You Invent This Invention

You invent this incredible invention. You call it the Chromex. It looks like a Rubik’s cube. It takes pictures and videos then projects them up in the middle of the air, in 3-D. You show me for the first time in your room on the 26th floor at sunset. We’re naked in bed. The Chromex floats over us and beeps. It sounds kind of cute. All of a sudden, we’re seeing ourselves in pink and gold. The pictures are shimmery. The video flickers like a real movie. “Oh my god, we’re so cinematic up there,” I say. You look at me and tell me that’s exactly the feeling you were going for.

The Chromex curls up into a little ball and then unfolds like a gardenia in a bathtub. It is the most incredible thing you’ve ever created. It’s a little metal creature. Like half machine, half insect.

At the launch party, you hold it in your big hands and spin it like a Harlem Globetrotter spins a basketball. People are waiting. It spins in mid-air and projects the two of us, naked, in pink and gold, in front of everyone. They gasp. Me too. Someone nudges me and says, “You’re gorgeous, honey.”

You’re the inventor and I’m a restaurant hostess. So many people are telling me how attractive and lucky I am. You studied robotics and I dropped out of a sports psychology program. My naked body, all mixed up with your naked body, keeps popping up in midair. I get so wasted that when the clock strikes two, I bash into the spinning Chromex and almost knock it to the ground. Then all of a sudden I am in the black of your black town car, and then screaming tires west, and then in your bed.

I wake up and you’re there, across the room, already awake. Chromex pre-sales are through the roof. You look at spreadsheets and fiddle with piles of metal on your desk. Your PR girl calls. I get my coat but I’m already wearing my shoes because I fell asleep in them. You must have known but you didn’t say anything to me so the first flush I feel is gratitude. I go home. I shower in my rusty shower. I balance my checkbook. I get dressed in all black for work.

You invent a tablet that lets you write books and documents and stuff—I don’t really understand how it works, but you write on the tablet, and then all of a sudden there the book is, in physical form. It’s called a Leafer. You draw and type to your heart’s content and then peel the book from the screen of the Leafer. I write a little story about two teenagers in love, and I peel it off my Leafer. I bring it home to my apartment and hide it between the pages of a September issue because I think you’d laugh at it. I like when you laugh at the things I do, like when I dance around in the cold on the sidewalk, waiting for your car to show up. But I don’t think I’d like it if you laughed at the things I write.

People freak out about the Leafer. They call it the “savior of publishing.” They call it the “Polaroid of books.” Philip Roth comes out of retirement and writes a short story on a Leafer at a press event  and the story sells like a million copies and wins a bunch of prizes, and the Leafer sells like a million models. The New York Times writes a cover story on you and calls you “The Heterodox Inventor.” You buy a place in Hudson and ask me to come live with you. Now there’s going to be so much room, you say. I cry in my rusty shower out of relief for the mornings I no longer have to spend sitting on the subway home, all sore and tired with greasy hair. I quit my hostessing job and you’re my guy.

I ask you if you can invent me a lipstick that changes color according to my mood. You look at me with such a look. It’s the look my gym teachers used to give me when I told them that dodgeball should be an Olympic sport. You tilt my head back and kiss me. We fuck in your shower. The shower in your house is enormous. When I scream, it echoes.

Hudson is quiet and full of leaves. I light the fireplace when it’s cold and the fire pit out back when it starts to get warm again. You have a workshop out back that I don’t go into. It only has one window. You’re distracted by the outdoors, it turns out. You’re in the workshop a lot. I go to the Columbia County Humane Society and buy a cat who limps around on the wooden floors.

I do yoga in the great room while you invent a pocket-sized translation scanner called the Linjax. It translates 32 languages and every diplomat on the planet gets one.

I crane my head back in upward facing dog and watch pine trees wave over the skylight, and you invent a light that literally never goes out, a bulb called Bioglow that gets used by astronauts and housewives.

