Francesca’s friend Tim decided he should sleep with multiple people at once while on a yoga retreat in Peru one winter. He had been contemplating an elderly man’s genitals when time, he said, collapsed in on itself, the old man he would be one day (should we all live till then, as Francesca’s Sicilian grandmother always said) and the child he had once been softening and fusing. Tim returned to Boston with a ponytail and began to learn what it meant to let attachments develop one on top of the other. He reminded Francesca of a scene from Jane Eyre, in which Edward Rochester tells Jane, “I have a strange feeling…As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.” Tim let himself grow––or was it feel?––those threads, and he didn’t seize on any of them. There was the string with the woman he had met at the Jungian discussion group in Somerville, whose husband then took him sailing; with the Romanian postdoc researching viruses causing stomach cancer; with the Bay Area programmer who grew psychedelic mushrooms on the side; with the university admin who had bangs and worked mostly remotely. Tim’s strings, and his lovers’ strings, did not get knotted but sliced through one another cleanly, like the sprinklers in Francesca’s mother’s garden that sometimes got confused and started watering one another.
Francesca has tried hard to cultivate this detachment. During her graduate program, she married another PhD student, separating three years later when it became clear that they would never live in the same city after they got their first, second, and third jobs. It has been important to her not to need men, and she online dates with the kind of enthusiasm a white American living in the Middle East displays when seeing an American f lag t-shirt: some embarrassment, some inexplicable thrill, some fear of being found out.
Francesca has tried to go on one date per week for a year, and until she meets Rob (spelled “R O B” on his dating app profile) in the fall of 2022, she has spent most dates trying to make the man she is out with feel like things were going well. Her nightmare, she realizes, is not so much being rejected (though that happens) but letting her date see that she finds him uninteresting. Francesca has been thoroughly colonized by androcentrism, a term she includes on her PowerPoint slides when teaching: in these brief after-work drinks, she (knowingly, ambivalently) props up a society centered around the feelings and experiences of men. And she has met a lot of men who were hard for her to feel interested in, except as curiosities: the recent divorcé with two kids, who summarized data on decreased success rates for children of separated parents, as they walked back and forth across the Harvard bridge; the Panamanian neurology fellow who asked precisely for “three kisses with tongue” in the street before returning to his VW bug; the Catholic from Beacon Hill who wanted to run for local office on an anti-prostitution platform (“do you mean anti-porn?” Francesca queried, making a mental note to avoid St. Joseph’s, where he went to mass). Some men tried to impress, using big words like “reductionist” or “epistemological” in ways that confused her. In grad school, Francesca had thought this confusion meant that the speaker was her intellectual superior, but she has since determined that clarity is harder than opacity. One of her most eager dates friended her on Facebook after they did karaoke together; he then posted highly performative analyses of novels and films and plays, at first mostly French and Dutch ones she had never heard of and which he argued revealed universal truths about the human experience. She still reads all his posts but doesn’t like them; they generally end in relish with some version of “all of us.” His only good post, she finds, is about Jane Eyre, and finishes with: “we are, all of us, balls of string.”
R O B, or Rob, is a tenured professor at a university in Toronto, working on a startup at MIT. He is tall, and Francesca is, too; he is also smart and eccentric, speaking the language of computers and of humans (he is studying Catalan); his hair is wild and curly, his gait uneven, and he insists on pronouncing Uruguay in Spanish when discussing his upcoming trip (in English).
Their first date is at a bar in Cambridge frequented by grad students. He doesn’t drink and orders a non-alcoholic beer; she orders a cider. They speak at length about Rob’s home department, his recent tenure case, his PhD program in Boston, his controversial first advisor, who lost his job for sexual harassment; Francesca, much earlier on in her academic career, listens with interest and asks questions. At one moment, Rob notes that he is talking too much––“you are,” Francesca replies, “but it’s okay, because I asked.” He smiles and goes on.
Their second date, at a restaurant in East Cambridge, lasts several hours, after which they walk back to his apartment. Normally attentive to her date’s body language––any language that would indicate that her date was feeling discomfited or uninterested––Francesca is instead intensely aware of her own body, her looser voice, her slippery laugh, her swinging arms, all of these things that feel opened up and that she loves and also wishes to smooth over. Rob points at a restaurant with an orange awning on which “Grace of India” is written. “I lived there after I finished undergrad,” Rob tells her, “and I ended up banging my roommate. That was convenient, though it didn’t work out too well at the end.”
