One day Simon stopped getting out of bed. His parents sent him here, to the Spa of Ultimate Indulgence, in Wall Street’s neighboring kingdom, the Land of Self-Help.
In the cafeteria he grabs a tray and a plate and studies the options. A saffron risotto, some kind of grilled fish. Snap peas are in season. Simon picked some himself just this morning, pushing his hand through leafy vines to find the green pods within. The dining hall is an atrium connected to a set of sliding glass garage doors, creating the illusion of a modern Italian villa.
He finds a seat at a courtyard table next to Louise. She’s fifteen, Black, with no eyebrows. Her race makes her a rarity at Float, where the clientele resembles a string of pearls formed in tight spaces under intense pressure. So too does her moderate economic status, which sets her apart from Simon and all the other wan sufferers of affluenza whose summer-home-parents send care packages filled with French face creams and exotic vitamin supplements.
As Simon sits, she is holding a snap pea pod up to the light, studying the peas inside.
“I picked that,” says Simon, “probably.”
Louise lays it carefully back on the plate, all the pods aligned at a right angle from the carrot sticks. She wipes her silverware clean with her napkin. Order is priority number one for her, immaculacy. Her plate is a kind of culinary Mondrian.
“What do you think all the normal kids are doing right now?” she asks him.
“Moving their thumbs.”
He pokes at his food, trying not to think too much about what will happen inside his body when he eats. The fluids excreted, the masticated morsels shrugging their way down into his filthy inner core.
“I miss my phone,” says Louise. “Sometimes I worry that selfies are what made me real.”
She holds her right hand up, mimics holding a self-facing phone. With the other hand she primps her hair, making pouty movie-star lips into the nothing. How much easier it is to pretend to be something you’re not. Recently Louise has gravitated to a clot of Southeast Asian girls who dorm on the south side of campus, doctors’ daughters who, like her, have assimilated into a culture that demands skinny arms and big boobs, light skin and boy hips. They speak in code about the pressures they feel to be “pretty,” to be “sexy,” to fit in. They are a closet full of clothes, all trying to become a clean white shirt. And the impossibility of this has miswired their brains.
“It’s the behavior point,” Simon tells her. “The moment technology stops being a tool and becomes instinctual. The toothbrush, for example. That first cigarette of the day. Language. I’m saying actions we take without thinking. Wake up, check your phone. Irrational, involuntary motion. Just watch the first weekers, clammy, jittery. It’s not anxiety. It’s withdrawal.”
He takes a cautious mouthful of fish, trying not to think about microplastics.
“Upper East Side?” Louise asks him.
“West Village,” he tells her. “The pink building, used to belong to Julian Schnabel.”
“Ooh, rich boy.”
“Financially,” he says. “Morally we all seem a bit bankrupt.”
She reaches up to pull a hair from her eyebrow but discovers she’s pulled them all already, giving her the look of an abstract artist’s rendition of a person. It’s a gesture she makes a hundred times a day. Sometimes, when her eyebrows are thick, she puts Scotch tape on them to remind herself to leave them alone.
“San Francisco,” she says about herself. “Just outside. Renters.”
She makes a face—forgive me. It is instinctual, this need to apologize for her life, to round herself up to an acceptable number.
“My grandma took out a loan to send me here,” she says. “When she dropped me off and saw the horses, she asked if she could stay.”
“Depression?” asks Simon.
“Something,” says Louise, then turns and makes the selfie gesture again, as if capturing the moment. Simon notices she’s bitten her nails all the way to the quick.
“Let’s just say I like the feel of a good pair of crafting scissors on my supple Black thighs,” she tells Simon, opening her legs suggestively. Slowly she draws up her skirt. On the inside of her thighs, near her panty line, Simon sees the scars. Old rail lines for trains no longer in use.
Louise meets his eye seductively.
“Wanna feel ’em?”
Simon blushes. She is a few months younger than him, but light-years ahead. It is a performance, of course, a way to draw attention and approval without having to expose the real Louise inside. This is what they all do here at Float, thinks Simon, hide in plain sight.