Link your life, it reminded me. Make the perfect you.
It asked me for my bank details.
By giving this application access to your financial records and spending, Perfection can see the true you. Make your career and lifestyle habits perfect, with customised advice for you.
I refused to input the data, and when I checked again the next morning, I’d lost two hundred points.
Perfection is hard, it said. The power is within you.
I closed the app and restricted its access to my phone.
Chapter 4
Things that are difficult, when the world forgets you:
• Dating
• Getting a job
• Receiving consistent medical attention
• Getting a loan
• Certificated education
• Getting a reference
• Getting service at restaurants
Things that are easy, when the world forgets you:
• Assassination
• Theft
• Espionage
• Casual cruelty
• Angst-free one-night stands (w/condoms)
• Not tipping
For a while after I’d been forgotten, I toyed with becoming a hitman. I pictured myself in leather jump suits, taking down my targets with a sniper rifle, my dark hair billowing in the wind. No cop could catch me; no one would know my name. I was sixteen years old, and had peculiar ideas about “cool”.
Then I did some research, and found that a contract killing can be bought for €5,000, and the majority of people who worked in the field were brutal men in nylon tracksuits. There were almost certainly no glamorous women slipping a vial of something into the villain’s drink; no cocktail parties where spies exchanged cryptic understandings, no goddess of death, no woman of mystery. Only a flash of brutality in the dark, and the smell of tyres on tar.
Later, as I hunkered down in my sleeping bag beneath the library stairs, I closed my eyes and wondered how I had come to the conclusion that murder was acceptable. In my predicament, deprived of family and hope, I already knew that crime was how I would survive, but did that mean human life had lost its sanctity? I pictured killing a stranger, and found it was easier than killing a friend. Then I slept, and in my dreams men beat me, and I tried to hit them back, and couldn’t, my arm frozen in the air, my body powerless.
Do it, do it, do it, screamed my slumbering mind. Do it! Do it! DO IT!
And still I didn’t move, and when I woke in the morning, I found someone had pissed on the end of my sleeping bag.
Chapter 5
Have you got Perfection?
Memories — do I need to explain what went before, to explain myself? Perhaps. There is a word Reina sometimes used — pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage: a journey made for exalted reasons.
A holy act.
And then again, Google search: Pilgrimage is
out of date
a waste of time and money
still important
Have you got Perfection, she asked, and where was this?
Dubai, a few days before Reina died. A hotel on an artificial island; the Burj al Arab Jumeirah. When I walked in, a man offered me a chilled hand towel, a woman offered me dates in a golden plate, the receptionist asked if I’d be wanting one of the hotel’s Bentleys. £650 bought you the cheapest room for a night, but for so little, your private butler might be a touch rude, and you didn’t get access to the VIP lounge. Is this where it begins? I think it is.
“Have you got Perfection?” Leena asked, and behind her, Reina sighed. “The CEO is coming to Dubai. We’ve got a thriving investment market here; you wouldn’t think companies like that needed investment, but something like Perfection, it’s going to go global, it’s going to go mega, I know, it’s changed my life! I’m going to get treatments!”
Five women on couches in the spa, the sea blue as the morning sky, the midday sky white as the midnight moon, filling the windows all around. Drinks in multicoloured layers brought in by Bangladeshi women with bright smiles, bowed heads. Of the five of us being served, only two were from Dubai, a princess something-something-of-somewhere with flawless English and her cousin Reina, who perhaps wasn’t a princess but it was hard to tell, who blogged about social reform and women’s rights and was, according to Leena:
“Wonderful, isn’t she just wonderful, but I do wish she was a little more… well, you know…”
A gesture, taking in the silent figure of Reina, who unlike the rest of us is wearing a swimsuit, not a bikini, and lies on her couch with laptop open, brows tight against the top of her nose.
“Treatments destroy your soul,” replied Reina quietly from her laptop, not looking up. “Treatments destroy who you are.”
“Darling,” exclaimed Leena, “some of us see that as a good thing.”
Now Reina’s gaze snapped up, met her cousin’s, held, turned away. “I just want to be myself,” she murmured.
“But is that good enough?” Leena mused, “Or is it just selfish?’ I went to sit by Reina’s side, asked what she was working on while the others relaxed around her.
“This is my jihad,” replied Reina, not looking up from her laptop. “This is my pilgrimage.”
Jihad: to struggle. To strive in the way of God.
I’ve always liked knowledge. It makes me feel like I’m real, part of something after all.
“Yesterday the police arrested a fourteen-year-old girl accused of sex outside marriage with an ice-cream vendor,” Reina mused, speaking to the computer, having learned long ago that no one else would listen to her. “He raped her, and will be deported. She is going to prison for adultery. I cannot accept that the rights of women are culturally relative.”
“You see!” exclaimed Leena, rolling on her couch so that the Filipino woman applying her platinum-metal body tattoo could reach the back of her neck. “Reina’s just so… so… well isn’t she just!”
“Have you got Perfection?”
An American woman, Suzy or Sandy or Sophie or something of that sort, who lay, back bare, chin down as thin pieces of gold foil were delicately brushed onto her skin, creating swirls and curves of thousand-dollar colour that followed the contours of her perfectly scrubbed, perfectly tanned, perfectly toned, perfect flesh.
I leant over from my couch to see what she was talking about.
“It’s an app,” she explained, turning for me to look. “A life-coaching tool, a way to make a better you. You sign up, give it access to your data, and it helps you get better!”
“What kind of data?” I asked.
“Oh, everything, really. Loyalty cards, air miles, online shopping, bank accounts. The more information it has, the better it can help you. Like, when I first signed up, I took a picture of myself and it was able to tell me my height, weight, shoe size, the lot — it’s clever, just so clever. And I was overweight then, I mean — well, I won’t tell you! — but it found better menus for me, good trainers, because that’s what matters, isn’t it? And every time you reach a goal, like, getting to your perfect weight or buying the perfect shoes from an in-app retailer, you get points, and after a number of points you get a subscription-linked experience!”
“What kind of experience?”
“Oh, just amazing, amazing. At five thousand I got a free haircut at Pike and Ion, it was sensational, they just understand hair. At ten thousand I got three hundred dollars of spending money to use at the SpringYou outlet at the mall, three hundred! I couldn’t believe it, but of course, the app knew what I bought, and just by buying the right clothes I got an automatic five-hundred-point bonus. I’m at fifty-two thousand points now, and can’t wait to see what the next unlock is.”