They go back to his apartment, which is sparsely decorated: he is only in town a few days a week, several weeks a month, for the startup. They talk about karaoke, and he tells her about what he calls the best moment of his life, years ago, when he sang “Rocket Man” in a bar to wild applause. He is teaching himself to play the guitar, too, but they both know that would be just a bit too on the nose: they are academics, and this is Cambridge, and this is a budding romance, so he leaves that instrument in the closet. That first night they shift their bodies into an interlocking position, clothes on, and they talk in a language that they both understand: about their parents’ middle-class cruises with dress-up dinners; about the nature of desire and its unacceptable edges; about the suicide of Francesca’s old neighbor, accused of downloading child porn; about running into their students at bars.
The next date is a month later, as he comes and goes between Toronto and Boston. They meet at a seafood restaurant across the river in Fenway, a Portland mainstay that has migrated down to try its chances in the city. Francesca feels, much to her surprise, that she can barely finish her half dozen oysters. This looks like she is watching what she eats, but it is actually just nerves, or even lovesickness, a contemporary manifestation of the chattering teeth she had in college when walking to the dorm room of a boy she liked. Rob eats with gusto, going into implausible and amusing anecdotes: about a friend he studied with at Dartmouth, who claimed to have shit backwards on a toilet for years (he found the position more convenient for reading). Francesca is disappointed in herself, in her inability to enjoy the moment, the food, so wrapped up is she in this feeling of exhilaration swishing in her stomach. She is also aware that she seems like a calorie-counting salad eater, an image she rejects on principle (the culinary equivalent of stilettos that one could not run out of a burning building in). The sex afterwards is good, and slow, and punctuated by his speech. She, on the other hand, feels like she can barely hold herself in, she feels so embarrassingly graspy, so intent on wrapping him into her.
&emsp When it is over, they lie on her bed for hours and talk, as if speech is the means by which they might reburrow back into one another.
His words lay out scenes from his past, from a summer camp when he had diarrhea in a urinal, from his first high school crush (on an older girl who drove his sister to school). “Where is she now?” Francesca asks. “I don’t know,” he replies and pauses for a while. His voice picks up, and he rotates away, “I was bullied pretty badly in grade school, and, even if it got better as I got older, I don’t try to keep up with anyone from back home.”
Emotional intimacy with people she only half knows is familiar territory to Francesca: sometimes her students, who come to her office to discuss their midterm grade, burst into tears from the nerves, and end up talking about other corners of their lives: a roommate who has a drug problem, or a bad essay grade another professor gave them, or a disquieting turn of events in their home country. As with her students, Francesca opens up her palms to receive his clunky confession, his emptying out of some partially visible interiority. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
“Yeah,” he continues, “it sucked. Like, it was really bad. Once I got teary eyed during gym class when I was, I don’t know, probably in like the second grade, and I got hit by one of those bouncy red balls? And one of the girls in my grade spit in a Kleenex and then rubbed it on my face.”
Francesca, who has begun softly rubbing his lower back with her fist, grimaces. “Did your parents know?” she asks.
“Never. I was terrified they would feel bad for me. My mom took off work––she managed a local grocery store and early fall was pretty slow––to come on a school trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo in, maybe, the f ifth grade. I never wanted her to be a chaperone, because I never wanted her to know…. as such things go, she thought that I was embarrassed for her.” He rubs the back of his hand across his mouth. “And of course I sat by myself on the bus, per usual, and my mom sat with the teacher, and she kept turning around and trying to make eye contact. So I ignored her and then pretended to fall asleep. At school I always ate lunch by myself, the whole deal…other kids said the earth shook when I walked, they said I smelled. And maybe I did. I’m not sure my parents were very good about making sure I wore clean clothes. After that school trip she and my dad had some talk and then they came to my room and told me that they had made their best friends in high school.”
“I would expect college,” Francesca says.
“Yeah,” he replies, “but they didn’t go to college. My dad worked at the Ford plant, and my mom ran the deli. Now all of their kids have PhDs.” He laughs.
“And can I tell you something funny?” he continues. “I’m in my mid-40s, but this is the first year of my life that I’ve actually felt good. Really, the very first time. My first few years in Toronto were terrible–the worst years of my life.” He pauses for a few beats. “My house burnt down, like actually burnt down––have I ever told you that? Some kids living upstairs tried to have a firepit on the roof and they burned down the entire unit. And then, I fucking hated my department; I didn’t know why I had taken this job in Canada; why I had left Boston, leaving behind my entire social world as well as all of the furniture I had accumulated since my Grace of India days.”
“Wait, your house burned down?” Francesca queries. “Like, it burned to the ground?”
“I lost almost everything, almost,” he says, and, for the first time in a while, sucks in his breath and goes quiet.
“Wow. God. That’s a lot for a few years. And, I guess, why do you think things have changed? Why do you think you’re feeling good now?” Francesca asks.
