“No one in the history of sayings has ever said that.”
“It means I am not crossing your picket line.”
“Oh, come on, Asha, you know you want to. I’ll even splurge on Greyhound instead of the Chinatown bus. And maybe we’ll hate it and it won’t even matter.”
“Or maybe we’ll love it and you’ll put me in some kind of moral dilemma where I have to choose between the forces of Cyrus and Jules.”
“Call it whatever you want. I know you’re flattered. I know you’re curious.”
I was both of those things. We went back and forth a few more times. Finally, I agreed, and we made up a story for Cyrus about how I was visiting my sister and Jules was going to sign some paperwork at his dad’s law firm.
And that is how we ended up auditioning for Li Ann and her band of merry Doomsayers.
Three
I AM WHAT I AM
Cyrus has been sitting in the house with his legs crossed all day, taking deep breaths with a little chime app on his phone. When the chime goes off, he stands up, walks around the room seven times to stretch his legs, then gets back on his mat, faces the wall, and sits there until the bell rings again. I might find this extremely irritating if it weren’t for the fact that after one of these sessions, he is always twice as everything I love about him. He’s tender and thoughtful and even somehow smarter. I call it Zen Face. Zen Face is my favorite of Cyrus’s faces, even better than Gazing over a Candle at Dinner Face, or another—close to the top—Freshly Shaved and Smelling like Grass Face.
When we get home, Jules and I pad around the kitchen and make sandwiches out of whatever isn’t moldy. I think of Rory and his vegan startup. Already I’m a little fond of the people we met that morning, and I’m trying not to spend too much time imagining what it might be like, walking into that building every day and calling myself a Utopian. Being surrounded by all that shiny promise and making plans for the end of the world. But then there are all the things I thought I was going to do with my life. I try not to think about my student loans and the postdoc at Stanford, which, until yesterday, was my dream job. Can I do it? Can I drop everything to chase a dream?
Eventually, Jules and I stop waiting for Cyrus and start eating our sandwiches. Outside, the night is dense and quiet. I’m picturing all the people strolling home after a late-night movie or a pizza, all the youth and the cavalier confidence of just starting out in life. I could be those things too, I suppose, but I was born with a tendency to think and overthink, a habit of picking everything apart until it came out tasting like burnt toast.
My sister, Mira, is the opposite. She knows exactly what she wants, and she makes no apologies. She also has an ability to be serious and completely nonchalant at the same time. When she decided at the age of fifteen that she was going to start wearing a hijab, my parents freaked. “Go out in a bikini!” my mother begged. “That’s what America is for.”
Mira tried to explain that she was protesting, among other things, the bombing of children in Yemen, the hypersexualization of young women in Western society, and frankly, the way our parents had somehow given us the illusion that we could do anything we wanted. Then she rocked that hijab like you wouldn’t believe, told all the well-meaning people who wanted to whitesplain the importance of modesty in Muslim culture to fuck off because she was in no way intending to be modest, told the brown boys in the schoolyard to fuck off and stop calling her sister, and told the racist shop assistant at Best Buy to fuck off when he suggested all that fabric would make an excellent guise for shoplifting headphones. I know exactly what Mira would do at a moment like this. She would not hesitate. She would not wait for anyone’s permission. She would grab it with both hands and fly like a girl on a dragon’s back.
* * *
The bells. Cyrus rounds the corner and makes his way toward me, and just from the way he does this, I can tell it’s no ordinary Zen Face. “Nice trip?” he asks, dreamy and unfocused. He leans over and takes a giant bite of my sandwich.
I blurt everything out at once. “Jules and I went to New York to check out this amazing place called Utopia and we want to move down there and turn the platform into a startup. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you but we were so sure you were going to say no that we were afraid to ask.”
Because of the meditation, everything Cyrus does is slow and deliberate, including shifting facial expressions. Right now he’s somewhere between “Am I awake?” and “What the fuck?”