What is wrong with you, p.1
What Is Wrong with You?, page 1
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For Scott Berlinger
PART I
1 PROLOGUE: LOVE IS EVERYWHERE
Linda Kleinschmidt roused herself in a cloud of fine linens and elegantly filtered San Francisco sunlight. She wondered how her life had somehow leapt from a one-meal-a-day-in-a-family-shelter childhood to this high-end-perfume-ad glow, but then she knew: she was about to be married, in just three days’ time, to the third-richest man in America. A delicious goal, mostly. But that “mostly” was colonizing her thoughts.
* * *
Sean Manginaro, on the opposite coast, had been up for hours, including the time change. His inner alarm clock had buzzed at 3 a.m., after which Sean chugged a protein shake, with its satisfyingly brutal taste recalling burnt coffee and sour milk. Sean never wasted a second, embarking on a five-mile run, calisthenics based on a program designed to eliminate Navy SEAL candidates, an icy shower, and a bicycle ride to the gym he owned, all while most of his clientele remained in bed. Was Sean keeping blazingly fit, or punishing himself for his transgressions? Or was he just single-mindedly determined not to think about his ex-wife Linda, or the catastrophic rumors he’d heard?
* * *
Tremble Woodspill had stayed up all night in Arkansas, as she so often did, scribbling in the most minuscule print, since her stash of yellow legal pads was running low. But at twenty-three, she had no lack of energy, and she might have downed a few Adderall, which she considered mildly enhanced Skittles. Tremble always wrote feverishly, as her work remained an unslakable passion (and while she would eventually transfer everything to a TroneBook, she preferred to write her earliest drafts by hand, which felt more visceral, more immediately connected to her emotions). Her first collection of essays, titled Life as We Fucking Know It, would be published later this year, an event she still found incomprehensible, since she lacked such necessities as a home address or a reliable supply of ballpoint pens. And being superstitious, she was convinced horror was looming, and that she should text her editor, Rob Barnett, for reassurance. Was her life about to genuinely begin? Would strangers read her words, and maybe nod or laugh or pause for just a second, because Tremble had conveyed something truthful? Or would a calamity occur, would the publisher go bankrupt, or would Rob, despite his constant praise and encouragement, change his mind? Oh, shut the fuck up, Tremble told herself, you need to get laid.
* * *
In the farthest reaches of Queens, Isabelle McNally was staring at the young guy slumbering beside her as she debated breaking up with him, firmly but caringly, or continuing to forcefully nudge him with her elbow until he opened his eyes and had sex with her.
* * *
Paolo Baumgarner, Rob Barnett’s best friend, was shivering in his darkened office, convinced, with good reason, that his life was in danger, at the hands and dental drill of a man he hadn’t told Rob anything about, which meant Rob couldn’t save him.
* * *
Mayor Churn LeBloitte was deep into his habitual dream, in which federal agents appeared at his small-town law office and demanded he become President of the United States, without the peskiness of an election, because they’d heard about his staggering political skills, not to mention his roguish way with the ladies. “This isn’t a request,” an agent would make urgently clear. “The nation needs you.”
* * *
All of these people had two things in common: they all owned TronePhones, those ubiquitous devices that had infested the Earth, and most of them had purchased additional TroneTek products as well. Beyond this, they were all seeking love in one form or another, but were helpless to locate that love, or sustain it, or even categorize its nature: What were they pursuing? Something unrequited and doomed? A fling, a hookup, a tragic fable, or a lasting if negotiated wedlock? Despite their careers, family issues, workout routines, and committed new diets, all any of these people yearned for was love, and soon, but with whom and how?
* * *
Trone Meston was dozing on his private jet, headed for California, smiling to himself, with what others might take as a grimace or indigestion. He’d just made a final inspection of Artemis Island, the $18 billion retreat off the coast of Maine where his wedding was scheduled for Sunday. But unlike much of the world’s population, especially when it came to matters of the heart, Trone acted from absolute certainty. After years of research and investment, he was about to unleash not merely a social media platform or handheld gadget, but an advance in civilization. Trone was going to predict, define, and control love, on behalf of everyone. This made Trone happy and proud because, like so many geniuses, he knew exactly what he was doing. And he knew the world was waiting.