“Therapy, of course. A really good therapist. And also meditation,” he answers. “Every day I meditate for at least an hour, sometimes more. I’ve been doing it since grad school.” He runs his finger up and down her arm. “I feel good being here with you,” he adds. And he promptly falls asleep.
For the next two weeks, Francesca works her way through Modern Arabic Short Stories with her upper-level students––the edited volume with Arabic on the right and English on the left. With her advanced beginner students, she has them develop presentations to give to their classmates. These classes are her favorites because the skits are eager and terrible, and no one understands one another. It is like a secret comedy with an audience of one. The students have a limited repertoire to choose among––mother, United Nations, chicken, library book––and so their skits lack coherence. (Francesca enjoys remembering her own high school rendering of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, which she had barely understood at the time and only later realized was the source of the famous quote: l’enfer, c’est les autres––hell is other people.) Francesca’s favorite Arabic A skits feature poorly concealed products of Google translate, such as in the play staged at the United Nations cafeteria: “I will be the right of my back,” one student diplomat tells another, as he mimes exiting the room. Pronoun suffix confusion is also rampant; another diplomat’s phone rings: “your mother always calls me at lunch,” he says looking in the direction of Francesca, who bursts out laughing. “Don’t talk like that about my momma,” she responds in Arabic, to a sea of uncomprehending faces.
During the week, Rob and Francesca message throughout the day. They don’t speak on the phone; Rob is probably old enough to try to do that, but Francesca is not. Only her mother and her 92-year-old great aunt call her without texting first, and Francesca does the same.
The weekend after the Arabic A skits finish, Francesca and Rob go out again. They meet at another restaurant in Cambridge where they share small plates, annoying the bartender by eating far too slowly and drinking little. The restaurant is packed, and their bodies sit close. Afterwards, they go back to Francesca’s again. She wears a long black nightgown; he wears his underwear. “Do you have one of those I could wear?” he asks, pulling on the strap of her gown. They have sex, and this time it is even better; though he is wearing a condom, he comes. “I’m not sure that has happened to me since I was in college,” he says into her pillow.
They speak until 4 AM, a decidedly inconvenient time for people who teach in the morning. Francesca fills him in on the recent developments in her friends’ lives; he asks her more questions about life in Algeria, where she did her dissertation research. She tells him about how she helped the son of her best Algerian friend apply to college in the United States, but with no success. They speak about the street animals that populate Oran, and the local contention that sterilization would deprive these animals of their best chance at happiness. They discuss how different their Gen Z students are from them, with their studied baggy clothes, their assertive body positivity, their prickly feelings. Sometimes, they learn from them.
“I never told you the whole story of why the kids made fun of me,” Rob suddenly interrupts, “but I guess I should say I was also the fat kid.” Francesca stays quiet, rubbing his shoulder from behind. “Because of it, I guess I should say because of the torture, I’ve had self-image issues my entire life.” He rolls towards her and then away again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s really hard.” “Yeah,” he answers, looking embarrassed. “Kids today are different, maybe,” she offers. “We grew up in the 90s. There has never been a day when I have not wished that my body looked different.” He flips her over on her side and runs his finger along her ear. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah.” He pulls the cover back over him and her underneath it.
The following day Francesca has coffee with her colleague Bridget to discuss some university gossip: a prominent administrator has been forced to resign for sleeping with her subordinate, who has also resigned, and whom she had brought with her on cross-country fundraising trips. Both resigning administrators are married to other administrators, who still have to show up for work.
A political lesbian, Bridget fills Francesca in on her own recent tryst with a middle-aged muralist who only wears overalls. The muralist is also helping Bridget redo her kitchen. Francesca tells Bridget about how much she likes Rob, how she finds him interesting and a bit eccentric, how he lives in a corner of knowledge foreign to Francesca. Francesca f inds that really attractive. They google him, his wild hair comparably tame on the screen.
Bridget seems skeptical, however, of Rob. “The way you tell it,” she informs Francesca, “it sounds like all he does is talk about himself.”
“Well that makes sense, because all I’m telling you is what he’s told me,” Francesca replies, slowly. “Why would I tell you what I told him? You already know it.”
“It just sounds like he unloaded all of this stuff onto you. He’s like, ‘hey, I’m vulnerable,’ and you’re like, ‘please, you can trust me, I’m your safe person. Lay it on me.’ I can picture it. I’m sorry.”
Francesca bristles slightly. “What is intimacy based on if not vulnerability?”
“I guess another way of putting it is: he’s laying out that he’s broken, and I know that makes you feel special. But why do you like that? It could make you run, or at least make you hesitate.”
“You, of all people,” Francesca replies, “are in a religion department, you’re a specialist of brokenness. Your own religion is premised on the idea that humanity cannot save itself, and that it needs some external force to redeem it.”
