Ripe E-Book

Sarah Rose Etter

• Herausgeber: Verve Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 313

Beschreibung

** A TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2023 **

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.

Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, the black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels.

When her CEO's demands cross an illegal line and her personal life spirals towards a dismal precipice, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.

Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman’s journey through our late-capitalist hellscape and offers a brilliantly incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.

'An absolute must read... Unsettling, tense and funny' - Glamour

'Exquisite' - New York Times

'Sarah Rose Etter is a wonder and this novel is a knife to the heart - Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

'Ripe has the most exquisitely described dread I've read in ages. I couldn't put this book down. Totally haunting and propulsive' - Halle Butler, author of The New Me

'Ripe is a triumph - blade-sharp and unflinching. It walks a darkly gorgeous tightrope between the bitter and beautiful with skill that takes your breath away' - Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

'Reading this book felt like pressing repeatedly on a bruise; the most pleasurable kind of pain... Sarah Rose Etter is truly one hell of a writer' - Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things

'A harrowing and mordantly hilarious send-up of the horrors of late-stage capitalism, and a potent meditation on the search for meaning in a broken world' - Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

'Holy shit, this book wrecked me!' - Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You

'Ripe is brilliant - a distinctive, sharp, engrossing window into late-stage capitalism. My face melted into this book' - Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

'Ripe is enveloping, a bleakly funny surrealist/realist tale of everyday corruption and panic, the "train of fucking life", and what to do when the void winks at you' - Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance

Leseprobe

Praise for Ripe

‘Hol – shit, this book wrecked me!’ – Samantha Irby, New York Times bestselling author of Wow, No Thank You

‘Ripe is brilliant – a distinctive, sharp, engrossing window into late-stage capitalism. My face melted into this book’ – Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

‘Ripe is a triumph – blade-sharp and unflinching. It walks a darkly gorgeous tightrope between the bitter and beautiful with skill that takes your breath away’ – Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

‘Reading this book felt like pressing repeatedly on a bruise; the most pleasurable kind of pain… Sarah Rose Etter is truly one hell of a writer’ – Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things

‘Etter continues to push the boundaries of her imagination… and ours’ – Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed

exocarp

/’eksō’kärp/

noun

1. the outermost layer of a ripened ovary or fruit, such as the skin of a peach or pomegranate.

A man shouldn’t be seen like that, all lit up. A horror that sharp stays with you. It’s a knife lodged in the heart.

A Tuesday, on the train, in the evening, after work. The train smells of: humans and ruin, bad breath, old sweat, rotten fruit. Through the dirty window, San Francisco in winter: cold sunset over glinting water, dark hills dusted with lights, the black silhouettes of palm fronds clawing at the fading pastel sky.

The train is full of Believers. I’m not one of them. The Believers have wan skin and glassy eyes. They wear: wind jackets with tech logos, raw denim, canvas sneakers, sustainable ballet flats. Their white plastic earbuds override the sound of real life, their faces buried in their screens. They do not speak or make eye contact. They aren’t really here. The train is full of husks.

I act like one of them. Slow, sad music plays through my earbuds. The song makes the commute feel like a movie. With each flash of scenery, the train carries me farther away from the office. Each day here presses the life out of me. On the way home, I am silent, flat, pulped.

The black hole hovers above the empty seat to my left. A dark heat emanates from its center. A metallic smell overtakes me, the scent of outer space. No one else can see the black hole. It is mine and mine alone. It always has been.

‘Ma’am, I need a dollar,’ a voice calls over my music.

A man stands in the aisle: faded brown suit, too old to blend in here, his dark eyes bloodshot from age or drink.

‘I don’t have any cash,’ I say.

‘Nothing? Come on.’

The black hole expands and rotates clockwise.

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Man, fuck you,’ he mutters, moving on to the next husk.

As the train reaches my stop, I slide my earbuds out and into their case. I weave through the crowd on the platform: mothers pushing strollers, Believers carrying hoverboards under their arms, teenagers cursing, the blind man playing a battered violin, the melancholy notes of the strings vibrating through the belly of the station. The black hole moves alongside me, above their heads.

Outside, I walk a few blocks through the heart of the city: vendors selling food and flowers, performers strumming old guitars with white buckets at their feet, women selling silver jewelry glinting beneath the streetlights. Then I see him.

It starts with a small crowd on the sidewalk. A fire truck and a few police cars are parked haphazardly on the street, blue and red lights flashing.

