Cull Party

second draft – Multiplicit universe

Marcus brings the lamb. He’s been doing the cooking since he moved to Raleigh — one of the ways you can tell he’s not you anymore. You’ve never had the patience for a four-hour braise. He sets the Dutch oven on the counter and lifts the lid and the kitchen fills with rosemary and wine and the particular smell of someone who cared about getting this right.

“Taste,” he says.

You taste. It’s perfect. You wouldn’t have made it this way. He knows this. He can see it in your face — the recognition, the tiny recalibration — and he grins the way you used to grin before his grin and yours stopped being the same grin.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to say it needed salt.”

He’s right. He’s almost always right about what you’re about to say.

There are five of you. There used to be six, but Anton — the earliest branch, split off eleven years ago when the business was expanding and someone needed to be in Singapore — Anton died in a ferry accident in the Strait of Malacca four years back. The textbooks say divergence is gradual and measurable. What they don’t say is that the measurement only matters when something breaks.

When Anton died, you cried for three days. Garrett sent flowers. Marcus asked about the life insurance. Jerome didn’t mention it for a week and then said, quietly, over the phone, “I keep reaching for memories that feel like they have a hole in them.” David said nothing, because David had spoken to Anton two days before the accident and knew something the rest of you didn’t, and it took him six months to say it, and by then the window had closed.

That’s five of you. Tonight it’ll be four.

You’re the one who volunteered. Everyone keeps saying the word with a particular emphasis, as though “volunteered” is doing more work than it can support. You volunteered the way someone volunteers to leave a lifeboat when the captain mentions the weight limit — not because you want the water but because you can do the arithmetic.

The house is Garrett’s. Oak floors, a back deck with a view of a creek that does nothing useful. Garrett kept the original career — financial planning, the thing you all trained for — and he’s the one the clients see when they walk in, and he’s good at it, better than you were when you were one person, because he has spent eight years doing only this while the rest of you wandered off into your various lives and got worse at the thing that pays for everything.

The business supports five branches. It used to support six, and then Anton died, and the budget relaxed, and you all felt that relief and didn’t name it. Now the market has contracted. The clients who diversified into clone-labor consulting have taken their portfolios elsewhere. Garrett’s pipeline is thinner. Jerome’s adjunct salary covers his rent. David’s nonprofit hasn’t turned a surplus in two years. Marcus cooks, teaches, coaches Little League, and earns roughly what the lamb cost. And you — you do data entry for a logistics company in Tucson, and you are the least productive branch of a collective that can no longer afford its current headcount.

You had “the numbers conversation” three months ago on a group call. Garrett shared his projections. Nobody said your name. Nobody had to.

Jerome arrives next. He’s thinner than the last time — adjunct pay and a divorce will do that — and he’s carrying a bottle of wine that costs more than he should have spent. He sets it on the counter next to the lamb and hugs you, and the hug lasts two seconds longer than it needs to, which is how you know.

“How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“Are you?”

“Jerome. I’m good.”

He’s always been the one who asks twice — a habit that developed after the split, not before. He found his way to tenderness through a marriage that failed and a discipline that requires you to take feelings seriously as data.

David shows up twenty minutes late with his husband, Paul, who is not one of you. Paul is a paramedic. He shakes your hand and says “Good to see you” and means it in the way that singletons mean things — without the layered awareness that turns every sentence between branches into a hall of mirrors.

Garrett is last, which is wrong — it’s his house — and you realize he’s been upstairs. When he comes down his eyes are the particular shade of red that means he’s been crying in a bathroom. You know this because you’ve been that shade of red in that specific way.

You eat. The lamb is outstanding. Marcus talks about his daughter’s soccer season — she’s nine, she plays striker, she has his competitiveness and her mother’s speed — and for ten minutes you are just people having dinner. Paul asks you about Tucson. You tell him about the heat, the light, the way the desert makes you feel like the last person on earth.

After dinner, Garrett pours the wine Jerome brought, and you move to the living room, and the shape of the evening shifts. There’s a ritual. Not codified the way a wedding or a funeral is — no officiant, no script. But there’s a structure that emerged from multiple culture over the past decade: template documents shared in forums, a standard sequence everyone knows even if nobody printed the handbook.

The custom is to eat first, settle the administrative paperwork between dinner and dessert, and hold the spoken portion last. Garrett brings out the Branch Reduction Agreement — a seven-page form, notarized, with the allocations already filled in. Your share of the collective income pool transfers to the remaining four in proportion to their current draw. The modest death-benefit payout from your branch-life policy — the one that every clone-group financial advisor recommends at formation — goes to the group trust. Marcus is the named witness. Jerome is the contingency witness. Their signatures go at the bottom. Yours goes at the top.

You sign. The pen is heavy and good. Garrett’s pen. You’ve always admired his taste in small objects.

There’s a separate form for the Tucson apartment: a pre-signed lease termination, effective the first of next month. Your landlord has done this before. The property management company has a checkbox on its standard lease — “Branch Reduction Clause” — that waives the early termination fee. You’d found this mildly unsettling when you moved in. Now it just saves paperwork.

Then the spoken portion. First beat: the others say what they’re carrying forward.

Marcus goes first. “Your pitch. The way you could walk into a room and read it in five seconds. I still do that. That’s yours.”

“That’s all of ours.”

“It’s different in you. Was different.” He catches the tense and doesn’t correct it.

Jerome: “The night we decided to split. The conversation at the kitchen table — you remember it the way I remember it, and after tonight nobody else will remember it from the inside. I’ll carry the memory, but it’ll be third-generation. Some of the edges will go soft.”

