Page 65 of Gifted & Talented

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In the wake of the fire, most of the house was fine. The dining room was uninhabitable, obviously, but the swarm of flies had been so thick there was no real chance of it jumping beyond the constraints of the house—the trees outside the dining room didn’t burn.

Aside from Arthur, Gillian, and Yves, who went to the morgue, and Dzhuliya, whom none of us particularly wanted to speak to (I didn’t know anything about her at the time, but even so, you have to admit, it’s not a good look), the rest of us spent the remainder of the day down at the base of the house, loitering around the carport. Monster conked out on my shoulder, sweet thing; in that sense, the perennial darkness helped. Then we picked through the ash once the firemen had come and gone. The bedrooms were okay; Eilidh’s turret remained completely unscathed, a fact she seemed to find hysterically funny until she started to cry. The bodies of all the dead flies were mostly burned away, so it wasn’t as disgusting as it could have been.

Through it all, the darkness never lifted. I knew that Eilidh’s apocalypse problem was part of what I had been commissioned for; technically, it was the only thing I’d agreed to try to solve, with Arthur’s deaths being attended to only tangentially to the more sensational issue of world-ending plagues. But witnessing the effects of Eilidh’s maladies firsthand, I was beginning to understand that the darkness that had befallen the Wrens wasn’t any sort of magic my grandmothers had prepared me for. I doubt they’d seen anything of this magnitude over the course of their lifetimes—though, they’d obviously seen a lot or they wouldn’t have come here, so who could say. Maybe they’d seen worse.

Since I didn’t know how to fix any of the big stuff, I tried to focus on the little stuff. I tried to explain to Meredith that there had clearly been a misunderstanding in the matter of Thayer’s neuromantic investments; my ex-husband was likely leading the team she was talking about because neuromancy did interest him, and she was right that the shell company she’d dug up included members of the start-up I had co-created when I first sold to Tyche. But Ben and I didn’t talk about work anymore, largely because he didn’t think I still had it—the appetite for what he considered to be success.

That was part of what ended us, actually. I met Ben at Berkeley, and we dated for two years of college on and off and then more seriously while we worked on our start-up, the one we eventually sold. He and I and the rest of our team all lived and worked together in the same shitty rental house, the Silicon Valley wet dream. In case you’re wondering, some indiscretions did happen, but it never felt to us like cheating. It just felt like we were, I don’t know, overflowing. And alive.

Ben and I were in love with a lot of it, mostly the work, but also each other, our whole team, the thing we were bringing to life. Our first baby, we used to joke. I wanted to keep it going, to build us up into something big, but Ben thought it was bonkers not to sell at the price Tyche was offering. I said okay, fine—I could see I was outnumbered, and we did all have student loans to pay off, so it was hardly my decision—but I insisted Tyche would have to keep us on, since we were the only ones who could really do this, et cetera et cetera, and then Tyche said yeah okay, they would take us on as Tyche employees, which I hated from the start. Later, I found out that Tyche only bought us out because they were developing a rival product, their own in-house software delivery for which our production had been further along. So we worked for Tyche for about a year, and then they shut us down once their own team had caught up, because we’d become a redundancy. They already had a team and now they had our IP and our tech, so they didn’t really need us . I was so devastated I cried all day and night for a week, and then when I finally got out of bed, Ben caught me researching curses on the internet, something I hadn’t done in years. “For their dicks,” I explained.

Ben smiled at me from the doorway. I should have known.

“Let’s make a baby,” he said.

I hated being pregnant. But I loved Monster so much. I loved Monster more than Ben right away, even though I told myself I wouldn’t. I told myself the marriage came first, because it was Ben I had chosen to grow old with, whereas Monster I would have to love no matter what. There was an element of fatalism there, and it was up to me, I felt, to honor the love I had chosen, because I thought it really mattered, that element of choice.

Unfortunately, I loved a version of Ben that didn’t actually exist, and I only saw it clearly after Monster was born—that I had chosen a convenient illusion, Ben as Eden, and I had fallen in love with the aesthetics of success. I’d fallen for the model I’d been given of personal achievement, which would somehow eventually become happiness, which, much like trickle-down economics, had always been a lie. And so, from there, my choice became not my husband, but the sleepless, needy little thing that I promised myself I would be better for—for whom I would be, somehow, magically, my best self .

