CHAPTER 5
LIYAH balances her phone on the windowsill so that both hands are free to mist and wipe the dust off her large-leafed plants. This is how she spends virtually every Sunday: on a video call with Neen and doing chores around her apartment.
“Anyway, I think I maybe hate my job,” Neen says, pulling their foot close to their face to blow on freshly painted toenails.
“Show me! And you don’t, you love coding.” Neen angles their phone so that their feet are in full view. There are little cactuses on their big toes, and the rest are painted a terra-cotta brown.
“I didn’t say I hated coding, I said I hated my job. Do you think everybody feels this way?”
“What way?”
They sigh. “I don’t know. Restless?”
“To varying degrees, probably.” Restless is exactly how Liyah felt before she started this new exhibition. Now her work feels interesting, maybe even meaningful, but sometimes she worries that if she slows down for a moment, that feeling will set in again. Liyah sighs. “If they’re still happening when you visit in October, you can join one of our Survival Club meetings. Complaining is the ultimate cure for millennial ennui.”
Neen’s ears perk up. “Will Daniel Rosenberg be there?”
“Unfortunately, yes. He is a founding member.”
Neen side-eyes Liyah through their front-facing camera. “What do you mean ‘unfortunately’? I know you, and you would not have agreed to the whole thing if you weren’t warming up to him.”
“I only agreed as a favor to Siobhan.” This is her fault, really, for telling Neen about Daniel’s apology. It completely flipped their opinion of him (A man admitting he was wrong? In this economy? I’m in love) and somehow convinced them it had flipped Liyah’s, too. Maybe it did, but only in that she logically knows he’s not truly a terrible person. It hasn’t done much to soothe the shameful unease that nestles in her gut whenever she remembers that summer.
“Right.” They raise their eyebrows. “I bet he’d tell me his birth time if I asked.”
Liyah shakes her head. “You’re relentless.” Neen, who believes in astrology in a way that’s only endearing when it’s not weaponized against you, has repeatedly reminded Liyah to ask for Daniel’s time of birth. They claim it’s only to determine whether Liyah and Daniel were destined to meet again, but they also asked Liyah how she’d thought he looked in a suit. Liyah was not fully comfortable answering that for herself, let alone for somebody else. Instead, she rolled her eyes, which got Neen off the subject of wayward attractions but also onto another mysticism rant (You randomly met two times after a fourteen-year estrangement. Twice! And yet you still insist there is no fate to govern your life). Liyah would have noted that the key word was “randomly,” but then there would have been no peace to be had.
“I have to look after you! If left to your own devices, you’d hang out with like two people ever. You don’t even have a real roommate!”
Neen’s not wrong. Liyah answered an admittedly odd-sounding Craigslist posting after a disastrous postgrad rooming situation, and now she has a two-bedroom in a neighborhood she loves to herself. The utilities are entirely Liyah’s responsibility, but she splits the rent with a girl who uses the apartment twice a year to convince her conservative parents that she doesn’t live with her boyfriend. Liyah’s still not sure if her roommate’s name is Lara or Laura. A multiyear relationship sounds like a nightmare if it requires lying to your entire family about it. Actually, a multiyear relationship is a nightmare, period. Neen is the only person outside of her family that Liyah has managed to never get sick of or drift away from.
“I have friends from Northwestern,” Liyah argues.
“Yeah, but do you see them?”
Liyah doesn’t respond, because Neen already knows the answer. She grabs lunch or goes out with friends from college every now and then, but she’s never been great at keeping in touch with people who aren’t right in front of her. And she’s been even more absorbed in her job than usual, hence mostly spending time with Siobhan. It works out though, as Siobhan is incredibly introverted and latched on to Liyah almost immediately after moving stateside. Neen, on the other hand, hosts house parties regularly and hates hanging out in a group of fewer than four people. Unless they’re with Liyah, of course. “Well, I have an active sex life, at least,” she tries.
Neen snorts. “One, you hardly speak to the people you sleep with, so that doesn’t count. And two, no, you don’t. Not anymore. I’m pretty sure the last person was what’s-her-face who you ghosted after she said she liked you. And that was months ago!”
“I didn’t ghost Ivy, and it wasn’t months…” Liyah pauses, realizing that it’s practically September. Which makes it months, plural. “I’ve been busy with the exhibit.”
“Yeah, and it’s stressing me out vicariously. You need to socialize more, and you need to send me Daniel’s time of birth. You said he was born in Madison?”
“Neen! I am not asking him for that.”