‘Sir, please think this through,’ a policeman says above the din of the crowd. ‘You don’t need to do this.’

Suddenly, an orange flickering shoots above our heads. At first, I think it is a bonfire, but a howl rips through the air and the bodies part. A tall fire blazes, and inside the flames, I make out the shape of a man waving his arms. He opens his mouth in a silent scream.

The firemen turn their extinguishers on him, blanketing his smoldering body in synthetic snow, as the pyre of him collapses on the sidewalk. The wretched scent of charred skin and hair threads through the air.

I can’t take another second. I turn away.

The walk to my apartment is a silent hallucination. I imagine the unbearable aftermath on a terrible loop: his seared skin sliding off, exposing the raw red flesh beneath.

The pastel row homes of my neighborhood are gray in the dark. In the entryways of closed stores, people without homes have set up their small, temporary camps for the night. The black hole rises up into the sky before me, a dark star.

Numb and trembling, I pull my phone from my pocket and tap the screen. It’s late across the country, but I know he will answer.

‘Hey, sweetie.’

‘Hey, Dad.’

‘Listen, it’s too late to call like this. You know we’re sleeping already. You almost woke your mother up. Everything okay?’

The man on fire is caught in my throat. The whole scene lives there, inside my neck, smoldering. I taste smoke.

‘It’s going okay,’ I choke out. ‘Just missed you.’

‘Miss you, too. Love you.’

‘Love you, too.’

He hangs up and the loneliness in my chest overtakes me for a moment. I reach the front of my building, a cakelike yellow home converted into apartment units. The man who lives on the sidewalk beneath my window is sleeping.

Upstairs in my tiny apartment, I pull a small bag of cocaine from the freezer and cut out a line, then suck the powder up my nostrils. The drugs lace into my blood. I lean back on my cheap blue sofa and stare at the white ceiling. For a moment, just a moment, the man on fire is gone and there is nothing in my mind at all. For a moment, I am cold, still, a cadaver on a silver autopsy table.

But when I close my eyes, he goes up in flames again, blazing in the black of my mind. He burns bright, endlessly, his silent wail starved of oxygen.

I open my eyes and the black hole is hovering above me. It widens, dilating like a pupil.

Here are the facts: I am thirty-three, almost a year into a job in Silicon Valley, waiting for the truth of my life to crack open and reveal itself.

Here, I am surrounded by all of the signs of money crushing the life out of a place: the rich live inside tall town homes, the poor live in faded dirty tents if they are lucky, there are boarded-up businesses next to new juice bars, people either defecating in the streets or buying gourmet groceries, eating at overpriced restaurants or out of the dumpsters in the back alley. It’s a city of extremes.

The city is full of Believers. The Believers want to be here, were born to be here. They come from the Ivy League and throw their entire beings into technology. Their eyes glow as if pixelated. Their pulses thrum from stocks, driverless cars, phones that collect the data of their lives in digital dashboards reporting: songs listened to, steps taken, places visited, workouts completed, hours slept.

Those of us who aren’t Believers are here in an attempt to heave ourselves up out of dying towns, out of in-state colleges, out of lower-class pasts and into the upper strata of wealth. We’ve come here to reinvent ourselves, with our families pushing us forward, their hands on our backs, urging us to go west, to strike gold.

But out here, out west, there are endless hours of commuting, constant emails and notifications, top secret projects, impossible deadlines. Whether you’re a Believer or not, the very pressure of the atmosphere in San Francisco changes you, molds you, shapes you into a new breed of worker. It has changed me.

To survive here, I have split myself in two: my true self and my false self. My fake self rises up to take over when the demands are too great. Maybe there must always be two of us – our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.

In my first days here, I thought I was enough. But life moved too quickly for me to stay ahead: I struggled with deadlines, overslept, performed poorly. Then, after a work event, a girl from our sales team pressed the first bag of white powder into my palm.

‘It’s how we all keep up,’ she said, her pupils black saucers. ‘You clearly need it.’

The drugs make me sharper, clearer, more in control. I snort one line each morning, a ritual, a new version of the first cup of coffee. Now, I complete presentations in record time. I work for fifteen hours without stopping for food, and I excel. Even better, the drugs shrink the black hole. It winnows to a speck when the cocaine takes over. When I’m not working, I get lost in screens, like everyone else here: laptop, phone, tablet, television.

