Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  But dating her had started to feel like paying the upkeep on a prize Lamborghini. Now he had to do things like clean his room or select clothes with attention to fabrics and seasonal palette. And smoke less. Or not really less but faster. What else could he offer? Money. He could fix her computer. And he could make her laugh by showing her his fat-kid pictures and imitating the way his mom said the word regular, even though he himself didn’t find it funny—actually it was bound up in his whole complicated deal about Asianness.

  So it was almost too bad that Vanya was worth the effort, surpassing every unrealistic standard that his friends had always insultingly urged him to lay aside. She was this outrageous cliché of sexiness, fashionable in wheelchair-tailored couture, in stilettos that added no height. With her bangs and faint overbite and humongous eyes, she was cute, and cute was more endearing than hot. And she was also hot. Vindicatingly. And—not that he ever bragged about this, not that he’d ever imply that this was her best quality—but in bed she was incredibly disgusting, indulging every tacky male fantasy, a blitzkrieg of clever fingers and smothering tits. She did everything that was too good to ask for.

  The bridge yielded to highway. Will’s head rushed with dark blood; he realized he was holding his breath. Though he sort of always felt that way.

  I think an apology—, he began to text. But he knew it’d make him seem petty, even though against the general current of his insecurity ran a riptide of vanity, insisting in its mirthless way that he totally deserved Vanya; that if anything, everyone was unworthy of him, they just didn’t know it. Will would always be the hungrier one in the relationship, a fact just shy of open acknowledgment ever since she’d caught him merging their photos together with face-morphing software to see what their kid would look like. Bottom line, he’d gotten a girl he couldn’t have, one who, by some divine clerical error, precariously tolerated him. He was desiring beyond his means.

  A shriek from the backseat pulled Will’s attention back into the world. “What, Cory?”

  “That guy on your left! You almost—Will, are you texting while driving? You are! Pull over!”

  “Calm down. I’m touch-typing.”

  “Will, at least put away—”

  “Yo, can I drive?”

  He’d forgotten about Cory’s control issues. Back when he’d helped her move to the city two years ago, she’d made him drive at fifty miles an hour the whole way to minimize fuel consumption. All that lofty lefty grandstanding, and here she was, insinuating he was a bad driver. He shouldn’t have invited her, especially since she’d brought Linda without telling him—though he supposed he hadn’t warned her Henrik would be here either.

  If it came down to picking between friends like Cory, who bossed him around and only hung out when it was convenient for them or when he could do them a favor, or Vanya, who bossed him around but also fucked him, the choice was easy. If Vanya moved in with him, he’d ditch everyone else posthaste, and things would be fine, or at least it’d be harder for her to dump him on a whim. That was all he wanted.

  THE CAR RECKONED down the narrowing road curving around the headlands, almost there. A tight turn caused the plastic binder to slide off Henrik’s lap onto his feet, waking him. He’d wrenched his neck sleeping with his head drooped over his seat belt sash. The stitches in his tongue ached and pulsed. With sticky eyes, he glanced at Cory, who poked his nose. The ocean roiled glamorously to his left, making emblems of light jiggle on the car’s ceiling. The heat itched on his face and his need to fart had a medical direness to it—possibly IBS, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, polyps. Or death. Yeah: chronic death; death not otherwise specified.

  He wished he hadn’t agreed to come. Even if they made good time heading back, he’d still spend all night at the finite element analysis workstation, eating dinner from a vending machine, wiping himself down in the bathroom. And when he finally got to bed he’d still have to worry about a repeat of last night, when he’d bitten his tongue in his sleep. (A nerve-rich sense organ right between the sharpest, hardest bones powered by the strongest muscles: There was your antiteleological argument. Or evidence of Stupid Design.) He’d gone to the ER, but downplayed the pain to his doctor and was discharged with nothing but some stitches and a wad of medicated gauze to hold in his mouth. And when Will and Cory came to pick him up from the Caltrain station he’d downplayed it again, keeping his mouth closed without explaining why, and Cory had just laughed and said, Oookay, Henrik’s being weird again, in that way people tended to talk about him behind his back right to his face.