The following month, Rob is traveling to meet with investors for his startup. He messages with excited updates, spread out over the days. Francesca finds her life to be full––dinners with a former roommate and now curator in Providence, days out with her friends with three children in Danvers, people whose lives have taken very different directions from hers and offer her momentary glimpses into what could have been. Francesca continues to go out for casual drinks with men who match with her on dating apps, though she acknowledges giving these dates less importance, as if they are the opening act for a show she has accidentally arrived at too early. Then another text: “Hey I’m back in Boston, how was your week?”
Over the holidays, Francesca travels home to Lexington, KY, where her siblings still live along with her parents, though on opposite sides of town. Francesca loves her siblings’ partners, especially her brother-in-law, who is in some ways her sister’s opposite: easy to make small talk with, whereas her sister sometimes speaks with an affect; easy with money, whereas her sister is anxious; blithely athletic, whereas her sister’s principal exercise is walking from her office to her car. Francesca is always so busy at home that she finds it difficult to see even her childhood friends, most of whom have stayed in Kentucky and have children now in middle school.
Back in Boston, Francesca prepares for the semester, and specifically for an Arabic literature course that currently has an enrollment of f ive. She had asked the department to hold the course in translation, with a section for Arabic speakers (led by a grad student), but the department declined.
Rob is preparing a public talk on his research on the human languages used for programming for AI––basically, a zoom-out on the work he does for the startup. He had at first asked her to listen to the talk but afterwards demurred, telling her it wasn’t ready. The talk is to be held at MIT in mid-February, just a few weeks into classes. When they meet, that first week back to school, Rob doesn’t want to talk about the talk. Instead he fills her in on his Christmas: his brother’s ex-wife, who sent the cops to the house on Christmas morning; his father’s inability to speak to his children in complete sentences; his sole Christmas gift, from his niece: a TikToker-recommended face cream for men’s fine lines. Francesca fills him in on her own winter break: New Year’s Eve with her out-of-town relatives and drinks with grade school friends a few MLM sales away from winning a trip to Puerto Vallarta.
On the day of Rob’s talk, she texts him a few words of encouragement. His former advisors will be there, she knows, which is always a strange thing: has he outgrown them? In what order should he greet them? Where will they sit? And what about the committee members who now, years later, hate one another, over a spat at a conference or some line in an article at which they had taken offense?
The talk––appropriately boring tempered by anecdotal asides for the non-specialists––goes smoothly. There are a lot of nodding heads, as audience members demonstrate, almost competitively, that they have grabbed hold of the buoy Rob has thrown to them. Afterwards, Francesca speaks to the other people she knows. A good number of her fellow grad students have ended staying up in the area, taking on administrative jobs or adjuncting at Babson or Lesley, and they are all interested in AI.
The line of people who are waiting to speak with Rob is long: most of them are undergrads, probably interested in his lab. Francesca greets Marianna, who is a quantitative sociologist but long ago shared a writing group with Francesca in grad school; now, Marianna is the editor of a public policy journal. Francesca finds herself in a conversation with Prof X, infamous for his intentionally provocative analyses of raced and gendered dimensions of intelligence. “Francesca, how’s the Arabic department holding up?” he asks, always looking to draw fellow faculty members to his side. Rob looks over, and is, she notices, sweating, his curls slick. Walking up to Rob to shake his hand, Marianna turns and draws Francesca with her, not knowing they know one another: “This is Francesca. She teaches Arabic literature.” Francesca laughs, “No, we know one another!” but Rob extends his hand: “Rob, nice to meet you,” he says. And he turns back to Marianna, “I know I owe you an email, but I have to take a look back at the code I wrote, it shouldn’t take more than a few days.” And he turns to the tall undergrad waiting behind her. Marianna bustles away as well, promising to message Francesca to get lunch the following week. Angry, Francesca finds herself surrounded by a group of her doctoral students, who pepper her with questions and share silly anecdotes about students’ cheating using ChatGPT. She walks outside to get air, and when she returns, she finds the room empty.
A year later, while on sabbatical, Francesca accompanies her friend Tim to one of his yoga retreats where old men’s genitals give rise to existential breakthroughs. Such gatherings make her nervous, like she is responsible for patrolling the omnipresent imprecise language and religious appropriation. (One of Francesca’s colleagues has recommended that non-Hindu “secular” yogis admit that when they do this thing called yoga they are actually doing religion: they are religioning.) Francesca has come to religion, to socialize, and also to think.
