She’d gotten
his email address two or three months ago from the bottom of an article he’d
published in an obscure site run by a former professor. Some barely serious,
stoner-philosophizing drivel about the evolution of celebrity worship syndrome
that focused on the potential illuminati symbolism of matching fingerless
gloves worn by Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a diabetes fundraiser. She wrote to Roger
about how she liked his acknowledging that the “legal framework in post-racial
America relies on the myth that universally held racist concepts no longer
exist,” and was especially impressed with his portrayal of Beyoncé, noting that
it reminded her of “dat slutty girl who you keep around bc she's a hot mess and
makes you feel better about your life and always has good stories bc she's a
pathological liar - who i havent talked to since high school aka before she got
married at age 18 to a guy who needed a visa and a jap to support him, just fb
messaged me asking if she could use my email to send an email....????? because
she lost her pw. wut?”
He’d given
up actual psychological research as an undergrad, and writing was just an
at-work hobby in the downtime between preparing invoices and market analyses,
but it felt cool to have a fan. Even if she didn’t seem like the
throws-panties-on-stage type. Even if she didn’t seem like any type.
Her name was
Allison Anvil, which sounded like a proto-feminist but retroactively offensive
comic book character, like her profile and online persona could actually be
administered by a balding dweeb-turned-identity thief named Kevin trolling in
his basement for passwords and social security numbers.
Roger knew
she was real, though. As in, definitely not a dude.
Their
exchanges followed a natural progression: gchats, texts, friend requests. Her
mobile uploads and posting history formed a more or less complete depiction of
her last five years, too thorough to be forged. There were throwback shots of
high school beach trips, a blurry ride on Disney World teacups, split-screened
celebrity lookalikes, vodka-happy off-campus posturing. Diatribes about
Holocaust Remembrance Day and World of Warcraft. A Young Democrats dinner
highlighted by a Bill Clinton handshake a cheek-nuzzle from an ex-boyfriend who
Roger imagined looked kind of like a younger version of himself minus ~15
pounds of beer fat. And the most recent pics – an intentionally unflattering
wedgie shot on a zip line in El Salvador, drinking simultaneously (with work
colleagues?) from a mammoth bowl of neon-infused sludge, their duckfaces
straw-induced and therefore acceptable.
The kind of
stuff Roger imagined he’d see and read from Jocelyn – the neighbor who
sometimes did her laundry at the same time as him in their building’s communal
basement dungeon and, when she wasn’t buried in her phone, looked to be around
the same age as Allison – if they’d been friends on Facebook or in reality.
Roger was a
man who had done so much laundry.
He still lived
in the first apartment he’d looked at on Craigslist, stayed put through several
drug- or career-related roommate transitions and absurd rent increases, worked
at the same firm where he’d started out even though he was mostly bored and
there wasn’t much of a chance for upward mobility. He used the same hair
product – “power putty for a windblown surfer look!” – long after his scraggly
faux-surfer days had ceased. But in the seven years since he’d graduated and
moved to New York, he’d allowed himself to be snared by commitment only once,
and that was brief and mostly on Skype with a younger girl who was still at the
school he’d gone to in Maryland, who couldn’t deal with the distance between
them and her desire for at least two members of the ultimate frisbee team.
That someone
so steeped in routine, who seemed to crave stability above all else, would
remain single for so long was puzzling to the friends and coworkers who populated
the periphery of Roger’s life. He wasn’t overly antisocial, didn’t suffer from a
recurring skin condition or extraordinarily gross breath; he was no better or
worse than the majority of his blue-collared-shirted and IPA-swilling comrades.
And there were
girls. One or two a month, sometimes fewer during dry spells. Standard
bar-hookups, Tinder dates, encounters at alumni functions. Connections that
lasted a couple hours, or petered off after a few increasingly half-hearted
(and foggier) mornings after. Companionship reduced to a series of exploits
where the names had been redacted or forgotten, from the occasionally
outrageous – the day trader who let him put it in her ass after he bought a $400
bottle of Grey Goose and told her his Kindle sales rivaled James Franco’s, the
daddy-funded poet from whom he received a period blood mustache without proper
warning and who later tried to cover up by asking he’d had a nosebleed – to the
more pedestrian and sadder: a text-message moratorium, an unrequited friend
request.
It wasn’t that
he was incapable of reciprocating passion, that his shallow-seeming emotions
were feigned and served an ulterior motive.
He was alone
because above all else, Roger loved ideas.
Age seven or
eight, he remembered sitting in Sunday school, listening to a watered-down
version of Revelation, thrilled by the cartoon chaos it evoked. Afternoons, he
would spend hours alone in his room, creating his own action-figure End of Days
– Skeletor or Mumm-Ra as the Antichrist, Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as
angelic mediators, Ninja Turtles as the Four Horsemen (duh). But a couple of
years later, during a particularly rough stretch of summer that included the
demise of a grandparent, a cat, and a Siamese fighting fish, death became something
far more brutal and uncertain than the easy deus ex machina redemption found in
swiftly dismembering a tiny villain’s plastic limbs. If there was a god, Roger no
longer wanted to be a part of its ineptness.
