“I’m not asking you for money, you demon. I’m not even part of this.”
“Aren’t you?”
I blinked. I was part of the machinery that had turned this place into a new age funhouse. Not that I expected to be compensated, not when the people who actually worked here didn’t expect it. As far as everyone was concerned, I was being given the gift of a lifetime.
The kid on the ladder was cleaning the elevator cable, making a slow, adoring, sensual motion like he was milking it. He, too, was probably doing this for purpose, not payment.
“Hey!” I shouted, my voice echoing. “Hey!”
“Please don’t do that,” pleaded Errol.
“Why won’t they ever look at me? It’s like they feel guilty.”
“They don’t feel guilty,” Clive assured me, amused by the suggestion. “They have to maintain focus.”
“Right. On me.”
“Speaking of which, who did you see this evening?”
“Oscar,” I said, still staring at the kid. “I saw Oscar.”
“Oscar!”
Clive seemed overjoyed. The reason I’d never introduced the two of them had less to do with protecting Clive from a superfan and more to do with protecting Oscar from being turned into an acolyte. Clive was a geyser of questions about how long I’d spoken to Oscar, how I felt parting ways with someone as “plugged in” as Oscar. As far as he was concerned, Oscar was the one that got away. But if I only dated people Clive liked, I’d have sex once a decade.
Jin appeared behind us, leaning on the door frame of the interrogation room, arms crossed. She had on expensive-looking sneakers with puffy tongues.
“May I borrow her, Mr. Glenn?” asked Jin, with a hint of a curtsey, one tongue behind the other.
“You make people call you Mr. Glenn?”
“I don’t make people do anything, Lola.”
“One day, you and I are gonna sit down and have a conversation about the semantics of ‘free will.’ The bowing is gross.”
“The bowing is organic.”
“Wow.”
“It’s a gesture to the Golconda more than me.”
“Just wow.”
“Barry called me Shepherd Glenn for like a week,” he said, playing at embarrassment, “but I asked him to stop. I don’t think it was catching on anyway.”
“Who the fuck’s Barry?”
“The barista,” he said, as if I’d forgotten my own mother’s name.
“Be right there!” Clive shouted to Jin, and then to me: “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“How you’re monetizing my personal failings?”
“Sure, but also how it’s actually working. We’re united by our shared humanity, but somewhere along the way, we get orphaned by our individual history. The Golconda will fix this by offering personal salvation as well as a new paradigm for larger emotional understanding.”
Clive’s recapitulative blather was starting to prick at me in new ways, ways in which I found myself more depressed than outraged. I longed for the days when he would’ve skewered this type of new age word salad, cigarette dangling from his lips, ice still rattling around his first drink as he signaled for a second. Thinking of it made me want to light up right now, in front of him, to blow smoke in his face. Actually, it made me want to put a cigarette out in here, to watch the ashes swirl across the pristine marble.
“A new means to personal salvation,” I said. “That’s the definition of a cult.”
“If anything, it’s the definition of a religion.”
“Let no one accuse you of aiming low.”
“Give me some credit, Lola.”
“Oh, I would,” I said, gesturing around us, “but you’re all stocked up.”
“It’s not a religion and it’s not a cult. Not in the traditional sense.”
“Why does it have to be a cult in any sense?! What do you have against starting a podcast empire like a normal person?”
“Because this is the most important mission I’ll ever be a part of. Lola, we were so blind all those years at the magazine. Fumbling around, trying to figure out who was fixing people and how, what was wrong with them to begin with. Like if any of it worked, why put out another issue and another and another? It’s indulgent to look inward and find out nothing about yourself, but it’s groundbreaking to do it and find out everything. Using tailored scenarios, we can put your past into a cohesive whole in an abbreviated time frame, thereby setting an actual course correction for closure. And it starts with people like you”—he poked me right between the eyes, pressing the bridge of my nose—“telling us all about people like Oscar.”