  At Stanford there was this smug saying that the students were like ducks: tranquil on the surface but paddling furiously to keep afloat. By reputation Henrik was all upper-duck: a round, approachable Danish face creased with smile lines, blond beard, huggable flannel, curly hair that was tidy only when wet. He was shy but could do eye contact. People seemed to like him when he drank, so he drank. Last time he’d been out with Will, he’d spent his rent money on rounds for the bar and done a tequila shot through his nose.

  But lately he was all lower-duck, a pair of thrashing webbed feet. Effexor had not made things better and Celexa made things worse, so he was on washout, which felt like a permanent caffeine crash. Last month he’d had his Depakote upped again, bloating his face and torso, while the Topamax made his arms bony, which seemed impossible, though if you could be manic and depressive, you could probably also be fat and emaciated. He would get better if it killed him.

  The pill fog had stalled his dissertation project, modeling how dermal tissues separated under various mechanical stresses. Instead he spent his time wondering whether his sink sponge was flannelly enough to throw out, whether that new freckle on his finger was lethal, and whether it was sadder to eat six boiled frozen potstickers off his cutting board or to spend a whole hour cooking and eating a proper meal while staring at his blank walls alone. It wasn’t that he was falling through the cracks but that he was a crack, not crazy but crazing like a hunk of schist, full of faults and microvoids, tenuously intact.

  All his friends had become self-sufficient adults, and he’d bumbled back into the incubator. He couldn’t blame them for not wanting to visit him on campus—happy hour, wine and cheese, trivia night, undergrad parties, no sir. Instead he ate Ruffles and returned Criterion Collection DVDs to the library unwatched, and took long walks for booze, single-handedly keeping the handles of Old Crow at the liquor store from acquiring that sticky layer of inventory dust. Sometimes when he passed by the Asian massage parlor on El Camino, he thought he might try to defibrillate his libido, but when he thought about it—entering some converted KFC and pantomiming with a baggy-eyed Filipina until she lifted his white modesty towel to give him a calloused handjob—shit, might as well just get an actual massage, his neck was killing. Not that he could afford either.

  The seat belt had locked and was strangling him a bit. It was probably better now that he had a medical excuse to keep his mouth shut, because all he had to talk about was himself. He wanted to talk, but not as much as he didn’t. His friends probably thought he was snubbing them, when really this was all he’d been looking forward to, and he kept his distance only because he didn’t want to annoy them with his complaining. Why waste their time with self-pity? Especially with Linda here—he could see the flossy ruffle of her hair directly in front of him, through the gap in the headrest. She was blond now. Make a scene in front of her? No. Everyone had problems. Just put on some sunscreen and suck on that gauze, buddy. Keep living with chronic death. Soak that tongue in salt water.

  By the time they pulled into the parking lot Henrik was asleep again, until Cory nudged his knee with hers. Daylight reddened through his eyelids. The sandy asphalt crackled beneath the gray Camry’s tires as Will parked and cut the engine. Doors opened and the clammy scent of seawater blew through. Linda blocked her fluttering eyes against the sun, tried putting her sunglasses on before realizing they were on. Her palms numb from the car seat’s vibration. Substances unplea
santly metabolized. Exhaling, Cory took Henrik’s elbow and told him to leave his homework in the car. Bones reordered in backs, legs under shorts felt the breeze freshen their sweat. They walked out between the bollards and across the spilled edge of sand, through dune grass yielding ticklishly underfoot. If Vanya had come they would be stopping here to collapse her wheelchair and carry her, because she was still weak in that way, no matter what.

  The coast, the endlessly rewinding spills of the tide, green curbs of seawater breaking into flat white sizzling foam. The political vacuum of leisure spaces. Diagonals of sunlight carving off the last figments of fog over the water. Didn’t she have another pill? Smoking and talking with towels over their shoulders. Behind the others he spat out his gauze and kicked a wave of sand over it, followed them to the concave shore. Towels down, snakes of sand filling the creases. A little crowded. But this weather. So nice. Days like this you have to have fun or you’ll hate yourself when you’re older.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Incorporation of Cordelia Rosen

  It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist—the potential victim within that we must rescue.

