The Candy House, page 16
After lunch, they all took a walk. Her father held her hand. London was heavy and dense and green. She felt grown-up at sixteen, walking beside the two men while the four musicians skulked and horsed around behind them. She swung her father’s arm, champagne and cocaine waltzing in her blood. In a park, they stood beside a lake full of swans and toy sailboats. As the musicians tried to push one another in, their manager turned suddenly to Roxy and asked, “What do you plan to do with your life?” Normally, she would have said, Become a dancer or an actress or just Be famous! (like every other L.A. kid), might have mentioned the MTV videos and several more she was already booked to shoot. But Roxy said, “I want to make my mark,” with such crisp finality that both men laughed in surprise. She felt her father’s pride, exhilarating and new. Long after the musicians had drifted away, Roxy stayed with her father and the band’s manager, walking and talking long into the night. At ten o’clock, the sun was still up. It was the happiest day of her life.
“I want to live with you,” she told her father on the plane ride back to Los Angeles. She was still drinking champagne, although he had stopped.
“Won’t work, Rox,” he said. “I travel too much. And Kiki would miss you.”
“She’d be glad to get rid of me.”
“Everyone needs a sibling they can be close to.”
“I could come with you when you travel. Like now.”
“Be fun, wouldn’t it?”
He wore his reading glasses. Papers were stacked on his airplane tray, and a pile of cassette tapes he needed to “give a listen” on his Walkman. She understood then that their trip had ended. The perfect harmony she felt with her father, a symbiosis that made her old life obsolete, had been temporary. She started to cry.
“You’re tired,” he said. “I’ve worn you out. We’ve got a long flight, get some sleep.”
She did, leaning against his shoulder as he worked. When she woke, the plane was circling Los Angeles and her father was packing up his tapes. Roxy watched him with a sensation of drowning, but she hardened her face and kept her arms at her sides. She didn’t see him again for five months.
Back at home with her mother and sister, she was morose and adrift. Kiki received her indifferently; Kiki refused even to see their father, whom she’d deemed “a godless man” on learning from Charlie that he’d seduced Jocelyn while she was in high school. Kiki spent all her time with a Christian youth group; Roxy assumed that, being plain, her sister had no better options. God loves everyone, right? But less than a year after Roxy’s trip to London, Kiki ran away with the youth-group leader, who was twenty-six. Roxy remembers the wounded astonishment she felt at being trumped in transgression by her humdrum sister. Their father hired detectives, but they failed to locate Kiki before her eighteenth birthday. She resurfaced a couple of years later, writing letters to their mother from the Far East, where she’d become a missionary. In the end, she married an insurance executive, settled in Connecticut, and had four children who are now adults. She goes by her full name, Krysanne. Roxy has seen her only twice in adulthood, at their father’s funeral and, more recently, their mother’s. But since all they have in common is their girlhood, about which Krysanne can only repeat, “Thank God I got out,” there is little to say.
Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone (it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful), gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady—or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.
* * *
The Cube chimes sooner than Roxy expects. She sits up, refreshed and wanting to pee, as if she fell asleep. Maybe she was asleep, for crossing the room feels different, strange. Good. Beside her futon, the Consciousness Cube is warm as a newly laid egg, Artie asleep on top of it. Roxy slides the kitten onto her bed and lifts up the Cube. It feels heavier: the weight of her past. As she plucks the sensors from her scalp, she feels a corresponding lightness, as if she’s been relieved of some internal pressure. She saw a video once about a woman who fell headfirst from a third-story window. Doctors opened up her skull and removed her brain, placing it in a basin of brainy fluid so that it could swell freely without getting squashed against the inside of her skull. That’s how Roxy feels: as if her brain has been released from a cell it outgrew.