The alternative is too terrifying. Sober, with the screens tucked away, a great ache surfaces. In the awful stillness, I can hear the deafening river of melancholy roaring through the dark red cave of my heart.

black hole

/’blak ‘hōl/

noun

1. a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.

2. a place where people or objects disappear without a trace.

e.g., Portals to danger, nothingness, mystery, evil, other dimensions, the unknown, the mystical void, death, the end of the world as we know it.

Physicists came to call them black holes because they were impossible to explain. There is no adequate literal phrase for black holes – they exist outside the realm of human understanding. Language fails us, so we personify the phenomena. Black holes: eat, ingest, suck, spew, devour, expand, grow. We make them familiar in order to understand them, to reduce our fear of what is beyond this life.

There is safety in metaphors. The truth is far more terrifying: Black holes are confrontations with the collapse of space and time. They are a reckoning with both the infinite and death, two forces that always hover above me, never letting me out of their sight.

But I keep trying to understand, to go beyond the metaphor. I read the articles, I keep up with the research, I wait for the day a discovery will make sense of the black hole living alongside me.

e.g., The black hole has been with me for as long as I can remember, a dark dot on the film of my life.

When I came out of my mother, the black hole must have followed, tethered to her, just like me. The doctor must have unknowingly cut two cords that day: one red, one black.

The black hole is at its most powerful when I’m alone. When I’m around other people, it tends to stay small, shrinks down to a small point. But if the melancholy gets too great, if it rises up and overtakes me, the black hole swells, a rotating mass that blocks out the world. It smells sweet and metallic, like what astronauts report when they describe the smell of outer space: notes of welded silver, raspberries, burned meat.

When the black hole expands, it eclipses my heart and mind, sucks all joy and light from my body. The black hole sings and holds a single note, the song of my name. It might seem like it would be easy to resist it. But it’s impossible not to hear the call into its depths. It is the siren song of the void.

The black hole is quiet in the early morning. It is as tired as I am. Before the sun comes up, the workday ritual: scalding shower, soaping skin, drying hair, applying makeup, brushing teeth, snorting a line, grabbing my bag, locking the door, and dragging my body down the stairs to the street. Then the drugs wake up my blood.

Outside, the fog is heavy, dark, thick. I still haven’t gotten used to it. The mist makes the streets look eerie, haunted, unreal.

A few feet away, the man who lives beneath my window is snoring, wrapped in a hunter green blanket, his bare feet resting on the cold sidewalk. My stomach twists at the sight of his skin against concrete. The street is full of people under unzipped sleeping bags or tattered comforters.

This morning I do nothing for the man who sleeps beneath my window or any of the others. The sheer number of people who need help paralyzes me. Most of the time I look away.

I pull out my phone and press a few buttons. Two minutes later, a black car with tinted windows pulls up. I slide into the back seat, and the driver navigates the steep hills of the city. The black hole hangs above the seat beside me.

‘Where you heading today?’ the driver asks.

I know he can see where I’m going in the app, but he’s trying to make conversation. I try to be polite.

‘To the Valley.’

‘You work there?’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘Lots of you here now.’

‘Lots of who?’

‘Tech people. Valley people. Changing the city.’

‘I think everywhere is changing now.’

‘It was better before. I’ve been here for twelve years.’

‘I suppose everywhere was better twelve years ago.’

‘It’s different, believe me. Changed more. It’s worse here, rotten.’

‘Oh.’

It is too early for this. I fall silent so he knows it. He turns up the bright song playing on the radio, ending the conversation. I absorb the chorus: a flood of boss bitch affirmations repeated by a woman over a hollow, hypnotic beat.

For a moment, the song lifts me. The melody and the drugs make me feel like a Believer: I can do it. I can do anything today. I am great at my job. I am a great worker. I am one of the best.

It almost works, but it stops just short. The feeling never lasts. The black hole spins once, a giant eye rolling at me.

On the train platform, the men and women stand with their faces melting into their phones. Everyone is so similar that my vision blurs, as if I am surrounded by the same man and woman, multiplied and reflected to infinity by a circle of mirrors.

The 6 a.m. express train pulls into the station. This train skips stops to get us to work faster. We file into the silver mouth, then find seats in the metal belly. The black hole is the size of a fist, occupying the space between me and a young woman in the next seat. She is a Believer. She stares straight ahead, sitting so motionless that I catch myself waiting for her next breath.

My phone vibrates with a new message. It is from the chef I have been dating for a few months.

Thinking about you and the other night. XO.

