Jake led me through the club, walking with a languid gait, his shoulders rolled back so that his heart looked open and imperiled. We sat at a sticky banquette. There was a bucket on the table before us, champagne on ice, clean flutes on a tray. He poured me one, tipping the glass to stanch the foam, graceful in how he held the stem, which felt breakable in my hand, dangerous. I tried to look comfortable. Jake sat back and sipped, so I did also. We checked our phones, turned them face down, checked again, sipped again. A waitress brought tiny strawberries on a platter and Jake plopped one into my champagne. It fizzed at the bottom until I swallowed it whole and poured myself another glass. Jake talked about his latest trip, to Peru, where he had done Ayahuasca and “seen the point of it all.”

“I’m telling you,” he said, “something clicked in my brain, like a new neural pathway. Like, before I would have looked at you and seen your hair, you skin, your smile, your eyes, your whole ascetic.”

“Aesthetic,” I said.

“Anyway, now I see your soul, and the fucking crazy thing is, it’s my soul too.”

We were, Jake said, as all humans and animals and plants and life forms were, part of the same consciousness, divided at birth into independent bodies. He touched his collarbones, his pecs. He tapped his phone and was silent for a beat, checking. He turned back to me, touched my leg.

“It’s all an illusion,” he said, and I knew he was making a commitment, telling me this mindset informed his managerial skills, which he called “conscious” and “nurturing.”

I was humoring him when I nodded, smiled, told him he was right. I was playing a part to get to his power, measuring every move I made against moves I’d seen other desirable women—girls—make: the way Daul Kim leaned forward for the camera, swan-necked and skinny-armed; the way Kendall Jenner touched her fingers to the tip of her shoulders, turned a cheek, and glowered. My body was the result of those other women’s bodies, and now the club itself, which had closed around me and altered what power meant to me, what it looked like, and who I was willing to become, to make power my own. This was experience, adulting, trying on roles, creating my own reality. A reality in which Jake, who had at first seemed corny and canned, was starting to glow, a twilit vampire, his skin like a little girl’s fantasy of paternal love, always beaming.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said and stood, pulled me up with him. I followed him back through the crowd, back down the dark canal and into a night that was brighter now, a sort of daylight.