Kill Process (13 page)

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

“It’s not religious. They only meet at the church.”

“I said I’ll go.”

“Oh, okay.” Emily looks away, down the street, toward nothing I can see that’s important.

I have no idea why things are suddenly awkward between us.

I pocket the paper and take the coffee back. For a moment, we’re both holding the cup at once. “Thank you,” I say. “I know you mean well and you care.” My voice is gruffer than I want it to be, and I realize I’m not mad at Emily, but I
am
scared and my knees are weak. I take a long chug of the mocha, and the chocolate and sugar fortifies me.

Emily knows me better than I know myself.

I
’
M SO NERVOUS
before I leave for the support group I contemplate a drink even though it’s still early morning. All I know of support groups is what I’ve seen on television, which I associate with alcoholics, and though this group is for domestic violence survivors, it’s enough to conclude a drink is probably inappropriate.

I descend a flight of dark stairs to the basement of the church, in a cold room with a linoleum floor and high, squat windows letting in a trickle of natural light. There are no men present, so for once I don’t worry about the distance to the exit or being blocked in. One woman, professionally dressed in a green satin blouse and slacks, smiles at me, and gestures for me to join the women seated in a circle on folding chairs.

“Please, help yourself to coffee or water, if you like, and take a seat,” she says. “We’ll begin in a few minutes.”

I skip the beverages and sit down. It’s the most diverse group of women I’ve been in for a long time. The youngest is still a teen, awkward and gangly, with red, puffy eyes. The oldest could be a grandmother. There’s a woman in ripped sweats and a band t-shirt, and nearly opposite her, a middle-aged woman in an expensive tailored suit. Portland is known as the whitest city on the west coast, due to draconian discrimination laws before the Second World War, yet here are two black women, a Hispanic woman, and an Asian woman.

For a moment, I’m comforted. I’m not going to stick out here. I might have one arm, I might be afraid to step into a room with a man, and I might make a scene if a man touches me, but here none of that will happen. If anything, I’m almost average for the group. Maybe losing an arm is extreme, even by these standards, although it’s possible someone here has experienced worse.

At some point the woman in the green blouse talks about the ground rules. A gnawing pain blossoms in my stomach, and soon all I can focus on is the feeling. My limbs tingle, another kind of nervousness I know from past experience.

The pit in my stomach grows every day around this time. It used to begin at 5 P.M., a full hour before he came home from work. Then he started coming home at different times, sometimes 5, once at 4:30. The gnawing and trembling appeared earlier then, at 4 or 3, even. Eventually, the feelings became too much, overwhelming, and my body and mind would go numb. I had to finish the household chores earlier then, by noon, for fear I’d lose control of my body, and be unable to do
them—

He touches me on the shoulder, and I know I shouldn’t, but I lash out, I fight back, but I miss and I fall out of my chair.

I’m confused. Where am I? I don’t remember this linoleum.

I realize I’m on the floor in the church basement.

The woman in the green blouse speaks to me, but her words come through a long, narrow tube. A squeak is all that reaches my ears, and I can’t understand anything over the pounding in my head.

I lurch to my feet, and stumble through the ring, crashing into several empty chairs before I run outside.

I gulp air as though I swam a hundred yards under water. The tunnel vision is so bad I can barely distinguish my car. Eventually I find it, grab onto the fender, and for a moment I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.

The woman in the green blouse circles into my vision, a cautious ten feet away, sunlight so bright on her blonde hair it’s almost blinding. She’s speaking, but I still can’t make out what she’s saying. She approaches me slowly with something held out in front of her, and she places it into my hand, which doesn’t protest. She backs away, and my hand folds tight of its own accord, crushing the business card inside.

I’m in my car, in the driver’s seat. I have no idea how long I stood next to my car, no idea how I got in, or how long I’ve been sitting here. I haven’t driven anywhere, because I still see the church right across the street. It’s still the same day. I’d know if a whole night passed, right?

I unfurl my hand, which has cramped up tight, and look at the business card. It’s damp with sweat, but the text is clear, and the words that stand out are psychologist and private practice.

