After dinner, my mother leads me into the kitchen, hands me a pineapple, and says I should peel it very thinly, then go around and around and dig out its eyes and cut the whole thing into triangles. This takes me about a year and gives her time to impart some wisdom.
“Your father has his head in the clouds,” she says. “Cyrus reminds me of him.” She’s chopping some green chilies to go with the pineapple.
“Oh, great. So I married my father. That’s not a cliché.”
“I always knew, even when we came here and started a family, that I was going to have to leave him to his dreaming. When you take people like that and force them to carry a job, responsibilities, they don’t always react well.”
“I thought Abboo loved the pharmacy.”
She puts her knife down. “Every day he didn’t want to go, and every night when he came home, it was my fault. He wanted to be a writer, but he could never finish his novel. So he blamed me for killing his dreams.”
“I had no idea.”
“That was between me and him. And see, now that he’s retired, things are much better.” She puts the slices of chili into a bowl and squeezes some honey over them. I thought of my father as unchanging, exactly in childhood as he is today, all of his words going into his little notebook instead of coming out of his mouth. I can’t imagine anger or resentment, and I guess it must have been my mother absorbing all of that, acting like a membrane between him and the rest of us, allowing only the soft, kind version of his dreaminess to permeate.
As for Cyrus and me, I’m sure my mother is about to tell me to suck it up.
“These are the things I had to do, and I don’t regret them. Marriage is an epic poem.”
I’m almost done with the pineapple. It’s eyeless now and waiting to be sliced.
“But you are young, and smart, and God gave you some very unique gifts. So I don’t think that kind of compromise should be assumed.”
I was sure, about three minutes ago, that Cyrus had achieved a permanent place in Ammoo’s pantheon, but maybe not. Maybe she actually loves me more than she loves him, even though, unlike Cyrus, I’ve never sat at her table and asked her, at length, why she prefers Twelfth Night over all the other comedies. Maybe she was playing the role of his mother for my sake. My head spun with the thought.
“You think I should leave him?” I ask, finally down to my pineapple triangles.
“No, I’m not saying that.” She examines the platter. “I’m just saying: ‘To thine own self be true.’？”
Later, on the cab ride home, Cyrus says, “I wish you wouldn’t call me white people either,” so I gather he’s still angry about the other thing, and just as I was too tired to argue with him before, I’m too tired to say sorry again, so we go for another round or two until we get across the bridge, and by the time we pull up to the loft, I feel like I’ve aged at least a dozen years.
* * *
A month later, WAI purchases Obit.ly, and Cyrus, Jules, and I all become part owners of Marco’s company. I’ve scoured his tech and haven’t been able to find anything that would convince the others to back out, yet I continue to feel suspicious of Marco. I can’t figure out what his motivations are. I find it scary that he’s not turned on by money—in the end, he sold his company to us for less than we were willing to pay for it, and that’s because he hardly negotiated. He seems genuinely, passionately committed to making sure that when people die, all their friends will come to hear about it immediately. He speaks in terms not of the market or the opportunity but of people’s right to know. Why are we still depending on obituaries and word of mouth? When someone dies, everyone they ever knew should be notified straight away.
He also talks a lot about AI. How we should use AI to allow people to continue to live indefinitely. He is obsessed with films in which people’s brains live on in robots or in the bodies of other people. Cyrus is no longer listening to me on this subject, and I do not have the guts to bring it up again. Fuck it. This is not on me. Then at other times I want to shake Cyrus and tell him again and again that Marco will ruin us. I know it in my bones—but because at this point, not only am I afraid of Cyrus, I believe in him more than I believe in myself—I don’t say anything.
Fourteen
NOBODY WANTS TO BE MARRIED TO THE MESSIAH
Sometimes being right is actually worse than being wrong. Six months after we merge with Obit.ly, Marco ruins everything and we are done.