Chapter 11
WITH EACH STEP, THE CRISP SOUND OF DESIREE’S HEELS ECHOED off the walls in sharp contrast to the thump of my clogs. We passed through an immaculate lobby and walked up a flight of marble stairs that led to a long, high-ceilinged hallway. Desiree had upgraded in the corridor department. Finally, we came to a stop in front of an eye scanner that verified Desiree’s iris before a steel pocket door noiselessly slid open.
Now we were in her office, a container that could only be described as maximally minimalist, whistle-clean. There was a coffee table featuring a tableau of business magazines, each with a different woman on the cover. Presumably, they were all clients. The table was situated opposite an onyx fireplace. In addition to a love seat at a right angle to the fireplace, there were two white, egg-shaped chairs suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room. I hopped into one. As I lightly swung back and forth, I noticed the design of the rug: a pile of bones in the shape of a triangle.
“Can I get you anything?” Desiree asked. She was kneeling in front of a mini fridge in the corner of the room. “Diet Coke?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m pretty keyed up as it is—and I should probably get back to the reunion dinner soon. So, I’ll just have my Memo, thanks!” I smiled uncomfortably. “Seriously, can I have it?”
“You already do.” Desiree turned to stare at me.
“I definitely don’t.”
“Didn’t you download it?”
I thought back to those strange texts. “Do you think I’m a total idiot?” I asked. “It could have been from the KGB,” I said, echoing Matt’s theory.
“The FSB,” she said.
“Whatever. I don’t download random junk from strangers.”
Desiree plunked down onto the love seat, pulled back the tab of her can, and watched me as the soda hissed. “I’m not a random stranger. Check your phone.”
I reached under my swinging chair for my bag and pulled out my phone. Sure enough, there was another text message:
Congratulations, Jenny Green. You got the Memo!
“How about that,” I said. This time I clicked on the link. My phone’s screen flashed white for a moment. Then a graphic materialized, a strange cosmic cube, the sides of which fell back to reveal the words “The Memo” floating over a pile of bones in the shape of a triangle. Then a dialog box popped up.
The text was in a barely legible font, full of boring clauses that appeared to be intended to induce migraines.
Donor Party will guide Recipient through influential branch points utilizing manufactured fuel to traverse the unstable portal. This Recipient agrees she cannot breach covenants pertaining hereto. Parties hereby agree to BlitztrackBeta? program.
I’d always had an allergy to legalese. My brain turned off at the sight of it. This was why I couldn’t bring myself to take the LSAT after my culinary dreams went up in smoke. (“Life is boring, Jen. A decent income helps,” my mother had said.)
Desiree came to sit in the love seat. We were nearly at eye level, and she was close enough that I could smell her perfume. “If you want to have a lawyer review your NDA, I have a list of vetted attorneys you can hire.” Exhaustion colored her voice. “But really, your thirty-sixth birthday is in what... a week?”
“Next Friday,” I confirmed. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Our technology can no longer help you reclaim your optimized self after thirty-six. You will become locked in. Fully cooked. Geriatric.”
I blew my cheeks out. “Way to make a girl feel good about the aging process.”
“This isn’t about fine lines and all that jazz,” Desiree said, leaning back in her seat. “Thirty-six is when a woman comes into her full flowering. It’s when the story is already written.” She paused. “Do you know how old Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were when they both died?”
“I think I can guess.”
“Cleopatra was thirty-nine when she killed herself, but she spent three years plotting that snake bite.”
“This all sounds highly scientific,” I said.
“You want science? You might have forgotten that thirty-six has the distinction of being both a square and a triangular number. And do you know the number of degrees in the interior angle of each tip of a pentagram?”
“Gonna go out on a limb and say I do.”
Desiree clucked. “I could go on about how in the Jewish tradition, the sun shone for thirty-six hours on the first day of creation, or how the Egyptians believed in thirty-six gods watching over the zodiac. The best hip-hop album of all time was—”
“Enter the Wu-Tang Clan (36 Chambers), obviously.”
Desiree stared at me. “We don’t have all day.”
The phone in my hands felt hot. I eyed the screen and checked the box.
“Okay, it’s done. I have agreed to follow your Memo,” I said, in slight disbelief. “And at long last, I can say I got the fucking Memo!”
“How is this not getting across to you, Jenny? Don’t cry it out like that. It’s not something you want to be in the business of doing. The one thing you can never do is talk about the Memo,” Desiree whispered.
“We’re in the privacy of your office,” I reminded her. “And you’re talking about it.”
“I’m not you. And you need to develop clean habits. That breach would have far-reaching implications. The first rule of the Memo is that there is no Memo.”
Geeta’s and Leigh’s strange behavior was starting to make a whole lot more sense. Why Leigh got tattoos only on the left side of her body, or how Geeta insisted on going to the same bar every Wednesday night and order an Old Fashioned with two orange slices, nothing more. The times she suddenly had to leave a party when things were starting to get fun because she just “had a feeling.”
