She meant their prose, not their conversation, but Gregory and his peers strained for fresh ways to say, in workshop, that a piece of writing was powerful （“coiled,” “obsidian,” “hegemonic”） or flat （“waxen,” “kerneled,” “coffee grounds”）。 Athena was the author of Gush, a collection of erotic essays that had roused her students of every gender to a state of manic lust before they’d ever seen her. She was known to have sex with the ones whose work she admired. Gregory was first in their workshop to be anointed; after lavishly praising his novel in progress, Athena rewarded him with a blow job among the stacked canvases of an art gallery where a debauched book party was in progress. The murky, drunken encounter left Gregory convinced he was in love with Athena, but he knew, from friends who’d taken her class the semester before, that the sex would happen only once. Gregory bore his unexceptionalism with dignity, he hoped, but a later recipient of Athena’s largesse went to pieces, professing his love for her in class and then fleeing home to Stockholm. The incident reached the ears of NYU’s administration, and Athena was quietly fired. But her new book of essays, Flout, hit several bestseller lists, and Gregory heard she’d landed a faculty job at Columbia.
The snow began to fall shortly after Dennis left to make his deliveries, soggy clumps that dropped past Gregory’s window like an unsavory load being dumped. He imagined his father’s critique, then felt a small jolt—as if he’d leaned against a wall that turned out not to be there. His father had died two months ago, of ALS. The complaints about climate-compromised snow were over; Sunday dinners were over; the family home in Chelsea would soon be over, his mother having already declared that she planned to sell it. “I’m not in the museum business,” she’d said.
The apartment Gregory and Dennis had shared for the past year was on the eleventh floor of an East Village high-rise. From his waterbed, Gregory could see a slice of sky and eight floor-to-ceiling windows in the building across the street. Since the onset of his exhaustion, he’d begun tracking—often while afloat between sleep and alertness—an array of human lives unfolding behind those windows. He’d watched a man masturbate to his laptop while his wife/partner fed their toddler daughter in the next room （Wanker Man）。 There was Garden Lady, who tended to twelve linked glass globes that covered her window, each containing a separate plant. Cocaine Couple, middle-aged lesbians, did lines late at night and frenetically cleaned their apartment until Corporate Cog, who slept with a gun under his pillow in a generic bedroom next door, battered the wall for them to stop.
Right now, only the Skins were visible: a male and female around Gregory’s age who spent hours sitting on a white leather couch wearing Mandala headsets. They always held hands, which meant they were likely using Mandala’s new Skin-to-SkinTM tool that let people access each other’s consciousness directly if their flesh was touching. “The End of Aloneness,” the advertising said—now you could share another person’s suffering and confusion and joy immediately and wordlessly. But the Skins tended to bellow in unison, which made Gregory think they were using Skin-to-Skin to watch streamers who broadcast their perceptions in real time, using self-implanted weevils. Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.
Gregory’s father was credited—and blamed—for ushering in this new world, although Mandala disavowed weevils （recycled military devices sold on a black market） and vehemently condemned their use. Gregory had declined even the ritual “baseline” upload to a Mandala Cube, now customary at age twenty-one as a hedge against brain injuries. In this, he was part of a fractured resistance whose symbolic leader was Christopher Salazar, an enigmatic West Coast figure a decade older than Gregory. Salazar’s not-for-profit, Mondrian, ran a network of role-playing games at Bay Area drug treatment centers but was also widely credited—and blamed—for coordinating a web of bafflers and proxies that helped people to elude their online identities, sometimes for years. Everyone loved a rivalry, and Mandala vs. Mondrian had been cast by the media as an existential battle whose very terms were decided by which camp you belonged to: Surveillance vs. Freedom （Mondrian）; Collaboration vs. Exile （Mandala）。 Gregory’s older brother, Richard, who was Mandala’s heir apparent, had persuaded their father to mount a PR campaign the year before to remind the world of what miracles Own Your Unconscious had performed in its nineteen years of existence: tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer’s and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a drastic decline in purist orthodoxies—which, people now knew, having roamed the odd, twisting corridors of one another’s minds, had always been hypocritical.