Helen and I had a beautiful apartment when we were young. It was warm and orange and opened from a low hallway into a vaulted living room. We were lucky to be on the fourteenth floor, where the building’s pattern broke and the levels spaced out into commercial floors, leaving us the outlier to our complex’s design. What’s above us? I asked the realtor, when we were looking at the place. Office space, he returned. This apartment’s on the best floor. Regular floor—he gestured—high ceilings. The pattern breaks in your favor. A few months in, the gatherings began. It seems we had a dinner party every weekend, and every other time there was some new member. I liked her, Helen would say after the guests left, giving a kind of pointed approval to future occasions, and I’d agree.

Helen was very into olive oils. Different infusions of olive oils, specifically. She mixed basil from our windowsill herb garden with the more pungent garlic from an organic market in SoHo and steeped them in extra virgin olive oil as if returning to some archaic practice. We tasted her creations like it was a ritual, using a shallow ceramic dish from Helen’s mom and plating the oil with bread and thin tomato slices. The garlic’s health overpowered our milder herbs, the corners of Helen’s eyes and the tip of her nose went pink, and she rubbed her fingers nervously. 

“Do you like it?” She looked up through her brown hair and asked, laughing and knowing the oil was unpalatable. She tried again, some mixture of fig and rosemary. The fig clogged the lip of the olive oil bottle, so she filtered the mixture, then poured it into a mason jar. This one was better. We ate it on bread and wine which left my mouth dry until I doused my tongue with the soft sponge of oil-soaked bread and my lips, her lips, became touched by the moisture again and then we began to kiss, there in the tangerine room with the high ceiling. Somehow we went from the wooden table to the relaxed green couch in the living room. Her head rested on my chest, and in that most relaxed position I stretched my arms above me and rotated my wrist, the orange-haloed shadow of my fingers against the backdrop of white ceiling losing its depth as I watched. Then, embarrassed by my self-absorption, I looked down at the way her looping curls spread over me and my fingertips found the place where the brunette waves began and she’d look at me with just one crinkling eye, and I’d think about how she was the most beautiful woman in the world. 

Some of our dinner parties were unexpectedly lively. I remember one in particular, some time in the rainy part of early fall, that Helen leaned forward, nearly out of her seat, to argue with a younger man from her office. I remember the slight jealousy I felt, at her intensity and animation, which she’d displayed with me at the beginning of things, but then I saw in the young man’s eyes a kind of unreadiness, and my envy dissolved. She must have been drawn to and equally disappointed by that wide, fearful look; perhaps the things he did not know reminded her of what she did know, momentarily making her feel like a whole woman, and then reminding her how she wanted a whole man. I put my hand on her back, where her shirt was just coming out of its tucked position in her loose brown skirt, and she leaned back into me, reminded of my eyes and touch, my apparent readiness. After the guests left, we walked out onto the dark shining street. It had stopped raining, and in the humid chill I felt the brief surprise of an unfamiliar temperature, a new season asserting itself. 

That was the time when Helen had a steady job, and I was looking for one. Now, at the end of the night, the issue was there, when she put her arms on my shoulders and looked up at me, and I felt there might be some kind of emanation of grayness coming off me that had only begun to radiate after the guests had left. She put her palm to the side of my cheek and skimmed it along the stubble which grew there. I blushed and told her I’d shave tomorrow. I didn’t tell her about the job interview I had at an artificial intelligence company. We walked into the lobby and took the elevator, and she went ahead to shower. I sat at the wooden island and looked at the jars of olive oil. I apologized to them, that night, the cloves of garlic and the sprigs of rosemary, through the yellow oil, whispering, I don’t know. I have to. I stared without blinking at the saturated herbs until their borders and colors blurred, I cracked my knuckles one by one, then pushed up from the table and went to bed. 

I got the job. It was a difficult thing to keep secret from Helen, and one week in, we had dinner and I told all. 

“So you’d been working on this.”

I nodded. She took the information silently, blinking perhaps a little more than usual and doing an unconscious thing with her fingers and wrists. There wasn’t an outcome by the end of the night. I noticed she asked me more questions after that; she was more direct about things. I felt she trusted me less, but only minimally. I was like a plastic cup that had almost fallen over when being poured into once and which she held fast to the table every time afterward. We didn’t have any less sex. She wasn’t the kind of woman, I supposed, who’d withhold, or go cold in some silent and holy way after feeling slighted—she was loud in her body. She wanted me as much as I did her, and without shame, she would take what she needed when she pleased. She used me, she knew the power of those dark curls, and I swore she’d let them fall in her face on purpose. 

