Golden Age Redux

Close to hyperventilation, you can mouth a few of the mantras you’ve developed until you find one that seems to work. “All of my electronic devices have abnormally long battery lives,” you might repeat, lips scraping the pillow. Other lapses in composure require variations on the theme. “I’m a white man with a Nordic complexion living in a state with harsher than average gun laws. I have better medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. My frequent customer card at the local deli is one hole-punch away from a sandwich valued at up to $10. In the event of any significant hair loss my head is nicely shaped and conducive to shaving.” The talismans that, with varying degrees of success, hold back the dreams that are always about running, running that’s never recreational.

At 28, you tell yourself in another black moment, your world is failing.

You’re fucked.

But you’ve got to remember, you’ve always been a headcase. There were the night terrors that started at age four or five, when not being able to sleep meant death was inevitable. The time when you puked Raisin Bran before school and for the next three months, automatic reflex, you woke up around dawn and started dry heaving, sometimes making it to the toilet but usually not, bile stains on the hallway rug, a routine that was squelched by a prescription for what you years later found out was high-end Pepto-Bismol that tasted like red velvet cake. And even distant relatives still remind you about the time when you watched a news story about a girl who underwent a tracheotomy to remove a nickel she’d swallowed. You spent the next week choking yourself because you had just upgraded your piggy bank and something could have slipped and who knows? You had to be sure.

Now it’s summer and you’ve just gone on a fishing trip back in Connecticut because your old man’s retiring and he wants to see you more. Late afternoon, you’re sitting in the garage, cleaning the fish you caught and swatting flies away from your beers. You watch your old man examine your subpar work, the messy fillets that are plentiful of bones and skin fragments, the perfectly good chunks of flesh you accidentally flung into the blood-crusted bucket reserved for organ gunk and skeletal remains. You brace for another lecture about technique but your old man stays quiet, places a fillet knife on the cutting board.

“When I’m gone,” he says, “who’s going to show your kids? I won’t be here forever.”

At night in your childhood bedroom in your parents’ house, you look at yearbook pictures of someone you don’t recognize.

Now you’re choking yourself again, saying the mantras.

It doesn’t take much.

When you return to the city where you live you make an appointment with a shrink with an ethnically androgynous name whose mostly positive online reviews you’ve been tracking for months, even though you couldn’t find any pictures of him/her, but you’re cool with it because the office is one of only a few that take your out-of-pocket plan. You sign in with the doorman in the lobby of a 70s-ish concrete abortion that looks like every downtown building, read headlines on the elevator flatscreen about a man falling 65 feet at a baseball game and the Dalai Lama’s website inflicting viruses on its visitors. You get off on the correct floor where you assume there will be an office with a comfortable couch in a dimmed setting, a Morgan Freeman type with the gravitas and wisdom of two centuries of psychoanalytic progress. You walk into a hospital-light cubicle. Behind a purring desktop and a tissue box sits a mousey South Asian woman who can’t be more than five or six years older than you.

“I’m Dr. K­—,” she says, standing up and extending a hand. “Have a seat and tell me what’s going on.”

The clinical florescence of the overhead light accentuates the shrink’s mottled, child-scar complexion. Your chair is comfortable enough but you wouldn’t want to watch TV in it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about dying,” you say, getting right into it because you’re on the clock, eyeing the tissues. “Actually it’s pretty much all I’ve ever fixated on. Not really my own death. I think about my parents getting old, the elderly people I see limping alone down the street, fat kids snarfing Tropical Skittles and Doctor Pepper. I guess it’s not that weird but for me it’s like, palpable. I think I’m losing weight, circles under my eyes. My mother says they’re hereditary but I never really noticed until recently.”

“Are you religious?”

“No. Spiritual maybe. I don’t know.”

“This is something that people have been wrestling with since before the language existed to express it. The ultimate hang-up. There aren’t any real answers, at least none I’m qualified to provide.”

Morgan Freeman’s voice wouldn’t have made it sting any less.

“Morgan Freeman is a false god,” you whisper to no one.

She asks you about your education, your hobbies, your sexual preferences. You imagine that each of your thoughts about death has contributed one mile-per-hour to the speed of a car you’re driving on a road with a singular destination, a cliff of an unknown depth. “You’ve got to try to stay in the moment,” she says at the end of the session, “in the present, stay busy. If the negative thoughts start to creep in, think of something positive in your life. It’s much more beneficial to be your own architect than to focus on things no one can control.”

