Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (3 page)

“The Internet lives, Gladstone,” he said with a smile. “And it’s here. In New York.”

Suddenly a vague disconnect bubbled up the way it used to when I’d detect a fraudulent claim at the bureau. Little things you’d think people wouldn’t bother to try. Blaming a preexisting left arm injury on a right arm incident. Or sustaining injuries in a workplace ladder fall and presenting with day-old black-and-blue bruising only minutes later.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You only just heard this rumor. But you were already in New York. Why?”

Tobey picked at the decal of his Mr. Bubble t-shirt. “Well, y’know, the site’s been down three weeks. I got nothing coming in.…”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, I was down to my last thousand bucks.”

“So you used it to come here and live off me? Why not save it or use it to pay your bills until you get a new job?”

“What bills? I do all my banking online.”

“They’ll just send them to your home.”

“But see, that’s the beauty of the plan. I don’t live there anymore. I’m off the grid, baby!”

Off the grid. The phrase caught me more than I expected, and Tobey could tell he was on to something.

“Let’s find the Internet, Gladstone. Someone’s got it.”

“It’s not so easy, Tobes. Unlike you, I don’t just crack jokes online. I have a real job to think about.”

Tobey took a step closer. “First of all,” he said, “I resent the implication that making up funny one-liners about how fat Jennifer Love Hewitt has gotten is not a real job. But more important, are you serious? Being a desk jockey for the Workers’ Compensation Board? That’s a real job? Judging from the amount of beer in your fridge and the fact that you’re wearing jeans on a Tuesday, I’m guessing you haven’t been there for a while.”

“I’m working remotely,” I lied.

“Working remotely or not even remotely working?” He smiled.

“Wow. That’s a good one.”

Tobey really was the best two-paragraph blogger there ever was.

“I know. I just wrote that. And now it makes no sense because there’s no Internet.” He paused for a moment. “Also,” he said, “considering there’s no Internet, that was the worst lie ever.”

I wasn’t sure why I was fighting Tobey. After Romaya, and maybe even before, my life had devolved into a fluorescent haze of desktop Outlook/Internet Explorer/Excel screens by day followed by laptop Chrome/Facebook/Netflix nights. Two equally useless existences separated only by the F train.

“Holy shit, I was gone for two minutes,” Romaya had said, probably having pissed on yet another pregnancy test, “and you’re back on that fucking laptop. You’re gonna turn into some sort of cyborg.”

“I was just Googling fertility stuff,” I’d said.

“Right.”

“Seriously, I saw something about more pregnancies going to term when the mom gives lots and lots of blowjobs.”

“Do they have to be you?”

“Of course not. I’ll just watch you service the whole third floor. I mean, how else am I gonna get an erection?”

She had laughed, but she hadn’t wanted to. “Y’know, you take every important or hard thing in your life and turn it into a dirty joke. You know that, right?”

There was nothing keeping me. And in the back of my mind, I remembered Dr. Gracchus owed me a favor for clearing a certain questionable workplace injury in his office. It wouldn’t be hard to have him verify my depression-based disability and get me out of that office. But it was something else that Tobey said that really sealed the deal.

“It’s a whole new world, Gladstone. We can be anything we want to be.”

I was standing in front of the hallway closet now, remembering the things I’d need.

“What’s the weather like outside?” I asked.

“I don’t know. May? It’s May out.”

I wiped some dust from the handle and opened the door. Hanging there was my tan corduroy sports jacket from years ago. On the shelf above was a flask Romaya had bought me for our first anniversary and my grandfather’s fedora hat from the forties. I took them all.

“Okay, Tobes. I’m ready.”

“You’re not serious. A fedora? You’ll look like one of those insufferable Williamsburg hipster douchebags.”

“Says the guy with a chain on his wallet containing no money. Fuck you. This was my grandfather’s. And what do I care? It’s not like someone’s gonna take a picture of me and put it up on FAIL Blog.”

“Ooh, speaking of that! I got something for this journey.” Tobey reached into his backpack and pulled out one of those Polaroid cameras from my childhood. “To document the trip. Who needs the Internet, huh?”