“Oh, come on,” they pout. “It’s hard to vet people from a distance, and I want to make sure you aren’t falling in with any unsavory types.”
“What, so if you find out he’s a Taurus rising or whatever you’re going to block his number from my phone and sabotage my promotion?”
“No!” They replace the cap on a bottle of topcoat. “I’ll only do that if he has more than one Scorpio placement in his big three. Okay, babe. I’ve got to get some work done. Talk to you soon?”
Liyah nods. “Love you,” she says, blowing a kiss. Neen returns both and exits the call. Maybe she should head to the Field and try to be productive, too. She still hasn’t unpacked the delivery from Friday.
She drops her phone on the sofa and heads to the kitchen to pack up her laptop. As she’s about to close the screen, a new message appears. If Jeff were more thoughtful, or perhaps a decade younger, he would keep the new exhibition emails in an easy-to-follow thread. Instead, he emails sporadically and often neglects to include a subject line. Sometime last week, Liyah had gotten fed up and set up a filter that searched for keywords and delivered everything to a specific folder. This one escaped, as it contains barely a sentence fragment: use second-century Chinese paper?
Fossilized bones are more her wheelhouse, but her mind is already jumping to the importance of a section on the written word, and she knew her limits when she proposed the exhibition. She’ll reluctantly ask Emiliano (his unendurable personality has proven to be undercut slightly by his expertise) to make sense of it tomorrow.
Her phone vibrates from the couch cushion, and Liyah’s eyes slide to the clock on her wall. Two hours have gone by since she told herself she’d go deal with the delivery. Liyah unfolds her legs and stands up to go check it.
Daniel
hey liyah! it’s daniel rosenberg. weird q: feel like an afternoon coffee?
She rolls her eyes. Does he think she didn’t save his number? Even if they weren’t working together, the SSC group chat is already so active that she cannot distinguish his and Jordan’s texts from context clues alone.
Liyah
Full name over text? Did I miss your 80th birthday?
Daniel
we know a lot of daniels
Liyah
I haven’t seen Gross or Schwartz in fourteen years.
Daniel
jordan bailed on our usual time and i can’t be trusted to actually work in a coffee shop by myself
i was about to start on the field account
Liyah
You need a babysitter? Figures, you’re rather childlike.
Daniel
clearly this was a bad idea
Liyah
I do have a babysitting certificate. I’m not going to a coffee shop, but you can come with me to the Field to scope it out and ask any questions you want
And unpack and photograph several boxes of plaques for her exhibit. But he doesn’t need to know that yet.
DANIEL MEETS LIYAH at a side entrance to the Field Museum, pastry bag in hand. His stomach does a nervous flip at the sight of her leaning on the door to hold it open and the sudden realization that this is the first time she’s intentionally spent time with him outside of business hours. Technically speaking, he’s still here for work, but he’s also keenly aware that they could have saved this for the middle of the week when he’d be in a suit and she’d be wearing—well, not quite business casual, but also not summer weekend clothes. Namely, an olive-green tank top—probably her favorite color, she wears it a lot—and a pair of tattered denim shorts that look like they were designed specifically with her in mind. She doesn’t smile as he approaches, but she doesn’t scowl, either. He’ll take the win.
“For you,” he says, offering the waxy brown paper sleeve.
She peers into the pastry bag. “A croissant?” She scans his face, her eyes narrowing slightly. “You didn’t have to get me this.”
He shrugs. “You need the fuel if you’re going to be developing-slash-designing on a weekend.”
She tears off a generous piece and points it at him. “This better not be your way of softening the blow that Brett rejected all our proposals. I can’t do another brainstorming session at Planet Navy Suit. The atmosphere is too different from Earth’s; I’ll suffocate.”
Daniel chuckles. “Always so suspicious.”
Liyah sucks her teeth. “I often have reason to be.”
“Not this time. The wine night, sleep-in, and holiday party are all a go,” he says. “Sometimes a croissant is just a croissant.”
“Okay, then. Thank you.” She stuffs the piece in her mouth. Her eyelids flutter shut, the same blissed-out look she had at her first sip of coffee during their Wednesday meeting taking over. He considers cracking a joke, but he’ll hate himself if some offhanded gibe makes her stop doing that around him.
Instead, he slips through the door, waits for her to take the lead, and watches her bound up the steps in front of him. Those shorts are even better from behind, white frays brushing against the smooth brown of her thighs.
“Do you want to see my babysitting certificate?” she asks as they reach the top landing and begin weaving through a narrow hallway.
“What exactly does it certify?”
