Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (11 page)

“You think this is
A Hard Day’s Night
or something?” I called over my shoulder.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“I hate you, Tobey.”

We ran past the joggers and baby strollers. The Hacky Sackers and caricaturists. The lovers taking walks and married couples washing off dropped pacifiers with bottled water. But by the time we got to the dude selling Tweety Bird ice-cream pops out of his pushcart, the YouTube zombies had started closing in. Tobey reached down for a fallen branch without breaking stride and swung it around across a zombie’s face. Everything froze before the crack had even stopped reverberating through the park. Oz and I watched to see what would happen next, as did the chasers slowly circling.

The zombie, on all fours and bleeding from the mouth, made a horrible groan as he reached up and out. Tobey brought the remnants of the branch over his head and was about to swing again when I screamed out, “What are you doing?”

“What?” Tobey replied. “I gotta destroy the brain!”

“You realize that’s not a real zombie, right? It’s just an expression.”

“C’mon! Is this the Internet Apocalypse or what?” Tobey asked.

“He’s not the undead,” Oz explained. “It’s just an Internet-addicted human who—”

Unfortunately, she had to cut her explanation short because in the time it took to down one zombie, twenty more had crept in and their circle was almost completely around us.

“Run,” I said. “And don’t fucking stop.”

I sprinted as hard as I could through the one opening in the enclosing group and headed north. I could hear Oz and Tobey on my heels, but I didn’t look to check. After about five minutes at full speed, Tobey called out for a break, but I kept running. The Swedish Cottage was coming into view. I remembered the cottage from walks with Romaya. It was over 130 years old and, according to its sign out front, had served as a WWII civil defense headquarters, a tool house, a library, and now, a marionette theater. It was at the upper end of the park, and for some reason that meant something. Maybe because breaking out from the trees seemed like freedom. I’d never seen zombies in taxis or subways.

Oz called out to me with the desperation Tobey lacked, and I had to look. She was holding Tobey up, and he was dripping with sweat, ready to hurl. Apparently, his running habits were like his blogging: best for impressive sprints and incompatible with marathons. He held on to Oz, hunched over and sucking wind while limping toward me. I scanned our surroundings. We seemed to have outrun the zombies. What they had in a focused determination, they lacked in proper nutrition. Although, it seemed my steady diet of Scotch hadn’t slowed me down.

I helped Oz, keeping Tobey between us with his arms around both our shoulders, his right hand gripping me for support, his left hand hanging limp and, arguably, caressing Oz’s left breast more than absolutely necessary.

“Let’s just sit down for a sec,” he said, pointing to a bench outside the cottage.

“We can’t stop until we’re out of this park.”

“He’s right, Tobes,” Oz said. “And how the fuck is a skinny guy like you so out of shape anyway?”

“Sssh,” Tobey said. “Or I’ll start to doubt the cardio benefits of constantly being high.”

Then he threw up across the entrance of the cottage, and sat down on the bench anyway.

“Cri—Christ!” Oz exclaimed, jumping a foot from the spew.

“You were gonna say ‘crikey,’ weren’t you?” I asked.

Oz denied it with a defiant three syllable “No-o-o.”

“You were totally gonna say crikey,” Tobey agreed, spitting out the remains of what I imagined was lunch. “And may I also offer, I don’t think we should head north anymore. Or south.”

I turned around to see nearly fifty Internet zombies closing in from all directions. I pulled on the main door to the cottage, but it was locked.

“Quick. Give me a bobby pin,” I said to Oz.

“It’s 2014. Who the fuck has a bobby pin? You think I keep it with my emery boards and curlers?”

They were getting closer. I took the pen from the pages of my journal and popped the clip off to make a tension wrench.

“I need something like a bobby pin. A paper clip. Anything.”

Oz started feeling around in her backpack and scavenging the ground.

“Will a paper clip work?” Tobey asked, pulling that and some change from his pocket.

I had no time to hate him. And not just because zombies were approaching from thirty feet, but because of the jolt of déjà vu as I took the clip. Suddenly, I was with Romaya and Martin in my law school dorm, working another window. The one on the twentieth floor in the hallway that led to the roof. I stood on top of a radiator to pick the window’s top lock as Martin worked the bottom. Romaya kept watch, just like Oz was doing now, except she was looking for RAs coming around the corner instead of approaching Internet zombies. Martin popped his lock first and passed his superior paper clip pick up to me.

