Cult Classic: A Novel

PROLOGUE

There exists a contest among the dead. Each week they enter a lottery. They hold slips of paper between the dusty tendons of their fingers and creep up to a hat that’s been placed on a small table in their respective town squares. They drop the slips of paper inside the hat, extending and releasing like carnival cranes. The hats are then collected by a particularly ghoulish bureaucratic employee, their contents dumped inside a spinning ball, the location of which is kept secret. Back at home, the dead turn on their screens or plug in their phones or their AM/FM radios (depending on when they died). Then they wait. There was some debate, at first, over whether to broadcast the lottery live. The concern had to do with time zones. In the afterlife, your day and night are the same as they were on Earth. It seemed unfair that every dead Japanese person who’d ever lived would be sleeping when the results were announced. But selecting a time was better than selecting no time.

What the dead win is the chance to walk among the living for exactly three minutes. Very little can be accomplished in three minutes (aside from murder, ask around) but three is all they get. This explains why every ghost sighting in history has taken about the same amount of time. Ghosts don’t go on road trips. They don’t wait in line with you at the supermarket or watch television over your shoulder. Astoundingly, some try to stretch their time. These are the kinds of ghosts who, when they used to be people, sauntered into dressing rooms and tried on pants at a pace that suggested an unfamiliarity with pants. They get summoned back quickly. On top of which, they have their pads of paper revoked for all eternity. It’s a devastating blow. But this is how much it means to them, this opportunity to stare at a cracked ceiling, to wash their hands or set the table or tidy their rooms. They miss it so much, the chance to participate in the mundane, it consumes them beyond reason.

This is the story Clive Glenn’s mother used to tell him whenever he’d complain of boredom.

I think about this story a lot these days, which is strange, since Clive has given me plenty to think about since. It’s more successful as an anecdote than a lesson, but part of the story had stuck with Clive, maybe the wrong part. Being a kid is like this. Your parents pack you a suitcase full of pedagogical messaging and by the time you’re grown, it turns out most of the items were perishable anyway. You have to start over, pack your own bag. I remember the day I heard Clive talk so earnestly about this parallel ghost world, expecting him to laugh it off. But he wasn’t laughing, he was confessing. That’s the first time I can recall thinking something was off with him. Way off. For all our surface similarities, there was a whole layer of one-eyed sea creatures on Clive’s ocean floor.

It was a Friday afternoon. We were sitting around the conference room table, perched on the edges of ergonomic chairs, plastic bowls of half-eaten salad warmed by the midtown sun. A centerpiece of untouched delivery napkins. We assumed Clive was turning his mother’s wacky parenting into lunchtime fodder, but no—he was floating the idea. Did we think it was possible that the dead operate like this? That this is how planes of existence are organized and maintained? Look beyond what you know, beyond science, and just ask yourself what’s possible.

But we were not capable of asking, never mind answering. We were young and poor, eating lunch at the office so we didn’t have to pay for it ourselves. We scrounged for segues. Vadis had an aunt who’d hired an exorcist once. Zach had a toaster oven that would turn itself on in the middle of the night. That was pretty weird. Clive excused himself to make a call.

I’d hoped that was the end of it. But as we were leaving an editorial meeting the next day, Clive held me back to tell me about the time he’d seen a ghost in the building. Our magazine had occupied the same space for more than a decade. Before us was a branding agency, before them, the ad men, before them, a Berlitz language center, before them, a Pan Am call center. Really, it could’ve been anyone haunting the halls. It wasn’t a figure, he clarified, so much as a shadow that moved with its own intent. Could I believe some poor schmuck had used its break from eternal damnation to watch the light on our copy machine plead for a refill? I shook my head. What I could not believe was that we were having this conversation.

The shadow, he went on, unprompted, was a reminder to appreciate whatever lies beyond our way of thinking, a world made no less logical by our lack of understanding and no less valid by our skepticism.

Mysticism, he concluded, is as rational as math for those living inside it.

I blinked, waiting for him to say something else. He didn’t.

Are you kidding me with this shit?

