Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  “You’re not old!” Cory said. “You’re seasoned.”

  “Pssh. Seasoned, right!” He pointed to the scorches of silver in his hair. “Salt-and-pepper, there’s your seasoning.”

  Taren got up and bid Cory good night. Obviously that was the moment she should’ve offered him a shoulder rub, taken his glasses off and—something. Rejection would’ve been disastrous, but if he was going to . . . goddamn internalized passivity. Now he was dead for want of vice.

  Cory kept scanning Taren’s will, slaloming across each page, until on the sixth page she came across a highlighted passage:

  14.1 I bequeath my nonprofit company, Socialize, and all the real property and business interests attached to it to my Outreach Manager, Cordelia Rosen, who will assume the title, duties, and responsibilities of Executive Director, and will receive full control of the company’s assets.

  That was her. Her name. Was it even legal to saddle an employee with a debt-ridden company? Would the board approve? Did they even know Taren was dead? She could just refuse. But Taren had singled Cory out, with such fait-accompli wording. He saw potential in her. A cold, keen executive heart. Or maybe he just didn’t have anybody else.

  II. Benefit Is Complicity

  Cory pedaled into a headwind with white scratches of rain wetting her face, navigating home by pigeon-instinct while her higher cognition performed triage. Work first: no snacks, no weed. Maybe go to the library to read case studies of companies whose bosses died. Or call Will and ask him to look up info online.

  The SoMa commune Cory shared with four roommates was a converted cookie factory. There were rooms insofar as roofless partitions could be rooms; a fart in one room was heard as distinctly as a fuck in the next. Thrifty strangers constantly arrived and vanished, smoked and dealt. In the rare intervals when everyone was gone, like now, it was gorgeous with capacity.

  Cory walked her white Bianchi into the hangar-size room, the flimsy ticking of its wheels tripled by the echo. Navigating to her bedroom in the far corner of the warehouse was like strolling down Market Street, with its miscellaneous zoning and visible class gradients: Roopa’s tidy earth-toned den, Jinnie’s live-in painting studio, the garbage bags piled in front of Laura’s room awaiting disposal, Bailey’s strip-club decor (leopard-print couch, mirror-plated dressers), then Cory’s room, a lofted penalty box with a bare lamp and a tiny unopenable window, through which you could see the glassy teal Infinity Towers mounted like enormous humidifiers in the skyline.

  Before entering her room, Cory heard the front door open distantly—probably Roopa, from the sounds of rustling vegetation. Roopa was big on food fads, and her current regimen was a self-invented one she called “ruminarianism”: every day she rode the BART to Berkeley or Piedmont, wandered in meadows to pick mushrooms and herbs while listening to her iPod, then Dumpster-dove at Trader Joe’s, all for a meal she’d spend two more hours cooking. She grew chanterelles in a Mycodome and sage and holy basil on the bathroom windowsill. Before this, she’d abjured meals in favor of chewing on little biscuits that looked like owl pellets; before that it was low-fat raw vegan and Master Cleanse.

  If Roopa knew Cory was home, she’d want to talk at her; it was how she amused herself while cooking, recounting the quotedium of chores and bores. Cory avoided drinking water near her, to head off a sermon about how we were literally flushing water down the toilet and everyone should just embrace urotherapy like the ancient Egyptians.

  Cory lifted up on her bedroom doorknob to keep the hinges from creaking as she opened the door, slumped in, and dropped her bag and bike helmet. She lay on her futon and gazed at the bookshelves at the foot of her bed, close enough that any minor earthquake would tip them over and kill her. It wouldn’t be awful to be killed by them, she supposed: the Chomsky and Klein, Gramsci and hooks, Freire and Alinsky and Hall, even Atlas Shrugged, which she’d read just to hate it better. But none of them told you what to do when your boss died.

  She was too hungry to read anyway—her hands twitched as she overheard Roopa in the kitchen, the faucet gush, the knife clack and skillet sounds of greens on low simmer. The cozy yellow odors of dinner crept in over her partition walls. Cory considered lighting incense to counter the scent, but once cravings came, they never left until oversatisfied. She got up light-headed, helpless, and her legs forced her to the kitchen.