The pep talk is beyond hackneyed, but you’ve always been susceptible to encouragement. It’s why you got good grades. When you leave the office and watch the video streaming in the elevator about a circus bear in Azerbaijan who has learned to ride a motorcycle, your hands stop shaking.

In terms of demographics, pigment, and the geography of your birth, you are lucky.

You stop smoking weed every day, lift free weights a few times a week, have coffee with friends you haven’t seen in a while who you consider “optimistic” and not “coke-jaded.” You initiate conversations with women at the restaurant where you’re a manager and at the bars where you drink and these encounters are occasionally successful, i.e. frictional. You re-read the Eastern philosophy textbooks that you were drawn to as an undergrad and that now make the tattoos that say “BE HERE NOW” in Sanskrit on your hip and the Chinese character the guy in the shop said means “Tao” on your back a little less like Phish-related mistakes and more like the fulfillment of a promise you made without knowing it. If everything exists in one moment, before might be irrelevant, and more importantly, maybe there won’t be an after.

One night you burrow deep in a Wikipedia hole that ends with dozens of open tabs related either generally or explicitly to transhumanism, which, you read, is “a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition, including radical life extension to the point of biological immortality, fostering a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life.” The idea that you might, in the tangible future, be able to overcome physical limitations through radical technologies that are already being funded, to diffuse the death switch.

You love this shit.

“You crazy fuck,” you say to yourself, giggling, but for the better part of a week you surge through websites that extol the possibilities of nanomedicine, mind uploading, postgenderism, cyborgization, artificial wombs, chemical brain preservation. You skim through the less interesting rebuttals from neo-Luddite haters bitching about the trivialization of human identity, hubris, coercive eugenicism, and dozens of other killjoy buzzwords.

Your parents are probably screwed, but you will still be middle aged in 2045, the estimated year of the Singularity, when things are supposed to really start going down, transcendentally speaking, when negligible senescence won’t be limited to lobsters and jellyfish. You join Beta Race, an organization that publishes a monthly e-mag aimed “to deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity's next steps” and begin following the group’s transhumanist lifestyle recommendations. You practice caloric restriction and supplement your mostly raw and vegan diet with up to 50 daily supplements that increase mental clarity, reduce cortisol release, and promote optimal health and energy in convenient, antioxidant-rich doses. Your coworkers start calling you PT, short for Purple Teeth, for the red wine you consume daily (one per meal and another after an acceptable cardio session) in order to maximize your resveratrol intake, and you ask them what you should wear at their funerals, when your Body Mass Index will still be at an optimal 18.5 to 20. They can’t tell you to go fuck yourself because you’re their manager but you know they want to. You couldn’t care less about hurting the feelings of weaklings who have already given in to self-immolation. You learn to use group collaboration tools on your phone and visit personal networking sites to meet and communicate with other proto-posthumans. You download an app that turns your phone into a device to supplement your memories, constantly recording conversations and other audible events. You purchase better insurance that’s more than you can realistically afford but ensures that the co-pay will be low enough for the regular examinations and blood tests you will have to undergo ad nauseum.

Your stomach might convulse sometimes at work or when you pass a pub, anticipating the succulence of animal fat, the release of hard liquor, but these are necessary casualties of the focus on everlasting survival, and denial is an essential quality for success in the cyborg nirvana you are destined to inhabit.

One afternoon you’re jogging in a park on a trail that’s almost the exact distance, if run every day, that will lower your blood pressure to an optimal level in only a few weeks. You avoid eye contact with the idle dying you pass – an liver-spot scarecrow reading a newspaper to a neck-lolling woman in a wheelchair, a trio of shagged-out kids smoking cloves, an otherwise hale-looking guy wearing a Ballpark Franks tee shirt thereby declaring his affinity for nitrate-induced gastrointestinal carnage. Close to a personal best time, you build up speed for the last few hundred yards, glancing at the occasional female runner heading in the opposite direction. One girl slows down as she passes, eyes wide, points at your midsection, sort of trying to hold back a laugh but also sort of concerned, and resumes her original pace. It’s humid, you’ve sweated through your shirt and there are probably some serious swamp ass issues going on, but you are exercising outdoors during an abnormally warm autumn.

