Private Citizens: A Novel by Tony Tulathimutte

Author:Tony Tulathimutte
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780062399106
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2016-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

III. All Mass Shares Identity

If Henrik had had a quieter place and more time to consider his peril, he might have. The warehouse where Lucretia lived was loud and active, and being there was like touring a foreign country where he had neither language nor currency. Discovering that Cory lived there too, not only in San Francisco but in the same building, seemed at first a miraculous consummation of fate, though since his dinner with her he’d sensed delta waves of malice wafting off her, her looking harried and on-task even when walking to the bathroom in her underwear.

He kept to Lucretia. On that first day, with his stuff still in her car, Lucretia toured him around Iniquity, let him feed the chickens in the backyard, introduced him to housemates. The air in her bedroom was heavy with incense, covering strong base notes of fungus and bouillon. He could reach the ceilingless tops of her pressboard partition walls on flat feet. Above her futon was a poster of arms cradling a lotus captioned YOU ARE WELCOME, and a cross-stitch that read LIFE IS A GIFT. Lucretia insisted he take the futon, nested with voluptuous down pillows and purple watered-silk sheets. She’d sleep on her yoga mat. Rent? No worries; he was a guest for now.

Henrik was anxious about what Lucretia was expecting from this bargain; if she was pulling a long con, the joke was on her, because he had nothing. But she appeared to thrive on exactly that: nothing. She scavenged and grew her own food, was uninsured, and didn’t mind Henrik’s silence because she was always talking. She was unconditional, projecting into everyone she met her sense of basic goodness and connection. Her generosity made Henrik want to cry, but for months now the Depakote and Topamax had been making him feel like his feelings were happening to someone else.

As Henrik pretended to sleep that night, Lucretia entered in the dark, undressing audibly. “I love guests,” she said, sliding under the sheets next to Henrik. She fell asleep instantly, bunched up against him as if asking to be petted. Was she ever lonely?

After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.

Under Lucretia’s advisement, he tapered off Depakote, figuring it’d run out anyway. Reluctantly she let him keep his asthma inhaler, but he white-knuckled the rest.

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