She texts the greenhouse that she isn’t feeling well and can’t come in, Effortless Prevarication being another Former Junkie skill. The greenhouse job is a Bright Day program, which means they’ll test her urine tomorrow. Fine—she’s clean! But she wants to give herself to this aftermath, to understand what has changed. Artie hops back onto the Cube when she sets it down. The Cube is her, in a way. It contains the entire contents of her mind: all the things she can and can’t remember, every thought and feeling she has had. At last, she is the owner of her unconscious. She knows where everything can be found.
Everything, that is, until the chime. The twenty minutes since won’t be saved to the Cube until she reapplies the sensors and updates her externalization. For now, they exist only in her mind. And although Roxy has longed for a Consciousness Cube as a means of traveling backward, it is this diaphanous new present, with its fresh-born minutes, that captivates her. She touches her face, feeling the warmth of her skin against her fingertips. She goes to her window and opens it. Blue sky. Brisk San Francisco wind. A sense of the ocean, although it’s nowhere in sight. The satisfaction of one good long breath. She inhales again, even more deeply, and thinks, I am lucky.
The movie she’s longed to see of her young self in London is the one she just watched in that flurry of memories dislodged by the upload. What more does she need? How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? What if, like those vile moments inside her father’s mind, the truth disappoints?
Roxy understands now why Chris Salazar opposes even the most private, limited use of Own Your Unconscious. The logic of this process pushes out. She feels it as a natural force, a current drawing her consciousness beyond the limits of her self into a wider sphere. To converge, to be subsumed—how she longs for this! The prospect shimmers before her: a fulfillment of everything she has wanted in her life. Make my mark.
Energized by a need to act before she becomes afraid, Roxy aligns the Cube with her Wi-Fi and sits cross-legged in front of it. She provides the required DNA swipe from inside her cheek and the Cube begins to hum, Artie purring rapturously at the rush of new heat. She feels a whirring deep within her body, the gush of her consciousness pouring onto the Internet: a torrent of memories and moments, many painful—some actually memories of pain—all emptying into a cosmos that writhes and twists like an expanding galaxy. Her father is there, somewhere. Roxy feels their memories conjoin at last, like their two arms swinging on that long bright night. The whole of her past whirls through a portal and vanishes onto a separate sheet of graph paper.
And on this one, a secret new life known only to herself, Roxy will go to D&D and say, to Chris and Molly, “I’m ready to make my character. Will you help?”
i, the Protagonist
Chris Salazar couldn’t remember what sort of work he’d envisioned when he first fell under the sway of Sid Stockton, the weirdly charismatic CEO of SweetSpot Networks, during a pandemic Zoom interview, and wound up ditching his editing job for Sid’s entertainment start-up, but it definitely hadn’t involved filling entire walls with algebra. Yet here he was, two years later, with an aching arm and a racing heart, having run through several dry-erase pens defending his suite of “algebraizations”—a word he would have had trouble defining two years ago but now used upward of eighty times a day (he’d counted).
Why, the professional counters wanted to know (Jarred especially; Stanford ’19, like Chris, but a calc major), had Chris algebraized A Drink in the Face—
a (+ drink) x (action of throwing drink) = a (– drink) + i⁄2
—making i, the protagonist, the target of the hurled drink rather than the hurler?
Without looking directly at Jarred, whom Chris made a point of ignoring, he explained to the group that a drink-hurling protagonist belonged to a different story block, Hero Delivers Comeuppance to Perennial Jerk, which Chris had algebraized several months back.
Jarred was dissatisfied; Jarred was always dissatisfied with Chris, and the feeling was mutual. “Shouldn’t i be squared after the drink lands in his face?” he pressed.
“Having a drink thrown at you is humiliating,” Chris said firmly. “Which is more likely to make i feel reduced, or i halved.”
“Yes,” intoned Aaron, their boss, a man of so few words that the occasional word he did utter had the cleaving finality of an ax splitting a log.
