Cannibals in Love (25 page)

I looked at this piece of paper and almost laughed. How could I write anything down on this? How could I explain how the last five years had led me here to now? I picked up the pen and scrawled
AIDS
on the paper, sliding it back. The woman looked at this, and then up at me.

“I'd just like a test, I guess, I mean,” I said meekly.

She smiled in this beautiful, selfless way again, and I wondered if someone had taught her how to do that. “Okay,” she said, handing me a clipboard. “Have a seat. We should be able to fit you in this morning.”

I shook the water off my raincoat and took a chair. This was still my first real winter here and I was continually trying to adjust. The short days and the low ceiling and the endless columns of gray light. The clouds did not thunder here, they dripped. Weather could happen very quickly, too. The sky gathering itself in speed and direction as the dull sun ducked in and out of cloud walls. These mountainous cloudscapes that obscured the actual mountains and made everything feel low and tight around you. The rivers and the bridges and the evergreens, all lost in a scrim of fuzzy mist. I had a vague feeling of the landscape going in and out of focus sometimes, and an illusion that the sea was much closer than it actually was. I had not seen Mount Hood in months, to the point of forgetting it was still right there. Eventually you were left with only the bone-soaking cold and a pissing rain. Your shoes could fill up and stay wet for days if you were not careful. It had rained twenty-eight of the last twenty-nine days, and I actually sort of loved it.

It was only then, sitting in my chair, that I had the guts to look around the room at the other faces. Nearly everyone was a teenage girl, or practically, it seemed. They were young and tough. Black and Latina. They didn't seem nervous or scared. They were bored as they gossiped and played with their cell phones. I had no idea why they were all here this morning. I wanted to believe that these girls were looking at me and asking themselves the same questions, but they weren't. I took some comfort in the fact that I was invisible to them. It relaxed me.

There was only one other male in the room with us. Younger than me and pizza-faced. Expressionless. He sat beside his girlfriend, I thought. They were here for a pregnancy test, maybe. Or an abortion. Did they do that here?

I was still thinking about leaving. I was thinking about standing up and fleeing now. I would look at the woman behind the counter and make some mumbled excuse. Nodding, nodding, and getting out of the Planned Parenthood. I was thinking about my house. Recently I'd been struck by the unabating feeling that I'd left the stove on, or that the door must be unlocked. Maybe both. Abundance is the mother of neurosis, I said without saying. Everything was fine; I was fine. I should just go back home now. It was still early. I could sleep for another hour, maybe.

*   *   *

I had a brand-new job, working from home, actually. I was writing spam emails for money. It didn't make much sense to me, either, but there it was. I was finally getting paid to write.

It started off as a joke, obviously. I answered an ad on Craigslist, never expecting a reply. I attached a résumé and a writing sample, and I forgot all about it. But an hour later a man named Roman Holliday called me from a blocked telephone number. He spoke to me for two hours about spam, and the First Amendment, and himself. This, I realized afterward, had been my job interview.

Spam, like much of the Internet, is shrouded in a cloak of secrecy. And Roman Holliday was no different. He spoke frenetically with the distinct and voluble whine of a man who had spent some portion of the morning snorting Adderall. He told me he was an anarchist and a capitalist, and, above all, an Internet purist. The muddled contradictions seemed intentional, I thought. I had spoken to Libertarians before.

“The thing that they don't want you to understand is that people
want
to give you their money. They're dying to give it away, you know? They don't even know what to do with it all. It makes them sweaty just thinking about it.
Help me
, they say. So all I'm saying is:
Sure. Hey. How about this?
You know?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, though I didn't know anything about this.

It did not seem strange to me that
this
should be the man who was in charge of an enterprise like spam. Roman Holliday was eternally banging the drum for free speech. He could talk endlessly about the “open exchange of ideas.” Every email we sent was couched as a defense of the First Amendment. Roman was not shy about presenting himself as a freedom fighter, either. He delighted in this positioning as the only civilized man among the savages on the Internet.

