Chapter 37
THE FELLS RADISSON, SANTA FE
JUNE 16, 2022, 11:32 P.M.
AGE: MERE MINUTES AWAY FROM 36
ISPENT THE NEXT FEW HOURS FLIPPING THROUGH TELEVISION CHANNELS, trying to block out my thoughts and feelings. I was terrified, excited, and relieved. Finally, Desiree came for me.
“Are you ready to meet your destiny?” she asked when I opened the door. Standing before her in my gauzy white dress, I felt less like a woman seizing her destiny and more like a human sacrifice.
Desiree took me by the hand and led me onto the elevator. “This is it,” she said portentously as the doors opened onto the lobby. “The end. And the beginning.”
With great concentration, I walked down the diamond-patterned hallway carpet toward the Topaz Ballroom. I hadn’t eaten anything more than a banana and a handful of prunes since my arrival in the Southwest. Between the hunger and the nerves, I felt weak, as if a blast of air-conditioning could blow me over.
All but a couple of the ballroom’s seats were filled with Consortium members. They bowed their heads and rose to their feet when I came in. Desiree motioned with her chin for me to go to the stage. I noticed the beads of sweat on her brow. She was nervous, too.
Countless screens lined the walls of the room. They all displayed the same seven words.
Resilience
Enlightenment
Achievement
Change
Happiness
Unflappability
Power
The column resulted in the anagram REACH UP. Seven magic values, like the words on a days-of-the-week underwear set. As I made my way toward the stage, I caught sight of a few familiar faces in the crowd. There were some celebrities as well as a few Coleman grads I recognized.
As everyone took their seats, I saw Keisha wipe tears from her eyes. I could feel how happy she was for me. I was finally getting the chance I’d always deserved. She and I would be united once again.
A trio of women wearing coordinating berets waited for me on the stage. They all possessed the proud and mighty posture of the spiritually enlightened.
At the center of the stage was a shiny metal contraption that looked like a miniature Airstream without wheels. Puffs of smoke emerged from one end. The door flung open, and out came Juliet Simcott. Over raucous applause she raised one finger in the air. The audience stood once again and began to hum. When their leader lowered her finger, the group sank back into their seats.
“Lighting, please?” Juliet intoned. The stage lights took on a blinding quality and the smoke emanating from the machine assumed the form of a purple cloud. “We’ve been waiting for you, Jenny. The one who got away,” Juliet said, gazing at me tenderly. “And now I summon forth our soul sister Desiree LeBlanc. Desiree has worked diligently to bring Jenny back into the fold so that she can fulfill her potential.”
My cosmic career counselor came to stand next to me with a closeness that was proprietary.
“Thank you,” Desiree said, bowing her head to Juliet.
“Jenny Green, we can’t tell you how grateful we are for your service,” Juliet said. “We’ve learned so much from your journey, and we can only hope that your new life is as satisfying for you as manifesting it has been for us.”
Valerie, Desiree’s immediate supervisor, walked out from backstage, her black-helmet hair gleaming under the bright lights. I hadn’t seen her since that time she screamed at me in her science lab for almost revealing to my friends that I had received the Memo. She was the one who’d sent a chandelier crashing down on my head to push me back through the wormhole after I almost blew my cover. But now, everything seemed to be copacetic between us. I had fixed my mistakes and was about to become a recurring source of revenue for the Consortium. She lifted her arms overhead and began chanting, the same rhythm and melody from the hotel lobby earlier in the day. The words drifted by like clouds.“Vita... Forte... Melior...”
The women in the room continued their chant, layering it in a round with harmonizing. It reminded me of a cappella, minus the lightheartedness. I was starting to feel like the star of a low-budget documentary on cults, but I smiled and went along with everything. On the other side of this ceremony was a dream husband, babies, financial success, and friendships built on strength, not neediness. This was my choice to make, not Geeta’s.
“Ladies and gentlewomen,” Desiree’s voice cut through the ballroom, bringing the chant to an end. “We are here today to honor the thirty-sixth birthday of Jenny Green, who has spent this past week journeying into the possible, testing our theories, implementing our newest blitz-tracking techniques, and learning about the forces that really control the world. The data we have gathered during this trial will forever change the course of our research on the science of the soul.”
The crowd applauded. “Friends who were able to join us tonight were wise enough to accept their Memos early in life and have been living by their direction ever since, reaching untold greatness,” Desiree said.
“Jenny has been a tricky customer,” she went on. “She made the mistake of turning us down back when we first approached her in college, but then—after realizing her mistake, or shall I say mistakes—she did something truly daring. Right before her complacency and laziness turned her into the paragon of mediocrity, the biggest failure on earth, she agreed to travel through the portal fueled by her own regret and shame, righting her wrong decisions and propelling herself to where the Memo had always wanted her to go—and just in the nick of time. Let’s review, shall we?”
I tensed as a huge screen lowered from the ceiling and covered the wall behind the stage. It began displaying the horror film that was my life.
The first image was a younger me standing in front of a burning bakery, distraught and weeping while hysterical townspeople screamed at me in Italian.