Water transfer isn’t just normal, it’s necessary.

“Uninformed bitch,” you whisper.

You pull off your ear buds, turn to flag her down or at least pretend she’s the reason you stopped and not because you’re totally winded. You feel an unnatural squishing between your sock and cross trainer. You look down at the athletic shorts that were Carolina blue but are now crotch-covered in brownish stains, at the thin red stream that’s coursing down your right leg, congealing, pooling under the tongue of your shoe.

An alert beeps and blinks on the activity tracker attached to your wrist. Your heart beats per minute have tripled. 

      

*

Your grandmother had been afflicted by hemorrhoids for most of her later years, referring to them as her “piles.” You’d always been careful to avoid the slime-capped Preparation H tubes and stool softener bottles that resided openly in her bathroom.

What’s currently sticking out of your ass isn’t like the gargantuan protrusions you’d seen in waking nightmares while listening to her graphic complaints, a relief that does nothing to ease the throbbing that makes it impossible to sit down.

Curled on your side in bed, tablet-addled, you learn that fifty percent of Americans will suffer swollen veins in the anal canal at some point in their lives, usually after age 30 and usually due to the strain of soft bowel movements, constipation, obesity, or pregnancy. Though initially painful, the prognosis is rarely serious, and can usually be corrected by a combination of increased fiber, drinking more water, drinking less alcohol and caffeine, exercising frequently, and applying an over-the-counter ointment when necessary. Except you can’t be certain that what you have is actually a hemorrhoid. You’re too young, you don’t drink coffee, you’ve been laying off the booze for the most part, and your diet has been endorsed after years of studies by Beta Race’s team of board-certified nutritionists.

The bleeding might also be caused by a similarly shaped polyp, tumor, or abscess. You analyze the risk factors for each. Until recently and for as far back as you can remember, you’ve been a happy guzzler of red meats, processed cheeses, over-proof spirits. Roughly seventy percent of your penetrative experiences have been sans condom, meaning that HPV is more a certainty than a possibility. The human papillomavirus accounts for approximately ninety percent of anal cancer diagnoses, and the three dozen or so partners you can remember make this risk exponential.

Your activity tracker starts blinking. You remove it.

You look up Google reviews of the primary care physicians in your neighborhood. You’re about to schedule an appointment when you remember hemorrhoidal Nana telling you in a brief moment of opiate-free clarity before she succumbed to the tumors that had spread to her marrow, to “never go to a doctor. I didn’t for twenty-three years and it wasn’t for lack of aches, there were plenty of those. It was because I knew, deep down, that the second they started prodding around they’d find something. You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it. Here I am, a few months past eighty, feeling okay, and I have the nerve to listen to your goddamn mother. A simple check-up. It’ll take a load off everyone’s minds, she says. Now look at me. Fucked. Take Advil, get enough sleep, don’t get married and you’ll be fine.”

She died two hours later.

You don’t want to be fucked. You want to be a sentient machine.

So you’ll wait. Say the mantras, wait.

But every morning there’s the same blood-streaked shit, the same WebMD links. One day you notice two identical lumps behind your ribs on both sides. Cancer already spreading from your lymph nodes? Maybe they aren’t lumps, but areas of organ-related swelling. Early onset kidney failure is a possibility. Nausea in the mornings, your skin crackled at the joints, a bit of fatigue. You begin documenting the frequency of bathroom visitations, checking each urine deposit for color, opaqueness, bubbles, activating the stopwatch app on your phone to get an accurate measurement of its duration. You check your semen for blood and other potential abnormalities with the thoroughness of a tea-leaf reader, cupping it in your hands, sniffing. While pressing your fingers to your jugular to confirm suspicions of an abnormal heart rhythm, you press on something like a growth that clicks when you move it – a clear indication of a thyroid disorder that might lead to hyperactivity, irritability, memory problems, psychosis, and paranoia. Brief episodes of dizziness: fluid on the brain. A shoulder ache is an aneurysm in-waiting. You keep clicking the links. Sleep is occasionally possible, but only after the forced repetition of the glass-half-full self-talk that you haven’t really believed in a long time.

You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it.

You stop looking.

There’s no point in continuing a transhumanist regimen if you aren’t even going to be around for the next upgrade of your phone.

WebMD can fist itself.