Now seems like a good time to mention that the magazine in question, where Clive was editor in chief for eleven years and I was his deputy editor for nine, was called Modern Psychology. This was a scientific periodical, the oldest and most prestigious in the nation, if not the world. We were the gatekeepers for the profession, the legitimizers of research, the debunkers of myth. I was not trained for this kind of talk, certainly not from my mentor, a man animated by logic and brown liquor. I felt betrayed by his sincerity regarding the occult, and he, in turn, felt betrayed by my judgment. It wasn’t long before he began shutting me out, confiding in me less, whispering into the phone, missing work without telling me why. Our coworkers hadn’t gotten the memo. Whenever they needed a stamp of approval, they asked me if I knew where Clive had gone. Or when he’d be back. I was the one to ask. But I never knew.

This was before the magazine folded, before the print-media world evaporated, before we began new lives.

And now? Well, now nothing, Clive. Now you’re dead.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but life on Earth has proceeded at pace without you. All your scheming did not alter the human experience as we know it. No one’s emotions can be purchased or cured from the outside. People are not your puppets. If it’s any consolation, I am not the same. Not after everything you did to me. I no longer believe in coincidences, for one thing. I often feel as if someone is waiting for me as I round certain corners, a feeling strong enough to set me walking in the opposite direction. I have difficulty relaxing in crowds, which is hardly exceptional, but solitude can be fraught in the same way. When I fall asleep, a force not entirely benign passes behind my eyelids. Like I can hear the mechanics of a curtain being drawn.

And if it helps, I’m sorry. That one is tough to admit, considering all the time I spent feeling wronged by you, but I suppose death is the ultimate lubricant for truth. You were my friend once and I’m sorry I didn’t try to understand you better when I could have. I fell for the projection and forgot the person. I wish I’d listened to you that day in the conference room. What you were trying to tell us is that, like ghosts, each of us would sacrifice anything—money, sanity, security—for a chance to go back in time, to make sense of our choices, of the unholy mess that is ourselves. So if it helps, Clive, I think you are out there right now, writing your name on a slip of paper, patiently waiting your turn. I really do. If it helps, I know you can fucking hear me.

1

Our dinner was winding down in Chinatown when I got up to get cigarettes. This was more about giving myself something to do than satisfying a craving, unless you count the desire to take a break from other people as a craving. I don’t smoke, not officially. A significant portion of my friends would express surprise to see me smoking at all. I also never smoke the whole thing, opting to leave a trail of crushed paper flutes in my wake. I sometimes wonder how this aborted indulgence reads to the naked eye, aside from registering as litter. I fantasize about other people’s fantasies, about cars that arrive earlier than expected, sweeping me off to some glamorous event. Sometimes I go darker. I think of kidnappings, of vans, of men in ski masks tossing me behind a steel partition. The traces of saliva on the filter—this is how the identifications will be made. Alas, the unlikelihood of being yanked off the street in downtown Manhattan kind of declaws the idea. But it beats vaping.

What kind? asked Vadis, tearing herself away from Zach too easily.

Her face was flush. She put an elbow on the table, triggering a little earthquake in her wineglass. Gold bangles slid down her arm, chasing after each other until they became one. Zach reached for his phone in an attempt to claim his own distractions.

The ones with the nicotine in them.

Oh, she said, somehow disappointed.

What kind. What a meaningless question. Cigarettes are not seasonal and Vadis didn’t smoke. Though she’d always been brimming with meaningless questions, asking what time meetings to which she wasn’t invited began, if I knew a long-dead psychiatrist’s contact information, if B. F. Skinner had pets, if we had an angle on this emotional intelligence feature, if I had any double-sided tape. Who, in the history of the world, has ever had any double-sided tape? Then she’d sigh over my desk after I told her I couldn’t help her, drumming those aristocratic fingers on my monitor as if her standing there would produce a better answer. The longer she stood, the more insulting her presence became. This was Vadis’s way of suggesting she knew other people’s minds better than they did.

"I once read this article in Harper’s, said Zach, eyes still fixed on his screen, about people who did all sorts of crazy shit on Ambien. They woke up in the corner of the room or boiled their underwear. This one woman, she buttered her cigarettes and ate them."

"Harper’s published this?" I asked.

Somewhere, he said. Cautionary tale.

That’s not a story about cigarettes, Vadis corrected him, combing her hands through her hair, it’s a story about Ambien.

Or butter, I offered.

It’s a story about the confluence of desire.

Don’t say desire, she scolded him.

An orgy of vices then.

She looked at him hard.

Really don’t say ‘orgy.’

The woman probably crushed up the pills and rolled the cigarettes in them, Zach muttered.

What?! Vadis hissed.

Like Mexican corn.

No one knows what you’re talking about.

