The Duration Read online

  “It’s great to see you,” Ava said, stopping me when we’d rounded a corner and were no longer visible to the reception staff.

  “You too,” I said. Awkward pause, then hug.

  Ava broke it and looked around quickly.

  “How’s your dad?” I said.

  “He’s good.”

  Her cheeks flushed slightly.

  “Sorry. I’m not used to coming across real people here. He’s good! Oh man, he won’t believe this. Ah, he retired a couple of years ago. Happy in his retirement. Still has a house here but spends a lot of time in Nevada.”

  “Nevada?”

  “One of the perks of working for the company. Family discounts. He’s just about the healthiest sixty-eight-year-old on the planet. Or, at least, that’s my goal for him.”

  I nodded. “Got it. And you’re here, doing this.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Right, come check it out.”

  We kept walking down the hallway. On the wall there were charcoal drawings and chakras, shit that seemed to be trying very hard to be covertly motivational. Must have been working, because I felt like some yoga. Never did yoga before. Kelly used to do yoga. It looked like a lot of work.

  “Guest rooms are this way,” Ava said, gesturing down a side passage. “Yours is down there to the left. The main spa building is straight ahead.”

  I looked around. I hadn’t seen another guest since we arrived.

  “You guys do good business in the winters?” I asked.

  Ava Winston nodded.

  “We’re fully booked. We were able to fit you in only because of a cancellation.”

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Around. You’ll see. It’s easy to fill your time.”

  She paused.

  “So, like, are you Sment too?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nah, I’m just along for the ride,” I said.

  “Nice ride,” she said, a little self-congratulatorily. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said.

  “In Boston, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I see Unsie sometimes,” she said. “He’s my link to the outside world.”

  We’d reached smoked-glass doors at the end of the hall.

  “Wait,” she said, stopping short. She looked at me closely. “This is about Chickie Benecik, isn’t it?”

  I tried to look surprised.

  “Pete, tell me it’s not about Chickie Benecik.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and as I said it I could hear that I had no future in the courtroom.

  She could hear it too.

  “Listen, I don’t know what that stuff was about the other night—last night, Jesus. It was last night. But I swear to God, you better not screw around with me here. Sment or no Sment, I will run you guys out of here on a rail.”

  I put my hands up.

  “Ava, when have I ever screwed around with you?”

  That came out sounding more suggestive than I’d meant it to. Ava narrowed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “I swear to you this isn’t about Chickie.”

  It was easier the second time.

  She straightened her skirt.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. Jimmer’s in town, I’m just tagging along.”

  She took a deep breath and pushed her shoulders back. After a minute, she resumed the tour.

  “Fine. Good.”

  She looked around, as if she’d forgotten where we were. Smoked-glass doors, right.

  “This is the main spa entrance. Steam rooms, pool, massage, treatments, you name it. We can wrap you in anything from seaweed to fettuccine. That’s a joke. No carbs.”

  I looked at her and grinned. She grinned back, grudgingly. Then she shook out her arms and took another deep breath.

  “Sorry, that’s part of the script. If you want to do any classes or outdoor activities, you can arrange those through me or use the on-demand system on your room monitor. Or just show up, they’ll fit you in.”

  “Classes?”

  “Mindfulness, Pilates, landscape architecture, whatever you’re into, really. Colorwork.”

  “Colorwork?”

  “Crayons,” she said. “Very therapeutic.”

  I pretended to evaluate that.

  “You guys have a knitting circle?” I asked.

  Ava made a face.

  “You’d be surprised. The dining room is across the way in the main building. That’s where we do our Welcoming.”

  “Welcoming, right. What’s that?”

  “It’s an initial personalized evaluation that we ask our guests to do when they arrive. Sort of like a physical, but with some nondenominational spirituality and environmental elements taken into account. It helps us customize your Head-Connect experience.”

  “That sounds awesome,” I said.

  I must have looked skeptical.