You bury most of your electronic devices in your closet. You stop responding to what few texts you still get from long-estranged friends. Afternoons: bong rips, HBO, Thai lunch specials. Nights, you drink with a fervor. More often than not, your super, who also occasionally sells you Percocet and mushrooms, knocks on your door to tell you about the previous night, how he stopped you from flinging a slice of take-out pizza at a passing bicyclist after another sidewalk puke session outside your building. You give him money, change the channel. Mornings don’t exist. Your cross trainers are ashtrays. You get all your shifts covered at the restaurant.

At least you’re sleeping.

You’re out alone one night and you meet a girl whose face you won’t remember and who’s almost as toasted as you are, but who sobers up fast a few hours later at your apartment when you ask her if she won’t mind biting a mole off your back that you assume is malignant. You wake up alone in piss-heavy boxers, roll off the bed onto the floor, a howling emanating from your balloon-swollen abdomen.

Your time has come.

*

The clinic’s waiting area is well-lit, featuring plush couches, a silent BBC news broadcast, an impressive selection of gender-neutral magazines. The only noise as you fill out your insurance information comes from the ambient nature sounds pumping from invisible speakers and a little kid making fun of his brother for coloring an eagle green and orange in a book in the children’s play area. A nurse enters from a side door and pronounces your name wrong. You take a last breath of willful ignorance and follow her into the examination room.

You don’t remember the questions she asks you, and you don’t remember your shorter answers.

She tells you to sit down, wraps a blood pressure machine around your arm and slips a thermometer under your tongue. “Ninety-eight-point-three,” she says. “Very good.” She frowns a little as the blood pressure machine relaxes from your arm. “BP’s high.”

“I’m always nervous,” you say.

She nods, jots something on a clipboard, tells you to roll up your sleeve. You watch the plastic pouch expand with truth juice. The nurse divides the blood into vials with different color caps, slapping stickers on each. As she flicks her gloves into the hazardous waste bin, you imagine being sucked down with them, crushed against the loose needles and emptied piss cups, pierced and filth-bathed into a strangely melodic silence, a soft gray place where you have no concept of gravity and the squirm of your days.

The nurse tells you to strip, walks out of the room, not making eye contact.

The man who enters a few minutes later is tall, thick with the traces of what must have once been an impressive musculature, with an unassuming salt-and-pepper beard and a dignified hairline. He introduces himself with a deliberate, Julep-swilled drawl and a mitt-shake that’s rigid but oddly pacifying. He motions for you to have a seat on the examination table and flips through the papers on the clipboard that the nurse gave him.

He looks up. “You decide to request all these tests yourself?” he asks. “Seems a little unnecessary for someone your age without a history of,” he looks down at the clipboard, “anything.”

But you know that’s not how it works.

You know there has to be a first time.

“I’ve done a lot of research, and given my distinct set of possibilities, yes I need them.”

The doctor shakes his head, reaches for a box of latex gloves in a nearby cabinet. “Well all right then,” he says. “Hopefully your insurance isn’t going to murder you for this.”

     “I have better medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. I have –”

     “Uh, ok. So which one of these possibilities will we be starting with?”

You guide the doctor’s hands toward every abnormality and inflammation, watching for a glitch in his serene face, the flowering of concern, but nothing changes. He asks you to flip over and assume a position normally reserved for canine submissives so he can get a look at the scabbed-over flap whose throbbing existence can’t be denied by even the most untrained eye.

“Yup, that’s a real big one,” the doctor says, almost chuckling. “This looks pretty straightforward, but I’m going to digitally examine your rectum for any irregularities, polyps, et cetera. This might be uncomfortable.”

You realize he doesn’t mean “digitally” in the technological sense.

You clench at the release of pressure and the snap of glove removal.

“Everything appears to be fine internally,” the doctor says, marking something on the clipboard. “You’re probably going to want to get the hemorrhoid removed for hygiene purposes. Shouldn’t be too painful since it’s mostly external. In the meantime, make sure you’re eating vegetables and drinking lots of water. Easy on the alcohol.”

The doctor tells you to put your clothes on. They’ll have to wait for the blood work results, but all of your vitals seem well within the healthy range for someone your age, with the exception of your blood pressure, which he’ll chalk up to a natural aversion to clinical settings. No need for a prescription.