For a while after her abrupt end with Rob, Francesca wondered: are broken edges supposed to fit into one another? Had she not been vulnerable enough? Had he needed her to break in order for him to feel like they could fit together? She had recalled how her father had told her mother, when explaining why he was in love with a woman at his midwestern commercial glass company: “she gets me.” “What do you mean?” her mother had asked, or at least, she told Francesca afterwards that she had asked. “She knows what it’s like to have had a tough start in life,” Francesca’s father supposedly answered. Her father is not a bad person; in fact, he tries very hard to be good. He is just, in his opinion, hard to really know.
She recalls what her brother’s friend, many beers in one night over the holidays, had told her about his days in college: “At Harvard, I would have been dating 6s, at U-Lexington, I was dating 2s. But I had the absolute best strategy. Here goes: I would put post-its on a girl’s car door, like, ‘hey, I know you have a test today, you’ll be great.’ The girls loved it.” Why did it work? Francesca had asked. “Because the most powerful thing you can do to a woman is make her think you are thinking about her when she’s not with you. Women spend all of their time thinking about men, and they love it when they think we are doing the same.”
In his dream, Rob is walking through Madison Square Park in mid-town Manhattan, where he had lived during his college years, about twenty years before it became ok to wear all-black orthotic tennis shoes. It is after 10 PM, and he has entered by the Steak and Shake’s outdoor seating area. Two people are having a conversation, one stroking the other’s inner wrist. Rob tries to cut straight through the park but finds himself circling its inner perimeter, all gates now locked. It is dark, and because you are not supposed to be in the park after dark, the city doesn’t light its lampposts. The piles of yellow leaves are slippery, and some of them hide dog shit. In the distance Rob sees someone exit the park, lifting up the black metal gate lightly and slipping out. Rob shuffles over, his eyes alternating between the ground and the gate. He doesn’t fall. Thank God. He lifts up the gate’s cold handle, twisting it to and fro, but it rebuffs him. How is the gate cold even through his gloves? If he jumps over the pointy gate will his testicles be impaled? How much is a chocolate shake at Steak and Shake these days? He wakes up in a cold sweat.
It is early spring 2023, but his first morning thought in his Cambridge apartment is from forty years ago: a memory, of eating a butterfinger for his after-school snack. He was watching Oprah with his mom: “I always wake up before my 6 AM alarm,” Oprah was saying, and the doctor guest was smiling––“That means you sleep enough”––and Rob’s mom was getting up to answer the green corded phone in the kitchen. It was his dad who was saying that his friend Dick White had died. His mom tried to speak quietly so that Rob couldn’t hear. Rob knows now that it is hard to remember, as an adult, that children hear most everything, and he is from time to time thrown back into a past self where he feels what he doesn’t now know. Is it his later self, the self who put together the puzzle pieces and went to Dick White’s funeral mass and years later tried to sleep with Dick White’s daughter, who is saying, “Mom doesn’t know it but I understand,” or is it actually his seven-year-old butterfinger-eating self who was quietly evaluating his mother’s cavalier underestimation of him? So many lost threads, incipient thoughts, never followed up on. “When it comes to living, experience is the best teacher,” Rob remembers his mother telling him, much later, but experience is not always in a forward motion, something to be acquired, but is sometimes a backwards one, something one had once learned but then forgot and remembered. Like through a first-thing-in-the-morning, edge-between-this-and-that moment. Rob never wakes up before his alarm; he is instead shaken awake by it.
Rob starts with a meditation every morning and has done so since grad school, when meditation gave him a means of practiced retreat into himself. He experiences what he terms intellectual sensations, as concepts take on a form inside of his body: he can witness thoughts rise up to the level of his consciousness. Though this first struck Rob as an incredible leap forward, his therapist has pointed out that this inward turn also makes conceptual those things that are otherwise hard to confront: that his childhood sucked, and he had zero chance with Dick White’s daughter; that he was a fat kid and his parents were useless in that regard, having quite a lot on their own plates (no pun intended); that he almost failed out of his doctoral program; that his siblings worried about him and had a separate group chat with their mother to ensure someone was always checking in on him; that he had had as an adult a series of failed relationships, the last his most spectacular failure. Through meditation he is able to step aside from these facts and look at them as they emerge, creating a meta-narrative about the very process of their articulation, as if they were not things that had happened to him in particular but just things that had happened in that place he called the world. Rob always argues with his therapist, pointing out that what she is framing as a retreat into oneself is actually a breaking through into a shared plane of meaning, in which Rob is just a human being alongside a bunch of other human beings like him. And Rob also points out that only in his forties was he able to finally meditate without thinking first about how he, eyes closed and legs crossed, looked to other people. For the first twenty odd years of daily hour-long meditations, he would battle internally before opening an eye to see if anyone was looking at him with derision, as he worked to build a leaky wall that both cordoned him off and pushed him past the limits of his own body.