Chris experienced a jolt of manic exhilaration. He was killing it, crushing it; murdering this meeting; he was destroying Jarred, having powered through an entire set of algebraizations with nary a mathematical change required. These included, in addition to A Drink in the Face, which he’d catalogued as 3Aim:
A Slap in the Face [3Aiir]
“You Never Cared for Me.” (Shouting) [3Aviiiy]
“How Dare You?” (Whispering) [3Aviiiz]
Protagonist Hits Bottom Alone, at Night, on City Streets (with Soulful Music) [3Aixb]
Protagonist, Drunk, Drugged, or Hit on Head, Stumbles Through Distorted Landscape [3Aixd]
Nighttime Roar Followed by Vacuous Morning-After Hush [3Axiiw]
Blurred Faces Lean Over Protagonist, Gradually Sharpening [3Axip]
Hand Fumbles from Bedclothes for Ringing Phone [3Ayiiin]
When Chris was first assigned the task of scouring movies and TV shows for every possible stock element (“stockblocks”), and then cataloging and converting them into one algebraic system, he’d thought it impossible. He’d been an English major at Stanford; he loved to read and still devoted his scant free time to the practice. But it turned out that representing stock narratives algebraically was easier than he’d expected:
Protagonist in a heightened state: i2
Protagonist in a reduced state: i⁄2
Protagonist, excluded by others, feels reduced: i < (a, b, c…) = i⁄2
i, the protagonist, had even begun to assume the swaggering air of a hero:
i!
Whereas a, b, and c appeared correspondingly meager—bit players who failed to get that the story wasn’t about them and that i would invariably triumph. In the world of stockblocks, redemption was guaranteed.
“SweetSpot is going to do for entertainment what MK did for social media!” Sid Stockton had raved during that first Zoom interview, and although Chris nodded in avid accord, he’d had to look up “MK” afterward. It referred to an anthropologist, Miranda Kline, who had mapped “the genome of human inclinations” almost thirty years ago and created algorithms for predicting behavior. She’d become famous for giving social media companies the means to monetize their business back when that was new, although she took no pride in it. The interview clips Chris had glanced through showed a kind of futility creeping into Kline’s demeanor over the years. In the most recent, a questioner said, “You seem kind of ‘over it’ at this point.” Kline, a silver-haired woman of seventy-two in a red satin blouse, threw back her head and laughed. “I still enjoy being alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. And then, in a phrase that haunted Chris, “But I’m tired of my history.”
Chris surged from the morning meeting in a state of jacked-up jittery glory that felt oddly close to tears. Triumph was premature; he was presenting another set of algebraizations tomorrow morning and wasn’t close to being finished. In states of artificial elevation (frequent in this job) he avoided SweetSpot’s roof garden—where bees from the company apiary drowsed in beds of lavender—and instead joined the smokers, who lit up outside the building beyond a yellow perimeter line thirty feet from SweetSpot’s entrance. The smokers’ disdain for their employer and antisocial vibe conformed with uncanny precision to stockblock 1Kiip, Raffish Outsiders. Chris was noticing more and more such correlations, which had the effect of turning the whole world into a matching game. But they also worried him; what did it mean that much of his life could be described in formulaic clichés?
Chris didn’t smoke; his attraction to the smokers was a consequence of his own narrative function—Enabling Sidekick—which he’d become sheepishly aware of in his two years of stockblock codification. All his life he’d played supporting roles in other people’s dramas (except in D&D games, where he usually played a burly leader), starting with Colin, his best friend from childhood and to this day, and extending to Pamela, his recent ex, whose heroin addiction he’d been unable to fix.
The smokers’ most raffish outsider, Comstock, appeared to do nothing but smoke; Chris had never seen him inside the building. Husky and leather-clad, Comstock quelled a lurking cough with swigs of Robitussin DM from a bottle secreted among his leather layers (post-pandemic, not even raffish outsiders would tolerate coughing). During a rare verbal exchange, Comstock had told Chris that his job at SweetSpot was in Diagnostics, which he described as “a repair shop where non-Stanford grads get their hands dirty.” To which Chris had rejoined, in similar spirit, “And we’re the thoroughbreds that can’t actually do anything.” It was the right answer. He was rewarded with a grin and something approaching eye contact.