After Monster was born, I told myself that I would exist wholly in this moment, and this one, and this one, and thus over time I would simply change . I would be grounded. I would be better. I would hate myself less, or at least less often. I would choose to see the world as a miracle, just a plain ol’ gosh dang miracle, instead of something to be leveraged, and ultimately reaped.

I think Ben had thought that if he gave me this new toy to play with, it would be like a bridge from one state of mind to another, and I’d move on to something else. He thought I needed to nurture something, so he gave me—the woman, born to nurture—something that was more acceptable for a woman to love. He thought I’d be bored with a newborn, cooped up; that I’d think of something else eventually, something new. I was the idea guy, Ben was the executor. But I didn’t want to work anymore, not on a start-up, not in technomancy, never again. We fought about it a lot, to the point where Ben slept with someone else and begged my forgiveness and I realized I just did not care. I cared so little, actually, that we’re still friends. I had that little of myself invested in him. I gave it all to our first baby, the one he so thoughtlessly sold away, and it all seemed so much clearer when I realized that what I really wanted was to feel the way I’d felt when I was young.

Like the world was still open before me. Like my destiny was still patiently waiting. Like I could one day have a love that would never feel lonely. Like loneliness itself was something I could eventually overcome.

After the Tyche debacle, I let Ben have most of the money, to reinvest it in whatever start-up he built next. I just didn’t see the point of making anything new, of putting my degree to use, anything like that. This is what the industry is: swallowing up, using, competing, delivering, pinging. Anything but people. It’s what I was trained to do—value advancement over humans, let the old ways and their caretakers get swallowed up by disruption for disruption’s sake. Ideas get rewarded only if their value can be predictably projected; only if that value is increasingly insane. Ben was the one who first told me about Tyche’s investment in Chirp, and yeah, sure, I felt a little jealous, but I also felt absurdly sad. I thought wow, it finally happened, someone bought Meredith. Someone now owned Meredith Wren like they had once owned me, even if that wasn’t how she saw it yet.

I wondered for a moment then if Meredith was smarter than me. Then I realized it didn’t matter, because this industry, this world, it doesn’t reward how smart you are. The more they want to use you, the worse you have to be. So instead I thought, What will they do to her now?

Then she was successful, and it was easier to be angry because I knew that she was cheating somehow. I felt sure, pathologically sure, that she was doing it with something she only knew how to do because my grandmothers had taught her—yet another situation of the rich exploiting the poor. We took her in, we fed her, we taught her our magic—she colonized us, just like that! I mean, sure, Meredith is mixed-race, we even share some portion of our heritages. Hers was the only face on that fucking Forbes list that looked anything remotely like mine. But still, it was hard to really call her one of us. A fake friend, with fake suffering, and now she was peddling fake happiness to people who only wanted to believe. She was like a goddamn cult leader! She was promising everyone eternal afterlives when all she’d done was poison their grape juice, telling them happiness was easy, that everything they’d so long been promised could really, honestly be theirs.

I told Ben it would never work because Meredith’s idea—her original idea, the one she wanted to use in a twisted, grieving way to fix her dead mom—wasn’t about short-term happiness. It wasn’t about dopamine. It was really a long-term idea that someone else might have bought for more streamlined psychiatric use, but Tyche was selling it as a quick fix. I told Ben, not thinking he was really listening to me, that actually, Meredith’s original idea was much better than Chirp, because neuromancy was a lot more complex than just pleasure centers, and either Tyche was selling something that didn’t exist or Meredith had shifted her research from the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic one. Meaning yes, Chirp could make someone laugh, haha-laugh, but not laugh from a place of deep, profound catharsis. And Meredith had always wanted to do the latter, which I told Ben was impossible, but what I meant was that it was impossible to fund . VCs would hate it because it wouldn’t work right away. Because happiness wasn’t a permanent state of being that you could trick your brain into, a little razzle-dazzle like shining a mirror off the sun. You had to believe it, you had to work for it, you had to choose it—on any given day you had to choose to remember the good over the bad, to honor the gradations in your joy and accept its complications—but what did Meredith Wren actually know about that?