He also feels a bit like it is a woman thing, this disagreement with his therapist, as in: it is hard for women to imagine that men can ever experience their bodies like women do. His therapist always sees him as someone looking out at the world, prepared to move through it and dominate it, an actor and not an acted upon. Rob had taken a feminist theory class his freshman year of college, and he had been struck by a passage from a 1990s text, The Beauty Myth:
But Rob had never felt like the gazer. He was always the gazed upon, feeling his too large body as if it were always attracting embarrassing attention. His wish was not so much to be desired but rather to be unremarked upon. When he tried to bring this up in class, his words seemed to take up a space that had not been allotted for them, and the class moved on.
This is a very important week for Rob, as he is slated to give a public talk at MIT on which human languages are principally used in language processing models for AI. It is a nice mix of technical and ethical, and he knows he will get a broad audience: undergrads interested in his AI startup as well as PhD students in Romance Languages. Francesca, an assistant professor of Arabic and a woman he’s been seeing, said her students had mentioned the talk to her, too. There are just so many academic jobs that have AI in the description, her students told her. They were trying to cover their bases. Would she go, too? they asked. He and Francesca both laughed at that.
He likes Francesca a lot, her Midwesternness, her sharpness and also her softness. He likes that she always wears a scarf––a pretension picked up during her study abroad year in Aix-en-Provence, he posits––and that she is close to her siblings. She asks a lot of questions, sometimes laughing while doing it, and he wonders if this is an anxious affect or if she is also weighed down by the metanarrative of their date, all of the silliness and the seriousness of what they are trying to do. He is aware that he talks too much. He was once told that talking to him was like reading a Wikipedia page, but Francesca hasn’t seemed put off by that, and she listens to him speak, too: about living in Canada, about his overwhelming tenure process and the series of betrayals that punctuated it, about his brother’s divorce from a crazy woman with connections to the Connecticut state government, about the college student who lived in his apartment building and seemed to have a crush on him. He likes that she uses a coffee cup that she painted herself, a real artistic venture for someone used to analyzing others’ creative productions as opposed to producing anything herself. Before his attempt at entrepreneurship, this was a way of living deeply familiar to him. When working late into the night on a project, he occasionally finds himself calculating how long she has likely been asleep, based on what he remembers of her teaching schedule for the next day.
Rob’s phone lights up with a message from Liz asking when he is coming over to practice his talk. He and Liz know one another from undergrad, and she is now the VP for a consulting firm in Boston. She is also married to Steve, Rob’s best friend from college and a high school history teacher. Liz texts again, a jumble of letters, clearly an error. He calls her. “You’re not a vegetarian anymore, are you?” she asks, when she picks up. “Nah, I eat it all, now,” he replies, “all of it.”
Liz’s and Steve’s house is located in Belmont, just north of Cambridge. Inside of the door, Rob takes off his shoes, something he learned to do during undergrad from a Japanese roommate who lint-rolled their dorm room. Rob’s body feels bulky in their hall. He has brought the presentation, and he is feeling nervous about it.
&emsp: Liz bustles into the kitchen, all warm energy. She is something of a paradox: an ethically non-monogamous forty-five-year-old with two children, one 7 and one 4. Liz is both with the times (sexually liberated according to the current norms) and hopelessly chasing them (as happens when one’s generation is no longer violating norms to reset them but is rather discovering the new rules and being revitalized, or scandalized, by them). The last time Rob was over, Liz showed him a woman she had gone on a few dates with, followed by a text message exchange with her college-aged nephew: “I’ll be in Cleveland next week for work. DTF.” “What did you think that meant?” Rob asked. “Details to follow,” she replied sheepishly, as her four-year-old asked Rob to braid her hair, something Rob’s ex-wife had taught him to do at the very beginning of their five-year relationship.
Steve comes in, carrying a plate of homemade scones. What a good family to date into, Rob muses. He has never been able to datemultiple women at once, though, after his marriage, his therapist had urged him to try, to stop replicating old ways of being, to try to see himself otherwise. As if all therapists had a list of lines to draw on that they shared in their closed Facebook groups: break out of your old patterns, set firm boundaries, put yourself first, don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. But how do I know what I want? Rob asked. What if what I want I can’t have? What if what I want is another person?Other people can’t make you whole, that’s codependent, the therapists say. A real risk for the child of an alcoholic, by the way. You have to live for you. Sit quietly with yourself, accept yourself, hone in on what you want. You mean, meditate? Rob would reply. But I thought you said meditation was an escape route from my life. He occasionally enjoyed out-therapisting them. They probably had taken classes in grad school on how to deal with patients like him, patients who tried to bludgeon them with their smarts and still kept coming back for the next week’s appointment.
