The Goddess Effect Act III, part eleven

even Ina can't write a recipe for spark

Look, I know we are our own best advocates but I’ll admit that I feel mildly douchey about pull quoting my own prose.

Irregardless,

A legend.

I stand by the above both in reality and in the context of The Goddess Effect, Special Collectors Edition.

Adam is finally realizing that his “brilliant” plan to pillage the minds of promising young people may not be so brilliant after all, and in the case of Anita, he’s worried that he let a real one go.

Or is there still hope? Let’s find out!

If you’re catching up, might I suggest:

The Goddess Effect

Act III, part one

Act III, part two

Act III, part three

Act III, part four

Act III, part five

Act III, part six

Act III, part seven

Act III, part eight

Act III, part nine

Act III, part ten

29

He paced the length of the master bedroom, turned around when the toe of his Common Projects hit the wall. Every three round trips, he was allowed to check his phone. This was the game he devised, so as to stop himself from clutching the device, unblinking, willing a text message from Anita to materialize.

Of course the sound was on, and the volume was set to the highest level, so if she were to text, his phone would ding like a Vegas slot machine, but you never knew with technology, and he was on an island in the middle of the Pacific, not mainland America, although still technically America, and what if the act of regularly looking at his phone, willing and praying — there was an idea — factored into the universe’s calculus of whether she gave him a chance or not?

Praying. He hadn’t done it in years. Couldn’t even remember what he had done with his last prayer mat. The floor of the master bedroom was carpeted. Could you pray, effectively, on beige synthetic shag? Beige synthetic shag that had seen Allah knew how many sinful acts, some of which performed by Adam himself?

He stopped, on the third leg of who knew what trip, knelt down, closed his eyes, and pressed his forehead into the plush fibers. Was that the indent of a stiletto underneath his left pointer finger? He moved to the carpet on the far side of the bed, less vulnerable to foot traffic. It still didn’t feel right. He got up.

Nothing about the night had felt right. The probitas had worked as promised, transforming suite 2094 into a hive of ingenuity and ambition, but depending on what those who partook had consumed earlier in the day — or maybe it just depended on each individual’s wiring — some of the ideas were either hard to follow or simply didn’t make sense. A capsule to send dogs into space — the world needed that … why? A guy wearing a large stack of glow in the dark necklaces spent 20 minutes trying to make a case for direct to consumer toilet paper. (“The margins are slim but the demand, bro! Never ending!” [Ed note: this was written in 2018, before D2C TP became a thriving market proposition.]

In a surge of creative energy, someone had poured hot wax from the candles onto the fire breather’s LED baton and had tried to sell it to Adam as the prototype of a self-lighting candlestick. In the span of five hours, he had heard exactly two good ideas: one to raze Catalina island, off the coast of Los Angeles, and transform it into a city of the future, which would involve financial and legal hurdles of Herculean proportions, and the other to use the blockchain to create a form of universal global identification that would render passports and driver’s licenses obsolete. The second idea left a bad taste in his mouth because Anita had walked into the bedroom in the middle of the pitch, and because of that, Adam would forever associate the blockchain with his crush — his could-have-been girlfriend, his could-have-been wife — running down the stairs and out the door.

He had meant to add a line of code to the Evolve app that would ensure the bot didn’t invite Anita to the after hours brainstorm, despite the fact that she fulfilled all of its criteria. Just her name and a few zeros and ones, an easy fix to forestall disaster. How could he have been so forgetful, so daft? What was the point of this goddamn Brain Boost if it didn’t boost his brain? Could he sue? (Who would he sue, himself?)

It had also dawned on him that there might be a fundamental flaw in his plan. You could corral the most enterprising, the most ambitious, the most out of the box individuals in one room, you could give them a drug formulated to open their minds and hearts, but you couldn’t guarantee that one of them would come up with a world changing idea. Didn’t elite universities try to do that, landscaping campuses and curriculum so as to yield the best out of each batch of young adults? But Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, so did Bill Gates. Adam thought he had crafted the perfect environment to foster forward thinking, to capture fireflies in a jar. Thus far, he had caught mostly fleas.

It could be that reverse engineering creativity was like reverse engineering passion. Compatibility tests abounded, and love could grow with time, but that jolt of electricity that one person sent coursing through another with a laugh or a touch or a text or a look, that defied a formula. There was no recipe for spark.

He had earned a phone check. He marched over to the desk and tapped the screen to life. Nothing. Seven text messages and five phone calls, what was a sixth? He dialed. It rang and rang. Her voice, cheery and curt, “Leave a message!” He hung up.

Outside, the black of night had begun to turn the deepest shade of blue. It was just after 5 a.m., the ideal time to venture into the water. Adam had brought his surfboard to Lanai with the intention of working on his pop-up technique, but the thought of tugging on his wetsuit and getting pummeled by wave after wave made him feel exhausted enough to curl up into a ball and sleep. As if he could do such a thing. He was too tired for physical activity, too wired to rest. The monk back in Malibu had advised him to meditate during moments like these. Adam had a better idea. He broke his rule and grabbed his phone. The monk, in possession of a hand-me-down iPhone thanks to Adam, picked up on the third ring.

“Mr. Adam.”

“Kai, oh man, Kai, it’s so good to hear your voice.” Though he stood just shy of five feet, Kai, short for Kaichi, possessed a gravely baritone that imbued a sense of calm even from 3,000 miles away. Adam pictured Kai washing his feet in the manmade brook behind the glass guest house he occupied on Adam’s Malibu compound, a narrow path of stones over which a thin stream of recycled water babbled. “What are you doing, Kai? Talk to me, I need to get out of my head.”

“Ah, Mr. Adam, I am watching last season of ‘Top Chef,’ the ice-cream maker broke and they are very, very stressed.”