From his apartment, the good ex FaceTimes me from beneath his blanket and covers. His face is elven, sharp angles -- his time mine.

Then the image shakes, and he says, “Ahh, an earthquake! There’s a little movie magic for you.”

He climbs out of bed to put on more clothes, holds up objects in his room to show me – a newly framed photograph, a book he’s halfway through. He lights a candle and points the camera down towards it.

“Watch out!” he says. “Now you’re in the fire! Careful - don’t burn up.”



The layoffs hit, and I’m on the list.

Reeling, I transfer files from my work laptop, which locks me out within hours. I sign the severance agreement, talk with HR, turn over my badge in the mandated time frame. Then I put myself in my roommates’ hands. Leon pours drinks, seltzer for himself, doles advice. Susannah massages my shoulders.

“Remember: fear is ‘False Expectations Appearing Real,’” Leon says.

“Where do you get this stuff?” says Susannah.

“Therapy,” he says. “Ok, AA.”

I drink until I forget my name, my address, my lack of occupation.



The next morning, Susannah’s in the kitchen making oatmeal. I feel a thousand years old. The scent of apples browned in butter helps. When I sit, she stands to spoon me a bowl. The window’s open, a breeze from the street.

As I eat, Susannah seems to be saying something. She’s telling me that our future selves will remember our current selves as “free.”

“Unbeholden,” she says.

“You know, lacking children,” she says. “Lacking partners.”

“Lacking healthcare,” I say.

I head to the fridge for jam and butter. My goal is simple and clear: I’ll make us toast. I locate the slices, load the toaster oven. But no. I’ve forgotten. When the coffee maker, lights, and toaster are on at once, a circuit’s overcome. With a snap, the electric hum and buzz go quiet. It’s familiar now -- the percolator’s last gurgle-and-hiss, its red on-light switching off.

The day’s overcast. I stand in the natural light a moment longer, still as the appliances. Then I walk to the fusebox by the door, reset the breaker, restore power to the room.



Thrown back on the structureless present, I sign up for healthcare on the exchange. Hundreds of dollars a month. I email everyone I’ve ever known: ghost-writers, copy-editors, true hacks. Call in every favor. Between insurance and rent, my savings will be knocked out in a matter of weeks.



“Your son’s a good egg,” the good ex had once told a friend’s parents at a wedding. They were European academics.

Said the father with dignity, “My son is not an egg.”



The next day, I take the train to my dad’s. He’s worried, but he hides it. I run errands and play with my young siblings. That afternoon, distractingly: the annual children’s book fair. Fluorescent lights reflect off waxed gym floors. Bean bag chairs muffle sound. All around, parents remind school-aged-kids to thank adults after every interaction.

Once my siblings have picked out their books, my father says we can go. But my stepmother is still chatting, so he lowers himself onto a bag of beans to read to my sister. It’s the story of a farm animal who goes to space.

“Zoey wasn’t like other chickens,” he begins. “She had a plan.”



Back in New York, I start taking myself for walks like a dog.



“if sloth were really a deadly sin I'd be dead,” I text Leon and Susannah. “you’re doing everything you can,” she texts.

“try 4 the AI job I sent u,” he texts.



I fill out the application, then scour old notebooks for leads.

A note to myself I find in a margin: “False cheer – my worst quality?”

I show it to Susannah when she gets back from work. She rolls her eyes, but lovingly.



The next day, on my loop, I discover fish floating atop the Hudson, the stink noticeable before the bodies. Scales in sunlight, dull eyes in heads. I google it and learn a warming of the river this season caused the die-off. I can’t outwalk the rank, ripe scent. I turn around.



The air feels empty on windless days, sun beating down on window glass.



I get an email about the AI job. They want me to do a training: “No guarantee of employment.” I accept.



Then I meet up with him, the good ex, at a bar with “tavern” in the name. There’s a pool table and jukebox, choice of peanuts or popcorn. When I go home with him in the downpour, everything is where I left it.

Getting dressed the next morning, the wind picks up outside his window, drops hitting the pane in fast bursts. When he hugs me goodbye, my head is just below his shoulder.



“These systems are fundamentally statistical text generators,” the engineer is telling the hopefuls on Zoom. “They introduce the next most likely word in sequence.”

I take notes inside my rectangle, camera off.

“We imbue these tools with human qualities,” the engineer says. “But they don’t have feelings, goals, desires, dreams, or big abstract thoughts.”

The strangers and I all copy down the list.



Now Susannah is telling me she just wanted Ben, her ex-boyfriend, to “love her the way she wanted to be loved.”

We’re in her bedroom, both trying to work. She’s at her desk, I’m on the bed. “How did you want him to love you?”

“I wanted him to play with my hair.”

I consider, tagging words with other words in the module.

"He would try, you know? But he would end up patting it like this," she says. She reaches over and stiffly touches the side of my hair, then sits back down at her place. It was the way someone afraid of a dog might pet a dog, or someone checking whether a towel was still damp.



The company will hire me on a trial basis, pending my speed and facility with the tasks - mainly identifying the emotive content of a given answer from the bot. Ranking tones, providing feedback.



“We think the point of a kid is to grow up because it does grow up,” my father is saying now on the phone. “But the point of a kid is to play.”

I’ve told him about the AI role, but somehow we’ve veered back to family life.

“If you always looked to the end, the point of life would be death,” says my father.



The good ex and I keep on meeting up for meals.

“You gotta eat,” he texts. He cooks, or I do, or we get falafel, grape leaves, and baba ganoush from down the street. Other days, rotisserie chicken, plantains, rice and beans.

Now he’s clearing up our places and pouring me some wine. On the woman exactly my age, whose writing I admire, he says: “She’s decided what she thinks matters, and she’s wrong.”



I advance quickly training the linguistic models, and the engineer encourages me to sign up for the visual course. It’s the same hourly pay, but more variety.

I find the prompts engaging. I begin to wonder what this life might look like.



“There was never anything I couldn’t understand, when you talked about him,” Susannah is saying. I’ve told her about the good ex.

“There wasn’t profundity or death in it.”

I don’t argue. We’re reading magazines, sprawled on her bed. “Parallel play,” we call it.



I go back up to my father’s.

On the hill, after the picnic, the kids are all shouting, buzzed on sugar from the cake.

“You’re in jail, you’re a crook!” they yell as they chase me, and catch me, all of us collapsing on the soft grass.

“You’re dead!” they cry, shooting my body to pieces with their finger guns.

“I’m not!” I protest. “I’m not dead!”

I’m on a hill, after a picnic, I insist. I’ve just had green grapes, cheese and bread, cold cuts, a few beers, a slice of cake.

“You’re in jail!” they shout as I stand.

“Not me!” I shout back, with as much conviction.

And it works and they run off, still imprisoning one another and setting one another free.



  “How is it there?” the good ex asks on FaceTime. I tell him I’m content. He shows me some drawings he’s been doing - sketches of strangers on a bus, the lines manic and lively. When we sign off, I text, “portrait pls.”

“send something to work with,” he texts, and I do, and he replies, “I see you.”

Cora Lewis is a writer and journalist whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Epiphany, Juked, GASHER Journal, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and her nonfiction has also appeared at the New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed News.