  “It’s really easy,” she said, looking me over, taking in the billow of my shirttails, the bovine thickness of my neck. “Nonjudgmental.”

  What was she suggesting? I’m a big-boned man locked into a sedentary lifestyle. And I can still almost dunk a basketball.

  I widened my mouth in mock surprise. She blushed again.

  “No, no, no,” she said, palms up. “That’s not what I meant.”

  I gave her my smoldering look.

  “Sure.”

  “Ha,” she said, in not-a-laugh, and patted me on the arm. “Now, seriously, you’ll want to be over there tomorrow morning at eight. It’s all in your folder.”

  The glass doors slid open silently, and a trim woman in white sweats walked briskly past us. Ava slipped back into business mode.

  “Okay, well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said. “Have, uhh, have fun.”

  I nodded.

  “Sounds good. Hey, do you guys have a safe?”

  She paused.

  “For valuables? Each room has a safe in the closet. You program the lock yourself.”

  “Cool,” I said. “No, like a big safe?”

  Ava looked confused, and her wariness returned. “Do you need something safeguarded? We can hold it behind the front desk. Security guaranteed.”

  “Nah. It’s okay.”

  She started to go, paused.

  “You sure? Not a problem.”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I could see her trying to suggest a solution for a problem she couldn’t identify, the helpfulness drilled into her.

  “The only big safe we have that is accessible to guests is our Vice Safe, and that doesn’t have a lock.”

  “What’s a Vice Safe?” I asked.

  But now she was already moving back up the thick carpet, away from me, fast and silent.

  “You’ll find out at Welcoming,” she said.

  I padded around the hallway for a second. What was a Vice Safe? I’d find out at Welcoming. When I stepped near the smoked-glass doors, they slid open silently. The spa entrance was shallow and quiet and taupe. White towels, each one rolled into a perfect cylinder, were stacked in baskets next to the door. Smaller baskets held flawless green apples. There were water bottles everywhere, both chilled and room temp. A counter stood in the middle of the room with a small bell on top. Behind it was a slate wall with daily services written in different colors of chalk, like ice-cream flavors. Tropical sugar scrubs. Sevruga caviar facials. Something with cranberry essence. Off to one side was a list of “Today’s Steams”: eucalyptus, rosewater, espresso. What the hell was espresso steam? Would that be good for you? I thought about going back to the lobby to ask Ava. Once, in LA with Kelly, we’d gone to some hipster beer bar, and there was a big slate behind the bar with all of the place’s guest taps listed on it. Next to the list, someone had drawn a picture of a gnome, like your run-of-the-mill garden gnome, and above the gnome, a pink chalk dialogue bubble that said, “Tried a gnome
yet?” So when our waitress came over, she was stunning and petite and checked-out, in the way that beautiful people can be, especially when they’re waiting to hear from their agent about the callback or whatever, and who am I to judge anyway? But anyway she comes over, and I’m trying to flirt a little because it’ll be fun to joke about it with Kelly later, but also I’m genuinely confused, so I point to the drawing of the gnome and say, “Hey, what’s a gnome?” And she thinks for a second, goes and checks with the bartender, and then comes back and says, “It’s a mythical creature, sort of like a dwarf.”

  So, yeah. I figured Ava would have a better explanation of what espresso steam entailed, but then I decided to let it remain a mystery, at least for the time being. I don’t need to know everything.

  When I got back to the Birch—it might just have been “Birch”—Jimmer was eating a fruit plate and watching SportsCenter. The room was about the size of my apartment, with a long entryway, a sitting room, a large master bedroom, and a gigantic bathroom. The bathroom had a soaking tub like a lap pool and a showerhead with settings for “deluge,” “mist,” and “pummel,” the latter of which you could use to strip paint. The sinks were accessorized with soap from Singapore and tubes of pink Hudson Valley lotions and these rough little pumice stones from Maui.

  This Birch was better than the Becket Birches. This was a wellness source I could get behind.