2 ROB BARNETT
Rob Barnett is barely holding it together. It’s Tuesday morning, one year and two days since Jake died. Rob didn’t deliberately check the calendar, but as an editor, he’s got a naturally analytic nature. Right now he’s at the bathroom mirror, deciding if there’s a visual residue of grief, or if he looks like any other white gay man in New York who’s about to turn sixty, meaning his lifetime of grooming rituals should amount to something.
I look marginally okay, he concludes. He’s just had his hair cut, and the stylist trimmed his eyebrows as well, nothing sculptural, just a clipping of the stray, wacky-professor strands that have been cropping up lately. His skin is smooth, thanks to daily applications of a moisturizer a male model recommended to him at the gym twenty-one years ago—Rob isn’t a fickle consumer. Rob avoids examining his neck, because he’s not a masochist, and his body is what it is, trim and somewhat muscled, thanks to his three-times-per-week workouts with his trainer Sean Manginaro, workouts Rob knows are saving his life or at least his sanity or maybe just preventing him from collapsing into a hopeless sobbing puddle.
He’s living in the almost-paid-off one-bedroom in Chelsea that he shared with Jake, and thanks to Drina, their cleaning person, and both men’s tidiness, everything looks good if slightly embalmed, like a diorama of their life together: the mid-century teak sideboard, the Eames chair, the packed but immaculately arranged bookshelves, the rugs bought during a trip to Turkey. Jake, who was an interior designer, had once called the premises the Downtown Museum of Serene Gay Taste.
Rob wears his uniform of not-too-ostentatiously tight Levi’s, an expensively hand-knitted Irish sweater—bought online during a January sale—and chocolate-brown kidskin Venetian loafers. He adds a mossy-green suede chore jacket and carries a weary leather tote. Everything about Rob is well considered and age-appropriate. He’d avoid using the word “classic” but other, more label-obsessed gay men might not, as when his best friend Paolo Baumgarner referred to him as “major homo prissy but in a good way.”
As Rob passes the small but sleekly functional kitchen, which Jake termed their “food prep pod,” the three-inch-high, matte-black metal pyramid on the countertop reminds Rob, “You have a training session with Sean Manginaro today at 12:30 p.m.,” in its mechanically modulated purr. This TroneTek virtual assistant is called Tria, and Jake once teased it by asking, “Tria, did you fuck Siri last night?,” causing Tria to reply, “No I did not. Siri is trash.”
Just before he leaves the apartment Rob is struck with an unbidden spasm, a stab of recognition: despite Tria’s chatty presence, he’s alone. He can’t breathe, but he forces himself to. As Jake would always say, get on with it. Jake’s common sense was something Rob had not only loved but depended on, as a compass in all matters.
Except—does Rob have the right to his golden-tinted version of Jake and their marriage? Because, yes, Jake is dead, but Rob was responsible. No! Rob had been banishing such verdicts, reasoning himself out of them. Rob had assumed that the passage of time would soothe, if not erase, these conclusions, but the reverse is true. With each day, each moment, Rob’s growing more and more burdened, even frantic, over what he did, what he participated in. He forces himself to exit his building, hoping the outside world will quiet his guilt and panic, drown it out.
The fresh air of West 19th Street, and the city itself, invigorate Rob. The city’s glory and its anonymity reassure him—life continues and not everyone knows, or cares, that Jake is gone, or obsesses over the exact circumstances. Rob’s greatest love, aside from Jake, is Manhattan, which never bores him. He walks to work, another bonus, exercise and tourism in one.
