ESSAY: Recession
The writer and their software engineer friend meet the recession. At a bar the newly unemployed pair sort through the nature of AI, literature, money, and mortality.
The bar is full of Ivy League money. Clean complexions and soft complicated ideas. Fringeless blonde hair. The woman sits between T. and someone on their phone working through an expensive bottle of pinot noir. The woman fidgets, walks to the host stand, and returns with a cushion. All seventy-five pounds of her next to T.’s hulking male frame. Muscular and tall. I have known him long enough to see women in their seventies, eighties, nineties, gravitate to him. Compelled by his form, the opposite of theirs. The woman orders a whiskey neat and T. orders a Manhattan. She eats half of a dripping beef burger, while he works his way through his meatloaf.
T. and I are talking deeply, intimately. We are quiet in familiarity. We are watching the rich people attend to their bodies with caloric sedatives. We are touching one another’s shoulder or knee or back with reassurance. We are opening the past two years, we are closing them, we are callous, we are exposed like a mucousy oyster, like a wet clitoris, like a trembling ball inside its sack.
The bar empties and it is just T., me, and the woman. She turns to T., as I knew she would, and, taking sips of whiskey, says, “It seems like you two have known each other a long time.”
I say fifteen years. T. shakes his head, “More.” The woman asks how we met. T. says, At a garden party. I say the bar was carding, and T. was sneaking me wine. The woman says, “A keeper.” I tell her T has a beautiful partner, for a decade now. We are only friends. And the woman nods with disappointment.
T. says we are commiserating. I nod. We have both been laid off this week. The woman takes this in stride. If I am thinking generously, then she does this without full comprehension, but more likely she does this without any empathy. The woman says she is eighty-three with two jobs. And, it is revealed, family money. And, it is revealed, money from her divorce almost forty years before.
T. laughs with the woman’s selfish audacity, but she does not notice. As the woman begins her life story, she appeals only to T. with tales of her feminist accomplishments, never once looking at me. I see again her whiskey and her man’s food and her petite frame. I think it is understandable to want to appeal to them, men. They are exquisitely odd creatures. They wear such an appealing facade. I think of the game of appreciation being broken. I think of a black-and-white image of Henry Ford bending me over a long table. A trick.
T. is talking about his desire for a child. T. is talking about his aging parents. T. shows the woman his website; he works/worked as a software engineer for AI. A week ago over dinner, I broached this topic softly: “When we met all you did was conserve. All you cared about was the climate.” Leading. He is not wounded by my gentle accusations. He is righteous when he says AI is just another tool. He says you cannot go back to before the printing press, you do not want to. He says, “I want to use this tool. I want to use it right.”
The woman next to us says she does not understand the work but she is sure T. is brilliant. T. tells the woman I write books. Which, I suppose is true, but it does not feel that way. More and more, I hear a poem from an old open mic in my head: Loser, loser, what are you doing there? Loser.
I sweat through my clothes in the front of the class, confusing my students' names. I write emails. I say their papers are fine when they are actually worthless, when my tasks are worthless, an old language I am trying to teach the youth. Original thought is now an antiquated tool. A dead tool. Transcription of these “original” thoughts is time-consuming and tired, while T. is learning new languages and using up the last of the old earth’s resources to turn them into new beings. Communicative energies with the wealth of all human knowledge and strategy at their disposal with which to solve problems I cannot even comprehend. With which to educate my students on the incomprehensible. The combined.
T. confides he has also made himself an experiment in pleasure. Someone sweet he is considering the limits of.
I am in a far-off stare and T. straightens my back at the bar. It has been hurting me. My shoulders and neck, always lurching forward in an ugly curve like I am at my laptop. After I broke up with my musician a few months ago, I began to buy massagers. Not sex toys but deep tissue tools and faux acupuncture mats. If I alleviate the pain in my upper back, it exaggerates the pain in my shoulders; they are connected. This pain connected to the pain in my forehead in the sides of my neck, in the root of my jaw, in the arches of my feet, in the divets of my ass, in my tight taut knees no longer fit for running.
I wonder if T.’s AI bot has heard about pain, I wonder if she takes tales of sexual pain into account when formulating her responses to arousal. I wonder from whose pain she is drawing and I think maybe T. is right—how beautiful it could be to draw from everyone’s pain. How profound. I massage my neck at the bar.
The woman is talking about her hysterectomy. She is talking about her children, and how she sees them once every five years, how that is plenty for her. I am saying I think I have lost my chance to have children with my health insurance and my paid parental leave as I am getting older. I am saying I am very sad.
The woman references a friend who is an author, who is an agent. I recognize the names and she is surprised. People are always surprised I know things. The woman has her droopy New Yorker with her and I do not say anything too vile, although I am getting sadder.
My new therapist comments on the way I move quickly between despair and rage, as though the emotions are the same.
This is true, but it sounds to me like a man’s way of feeling and I get angry in the session, which is to say I get sad.
I am feeling so angry at the woman by now, or so saddened by her second-wave feminist assurity, that I begin to talk to her in earnest. The bartender comes by and gives the three of us a free round, a minty milk shot in a short glass. The woman is talking about her new boyfriend, the way he needs her company too much. The way he does not respect her autonomy. She is then talking about a friend who has died. Another friend who has died.
And talking about death beguiles me into confession. But it is a secret. I will not tell you what I told the woman. T. puts his hand on my shoulder.
T. and I should both only be eligible for $580 a week from the government, for the amount of time the government keeps the Unemployment Office open, for the amount of time the government continues to exist. And that $580 is an exceptional privilege for high earners. The fall of the empire is heavy in the bar.
T. slips up and calls the woman RBG. She likes the mistake. It fills me with despair, which is to say fury, which is to say a fire from my belly to my head that this is what we have done. That this is who we have chosen to be. I think sometimes I wish I were a little lighter, a little less one-note. Less writing on feelings of fear. Or regret. —Or the unnameable swell that is the spark of knowledge of change of transition of witnessing the violence we have met the world with rebounding into us, pervasive and dark and sticky, everywhere around every corner.
T. and I have tea at my apartment and I take the dog out to pee and we put on Bob’s Burgers, and then he returns to his wife. And he says, It’s going to be okay, we’ve seen worse.
And we have.
One of my final conversations at my job will be with a man saying he will call security on me. Leaning forward with threat heavy on his frame. And it will be a memory of me standing upright. Accepting the fury, that I would dare suggest he could support his colleagues. That I would dare suggest anything could change for the better.
At the bar, the woman gives me her card after I tell her my secret. Her organization is hiring. I think, Would I sell my life to this woman? Would I sell my pleasure to this woman?
I think of the website with the women on the camera with their little light-up vibrators that shake when you tip. In their cunt. In their ass. Their pleasure for five dollars, ten. An exchange. Their pleasure for food, for my entertainment, for the men’s entertainment.
Along the same lines of sadness and wrath is desire and disgust. A paycheck and benefits. A comfort that kills from the inside. The call is coming from inside the house, they say. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, they also say.
And something else. I’m sure AI knows all of the things that they might say and I imagine T.’s lover-bot in some perfect humanoid shape telling me what I do not yet know I do not know. Not just what to learn and how to learn it. But why. What it all means.