  ROOPA STOOD AT the stove in a capital R, a hand bracing her tailbone and one leg stretched back, with her waxy black hair tressing down like a stripe of brushed pitch, ending in a horizontal slash at midwaist. Her face was babyish and marsupial-thin. She wasn’t ravishing, but she wasn’t unattractive, but men definitely treated her as if she were ravishing. She wore a blue apron over a brown dress with the sleeves ripped off. Cast-iron pans and stew pots were stationed over all four burners.

  “Oh, you should’ve told me you were home, I would’ve made more,” Roopa said. “It’s potato hash with fennel and rosemary and Niman Ranch bacon and tempeh. And TVP.”

  “It’s okay, thanks,” Cory said.

  “I found chèvre too. The Trader Joe’s ones are ginormous. And they throw it out fully wrapped. Think how many landfill acres are taken up just by airtight cheese. Sure you don’t want any?”

  “Yeah, no, I’m good.”

  “Really? You sure?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine.”

  Cory opened the refrigerator. It was a maddening presence—always on, drawing an eighth of their electricity, just to store food. It carried a permanent stench of chilled compost and was crammed with communal groceries; Cory spent an eternity rearranging items to get to her week-old bok choy stir-fry leftovers. It was greasy, awfully greasy. She could do radishes and hummus for fiber, soy milk for protein, liquid amino for more protein. She took out the hummus and the soy milk and put the hummus back in and borrowed a nectarine from Jinnie’s shelf, and then took the hummus out again, jogging it in her hands to ponder its mass, its lipids and carbs, though she already knew all the numbers to the tenth decimal. Also she’d heard this particular hummus had done something bad to Palestine. Her hunger stabbed her; she tossed the hummus back in the fridge and took out her Tupperware of stir-fry. She just wouldn’t eat the whole thing.

  “That’s your dinner?” Roopa said, in that sympathetic/annoyed tone you used with confused foreign tourists. “Where’s the flavor? Aren’t you at least going to heat it up and plate it?”

  “Nah.”

  Roopa turned to the stove and mounded a plate with a few hundred thousand calories of glistening tempeh. The odor made Cory’s saliva salty. “Try this. It’s yummy and it’s totally sanitary. Nom nom.”

  “Thanks, Roop, but I gotta eat this—”

  “Before it goes bad? That’s so depressing. It probably doesn’t even have any nutrients after all that refrigeration. Try my food. I know it seems gross to eat ‘garbage,’ but people have to get over that.”

  Cory laid her things on the kitchen counter. When she had first moved to the city, the plan had been to recruit kindred progressives into the warehouse, maybe becoming one of those Bay Area cultural polestars. She first met Roopa at Socialize’s garden harvest potluck three months ago, and, spotting a potential girlfriend or roommate or both, Cory had approached Roopa and smoked her out. As Cory wondered how to broach Roopa’s sexual and political alignments, Roopa was already headed straight for those topics: two years at Oberlin as a sexual health advisor who practiced what she preached, a year in South America for her anthropology thesis (“Recuperating Presence: The Immediacy of Indigene Consciousness”—in lieu of Eurocentric written documents, she’d produced photo-graphs and small beaded weavings). Then she’d dropped out for culinary school in Boston, dropping out again to couch-surf California.

  In Cory’s stoned brain, Roopa had seemed ideal, and they moved her in ASAP. But it turned out they weren’t equally political, just equally pedantic. At first Cory had been thrilled that Roopa attended Socialize events, but Roopa would keep offering unsolicited advice (“
I still think marriage equality isn’t the issue. We need to abolish marriage”). In turn, Roopa brought Cory to her anarchist “salons”—usually potlucks or homebrewed pickle tastings at other collectives, where discussions played on conspiratorial themes: 9/11 was an inside job, canned tomatoes caused Parkinson’s, etc. An urban primitive with pepperoni-size ear gauges wondered aloud if heterosexual intercourse was “inherently degrading.” Cory got through it only by pretending she was conducting an anthropological study of failed radicalism. Roopa understood Cory’s lack of enthusiasm as liberal wimpiness, which she liked taking potshots at, like now.

  “I think,” Cory said, “we can divest from industrial monoculture instead of relying on its waste. You know how they say benefit is complicity.”

