to them — that isn’t applied to women. What I’m trying to say, Anna, is that you’re allowed to be conflicted about someone without being a — to use your language — “tease.”

    Is that actually true, though? Don’t my actions have consequences too?

    What do you mean? Do you think you did something wrong?

    I did lead him on. That seems undeniably true. But I was working with a guess. I can’t know for sure now whether how I acted was wrong, the same way I wasn’t sure then if he liked me. It’s confusing, but, yeah, I think there was a transgression, that I am at fault.

    You said that he wanted love. I want to hear how you navigated that.

    Well, horribly, right? Isn’t that why I’m here now?

    I want to hear how you dealt with it at the time.

    I think that I knew what I was doing, that I knew what impression I was giving him — the impression of romance — but I couldn’t stop, because I wanted to talk to him and to be near him so badly, and so I did whatever mental gymnastics I needed to do to facilitate that. Eventually there was a breaking point, but for two months or so, it worked out well, and I was quite happy, though I was quite depressed, then, as well.

    The therapist paused again. What did you talk about?

    Everything.

    Which parts of everything?

    Books, movies, religion, our friends, our families, our ambitions… music, a lot of music. American culture, Spanish culture, the differences we noticed between. Not, like, siestas, but, like, for example, we both liked how many of the people our age we met, faced with the unemployment rate and the economy, still sort of stagnant from 2008, just went back to school, which was basically free. It seemed like a better life, one we admired. Morality, too — he had really concrete ideas about right and wrong, and about politics. I liked it because it gave me shape, me who always lived in a gray area, a kind of haze. He was, you know, always yelling about universal healthcare and how advanced other countries were compared to the U.S. He would chide me for having voted for Hillary in the primary, kind of shook me out of my neoliberal passivity, I guess you could call it. I mean, he would call it that.

        He’s very funny, Anna continued. Everything made me laugh. All of it. What’s a good example? Sometimes I still laugh to myself about this one thing, it’s dumb, but –  I said something about the Lion King as an adaptation of Hamlet, probably like he didn’t know that, being annoying, and he said, without missing a beat, “Right, just like how Transformers is an adaptation of Pale Fire.” Does that make sense? He helped me with my Spanish, too, he spoke it beautifully. Without flaws, somehow, always. Even better when drunk. He just had excellent taste, he’s one of those people, and he knew about everything, and so he curated his life so specifically in that way that to be part of his life meant that I too contained excellence. He came from a sort of shining place… a world of brilliance that I fell in love with too. He and his parents were always fighting about things that were so… important, academic I guess, but very real. My family, we fought over, you know, television remotes, and spots at the dinner table, and his father would yell at him for leaning towards authoritarian leftism… it was really captivating to me. Eventually we spoke so much on every topic that there was the creation of a world, or at least a shared worldview. I sort of stopped being able to speak to anyone else.

    Do you think that he learned from you too?

    I’m not sure, I think that was my big fear. I couldn’t imagine what he could have been learning from me. I felt so worthless, like a philistine. I learned that word from The Squid and the Whale. Thomas showed me that movie, even though he didn’t like it. Anyway, the only thing Thomas really sought out was my emotional intelligence, and some book recommendations. But that capital was limited, the cultural capital was all his.

    This cultural capital — for you, was that in sum enough… enough to sustain so much? She paused. In other words, I suppose, why was a connection over culture, or art, so important to you? That’s really what I’m hearing – that that was the central interest between you. An aesthetic. But an aesthetic that was almost global, like a way of life.

    I don’t know. My brain is creative, though I’ve tried to stifle it, I suppose. Ugh, that sounds awful. No, it’s just that those were the subjects that I felt, sometimes, I had no one else to talk to about. It’s not what my friends care about, not what my family cares about. And on those subjects, he knew so much. She paused again. What it comes down to, though…. well, I didn’t want to sleep with him, and he wanted to sleep with me. That was the key… it made my body, which I was already shrinking, feel so… it slowly killed me, to be valued for that.

