Katie Williams: The Happiness Machine

The pockets of Rhett’s jeans were empty; so was the small trash basket beneath his desk. His screen, unfolded and set on its stand on the desk, was fingerprint locked, so she couldn’t check that. Pearl stood over her son’s bed in the dark and waited, as she had when he was an infant, her breasts filled and aching with milk at the sight of him. And so she’d stood again over these last two difficult years, her chest still aching but now empty, until she was sure she could see the rise and fall of his breath under the blanket.

After Rhett’s first time at the clinic, when treatment there hadn’t been working, they’d taken him to this place Elliot had found, a converted Victorian out near the Presidio, where a team of elderly women treated the self-starvers by holding them. Simply holding them for hours. “Hug it out?” Rhett had scoffed when they’d told him what he must do. At that point, though, he’d been too weak to resist, too weak to sit upright without assistance. The “treatment” was private, parents weren’t allowed to observe, but Pearl had met the woman, Una, who had been assigned to Rhett. Her arms were plump and liver-spotted with a fine mesh of lines at elbow and wrist, as if she wore her wrinkles like bracelets, like sleeves. Pearl held her politeness in front of her as a scrim to hide the sudden hatred that gripped her. She hated that woman, hated her sagging, capable arms. Pearl had sat here in this apartment, imagining Una, only twenty-two blocks away, holding her son, providing what Pearl should have been able to and somehow could not. Once Rhett had regained five pounds, Pearl had convinced Elliot that they should move him back to the clinic. There he’d lost the five pounds he’d gained and then two more, and though Elliot kept suggesting returning him to the Victorian, Pearl had remained firm in her refusal. “Those crackpots?” she said to Elliot, pretending this was her objection. “Those hippies? No . ” No , she repeated to herself. She would do anything for her Rhett, had done anything, but the thought of Una cradling her son, as he gazed up softly—this was what Pearl couldn’t bear. She would hold Una in reserve, a last resort. After leaving the Victorian, Rhett was back in the hospital again and then the terrible feeding tube. But it had worked, eventually it had. Pearl had eked out her son’s recovery pound by pound. Was that where Rhett had been this afternoon? Had he gone to see Una? Had he needed her arms?

A subtle shift of the bedcovers as Rhett’s chest rose, and Pearl slipped out of the room. If she were to sit for Apricity again, she wondered if there’d be a new item listed on her contentment plan: Watch your son breathe. Though, in truth, this practice didn’t make her happy so much as stave off a swell of desperation.

THE NEXT MORNING, the web designer was late for their follow-up appointment. When she finally arrived, she entered in a huff, which Pearl mistook for more of yesterday’s outrage. But once the woman had taken her seat and unwound a long red scarf from her neck, the first thing she did was apologize.

“You probably won’t believe this,” she said, “but I hate it when people yell. I’m not one to raise my voice.”

The woman, Annette Flatte, made her apology in a practical manner with no self-pity or shuffling of blame. She wore the exact same outfit she had the day before, a white T-shirt and tailored gray slacks. Pearl imagined Ms. Flatte’s closet full of identical outfits, fashion an unnecessary distraction.

“Did they tell you about what happened after the Christmas party?” Ms. Flatte said. “Why they brought you in?”

Pearl made a quick calculation and decided that Ms. Flatte would not be the type of person who would consider feigned ignorance a form of politeness. “Your coworker who killed herself? Yes. They told me at the outset. Did you know her?”

“Not really. Copywriting, Design: different floors.” Ms. Flatte opened her mouth, then closed it again, reconsidering. Pearl waited her out. “Some of them are joking about it,” Ms. Flatte finally said.

Pearl was already aware of this. Two employees had made the same joke during their sessions with Pearl: Guess Santa didn’t bring her what she wanted.

“It’s tacky.” Ms. Flatte shook her head. “No. It’s unkind.”

“Unhappiness breeds unkindness,” Pearl said dutifully, one of the lines from the Apricity manual. “Just as unkindness breeds unhappiness.” She reached for something else to say, something not in the manual, something of her own, but the landscape was razed, barren. There was nothing there. Why was there nothing there?

“They’re scared,” she finally said.

“Scared?” Ms. Flatte snorted. “Of what? Her ghost?”

“That someday they might feel that sad.”

Ms. Flatte stared at the scarf in her lap, combing its fringe. When she spoke, it was in a rush: “She wrote something for me once, a little line of copy, or actually poetry. She left it on my desk my first week here.”

“What did it say?”

Ms. Flatte bent down to the bag at her feet. Pearl could see the bones of her skull through the close crop of her hair, could see the curve and divot where spine and skull met. Pearl pictured fitting these pieces together, turning the tiny screws. Ms. Flatte came back up with a pocketbook, and from its coin compartment she extracted a slip of paper. Pearl took the slip carefully between two fingers. It was printed with a computer font designed to imitate hasty cursive.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

“I looked it up,” Ms. Flatte said. “It’s from an old poem called ‘Lines for the Fortune Cookies.’ And see? Doesn’t it look like the little paper you get inside the cookie? Apparently she did it for everyone on their first week, chose a different line from a different poem. To welcome them. No one else told you about how she did that?”

“They didn’t say.”

Ms. Flatte pressed her lips together.

“The truth is, you were right,” Ms. Flatte said. “Or your machine was anyway. I do need something .” She laid heavily on the last word. “I don’t know about religion. I was raised to distrust it. But … something. This morning—” She stopped.

“This morning?” Pearl prompted.

“The bus takes me through Golden Gate Park, and there’s always these old people out on the lawn doing their tai chi. Today I got out and watched them for a while. That’s why I was late to meet you. Do you think … could that be it? For me, I mean? Do you think that’s what the machine could have meant?”

Pearl pretended to consider the question, already knowing she would deliver the standard reply. “Try and see. With Apricity, there’s no right and wrong. There’s just what works for you.”

Ms. Flatte smiled suddenly and broadly, her whole face changed by it. “Can you imagine?” She laughed. “All those old Chinese people … and me?”

She thanked Pearl, apologizing once more for her outburst the day before, before bending to gather and rewind her long red scarf.

“Ms. Flatte,” Pearl said as the woman stood to go, “one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Would you say that you anticipate Apricity’s recommendations will improve your overall life satisfaction?”

“What’s that?”

“Will you be happier?” Pearl asked. “Will you … will you be happy?”

Ms. Flatte blinked, as if surprised by the question; then she nodded once, curt but sure. “I think I will.”

Pearl was surprised to feel a flare of … was it disappointment? She watched the gentle nape of Ms. Flatte’s neck as the woman walked from the conference room, and she felt a sudden and ferocious wish that Ms. Flatte would turn around and, as she had the day before, begin to shout.