“Shoes off, please,” Athena said, and went inside.
He left his boots in the onion-smelling hallway and padded into Athena’s apartment, which was small and high-ceilinged with faded abstract oil paintings on the walls and a radiator hissing in one corner. She poured each of them a glass of scotch at a small freestanding bar. Dave Brubeck played on an old-fashioned turntable. As Gregory lowered himself onto a cushioned window seat, he experienced a flash of imagination that felt like memory: white guys in 1950s turtlenecks lounging in an apartment like this one, sipping martinis as they engaged in earnest literary debate. The apparition roused a shiver of awareness, as if he’d glimpsed a shaft of light from another dimension.
Athena brought her scotch and an ashtray and sat down beside him, her long legs exposed between folds of kimono. Tattoos of the Seven Dwarves encircled her calves. She looked the same: thick dyed-black hair; short bangs, long flickering eyes. Her blackberry-dark lipstick was so invariable that Gregory suspected her lips were tattooed. She had just the one name, surely not the one she was born with, and struck him as a person without origins, who had made herself up from scratch. The rumor about her sex only heightened the breathtaking quality of Athena’s self-genesis.
“How’s Columbia?” he asked.
“I love it. My students are native.”
“At writing?” He couldn’t resist.
Athena narrowed her eyes. “Yes, at writing,” she said. “I had to sign a behavior contract to get the job. Plus, I’m in a monogamous relationship.”
Gregory indicated surprise.
“His name is Barney. He’s sixty-two. I had to agree to stop sharing to the collective before he would sleep with me.”
“Was that hard?”
“Hell yes,” she said. “My life felt like it was made out of disintegrating straws. But now I like it. Incognito. I think I’m done with the collective. Sorry, Bix.” She raised her eyes heavenward.
“Oh, he’d approve,” Gregory said. “His Cube is programmed to delete if anyone tries to share it to the Collective Consciousness.”
“But he invented it!”
“Yeah, but only as an extension to solve specific problems. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that people would choose to hand over their minds to the counters or stream their perceptions with weevils.”
“Age,” Athena mused.
“He wasn’t that old. Sixty-six.”
“I’m sorry about your dad,” she said. “I should have said that first. It must be so hard. Ack, sympathy-casings. But I mean it.”
She took Gregory’s hand and held it with intention, studying his fingers and knuckles and palm as if telling his fortune. Athena’s hands were smooth and hot, the nails lacquered magenta and filed to sharp points. Each time one of those points grazed him, Gregory experienced a flicker of arousal that felt akin, somehow, to that imaginative flash of martinis and turtlenecks. Desire—that was what his lassitude had extinguished. Desire for anything.
Athena released his hand and opened her red velveteen bag. “Shall we?” It wasn’t really a question.
Gregory didn’t like being stoned; it untethered his mind too much, detaching him from the people around him and occasionally even from himself. But his fleeting arousal—his desire to feel desire—argued in favor.
The joint crackled and spat like wet firewood as Athena took a first long toke. “Jesus,” Gregory said, waving sparks away from his eyes.
“Seeds,” Athena croaked, passing it to him. “Eureka Gold: It’s cloned from an actual crop grown by Beats in California in the 1960s. The whole forest burned up in the early ’20s. Space travel: We’re going to a real place that doesn’t exist.”