Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (14 page)

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Can I ask you a question?”

A librarian shushed us before I could answer, and I somehow found the nerve to point outside. An invitation to a full-volume conversation.

She smiled and stood, revealing a simple blue summer dress with tiny white polka dots that I followed out of the reading room and into the third-floor hallway.

“So,” she said, spinning around and planting her feet. “This is even more awkward with the build-up of a walk, but I have to know: is that your journal there?” she asked, pointing.

“Yes?”

“So let me ask you this,” she continued. “In a library filled with millions of books, how narcissistic does someone have to be to sit and read their own work?”

It might have been one of the most cutting things ever said to me, but somehow her beauty and abuse were only empowering. It kept me calm the way speed settles hyperactive kids.

“True,” I said. “But my prose is really just fucking sensational.”

She did that thing again, disapproving of me in a completely accepting way, and I told a half truth.

“Actually, it’s not my journal. It’s notes for a case I’m working on.”

“You’re a private detective?”

“Well, yeah. Why else would I dress like this?”

“Not sure,” she said. “Because you’re some sort of insufferable hipster douchebag?”

I laughed and she did too, and it felt different from any of the laughs I’d had these last two months. I could feel this one just like I could feel the tile beneath my feet.

“Let me tell you all about it,” I said. “Over coffee?”

She blushed a little.

“Maybe, but you sure your wife wouldn’t mind?”

She pointed to my left hand, and I looked down to see my wedding ring. I was wearing my wedding ring. Had I really never taken it off? I was wearing my wedding ring. I was standing in the New York Public Library talking to a beautiful woman. There was a slight wind tunnel in the hallway. Her dress had a tiny fray by the hem of her left shin. I was wearing my wedding ring.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not married. I have to go.”

“Wait,” she said. “What? Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry. You’re very beautiful.” I took a step backward.

“Thank you. I mean, are you okay?”

She leaned forward slightly, and now I could see over her shoulder. A man was approaching from the hallway behind her in a frighteningly linear fashion. Rowsdower?

“Is he with you?” I asked. “Is this some trick?”

“I don’t understand.”

“My wife is dead. I have to go. You’re very beautiful.”

I rushed down the steps along the perimeter of the main entrance and out to Fifth Avenue. My sanctuary had betrayed me, but Rowsdower would not catch me here.

I was hit by a thick humidity rising into rain. New York was wet and gray. A concrete terrarium for me to cut through while escaping to the B a block away. The subway doors closed. The car was air-conditioned. No one knew me, and I was safe. Safe to take a swig from the flask that had somehow gone untouched all day. There was a slight burn and a tingle that settled. I settled with it.

My fingers were tight on my wedding band, twisting it as I wondered why Oz had never mentioned it. True, married men rarely stay out drinking for two months, or maybe Tobey told her what happened with Romaya, but to not even ask? It didn’t seem right. And it also didn’t make sense that Rowsdower would have anything to do with the library beauty. If he knew where I was, he didn’t need an ingénue to ensnare me. And if he knew where I was, I wouldn’t have been able to just run away from him. Would I? But it looked like him. What if he had no backup? Maybe he’d gone rogue? Of course, given the breadth of authority offered by the NET Recovery Act, it was hard to imagine what kind of activities would even be considered against government policy.

I needed Oz and Tobey to help talk this through. I also needed a room with a door. And a lock. The hotel was only a few blocks from the Broadway/Lafayette stop, and I took that extra thirty seconds I always need to get my bearings when I’m off New York’s midtown grid. No sign of Rowsdower or roving Christians. No zombies. Just a less populated SoHo filled with the city’s youngest, thinnest, most unique and indistinguishable New Yorkers, carving out twenty-first-century existences. Being thirty-seven made me invisible, and I got to my room without incident.

Everything was where I’d left it, and I took a certain comfort from the familiarity even if I didn’t remember closing the bathroom door in the foyer entrance to the room. I double-locked the door behind me and walked out into the room, placing my grandfather’s fedora on the tiny writing desk before falling into bed.

That’s when I heard a flush. My heart tried to run to a safer place, but I managed not to make a sound. Whoever was in the bathroom didn’t know I was here, and I thought about running past that closed door and out of the room. But then there was the quick rush of water and the squeak of a towel ring. Too close. I waited in the bed with only the cheap bathroom wall between us.

The door opened, and in the reflection of the room’s one mirror, I saw Jeeves exit the bathroom. He stood still with his eyes closed and palms out. Then he smiled.

“Aah,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I was pretty sure I could take Jeeves in a fight, but his serenity held some hope. He opened his eyes and then put his hands in the air like a criminal, his gut rounding out from beneath the edge of his rising Rush 2112 shirt.

“May I enter?” he asked, from the foyer.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

“Please,” he said. “I’m sorry about the surprise, but I promise you, I’m not a bad guy.”

He saw his words failed to settle me, and he thought for a moment.

“I don’t want anything from you, Gladstone. May I come in?”

I pointed to the small chair.

“Thank you,” he said, taking his seat. Not since Oz at the peep show had someone looked so happy to see me. I double-checked the bathroom. It was empty.