  —bell hooks

  I. Live/Work

  In October, Cory was promoted again, because her boss died.

  Arriving at work early on Monday, Cory had found Taren Worth sleeping at his desk. He lay with his arms crossed at the wrists as if to ward off life’s final beating. After Cory said Good morning to no reply, she assumed she’d caught him napping, and sat at her desk with minimal chair squeak. It wasn’t until after the office manager, Martina, showed up, and after Cory made shushing gestures to keep her from waking Taren, and after Martina mouthed, What smells like shit?, and after the paramedics covered Taren’s body while the police collected Martina’s and Cory’s trembling statements, and after Cory biked home, wept in the shower, smoked a bowl, and drank two glasses of chocolate almond milk, that she realized that she had no idea what to do when your boss died. Why didn’t they teach it? You got math, you got sex ed—where was death ed?

  Taren’s timing was almost convenient: with three consecutive down quarters, Socialize was on the brink of default. For months they’d only been able to book bar venues with exposure-hungry local bands. The Oakland PD’s cabaret permit sweeps were shuttering the East Bay venues, and San Francisco’s dive bars were mutating into gastropubs and curio boutiques that thrived even as the economy withered. Taren had handled it with grim uncomplaining authority, and even though he’d been racking up overtime, nobody thought it’d kill him.

  Her careworn boss. He was only thirty-four, but in hindsight he’d been a clear candidate for his version of death, with his asphalt complexion, dark purple nailbeds, drooping eye rims, a face creased like a palm. No matter his exhaustion, he always gave an unsmiling but sincere thumbs-up to Cory when she left the office. A light stutter made him seize up and squint like he was trying to read his own mind, and he’d say avuncular things like, At this point the juice ain’t worth the squeezing.

  Not knowing what else to do, the next day Cory returned to the office, a live/work loft in SoMa. The awareness that someone had died there made her sensitive to the exposed air ducts and furniture purchased from the liquidation sales of other offices. Taren’s desk had been thrust aside by the paramedics, but its effects were intact, littered with consumerdrug: punctured blister packs, Dunhill soft packs, stagnant coffees, tombstone-shaped nasal sprays, ibuprofen bottles with no caps.

  Lacking the wherewithal to clean it up, Cory spent the day calling venues to suspend the ongoing projects. She tidied up, cleared the whiteboard, stocked the printer paper, then sketched hands and dresses on her notepad until she remembered to fetch the mail, where she came across a delivery packet marked ATTN: CORDELIA ROSEN.

  Inside was a copy of Taren’s will, addressed to Cory by Taren’s ex-wife, without comment. It stipulated the terms of his disposal (by incineration), the disposal of his possessions (to Goodwill), and finally an alarming dearth of goodwill:

  3.1. To Deborah Higgins, who in marriage and separation treated me with contempt, ingratitude, and sexual spite, I leave the inconvenience of my corpse: the burden of my funeral expenses and the execution of my will.

  3.2 To my half brother Dick Macy (emphasis on HALF and DICK) I leave sincere wishes for a quick death pinned under your WaveRunner.

  These were lifelong gales of resentment from the legal void, a petition to God for redress, current to two weeks. Taren had rarely discussed his home life; Cory’d figured he just had no time for personal bullshit. Her eye jumped from clause to clause, catching spurts of venom for his lawyer, for Socialize’s landlord, for his therapist. She felt guilty for prying, but did he need the privacy anymore?