“This moment was our subject’s first branch point, the first, but certainly not the last decision that shook her confidence and led her from a life of promise to stunning failure,” Desiree said. Ouch.
She clicked her remote, and the ballroom was treated to a succession of clips from my error-filled life. There I was, graduating from college, when I should have been meeting Alex in the Maldives. There I was, looking miserable in a ratty Snoopy T-shirt and ill-fitting shorts, answering the phones at my parents’ accounting business. There I was, eating a muffin after it had fallen on the floor in an empty conference room at the radio station. Oh, and look over there, there I was with my then-fiancé Hal, who was explaining to me that he no longer believed in the “marriage industrial complex.” The Jenny on the screen fought back tears and told him that she was so grateful to him for his honesty and transparency. Anything not to lose him.
“So given our time constraints,” Desiree said, “our first destination naturally would be to fix the site of the subject’s biggest disaster, where she would make a seemingly minor choice—putting on a certain pair of earrings in the morning—that would alter her trajectory. This tiny shift would allow her to be inside the bakery when the minor fire started—and extinguish it.” Desiree clicked the remote again, and the guests cooed as they watched me put out the fire, the cameo earrings glinting in the Italian sunlight.
“The subject even got a bonus out of it,” Desiree said, as a video of me wrapping my toned legs around Massimo’s naked torso played out on the screen. This occasioned a great deal of cheering and whistles.
Click.
Now the assembled crowd was watching a late-twenties version of me locate a piece of sea glass on the beach in Costa Rica and look Alex Stone in his blue eyes.
“By contrast, here’s how she spent her time at the wedding in the mediocre alternate life she is parting with.”
The video showed me rolling around on the uneven floor of a treehouse with Hal. My hair was flying this way and that and I was grunting like an overtaxed Labrador.
“Can we move it along here?” I asked meekly.
Desiree skipped through slides of Hal cheating on me with various women, many of whom I didn’t recognize. Jenny the Pathetic could be seen trudging into work at the radio station and Alice’s foundation, looking increasingly pale and drained of life and self-respect. The crowd made sympathetic murmurs. Why did I take so much crap for so long? Never again!
“I don’t want to end that portion on a sour note,” Desiree said, flipping to a photograph of Alex and me on our wedding day. I was as taut as a rope and leaning into his shoulder. I looked happy. He looked... catalogue-model gorgeous. We were perfect. The crowd agreed, to go by their swoons.
“Let’s zoom in on the subject’s career trajectory,” Desiree said, advancing to footage from my festival interview with Sebastian Shapiro. I felt a stab of pride as I watched myself answer his question. Apparently I was helping a UN-appointed international botany group identify new edible flowers native to the Amazon that appeared to speed up metabolism, alleviate stress, and address economic inequity.
I watched my shiny-haired self stretch my arms across the back of the sofa. I looked like I was waiting for two lovers to come over and feed me grapes from either side. “I’m always thinking to myself, ‘How can we innovate? What legacy systems can be disrupted here?’” power-posing me said to the celebrity intellectual.
Desiree winked at me. “And again,” she addressed the crowd. “Here’s what she was doing that same day in her ordinary unfortunate life.”
Click.
We were treated to a scene from Geeta and Matt’s wedding.
I began to feel ashamed as I watched the scene play out. There was my regular self, with my blah hair and blotchy skin, smiling like a madwoman and dancing the macarena with Geeta—until my heel snagged on a loose floorboard and I fell on my doughy ass.
Juliet smiled and stepped closer to me. “Ten minutes until showtime,” she whispered, pointing at the red LED clock at the back of the ballroom. It said 11:50 p.m.
I inhaled deeply. I was about to be someone else, a better version of myself. Juliet wrapped her arms around me, her chin pressing into my shoulder. “Before we send you off,” she murmured, “do you have any final words you’d like to share?”
I glanced up at the two hundred or so pairs of expectant eyes and scanned the crowd, some idiotic part of me still searching for Geeta. But of course she hadn’t shown up. I was meeting her at her own level, and she couldn’t stand it. I’d tried to help her. Now it was my time to shine.
“Sure,” I said. Public speaking was never my forte, but there was something about knowing how soon my departure was that made it easier. “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for having me,” I said, my voice gaining in volume. “Thanks to Juliet, Valerie, and the rest of Consortium. And”—now I realized I’d omitted the most important player—“especially thanks to the incomparable Desiree LeBlanc, who never gave up on me, and who always knew I had more potential than I’d ever realized.
“As we all know,” I continued, “my life has been marked by indecision, often of the paralyzing variety. I long suspected I was a failure. The biggest failure in history, evidently. But I managed, thanks to the Consortium’s valiant efforts, to find my way here. I will not be blocked by ambivalence anymore. I will no longer complain that I didn’t get the Memo. Because I got my Memo, and I am ready to follow it. Not just for me, but for the good of womankind!”
Over thunderous applause, Juliet approached the chamber that occupied center stage and opened its door. “Take a moment in there to reflect,” she said. “When you are fully ready, you’ll pull the lever. We will see you on the other side.” She kissed my forehead. Her lips felt like paper.