“I'm offering you the chance to become a foot soldier in a movement that is larger than yourself.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, worried that this dude was never going to pay me in a million fucking years. I could feel Roman Holliday—with his florid con man's name—fluttering a handkerchief before my eyes. I was watching him slip his hand inside my vest. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

I worked the whole first week with every expectation of getting stiffed. And when I didn't—when the first check came, exactly as promised—I nearly fell on the floor laughing. Never mind the fact that this check was issued from a bank I'd never heard of, signed by someone called Rolf Federlein. It cashed. And, suddenly, I was making money again.

So I just kept going. Producing numb and meaningless content. Throwing pennies into the void. The Internet demanded it: this filler that showed up in waves, in people's in-boxes, all across the country. Around the world, really. Actresses in Malibu. Politicians in The Hague. Soldiers in Iraq. There is no such thing as immunity from spam. Even the astronauts in outer space were receiving my communiqués now. I had an audience of millions!

Still, people could not seem to wrap their heads around what it was that I was actually doing for a living. It was hard for them to accept the idea that spam could be a real person's job. It was easier, I knew, to imagine these uncanny missives born of unthinking, unfeeling computers. Or, at the very least, they must be coming from India or Africa, right? People had an image in their minds of an overcrowded Internet café where swarthy-looking men, with heavy mustaches, came in to buy international phone cards. Where else could these sentences possibly come from, if not from the hand of someone using English as their fourth or fifth language? How else were we meant to account for such strange and unsettling syntax?

But it was really just me. Sitting there in my boxer shorts, hungover: me. Sleep-deprived, and sex-obsessed: me. Young, white, American, middle-class: me. I had a college degree and an unpublishable novel, for fuck's sake. And the worst part of all was that I was getting really good at this. I could make almost two hundred dollars a day writing spam, if I really put my mind to it. All of which threw a thin mask over the fact that I was just one more cold-blooded mercenary hiding among the multitudes.

*   *   *

My whole life had begun to feel like a blur of aging young people. Girls who smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey. Boys who took pills and drove drunk. We were all drinking too much, fighting too much, starting unnecessary trouble. The casual sex and self-destructive behavior; the phobic incidences and fear of dying. “What the hell's so great about living to a hundred, anyway?” I could remember Lauren saying as she laughed at me. We carry around these memories that cling to us for years. Not the big, specific errors that put a fork in the road, but just a general guilt and depression over all the little ways we find ourselves living. Everything replaying itself endlessly in our heads. What is it supposed to mean, and what is it asking of us? Or is this just some glitch in the brain's grand and ancient architecture?

There was a girl who spoke to me in baby talk. It made me feel agitated and expendable. Worse, she talked to her dog like he was a sentient, intelligent being. She would ask him questions and take his opinions, and explain her own complicated belief systems to him. I was made to feel in competition here. Clearly it was incumbent upon me to distinguish myself from the dog. It made me want to strangulate that fucking thing.

There was a girl who lived in an anarcho-collective where they brewed their own beer and raised farm animals in the side yard. She would go out at night and spray-paint George Bush's name with a swastika onto stop signs. She was prone to strange acts of whimsy in the kitchen, like putting squash in our nachos and pumpkin seeds in our spaghetti sauce. I would protest, and we would actually fight about these things. Eventually she told me that she found it hard to take me seriously. That made me laugh.

There was a girl who was a Christian and a virgin, who was into kissing and heavy petting. She would describe herself to me, in earnest, like a horoscope: optimistic; enthusiastic; generous; independent. She said that she wanted me to take her virginity and I told her that I couldn't. She seemed grateful to me for this, and I didn't know how to feel about it then. Everywhere we went she held my hand. I eventually decided I was wasting her time—I mean, she barely even drank.

There was a girl I only saw after midnight. She had begun to seem like a weird nonperson to me. She'd started eating the things that I was eating. She was reading every book that I had read. I found this strangely disconcerting and claustrophobic. And yet it wasn't enough to stop me from going home with her because she really seemed to want me to. Plus she was like a fucking mental patient in bed.