  If Cory had known Taren was this lonely, she would’ve done . . . something. She could admit, now that it was too late and despite being a solid four on the Kinsey scale, that Taren was probably her ideal partner—noble, intelligent, Jewish. Naturally she’d love him—you couldn’t get more unattainable than dead. The missed opportunities were coming to her now, all those late working nights, and the time they’d watched Dark Days on the meeting room projector. Or the last time they’d been alone, two weeks ago. They’d been doing routine overtime, circles of lamplight on each of their desks as the skylight darkened, the turntable playing Nina Simone. Taren was reclined foreshadowingly in his chair, stiff and diagonal, fingers latched across his stomach. “What’s up?” Cory had asked.

  “My daughter,” Taren muttered.

  Cory pushed her chair back, casters rolling mutely over the vinyl scuff mat, and waited for the confession. “I shouldn’t dump this on you,” he continued, both protesting and capitulating. Cory encouraged him with appropriate subordinate concern.

  “One sad truth,” Taren said, “is that I achieved my goals—sort of. Owning a nonprofit, bending the arc of capitalism toward justice. I wanted to see the final swing of the materialist dialectic. But it swung the wrong way. Confidentially, our nonprofit is a nonrevenue. Everything’s so small. In activism, you know, scale matters; I’m not some sentimental jerk who thinks everything’s worth it as long as I ease some collective guilt. I came up rough. I’m realistic.”

  Taren had grown up on the fifth floor of a public housing development in Denver, living out the usual hardscrabble urban latchkey narrative, with crucial mentors and social awakenings; at Berkeley he did coke and studied public pedagogy and community organizing theory, graduating in journalism at the exact moment that O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky cratered his faith in news. His girlfriend, a development economics grad student, was abruptly deidealized by an unplanned pregnancy, and Taren married her in the same civic building where she would pauperize him six years later. He waited tables until his daughter was in preschool, then got hired at the Ad Council, where he coordinated billboards telling black people to get checked for lupus, gay men to quit meth and get tested, Chinese people to seek mental illness assistance, Latinos to curb their kids’ TV watching, everyone to exercise. “I was the white colonialist coming down from the mountaintop to hang fifty-foot commandments for minorities. I might as well’ve been wearing a pith helmet and jodhpurs.”

  So Taren made a Hail Mary; with a fateful loan and alimony payments yet to murder him, he founded Socialize. At the beginning, they threw $5,000-a-plate fundraising dinners that failed completely (“For some reason I expected big gives from the very echelon of society I was trying to eliminate”), so Taren took shifts at an oyster bar while the company relaunched at the opposite end of the price-point spectrum, trawling not the lunkers of philanthropy but the small fry of disposable income. He’d formulated the relationship between pragmatism, profit, and pride: put two in conflict and forget the third. Nonprofits, he learned, supplicated the idle rich, ate young hearts, and defrauded the middle class.

  Then the divorce. He’d accidentally left one page of his prenup uninitialed—the pages had been stuck together wi
th his daughter’s apple juice—nullifying it. “Wiped out by a drop of apple juice! I went ballistic. For weeks I’d lie in bed with my face in a pillow and my ass in the air screaming, ‘Apple juice! MOTHERFUCKING APPLE JUICE!’”

  Cory said, “You went bananas over apples.”

  Characteristically, Taren did not smile or laugh but instead nodded and said, “That’s funny. I spent hours driving down Highway 1, not to relax, just to depreciate the car before my wife took half.”

  Twirling a pair of scissors around his finger, Taren recounted the quiet slow tragedy of therapeutic jurisprudence and child-centered divorce, the arbitration center with its separate entrances. He hated being an absentee dad, hated forfeiting 60 percent of his income to support the willfully unemployed woman who kept his daughter away from him, while she indoctrinated his daughter with a narrative of courageous single-motherhood. All she did was stick a spoon in the kid’s mouth! Whereas he was paying for the piano lessons and body-positive dolls and computer camp; if he didn’t, he risked warping her with that ubiquitous American materialism borne of aspirational envy, plus he’d go to jail. “Shitty little compromises. That’s marriage: never-ending shitty little compromises. Beestings and paper cuts unto death. That’s business, too, if you have the liability of a conscience.” He smiled meaninglessly at Cory. “Family’s overrated. Make a plan. Make money and focus on work. Before you get old like me.”