I breathe deeply and stop calling the couple friends I had left and you invent a super-cheap chair called the Attitude Chair that just about eliminates the need for chiropractors.

I read your press releases and they say things like “Eames” and “Jobs” and “environmental” and “next-level.” I point out typos when I see them and you call me a godsend.

Hudson is quiet, even with a cat who yowls hourly. I take your credit card and buy a guitar. I keep getting stuck on the F chord. I ask you to take a shower with me and you do. It’s you and me under the hottest water we can stand. I tell you my fingertips are sore but the shower is so loud and you can’t hear me.

You do promotional tours. You hire a Yale grad to ghostwrite your memoir. He asks me questions about your childhood that I can’t answer. I’ve never even met your mother.

You start consulting in different countries. You come back from one with a bunch of incredible looking fur coats in garment bags and a weird look on your face.  I put on one of the coats and it makes me look like a Yeti. I try to make you smile. Dancing around the great room in a hooded white fur monstrosity. You smile, finally, like you remember what I’m here for.

There’s a Bioglow lightbulb in 72% of American households now.

Your team did an independent study and the Attitude chair has been proven to boost office morale by 300%.

Your memoir is on the bestseller list for 24 weeks. I am mentioned in it twice: in an anecdote about the Chromex release party, and in the dedication. The anecdote reads, “My girlfriend didn’t know that picture of us was going to be the one to make everyone understand how simply beautiful the Chromex was—and the expression on her face at the moment of the reveal was even more beautiful than the Chromex itself.” You would never say something like that out loud. The dedication reads, “To Eliza.” Eliza is not my real name. I know it’s meant to be me anyway.

You get audited. It’s summertime and there are guys in white short-sleeved shirts poking around at your modern art collection. I crank the A/C. One of them asks, “Are you sure this is all you’ve got in your closet?”

My fingertips have calluses now. I play a slow but accurate “Variations on a Theme by Mozart” for the cat. I think that if the cat could clap, he would.

I notice you’re looking skinnier. I joke about shitty airplane food. You get irritated and ask me if I really think you fly commercial.

You wake up in the middle of the night screaming about an invention called a NAP-41. You’re sweating and saying, “All their legs came off,” over and over. I grab your head and put it on my chest so you can fall back asleep to my heartbeat. I always had the slowest pulse of anyone I knew.

In the morning you ask me to marry you. I say no. You look at me for a long minute and then nod. “Right. It’s perfect the way it is,” you say. “That’s why I’m saying no,” I say.

The cat gets ahold of one of the fur coats. He pisses all over it. You’re thrilled. You take the coats out to the fire pit, douse them in lighter fluid, and set them all on fire. Even though the cat only peed on one. I watch you from the window. You look relieved. You look giddy. The backyard smells like burnt hair for days.

I can feel your ribs when we make love.

The phone rings in the middle of the night.

The Leafer is voted “Most Influential Product of the Decade” by TIME magazine.

•

Once the press starts calling me, I know you’re probably gone for good. They’re looking for you. Maybe they’ll even find you. I don’t look for you. You’ve left me the house, as far as I can tell. I play along to Andrés Segovia live recordings. The cat dies so I get another one—a kitten, this time. A Jehovah’s Witness somehow finds the house and I open the door and scream at her to fuck off and she tears off on her bike so fast she almost crashes turning off the driveway. I have found perfection in being alone.

The curiosity finally gets to me. I go back to your workshop, break the only window, and wiggle my way in. I open your drawers, the few ones you left unlocked. Papers with formulas and assembly instructions. Language puzzles. I go out to the fire pit and burn all the papers. I leave the prototypes. It is better not to touch the things  you don’t understand.

But the lipstick tube, that I open. I know a lipstick tube when I see one. I put it on in the bathroom mirror. My lips are lip-colored, and then they’re the darkest purple ever. I look at myself in the mirror and there’s a pale moon face and a big purple slash. I haven’t seen a purple like this anywhere, not even in the craziest kind of tropical flowers. You invented the lipstick, I invented the color