Lola knows.

You guys can leave me out of this if you want, I said.

How did these people wind up being my people? I’d had other friends before them, had I not? It was hard to remember. After Modern Psychology folded, it was as if a starting pistol had been fired and we scattered to separate corners of the professional universe. Vadis went to a bedding and lifestyle company run by a socialite (the arbitrary delineation between bedding and lifestyle amused us all), running their events and producing their content (blog posts with headlines like Thread Count On Me and Bath Bombs to Detonate Calm). Her work complaints centered around her flighty, impetuous, presumptive boss, traits I associated with Vadis herself. It was therefore difficult to tell if the socialite was a real problem or if Vadis was unaccustomed to engaging her mirror.

Zach wound up overseeing the editorial page of a headhunting agency. The idea was that if Modern Psychology, the world’s preeminent psychology periodical, had seen fit to employ Zach, he must be a people person. He must have insight into the needs of people. When they fired him, they cited a personality conflict. The fact that it took them six months to come to this conclusion was alarming. Generally speaking, being fired would’ve been a badge of honor for Zach. Alas, to be an unemployed headhunter was to be the butt of a joke that even he did not find funny. Disillusioned with corporate America and the hoi polloi corruption of media, he went the practical route rather than settle for some foggy facsimile of culture. He entered the gig economy, delivering medical supplies, building bookshelves, drilling holes in the walls of useless liberal arts graduates, picking up dog medication for old ladies. He would’ve preferred to report to the dogs.

Of Clive’s protégés, only I stayed the course. Or the closest to the course. I wound up running the arts and culture vertical of a site called Radio New York, the pet project of a venture capitalist who mostly left us alone. I farmed out bite-size nostalgia in the mode of lists of popular books and movies and podcasts, or assigned essays on popular books or movies or podcasts or think pieces responding to widely circulated essays on popular books or movies or podcasts. The Lloyd Dobler nightmare for the new millennium. Radio New York stifled every voice and clipped every word count. The culture of quotas and reviews was difficult for some (me) and a given for others (anyone under the age of thirty-five). But at least the specter of media decay felt different than it had at Modern Psychology, where the end of the magazine felt greater than itself. In the new media landscape, reduction was baked into the deal. Like going to work as a stunt double. Probably nothing bad will happen to you immediately but probably something bad will happen to you eventually.

Is there any of that spicy cauliflower thing left? asked Vadis, looking down the length of the table.

The table had been demonstrably cleared, all dishes replaced by dessert menus.

I worry about you sometimes, said Zach.

Worry about yourself, she said, patting him on the cheek.

He jerked his head back in a halfhearted way that suggested that cheek would go unwashed. I touched my jacket on the back of my chair. It was a thin army jacket, flammable, more for style than utility. I told myself I would leave it as self-imposed collateral.

In the beginning, these dinners were a lifeline to the past. The brainchild of Clive Glenn, our erstwhile king, they came with the air of leadership, no matter how neutered. Which is what we wanted and what we had lost. There was a time when we’d spent every moment with one another, arguing over articles like Arguing Productively with Your Coworkers. We were shipwrecked from newsstands, kept alive by doctors’ offices that allowed us to claim a staggering 17.5 pairs of eyes per copy. We were not invited to the cool parties (except, sometimes, Vadis) or the all-day Twitter wars (except, often, Zach) or the televised panels (except, toward the end, Clive). But we had low health insurance deductibles and we could stand the sight of one another.

Alas, even we were not spared from the shifting American attention span. Advertisers had clued in to the futility of the magazine ad, even in a targeted publication like ours. Print ads are like tossing wet pasta down a well, said the rep for one account, a mixed metaphor that kept us amused—It puts the pasta down the well or else it gets the hose again—as we switched from monthly to bimonthly, from bimonthly to quarterly, from quarterly to online only, from online only to newsletter, from newsletter to dust.

Only Clive was somehow bolstered by this entire experience. Not unscathed, not like me, placed with some media host family until he found his forever home. Bolstered. Even when his name still crowned the masthead, he’d begun to step away from the drier aspects of running a magazine and morphing into a full-blown psych guru. He wrote the introduction to an anthology about psychic pain. He invented a DSM drinking game that he played at intimate dinner parties with celebrities who posted videos of the experience on their private social media accounts. When the videos leaked, he issued an apology for his insensitivity that landed him on NPR. He got his own talk show for a while, which was something. Tote bags appeared with the silhouette of his face on them. His speaking fees skyrocketed. But even Clive, with his Brain-Wise™ meditation kits and fancy friends, even Clive—well, I just never got the sense that any of us were as happy apart as we’d been together.