    You were sure that that was why he valued you?

    Yes.

    Why?

    It was all that I could think of.

    What happened next?

    Hmmmm. It started… it broke down. There were a few distinct nights, and then everything was sort of chaos. The first time was the night of the election; we watched the election together.

    Tell me about that night.

    Of course, we all thought Hillary would win, in Spain and in America. I sent in my mail-in ballot with Thomas, we dropped them at the mailbox together, I think I even took a photo, naively, thinking, the first female president! The day of the election, it felt momentous, not certain, but almost certain, and so it didn’t feel high stakes to watch the election with Thomas and his friends. I thought it was natural, that it made sense. It did make sense. We watched at an American bar on his side of the park, where many other Americans had gathered. It had a projector and a blank wall, and we watched a screening of CNN on that wall for hours and got very drunk. It’s five hours ahead in Spain, so we met at the bar at eleven or so, I guess when polls were closing or starting to close in the U.S. We stayed at the bar until about five a.m., which was normal in Spain, but the election wasn’t called then, we left before it was called. At midnight, one, maybe even two, it felt okay, and then maybe closer to three it started to look like Trump could really win, then later that he would win, but I don’t remember the timing well because at that point I was very drunk, so drunk that I couldn’t get off the barstool. Closer to five, I felt completely numb. I started crying, and Thomas took me home, walked me across the park, and the whole time I screamed things about how we could get mugged, that we had just elected a sexual assailant. Thomas left me for a moment outside the park and men were driving by, collecting trash, and they catcalled me because I suppose they didn’t see that I was with a man, it’s amazing how just one man’s presence erases that whole part of a woman’s life. I was so drunk that I screamed at them, in English, not today! Thomas almost carried me home.

    Did you discuss his feelings?

    We were outside my apartment building, it was probably closer to six, but I didn’t check my phone — I woke up to the notification that he had won, and then just below that the notification that Pennsylvania had gone for Trump, and I was crushed. I almost deleted the New York Times app. My state!  But — anyway, I didn’t accept it until the next morning, actually it was sort of like “Schrodinger’s Cat,” that idea we learned in Chemistry class in high school. I felt that way sort of about checking my phone the next morning — as long as I laid in bed, not checking, both Hillary and Trump had been elected, and I was okay. Eventually, my host mother came in and yelled at me to wake up, she said, get up, girl, no one has died. So, I woke up and I knew that he had won, and I went to class still sobbing. But I’m getting distracted — Thomas. Thomas walked me home, and we were on my street, which was really only one block or so from the park, so it was good of him to take me to the door, sometimes I felt scared at night, but anyway, it was then that he kissed me, when I was at my lowest, when I was literally in his arms. It all… unraveled from there.

    Did you feel taken advantage of?

    No, not necessarily. But I wished that he had gone about it differently. It wasn’t unfair, so to speak, to kiss me, but it was maybe unfair to have done it in that moment. It grossed me out, too, it confirmed everything I had suspected about how much he liked my fragility… my skinniness! Anyway, then I told him no, and I went inside my apartment. But it was the catalyst. We hung out later that week and we split a bottle of wine between us and smoked a blunt and then he wanted to discuss whatever was happening between us, he said. He said he needed to know. He said that he was losing sleep over me, like I was driving him to ruin.

    What did you say to him then?

    I told him that I loved him, but not in the way that he wanted me to. I told him… oh, God, I’ll barely get all of this out now. It was bizarre enough to say the first time. I told him he was the first person I’d ever met who made me feel less lonely. I told him that he was my best friend. I told him that I cared about him enormously, that I had only affection, admiration, and respect for him. I told him he was the smartest person I’d ever met. I told him that he enriched my life. But I think that all he understood was that I didn’t want to be with him.

    What did he say?