Liz and Steve assemble an appropriate crowd to listen to Rob’s talk: there is Liz, a single finger raised in preparation to ask a devastating question; Steve, posing as a Cantabridgian senior who has come for the post-talk cocktail hour; Sparrow, a child in an adult’s 100% Italian wool suit jacket, taking vigorous notes in a Moleskin with a colored pencil; and Eleanor, there just to show off her new hairdo and because as a four year old she has no other options at 10 AM on a Sunday morning. It is good to have friends, Rob thinks, and to be reassured of one’s goodness by the friendship of good people.
After the run-through, Liz and Steve give feedback mostly on the delivery: be sure not to walk more to the right side of the room than the left, they tell him. Look up more from the paper during slide 13. There’s a typo in the German sentence on slide 7. Be confident, Liz tells him. These are technical conversations that you have made digestible to non-specialists. This is a presentation as much about ethics as about verb conjugations and lines of code. It’s really good. Do you feel confident? Not completely, he replies. Well you seem supremely confident, Liz says. But you always have. She wraps up a stack of books and heads out with Sparrow and Eleanor to a child’s birthday party in Dorchester.
Want to do some shrooms? Steve asks. It will help you relativize. I’ll be like the mystics, Rob says, not sure of which ones, just that there were some. He recently saw an ad on a lamppost for a reading group on religion and psychedelics at Harvard Divinity School.
Rob did shrooms once before, years ago, but the dose was low, and he had not had much of a reaction. Steve gives him four pieces of chocolate from a company in Oregon called “Trippy,” and they sit down on the sofa to watch Fantasia.
Afterwards, Rob won’t be able to quite put together the timeline of his bad trip, but he suddenly finds himself curled up in a ball, begging Steve to turn off the TV. His mind is undone and on fire, and it loops (lOops LooPs) through burning rings, hoops of flame at a wrecked circus, everything is absolutely, stunningly wrong, and everyone thinks it is all right side up; his untethered mind zip, zip, zips around, drawing up from the waste of the world sparkling parallels that have always been invisible to him in his unshroomed mind, astonishing analyses that he can’t bear to write down and so are immediately forgotten. What a waste, all this thinking he has done. He sees the metanarratives piling on top of one another: every single one a performance, a totally pathetic means of indexing himself in relation to other human beings, weighty metal matrixes that look heavy but are in fact hollow inside, he could toss them in the air; he sees that at the end of the flaming circus hoops, at the very bottom of the black pit, his entire life is equally hollow: a demand for sympathy, a plea for attention, he is a primate announcing himself on a ladder rung by writing a book and saying neoliberal and not my wheel house and modalities of experience. He is shaking and nauseous; he feels an Adam and Eve lesson burst in his mind, that he had wanted this dangerous thing, to know what this thing felt like, and now he knows it and he hates it and wishes he had never known it; it is rotten and will live like a kernel in his gut; he feels his gushy mind lurching in fits towards the ultimate nothingness behind all of existence, and he keeps coaching himself back: that thing is there but we will know it later. His mind is in flames and he is throwing water on it.
He closes his eyes, which is too much. He opens them and focuses on the light blue blanket across his chest. That is all he can handle.
Rob, you’re crying, Steve says. Look at me. What’s wrong? Most people don’t cry on shrooms. You’re going to have to throw away your contacts. What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Look at me.
I’m not crying, Rob says, and he puts his hands up to his face and he is crying. He can’t stop. I don’t feel sad, he says. I just can’t stop.
What is it? Steve says. Tell me. Is it Shanni? Is that it? Steve seems to be trying to restrain a laugh.
Rob hates him. Your mind is not logical right now, Rob tells himself. You’re on shrooms. He can’t close his eyes and he also can’t look anywhere other than the blue blanket. The lights are off. There is no sound. Any sounds would be intolerable.
It might be, I don’t know, Rob replies. Maybe it’s Shanni. You know. Or my grandma. It’s just so goddamn sad. God damnit. Or maybe it’s my nephew’s best friend. He died too. It was a fucking accident. I dunno. My God. Steve. Can you just tell me: will this be over? Will I be able to go back to how I was before? I’m standing on shaky ground. Please tell me. Rob vomits. He continues to cry.
There is another side to it, Steve said. It’s just a few more hours. It only lasts a few hours. Do you want a ginger chew? You’re going to have to throw out your contacts.
The following morning, Rob feels not his best. His talk is in two days. Liz calls him, but he doesn’t answer. He is sure she is furious with her husband. His friends have always thought of him as someone easily breakable. Shanni had told him this once: you’re a cup of hot coffee filled too close to the brim. I feel lucky to have you, but I can barely carry you back to my table.
