“Maybe you should give her a name.”
“It’s gender-neutral.”
“Maybe you should give them a name.”
“Maybe.” She taps on her keyboard. Turns to a woman on her left with curly red hair. “What do you think, Maisie? Should we give the consent image a name?”
Maisie pulls the headphones from her ears. “Sorry, I was watching The Sound of Music. It relaxes me.”
“The ditched baroness was the best character in that movie,” Destiny says. “What was her name?”
Maisie Googles. “Baroness Elsa von Schraeder.”
And that’s how Von is born. A few days later Maisie brings an inflatable doll to the office. It leans against the Pulp Fiction poster and wears a sweatshirt that says BRAINY.
* * *
Sometimes Cyrus, Jules, and I take our packed lunches to Hudson Yards and judge the terrible people it has attracted. “One day we are going to be just like them,” Jules predicts, watching the tourists with gilded shopping bags heave themselves up the metal spiderweb.
“Cyrus won’t let that happen, will you, Cy?”
“I won’t, I promise.” His hand is warm on my hand.
We gossip about the other people at Utopia. Jules was on the admissions committee for the first time last week. “You will not believe the crazy shit people are pitching.”
“Did any of them get in?”
“Li Ann gets final call. But I voted for Buttery.”
“Please say it’s something to do with cultured milk.”
“No, Asha. It’s buttery as in Buttery.”
“If I ask you not to tell me, you’re going to tell me anyway, right?”
“Yup.”
“Go on, Jules, just say it.” Cyrus laughs.
“It’s simple, really. First, there’s a jet spray that cleans your asshole. Then there’s this other squirty thing that moisturizes. Hence the buttery.”
“That’s it?”
“You subscribe to the moisturizer. Customized scents.”
“Well, at least after the apocalypse, your people can aspire to have the clean buttholes that brown people have had for centuries.”
“You’re telling me your people have cleaner butts?”
“You’re telling me you don’t know about Muslims and ass-washing?”
“I can attest,” Cyrus says. “She washes her butt. Now I do too.”
“When I went to college, my mother was like, ‘If I’ve taught you anything, it’s to wash after you go to the toilet. Please don’t just use paper, that’s disgusting.’ By then I was already indoctrinated.”
“No wonder we’re so afraid of you.”
“Yeah, perfumed assholes. Imagine if everyone knew how superior we were.”
Unfortunately, Buttery doesn’t make it into Utopia. But it’s summer in New York, and everything is sweet and light as whipped cream. Even living with my parents isn’t so bad. My mother packs the freezer with enormous portions of curry, and when she’s at rehearsals, we sit down at the table with my father and play cribbage using an old board he brought over from Bangladesh. Mira lives ten minutes away, and sometimes when Ahmed is working late, she and I curl up on the sofa while Cyrus talks to my father about his novel, and it’s like being a kid again, except Cyrus is there, making everything better.
* * *
“I need your priest to talk to a friend of mine,” Auntie Lavinia says. She has come to help my mother with her Fourth of July biryani. My parents insist that, unlike their neighbors who buy hot dogs from Costco, they celebrate American independence with an actual meal.
“Cyrus is not a priest.”
“Your mother said.”
“Ammoo thinks Cyrus can do no wrong.”
“He’s so clever he could have been anything!” my mother shouts from behind the biryani. “All he does is read.”
That isn’t true. Cyrus does more than read. On Mondays, he attends a meeting of the Dungeons and Dragons Ravencroft Holy Society. On Tuesdays, he goes to a weekly Al Anon meeting, although he has, as far as I know, never been affected by addiction. On Wednesdays, he attends the prayer circle of the local Gurudhwara specifically for the LGBTQ Sikh community. On Thursdays, he attends choir practice for St. Saviors Church, on Fridays, he goes to the Long Island Mosque for afternoon prayers, on Saturdays, he attends the East Ham Rabbinical Society Talmud study group, and on Sundays, not being one for rest, he attends, in turns, an Episcopalian sermon, a Catholic Sunday Eucharist, a Quaker meeting, and a Unitarian service. In between, he is in constant touch with friends who are Wiccan, Buddhist, Jain, or Greek Orthodox. He is interested in everyone and everything. He occasionally strays into Utopia, sometimes for a few hours in the afternoon, and then wanders off to some meeting or other in the name of research.