I grabbed my bag of dicks and headed to the subway. I found a crimson car and waited to see if anyone would change it back to candy-apple red. The subway cars didn’t change shade whimsically; there was an algorithm at play. Bio-meters were designed as orange-sized orbs that could fit in a palm. Sophie had a test model in her office, and while she refused to use it on me, she let me see a demo. She held it cupped in her hand, and the sphere turned forest green. She passed me the small monitor on her desk, which read, 8636, luminous contentment.

“Is that you?”

She smiled. “No, that’s one of the presets.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed her.

When corporate scientists began developing the Bio-meters, they created an offshoot that could gather the emotional data of many subjects. The subway was the perfect place for what became nicknamed the Butt-meter, which collected data from contact with riders’ buttocks (or hands on poles or feet, but butts clearly had the largest surface area) and turned the subway cars various shades. In more affluent areas, the shades were often quite pretty, and there was fierce speculation as to whether the Butt-meters were designed to skew toward pastel in those neighborhoods, or whether the inner world of heavily resourced folks was full of softer feelings.

Occasionally, even in nicer neighborhoods, a disconsolate person would enter a train and everyone would glare as the shade changed from faded coral to carrot-diarrhea. Certain mornings, a screaming baby would be lifted into tender, braceleted arms and the palest yellow was restored.

The train lightened as we moved toward Williamsburg. We crossed over the bridge in a state of juicy, liquid red. Of course, I had a fantasy that my feelings alone were potent enough to shift the subway cars, the walls of buildings, and even the atmospheric pressure of the city to my moods, whether salty or enlightened.

The train arrived at the Wall Street stop, where I could catch the white ferry. The fastest way to R would have been two buses, but that seemed an undignified mode to take for fucking a celebrity.

I walked up the station steps into the city air, onto a street with five salad shops for young lunching financiers.

I needed a snack before boarding. The last time I’d eaten dinner with R after a session, she’d pulled out cartons of dandelion greens, bean sprouts, and brown rice that her PA had left, plus kombucha and a good bottle of red wine. For a while afterward, my body felt “clean” and well, but two hours later I was ordering from the Chinese/Mexican place down the street that also served donuts that no one ever ordered and would end up in the to-go bags instead of fortune cookies. As I ate the soggy fish tacos in our dark kitchen, and then the chocolate donut with a surprising vanilla custard filling, I said MMM MMMM to myself. I was happy in my own little pasture without a perfect yet non-fulfilling meal, and wanted to yell at every internet article about how to “eat better.”