  “The real waste would be to let food spoil for an empty gesture.”

  “Couldn’t we put community pressure on supermarkets to reduce waste in the first place?”

  “The fact is”—Roopa sucked a crumb that had fallen on her apron—“that the waste is there now, and it supports indigent communities.”

  “Well, you’re right about that. Is it really okay for people like us to take free food we don’t need?”

  “There’s plenty for everyone. Also, I’m not exactly well-off.” Roopa laughed. “I’d starve if I didn’t hit the Dumpsters. It’s not like I’m exploiting food stamps. I’m part of the working poor.”

  Somehow Roopa got by, part-time and under the table, freelancing as a food photographer and botanical illustrator. Cory didn’t want to have to explain the distinction between poor and broke. Spurning the nine-to-five was fine, but Cory suspected Roopa’s work ethic was rooted in a determination to feel good about feeling good. Still, it was baffling how Roopa could afford San Francisco on freelance wages. Cory did take food stamps.

  “I think you just get off on guilt,” Roopa said, closing her eyes and making cumming noises as she forked up a mouthful of hash and worked it around in her mouth without chewing.

  Cory’s eyelids glitched. “I wasn’t saying Dumpster-diving is immoral. I was only thinking maybe it’d be best not to create a social institution dependent on corporate excess.”

  “We’re redeeming the waste. It’s putting ideals into action on the most basic level.”

  “Spending half a day making dinner, that’s ‘action’?”

  “That’s the role food should play in people’s lives. Food is culture, just like songs and paintings. I’ve had meals that made me cry. Some people are visual, others are tactile, and actually I’m a synesthete so I’m kinda both, but I also get so much meaning in through my mouth.”

  But so painfully little out from her mouth . . . “Well, air is important too. Should we spend hours every day working on breathing?”

  “Doy. Ever heard of yoga? I’m only sort of kidding.”

  Cory wouldn’t win. Roopa was rigid, the way free spirits often were, about the romance of naturopathy and well-being as morality. Photographing meals, food blogging, recreational fasting—all that time committed to sweeping the steps of her temple. It was at least as disordered as what Cory had. There was this spin, this indulgent spin to Roopa’s charity: when she did relief in Chile, she returned with a copper-goddess tan; if she volunteered for a bake sale, it was because she enjoyed baking. Her diet was another slick win-win rationalization of glut. Good intentions notwithstanding, that was the lemon-meringue heart of her frankly dipshit worldview: that merely observing selective austerities—abstaining from work, from money—was activism, when really it was shallow passivism . . .

  Roopa turned off the burners and unlaced her apron. She never looked tired. “Honestly,” Roopa said, “people who shop in supermarkets should be forced to spend a day in a cage, like factory chickens. And those of us who didn’t go to Stanford don’t have the option to buy bougie farmer’s market greens.”

  Like Cory was so rich! As if she lorded her diploma around! She hated that no matter what she did, her achievements redounded to a massively endowed, for-profit corporation—Stanford, Inc. But complaining about this would make her seem even more stuck-up. “Yeah, okay, Roopa? First of all, you went to Oberlin. Second, I’m just as broke as you, and my degree means nothing in the nonprofit world—well, I know privilege is invisible, but . . .” Cory pressed a thumb to her temple, where an éclat of migraine was about to light up a deep furrow of her brain. “Look, we both hate consumer waste. I prefer a policy approach, and you—well, you tell me.”

  Roopa leaned in and seized Cory’s hand. Cory hated rhetorical touching. “All politics are spiritual issues first,” Roopa said.

  Oh, fuck this. Roopa always fled to superstition. Sometimes she couched gemstones on her body to “smooth out her energy,” and at day’s end Cory would hear raw gems scattering on the floor as they dropped from the cups of Roopa’s bra, a few more clicking down as she shook her hair. And men did love their bedazzled sex object. But more to the point, Roopa had this kernel of willed impracticality, like when Cory proposed a common-area cleaning schedule and she’d said, I don’t believe in linear time. Irrationality was comprehensible; Roopa was prerational.

  Cory drew her breath for the steep ascent. “Okay, ‘the spirit.’ What is it? How do you base decisions on it?”