The contraption was cryogenically cold and pitch dark inside, save for the red lever with a blinking light on top. I sat down on what felt like a velvet cushion—no doubt one of Desiree’s decorative touches—and took a deep breath. This was the moment I’d been working toward. It was time to say goodbye. To the bad and the good. To the confusion. But I was still confused.
My old life had been a mess, but it had its pluses, didn’t it? That treehouse sex with Hal was, no question, the best sex of my life. I’d loved Geeta, even though she never told me that she was following the Memo and that she didn’t want me to follow it for some reason. I loved to sing, despite my musical limitations. I loved to bake, even though the passion had turned me into an inadvertent arsonist.
“Five minutes!” the crowd cried.
I thought about the look of delight on Gabe’s face when he ripped off a piece of my focaccia. I thought about the unbridled joy of dancing at Geeta’s wedding. Now I was heading to a destination where I couldn’t even be bothered to show up for her. My throat tightened. Desiree insisted Geeta’s motivation boiled down to her need to keep me from dipping a hand into her treasure chest. But... that didn’t compute.
“Two minutes!” The crowd was roaring.
What’s it going to be, Jenny? I asked myself, pressure building in my chest. Old me or new me?
Geeta always liked the old me. Leigh liked the new me, but it had helped that my rich husband bought her ugly art. My mom loved the new me to bits. Gabe liked me as I was, the only me he ever knew. But why did I care? He’d completely forgotten about me. Hal... why was I even giving Hal any thought? Our relationship was deader than dead, and I was delaying the inevitable.
On the other hand, there was Alex. The dream man who took note of my every mood swing, who catered to my every need, who looked at me like he’d never seen anything so beautiful. Alex who supported me and saw to it that I had the career and the Italian villa I’d always dreamed of. Then there were the two perfect children who were now waiting for me in my optimized life. Didn’t I want to meet them? It was unlikely I’d ever get to be a mom in dead-end Pittsburgh.
Maybe I’d still have Sophie, but she was so young and cute and she’d probably get married, have kids, and become too busy to bother with the likes of me.
The crowd in the ballroom was now counting down seconds. Only sixty to go until I pulled the lever. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight.
“You have nothing to fear, Jenny!” Desiree called from the outside. “She’s hesitating! Fire up the live cam!”
There was a beeping sound. Now another screen revealed itself, unfolding from the ceiling like something out of an old-model airplane. “New York City” read the subtitle beneath a bird’s-eye view of a cocktail party. The frame moved in closer. My friends were assembled at Alessandra’s summer solstice gala, the one I was not invited to, the sort of event I would never be invited to if I didn’t pull the lever.
They were in the MoMA sculpture garden close to midnight, still raging, drinking champagne, and eating what remained of the canapés. Allie was talking to an actress I recognized from an HBO drama about drug cartels in 1970s Texas. Leigh was thrusting her hips in erotic figure eights, her body balanced on top of what looked like an enormous cast-iron ram. Geeta was standing in a corner and staring into space. She looked so sad. I had to remind myself to snap out of it: Geeta hadn’t just lied to me all these years. She didn’t want what was good for me, and if Desiree was to be believed, she had come here to try to yank me off the life track that I was due. Our days of codependency were long behind us, which was for the best.
“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six!”
Come on, Jenny, I told myself.
I had to go through with this. I had to go through with something. And it wasn’t just for me. My collaboration with the Consortium was going to help womankind. I was but a droplet in the sea of possibility. I stood on the shoulders of giants. Now or never, Jenny.
I reached for the lever and tightened my grasp around the cold metal handle.
“Five! Four!”
Look, I told myself, it’s not like things are so great. What are you going to miss? You’ll get used to your new life. You’re popular there. Your mother loves you there!
“Three!”
This is your chance, Jenny. You can catch up with everybody else. You will make your mom proud every single day for the rest of your life.
“Three! Two!”
A sense of spaciousness was opening inside me. I was crossing over to the other side. Finally.
“One!”
My stomach went light as my hand cramped around the lever and I pulled it toward me. My thoughts evaporated. I was gone.
But when I opened my eyes, the lever was still in neutral position. I was still in the metal chamber. And the screaming outside the contraption had taken a terrible turn.
“She failed to self-propel,” I heard Valerie cry. “She overanalyzed and blew the deadline. Just like I told you she would.”
My body went rigid. I was a Houdini trick gone terribly wrong. The world’s biggest failure had failed again.
“We’ll find another, more appropriate, subject,” boomed Juliet’s voice. “It is possible that our underlying assumptions were flawed. More experimentation is needed.” The sounds of mayhem rose as somebody wrenched the door open. Several Consortium members were peering into the chamber, staring at me in abject horror.
“Eject her!” Juliet cried. “It’s enough!”
I could feel the floor slide out from under me. I was in free fall, on a fast track to nowhere, grasping that cushion that had once connected me to the ground. Down, down, down I went, through a tunnel of blackness, barreling along like an elevator car plunging toward its destruction.
Then all movement ceased, and I was exactly where I’d started. Flat on my ass on the side of a road, just the tumbleweeds and me.