Instead, he
focused on another portal that was plastic and mostly reliable and seemingly infinite.
A penetrable citadel of unsupervised mischief where age/sex/location was as
malleable as his grasp of geography and his desire to blend in to whatever chatty
den of liars and pedophiles he’d clicked into. His first girlfriend was
ninety-eight percent instant messages and two percent hugs before and after
school. When she broke up with him in-person a few days before the eighth grade
semi-formal, using more words than she’d spoken to him in the past month, he
was only shocked because her messages the previous evening had included the
requisite number of extra vowels and exclamation points – byebyeee talk to u sooooon!!!! – to make it seem like everything
was going smoothly.
High school
nights, holed up in a parental home office suckling on filched Bacardi, he
would scroll through his AIM contacts, initiating conversations with girls
whose screen names he’d acquired in mostly sheepish exchanges or gleaned even
more awkwardly from nonplussed friends. He devised and honed a system for
gathering information, for establishing a connection that somehow seemed more
meaningful because it usually played out on his own terms, the rehearsed-yet-casual
sequences of manipulation that belied the painfully ordinary, pimple-skinned
insecurity that consumed his non-typing life. He’d start with a simple, hi, hey, hello, wait for the nm u? response, and then it was on. After
enough practice, it wasn’t difficult to always act interested and to keep the
exchanges flowing with as little dead time as possible. The trick was in
controlling the flow, carving its direction. If KatyKay40286 from French 201 complained
about the frumpy patterns rimming her newly issued field hockey skirt, he would
commiserate by mentioning how his water polo coach had screwed up everyone’s
Speedo sizes – yea sucks its a little
uh…tight hehe. After her expected LOLish response, he might conjecture that
while he was certainly uncomfortable, it was probably nothing compared to the
sports bras she was forced to endure (KatyKay40286 being a notable subject of
bust-related speculation). If everything was progressing at an acceptable pace,
Roger would suggest that they play The Question Game, basically formalizing
what they’d already been doing. The only rules were that you had to alternate
asking each other questions, one at a time, and that while the questions could
be about anything, yes/no answers were strictly discouraged. The game would
start innocently enough – what series of
decisions do you think caused Mr. Neary to become the kind of teacher whose
coffee mug reeks of Kahlua every first period? – but would quickly veer
toward the quasi-erotic:
whats your favorite position?
how big is/are your [ ]?
The
questions were tamer than much of what he’d encountered as a barely pubescent
chat room devotee, but there was a thrill in the forging of textual intimacy, an
arousal that was on par with what he imagined actual physical contact would
elicit. If the girl got skittish and stopped playing or signed off before the
game turned interesting, he could always resort to another less pleasurable,
but not-without-its-merits hobby: scouring the streaming video landscape in
order to check in on which of his favorite starlets – souls he felt he had
grown to understand almost as well as the minds behind the screen names he
hoarded – was farther along on the oft-tread path from casting couches and coy
handjobs to triple penetration and rectal prolapse.
To an adult
Roger, Allison was a welcome throwback to an almost-forgotten era, an aspect of
himself that had once been indispensable. It wasn’t anything sexual; the need
to fulfill unrequited horny-boy urges no longer existed. Instead, they traded some
of the facts – her recent graduation from a small school in a rust-colored
Pennsylvania city, his summer share house on Fire Island – and the obsessions –
her resentment of a single-mother childhood and the sperm donation that led to
her creation, his constant fear of colorectal cancer due to rye whiskey and chronic
McDonald’s addiction – that comprised their inner and outer lives. She was fascinatingly
ADHD, filterless, able to jump, in the space of a few lines, from her internship
at a law firm where she was trying hard not to perpetuate “America’s
meritocracy myth,” to her quest to scour the internet for the most awful
sounding white baby names (my personal
favorite so far is Kamdyn – murder capitol of new jersey), to delightfully
random and gross conjectures: would you
rather be murdered and have your corpse jizzed on by 1000 men while it lies at
the bottom of a ditch OR your corpse + ditch + 1 man with a bucket of his semen
that he has been storing for years OR 1000 women menstruate on you your corpse
+ ditch?
The best
part was that for all she confessed, she never demanded equal revelations from him.
She could discuss how her college roommate was a popular webcam model who got
paid to play videogames in an elf costume and how sometimes Allison would play
with herself and wipe her fingers on the plastic ears, or how her brief bulimia
phase was so extreme that she wouldn’t go to class unless she was guaranteed a
seat by the door and a bathroom/garbage bin was nearby, and Roger wouldn’t feel
compelled to talk about how he cried every night for a couple years after he
and some friends beat a pregnant squirrel to death with a nine iron or how he
and his neighbor Timmy, before his mother found out about it, would take turns
wiping themselves as part of a game they called “family time.” All he had to do
was keep the conversation going with a word or two, feign the vaguest interest.