  “You’re on the couch, my friend,” said Jimmer, which was fine with me because it was a really nice couch, and it pulled out. I suppose we could have called for a cot, and I half wanted to, because it would probably be the coolest cot I’d ever seen, but I didn’t push it.

  “Jimmer,” I said, sitting down next to him and spearing a piece of cantaloupe with a knife. “This is badass.”

  He didn’t take his eyes from the screen. Around the fruit plate were various electronics: a tablet, two phones, a laptop.

  “Can I, uh, contribute?” I asked, hoping my tone would convey the complicated sincerity of the offer.

  Jimmer waved it off.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  I looked around the room. It was pretty gorgeous. Blacks and neutrals. Exposed wood. Two flat screens that I could see. A bouquet of flowers on the desk and a bowl of fruit on the coffee table. I felt slightly destabilized, like you might feel if you got onto the wrong chairlift and had a few minutes to contemplate all the black diamonds between you and the lodge.

  “Jimmer, this must cost a fortune.”

  He shrugged.

  “I think so. We have it for the week. But, see, we don’t pay a fortune for it.”

  “Why don’t we pay a fortune for it?” I asked, cautious about the “we.”

  “We don’t pay a fortune for it because they know I’ll stay here more than once. And I’ll tell my friends—my tech friends—and they’ll stay here more than once. So the rate we get is about half of the rack rate, and that gets billed to the LLC anyway. Business expense, tax write-off. Not a whole lot more than your standard Four Seasons.”

  I tried to follow along.

  “Business expense?”

  “There are some kids at MIT doing neat stuff with nanotech. You have to see it to believe it. So I’ll go see it. And then I’m going to speak at some dinner they’re organizing. Pick up a small honorarium. Flight was on miles. If we invest, this whole trip will probably net positive.”

  He searched through the fruit plate for remaining honeydew and, not finding any, took a grape.

  “It’s a weird thing about wealth,” he said. “The more of it you have, the less you sort of need it.”

  I nodded. SportsCenter went to commercial.

  I was finding it hard not to be jealous of him, of his distraction and forward focus, his ease with this sort of life. So I tried to join him in it.

  “Sment,” I said. I’d gotten good results with that one before.

  Jimmer confirmed that the SportsCenter he was about to watch was a repeat of the one that had just concluded, and put the TV on mute.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sment. Wild.”

  “So, like, how’d you come up with that?”

  Jimmer shrugged like it was a story he told a lot.

  “Started at Caltech. We were doing some research on a DARPA grant, looking at mammalian olfactory receptors and their connection to memory and cognitive function. We began to try and emulate what people were doing with sound and visuals.”

  I nodded as though I understood.

  “The initial applications were weaponized,” he said, ducking his head back toward the fruit plate.

  “Weaponized smells?” I asked. “Like, uh, what?” The answer seemed obvious, so I said it. “Farts?”

  Jimmer grinned at the fruit.

  “That is, in fact, where our research started. Not farts, but sulfur, other unsettling odors. Depressing odors. Stuff they might use offensively, or as part of a psychological campaign.”

  “What’s a depressing odor?”

  Jimmer shrugged.

  “The data suggests asphalt. Industrial cleaner, like you smell in offices. Dead skin cells. Some people smell depressing. Unsanitary deep-fryers, although research is mixed on those. For certain subjects, the smell of an unsanitary deep-fryer works on a whole other level. Pizza has a surprising Q score. Imagine being confined for some period of time, and the only thing you can smell is pizza, but you can’t have any. You’d go nuts. Seriously. You should see the chimpanzees. Or imagine you’re on a battlefield, and all you smell is pizza, and then the pizza smell turns to bad eggs, and then back to pizza, and then back to bad eggs. Right? You might just want to call it a day.”

  “So, what?” I asked, nodding. “You pump these smells in over the Internet and depress your enemy to death?”