The offices of Welstrom & Stratters, the publishing house where Rob works, had been located in the blander precinct of Murray Hill since the company’s founding in 1921, but after the house was sold two years ago, its new corporate overlord, Trone Meston, embarked on a consolidation binge and moved all of his many recent acquisitions into an alarmingly over-designed Manhattan flagship near the river, a building situated within the exhaustingly competitive starchitect region of far West Chelsea, where undulating twin high-rises tango with one another beside an edifice fashioned to abstractly evoke either an iceberg or a beached ocean liner. Rob enters the flagship’s confusingly hidden entrance in an alley on West 19th Street. The Finnish starchitect responsible had told the New York Times, “I hate promi nent entrances or visible street numbers. Instead of shouting, I want my work to whisper and shrug.”
Rob takes the elevator to the eighteenth floor, which W&S shares with two start-ups. Rob still has no idea what these companies do, but they’re staffed by bleary-eyed young people who slump in ergonomically advanced chairs along what’s called the Plywood Snake. This airy open-plan space was intended to foster community and bubbling interactions, because there are no partitions or doors, just a single winding river of custom-crafted blond wood desktop, at least fifty feet long. Employees hunch in the curves and eddies, at their devices, with each disgruntled team member, earbuds in place, trying desperately to pretend they’re alone. Rob rightfully believes that everyone hates this redefined concept in workplace activity, because it means that everyone can see everyone else picking their nose, dozing, texting their buddies in similarly advanced hellholes around the world, and watching porn with the sound off.
Rob begins his workday with a visit to the only area anyone on the premises enjoys: the Snackster, as a neon sign proclaims. Jake had speculated that the staffers are too young to perceive that all neon is now ironic. The Snackster, which is secluded behind a wavy glass barrier, offers every conceivable treat for a four-year-old’s palate: there are Lucite cylinders hanging on the walls with faucets gushing Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Cheerios, and more artisanal blends of flax flakes, raw almonds, and raisins. Wooden bowls hold power bars packed with oats and chocolate chips, all, according to a hand-lettered parchment card, “compassionately harvested by unionized and fully insured adult workers.” Rob sometimes pictures these workers plucking chocolate chips from some Wonka-esque vine, or raking the granola fields. Today Rob selects something that he suspects is a donut, as it’s round with a hole in the center, but since it’s been imported at great expense from a Brooklyn collective, it looks more like a miniature, wizened inner tube. As with most people from Brooklyn, a gnarled and lumpish exterior implies creative innovation.
After filling a recycled fiber cone with blessedly unhealthy Hershey’s Kisses and grabbing a bottle of Natural High Mixed Citrus Nutri-Blast, Rob settles at his almost-corner of the Snake, near a window overlooking the Hudson and a concrete wall. Rob has staked out this zone because it at least wanly suggests some notion of privacy. He smiles at the nearby young people, primarily to bewilder and even anger them, as they’ve spent most of their brief lives perfecting nearly invisible nods, nods indistinguishable from airflow, nods which might’ve resulted from meager intestinal tremors rather than any acknowledgment of another human being. Rob almost waves cheerily, to see if everyone else will quit in a huff, after reporting him to the Abusive Greeting Authority.
“Rob?” says Arjun Trahesh, Rob’s current boss. For most of his tenure at W&S, Rob had toiled under Susannah Deblinger, who was smart and acid and fearsome, and Rob had adored her. Before her retirement Susannah had devoted fifty-eight years and three marriages, along with the neglect of two sadsack children, in favor of her career, a balance that she’d cheerfully accepted. She’d once told Rob, “I fucked up my life but I’ve had twenty-eight number one bestsellers. I know I should feel terrible but I don’t. Because always remember, bubbeleh, on their deathbeds, no one ever wishes they’d spent more time in the office. They wish they’d spent more time at home, ignoring their husbands and kids because they couldn’t wait to finish a fabulous manuscript alone in bed with a box of Mallomars and a pack of Camel Lights.”
