The hall was full and I took a seat at the very back. I was struggling to recall the names of the bride and groom—Cyrus had told me, but right now all I could remember was the way he had run his finger along the rim of my collar.
The groom was standing at the front of the room, and the light from the window made a halo around him. There was no music, only the soft roar of the water being turned by the mill. Cyrus stood beside him and gestured to the audience, and together we all sat down. I heard a rustling sound behind me, and when I turned around, I saw a woman in a puffy dress and a thick veil. As she walked past me, I noticed that the dress and the veil were made entirely from long strips of paper. “It’s The Iliad,” an older man beside me whispered. “Charlie and Bethan are classicists.”
Bethan joined Charlie and they turned to face each other.
“Penelope,” Cyrus began in a voice that was both soft and loud, “waited for Odysseus for twenty-two years. She knitted, and she waited.
“Some of us search for a lifetime to find our soulmate. We scour the earth and journey to distant shores. Charlie and Bethan, born in the same hospital on exactly the same day, appear to have been soulmates from the start—the way Plato imagined soulmates, as two bodies that were once joined together. This marriage is not just a union but a reunion of mates who have been known to each other in another realm.”
Charlie and Bethan, holding hands, leaned toward each other. Cyrus was looking at them, but he was speaking to me.
“We will now conduct the Anakalupteria, the ancient Greek ritual of the removal of the veil.”
Charlie stepped toward Bethan. With great tenderness, he tore the first strip of paper from her veil. He held it up and read: “?‘Bethan, I pledge my love, my body, my life to you.’?”
Bethan reached up and tore another strip of paper from the veil. “?‘Charlie, I pledge my love, my body, my life to you.’?”
Another strip: “?‘… like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.’?”
Charlie pulled a ring from his pocket and placed it on her outstretched hand. “Wishing to marry you, I honor you with this.”
“Wishing to marry you, I honor you with this,” she echoed, doing the same.
“In the tradition of Ancient Greece, and sanctioned by the state of Massachusetts, and in remembrance of your mothers, who could not be here today, and surrounded by these beloved texts, I pronounce you bound together by the love you share and the promise you have made.”
To the sounds of laughter and clapping, Charlie and Bethan kissed.
After the party, the dinner, the toasts, dancing, champagne, the bride pulling away pieces of her dress until she was left in shorts and a T-shirt that had I HEART HOMER written across the front, Cyrus and I drove to the B&B he had booked. We greeted the owners, a sunburned couple called Sam and Sam, and their orange cat, then we took our things to the top floor and closed the door behind us.
Sex with Cyrus. Was it everything I’d dreamed it would be? I could say no, but I would be lying. It was. Was I Goldilocks with my perfect bowl of porridge, my not too soft chair, my excellently firm bed? Yes, yes, and yes. Did he make me do things I’d always wanted to do but was too much of a repressed nerd to ever admit to wanting? Mm-hm. Did it make me question everything I had ever done before in the name of sex? Absolutely. Did my stomach do somersaults when I thought about it afterward? Constantly.
Did I worry it was too good to be true?
No.
Because I had made a promise to myself that I would no longer waste time doubting the greatness of a thing that was right in front of me.
In the morning I casually suggested to Cyrus that we should start a platform that allowed people without religion to practice a form of faith. I said I would customize the Empathy Module algorithm to create rituals around the things that people loved: their hobbies, their obsessions, their favorite characters in their favorite books. It would pull from history, from novels, from poetry and witchcraft. People could form micro-communities around their interests, and in this age of emptiness, it would give them a kind of virtual parish.
“You can do that?”
“I have magic hands.” I giggled. “Just like you.”
“You want to start our own religion?”
“Something like that.”
“How about we just worship each other forever?”
He pulled the covers away and leaned over to face me. We were on the top floor of the B&B, and the ceiling sloped down above our heads. The white paint reflected the bright light outside, and Cyrus was so, so lovely. I felt his imprint all over my body. I would never forget, now, the smell of maple syrup and old wood and the things he had said to me after and the way he had delicately pulled a strand of hair from my forehead. “Seriously, though. How many of these rituals have you done?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, dozens.”
“And were any two the same?”
“I get a lot of requests for Harry Potter. But no, they’re all different.”
“Imagine if we could use AI to give people exactly the kind of experiences they were looking for, things they shared but were never able to integrate into a faith-based system.”
“How would we do that?”
“I don’t know. But I can figure it out.” I would need someone to help me design it, but I had a vague idea of how I might get started. It wouldn’t work if the rituals were ever the same—there would have to be an infinite number of possibilities, and we would have to decide where the system would get its data, and there were a million other things to sort out. But I knew it was just a matter of time before I worked it all out.
One of the Sams knocked on the door to announce breakfast, and at their kitchen table Cyrus and I held hands and struggled to cut our waffles. After breakfast we went back to bed and stayed there until it was time to leave. On the ride home we talked about other things, and then he dropped me off at my apartment, and when we said goodbye, I wanted to cry and tell him we should never spend another minute apart, but of course I didn’t, because even though there was little pretense between us, I had some sense of preserving my dignity. Twenty minutes later he called me, and instead of going to the lab, as I’d planned, I met him for tea and then we went back to Julian’s house. “Did you mean it when you said you just wanted to worship each other forever?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I want to get married.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I confessed.
“I don’t actually want to get married, I want to already be married.”
I knew what he meant. The in-between stuff seemed unnecessary. I had loathed every minute of my sister’s wedding. The thought of having to douse myself in gold jewelry and wear a sari safety-pinned to me so tightly I’d be doing Kegels without even trying made me want to throw up. But Cyrus was all about ceremony. “Are you sure?” I asked him. “You don’t want to stand in a field of cornflowers or walk around a circle of fire?”
“Let’s pretend we’ve done it already.”
“Speeches and champagne and biryani?”
“Tents and drunk dancing and I do.”
“Well then I do too.”
* * *
I called my sister. “Mira, I need you to come to Cambridge.”
“Now?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“I am marrying Cyrus Jones.”
“Fuck off. Cyrus? Cyrus from high school? The guy with the hair?”
I was so happy that she understood the importance of Cyrus’s past hotness. “Yes! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” And then I said, “You’re wondering why he suddenly loves me back.”
“Of course he loves you back. You morphed into a cross between Snow White and Iron Man.”
“What was I before?”
“One of the Seven Dwarfs. Bashful, if I’m being generous.”
“I can’t wear a sari and get pinched by aunties. You have to come.”
“I’m sorry. Ahmed and I are trying to get pregnant.”
“Oh. Can’t you just bring him and have sex in Cambridge?”
“It’s not sex, it’s IVF.”