A moment later, I popped mine, too, and we had access to the roof. I took a step out of the dorm and into the air, completely aware that I had lived my very short life in such a rule-based way that this simple act of rebellion was clearly the worst thing I’d ever done. The night welcomed me, wet and black like a Morphine song, and I offered Romaya my hand as she slipped out as happy as I’d ever seen her, somehow collecting all the darkness in the flow of her hair.

“Look! The stories,” she said, pointing to the apartment building across the way.

Martin didn’t understand, but I knew Romaya was just trying to get closer. Closer to those storybook lives we’d watched from my window. And now, on the edge, there was nothing between us besides New York City air and time. They were closer then ever.

“For fuck’s sake, Gladstone,” Oz screamed. “They’re closer than ever.”

I dragged my pick across the lock’s teeth, hoping they would catch. A ripple of metal and then nothing. I did it again. Harder, but slower, while focusing on my former law school grace until I heard a click.

“Get in here,” I screamed, opening the door.

Oz and Tobey ran into the Swedish Cottage, and I locked the door behind us. I’d done it. We were inside. There was a stage and some benches. There were also lots of windows. Zombie hands slapped at the panes while hungry fingers scratched at the doors.

“Secure the entrances!”

“With what?” Tobey asked.

“I don’t know. Plywood!” I barked.

“Um, yeah. I’m pretty sure most puppet theaters don’t keep stacks of plywood and nails in case of zombie attack,” Tobey said.

“Well, this place used to be a toolshed. Surely, there’s something?”

“Surely?” Oz asked. “You don’t think they managed to relocate the axes and
Evil Dead
chain saws when they converted this to a puppet theater?”

“Fuck off,” I said. “I picked the lock. You do something.”

That’s when a rock came through the window. Then another. Then some more. In fact, the rocks kept coming even after every piece of glass was shattered. That’s the thing with zombies. Total herd mentality.

In the few minutes that followed the first broken window, the three of us did our best to arm ourselves, but managed to gather little more than rocks and puppets. And then they were in. About fifty, all approaching.

“Will you bring us Facebook?” a sixteen-year-old girl asked.

“Twitter first!” her friend demanded. “I have no idea what Justin Bieber’s been doing.”

“No, I’m sorry, but no. I can’t do any of that,” I said, backing up to the stage.

“When can I stream Netflix again?”

“Can you bring back
World of Warcraft
right where I left off? I was just about to hit the level cap!”

“Please, I’d love to have the Internet too, and I’m looking for it, but I don’t know any more than you.”

“Why are you even here?” one teenage boy asked. “Shouldn’t you be getting the Internet? It’s been weeks, and you’re the Messiah.”

“I’ve just explained—”

My attempt to make myself understood was interrupted by a fat man in sweatpants. “Please!” he screamed, grabbing my lapels and driving me against the hard wood of the stage. Then he fell to his knees and whispered, “… I can’t afford the Rule 34 Club.”

“I can’t help you. I’m sorry. I’m not this Internet Messiah. I’m just some guy.”

“He’s lying!” a Digg zombie called out. “He wants it for himself. It’s a conspiracy!”

“Yeah, himself and Corporate America!” a Reddit zombie agreed.

“Give it to us!”

The group closed in as if I could produce the Internet from my inside coat pocket if they just pressed hard enough. This would end badly. Especially since no matter how hard they beat me, I would never be able to give them what they needed. I simply didn’t have it to give, and more than the fear of being torn apart by a crowd, I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in their eyes. Another promise broken. I had to find a way out.

I climbed up on the stage, raising a unicorn puppet I’d grabbed, above my head. “Wait! All of you. You don’t need to walk around endlessly waiting for the world to come online. We can entertain ourselves.”

“How?” Twitter girl asked.

“I don’t know. Plays, theater, music?”

“Are you seriously gonna put on some sort of gay puppet show?”

Seeing my desperation, Tobey got up on the stage with a lion puppet.

“Look at me,” he exclaimed. “I’m Farty McPooPoo, the gassy lion!”

That played well with the kids, but some of the crowd frowned, seeming to exhibit more discriminating taste. Oz got on stage with a princess puppet.

“And I’m Princess Scat-lover! Mmmm, come here, Farty McPoo-Poo.”

