He arranges to come over on a Saturday afternoon, and I make plans to see an osteopath and to have lunch with Destiny at her place in Long Island City. I want to be in a totally different borough. “What if he lives in Queens now?” Destiny says when I call to ask if I can drop by. Then she says, “I don’t think he lives in Queens. He probably lives in a Zendo downtown.”
On the subway I notice a woman wearing a mask. It’s fogging up her glasses, but she keeps it on the whole way to Long Island City. I try not to touch anything while also trying not to obsess about Marco and how fucking smug this is making him.
Before I ring Destiny’s doorbell, I practice a cheerful but not too fake smile.
“How was Cheryl?” she asks, handing me a small cup.
“She cracked my back like it was a Rice Krispie treat,” I say. I take a sip. It’s warm sake. She settles me on the sofa, puts the carafe of sake by my elbow, and starts to make lunch.
Right now, as Destiny tosses a salad, Cyrus is opening and closing the doors to his side of the closet and putting his sneakers in a box and looking for a notebook he thinks might be in the sideboard. I’m putting kale and pine nuts in my mouth, and with every chew, there is less of Cyrus in the apartment, less of Cyrus in my life, less of his smell, less of his loose change and his socks stuffed between the sofa cushions, less of his voice on the other side of the bathroom door, asking when I’ll be done even though there are two other bathrooms in the apartment.
There is an East River between us now, and it’s possible that soon we won’t even be married. Marco has informed us that Wuhan is under lockdown and that it’s only a matter of time before the virus strikes New York. I realize I’ve never really believed in the apocalypse. It was a distant possibility, one that we might even avoid if people like me used our brains enough. I thought that’s why we were here, at Utopia, why we had doctors and climate scientists and AI and tech. And I certainly didn’t imagine I would have to face it without Cyrus. I had assumed that Cyrus would be beside me to answer the big questions. Mine was the realm of ones and zeros, not the space of the unknowable—that was all his, and without his sure, calm voice, I am adrift. I’m just like everyone else: my imagination fails me.
“Do you want to sleep over?” Destiny asks. Her apartment is high up on the twenty-third floor. It looks east, not toward Manhattan but away from it. It’s what she wanted. The sun on her face and the city at her back. She and Ren found it around the same time Cyrus and I bought the loft. They moved in together as friends, and somewhere along the way, I think, they’ve become more than that. They don’t say and I never ask; I just assume it’s the way she wants it, a kind of accidental blurring of roles. Nothing dramatic. No sacred rituals.
I’m tipsy now and full of raw greens, so I think about taking the guest room for the night. I could put off returning to the loft and finding empty corners and realizing there were things that were Cyrus’s that I assumed were mine. Gaps in the bookshelf. Little absences that will hurt even though I’ve made a huge effort to numb myself to a lot of things related to Cyrus.
Queens is out in front of me, industrial, squat, squares of green where someone has thought to put a park. I wonder if I too can turn my back on the city, on WAI. But I know I can’t. Jules and I have talked about it. I know he’s been approached by headhunters, that Gaby has encouraged him to leave WAI and branch out on his own. But we are bound together, and to Cyrus, by the thing we have created together. The truth is, I wouldn’t know what or who we would be without it.
I decide to go home after all. Destiny takes the elevator down with me. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.
Tomorrow is Sunday. “Why? What are we doing?”
“It’s pizza-bagel appreciation day. I’ll bring the bagels.”
“Okay.” I give her a grateful hug, even though Li Ann has told us to stop hugging.
The Midtown Tunnel takes me home. When I’m there, I press buttons on the alarm system. The apartment is dark when I enter, so I say, “Lights on.” And then I say, “Lights dimmer.” And the metal-framed windows come into view. Very slowly, I turn my head this way and that.
The boxes are gone, and so is the watercolor that Jules gave us when we first moved in, which I assured Cyrus, before he had a chance to ask, would be his. Other than that, there is a generalized sense of emptiness, a vague feeling that the space is hollow. Nothing I can quite put my finger on. I tell the TV to turn on Netflix, and I browse through a bunch of options until I retreat to Anne with an E, which is what I watch every night when I am alone. And then I fall asleep in front of the green hills of Prince Edward Island.