“What exactly happened?”
“You and Jules know what WAI is about—it’s not about making money. It’s about giving people a safe place, a community. We promised them that. For you to renege on that promise is unacceptable to me. And hurtful.”
“No one is asking you to give up your principles.”
“I refuse to be treated like a commodity.”
“No one is treating you like a commodity.”
We go on like this for what feels like a hundred years. Cyrus levels accusations at me, I deny them. He defends his vision, his beliefs. I ask why he’s the only one allowed to have visions and beliefs. He denies this. He tells me I’ve lost the plot. I tell him he’s lost the plot. This is all going to go away, I say, if we don’t find a way to raise money. And anyway, why was he willing to take money from Crazy Craig and not find a way to not take money from Crazy Craig?
Halfway through this sentence, I realize I am so hungry I’m starting to sweat. I make myself a peanut butter sandwich with the one remaining knife in the drawer. Then we are back to whatever it is we were doing, which has no name, except maybe “fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t.”
Finally, I apologize. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, Cyrus, I didn’t mean to.” I don’t know if I am sorry, I just know that I’m so tired my teeth hurt.
Immediately, Cyrus leans over to my side of the bed and puts his head in my lap. I can feel him crying, so I stroke his hair, the back of his neck. Eventually, we both fall asleep, and at some point in the middle of the day, I wake up with peanut butter on my tongue, and when I get up to brush my teeth, he cradles me and whispers he’s sorry too, for not calling me all night, and when he kisses me, I relax, absolved, and fall asleep again.
* * *
The next few weeks pass in a blur. Ren and I work around the clock to get the subscriptions going, and Jules and Gaby try to stretch the last of our money as far as it’ll go. Cyrus and I don’t get paid, so I’m back to asking my father for a loan, which means I have to go out to Merrick and suffer the humiliation of him silently handing over a check without asking me a single question.
Cyrus hasn’t said yes and he hasn’t said no. We’ve all just gone on as if nothing happened that night, and everyone is acting normal except Gaby, who avoids making eye contact with any of us when we’re at the office. Then, four weeks later, Cyrus calls us into the meeting room. “Thank you for all your hard work,” he says to Jules and me, as if we just walked in yesterday and started putting up shelves in the empty alcove. “I really appreciate it. Although I was disturbed by the manner in which you brought up the issue, I don’t dispute that we have to find a solution to our financial situation.”
I glance over at Jules, wondering where this is going.
“I’ve decided to accept your proposal about the subscriptions. But I have two conditions.” He pauses while we get out our laptops and take notes. “The first is that the contributions will be voluntary. In that people will contribute what they can every month and there will be no upper or lower limit. If someone wants to give us a penny, they can do that, and we will give them the same service we would if they gave us a hundred dollars a month.”
I wait for this news to land with Jules, who is shaking his head.
“They have to give something,” Cyrus continues. “But it can be a tiny amount.”
“How are we supposed to model that?” Jules says.
“Let me finish, and then you can state your objections,” Cyrus says. “Second, we don’t give people a set amount of free time on the platform, we give them one free ritual.” He shows us something on his screen. “As you can see, our attach rates are through the roof. So presumably, a person who has received a free ritual will want more.”
He leans back, takes a sip of his coffee. He has started drinking seven or eight cups a day, just black, no sugar, in an old-fashioned thermos he found in my parents’ garage.
“Thanks, Cyrus,” Gaby says. “I’ll go and crunch the numbers.”
“But what do you think?”
“I think it’s great!” I say before Jules can speak. “I love it.”
Jules nods. “It’s a really great way to solve the problem,” he says finally. Gaby agrees.
Cyrus is pleased with himself. “Isn’t it? We get the revenue, but we also get to keep the spirit of the whole thing, which is that it’s essentially a community.”