“So you want us to create entirely new designs when the old one is working fine.”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“Because one of them might be better.”
He is right. One of them might, indeed, be better. We won’t know unless we try. Cyrus wants to try everything. In the same way that he wants to meet the three people on the planet who have written PhD theses on the Japanese goddess Ame-no-Uzume, and then he wants to go to Japan and have the original texts recited to him while someone simultaneously translates them into his ear, and then he wants to learn a few characters so he can check his own interpretation against the translations, Cyrus wants to know absolutely everything. The more he knows, the more he believes he can know. He is constantly entering new data into the algorithm and teaching it new ways to think, new connections between seemingly disparate threads. This is how he approaches everything these days, with a maniacal need to try every available option before making a single decision. And that leaves the rest of us—well, it leaves the rest of us in what we have started to call the Cyrus wake, the dizzying, turbulent, stirred-up waters that follow wherever he goes.
Twelve
THE CUDDLE PUDDLE
Cyrus and I go to Sicily. We eat a lot of ice cream and we have a lot of sex without a care in the world because I had an IUD put in after spending one terrible night with Gitanjali. We rent a car and visit a necropolis, graves carved into limestone hills, where Cyrus tells me about the Mycenaeans, and at a Greek amphitheater on the edge of the sea we reenact the final scene in Antigone. Cyrus plays Antigone and I play her brother’s corpse. By the pool at our hotel, we hold hands and doze side by side. Away from the office, the loud static of New York, in sweet, unhurried moments, Cyrus is warm, familiar, and mine again. We have long, unfocused conversations about important and totally not important things, and we play multiple rounds of Old Before My Time.
“I don’t understand Keanu Reeves,” Cyrus confesses.
I gasp. “That’s not being old before your time, that’s not having a heart.”
“I’m being honest. Don’t judge.”
“I suppose there are people who don’t understand you.”
“Me?” he says with a shudder. “No way. That is impossible.”
“Only really terrible people who do terrible things.”
“True. There are some really awful people out there.”
“I don’t understand dick pics.”
“Hm, yes.”
“I mean, at any given moment in time, there must be hundreds of thousands of dick pics flying around the world, and why? It seems to me the demand is not really that high. A penis out of context is not a beautiful thing.”
“You really think there are people who don’t get me?”
Cyrus receives equal amounts of fan mail and hate mail. Some months the fan mail outweighs the hate mail, but other months, like this one, the hate is especially thick. Last Monday, he received a letter from a man whose daughter had decided to read a passage from The Handmaid’s Tale at her bat mitzvah, and on Tuesday a woman had written to say she had singed her eyebrows while attempting to cremate her novel-in-progress with the hope that it might be reborn into something she could actually get published.
Jules and I almost never share these letters with Cyrus; once, after receiving a message from a lapsed Catholic who was now trying to rewind two decades of atheism, the last year of which was on account of WAI, Cyrus spent several days corresponding with his friend Father Douglas so that he could find a scripturally appropriate response to the lapsed Catholic, and then he invited this man to meet Father Douglas, who agreed to rebaptize him and formally absolve him for twenty years of denying the existence of God.
Since we don’t share the hate mail, Cyrus has reason to believe there isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t think he’s totally amazing.
We also have a new game called Should I Go to This?
Cyrus reads an email from Eve listing out his invitations. “Founders First Forum?”
“Where is it?”
“Vegas.”
“Are you serious? No.”
“You’re right. How about a month at Bellagio to work on my memoir?”
“You’re writing a memoir?”
“Started it last week.”
“I’d miss you.”
“You’re right. No. How about Davos, should I go to Davos?”
“Sure,” I say. “Rub shoulders with your people.”
He texts Eve with the results of our survey, and the holiday ends with twenty minutes of hot Mediterranean making out, a late checkout, and one last, perfect scoop of lemon gelato.