He had gone up to the edge of it, and he had come back. That was indeed a refrain he had repeated through the final hours of the shaking, tears running down his cheeks: I have had terrible things happen to me before and I have gotten to the other side. There is another side to this. He had passed through everything thus far: his shitty childhood, grad school failures, his colleagues’ trivial jealousies, but also the house burning down, Shanni, his friends who stopped answering their phones (he always asked them the same question, “is there afterwards to this?”).
By Wednesday, he has had two days to meditate himself out of the hole, to eat two dozen oysters, to listen to the Dark Side of the Moon, to reanchor himself to the world. He has talked himself back into the confidence he had for Sparrow and Eleanor. At the start of his talk, he sees Liz and wills her to raise one unearnest finger to ask a devastating question. He feels light on his feet. He sees Francesca and is glad that she has come. She waves to him and he smiles at her.
After the talk is over, Rob fields the questions, the undergrads who are looking to work in his startup, yes, but also the enterprising PhD students in English literature who like that he is doing this thing––making space for them in a world they barely understand, the world of tech. They are going to bring their words into it, he knows: their colorless green ideas sleep furiously, with the meaning always just underneath where you think it is. It is a claim to know, a hermeneutics of suspicion: you always have to dig a bit deeper. You’re almost there.
Francesca moves towards him and he is suddenly seized by a feeling of panic, an uncertainty. He remembers how bad he initially was at sex with her. That was kind of embarrassing. He remembers his confessionals, his self-disclosure: the bullying and the spitty kleenex story and the shit on the walls of the summer camp toilet when he had only managed to make it to the urinal. He and Francesca had laughed so hard they had almost cried then, too. The class anxieties and the Trump-supporting parents and the posters around campus concerning imposter syndrome. When he had come, he remembered announcing, “I haven’t done that in quite a few years.” Why had he said that?
He had been able to tell that Francesca loved all of it. It was intoxicating to feel that you could unload yourself on someone, and that they would accept it. He had told his therapist: it is like irresponsibly overpacking for a trip and then carrying your overweight suitcase onto a tarmac, where you say to someone, “can you pull this for me for a few minutes?” That sounds like trust, the therapist told him, maybe love. Why not just pack two smaller suitcases? Well they’re only pulling it for you for a few minutes, Rob interjected. Then, I think, the therapist replied, you just took a break, and you keep on walking forward.
When Francesca comes up to him, she is with Marianna, the editor of a journal he had recently published in with his grad students. Marianna had sent back snarky comments on their initial submission and, to blow off steam, one of Rob’s grad students had posted them on a subreddit. Marianna also happens to be a friend of Shanni’s grad school adviser. Shanni, Rob’s ex-wife, who had left when she eventually emerged out of the hole she had fallen into in the second year of their marriage. Shanni who, titrating down her Lexapro at his offhand suggestion (“have you ever thought of reducing your dose, Shanni?”), began to feel electric shocks sliding out from her fingertips and down her neck. Shanni, who suddenly couldn’t be trusted to drive alone, who couldn’t get out of bed, whose psychiatrist didn’t want to commit her because she didn’t want to lose control of her patient’s medication. Just a few more days, Shanni. Rob who intentionally awoke very early in the morning to make sure Shanni wouldn’t have enough time to lay in bed and think, so he could take her away from the pillows and sheets, put her under a hot stream of water, fill her downturned head with positive mantras. You can do it Shanni. This is the right thing to do now. He massaged her back from her spine up to the top of her shoulder bones, making shushing sounds, telling her, I’m pushing all the bad stuff out. Then their apartment building burned down, and Shanni left for her sister’s house in Arizona. Her sister texted him: she’s really different. It was his one true failure.
Seeing Francesca and Marianna together demands a certain recognition from him: that he has tried this thing once, and here he is trying it again. It asks him to say it aloud, telling Marianna, when she introduces Francesca, “No, I know her, in fact I know her pretty well.” A sly smile. It is kind of his schtick. He is a confident guy. It asks him to connect this world––this strange, momentary turn as a startup “co-founder” who might fail––to the more boring life where things are somewhat fixed and only his own grad students care what he is up to. But he freezes, and he shakes Francesca’s hand, and he sees that it hurts and repulses her.
She tries to reach him twice after, but he doesn’t respond. He runs into her once, on tree-lined Ware Street, and he can tell that she almost doesn’t recognize him. He is ashamed. He heads immediately thereafter to Canada to file papers for his residency permit, and he can’t see her anyway. What is there to say? He picks up his overstuffed, leaking bag, and he keeps on going.
Later that spring, back in Cambridge, Rob heads to an old spot where he had lunched frequently as a Master’s student. It is a dingy place with an orange sign out front, Grace of India. He feels anonymous there and quite at home: he pulls out his copy of The Lean Startup. He is going to fancy himself a real businessman for a few minutes.