The Only Place pt2

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.