“They already have,” you say.

“I know. That’s what I’m saying.”

David doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then: “You read more than any of us. You actually read. You’ve read things none of us have read, and after tomorrow those thoughts just — stop.”

“You could read the same books.”

“I could. I won’t be reading them as you.”

Garrett says: “I’m carrying the business. That’s you too. The client philosophy, the risk framework — that’s the shared root.”

This is the part of the ritual where the departing branch says what he’s grateful for, what he’s leaving behind, what he wants the group to carry forward. You’ve read accounts of other prunings — some written by remaining branches, a few written by the departing branch in the days before. The standard gift — it’s almost always a standard gift now, recommended in the forums — is a handwritten letter to each remaining branch, sealed, to be opened afterward. You wrote yours last week at the kitchen table in Tucson. They’re in your bag.

You open your mouth to say the generous thing.

What comes out is: “Do you actually believe this?”

Nobody answers.

“The carrying-forward thing. The ‘your memories live in us’ thing. Do you believe it? Because I’ve been trying to believe it for three months, and I keep running into a problem.”

“What problem?” Jerome asks. His voice is careful. Philosophy-seminar careful.

“You don’t laugh at the same things I laugh at.”

It sounds small. It isn’t.

“Marcus — when was the last time you watched a movie that made you cry?”

He thinks. “I don’t really watch movies anymore.”

“I watched one last week. A documentary about a blind pianist. Forty-five minutes in, she’s tuning her own piano by ear, and she hits a wrong note, and her face does this tiny flinch, and I lost it. Completely. Would any of you have cried at that?”

Silence.

“Jerome — you’d have found it interesting. You’d have thought about phenomenology and written a note. Garrett, you wouldn’t have watched it. David, you’d have watched it with Paul and felt something and moved on. Marcus, you’d have been at practice.”

“That doesn’t mean —” Garrett starts.

“It means that thing — that specific Tuesday night, that cry — dies with me. You can carry the memory of the me who would have cried at something like that. But the me who actually did? He’s only here.” You tap your chest.

“That’s divergence,” Jerome says quietly. “That’s what divergence means.”

“I know what it means. I’m saying the ritual story doesn’t account for it.”

David’s husband Paul is looking at his hands. He’s the only person in the room who has never had to think about this, and you can see it landing differently because he’s hearing it without the insulation of the culture. Outside groups — singletons, the press, the ethics boards — they hear “cull party” and think something barbaric is happening. That misunderstanding is part of why every guide recommends keeping these evenings private, domestic, among branches only. Paul is the exception. David asked, and the group agreed, and now Paul is sitting in the room where the exception proves the rule.

“I’m not refusing,” you say. “The math is the math. If I stay, the numbers don’t work. Two of Jerome’s students defaulted on tuition this semester. David’s nonprofit is on fumes. Marcus has a nine-year-old who needs braces and a travel team and eventually a college fund. I’ve done the arithmetic. Me staying costs you more than me leaving.”

“That’s not how we think about it,” Marcus says.

“It’s exactly how we think about it. It’s how I thought about it when I volunteered.”

Garrett refills your wine. You let him.

“I have a question,” you say. “And I don’t want the ritual answer. I want the real one.”

They wait.

“When you think about me — after. What are you going to remember? The version of me that existed when we split? Or the version that exists right now?”

It’s a real question. The version that existed when you split was all of you — same memories, same instincts. That version is easy to carry because he’s already inside each of them. But the version that exists right now — the one who moved to Tucson and took a bad job and watched a documentary and cried, the one who has spent three months not sleeping well and reading everything he can get his hands on because the books are running out — that version is yours alone.

“Both,” David says.

“You can’t carry both. One of them is a stranger.”

“He’s not a stranger. He’s you.”

“He’s the me that none of you became.”

Outside, the creek. The sound of good real estate.

“I’ll go through with it,” you say. “I said I would and I will. But I want you to know what it is. Not what the culture says. What it actually is.”

“What is it?” Jerome asks.

“It’s you ending the branch who got expensive. And telling yourselves a story about continuity so it doesn’t feel like that.”

Marcus sets down his glass. “That’s not fair.”

“No.”

Paul gets up and goes to the kitchen and comes back with water and sets a glass in front of each of you.

Morning. You didn’t sleep. Marcus makes breakfast. Eggs, toast, fruit. The kitchen smells ordinary and you stand in it and let that be enough.

The appointment is at two. The clinic handles end-of-life services for multiples — not the cloning facility, a separate practice. The branch-reduction insurance covers the procedure fee; the remainder pays into the group trust, earmarked for Marcus’s daughter’s education fund. This is standard. Most advisors recommend designating a minor dependent. It makes the tax treatment cleaner and it gives the departing branch a line in the next generation’s life, which the forums say helps. You don’t know if it helps. You signed the form.

Jerome drives you. He doesn’t play music. Forty minutes on the highway, neither of you speaking. It’s the most honest forty minutes of the whole visit.

In the parking lot he turns to you.

“The documentary,” he says. “The blind pianist. What was her name?”

“Hana. Hana Ito.”

“I’ll watch it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to.”

He’s crying. You’re not, which surprises you. You feel something you don’t have the right word for — a calm that isn’t peace and isn’t resignation. The feeling of having said the true thing in the room where it was unwelcome, and having it change nothing about what happens next.

You get out of the car.

“Jerome.”

“Yeah.”

“It was a good dinner.”

He laughs. It’s wet and broken and it sounds like yours used to, back when yours and his were the same laugh, and for one second you can hear the overlap — a shared frequency, fading.

You close the door. The clinic is beige. The plant is real.

You go in.