Private practice means not having to go into a room and hear other women talk about their experiences.

My breathing gradually returns to normal, eventually my vision appears normal, and I might be fit to drive. I’ll call and make an appointment. From home.

*     *     *

I stare up at the building. My appointment with Charlotte, the psychologist from the group session, is in a few minutes. After the experience at the church, I’m not sure I can handle this. I avoided thinking about it on the drive over, although now that I’m here, I’m sweating and faint, and haven’t even gotten out of the car.

In the elevator ride up, I get agita, that combination of nauseous and acid reflux and impending vomit which apparently only Italian-Americans experience often enough to warrant a word for the specific feeling. Are we going to talk about what happened? How can we not?

By the time I reach Charlotte’s office I’m shaking, and it takes everything I’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Charlotte opens the door when I knock and takes in my sweaty, trembling mess.

“Come in, Angie. I’m glad you called. Please, pick a seat.”

The office has two chairs and a couch. I pick the chair, because I could make a faster exit from it.

Charlotte settles into the other chair with a pad of paper. “You’re anxious.”

I swallow, unable to form words, and nod.

“We’re not going to talk about anything from your past today. We’re not even going to talk about feelings, or any challenges you feel.”

I nod again, my head like one of those desk toys that bounce up and down uncontrollably, although I don’t understand. Isn’t that what therapy is? Talking about stuff you can’t handle? How are we not going to do any of that?

“You’re anxious. I’m going to give you some tools for dealing with anxiety. How does that sound?”

My head continues its unstoppable bobbing.

“Wiggle your toes in your shoes, and pay attention to the feeling of your toes rubbing around inside your shoes.”

What the hell? I can’t see the point of it, but I do what she says.

“Can you feel your toes?”

Of course I can. I nod, a little slower.

“Now focus on your heels. There’s some weight pressing down on your heels. It’s the weight of your legs, the pull of gravity. Can you sense that?”

“Yes.” My voice is a whisper.

“Good,” she says. “Now think about your legs and pants. Your pants are touching your skin. The fabric is lying on top of your legs. Can you feel that pressure, the sense of the cloth resting on your thighs?”

“It’s very faint,” I say.

“That’s okay.” She continues to lead me through my entire body, all the way up to my hair. I thought maybe she was going to become all new agey on me, and talk about energy and wacky stuff, but she never did.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, after she’s assessed whether I can feel the difference between the side of my face closer to the window and the side away from it.

“I’m okay.” I’m startled to realize I’m relaxed, even slightly blissful.

“That’s a big difference from when you walked in. That’s what we call grounding, and you can do it any time you feel like you need to. I can teach you more tools you can use.”

“Is that what therapy is?” I ask. “I thought . . .”

“Different people need different things. I like to find out what a new patient needs. Based on what happened at the church, and how you looked when you came in, I thought we should start with something to help you cope with your anxiety. If you agree, we should continue to focus on some more tools to help you deal with anxiety. Would you like that?”

I feel like I’ve been drowning for years, and someone has thrown me a life preserver.

“Yes,” I say, and resist the urge to cry.

M
Y LAST DAY
at Tomo is a Wednesday. Thomas takes the next two days off work, and we spend a long weekend in a small beach house in Manzanita. It’s cold and wet, but we bundle up and go for long walks on the beach. At night we curl up by the fireplace and read books.

More than anything else, I sleep. I’m shocked by how tired I am. It’s like the exhaustion of years of double-duty hit me all at once. Thomas asks if I’m okay when I sleep until nine one morning.

Although money is tight, Apple lures me in with a refresh of their laptops, and I resist for a week before I give in. I spend a few days playing with my new toy and getting my development environment set up just right.

I build skeletal prototypes of my ideas for the protocol between disparate social networks. They’re simulators, more than proper software, but I still take great joy in passing messages back and forth between the separate programs.

I show off my code one night to Thomas, who leans in to stare at the text scrolling by in my console.

“See, right there, it’s passing messages back and forth.”

“This line here, where it says ‘message received’?” He smiles. “That’s cool!”