Even now, I fixated on these faces. I tried to make them whole in my memory, but I couldn't. They were all the same Tomboys in a different city. And I didn't want that anymore. They were too tough, too sharp, too young for me now. I wanted a fat happy woman with some hips and an ass and a little skin under her ribs where I could hang on to her. I dreamed of soft arms and big breasts. I wanted to know a real female body with some stillness about it. Something calm and confident. I was ready to fuck and feel happy again.

But I was perpetually ending up naked in these strangers' beds. I was not a hero and these were not conquests. We were the children of privilege: insulated; overeducated; underemployed. Eternally running away from home and playing at being adults. I had started having unprotected sex, too, for reasons I couldn't comprehend. I would feel a tremendous guilt about this and vow to stop. But I wouldn't, and I didn't. I would wake up next to these nice, middle-class girls with a sad memory of coming too quickly and not caring. What is sex without the connection between two bodies but a sad act of ego. We were just two people flailing and not hitting, not really giving ourselves over to anything.

Last night, there was a tiny blond girl at the bar. She was a German exchange student with red, red lipstick who had been touching my head strangely all night.

“I think you have too much bangs,” she kept saying, laughing.

We kissed a little in the bar, and I begged her to take me home. My body felt empty and numbly undrunk. I flatted my bike somewhere and we walked it in the cold to her apartment. I listened to her laughing, and I asked her to speak to me in German, because I didn't want to understand anything about this night. I knew that I'd stopped talking somewhere, too. I was almost sleepwalking when I realized we were inside of the house, already in her bedroom, all at once. She had a huge lofted bed with a ladder.

“I will be back in a meanwhile,” she said with a laugh.

As soon as the bathroom door clicked shut, I took my clothes off and climbed into the loft, where I curled myself up in her down comforter and promptly fell asleep.

I woke there this morning, buck-naked, beside this funny German girl who was nothing if not a total stranger. I asked her awkwardly to tell me if we'd done anything. She laughed and seemed amused by the whole idea. She wanted us to go get breakfast, but I told her I had somewhere else to be. That's when I came here to the Planned Parenthood.

I could still smell this girl on myself, or maybe it was my imagination. I suddenly wished that I had taken a shower. A long, hot shower with scalding water that hurt. I had been wearing these same clothes now for days. Over and over and over again. I tucked my thumb and forefinger behind the waistband of my jeans, and I felt at my crotch surreptitiously, pretending to adjust my belt. I pulled my hand back out and secretly smelled it. I couldn't be sure at all. I was confused, except that I knew I liked the smell.

*   *   *

“Are You Tired Of Being Alone?”

These were the subject lines I wrote. “Want To Meet A Beautiful Woman Near You?” They had ceased to mean anything to me. “Are You Depressed?” “Find Local Sluts!” “Want To Add Three More Inches?” “Make Money Fast!”

It was all a matter of pornography in the end. Sexual, spiritual, or financial. Spam was an offer to fill an unfillable void. This was the “product.” This was the reason that everything had to be phrased as a question or an exclamation. It was preying on your greatest fears and desires. “Want To Lose Weight Fast?” “Make Money From Home!” “Want To Have The Best Sex Of Your Life?” “Are You Depressed?”

Spam was the offer that seemed too good to be true. Hope was an evergreen commodity, Roman told me. By the middle of the decade, spam had come to represent 85 percent of all emails sent worldwide. Tens of trillions of spam emails were dispatched every single year. As far as Roman was concerned, this granted us supermajority status. Whatever the original intention of email might have been, it now ceased to exist. Spam had taken it over.

“Spam doesn't discriminate,” Roman Holliday told me proudly. “That's the beauty of it. Everyone is invited to click.”

Still, it was hard for me to imagine anyone with a brain actually bothering to do that. It wasn't until Roman explained to me the microscopic hit rate we were actually targeting that I understood what was happening at all. As long as one in every twelve million people clicked on my email, he said, we made money. This was staggering to me. After my first month on the job, Roman Holliday had disseminated more than 350 million copies of my emails. This resulted in a paltry twenty-eight hits, a number that Roman was ecstatic about. Abundance is the mother of neurosis, I marveled.