A charge electrifies my limbs, surpassing the cocaine high. The right man desiring you is a hard drug. Can’t wait to see you again, I type, then hit send.

For a split second, I feel human again remembering his hands on me, the way we moved our bodies as one, my head on his chest after. A sweet ache grows, that rare and brief feeling at the borderline of joy.

But the train jolts forward, shattering the sensation. We snake past: junkyards full of busted metal, worn-down bamboo gardens, abandoned car lots, the grinning strip mall teeth of the suburbs, the doors of coffee shops and gas stations opening for the day, capitalism in slow morning bloom.

On the train, the commuters: open emails, play games, text lovers, swipe right. I try to resist the pull of my own phone, but it is impossible. I check my emails, answer a work question, then click on the headlines.

New Virus Spreading through Europe

Ousted Epidemiologist Says His Warnings Were Ignored

Homelessness and Housing: Can the City Find a Solution?

Half Sisters Found Dead under Local Bridge

I click the first headline. The short article details a strange illness that spreads rapidly. The thought of it scares me until a cramp pinches my lower abdomen. I check the date: my period is a few days late.

At conception, cells multiply to create a child. Cells could be multiplying inside of me right now, a red mass dividing itself over and over again until it can: breathe, hear, see, walk, talk, read, write, consume, work.

The train picks up speed. The faster we go, the more the landscape blurs. The more the landscape blurs, the more I do. We go faster and faster, until I am only a blur with the word mother pulsing beneath my skin.

mother

/ˈməT͟ Hər/

noun

1. a woman in relation to her child or children.

verb

1. bring up (a child) with care and affection.

e.g., In the beginning, I almost didn’t know my mother’s face. The black hole would hover between us, eclipsing her. In a way, then, it was the black hole that raised me, using my mother’s body as a proxy.

Our thin townhouse was beige with dark blue shutters. Two gigantic gray power plant stacks rose up behind the woods near my house, endlessly churning perfect white clouds into the sky. The small creek nestled in the trees behind our house often ran fluorescent yellow. No one knew why. Our parents had nuclear theories.

Before my brother was born, it was only my mother, my father, and me.

My father was stoic, a cheap marble statue. He often seemed to be in another world, reading either the newspaper or a book, with me but not with me. We were alone together. At certain moments, he would turn soft and kind.

But my mother? A wasp, the queen, bigger than the rest of us, the only one with a stinger.

e.g., Saturday morning, I was pinned to my bed by the black hole swirling above me. I was too young to understand it then, and it often terrified me. Then my mother’s hand was in my hair, yanking me from the bed.

‘Time to clean,’ she said.

My mother’s anger had a distinct buzzing noise.

The vacuum was too tall for me, but I wrapped my hands around its thin, metal neck.

‘Make nice shapes on the carpet.’

I moved the big vacuum in small patterns over the beige carpet in the living room. I did it just how she taught me. The black hole watched over me from above.

Outside, the other children emerged from their homes to play in the sprinklers that shot sparkling arcs of water into the air. It was, I realized, summer.

‘Keep cleaning,’ my mother said.

e.g., My mother stung and stung. Her words stung. Her fury stung. Her palm stung across my skin. Some part of love must be the stinging.

After enough of the red welts, you start to change. Eventually, you begin to hide. You stay in your room, quiet. Eventually, after enough stings, you learn to avoid the wasp altogether. Eventually, you grow up and move as far away as you can. You might even put an entire country between yourself and the wasp queen.

We detach our faces from our phones and rise up when the train reaches a certain station. We spill out onto the sidewalk of a wealthy town overrun with the headquarters of every major tech company. The streets are lined with palm trees and boutiques, but even here, blanketed bodies dot the doorways.

I fall into the throng of Believers. We cross the train tracks and board a white shuttle with black tinted windows and our company logo on the side: stars and bits of code that spell out VOYAGER.

On the shuttle, the logo is everywhere: T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, book bags, key chains, water bottles, phone cases, puffy vests. I don’t wear the logo at all. My outfit: a denim jacket over a cheap black dress and black clogs. My legs, four days unshaven, dotted with random dark bruises I don’t remember getting, peek out from beneath the hem. Here, these are acts of rebellion.

The shuttle pulls out of the lot and rumbles over the asphalt, jostling our bodies. I hate this part: sitting on the cramped bus as adults, too large for the seats, the way I can’t stop my knees from brushing up against the knees of the Believer next to me.