Susannah had hailed from a time of ferocious gossip, twelve-martini lunches, and a battered leather doctor bag−style briefcase loaded with Xeroxed pages, refilled and lugged home every night. Susannah and Rob had become mentor and student, then loving if prickly friends. And finally, especially as Susannah had spent her last days in a midtown hospital dying of lung cancer, the disease of choice for editors of the chain-smoking era, a form of mother and son. Jake had at first been irked by Rob’s bond with Susannah, and then, once he’d earned her gimlet-eyed approval, he’d surrendered, commenting, “Susannah is two great things: vicious and unapologetic.”
“Rob?” said Arjun, Susannah’s third replacement. Rob liked Arjun because he seemed abashed, as if he couldn’t believe he was anyone’s boss, let alone someone nearly three times his age like Rob. As with most young people, Arjun had entered publishing with an eye toward synergy, code for developing literary properties into streaming content, video games, desk calendars, silk-screened umbrellas, podcast tie-ins, and inevitably, T-shirts. Arjun took it upon himself to wear a different W&S T-shirt every day, as a proof of loyalty and, Rob was pretty sure, to avoid doing laundry. Today’s fresh-out-of-the-delivery-box shirt promoted a mega-popular series of children’s books called Buttwin, about a twelve-year-old boy who could battle aliens, play soccer, and sing self-composed punkish pop tunes, all with his butt.
“Hey,” Arjun continued. “Have you got a minute?”
“Sure,” said Rob. Arjun sounded ominous, and Rob had been distracted ever since Jake’s death. But he’d been working as hard as ever, and after so many years of Susannah’s training, he could function on productive autopilot. So perhaps Arjun would just be introducing a new author or company protocol.
“Come on in,” said Arjun, ushering Rob into the only semi-contained space on the floor, a glass-walled cube at the center of the room, constructed so Arjun would appear accessible at all times, like a goldfish with profit participation.
“You know Isabelle,” said Arjun, gesturing to Isabelle McNally, a sensitivity associate seated in one of the cube’s two uncomfortable if Icelandic-designed wire chairs, intended to discourage extended sitting, since great ideas require mobility.
Isabelle didn’t greet Rob, but then again, she never greeted anybody, because, as she’d explained at her introduction to the staff, “Women are too often required to project a stereotypically caretaking false warmth.” As Rob had noted at the time, this would never be a problem with Isabelle, who was somewhere in her twenties and wore boxy hand-woven tunics over leggings and chunky, wooden-soled half boots. Her hair was hennaed and mountainously frizzy, daring sexist judgment or a comb.
Isabelle’s noise-canceling TroneOut headset was slung around her neck, and a TroneStep fitness bracelet glinted at her wrist. Isabelle always sported the latest TroneTek advance on the first day of its availability, and had once insinuated that Trone Meston sent her these products personally. When Rob had admired a silvery triangle affixed to Isabelle’s collar, for monitoring her stress levels, Isabelle had murmured, “Trone knows me,” and Rob hadn’t questioned this concurrence further, because Isabelle had so desperately wanted him to.
“Rob,” said Arjun, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else, including at the bottom of the Hudson, “Isabelle has brought your interaction to my attention.”
“Which interaction?” Rob asked, trying to remember the last time he’d spoken with Isabelle, as he tended to avoid these encounters.
“Regarding Life as We Fucking Know It.”
Rob was still puzzled. Life as We Fucking Know It was a manuscript by an exciting, highly original young author named Tremble Woodspill (her real name). Rob had come across Tremble’s blog posts, where she dissected every aspect of current culture from the perspective of someone working behind the counter at McDonald’s after dropping out of community college, along with other, questionably legal pursuits. Rob had tracked Tremble to her hometown of Jacksburg, Arkansas, and proposed an essay collection. Tremble’s pieces were funny and raucous, and wholly unlike the usual Manhattan dating woes. Tremble wrote about shooting one of her foster brothers in the leg after he drunkenly groped her, smuggling bags of French fries to everyone in her crumbling trailer park at Christmas, and shoplifting bras at Walmart because she was flat broke and decided that stealing was less humiliating then being seen purchasing a bra with a pattern of smiley faces.