He would come
home from work or the bar or wake up late on a weekend morning, turn on one of
his devices, and know that in a few moments he would be inundated with the same
pleasantly unchecked stream of Millennial pathos and pop culture:
-
ugh
roggerrrrr im dying
i
took a vicodin
but
i just took it
whenever
i get really bad insomnia i get scared that i've developed bipolar
because
that's an early warning sign
and
this is the age when people show their first symptoms
like
stay awake for a week straight babbling like a homeless veteran
oh
no. katy perry is back on Reddit.
save
me from myself.
He could
absorb her unique brand of damage until sated, take what he wanted and give
back less.
-
Sounds
awful :( I gotta pick up a jacket at
the dry cleaner. Later
After about
a year Allison started trying to meet Roger in person. Initially it was subtle.
She was thinking of staying at a friend’s in Brooklyn in two weekends, would he
be around if they took a train into the city? She had to come in next Wednesday
to get her passport renewed at a Midtown office that happened to be near where
Roger worked, would he want to get smoothies?
Foiled by
half a dozen limp excuses, she became painfully direct. They could hang out on
his schedule. What weekends did he have free? When was she going to finally
going to meet the roommate who used Febreze as body wash? She would have no
problem sleeping on the couch as long as less than three sex offenders lived in
his building.
Roger knew
that it might go down like this, that she would eventually try to sabotage the
idea of herself he had worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. He wasn’t skilled
enough at Instagram to keep conjuring images of the imaginary places that
coincided with his cop-outs, so he tried broaching the subject honestly.
-
Do
you ever think that if we met in person it would ruin our internet bond?
its
just that once you meet in person, that’s it, it's no longer an internet
friendship and there's no turning back and reinternetizing it.
Her middle-finger
emojis were swift, relentless.
He was
selfish. He was a solipsist. He was needy and emotionally dependent. He was
gross and old. He was too privileged to understand the consequences of cultural
appropriation. He wore the same Third Eye Blind tee shirt in at least 15 of his
pictures, none throwbacks.
Though Roger
agreed with roughly two thirds of her accusations, he didn’t feel the sting of
her absence until the third day of signed-off silence. His friends had left the
bar and he had secured a reluctant seventh pint from Jessica, who knew his
tipping calculations would begin to suffer greatly. He was looking at a
Buzzfeed list of horrible sounding vegan Trader Joe’s products and wanted to
text Allison the link. He tried thinking of someone else whose opinion about
the article he would find interesting or worthwhile, and couldn’t. Least of all
Jessica, who was viewing the possibly dwindling pile of singles in front of his
beer with increasing trepidation. With Allison he could drink to the point of
being a dickhead and send stupid shit to her and regardless of her response he
would know that he was on the same wavelength with her for at least a few
moments, what he imagined it would be like to have someone worth coming home
to.
Now he was
simply another lonely dick.
When she
signed back on (heyyy dummy I still h8t
you and im never coming to ny but hows ur week been??) he decided he would be
more engaged, give a little more of himself, enough not to lose her again. Even
if she only wanted to tell him about sending her ex-boyfriend pictures of her
armpit stubble or her ideas about the patriarchy’s relationship to
anti-Semitism that evolved into a treatise on the ineptness of female biology.
He would
try.
-
if i could
redesign lady parts, balls would be on the inside, as would clits, and there
would be no vagina, just a little hole, covered by the labia. and nobody would
have hair.
it
would be like the iOS 11 of genitalia.
-
isnt that
pretty much what a vag is
a hole covered by labia
-
no there's
the other shit inside
i don't know what it's called
the labia minora!
-
idk i kind
of like my genitalia
-
you're the
only one.
the worst is when guys send dick
pics.
like okay, i can tell if someone
has a nice dick but i don't need to see a picture of it.
-
note to
self do not send dick pics anymore
-
i'm not
going to get off to a picture of an erect penis
-
lol
-
you would
never send a dick pic
-
lol only
if asked
-
send me
one
thats what snapchat was made for
-
i dont
have an erection tho
-
that and
me sending pictures of my boobs with animal faces drawn on them
a new hobby of mine
how hard is it to get an erection?
pun intended
-
very punny
-
now i'm
inspired to send another boob animal
-
do it
-
not to
you. i would only send it to you in exchange for a dick pic.
-
what about
a soft dick pic
-
nope
-
haha ok
-
i just
sent my friend a boob puppy.
-
are you
going to have me arrested if i send one
-
no!
as long as you don't screenshot
mine
-
i dont
even know how to do that
He really
didn’t know how, and wouldn’t have done it anyway. He wouldn’t piss her off
again. But the reference to a relative state of permanence awoke in him a
twinge of memory, an ugliness he tried to shake off while looking for his phone
in the bowels of a clothes pile.
While
Allison waited, faceless and soundless.