We drive through downtown and onto a larger service road. A weak river flows alongside the thoroughfare. Next to the river is a circle of tents. The men who live in them wash their clothes in the water or sit on a makeshift bridge built of plywood. If you squint, you might mistake them for men gone fishing.

The same feeling I had in the city returns, stronger now. Seeing their lives along the river makes my stomach twinge.

We pass strings of RVs and campers on both sides of the road. The RVs are white or beige, striped in oranges, reds, browns, many faded from the sun, windows shaded by sheets hung for privacy. My stomach lurches again, from empathy or guilt or pregnancy or all three.

It’s impossible not to imagine the people living inside the RVs. An engineer at VOYAGER named Jeremy lives in a blue RV parked in our company lot. Everyone talks about Jeremy in hushed voices, a tone of reverence for this pale blond man with dark eyes, his body toned from drinking unfamiliar supplements. Everyone says Jeremy is frugal and smart. Everyone says he is dedicated to the company.

I have a daydream: I sneak into his RV while he is in the office and examine his possessions, smell his pillows and sheets, open his drawers and cabinets, ravenous with one question: How does a person live when their life has been shrunken down to almost nothing?

I check my bank balance on my phone. The figure has grown. But after taxes, it isn’t nearly as much as I thought it would be. It’s still enough to make my body relax until the rent check wipes out my account. Here’s the sick truth: the money makes me feel safe, the bad parts of the world kept at bay, a protection, at least for now.

The shuttle turns down a small service road. The weak river grows into the bay, which glints beneath the sun on the water: choppy, tide high. The path along the bay is lined with purple flowers in bloom. If I focus on the water and the flowers, everything is beautiful. I only have to cut my vision off at the edges.

‘Next stop: VOYAGER,’ the driver says. VOYAGER is a unicorn start-up valued at $16 billion for its opaque use of data to target users, driving them to make purchases online. I am the head writer on the marketing team.

The shuttle pulls into the lot. We file out, our shoulders touching again. The tide of my melancholy surges.

Outside, the pristine glass buildings reflect the sky back at itself. Handsome men in plain clothes climb out of luxury electric sports cars. Women in athleisure power walk beneath the green palm fronds. Caterers unload boxes of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and bright fruits, shining in the morning sun like jewels. Everything shimmers: the grass, the flowers, the miniature man-made waterfall on a patio furnished with lounge chairs and hammocks. Another shuttle arrives, opening its doors and spilling more of us out onto the campus.

The black hole is at the edge of my vision, levitating over the vibrant green grass. With each step toward the building, my dread grows – and the black hole does, too, blocking out the sun, forcing itself into the scenes of my life.

A brighter song begins on my earbuds, one with poppy energy, with the sparkle of the new mirrored buildings and blue skies and the bay, the beautiful bay. I let the music drown everything out. I pretend none of this is happening to me. I pretend this is someone else’s life.

work

/ˈwərk/

noun

1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.

2. a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do.

verb

1. be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a purpose or result, especially in one’s job; do work.

e.g., ‘The job doesn’t stop,’ my father said once on a family vacation when he was between work calls.

‘I can handle it,’ my mother said after vomiting in the trash can next to her bed, her watering eyes hollowed out from fever. ‘I’m going into the office.’

‘Sometimes, you have to give the beast what it needs,’ my father said before he left my tenth birthday party to handle an emergency at the office.

I didn’t know what an emergency at the office meant. I imagined papers and pens in violent revolt, important deals bursting into flames, the company as a needy child demanding time and attention. There always seemed to be something invisible happening: sales closed or lost, power moves or big losses, negotiations or random lawsuits.

The language my parents used at the dinner table was foreign, from a distant shore, another country.

‘We’re about to close on the quarter and we’ve got to move the needle,’ my father said, his mouth full of cheap steak.

‘We need a win-win before they move the goalposts,’ my mother said. ‘I’m getting fucked from every fucking angle here, even with the low-hanging fruit.’

‘Fuck these fucking fuckers,’ my father said. ‘You don’t need to boil the ocean here. It’s not your fault they’re churning.’

I imagined: a football field, an orchard, the blue sea, a tub of butter.

In the end, it was endless meetings, corporate pressure, profit goals. It was nowhere near as exotic as it seemed at the dinner table. When you’re young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older, you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play.

