I sometimes wonder about the relationship between violence and space. There is a reason that urban areas have high murder rates. People are packed too tightly; boundaries blur. The closest I ever came to homicide was as an undergraduate. I did not like having a roommate. My roommate did not like wearing headphones while she listened to music. She did not like taking the phone into the hallway to talk to her boyfriend. She did not like staying on her side of the room. She did not like waiting until I was out of the room or asleep to engage in sexual activity. Instead of peace and quiet I got pillow-muted panting. Bedsprings scolded like aggravated ghosts. I pictured her body as a punctured balloon, air slowly escaping until she was small enough to be flushed down the toilet without clogging the pipes.
I was running low on time, so I asked the clerk to bag various items. I would try on the outfits later and return what didn’t work. I picked out underwear, socks, a bra, a knee-length charcoal skirt, three T-shirts, tights, a pair of flats, and a lightweight cardigan to keep me warm in the air-conditioned office. I chose a black pencil skirt for that morning’s pitch and paired it with a simple Oxford shirt. I did not select any of the parkas and scarves displayed on the mannequins. Designers had taken a stand against climate change. They would not bend. They would not break. They would not relinquish their seasonal collections. Fashionistas nobly suffered, sweating through wool sweaters on eighty-degree days. It was a sign of commitment, and stupid.
I gave the clerk my American Express card. After a brief interlude, she handed it back. She whispered the word declined the way my uncle Alan whispered words like gay or black. I regretted not choosing a chain store manned by telepresence bots. The boutiques still hired humans. Only a particular breed of female can produce the specific sneers essential to these boutiques’ elitist mystiques. These women had made themselves indispensable by force of attitude.
I said, “There must be some mistake. Could you please run it again?”
The clerk did as she was told. The card was declined again. It’s an awful feeling to have a card declined. You want some other proof to present, evidence that you’re still entrenched among the world’s earners and savers.
I gave the clerk my ATM card, which was also declined. I had a feeling it would be. Our balance had been dangerously low. Michael had said he was waiting for something to come in. He’d said liquidity in a tone that meant I shouldn’t ask. When my most recent paycheck disappeared from our statement, he’d said he was moving things around. I knew something was wrong, but not the extent. I didn’t want to know.
The machine declined my Visa as well. The clerk looked so smug as she told me, forearms crossed in an X over her torso, the outline of her rib cage showing through her T-shirt. I was wasting her time. The store was otherwise empty. I had no cash on me. I had no other cards. I tried Michael’s cellphone again. It rang.
By the time I arrived at my office—an open-plan studio that makes it impossible to go unnoticed in absentia—it was after ten o’clock. Our staff and a lone member of the client’s team were seated around a projector screen. Greg was up front with a laser pointer tracing the outline of a Venn diagram. Greg has broad shoulders. His cheeks are covered in cultivated stubble. He wears a college ring from a second-tier East Coast university (Tufts), jeans and sport coats (both stylish), no tie, and shoes that aren’t quite sneakers or boots, but give an extra lift to his five-six frame. Favorite adjective: kick-ass. Once, in a pitch meeting, he’d suggested the tagline Hennessy: Latinos welcome, after the company’s head of marketing had expressed a desire to expand their demographic.
It was the broad-spectrum spiel we fed all our clients. Lillian oversaw the proceedings from the perch of a barstool. She gave me a look that said: we’ll talk about this later. I found a seat up front.
Our team—Greg, Lillian, and myself aside—consisted of developers with poor fashion sense. Felt, red trim, fedoras, bandanas. The occasional splash of platinum lamé. They could have passed as bar mitzvah DJs or landlocked pirates headed out on the town in 1980s Las Vegas. Communitiv.ly is a casual company. The tech world takes cues from San Jose. Across one wall, graffito-style spray paint declared creation isn’t an ism. Greg was on the part about the speed of culture.
“The United States,” he said, “is not just one country.”
The client looked unconvinced. He was handsome, almost boringly so. His shoes must have been the ones Lillian had described. She was right about the leather.
“The United States of America is many tiny countries,” Greg continued. “And each contains multitudes.”
At the mention of multitudes, a new slide headed demographics appeared on the projector. The slide featured illustrations of men and women done in a variety of gray-spectrum skin hues. At center was a young African American man—you could tell from the hair and dark shading—wearing both a hooded sweatshirt and a necktie. He wore AirPods in his ears. The man was labeled urbanite. A caption described urbanite as someone who makes over $80,000 a year and spends up to three nights per week in bars and nightclubs. It was a slide we’d made for a pitch to Axe Body Spray in July.
“There are many countries within us,” Greg said. “Within each and every one of us.” He pointed to his heart.
“But there are also many countries without us. We are part of a global economy now, a global movement. The globe is spinning faster every day. The world makes more revolutions around the sun now than ever.”
A cartoon of a spinning globe appeared on