We would get out of work at the same time in the afternoon, only twelve blocks apart and near SoHo, so we’d go to a restaurant or the organic market. It felt like victory, getting home from work and dinner, walking into the apartment and clattering the keys down on the hall table in the middle of some joke. We took off our clothes and each time, her mouth had a different flavor, it was the cold earthy taste of bean sprouts, the tang of balsamic vinegar, on her lips a coating of flour and charcoal. 

Things began to take off at work. Multiple coworkers above me expressed fear online about the end of the world. It was on my mind for a few weeks. I didn’t work in their offices, and though I was included in some of the company-wide groupchats, I wouldn’t be able to put a face to the names of the most active participants in the messaging platforms. I was employed in a different section, mostly unrelated to the actual pursuit of a greater intelligence. It was around that time that Helen would look at me with some reverent, elated sense of wanting to be a mother. I wanted that for her, too, and believed she would make for an exceptional mother. I wasn’t sure whether it was my children she should have; it seemed an impossibility that there could exist new beings who would be part of me, come from me, and that they would be Helen’s and my responsibility. It would inevitably be the worst of me that Helen would incubate in these children and which they themselves would inherit. In bed one night, she, wrapped in a blanket while I lay not yet in my night clothes atop the sheets, brought us to the subject. I was stifled by apprehension and rehearsal, forgetting to voice the parts of my reasoning which I’d emphasized too many times in my mind. She was quiet for the rest of the night. 

It was a bad phase for us. She talked less of her work, and the dinner parties spaced themselves out like our bodies in bed at night. We tried, of course, in bursts of desire which came from compromise and mutual weakness, from moments when our problems didn’t seem all that threatening, but then I’d feel it, the heaviness, the memory of a conversation coming back to her as she tried to move against me. And she would feel me feel it and she’d stop, and our love became sex, but not with the excitement and mystery it had enjoyed in the beginning. She turned off the lights and would not look at my eyes, and I knew they must have grown unready.

At work, we nearly lost everything. I remember I was having a conversation on the elevator with a coworker about his daughter who had just joined sixth-grade band when the doors slid open to the silent office. Most workers sat at their desks, tapping their pencils. That’s the sound I most remember, the tapping, feet, pens, pencils, fingers trembling on desks. The computers were all black. Some spoke, intermittently a worker would become angry, but between these outbreaks of noise it was uncannily silent, like a power outage during the daytime. We stared at the computers and tapped. We were told to go home and informed later what had happened. A larger, more advanced artificial intelligence company had hacked us, stolen our data, and shut down our entire system. It was apparently accidental. There were differing opinions around the office, and the whole thing went around online for a few months. Then we all moved on.

One night Helen came home crying. She ran toward me and halted, then came into my arms and slid to the floor, taking me with her. 

“I tried doing something about this,” she started and shook her head, burrowing saliva and snot into my chest. 

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. She pulled back and looked at me.

“But I-”

I rested my forehead against hers.

“Helen, whatever happened, it’s been hard, we’ve been–” I stopped. I really didn’t know what to say. I felt our problems were irreconcilable. I remembered something. 

“We haven’t been a team, Helen.”

She let out a sigh. I resorted to the ideal of our friendship, appealing to the idea that it had come first and was somehow greater, that we hadn’t been supremely attracted to one another from the start and that we didn’t depend on the cozy orange apartment near Riverside park, our two compatible bodies and similar taste in friends, the environment we’d created around us to alleviate concerns beyond whim and desire. I held her fast but I felt suddenly that I was not the man who was holding her fast. I liked that she had a thing for olive oil. She liked that I had seemed like a whole man to her whole womanness. While she cried I spoke softly and calmly so she might consider later how mature I’d acted while she was bawling in my arms, and think with renewed confidence that perhaps I was a ready man, but as I comforted her I did not know if we would make it. 

We did not know it then, but when we made love that night—and it was making love, for she looked me in the eye and this time it wasn’t empty, she was reclaiming a mandate, one she’d decided was, in fact, hers for the sacrifice—we did not know that it would be the last time. When she looked me in the eye and I felt a sharp desire to look away, the thought sprang up that it might be the last time, but the choice was not mine to make. 

As Helen and I had been getting closer to knowing one another, so had the company been getting closer to knowing everything. Our A.I.—which had been rapidly innovated after the initial attack, and which had picked up the capabilities of its attacker only to venture uncontrollably further—reached the singularity. I was not in the office that day. I was at the wooden kitchen island with Helen, smiling, the apartment was brightly lit, and we had a small gathering planned for later that night. She made a joke that hinged on a reference to the cat I’d had as a child and I saw the glint in her eye through her brown curls, and then it happened. Our world suddenly knew creation, the size of the universe, the meaning of life, the way Helen and I could work, and what happens when you never get around to figuring it out.

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Ellen Kramer produces new olive oils and new love.