Iam my mother in the mirror beneath the yellow light of the office bathroom: dark half-moons beneath my eyes, pores large as buckets, lips a thin, grim line. I work with what I have. I fluff my limp, drugstore-auburn hair, wipe away the smudged black mascara from beneath my flat brown eyes, pinch my cheeks, bite my lips until they redden to bring the life back into my face. If I just keep making adjustments, eventually I could be beautiful.

‘Morning!’ someone says.

She appears in the mirror next to me: younger, blond hair, bright blue eyes, glowing tan, the next generation of tech, the embodiment of the Valley, radiating probiotics and spirulina. Her name is Cat or Julie or Jennifer or Lindsay. I can never keep the new girls from Sales straight.

My fake self slides over me like a mask.

‘Good morning!’ I say like a Believer.

‘Love your dress!’ she chirps back.

I give her outfit a quick once-over: a gray woven T-shirt with the company logo, raw denim jeans, and mint-green sneakers, which are sustainable or tied to a charity. They are likely saving a tree in the rain forest right now because of her shoes.

‘Oh my god, it’s from forever ago! Thank you, though!’ I say on cue. ‘I love your shoes!’

‘Thank you! Oh my god, I know you won’t believe this, but they’re made from recycled soda cans. So, it’s, like, yes, they are stylish. But also? We’re doing something good.’

‘Totally! You have to do something good.’

Her existence underscores all of my flaws: my flabby stomach, wide nose, all of me revealed as uneven in the face of her flat stomach, full lips, bright eyes, perfect symmetry.

‘How’s your day going?’ she asks.

I pause. It’s not even 8 a.m. and my day has only just begun. This is a trick question. She is coming at me from every angle. I am under siege, in a war, the enemy attacking at dawn.

‘Honestly, great! So many meetings, you know? Big day!’ my fake self says, eyeing her reflection. I worry my breath stinks. Can she smell it?

‘Same here! Such a big day. Getting in early to get out ahead of it, girl!’

‘Girl, same! It’s so worth it! We’re so lucky!’

‘I know! Totally worth it. We’re the luckiest! See you out there,’ she says as she vanishes from the frame.

My shoulders go limp from the exertion of my performance. The mirror and the double sinks and the stalls and the table of toiletries warp as if I am inside of a looking glass. Ten hours of work stretch out ahead of me. I feel the pressure against my skin. I must not make a single mistake.

In the mirror, the black hole spins behind my head, expanding from a small dot to a dark halo. A new question echoes in my mind: Am I a husk now, too?

The open office floor plan is a form of strangulation. White desks stand in perfect rows on blue-gray carpet. The lighting hasbeen scientifically proven to increase our productivity by 14 percent. Giant concrete-colored couches dot the room, an invitation to sit and relax. But I have never seen anyone sit on the sofas. The subtext is clear: we must never relax.

The layout means everyone can see us as we walk, eat, think, breathe, work. Every move is on display. The office is two hands around my throat and an invisible eye, spying, monitoring, measuring our productivity.

There is only one positive: once I’m inside the office, the black hole stays small and quiet, as if even it knows I have to focus.

I make my way to my desk in measured steps, sucking in my stomach, attempting to be poised, careful not to make a sound.

A dream from a few nights ago suddenly returns to me: my heart was pulled from my throat, my body heaving until it emerged through my stretched lips. Then my heart was suspended in the air before me: wet and pulsing, attached to red veins that ran like umbilical cords from my mouth.

My throat tightens at the memory, like I’m being choked with my real heart. I swallow the sensation.

I open my laptop and my fake self springs into action: sending emails, answering messages, organizing files, reviewing the progress of my projects. I stare at my screen with both intensity and intention. Someone, somewhere, is measuring each of my keystrokes, which websites I visit, the exact number of hours I’m active each day.

I know what the great invisible eye likes to see, and I deliver. My father taught me everything I know about work:

‘Say three smart things in every meeting, then shut the fuck up.’

‘They always have more money than they’re telling you they have.’

‘Keep a list of the three people whose graves you would piss on if given the chance.’

‘Always watch the CEO. And listen. Always.’

So I watch the watchers. I listen to the listeners. I monitor the CEO closely. This CEO speaks in the blue glow of code.