“On a one-to-ten, how confident are you?” you ask. “I mean, I’ve read that misdiagnosis rates can be as high as forty-seven percent in a preliminary examination like this.”

The doctor sighs, stares at the phone you’ve taken out of your pocket. “This is the golden age of hypochondria,” he says. “You should get back into a more consistent workout routine and maybe find a couple hobbies that will keep you off WebMD. Make an appointment with a rectal surgeon to get that hemorrhoid removed. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.”

You leave the office as you entered it, trailed by a rotting, skeletal version of your dead grandmother’s face mouthing the word fucked on constant repeat. Three days later, sleeplessly camping on the couch amidst untouched plates of disintegrating drunken noodles, you get the call.

The bird-pitched, Mouseketeer twang belongs to someone who introduces herself as Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics who sounds like she’s barely qualified to read lottery numbers, but at least she’s bubbly. That might be the point.

Syphilis with a smile!

“So, um, I’m going to read you the blood work results from your recent visit with Dr. E—? Please let me finish before you ask any questions, but honestly honey you’re not going to freak. All the blood cell counts are great! Liver, thyroid, and kidney function are good…”

She reads off every result and she’s right. You know because you’ve already checked what the numbers should be. She’s “super jealous of your cholesterol?” and your STD panel is “totally negatory!”

You hang up, scoop solidified chunks of MSG into the garbage, and go into your room to find your cross trainers.

The next day you call your boss and tell him you won’t be coming to the restaurant that night, or ever. You’re going to look for a job where you can utilize your philosophy degree: arts conservatories, historical organizations, cultural think tanks. You run a little every morning because it feels good to be outside and moving. When you get tired you stop. You shave every day and dabble in some of the facial products that had been lying dormant on your dresser since before your thesis defense. You buy groceries at a store that doesn’t sell kombucha or wild broccoli and supplement your non-organic vegetables with ground beef or boneless pork chops or whatever you feel like cooking. Your phone resides in closet purgatory when the retro flip model you purchased on Amazon arrives in the mail.

Whether everything is one big moment whose meaning shines perpetually or a collection of seconds adding to nothing, you don’t care.

     You’re not fucked.

You’re alive.

One afternoon you’re getting ready for happy hour drinks with an environmental lawyer whose pictures are all taken from questionable angles and no full-body shots but who comes across in her profile as “relaxed” and “balanced.” The phone rings, unknown number, but you’re expecting a follow-up from the interview you had the day before for an archivist position at an online Nietzschean database. Or it might be the lawyer, XOXO-Jennie88, calling because she has to work late or something. 

“Hello, is this J—?”

Monotone, rehearsed.

Telemarketer scum.

“Mm-hm?” Your thumb slides along your well-moisturized cheek toward the hang-up icon.

“J— this is Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics. I’m calling again in regards to some blood work you recently had done.”

The twang is gone. The harmless questioning cadence replaced by stoic certainty, the weight of bad news.

Your thumb slides back, gripping.

You hear your grandmother’s chalk-scraped cackling. You feel the soft gray place spiraling farther away into the bowels of a basket you’ll never grasp.

“I’m glad I was able to reach you. I’ve been trying to get in touch for the past week but your inbox is full.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience but there was a mix-up in the lab regarding the samples we received. An obviously undesirable administrative error. These things are rare but they do happen, and we make it our primary responsibility to notify those affected as quickly as possible. There’s probably no need to be super concerned just yet – your cholesterol is still excellent – but there were minor incongruities in a few of the readings and we’d like you to make another appointment to draw more samples and to discuss with your primary care doctor the possibility of –”

“I have surprisingly good credit for someone my age and it increases with every punctual student loan payment I make.”

“I’m sorry but that doesn’t have anything to do with –”

“In the event of a natural disaster my apartment is ideally situated along a major evacuation route.”

“Um, congratulations?”

