“So you just want to disprove it?” Dee asked.
“Maybe that’s it. I feel like our lives are so much under the spell of technology these days.”
“But I think it does work for some people,” Dee said. Ed assumed she meant the Actor. Was she aware of his feelings for her? It seemed like everyone else was.
“Forget it,” Ed said. “It was just a stupid thought. I guess I’m bored. It’s just a parlor game in the end.”
“I don’t know,” Dee said. “There’s something offensive about it. ‘Spell of technology,’ like you said. We sign away our rights, and Karen makes a shitload of money. And for what? Many of us have worked so hard to channel our emotions away from easy love.”
“Exactly right!” Ed said. They were so alike in some ways. But he felt dejected by the fact that she wouldn’t try the application with him and that she wasn’t looking for “easy love.” They stood before a barn rotted away through the decades by a series of economic downturns, its gambrel roof see-through enough to permit a view of the mountains on the other side of the river. Clouds cast shadows over the mountains, like dark spots on an X-ray. They were less than six feet apart, and he wanted nothing in his life but the smell of her cheap floral shampoo. If he reached over and took her hand, he surmised that it would be hard, callused, not from the farmwork her ancestors knew but from the steady urban anxiety that was her life now, the constant rubbing of thumb against forefinger.
He watched her stare through the transparent barn, smoking, smoking. She was thinking that she had never met anyone like Ed. He was so outside the system he probably was the system. He reminded her a little of the luxury-watch journalist who had tried to date her, the one who chewed on the left side of his mustache until it curled. They were both fussy, with their clothes, their words and mannerisms, the way they stood both ramrod straight and internally slouched. Did a content person live inside those well-groomed shells? When he lit her cigarette, twice, he had broadcast both shyness and sex, which is why she had requested the second one. No algorithm at work, just a man shuffling through his card deck looking for a trump. Could she have sex with him, then cast him aside? It would be hard given the Japanese reality show format of the next few weeks or months on the Senderovsky estate.
And also, what was the deal with the hand always cupping the ear? Was he receiving instructions from his extraterrestrial masters?
But she was mostly preoccupied with other matters. Even before the virus, there had not been enough attacks on her book. Recently, she had had to take matters into her own hands, had tried to ignite controversy and get invited to a morning show, but the situation kept changing, and there was little room to maneuver. Should she please that Laotian American student at the expensive Minneapolis liberal arts college or incite her?
They walked back toward the house, both in thought.
As they passed the sheep farm, the driver of a black pickup truck with heavily tinted windows, charging down the road at double the speed limit, slammed on the brakes and cruised to within a few meters of them, the engine flexing under the hood, the crackling sound of coolant being displaced. A hazy, presumably male figure waved at Dee, then, not receiving a wave back, floored the gas, skirting right past Ed, enveloping him in the pickup’s fumes.
He waved after it defiantly.
2
“I’ve been rereading Odysseus this morning,” the Actor said.
Oh no, Senderovsky thought.
“I was thinking about my own commonalities with Odysseus. And with Misha.” Misha was the name of the character the Actor was supposed to play in the adaptation of one of Senderovsky’s early novels. He was the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch who tried to escape to the West in a long, roundabout journey that took him through a former Soviet republic riven by civil war. “Me, Misha, and Odysseus share a lot in common,” the Actor was saying. “We have a worldliness, a cunning, we’re tricksters. But we’re constantly battling our hubris. And by hubris I mean self-entitlement, which is the same thing.”
Is it, though? Senderovsky asked himself.
“Yes, I’m self-entitled,” the Actor was saying, “but that’s what drew me to this role to begin with. It’s the most natural elucidation of who I am as a person circa right now. It’s the rare role that lets me plunge feetfirst into myself.”
“I see,” Senderovsky said.
“Do you, though? Because—”
The em dash above may make the reader think there was a break in the Actor’s speech, but it was only a break in Senderovsky’s consciousness. His eyes were watching the Actor pace, puma-like, as he was known to do in his most excitable moments, up and down the short length of the bungalow, constantly removing the hair that cropped his eyes like an ancient veil. Ed had recommended a Japanese reality show to Senderovsky, and he was now reminded of the way the young women on that show also continually brushed their hair away from their pretty faces as a way of punctuating their dialogue. Senderovsky was also reminded of the classroom. Not the one he led in his decade as a professor, which could never have been tarnished with an epithet like “didactic.” （One of his students had drunk so much Armagnac during a seminar he had to be transported to the university hospital.） He was thinking of his early years in the country, sitting in a classroom without English, trying to follow the ramblings of some unprepared, anxious educator, while his mind returned home to Leningrad, to the metro, to the whoosh of its rubber-clad tires, to the chess moves of a junior novel he was already plotting in his overstuffed mind. Did Nat have any memories of the Harbin orphanage, despite arriving in this country just shy of four? He planned to ask her at a much-later date, frightened of what she might reveal to him.