  “Well,” said Jimmer. “We don’t do that, but certain arms of the government might. You need to have the right sort of receptors on the host device. Like, your laptop has speakers, you can hear music. But that tech will follow pretty fast once we get the application right. Future laptops, tablets, phones, cars, planes, they’ll all have these little nodes that emit scent. We call them ‘Petals,’ of course. That’s trademarked.”

  I started to frown, because I felt like I’d identified a flaw in that logic, but then reined it in since probably a hundred really smart people had already mentioned it, and it had been addressed. In that light, I reworded my query.

  “So, is this just a military thing?”

  Jimmer shook his head, the softball right in his PR wheelhouse.

  “That’s the really interesting thing. So, when we first started, we thought military, covert ops, detention centers. And that’s where the funding was initially—Guantanamo-type places. But then we started to see some really interesting overlaps with cognitive thinking and modern human bandwidth. I mean, the associations between olfactory stimuli and cognitive functions like memory and reason and desire are pretty well documented. But our research suggested a more profound link. Like, when I was young, I always wanted to be cremated, right? As a logical proposition, any environmentally conscious person can’t justify taking up a plot of land for the foreseeable future just for a grave, right? They’re not making more land, and they are making more people. It won’t work. So I was like, cremate me and spread my ashes fifty percent around the Lions Gate at Tanglewood, twenty-five percent at the old Boston Garden, twenty percent on the cliffs of Big Sur, and five percent in the Stanford women’s soccer locker room. Pretty standard stuff, right? But our research was interesting. Turns out, when people imagine their own deaths they opt for cremation, but when you ask their survivors what the survivors would choose for the deceased, cremation or burial, the question causes all sorts of anxiety. And the anxiety isn’t around the idea of a loved one’s death. We control for that. The anxiety for the survivors is about being able to locate the deceased, physically, mentally, emotionally. The benefit of a physical memorial, like a grave, is that it frees the survivors from having to devote cognitive space to the me
mory of the departed. If you know where to find someone, then you’re free to lose them. If we know Uncle Walt is buried back in Queens, you know, we can go about our lives, function better, not worry about having to remember him. Right? His grave isn’t going anywhere.”

  I nodded along. Jimmer was cruising.

  “Right. So what we found is that when we could isolate and replicate certain scents, the subjects for whom these scents represented certain triggers were able to in effect store their associations in digital form, let them go, know they were safe, and free up huge amounts of cognitive space. Like, they would have a file on their computer where they could store gigabytes of their childhood, their parents, their travels, their great loves and triumphs and heartbreaks. Like an online photo album, except that the olfactory associations just blow the doors off the visual ones. You know, you see a picture, and you see the picture. But the smell of your dead mom’s apple pie comes wafting into the room, or your grandfather’s after-shave, and you are fucking bawling. And you know where to find it, whenever you want. No need to carry it around.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Shit is nuts.”

  Jimmer reached for the remote.

  “I know,” he said. “Cool, right?”

  “What happens if your computer dies?”

  Jimmer paused.

  “Like, what?” he said. “Like the hard drive is fried?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “Well, there’s the cloud, and there are the Sment servers. But, yeah, I guess you could be theoretically fucked if you don’t back up. Might be awesome, though. You might have to start fresh, revert to IRL stimuli.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s not the worst thing in the world.”

  Jimmer nodded. “Seriously, pal. You should see the folks for whom we’ve itemized trigger scents. They’re like zephyrs. They move through life with no friction. They know where the shit is if they need it.”

  I leaned back on the couch. Jimmer’s forward focus was making me feel like I’d wasted my life.

  “So, is there like a library of the world’s smells? Do I have a smell?”

  Jimmer laughed.

  “You certainly do have a smell, but yeah, we’re in the process of smell-mining. I mean, there are certain basic elements—we call them ‘smelements,’ trademarked—that once you get them, you can combine to replicate pretty closely any other scent. But you know how it is, right? The thing sort of hinges on having the exact match—if you walk in a room and there’s a smell that’s almost like your baby blanket, it doesn’t do anything. Almost doesn’t cut it. So there are personalizing applications that we’re working on.”