“Mostly that I know rescue breathing for infants and toddlers and that I won’t give you shaken baby syndrome.” Liyah pushes through a slit in floor-to-ceiling plastic sheeting, gesturing for Daniel to go in ahead of her.
The room is cavernous in shape and atmosphere, boxes strewn about. Five diffuse spots of warm light hit the floor in the center of the room; several more illuminate seemingly random swaths of white wall. Liyah strides toward one box, picks up the stack of papers that rests atop it, and drops to a cross-legged seat on the floor.
Unsure what to do with himself, Daniel joins her on the ground, propping his elbows on his bent knees. “This is where you wanted to do the wine night?”
“No, this is part of my exhibit. But we can plan the wine night while we unpack these.” She tosses him a—thankfully closed—box cutter.
“Why do I feel like you invited me here to do manual labor?” he jokes, disappointment swirling through his stomach. Liyah’s invitation is not proving to be the step forward he’d hoped.
“Because I did. Here, this one should be the smaller placards. Can you unwrap them and lay them out over there? Then I’ll do the printouts of the corresponding artifacts and you can photograph them.”
Daniel rubs his hand over his chin, trying not to laugh. “Oh, I can photograph them? How kind of you.”
This earns an eye roll. Eye roll is a misnomer, actually: Liyah rolls her head, too, her shoulders even aiding the action. It seems to require her entire upper body. “Listen, Rosenberg. This needs to get done. So I am going to do this while we talk about the wine event supposedly so magical that previously uninterested adults will be begging to give us their money and attention. You can help me, or you can stand in the corner facing the wall while I work.”
“Well, when you put it that way…” He slices open the first box. “I thought you needed this to go well,” Daniel mutters.
She sighs, shoulders sagging. “I do need it to go well. That doesn’t mean I believe it will.”
“We’ll figure it out. I need this to work, too,” he says.
Liyah furrows her brow. “No, like, Jeff said that I need the numbers of young adult members to go up if I want to make curator. Which I really, really do. I’m sure you’d survive one bad performance review.”
“It’s not just about my job performance.” He lays out a card that reads Gravettian Venus Figurine, Calcite, 24,000–22,000 B.C.E. “I had to persuade Brett to let me pick my two main accounts, so if I don’t deliver, I’m going to end up working with the worst of the worst for the foreseeable future.”
She tilts her head. “I didn’t realize you chose this.”
Daniel blushes. “I mean, Brett seemed happy to pawn it off on me.”
Liyah thumbs through her stack of papers, placing one with a sculpture of a woman with large breasts, belly, and hips above the placard. “What’s the other account?”
“You know the CTA?” He unwraps another Venus placard for one made from limestone.
“Do I, a Chicago resident, know about the Chicago Transit Authority? Yeah, I think I’ve heard of it,” Liyah deadpans.
“Well, looks like my job is obsolete. Digital strategy: marketed.” Liyah laughs. It’s quick, and she tries to conceal it, but Daniel’s chest inflates a little with pride. “It’s not as exciting for the firm as, like, pharma, but I enjoy it.”
Liyah props her elbow on the box next to her and rests her chin in the palm of her hand. “Why do you say pharma like that?”
“Like what?” he mumbles, even though he’s likely already given himself away.
She drums her fingers along her cheekbone, squinting at him. “Like you’re allergic to it.”
Daniel shrugs, averting his eyes. “Maybe I am.”
“Or do you just like trains better?”
Liyah’s guess is what Daniel had let everyone at the firm think—he finds medicine boring. If he doesn’t want to go down this rabbit hole, he’ll let her think the same.
His mouth, betraying his mind, says, “I’m not so into the ethics of it. There’s a lot of making small changes to the same drug to maximize patents and price gouging on medicine that people literally need to survive.” His throat tightens. “Did you know that there’s the manufacturing capacity to supply more than enough chemo to the U.S., but there’s a shortage almost every other year? It’s only about profit margins.” He holds his breath, fighting the urge to put his head in his hands.
Liyah’s gaze is steady, as if she’s studying him carefully. He prays that she doesn’t ask why he knows all that; something tells him his treacherous vocal cords aren’t going to give his usual canned response about a New Yorker article.
She doesn’t press him. Instead, she drops her hand from her face, leans back, and quirks the corners of her mouth. “Who knew there was a bleeding-heart leftist under that suit of yours?”
His shoulders relax, relief washing over him. He constructs a smile. “There’s more to me than meets the eye.”
Liyah snorts. “Like what? A collection of secret L train tattoos?”