“Look at your phone again,” Desiree instructed. The agreement had vanished; in its place were two little boxes at the bottom of my screen, a red one labeled Pathetic and a green one labeled Kinetic.
“We’ve discovered a portal to the past, but it is wildly unstable,” Desiree explained. “So you need these things, what we call negative energy shock waves—literally jealousy and regret, which thankfully you have in spades—to make the path temporarily traversable. You just tap the Pathetic button to see reminders of all your missteps and all the amazing things happening without you. And then, when you’re sufficiently fired up, you enter the date of interest into the Kinetic tab. Your dark feelings will be so powerful that we believe it will have the ability to propel you backward and fix your life!”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said.
Desiree just stared at me, slowly shaking her head.
At a loss for what to say, I drew a deep breaths and checked out the Kinetic section. At the top of the screen was a wheel where I could scroll to any date from the past. Once I selected one, a directive would pop up, my digital Memo. The Memos looked more like grocery lists than carefully calibrated strategies for self-betterment. The July 6, 2008, suggestion, for instance, read:
Go to Barney Greengrass and purchase a half pound of smoked mackerel.
“I have so many questions,” I said, feeling dizzy.
“Good thing I’m here to guide you.” Desiree smiled. “Did you know that the term ‘getting the memo’ can be etymologically traced back to the 1960s? That was Juliet’s time, following the publication of her landmark book.”
“Juliet,” I repeated. “The study of the soul lady?”
“Yes, Juliet Simcott, the physicist philosopher. She is the patron saint of Memos. Though she didn’t invent the form, obviously.” Desiree rubbed her hands together and leaned forward. “Let’s get you oriented.”
Memos, Desiree proceeded to explain, dated back to the late nineteenth century, along with the birth of corporate management science. When commands were written in memo format, people tended to follow them.
“The official memo style made them stand out, leading workers to prioritize and focus on their objectives,” she said. “It made organizing large groups much easier, helping them to achieve shared goals, thus leading businesses to greatness. As Juliet was to discover, the same could be applied to individuals.
“Before there was a Consortium,” Desiree went on, “there was the Savard Company. Headquartered in Sequoia Falls, Savard was a manufacturer of rubber gloves that eventually expanded into making all sorts of consumer products. When Juliet was a teenager, she dropped out of high school and took a job as a bookkeeper at Savard so she could help her widower father make the rent. She hated the job but loved the employee library, where she would lose herself in books about theoretical physics and relativistic quantum mechanics. She often ran around the office, delivering memos from one division to another, but lost in thought about black holes and alternative universes.
“Juliet wasn’t only thinking about the things she’d read in books,” Desiree went on. “Visions had started to come to her during her reading sessions, all of which concerned her female colleagues. And so in the evenings, she’d write Memos to the subjects of her reveries. The first person to receive one such Memo was a receptionist named Wanda Millman.”
TO: WANDA MILLMAN
From: Juliet Simcott
Date: January 10, 1955
Subject: Walking
Please be advised that it has been determined that your route from your desk to Manufacturing is suboptimal. It may seem inconvenient, but if you take the freight elevator located at the northwest corner of the building, you will soon notice a great improvement in your circumstances.
According to Desiree, on the following day, January 11, 1955, Wanda Millman took the freight elevator when she went to deliver a stack of receipts to the Manufacturing Department. She tripped on a piece of compressor equipment, slicing open her leg. The injury required no fewer than forty-one stitches.
“Juliet felt terrible. But the accident turned out to be a miracle,” Desiree said. “Wanda completely recovered, got a handsome settlement from the company and used it to pay for law school at Coleman. A tremendously rewarding career followed.” Desiree craned her body forward. “You see?”
I swallowed and nodded. “Wanda got the Memo.”
“It was just the beginning,” Desiree said, and continued telling me the story:
Her head swimming with visions, Juliet wrote Memo after Memo, urging her coworkers to arrive at work three minutes early, to use two not three tablespoons of cream in their coffee, to wear shoes one size too big, to put their pants on backward, to study German, and so on. The Memos, when followed, catapulted dozens of women to untold levels of success. Many of them left the Savard company to pursue their passions.
Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, Juliet’s boss discovered one of her Memos. Juliet tried to explain the nature of her visions, her obligation to help womankind improve their lives. Her boss was unmoved. He felt Juliet was consumed with hysteria. He fired her.
“Which was for the best, because Juliet had always wanted to write a book,” Desiree said. The words poured out of Juliet as if she was channeling a gift from another dimension through her fingers. The result was a humorous treatise on time travel and career achievement for women called Time Wounds All Heels.It wasn’t a huge success financially, but Juliet’s innovative ideas garnered critical acclaim, which led to a professorship at Coleman. All the while, she developed the Consortium, a group of women who had benefited from her visions. They recruited others to join the cause.