    He said that he loved me, that he had thought that I must have loved him too. He said he couldn’t understand what had happened any other way. He said that he didn’t believe me. He started shaking his head, wouldn’t look at me, and just started repeating, like he was chanting, the word “no.” No, actually first — oh, God, this is so horrible to remember, at first it was, “say it again.” “Say it again,” “say it again.” Like… like he wanted me to punish him. Like that. Somehow. It was so strange, and I was so high, and I remember sitting there very carefully, trying to keep still, basically unable to talk.

    Did you feel safe?

    No. I mean. No. We were in his room in the Erasmus apartment, which was very small. He had strung up some rainbow lights, you know, Christmas lights, and we were sitting on the ground by the desk and he started shaking, like he was convulsing, and he just kept repeating these things, and I started to back up, so that if he shook a lot more, he wouldn’t hit me, and I wanted to go home so badly, even though my host mother would yell at me too. I said that I wanted to go home, but he kept repeating the word “no,” and eventually he started to cry, and I just sat there, and I felt so scared of him and scared of myself, scared that I could be so unfeeling and heartless, scared that I had driven him to harm, scared that he was hurting me, too. Scared that the person I had trusted most, had given so much of my brain to, had loved so closely, could leave me if he was denied access to my body. I’m still sad about that, it’s so cliché, but, you know, that I wasn’t enough otherwise. But it was the “no,” it was the way he said “no” that put me over the edge. I’d never seen anything like it.

    Did you feel that you were… somehow… supposed to trade him your body for his brain? Or access to one for the other? Like you owed him?

    Yes.

    Did you think that he thought that too?

    Yes.

    Did he say that he thought that?

    I brought it up, and he said it wasn’t true, he repeated that he loved me.

        What did it feel like to hear him say that? That he loved you?

        I don’t know. I mean, it felt true and it also didn’t.

        Did his behavior align with your definition of love – of what love is to you?

        I’m not sure. In some ways, most of the time, yeah, like the infatuation, the momentum, the chemistry. But in other ways, no, I don’t actually think so. It’s probably a cliché that I don’t even know about, a movie quote I haven’t heard, but, when he said love, I felt like he was looking at or talking about someone else, someone right behind me, someone not there.

    I’ve never heard that quote before, Anna. But it makes sense to me. If we might – what happened that night in his apartment?

    I slept there, next to him, while he continued to cry and to shake. I didn’t know what else to do. In the morning he kissed me and I kissed him back, which I shouldn’t have done, I know that, but I was just so glad… I was so happy to have him back, I mean my friend back, back in his body, however briefly, and then I walked home, and my host mother berated me, and I didn’t tell her what had happened, even though she said she almost called the program to report me missing. I just said I was at a friend’s and I went back to sleep. But of course she knew that I didn’t really have friends. Just the man she called my novio.

    Did you speak about it again?

    The same kind of… explosion happened a few more times. Every time we went to cafés, any time he had alcohol. We would leave the group of friends to smoke cigarettes in the back, or be alone in the park, and he would start to talk about his feelings. His tone always felt so accusatory, and yet it always went the same way, from my end… no, I love you, but I don’t want to be with you. No, no, no. Every time. But I did feel like I was wearing down, and I thought he could tell that he believed he was pursuing me, and with some success, and that it was a fair… that it was a fair courting ritual, or something. That, like, that was how it could be, sometimes, that it was just one inconvenient path . I guess that was how I imagined him describing the situation to his friends… his narrative. Confusion… intermittent success… desire… longing… pain. Meanwhile, mine was something like, loss of affection… loss of acceptance… denial… pain… the hollowness of male friendship. I can’t believe that I still miss him.

    When you say you miss him — what exactly is the status of your relationship now?

