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She understood the importance of abandoning a place that no longer wants you, before it develops the gumption to drive you out.
It was this tiny, nagging voice that wondered if she liked her life now because it suited her, or because she had to like it in order to survive.
It was rare to find that in a man, she thought, someone who doesn’t feel threatened by all the things you could become.
Lena has always felt fluent with the ocean. Never once has she experienced nightmares of looming tsunamis, sinking ships, plunging canyons in the deepest parts of the Atlantic. Of course she understands the fear. But it seems unproductive to be afraid of something so infinite, something that couldn’t be aware of your presence, that would never even target you, but instead simply overwhelm you without any sense you’d ever stood in its way.
“I wish they wouldn’t say that,” Bethel says. “God bless. God’s not here for all this.” She gestures to the world around them. “Clearly.”
“At least her sign was honest.” “That I don’t care about.” Bethel lights a cigarette just as they turn into the parking lot of the hardware store. “No one is honest about the ways they make money, why should homeless people be?”
Maybe beauty is just a devotion to borders, rule-following. An unshakable aversion to mess. That’s what she and Bethel hate about the influx of tech people, anyway, how obsessed they are with obedience. Fancying themselves rebels while measuring the success of a machine based on how well it listens.
She’d noticed that it was the girls in class who chose to work with clay, but it seemed to Mitty that beneath that pattern, there was a darker truth. While the boys felt confident adding to their own creations, the girls were only ever carving away at theirs. This constant process of subtraction until every curve was smooth and wet, the scrap pile tossed into the trash, the little figurine delivered into a hot tomb to bake, all of her perfections preserved.
that sometimes when she leaves the house, she has to remind herself of her personality; that the first few minutes of every interaction is simply an act of working out the kinks of being a human.
“The men were dynamic!” She continues, now with more vigor. “Inappropriate. They talked about themselves, told loud stories, finished entire plates of ribs with their hands. And somehow, they never got tired. They could go all night.
The pool was small and deep, a lapping lima bean, and based on Esme’s demeanor—tranquil like a lizard on a rock, offering her chin up toward the sky—it seemed she had no intention of jumping in. This was always how it was at other people’s houses, Mitty thought. Untouched candy bowls in the foyer, a pantry of unopened Pop-Tarts. The people who had things others didn’t never even used them.
Empowerment is exhausting, she would think to herself. What if all she wanted was to be gorgeous and obedient?
The idea of sex seemed so anticlimactic to her now, something people did who couldn’t be satisfied with only their lover’s mouth. It was prescriptive, ungrateful, to imagine needing more from a person than the part of their body that said your name. She wanted to climb inside Esme’s open mouth, to curl up in the warm, damp cave of her cheeks, just to ensure that if Esme’s jaw suddenly snapped shut, Mitty could remain there, swaddled in her breath.
“What about it exactly isn’t ethical?” she says softly, attempting to cloak her timidness in a naïve curiosity. Sebastian’s eyes trace her face, like he’s searching for whatever might make her qualified to have this conversation. “Well, don’t get me wrong. It’s fascinating. And groundbreaking,” he says. “But anytime humans are looking for a shortcut, ethics go out the window.” He pauses, allowing the question to remain unanswered. “That’s why, if you want to get anything done, you have to distance yourself from ethics.” “Then how do all these guys justify doing it?” Bethel asks, crunching ice
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“But people still buy it. They use it. And they say things like, These companies make us need them! But the problem with tech is that the customer is often demanding something that doesn’t exist yet.” In a way it’s soothing, Mitty thinks, to watch someone make such a coherent argument that exists entirely to protect their own conscience. Like anything wrong you’ve ever done could be explained away if only the right person was speaking.
The difference between Esme and every other memory is that it feels impossible for Mitty to keep moving once she’s arrived there. Something forces her to disembark, to walk through the sliding glass doors and meander around the musky station of her life back then. Take in every detail.
She will finally tell her mother she was wrong. Nothing ends. It’s all there inside her somewhere, a looping supercut of people around her who always seem to be talking. But somehow, when Mitty thinks back, she feels like she never was. Somehow, no one is ever quoting her. Somehow, the only thing she can’t remember is anything she’s ever said.
Patricia talked about how death is sometimes the easiest way to lose someone. It does the hard part for you. It removes all possibility, leaves behind the unexplained and frustrating artifacts of the person’s private self, the things they hid from you, the things that made them human.
If Lena’s fear about her own existence is right, it would mean that all of those minuscule moments in which she thought she’d chosen one particular route over the other—the decision to sleep in rather than go out paddleboarding or the decision to wash her body before her hair—were actually predetermined. It would mean that she was merely selecting one of two options that had been curated for her by someone else. It would mean that nothing in her life happened by chance.
Her technology by then will be archaic, laughable to children raised on the lab-made breast milk of their robot nannies, children who have never held a pencil long enough to earn a callus on their finger, who can hardly imagine why they would ever willingly take on the challenge of loving a person when they could just build a person who loves them.