“I have three point five times as many Twitter followers as the global average. The shoe store on West Broadway is finally having its annual end-of-summer clearance next week and the mid-cut suede boots that match most of my collared shirts and a fair number of my jeans will be sixty to seventy percent lower than their current value. My cholesterol is still excellent…”

great uncle charlie

Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) citation:


Charles F. Cymerys, 31021808, Corporal, Company C, 505th Parachute Infantry, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism in action on 10 July 1943 on Sicily. With utter disregard for his own safety, Corporal Cymerys, who was second in command of a rifle squad, crawled to his unit's equipment bundle to secure automatic weapons needed in the attack on enemy positions. In the face of heavy enemy machine gun and rifle fire he secured the weapons, but was wounded in doing so. Despite his wounds he crawled 150 yards toward the position where the enemy was hiding and threw hand grenades, killing two of the enemy and forcing the others to abandon their position. This heroic act enabled his squad to procure its equipment and organize for an attack. Corporal Cymerys later succumbed to the wounds he received during this gallant action.

subway pamphlet erasure poem #1

Jesus Coming




Rapture the “snatching,” the immediate twinkling rise,
remain caught in the clouds
to meet the air.
In the near future Christ will descend
and take brides and this will be awesome,
the moment for the raptured ones
since they all shall be glorified bodies tasting hard God,
who created the universe by coming.
Now learn this parable:
When his branch has already become tender
and is near to shoot forth
with all the fulfillments of heaven, be alert,
as the Lord only comes for death and hades.
The key to salvation is found in sinful, idolatrous ways,
defiled virgins, the ones who cannot see the kingdom
and melt with fervent heat.
Look for a new earth
in which prepared brides, earthquakes,
drugs, sexual immorality, the New World Order,
the media, energy companies, judicial systems,
the government, the military,
and most importantly the banks, will be increased.
With technology you can run, but you
cannot hide. Your only chance is to stay
and endure Christ’s second coming,
unparalleled in trouble and horror.
You can expect to unfold before God enters
strongly in you – every torture will be used
in order to force you to Christ, even your children,
killed in front of you to force you to take the motion.
Although you may suffer, don’t give up hope:
The Tribulation will end
with the triumphant return of the Antichrist
and you will be rewarded greatly!

the departure of echoes from a scrubbed-out space

A new story, Dams, is up at Mark Cronin's new publishing venture The Heavy Contortionists. It's the longest piece of my collection-in-progress How to Find a Flock, and a companion/sequel/prequel to this.

Simply absorb fluids. Keep your shit together.

The Terrible Softness of Tongues is up at Cleaver Magazine.

Her middle-finger emojis were swift

A new story, AN OCCURRENCE AT THE ONLY PLACE YOU'VE EVER KNOWN is up at the excellent Revolution John Magazine.  

Immigrants

Your immigrant grandmother

sipped the bones

                   of shorelines,

                       kneaded their 

splinters

into a faith

built on

a freak of nature.

Your immigrant grandfather

rejected legislated fun-bags,

plastic trees

and disaster relief,

yelled his mangled un-responses

in groves of goatees

                                 and Cadillacs.

Your immigrant uncle

          wore a belly full of corn syrup,

slid off 

his skin junkie’s charisma

into a Brownstone bowl

and buried it

with soft-boiled consequences.

Your immigrant mother

licked the cigarette’s copper coil,

           synchronized her lungs’ waste.

Beneath the branches

of a fire escape,

her breast curved

like a pomegranate.

Your immigrant brother

sees the reflective lights

of the helicopter’s ugly

bubble cockpit,

knows that

within certain limits,

the Moon is as imitated 

as a cop's fist.

My immigrant fingers

   hide behind a 

swelling glass abscess

                   

and next week’s podcast,

afraid to touch

this city

through an astronaut’s suit.

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. 

How has it come to this, he would think, zoning on the pixels that flickered like a CAT scan from the screen on his blanket-covered stomach. Regardless of how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep my shit together.

Fundamentally, he knew you couldn’t keep any kind of shit together. Everything was carbon and particles smaller than carbon and those particles were always corroding, breaking, collapsing against each other with the terrible softness of tongues. A rapid, infinite sequence of shifts that were at once fragile and impenetrably brutal. If he felt an uncommon pang of irrational strength, he would try to fight the changes: he would dismantle his power cord, close the screen, his thoughts, his head, and for as long as he could, forget the events, faces, and hips that had come to define his particular disintegration.

He would stay in one place and keep staying still. He would hold his breath and try not to desire it.

Simply absorb fluids.

Keep your shit together.

The dense and desperate oscillations, though muffled, continued unabated, buzzing in directions he wasn’t even aware of, reminders of his task’s impossibility.

He would open his laptop and jerk off and sleep soundly.