Which is why, counterintuitive as it sounds, I dreaded these dinners.

We were flaunting our former selves to our current ones. We’d become too disconnected, too leery of bridging the gap, too likely to run down a list of conversational categories as if detailing a car. How’s the family? The job? The apartment hunt? As if making deeper inquiries would open up a sinkhole of sadness from which we’d never escape. Once, at an Indian restaurant, I watched Zach sullenly picking cubes of cheese out of his saag paneer. I don’t know why he ordered it. He was in a self-flagellating relationship with dairy. I asked him if he had any fun summer plans.

Lola, he said, twisting his face, are you ‘making conversation’ with me?

We hated asking these questions. Besides, I knew all the answers already. For instance, I knew all about Clive’s apartment hunt. He’d gutted a place in my ever-gentrifying neighborhood, a duplex penthouse with heated bathroom floors and two terraces, one of which got caught in the fold of the design magazine spread about the renovations. The building was a complex for childless men who divorced early and without consequence, men who would be young at fifty. Clive had a live-in girlfriend now, a giraffe of a person named Chantal with thighs so thin, birds probably flew into them. But he was still a poster child for New York divorcees, for inoffensive fine art and impressing women half his age by boiling linguine. Sometimes I’d see him on the subway platform and hide. I was not proud of this. But I was never in the right frame of mind to deal with Clive.

And yet the temptation was always there, to grab a stranger, point, and whisper: Ask me anything about that man over there.

Is Lola leaving us? Clive barked from his end of the table.

He hiccuped but seemed delighted by it, like a baby. No one made it out of these dinners sober. Perhaps because they took place on Friday nights. Or perhaps it was because Clive never took care of the check and was impervious to all suggestions that he should. Zach’s theory was that being cheap made Clive feel like he was running for office. Gather ’round, ye townspeople, and watch the multimillionaire eat a hot dog! Mine was that it was a show of respect, like we were all on the same playing field now that he couldn’t fire us. Vadis’s was that we were overthinking it: Rich people stay rich by not spending money; she should know (she was being grossly underpaid by the bedding socialite). Whatever the reason, we always split the bill, which meant cutting off our noses to spite our wallets and ordering as many cocktails as possible.

How could you? Clive asked, feigning a wound.

Because I’m not interested in spending time with you.

Liar, he bellowed, and slapped the table.

Even drunk and sloppy, a Viking demanding mead, the man was alluring. Maybe not to me, not anymore, but certainly to the Chantals of the world. See the sharp cheekbones to which his youth had clung like a cliffhanger. See the sparkly eyes of indeterminate color lurking below the swoosh of hair that flaunted its bounty. See the chin scar from a childhood bike accident in a town with no plastic surgeons.

Where are you going? he mouthed, more sincerely this time.

I pressed two fingers against my lips and moved them away. I could tell he wanted to sneak out with me, the conversational equivalent of eating a hot dog. But he couldn’t risk being spotted smoking by some wellness fanatic with a platform. Plus, his desire to hold court was too strong. To leave would be to acknowledge the conversation would continue without him there to moderate it.

A long bar area connected the entrance to the dining room in the back. Patrons attempted to shift their stools even though they were nailed to the ground. They nursed cocktails with spears of dark cherries and citrus rinds. Mirrored shelving made the rows of booze seem infinite. I felt a sense of pride, imagining a foreigner stumbling into this place, noting that all the world’s swank looks more or less the same. It was mid-May, the season formerly known as spring, but the restaurant had yet to take down the velvet curtains that circled the entrance. Passing through them felt like walking onto a stage.

I was unfamiliar with this section of Chinatown, as much as anyone can be unfamiliar with an island on which one resides. The area a few blocks over was experiencing a mini-resurgence in the form of vegan provisions and upscale boutiques manned by Parsons students (the prices could be guessed by multiplying hanger distance and overhead). This was perplexing to me, as there was nothing to resurge. The neighborhood had been fashionable for years. Whatever businesses opened now did not arise from cheap rents or a triangulation of community and so ladling on layers of practiced nonchalance made it feel as if people with no sense of history had planted a flag in a neighborhood where the denizens had been drinking natural wine since