“So it’s sort of like a multilevel marketing scheme,” I said.
Desiree scowled. “Are you even listening? The timing and place were fortuitous, for now it was the 1960s, and Juliet had noticed her female students were becoming overwhelmed with career options and societal expectations.”
“Good old having-it-all syndrome,” I said.
“Correct. There were so many choices that needed to be attended to, with consequences that needed to be better understood. Juliet couldn’t single-handedly manage the project. She needed to scale her operation.”
“Scale.” I shuddered. “I hate that word.” Geeta was perpetually stressing about the requirement to scale. Alice, too. It always annoyed me that a business couldn’t just exist without seeking to destroy the competition and maximize market share.
“It doesn’t hate you,” Desiree replied. “Not anymore. To wrap up the story, Juliet’s initial adventures in scaling were shaky. The Consortium’s methods were imprecise at first. More blunt instrument than scalpel.” As a result, Memos were as short as the messages contained inside a fortune cookie. Juliet, or Professor Simcott as she was called by then, could see immediate changes that needed to be executed to lead to a subject’s optimal existence, seemingly small tweaks like booking a long weekend in Cape Cod or avoiding bus travel on Tuesdays.
But as time went on and technology improved, the Consortium was able to leverage the marvels of computing power to explore almost every possibility for a given woman’s life, and determine the series of smaller decisions required to reach cumulative success.
“And voilà!” The great emissary of the S.C.S.S. raised her arms high above her head. “The Memo as we know it was born. Life was never the same after that.”
“But what’s with all the secrecy?” I asked.
“It wasn’t always so secret. Juliet used to talk openly—to anyone who would listen—about her discovery, but many were unable to understand what she was trying to say. They thought she was crazy.” Desiree’s eyes went cloudy. “So she went off the grid. Disappeared. I don’t blame her. And she left her research to us.”
“Is she dead?”
Desiree gave a placid smile. “The heart might give out, but the soul can live on. We can use her visions when we need to.” Desiree rose from the love seat to take another can of soda out of the mini fridge. “Now that you’ve had your crash course, you can have a good look at the app.”
I went back into my Memo and began scrolling through dates.
December 19, 2010: Attend the 8:10 p.m. screening of Black Swan at AMC Union Square.
November 27, 2013: Purchase a Green Thumbs membership at the New York Botanical Garden.
April 7, 2015: Seek out the second car of the N train.
“Pretty incredible, huh?” Desiree glanced at me. “By this time next week, you’ll be the best version of yourself imaginable.”
“And what is your definition of ‘best version’?”
“Jenny, we’re not here for a philosophical symposium. I fought tooth and nail to get all the necessary sign-offs. There’s still quite a bit of trepidation around blitz-tracking.”
“Blitz-tracking?”
“It’s an experimental technique for retroactive Memo implementation,” Desiree muttered, sipping from her aluminum can.
“Normally, the Memo works in real time, but owing to our scientific advancements, you will be able to rewind to the essential moments. It isn’t going to be easy, but it will be well worth it.”
“I can just spin the wheel and rewind to the moments in my life where I screwed up?”
“Correct. Your case is a highly targeted last-chance dance, if you will.”
“You know I’m not the best dancer,” I told her. Swooping back and forth through time seemed risky, particularly for a klutz like me. What if I set another fine culinary establishment on fire?
“You’re plenty nimble,” Desiree assured me. “And our technology is fairly foolproof.”
“Fairly?” I asked.
“Consider it your duty. For womankind.”
Ducking my head down, I flipped around my electronic file.
April 23, 2008: Sing Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” at karaoke night.
May 6, 2009: Attend Keisha’s book club meeting for One Hundred Years of Solitude.
July 25, 2009: Put on your cameo earrings at 6:07 a.m.
I went cold at the sight of that date. July 25, 2009. The day of the fire at the bakery in Italy. The day my life went up in flames.
“See something you like?” Desiree asked.
“I’m not sure I’d say I like it. But here’s the moment when everything started to go terribly wrong,” I said, pointing to the date on the screen. “Not that I am proud, but I was distracted by a date I had that night and left work early to put on my cameo earrings and get ready for it. I started a fire in the bakery kitchen, got kicked out of my fellowship, and fell into a depression that lasted more than a year.”
Desiree raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t put too high a premium on a single mistake. There are myriad downward junctures along your trajectory—not to mention the unfortunate tendrils, like when you decided to ignore my advice about dropping out of school—but you are correct. This is the moment you really started to go off course. Wearing your cameo earrings for Massimo was the right impulse, but you should have put them on in the morning before you left for work. As your Memo would have told you.”
I still couldn’t believe she knew all about the earrings. I was speechless.
“There’s no way for you to fix all your past mistakes in the time we have.” Brutal as Desiree’s words were, her voice was eerily calm. “You’ll focus on a few key incidents, which, thanks to the Consortium, have now been identified. Righto. Time for your preview.”