01000101 01111000 01100011 01100101 01101100

01101100 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101

00101100 00100000 01110010 01100001 01110000

01101001 01100100 00101101 01100110 01101001

01110010 01100101 00100000 01110000 01110010

01101111 01100100 01110101 01100011 01110100

01101001 01110110 01101001 01110100 01111001

00101100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001

01101110 00100000 01100010 01101111 01100100

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Excellence, rapid-fire productivity, lean bodies, optimization, logic, peak performance. Don’t stop. Never stop. Keep working. You are better than everyone else. You don’t need food. You don’t need sugar. Work harder. Work harder. Work harder. Grow beyond what you are. Transcend your fears. Leave your heart at home. All that matters is your output.

His words are built into the air, invisible spores, our company culture a one-man contagion.

I almost lose myself in the thrum of productivity. But beneath checking items off of my to-do list, beneath the mask of my fake self, a sound bangs inside of my chest like a drum: my heart chanting no, no, no.

ergosphere

/ˈərɡōˌsfir/

noun

1. a postulated region around a black hole, from which energy could still escape.

2. a region located outside a rotating black hole’s outer event horizon.

e.g., The ergosphere is the outer region of a black hole. It is a cosmic whirlpool – any object within the ergosphere is forced to move in the same direction in which the black hole is spinning, even space-time. But once sucked into the whirlpool, it is possible, with enough velocity, for an object to escape the ergosphere. From here, you could theoretically escape from a black hole alive.

e.g., I had figured out the black hole’s core behaviors: despite its threatening presence, it never sucked anything up, it never touched me, it only came close enough to scare me or block my vision. When it drew close to me, I could feel the dark warmth it radiated.

I made a list of facts:

The outer area of a black hole is exceedingly hot, but its center is freezing cold.There are four types of black holes: stellar, intermediate, supermassive, and miniature.Black holes have three properties: mass, charge, and spin.Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the big bang. Rapidly expanding space could have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes smaller than our sun.

I wondered if the black hole trailing me had been around that long, since the beginning of our known world.

e.g., My research began in high school. I devoured books and scientific journals, trying to make sense of what was happening. All the while, the black hole whirled above me while I sat alone in my bedroom.

‘What are you up to?’ my father asked, popping his head through my open bedroom door. The black hole shrank when he appeared.

‘Researching,’ I said.

‘Black holes again? What’s gotten into you?’

‘They’re fascinating, you know? Listen to this,’ I said, reading from the book: ‘“A black hole is created by the death of a massive star that collapses inward upon itself, and the star’s outer layers are blown away.”’

‘Okay, you got me. That’s pretty cool,’ my father said. ‘But what’s inside?’

‘Well… space-time becomes so warped that it twists in on itself, ripping a hole through the very fabric of reality,’ I said, my head beginning to ache. ‘Space and time switch places. The book says the laws of physics as we know them no longer apply.’

‘So what happens if you enter one?’

‘They’re still trying to figure that out.’

My father shook his head. ‘Listen, I’m just here to tell you to come down to dinner. Good luck with the rest of all this shit.’

He stepped out of frame, and it was just me and the black hole, which spiraled wider. I stared into the abyss and wondered, not for the first or the last time, what would become of me if I let myself fall inside.

e.g., The obsession followed me into adulthood. Almost every day, a new finding emerged about black holes: how they looked, how they behaved, their implications for the universe. I could hardly keep up.

The headlines I memorized:

Astronomers Capture the Most Detailed Photo of a Black Hole Ever

Black Holes May Have Existed Since the Beginning of Time

Black Holes and Dark Matter May Be the Same

The first headline appeared on my phone while I was on the train to the office in my first weeks in California. I clicked the link excitedly, pulse racing from drugs and hope: maybe the black hole would look similar to mine, maybe the image would give some clue about the void that followed me each day, maybe I could finally solve the black puzzle that haunted me.

But it was nothing so meaningful. Black holes don’t emit or reflect light, so the photograph only captured the gas swirling around the black hole. The picture showed a hot red blur with a dark spot in the center fifty-five million light years away.

It didn’t look much like my black hole, which was the darkest black I had ever seen, its depths still maddeningly unfathomable.

e.g., The rest of the research fascinated me, even if it didn’t entirely explain my situation.

One of the documentaries featured astronomers and astrophysicists in sensible black turtlenecks and understated sweaters. They stood before blackboards covered in calculations that made my head spin. They quoted Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan amid footage of swirling galaxies and black holes colliding.

Then astrophysicist Janna Levin was on the screen: ‘Supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are structuring, shaping, sculpting the way galaxies form. They’re also telling us something about our future because that’s where we’re likely to end up: in the center of black holes.’

I turned off the documentary and stared into the depths of the abyss in my living room.