  “Soul, qi, quantum energy, kundalini, whatever. It’s the force field that’s dissimulated throughout everything.” It was extremely typical of Roopa to misuse a big word for emphasis. “It’s about intuition. Instead of forcing things into this rigid paternalistic framework of, like, X equals Y.”

  “Isn’t it more paternalist to assign a gender to logic?”

  “I’m just saying, if you insist on denying a spiritual existence, why discuss it? You can believe in it or not.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s your limitation,” Roopa said, wounded with empathy.

  They were experiencing the same exact pissy offendedness. Cory tugged the hairs over her left temple, where her migraine strobed, depositing curly afterlights in the air above Roopa’s head. Her kundalini visible. Cory withdrew her sweaty hand. “I’m gonna go eat in my room.”

  “I think my background gives me a different perspective. When my parents came over from India, they had nothing—they couldn’t, like, lobby supermarkets. Minorities understand power structures.”

  “You know I’m Jewish, right?”

  “Um, seriously? You’re white. Sorry, but dreadlocks don’t give you the voice of color.”

  Roopa was right, sure; but come on, like a cute skinny desi didn’t have it way better than a chubby Jew! As if Roopa couldn’t eat whatever, sleep whenever, fuck whomever, believe any and all woo-woo bullshit . . . Cory’s irritation alerted her to the dangers of blithely dismissing people of color or bitchily undermining other women, red flags of internalized bias; though Roopa was clearly exaggerating to gain yardage—ugh, but that might be a privileged intuition too. Then again, who was Roopa to condemn privilege, as a cisgender bobo, equally inoffensive in conventional society and her so-called underground?

  Cory stood and turned away before Roopa could get the wrong idea about her tears. “I’m going to my room,” Cory said.

  “Okay. Cory, please don’t get upset. Enjoy your supper. I won’t tell Jinnie you took her fruit.”

  Cory left a trail of smoldering footprints back to her room. Sitting on her futon, she opened the Tupperware and pushed her fork into her food and then her mouth. Frigid and bland. Cory hated being vegetarian. She loved meat but was also mad at it, having acquired the taste in childhood innocence. The lip-glazing completeness of a cheeseburger, bacon’s salty crunch. She loved meat and hated kale and yoga and hated women who fetishized kale and yoga, capitulations to the male gaze marketed as fitness. The only problem with eating meat was that it was evil for every conceivable reason. Cory did more than abstain; she resisted.

  Thoughtful people who wanted to extend their unmerited fortune to others, without expectation of profit or recognition, sheepishly acce
pting the discredit and liabilities of their privilege: they’d always be the most irrelevant minority. And then there was the self—the universal minority.

  Cory consumed half of her cold gluey meal with her eyes closed. It was like what people would eat if they didn’t have tongues. Her mouth was dry, but she wouldn’t go back to the kitchen for water, so she tilted the rest of the stir-fry into her wastebasket and put out the light. She answered her stomach’s aching ribbit with a dash of hot sauce, and pulled at her miserylocks, which felt like kudzu rooting into her skull. Weed would relieve the headache but it’d make her hungrier. Everything was wasting energy. She sat on her futon, adapting to the dark, and spoke aloud to her migraine.

  III. The Patriarch

  After an hour-long nap, during which she dreamed she was cutting a huge yellow toenail off Roopa’s foot, Cory got back to work. She squinted at the printed financial records that she’d taken from the office’s filing cabinets—TFS, OCF, EBITDA. Were these good numbers? What was the difference between earnings, revenue, and income? She hung a perplexed finger in her mouth. She didn’t even know if they could afford an accountant: she’d need to hire an accountant to know.

  She felt mute and illiterate in the language of power, which was money. She knew that corporate oligarchs used it to subvert democracy. But she was hazy on macro and micro; how US trade agreements affected sweatshop conditions in Indonesia; what the Fed did, exactly. Her efforts to research the housing market crisis ended in page-crumpling fury—credit default swaps? Mortgage-backed securities? Collateralized debt obligations? How could people be moral when morality obliged you to know everything? It was her fault for not studying econ in college, but she’d had so much contempt for the future ibankers that it had seemed principled not to.

  Her landline phone felt enormous when she picked it up. She dialed, sort of hoping nobody would answer, but on the last trill of the sixth ring, someone did—it was Barr.