    Around Thanksgiving — I remember because we had plans to cook an American feast together, which he canceled. He told me he couldn’t speak to me anymore. He stopped responding to my messages, he said it was too painful for him. He refused to see me. It was so jarring — I felt that I had instantly gone from a human being to a woman, without, you know, my permission or consent. This is unrelated, but — I’ve felt that way before, or I guess become aware of it, like, usually more existentially, as in thinking about how we don’t give consent to be born, and certainly not to be born women, not with everything that comes with it. Childbirth — it’s not something I want to do, but I didn’t get a choice. I secretly — I secretly don’t think I can go through with it. When I think about it, I panic, my skin feels like something foreign, something I’m trapped inside.

    Anna, the decision to have children or not is your choice. It’s not something you have to do. You’re not trapped in it, and you won’t be later, when you’re older. It will always be a choice between equally valid options.

        But it feels sort of like a choice between real life, the main plot, and something else. Something completely undefined. Not really, like, an equally valid option, because – it’s nothing at all.

        It’s okay. The therapist paused. Have you spoken to Thomas since then?

    Not once. I saw him on the street with some of our friends, from afar, but they turned the other way. Of course, they all stopped seeing me, too — they were his friends, the whole time. They would respond to my messages, once I even got drinks with one of the girls and she told me that she didn’t know what had happened, that she understood it had been “crazy,” and that she liked me but didn’t want to deal with it in that moment. I never contacted her again. When I got home for Christmas, my parents took one look at me and knew I was two or three sizes smaller… I suppose it got much worse in those few weeks from Thanksgiving to the end of the fall semester. I felt like I had spun my entire life out of control, and I liked that the eating… I could keep that up, and I could contend with myself at the same time. I could shrink, then shrink, then become someone so small I would be fully incapable of harm forever.

    So it felt like an expression of control.

    Yes, of course, I know that’s the classic… the classic root cause. But it was also of pain. I felt like this person… this person capable of real malice, of evil. I wanted to disappear, to become nothing. I knew that I was nothing to him anymore, but I was trying to mutate my relationship to my actual body, as in, my body to the actual world, sorry.

    When do you miss him? What do you miss getting out of your interactions with him?

    I miss him when I read something funny, a passage or a quote that I think he would like. Or I hear a song on the radio, and I know he’d like it. Sometimes something bizarre happens to me, and I wish I could tell him to make him laugh, even something stupid, something that happens when I’m at Rite Aid or with my family. I miss his responses to all of those things. I guess I got to a point where the world stopped having meaning if it wasn’t something that he was reacting to. Like his reactions created the world, because they defined it, or at least they defined its rules. So I walk around and I think, Thomas would think this shop is lovely, he’d think this album is horrible, he’d think these people were bourgeoisie, he’d think this outfit was flattering. It’s stupid, too, because I feel so empty now, because I live in his head, and not in mine. So I walk around kind of vacantly, and I compare… I constantly compare us, and I constantly lose.

    What you miss about him — this validation, or this feeling of approval, maybe simultaneously of judgment — is there a way you could give that to yourself? What would that look like?

        Anna thought. I’m not sure, she said. I think what I miss — the feeling you’re describing — is the feeling of being known. I don’t think that I can give myself the same kind of ‘love’ that he gave me, I think that’s, therefore, by definition, impossible.

        Did anything more ever happen with him? Did he try to kiss you again?

    Yeah. We had sex once, I know it was wrong, but it happened. It was two days before Thanksgiving, the day we were supposed to cook together, and I got high with him and took a shower at his apartment and when I came back into his room, it kind of just happened. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t good either, I was high and felt like having sex and wanted him to be happy more than anything. The next day, he told me that it destroyed him, having sex. That was when he said we could never speak again. I used to read books written by men about sex, and I was always shocked at their delusion — no woman has ever felt “completed” by a penis, good sex is good sex, it’s never destroyed me, made me fall in love with anyone, anything like that. It is… it just is. And sex, at least heterosexual sex, is usually pretty bad! It happens and it’s done, and you get the toilet paper or the rag or whatever and you clean up and it was fun and now it’s over, but it probably wasn’t that fun because it probably ended when he got off and you didn’t. You watch a movie. If the guy is basic, you watch something basic; if the guy is interesting, you watch a film with subtitles, whatever, it’s all vaguely dissatisfying, and it’s fine, and you’re probably faking it, and it’s okay. But then Thomas said he was destroyed? Like my body destroyed him? Like he was Icarus and my fucking vagina was the sun?