Farts and deviant sex. Now we were on to something. The crowd closed in, gathering tight around the stage. There was no way out, and I couldn’t imagine the adventures of the Dirty Princess and Her Farty Lion would last forever.

“Z’oh, my God,” Tobey cried, and pointed off in the distance. “Look!”

I couldn’t believe Tobey was trying to fool an angry mob with the oldest trick in the book. It was probably because he didn’t really read books. But then I saw fifty faces turn, and what’s more, it wasn’t a trick at all. As if proof of some higher power, there, in the middle of Central Park, was a kitten dressed as a Daft Punk robot trained to dance to “Get Lucky” while its owner, a shapely burlesque dancer in a leopard-print bikini, Bettie Page wig, and heels danced along behind. It was the ultimate living Internet meme and the masses drew to it like moths to a flame or Web reporters to secret gay sex.

Oz and I stared in disbelief as the crowd thinned, leaving us alone. Then we noticed Tobey leaving too.

“Tobey!” I hissed.

“Dude,” he said. “Do you not see this shit? Look at it.”

“Yeah, it’s great. Do you mind if we run away now? Because getting consumed by zombies sounds like a drag.”

Oz and I slowly edged toward the door and Tobey reluctantly followed. Just as we broke into a run, I could have sworn I saw Agent Rowsdower peek from behind a tree, but I wasn’t turning to make sure. I needed to get away to some place where no one needed anything from me.

*   *   *

We broke free of the park and hopped a subway to some miserable Upper West Side bar I knew from my Fordham law orientation bar crawl. Tobey was looking decidedly less green after some beers and nachos, and with nearly no cannabis in his system for twelve hours, he was finding purpose.

“So,” he said, picking the best nacho to systematically snag every other cheese-connected chip, “where to, Mr. Messiah?”

I guess it was a normal question, but it caught me by surprise.

“We just escaped a park full of zombies,” I said. “I thought we might, y’know, chill for a bit.”

“Yeah, that was pretty crazy. You have more followers now than you ever did on Twitter.”

“Yeah, I never really got Twitter,” I confessed.

“Well, reading Twitter’s a lot like staring at an ant farm,” Tobey explained while wiping some cheese from his mouth. “Except without all the productivity.”

“And the ants hate themselves,” Oz added.

“So anyway,” Tobey continued when the laugh died down. “Get your drink on and all that, but then, after that. Where’s next on our journey?”

Oz touched me under the table.

“I’m not sure, Tobes,” I said, biting the Scotch out of my ice. “So … what about tonight? You sleeping at Stand Up NY?”

“Well, I was, but…”

Tobey’s eyes scanned back and forth between Oz and me. “Holy fuck,” he yelled. “You fuckers are fucking, aren’t you?”

Bits of spewed chips littered the table.

“Aren’t you?” he insisted.

“Sorry, Tobes,” I said. “There were a lot of fucks in there, I’m still working out the syntax.”

“What if we are?” Oz said.

“But Gladstone’s old enough to be your dad!”

“I really wasn’t getting any at thirteen, Tobey.”

“That’s not the point. Bros before hos, G-Stone!” Then Tobey turned meekly to Oz. “No offense.”

“Don’t be silly,” Oz said, spearing the lime in her vodka tonic. “Why would I be offended?”

“I just mean…” Tobey took a second to swallow his food. “We’re on a journey here.”

“No one’s forgetting the journey, Tobes. It’s just, I don’t know, maybe it’s time to regroup. If we split up for a few days and then pool resources…”

“Oh, fuck off. Just hang a tie on the door and spare me this bullshit.”

He got up from the table.

“Tobey, it’s not like that—”

“Well, I’m still looking,” he said. “I’ll be sure to report back with my findings.”

And then he was gone.

“He’ll be back,” Oz said. “And at least this time we know where to find him.”

“Just don’t talk for a second, Yoko.”

“Excuse me,“Oz said. “What incredibly dated reference are you making?”

“Y’know, The Beatles broke up before I was born, too, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” Oz said. “My musical knowledge doesn’t start with Midnight Oil.”

*   *   *

In the early days, Romaya used to wake around 7:00
A.M.
and whisper, “Hello, in there,” directly into my ear, over and over, until she had a playmate. Oz seemed more the sleep-in type, and she didn’t start to stir until I did. My half-dreamed attempts at snuggle sex succeeded only in turning on the TV. One of us must have rolled on the remote.