“With you in charge? No way.”
“I’m not in charge, remember?”
“Right.”
Cyrus continues. “I’m worried people won’t have anywhere to turn to if something goes wrong, if the ritual they get isn’t right or they want to change something,” Cyrus says.
At least he’s trying. “Good idea,” I agree. “We need some way for people to talk to us, and to each other, about how the ritual is working for them.” I scribble Messaging service on a piece of paper to remind me later.
“Maybe they can upload photos,” Jules suggests.
“I don’t want to turn into Instagram,” Cyrus says.
“It’s not Instagram, it’s insta-religion.”
“It’s not religion.”
We have the debate all over again. The whole point is that we are giving people an alternative to religion, but we always have to skirt around religion in order to do that. And every time we mention it, talk about God or fate or creation, Cyrus freaks out, as if we’re handing him a crown of thorns.
“People need to hold on to something,” I tell him. I am thinking about my mother, how for years she had refused to enter a mosque, but lately, I’ve found her peppering her sentences with “Inshallah, God willing,” and once I even caught her kneeling on the carpet in her bedroom, her body angled in a direction which I assumed was east, toward Mecca. “When they get old, or when something bad happens to them, people need belief systems.”
“So we’re just going to create one more thing for people to blindly follow.”
“Think of it as a set of choices.” I don’t have to explain it to him—Cyrus knows exactly what we’re doing.
“This is important,” Jules says. “And only you can do it.”
Cyrus nods. Once again, he is dragged off the fence. But just barely.
* * *
Destiny reads me the gym schedule. “Upside-down yoga at six a.m.,” she says. “Water yoga at seven. Hot yoga at eight.”
“What time is the Very Hot Yoga?”
Instead of saying “There is no very hot yoga” or, worse, “Should I put in a request to the Wellness Committee?,” she says, “It’s right before Unbearably Hot Yoga,” and so we become friends. Around eleven, when I start to get hungry, she brings me an overpriced donut from the diner across the street.
“I love New York,” I say every day after the last bite.
“I love bread,” she says, nodding.
After a few weeks I get up the courage to ask her about Consentify. “So, what’s your app going to do?”
“It’s going to make you sign a contract every time you want to touch someone.”
“Hm. Do you think, maybe—” I start to say.
“That we’re killing sex?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the question everyone asks.”
“Sorry.”
“I really don’t mind. It’s good to get your fears out—it’s the only way we remake the world. First of all, every sexual encounter should be consensual—agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“But the very basis of our culture tells us that the gray zone, the space between what you know and what you don’t know about your partner—that’s the sexy part.”
“Isn’t it?”
She looks down at her hands, brushes an imaginary bread crumb from her leg. “No, it isn’t. We have to unlearn the meaning of seduction. We think it’s all about mystery, that it’s about what we don’t know, rather than sharing something we agree to beforehand.” There are little patches of red climbing up her neck. “Feeling that bit of tension, where you don’t know what the person is going to do, are they going to unbutton your shirt or put their hands on your crotch, what is that?”
“Anticipation?” I ask.
“Fuck no. I want to live in a world where women aren’t afraid.”
I can’t disagree. “Tell me how it works.”
“You list all the things you’re consenting to, and then you both do a facial-recognition thing, and that’s your signature.”
“You write it all down?”
“No, you just swipe over the parts you consent to having touched.”
I want to ask where the idea came from, but something about the way her voice seizes up tells me I should leave it there. She pulls out her phone and points to her screen, which has a diagram of a body. I roll my finger over the chest, the abdomen. Breasts pop up on the screen. Upper diaphragm. Touching, kissing, fondling. I press on all three words and they light up.