He’s happy for me, because I’m excited, but it’s clear he doesn’t experience the same thrill I feel. That night at dinner he suggests I meet with a client of his, Mat, who is the CEO of a small tech company. “He’s recently been through the funding process, and knows everyone in the startup community.”

I know he wants to be helpful, but I grit my teeth in resistance. I want to do things at my own pace, in my own way. At lunch with Emily a few days later, she convinces me to at least give it a try.

“You’re not committing to anything,” she says, around bites of lettuce-wrapped chicken breast. “You’re only meeting someone to find out what they know. There’s nothing wrong with learning.”

I sprinkle more hot sauce on my chimichanga and manage to look doubtful.

Emily sighs. “It’s an email. Humor Thomas and talk to the guy.”

I let Thomas email me an introduction to Mat, and after a few back and forth emails, Mat and I agree to meet for lunch at Pok Pok, a restaurant in Southeast Portland, far from the tech bubble downtown.

I arrive fifteen minutes early to ensure a table in a far corner where we won’t be overheard. Of course, this table choice requires some compromises. The front door looks like it’s a few hundred feet away. Don’t believe everything I think. Don’t believe everything I think. I repeat Charlotte’s mantra five times, counting it off, then practice grounding myself. Seat. Floor. Butt. Shoes. The panic subsides, and when Mat approaches, I’m able to greet him with a smile.

He holds out his right hand for a shake, and his eyes flare when he sees my stump. I turn my left hand around and give him the best off-hand shake I can.

I decide to try one of the corny jokes Charlotte told me. “I had a little problem with a pit bull on the way over.”

Mat laughs, and the awkward moment passes. We exchange the usual greetings and discuss our backgrounds. He’s British, and has been in the United States almost ten years. He founded his latest company several years ago, their specialty data analysis for other tech startups. We geek out on our favorite statistical analysis software until we’ve ordered food.

“I heard you want to do something in social media. Aren’t you worried about a Tomo noncompete?”

I swallow hard, and force myself to wave it off casually. “No non-compete. Didn’t sign it.”

His eyes go big. “Wow. That’s fortunate. What’s your angle?”

I’m wondering how much I can and should say. The question is natural enough, yet I’m reluctant to share my idea.

He sees my reluctance, and misunderstands. “Ideas are cheap. It’s building them into profitable companies that’s hard. Gifford Pinchot says ‘ideas are like insects: many are born, but few live to maturity.’ ”

“I’m not worried about you stealing my ideas. I’m thinking about how ridiculous it sounds. I want to create a direct competitor to Tomo.”

“Hmm.” Mat leans back like he’s wondering how he got himself into having lunch with an insane person.

“It’s not as crazy as it seems. I don’t want to build the whole thing. The concept is we decompose the social network into its constituent parts and enable anyone to build a single part in isolation by defining standard protocols to allow the pieces to plug in together.”

“One app for photo-sharing, a different one for status updates, like that?”

“Even more fine-grained. Consider your feed
—
everything you see when you visit Tomo. Tomo has an algorithm that chooses what you see, and you don’t have any control over it. Tomo gives you a hundred and fifty updates a day, max. Other social networks give it to you raw: every message, as it happens.”

“That’s a whole different approach,” Mat says. “The most you can do is dip a toe in the stream and sample it. You can’t read everything.”

“You can’t read everything no matter what. Even a modest user has two hundred friends, times five updates a day, that’s a thousand messages to read. Highly connected users might have a raw feed of twenty-thousand items. They can’t read them all. Right now, users don’t have any choice of the algorithm used. Should it be everything? Should it be filtered? If it is filtered, what’s the criteria?”

“You want to let the user pick from different algorithms?”

“No, I want an API so anyone in the world can create feed filtering algorithms, and every person can choose the algorithm they want that day. One algorithm might be based on the number of thumbs up and thumbs down a post gets. Another algorithm can use sentiment analysis to figure out what’s funny, serious, sad, or happy. Another can measure the strength of friendship based on the number of interactions we have. You
could—”