    That’s quite a metaphor.

    Thank you. As I said, creative mind. Anna laughed, then continued. It was the only time I had sex abroad, only time in six months or so, I don’t know. I hated myself for a while for doing it, I guess that’s part of the reason I wanted to change my body, I felt sort of poisonous.  I didn’t really do anything, after, until I got home, either. I would go to class and come home and watch Narcos on my laptop. My host mom would get me for dinner and we’d stare at each other across the table like cowboys in the Old West or whatever. I’d just think about everything until I went to sleep. And then a few weeks later, it was time to fly home.

    The therapist paused. How did you feel about yourself during this time, as a person, mentally, or maybe I should say intellectually?

        Anna paused too. So stupid, she said. I felt so stupid. I felt like a shell of a person, and he was, in contrast, the deepest person I knew.

        Would you say that all of your conversations with Thomas were “deep”?

    I guess so. I don’t know. I guess I still don’t know whether or not it was… shallow or deep. I guess it is shallow to talk the way we did. Cultural capital must be as shallow at least as any other type of capital. I guess there’s no distinction between hoarding book recommendations and hoarding restaurant reviews or… something like that. I don’t know. I don’t know how important I found all of that before I met him, because I can’t really remember. I don’t know whether he confirmed my belief in the importance of all of that, or he created it.

    I don’t mean to overstep. It just seems the question for you is one of depth and this idea that you lacked it. Would a deep person become close to a shallow one if the conversations required depth? I’m just throwing things out there. I want to understand how you valued yourself and him. We are running out of time, so we can sort of wind down on this note, if that’s alright.

    Well, if he just wanted… if he liked the way I looked.

    But if he was so wise, so omniscient?

    Everyone is blinded by physical impulses, even the smartest people.

    Hm. And you felt you owed him, maybe, well — did you feel that you owed him that chance, some time with these physical impulses?

Yeah, I guess so, but I mostly felt bad. Is that the same thing?

That’s a good question — let’s talk about that next time we meet, explicitly, though I think we’ve been discussing it today: what it means to owe someone something. I think more specifically, what that means when it’s someone we really love. I think if the working definition of love itself is somehow distorted — not wrong, but not serving you — it’s also going to impact the areas that self-love would improve, like confidence and self-esteem.

Okay.

        I think next week we should start here, although I do want to start talking more seriously about the eating disorder.

    It was more like disordered eating.

    We can discuss that next week as well. I want to ask, Anna — the loneliness you described, that he helped abate to some extent when you were close with him and trusted him, how is that going right now? Now that you’re home and with your family?

    It’s been okay. I’m close… relatively close with my high school friends, and everyone is back, and it’s nice. I’ve been seeing them, getting brunch, going out. My family is… we’re not particularly close, but we get along.

    What would it mean to let them in, in the way you let Thomas in?

    I don’t know.

    Okay. I want you to think about that a little bit over the next week, before we meet again. Take care, Anna.

    Will do. Anna stood and paused. Her jeans had risen in ripples on her calves, and she kicked the fabric back down with the toes of her boots, then wrung out her hands. I’ll see you next week, she said to the therapist. Thank you. She walked out of the room, past the beige chairs of the waiting room, ten minutes from her family’s home. She thought, as she walked, though maybe it was normal, maybe, she thought, it was even the point of therapy, that it was the first time she’d ever talked about it. I talk so much, she thought, pushing open the glass and white wood door — this might be the only thing that ever happened to me that I’d never told anyone about.