Currency of Desire

The first time I understood what had happened to the world, I was sitting across from my wife at a restaurant we couldn't afford, watching her push a thirty-dollar risotto around her plate like it was gravel.

Her name is Diane. We'd been married eleven years. We had a mortgage and a kid and a dog with a limp. Up until three weeks before that dinner, we'd had sex on Sunday mornings and sometimes on Wednesday nights if the kid fell asleep early. Regular. Good. The kind of sex that doesn't make headlines.

Then one Tuesday in October, every woman I knew stopped wanting it. Not some of them. All of them. My sister, my coworkers, the woman who cut my hair. It came on like a power outage, silent and total. The news called it the Suppression, which was a stupid name for something that felt like a door slamming shut in every bedroom on the planet.

Diane didn't want me to touch her. Not in that way. She still loved me, she said. She still liked being held. But the wanting, the actual hunger, was gone. She described it once as reaching for a light switch that wasn't there anymore. The wall was smooth. Nothing to flip.

I didn't handle it well. I'm not going to pretend I did. I sulked. I picked fights about dishes. I bought a gym membership I used twice.

So there we were at Il Forno, a place with white tablecloths and a wine list that made me wince, because Diane had said, two days earlier, that she wanted to try something. She wouldn't say what. She just said to dress nice and bring my credit card.

"You're not eating," I said.

She set her fork down. She has these long fingers, piano fingers, and she drummed them once on the linen. "I'm nervous."

"About risotto?"

"About telling you something."

The waiter came by. Diane ordered a second glass of the expensive Chianti, the one that cost more than my lunch. I noticed the price. I always notice the price. She noticed me noticing.

"Stop counting," she said.

"I'm not counting."

"You do the thing with your jaw."

I unclenched my jaw. The restaurant hummed around us, forks on porcelain, a birthday being celebrated two tables over. I remember thinking that everyone else looked normal. That's the cruel part of a slow catastrophe. Nobody looks like the world is ending. They just look like they're having dinner.

"Okay," Diane said. "I'm going to say it fast. When you bought me those earrings last month. The ones from the pawn shop."

"Your birthday."

"When I opened the box and saw them, I felt something. Down there. For the first time in weeks." She watched my face. "And then I felt it again when you paid the electric bill. And again when you put money in the jar for the beach trip."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "You're telling me you're turned on by paying bills."

"I'm telling you I'm turned on by money," she said. "Not by you. Not by the earrings. By the money."

The table went quiet between us. Not the restaurant. Just our table.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"I know."

"That's not how bodies work."

"I know, Mark."

She drank her wine. I watched her throat move when she swallowed, and I hated myself for watching, because the old reflex was still there, the one that said *look at her, she's yours, touch her*. That reflex had been living in my chest for eleven years. It didn't care about the Suppression. It didn't care about science.

"Say something," she said.

"Where did you hear this?"

"Everyone's saying it. The forums. My group chat. There's a researcher at Berkeley who posted a paper two days ago. It's not peer reviewed yet, but the numbers are insane." She leaned forward. Her eyes had that bright, hunted look they get when she's been reading too much on her phone. "It's not just me. It's all of us. The drive didn't disappear. It moved. It got rewired to a different currency."

"Currency," I said. "You mean literally money."

"I mean literally money."

I thought about my bank account. I thought about the number in the checking, the smaller number in savings, the kid's college fund we'd stopped contributing to in March. I thought about all of it, and I felt something cold crawl up my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

"How much?" I said.

"How much what?"

"How much money does it take? To feel something."

Diane looked away. She looked at the birthday table. She looked at the candle in the middle of it, the little flame wobbling. When she answered, her voice was small.

"I don't know yet. I've only felt it in little flickers. A hundred dollars. Two hundred. It's like a dimmer switch. The more money, the brighter it gets."

"And at the top?"

"Mark."

"At the top, Diane. What happens at the top?"

She didn't answer. She didn't have to. We both knew what was happening in the cities. We'd both seen the headlines about the brothels, the ones that had been dying for a decade and were suddenly booked solid, women lining up around the block to work them, men paying thousands for an hour. Nobody had explained it yet. Now I understood. The women weren't there for the men. They were there for the money. The money was the sex. The man was just the delivery mechanism.

I put my napkin on the table. I stood up. I don't know why. I just needed to be vertical.

"Sit down," Diane said.

"I need air."

"Sit down, Mark. Please."

I sat. She reached across the table and took my hand, and her hand was warm, and I felt nothing from it, no charge, no current. Just skin. Just my wife's hand.

"I'm not leaving you," she said. "I don't want anyone else. I want you. I just. I need to understand my own body. I need to figure out what I am now. And I can't do that if you're doing the jaw thing and counting the wine."

"I'm not counting the wine."

"You are."

I was.

The waiter brought the check. He set it in front of me, a little leather folder with the total written in blue pen. Diane watched me open it. She watched my face as I read the number. I felt her watching, and I felt something else too, something new, something I didn't have a name for yet. It wasn't arousal. It was worse. It was power. The number on that check was a lever, and I was holding it, and my wife was looking at me like I was a match in a dark room.

I paid. I put the card down and the waiter took it and brought it back and I signed, and the whole time Diane's eyes were on my hand, on the pen, on the little line where I wrote the tip.

Twenty percent. I wrote twenty percent. I don't know why. I'd never tipped twenty percent in my life.

In the car, she kissed me. Not the way she'd been kissing me for three weeks, the dry peck, the sisterly press. She kissed me like she used to, before October, before the Suppression, before the world turned itself inside out. Her hand found the back of my neck. Her breath was wine and garlic and something underneath that I'd missed so much it hurt.

"See?" she whispered against my mouth. "It's still there."

"It's the money," I said.

"It's you," she said. "It's the money and you. I don't know how to separate them anymore."

I drove home with one hand on the wheel and one hand on her thigh, and the whole way I kept thinking about the checking account, the savings, the college fund. I kept doing math. I kept converting my wife's body into dollars, and I hated it, and I couldn't stop.

The kid was asleep when we got home. The dog limped over to greet us. Diane went upstairs. I stood in the kitchen with the lights off and listened to the house settle, and I understood, standing there in the dark, that I was going to have to make a decision. Not tonight. But soon.

Because the world had found a new way to make women want, and I was a man with a mortgage and a limp dog and a number in a bank account that wasn't nearly big enough.

And I'd already started to wonder what I'd do to make it bigger.