“Tobes, y’know, you don’t actually need the Internet to take pictures, right? Digital cameras still work and download directly to computers and, y’know…”

But he wasn’t paying attention. “What’s in your pocket?” he asked. “Your jacket’s puffy.”

I reached inside, removing my flask. “You mean this?”

“I guess…”

“Let me fill it, and then we can go.”

3.

DAY 22. RUMORS

On the second day of our investigation, we left the apartment early. I was determined this not be another day wasted, like yesterday afternoon when Tobey and I gathered nothing but rumors. We had taken the F train into the city to look for the Internet, and the only thing stupider than writing that was actually doing it. Tobey said we should start at Washington Square Park because he heard there was good intelligence to be had, but it turned out he just wanted to score some weed. Poor thing. My offers of flask whiskey weren’t cutting it. Not surprisingly, the loss of the Net had little effect on weed dealings, and after a handshake, Tobey was on his way. So we walked around and talked and eavesdropped and mostly just made asses of ourselves while Tobey floated on his skank bud and I sipped too frequently from my flask.

Most of the day was spent debating trivia. What year certain movies came out. Who starred in sitcoms from our childhood. And each dispute ended with “agree to disagree” or “I’m telling you, I’m positive” or “shut up, you’re such a fucking idiot.” But without Google or IMDB at our fingertips, nothing was resolved. Nevertheless, Tobey can fuck off because Jason Bateman totally played the bad kid in
Silver Spoons
.

We got tired around dinner time and went back to my apartment. Not exactly the
On the Road
experience I’d been hoping for.

“Not exactly the
On the Road
experience I was hoping for,” I shouted to Tobey from my bedroom before passing out.

“Is that a movie?” he called from the couch.

“A book! Jack Kerouac.”

There was a pause. Then: “Christ, how old are you?”

Despite our early start, today wasn’t looking much better. Some people were claiming the government had shut off the Internet to stop the groundswell of free speech and democracy. I didn’t find that particularly compelling in a world where the Right was already kicking ass and taking names in the online public influence wars.

“Who said it was the Right?” Tobey asked.

That was a good point, and I pondered it while taking swigs of Scotch and wandering Manhattan. I suppose the Left was equally capable of such things, if such things were even possible, but I couldn’t see liberals living without the Net. We love Daily Kos and viral videos too much. And you can’t hoard the Internet like Gollum and his precious ring. Cutting the Internet off from the suppliers of content made it useless for entertainment and information purposes, leaving it mainly as a communications tool.

“That’s pretty smart,” Tobey said, exhaling a cloud of weed.

“This isn’t L.A., Tobes. You can’t just go all Rasta in the middle of New York.”

“You gonna narc me out, G-man?”

I stopped walking and waited for Tobes to stop too.

“Was that an abbreviation for Government man or Gladstone?”

“Not sure. Really high,” Tobey said, holding in his smoke.

“Anyway, yeah, that’s not bad,” I said. “I’ll make a note about the communications thing.”

It wasn’t hard to find more conspiracies. A bunch of people were laying blame on Corporate America—specifically, “fucking Corporate America, man.” But none of the rhetoric was particularly compelling because, let’s face it, “the Man sucks” will only get you so far. Still, it was the most popular refrain as we went from parks to bars to coffee shops.

“Are you keeping track of suspects?” Tobey asked. “Write down ‘Corporate America.’”

“I’m not writing down ‘Corporate America’ until someone actually articulates a theory. People are throwing that phrase around like some racial slur. As if it held some talismanic power to create liability without proof.”

This time it was Tobey who broke stride.

“Yes?” I asked.

“You understand that I’m, like, really high, right?”

“I’ll keep it simple. You find me someone who can actually explain why ‘Corporate America’ would steal the Internet, and I’ll put them in my journal as a suspect.”

“Deal,” Tobey said. “To Starbucks!”

“Is that a big Reddit hangout now?”

“Maybe, but I need like six espressos if we’re gonna do this. I’m pretty much tripping balls right now.”

We hit the Starbucks in Union Square in the hopes of sobering up, but that’s also where we met Sean. He was a self-proclaimed Redditor, but clearly not yet zombified. Just agitated and holed up with a grande and stacks of papers. He must have opened the place, because he’d managed to score the corner cushy couch for one. His tiny table was filled with mountains of notebooks stuffed with highlighted clippings. I bet he would have rocked the microfiche back in the day.