He gestures down at his exposed skin—Daniel runs hot, temperatures over sixty-five mean shorts and as many undone buttons as he can get away with. He thought he was clever when he got the jellyfish done, that it would be easily hidden under clothing. As it turns out, it’s on full display for half the year. More, when you consider how many buildings in Chicago abuse their central heating in the winter. “I don’t know how I would’ve kept them from you.” Liyah’s eyes trail down the line of his legs, assessing him, and he finds himself looking back at her. Those shorts seem to hug her narrow waist perfectly, emphasizing the fullness of her hips and thighs …
He blinks, snapping himself out of it before he does something embarrassing while she sits a foot away. When he focuses back on her face, there’s an unexpected subtle pinkness in her cheeks. Does she flush like that when …
For fuck’s sake, Daniel. Get it together.
“I didn’t really peg you as an ass tattoo type of guy,” she says. “But I guess you never really know someone.” The second part comes out tightly, and he can’t help but read into the subtext. They were doing okay, he thought.
He decides to go for levity, gasping and covering his mouth. “Rats! I’ve been found out. Detective Cohen-Jackson has done it again.”
Liyah does another full-torso eye roll, handing him a printout of a figurine and pointing to its place in the row of placards. The next placard reads Self-Portrait of a Pregnant Venus, Photograph, 2022. “What’s this one?” he asks, showing Liyah the description.
Her eyes light up, and she sifts through the pages with a loud rustle until she finds the sheet she’s looking for. “Here! For a long time, historians assumed that these Venus figurines were made by men, and that the secondary sex characteristics were exaggerated to cater to their gaze. They typically have minimal facial detail or no head at all. But recently, there’s been a movement to consider another option: that these were self-portraits. If you look at a Venus from the top down, it closely resembles the view a pregnant person might have when looking down at their naked body.”
Daniel looks at the side-by-side, and a strange feeling spreads through him. Something so ancient and a picture of someone growing new life so recently are one and the same. “Wow,” is all he says.
Their gazes meet, and she bites her lip and averts her eyes. “For the wine night, what if we made the pairings related to the exhibitions somehow? Like each one was theme-based on the country of origin or the label.”
Daniel nods. “That’s a great idea. We could have ‘tasting notes,’ both for the food and drink and for the exhibition. Cabernet Sauvignon, vintage 2018 with notes of cherry. Pairs well with Inside Ancient Egypt, vintage, um…”
“Twenty-four hundred B.C.E.” Liyah smiles. “With notes of natron. That’s the salt they used to dry out bodies for mummification.”
“I’ll contact a few local wine bars this week and see what we can do. See?” Daniel says. “We make a good team.”
“Let’s wait until we pull this off before we jump to any wild conclusions. I still hate this, but it’s better than being forced to turn Evolving Planet into an Instagram trap. Like half of that exhibit is about mass extinction events. I don’t think anyone can make that sexy.”
“What’s wrong with people wanting to take nice pictures?”
“I’m not even gonna touch that statement, Rosenberg. Start the photographs,” she says, passing over a mid-2000s-era digital camera. Just then, her phone screen lights up. She looks down and smiles.
Shit. If he were interested in her—which he isn’t, that’s such a horrible idea he’s not sure how it managed to cross his mind—it would be a bad sign.
Daniel waggles his eyebrows. “Texting somebody special?”
“No. Or yes, I suppose. It’s my best friend, Neen.” She pauses, as if debating whether to continue. “You met them, actually. At Dan’s pool party.”
He furrows his brow. “Your best friend is Neen Khatri? Tran’s Neen?” More importantly, he thinks, you talked to your best friend about me?
“Neen is their own person. But if they had to be somebody’s, I’d like to think they’re my Neen, not Tran’s.”
“Well, your Neen is awful at beer pong,” Daniel says.
“They convinced you to let them do a celeb shot and lost you the game, didn’t they?” He nods, and Liyah grins. “A classic move. They are … not a coordinated person.”
“Tell them I say hi.”
Liyah shakes her head. “God, no. At least not until after you leave, otherwise they’ll call and demand that you recite your exact time and coordinates of birth for your zodiac chart.”
“You say zodiac the way I say pharma.”
“Well, that’s because I had to listen to Neen prattle on about it this morning.” She swipes the box cutter from his side and starts on the next package. “The idea of destiny is stupid. I’m sitting here with you in an empty exhibition room because I want to, not because Saturn told me so.”
Daniel beams. It’s a good thing he texted Liyah when Jordan canceled; he wants to be right here, too. “I was under the impression that you only wanted me for my labor.”
“Aw, you’re short-selling. You also brought me a croissant.”