“Try to enjoy it,” Destiny says. “Women never get to enjoy anything.”
This feels like the right moment to ask Destiny why she’s so angry with the world. “Did something happen to you?” I ask gently.
She laughs, a dry, bitter laugh. “Isn’t it obvious? Daddy issues, abandonment—my mother was desperate for male attention, my father was absent when he was present, and then one day he was actually gone—the usual cocktail of clichés.”
We sit in silence for a moment.
“I used to be a stripper,” she says. “That’s how I got my name.”
I can’t help it—a small frown crosses my face, and before I can shake it off, Destiny has seen it. “You’re judging me.”
“No, of course not. I was just—I’m surprised.”
“It was when I first moved to New York, and it was only a few months. I’d run out of money, I didn’t know anyone.” She hangs her head. “I saw some shit, did some shit. Some shit was done to me.”
She looks out the window onto Tenth Avenue, and there is an old woman on a mobility scooter and a young woman on an electric scooter, and they glance at each other and smile at the exact same time. “I love New York,” Destiny says. “Every single person in this city is in love with this city. They might hate it, but they’re also a little bit in love. You walk down the street, and you can just tell people are self-high-fiving themselves all the time, just for being here.”
“True,” I say. “It’s one of a kind.” I don’t remember loving the city as a kid—at least not this part of it. This part was remote and inaccessible to people like me, those few stops on the train like falling through the looking glass into a world of skyscrapers and people in taxis. And now here I am, totally at ease; even, in moments, feeling like I too possess a tiny piece of it.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like.”
While she’s telling me the story—of those eleven months of dancing, the back rooms, the way the dollar bills chafed against her skin, and how she did it because she had nowhere in the world she could go—I can’t help but think of all the ways this could never have been me. My mother had told me there were always uncles and cousins around when she was growing up, and it wasn’t unusual to be touched or pinched in a way that felt wrong but was always covered up with a laugh. “I will never let anything like that happen to you and your sister,” she had said, preemptively angry at the thought of it. And when I was in college and grad school, and on all the holidays in between, weekends and Thanksgivings and spring breaks, my parents always knew where I was, they were always begging me to come home; I had never walked the streets of any place because I had nowhere to go. Destiny was telling me what an extraordinary privilege that was. She was also telling me something else, and if I listened carefully, I might have heard a little warning. But I was too busy believing we had nothing in common except that she was my friend and I wanted to make things right for her. As for me, I was protected, cocooned against such violences. No, it would never, could never, be me.
“I like to look on the bright side,” she says, brandishing her fork. “My stripper name is my superhero name now.”
Eight
THE RAISE
Cyrus won’t do any interviews. He won’t speak to the press, the networks, the bloggers, the influencers. He will only talk to the WAIs. Yes, that is what they are called. It’s pronounced “wise,” of course. We didn’t call them that, they decided to name themselves. They have uploaded photos and Medium posts and TikToks about their rituals, and some of those posts have gone moderately viral. They have printed T-shirts and hats. They have authored Instagram stories and videos and clickbait.
The press is hungry. They want to know the story behind the story—how we built the platform, how the three of us met. Mostly they want to interview Cyrus, but Cyrus refuses, so Jules does it instead. Jules is made for prime time—he’s funny, self-deprecating, yet brimming with confidence as he talks about how we’re going to turn social media on its head. The tech news loves him.
Cyrus won’t talk to the media, but he will talk to his people. So every morning, at exactly seven a.m. Eastern Standard Time, he posts a five-minute video he calls the WAICast. He is always in the same place, in front of a fixed camera that’s set up against an exposed brick wall at Utopia. He dresses in the same clothes, and his hair is pulled into a ponytail behind his head. He talks about a range of things, about the state of the world, myths, stories from archives that have been covered over with dust and ignored by history. He sometimes talks about himself. One morning he tells the story of his mother’s death, how she slipped away from him over the course of that terrible year. He is responsible for a lot of tears that day.