But I forgot that I was Ben’s muse, and I could tell he only heard the part about how Meredith’s idea could use improvement and that Chirp would ultimately fail.

Anyway, I realized all of this just as I was about to explain everything to Meredith, who was obviously misinformed, but it felt like a really long story that I wasn’t sure I knew how to tell.

So in the end, all I said was, “I think it’s my ex that Thayer was probably working with. Though I did meet with him about something else, something totally unrelated to Chirp.” I didn’t want to tell her yet what I’d come up with, because it was so small. Meredith only aimed big, she lived large, she still honored her genius whereas I had chosen (more rightfully, less inspiringly) to believe I was a tiny speck of nothing who already had everything I needed; that Monster and I wouldn’t have wealth, but I’d already done enough to ensure that we wouldn’t go hungry. That we would have time and rest and each other and the faith of a life well lived, and that was enough. More than enough. Most days I even believed it. “But as far as whatever Thayer was doing with neuromancy,” I finished, “I don’t know anything about it.”

Meredith gave me a sort of gruff acknowledgment in response. She had a lot of other stuff going on. I didn’t press it—didn’t really know how to. I still felt, overall, that an apology was more owed on her end than mine. Because what did I do to her, really? Except believe the worst of her. But everybody does that, it’s one of the most common human-on-human crimes. We were teenagers back then, for fuck’s sake, and she had to know she was ruining my life.

“You didn’t ruin me,” I added just before I turned away.

“I know.” She didn’t look at me. “I never really thought I would.”

She looked startled then, like she’d just realized something, which I later learned she had. A pretty transparent metaphor. She’d had almost the exact conversation with Jamie, which is something I would find out later. It’s not important right now.

I don’t know why I stayed at the Wren house so long. I should have gone home instead of what I did do, which was stay there overnight, just in case—in the hopes that, maybe—someone might need me.

It took me longer than it should have to realize that Monster wasn’t happy being stuck with me in that dark, half-demolished old house.

I’m still relatively new at this, the mom thing, which I guess I always will be. I’ll never really understand parenting because Monster will always need something different from me, something new that I don’t yet know how to be, and maybe by the time I do, it’ll be too late. So even though I knew in retrospect that Monster probably wanted his usual dinner and his usual bathtub and his usual bed, even though he was a good sport who loved me so unquestionably, unerringly, that he’d gladly sleep in my arms—you know, to the extent that he actually sleeps, which is pretty hit or miss—nothing was more shameful than knowing I’d denied him his comforts because it’s apparently very hard to kick the habit of wanting to be a Wren. I just wanted to sleep in that house like I belonged there, like I was necessary to its inhabitants. I recited all of Monster’s favorite bedtime books over and over and he tossed and turned, until eventually he must have sensed that this was the world now, so he curled into my side and fell asleep.

The house breathed around me while Monster slept in my arms. Then a fly landed on my arm, and in my new, sharp panic about swarms I brutally realized that I was an idiot. A tear or two slipped down my cheek onto Monster’s hair and then I felt worse. I felt the worst you can ever feel; the kind of badness you can only feel when you haven’t even been through anything, when everything that happens to you feels like peeling back your skin. I felt seventeen again. I felt like someone whose best friend had betrayed her again. I felt like a girl who thought sex would make her feel like she mattered; like a penis—even Arthur Wren’s penis—could honestly confer some hard-earned sense of worth. I wanted my mother, I wanted Lola, I wanted Abuela, I wanted my son’s hair to smell like coconut milk and kids’ sunblock instead of the expensive travel shampoo stocked in Thayer Wren’s guest bathroom. I wanted to be older, to feel wiser—I wanted to be the prodigy I used to be. I wanted to be someone with a future. I wanted fucking Eden back.

And the worst of it was that what I really wanted was to feel like someone in that house could actually love me, even though that day should have proved to me that they themselves were so inept at love that they couldn’t have done it even if I’d asked them, even if they wanted to. Even if they tried.