I asked Tobey to stand back as I approached, considering that between the two of us, I was the one not wearing a t-shirt for the failed start-up vaginalbloodfart.com. (I can’t remember what Tobes had planned for content, but he never made it past the t-shirt phase anyway.)

“Sorry to disturb you. Can I sit down for a second?” I asked.

“What?” Sean barked in a hyperdriven voice that shook like the loose flap of a car ashtray. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Um … I’m not here to arrest you or anything,” I said. “I just wanted to ask your opinion on some stuff.”

I’m not sure if he fully believed me, but no one from Reddit can resist giving an opinion.

“Sure,” he said. “Just be careful of my shit.” He gestured to his papers.

“You thought I was a cop?”

“Yeah, or, I don’t know, an agent or private eye, maybe.”

“The fedora and sports jacket?”

“Yeah, I guess I just assumed that’s what you were. Either that or some sort of hipster douchebag.”

“Fair enough,” I said, taking a seat. “I’m Gladstone. Mind if my buddy, Tobey, joins us?” I said, gesturing over my shoulder.

“No problem. I’m Sean.”

Tobey flashed me the “one second” finger from over at the Starbucks fixins bar while he poured his coffee into the counter hole, making room for half and half and far too much vanilla powder.

“Apparently, my buddy is unavoidably detained, but I was wondering if you had any theories about the world going offline.”

“The Internet Apocalypse?” he asked.

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Well, I am.”

“Hmm, too bad there’s no Internet,” I said, stirring my coffee. “You could have staked your claim.”

“First!”

“Exactly.”

“So Sean,” I said after infusing my body with caffeine. “Whaddya got?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, fuckin’ Corporate America, man.”

I was disappointed. All that information consumed just to muster a cliché. I’m sure it showed. Fortunately, that was only motivating to Sean.

“C’mon, man. They’ve showed their hand, or have you forgotten about SOPA? Their draconian little bill failed, and now they’re still hemorrhaging millions in piracy. Without the Internet, we’ll have to go back to buying CDs and movies. Think of all that revenue they stand to gain.”

“Yeah, capitalists like money, but…”

“But nothing. That bill was going through in Obama’s White House. Not some random neo-con administration. And it took the people, the Web, to stop it. But take away the Web, and well, what’s left?”

I was impressed. Not by the sentiment so much, but by his ability to spew it in under five hundred words. No small achievement for a Redditor. Sean was pleased too, swigging hard on his soy latte (I’m assuming).

“That’s a fair point, Sean,” I said, “but Corporate America is more than just one thing. What about all the investors and businessmen who’ve turned a profit off the Internet? Service providers, websites, and digital media. You think all those businessmen will sit still and let the entertainment industry cut into their profits?”

Sean thought for a moment, stacking and restacking his newspapers. I looked over at Tobey, who had struck up a conversation with some kid sporting those nauseating earring plugs. I was on my own.

“Well, I’m not sure, but all that means is there’s some angle we’re not seeing.”

“Would that angle also explain how they’d even do that? It’s not like the Internet’s their own personal light switch.”

“Maybe it is. After all, Corporate America has always liked to own things before they destroy them.”

Sean went on to explain about how the car companies bought up all the stock in trolley cars until they had the power to dismantle them, thereby forcing everyone to get a car. When Comcast merged with NBC in 2010, that was just the start of the Internet resting in the control of fewer hands. It just got worse until it only took a small cabal to shut it down.

“Fair enough,” I said, and wrote down “Corporate America” in my journal.

Of course, there was only one problem with Sean’s theory: it was stupid. Capitalists like to play with their toys and there was no compelling reason I could see for them to take their ball and go home. Not this ball that was wanted by millions willing to pay for it. I explained this all to Sean, who continued to stare at his data while sipping coffee. After a moment, he wiped the foam from his goatee and said, “Well, fuck. I don’t know. Terrorists then, maybe?”

DAY 23. OZ

It was a beautiful day. The kind that makes most people happy, but ultimately depresses me when I realize something as superficial as the weather can affect my mood. Still, the sun was shining, and I wanted to look at pretty things, so we set our course for Central Park.