Chris looks worried. He worries more about her since Colin’s death, and his Sense Subterfuge, which rivals Roxy’s own, has been activated this morning. Can he intuit the glassine bags in her pocket? When they’re walking again, he asks, “Are you going to the greenhouse today?” and she nods, still too short-winded to speak.
Outside her building, he seems reluctant to let her go. “Come to dinner this weekend,” he says. “Sam would love to see you—I’ll pick you up.”
But Roxy is too excited about Own Your Unconscious （and the glassine bags） to make concrete plans. She hugs Chris goodbye.
* * *
The Mandala box is already waiting by her door; Piers, her neighbor, must have brought it in. Roxy has lived in the same studio apartment for almost twenty-five years （her rent paid directly by her sisters; no one trusts her with money）， and for the past seventeen of those years, she has shared a wall with Piers. He looks to be in his sixties, gay and sexually active—she’s seen men leaving his apartment—but aside from a sister who visits occasionally with her two young grandchildren, Piers is alone, like Roxy. They are friendly neighbors who make the effort to run downstairs when they hear the other’s buzzer go unanswered and see a delivery truck outside. They have never entered each other’s apartment. Lying in bed watching lavender fog hurtle across the night sky, Roxy can sometimes hear, or even just sense, Piers moving across their shared wall. It will strike her, with force, that he exists even when she can’t see him. She struggles to believe that Piers is as real as she is—as full of thoughts and memories and feelings. Yet he must be, and so must everyone else in this low-rent warren of small apartments whose inhabitants range from tech-boom refugees to “lifers” like herself and Piers. How can the architecture contain all those lives? Why doesn’t it explode from the pressure?
Chris is troubled by Roxy’s lack of intimacy with her fellow lifers. Why aren’t she and her neighbors friendlier—friends—after decades of coexistence that have included spells of pandemic quarantine? But friendship risks the end of friendship, and Roxy has moved through too many friends in her life. Maybe they all have—maybe being a lifer in an O’Farrell Street apartment building presumes a trail of scuttled friendships. She and Piers are better off remaining amiable strangers than taking the risk of becoming enemies who share a wall.
Artie, the orange kitten she adopted three weeks ago from a Bright Day client who had three of them tucked in the pocket of his hoodie, marauds amid the packaging as she carefully opens her Mandala box, with its distinctive glyph. She arranges the contents on her gleaming wood floor, which she cleans with Windex as if it were a window. After long consideration, she chose “graphite” for her Consciousness Cube: one cubic foot of sparkling material that looks like it was mined from the moon.
Roxy has an intuitive gift when it comes to machinery—might have been a Bix Bouton herself, if only… but half the world probably tells itself that. Still, she did manage to view her father’s consciousness even after Charlene gave her the list of passwords in the wrong order. Roxy wanted to watch her trip to London with her father through his eyes, see her sixteen-year-old self in action like a movie heroine. But she ended up tearing off the headset before her father had even left his house to pick her up for the airport. The intimate flux of his thoughts sickened her: of Jocelyn, his strung-out girlfriend, spread-eagled in bed; a loop of electric guitar chords; an itch on his balls; a lawnmower buzz from somewhere; a yen for an avocado-and-Jack sandwich; a wish that he could go to London without Roxy; a seizure of regret at having invited her to come with him—all subsumed by a spasm of rage when he spotted Bowser taking a shit by the pool.
After flinging away the headset, Roxy sat numb and horrified, thinking she might vomit, or die. With a sense of crawling away from a precipice, she reminded herself that the magic of their London trip hadn’t begun until she and her father were on the airplane, in first class, and he let her drink champagne. She’d hardly known him before then, being one of his middle children by his middle wife. According to her mother’s own bitter report, her sole function had been to lure him away from the first wife, Christine, whom he’d actually loved.