“Salutations,” Comstock said now, his standard greeting. Then he added, “¿Qué pasa, hombre?”
The Spanish startled Chris—was it a comment on his ethnicity? He looked like his dad, who was, in fact, Latino—self-hating, Chris liked to needle him, although that was too extreme. But it was fair to say that Bennie Salazar had subsumed his Honduran origins in a Countercultural Mien [1Aiiip] starting in high school, right here in San Francisco. A punk rocker who’d presided over a band unforgivably named the Flaming Dildos, his father had been too ashamed to bring a single friend home to Daly City, where he lived with Chris’s grandmother (who lived there still) and one of Chris’s four aunts, who’d had a baby while in high school.
Chris would have liked to greet Comstock’s ¿Qué pasa? with a torrent of Spanish, but his father had always insisted he take French. “How long have you worked at SweetSpot?” he asked instead.
“Too long.”
“Meaning—a week?”
“Five years.”
Chris felt a squiggle of doubt. “Haven’t we only existed for three…?”
“I was in it before it was SweetSpot,” Comstock said. “Sid and I go way back.”
Chris had never met anyone who knew Sid Stockton; only others like himself, who had been hypnotized by him. “How come you’re stuck in Diagnostics if you and Sid are tight?” he asked.
“I’m not a team player,” Comstock said. “But Sid can’t chuck me—I know where the bodies are buried.”
Chris felt a quiver of awareness: a sense of new experience tilting his way. It was the feeling he’d had when he first spotted Pamela at Colin’s graduation from Sylvan Shires, an inpatient rehab in the East Bay: a sense that the excitable girl with dangly heart-shaped earrings would lead him somewhere new. Chris had mistaken Pamela for a friend or relative of a graduate, not a person with an addiction. But the feeling had been right: He’d never loved anyone so much. And Pamela had loved him, or seemed to until her relapse, after which point Chris could only fume ineffectually as she nodded off in front of the Yu-Gi-Oh! cartoons she liked to watch when she was high, strands of orange hard-candy drool lazing from her mouth. Chris’s shouting, begging, and intermittent weeping couldn’t touch Pamela in that state; she greeted all of it with tender, blinkered euphoria.
Comstock was talking—which, for Comstock, meant sweeping words in Chris’s general direction without looking at him. “… take my bike for a… Want to come…?”
“Sure,” Chris said reflexively, aware that Raffish Outsiders seldom repeated an offer. In truth, he couldn’t go anywhere—he’d have to work the rest of the day to complete his algebraizations by morning. But there was no need to pull away just yet. He walked downhill beside Comstock away from SweetSpot’s blond-wood lobby, which soared invitingly behind plate glass. The block facing theirs was bisected by “Junkie Alley,” where Chris had seen people injecting into their groins and necks when he dared to look. SweetSpot claimed it couldn’t regulate what took place across the street, but the smokers had a different theory: Management tolerated the dire symmetry because it kept SweetSpotters from venturing outside their cushy citadel.
Comstock’s dented black Harley-Davidson was parked amid a bevy of bicycles that looked like cowering fawns beside it. The moment had come for Chris to peel off—or, rather, a succession of moments had come and gone, each having seemed just slightly premature. Comstock tapped the seat of his bike, inviting Chris to experience firsthand its brand-new leather padding. Chris mounted, aware that the moment had now decisively arrived, then was taken aback when Comstock hopped on in front of him with surprising agility for a big man, bringing their torsos into disarming union. Comstock gunned the engine and the bike lurched forward, forcing Chris to seize his acquaintance’s warm midriff in order not to somersault backward into the street. They gobbled up a hill and plunged down its backside, pounded by wind and the quaking, shrieking vibrations from the machine. Chris was terrified. He had little experience of physical danger; his parents had taught him, in earnest unison, that his young life was precious, and he had absorbed the lesson.