“I’m alone,” he said. “My functionally retarded minions are wandering the Upper West Side, where I left them. Told them the feelings were very strong up there. Half of them are loitering in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel right now.”

“Why’d you do that?” I ask.

“Because fuck Trump,” Jeeves said.

“No, I mean, why did you mislead them?”

“Because I’m not your enemy. I just wanted to meet you.”

I went to the window. No minions. No zombies. No Rowsdower.

“How did you find me?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m psychic. I
felt
you.”

I was struck by something I hadn’t noticed before. I had been thrown by his atrocious fashion sense and indifference to body consciousness, but seeing him now, in person, I noticed that certain quality political correctness trained me not to associate with being gay, but there it was. Jeeves was a gay psychic librarian prog-rock fan. It was hard to imagine a more sparsely overlapped Venn diagram.

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

Jeeves rolled his eyes. “Again. Psychic. Also, it’s all over your room service receipts. Someone’s certainly not the keeping-a-tidy-room messiah,” he said, gesturing to the mess.

I laughed. Definitely gay. I sat on the corner of the bed, facing him.

“Gladstone. I found you. Alone. If I were gonna help anyone else, they’d be here already.”

Jeeves saw me contemplating trust like a remora in the bathtub.

“The government approached me after O’Reilly bought it, but I didn’t give them your description.”

“No?”

“Turn on the news.” He handed me the remote from the desk.

“Oh, I suppose the perfectly relevant news story is going to be on just at this exact moment?”

“Seriously. What part of psychic don’t you understand?”

I turned on NY1:

“Authorities have now released a sketch of the so-called ‘Internet Messiah.’”

A crude charcoal drawing came onto the screen revealing a picture of a bearded man in a fedora with a nose distinctly longer than mine.

“Wow. You really Jew’d me up there, didn’t you?”

Jeeves was pleased. “Yep. Could be half the city.”

“You’ve just bought a lot of headaches for the fine Hasidim of Crown Heights,” I said.

Jeeves just shrugged. I didn’t think he was psychic, and I knew I wasn’t the Internet Messiah—whatever that was—but I also knew I wasn’t in danger. And I wasn’t alone. Maybe I trusted him because I felt he and I were both on the outside.

“Jeeves,” I said, removing my flask. “Could I offer you a drink?”

He got up to unwrap one of the plastic cups from the bathroom, and I poured him two fingers of Jameson from my flask. It wasn’t until the second round that I told him I didn’t believe he was psychic.

“I have millions of followers,” he protested.

“So does Fred.”

“Gladstone, it’s not 2009. Fred hasn’t been relevant for years. You need to update your references.”

The Internet had kept Jeeves young, and I could tell he must have devoured social media as hungrily as he consumed books earlier in life. I had too, but he was in his fifties, so it was even more impressive.

“Not that I think getting lucky on O’Reilly and knowing the local news schedule makes you clairvoyant,” I said, “but do you mind telling me what the fuck an Internet Messiah even is?”

“It’s just a name. You’re the guy who brings back the Net. Web Locator? Net Finder? I’m going with Internet Messiah. More of a ring.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“Well, if I knew that, I’d be the Internet Messiah, wouldn’t I?”

Jeeves had a fair point, and I could see I’d never be able to pin him down. It was something I didn’t understand, like gamer-based memes, and I stopped pursuing it. I just let him drink. I drank too.

“What does the government want from me?”

“Whaddya mean? The same thing we all want from you. To bring back the Net.”

“Or maybe they’re the ones who took it down and they want to
stop
me from bringing it back. Did you ever think of that?”

“I have,” Jeeves said. “But does that mean you believe you’re actually capable of bringing it back?”

I poured myself another while Jeeves nursed his.

“Yeah, I’m not sure, Gladstone,” he said. “I couldn’t feel their motives, I just didn’t help them because, y’know, fuck ’em. The Internet is for us.”

“Yeah, it’s what I had instead of a passport.”

“Why don’t you have a passport?”

“I don’t know. I never got one. I mean, I had no money as a kid. What was the point? And then with the honeymoon, well, we got married in a hurry and there was no money for a European vacation or anything. And then, well, it was just another thing I never did.”

I thought of Romaya. How she had bought a passport with her Taco Bell earnings as a teenage girl in Eureka before I ever met her. It expired during our marriage, before she got to go anywhere.

“Well, yeah, the Net made the world smaller,” Jeeves said. “But not just distance. It shrinks differences in money, power, influence. I mean, just about everyone had the Net. Everyone could watch the latest YouTube video. Bill Gates and Barack Obama and Warren Buffett have probably all heard of…”

Jeeves searched his memory for the most widespread memes of the last few years.

“Two Girls One Cup? Lemon Party?” I offered.

“Those are the first that occurred to you?” he asked. “Christ, Gladstone. Did
you
destroy the Internet just to get rid of your cookies? No. I was gonna say something
like LOLcats.”

We sat for a while. I opened another bottle I kept in the writing desk. Sometimes, he’d stare at me, trying to figure out how I could be the man he thought I was, but mostly he didn’t.

“So,” I said after a while. “This not working for a living is pretty great, huh?”

“Fantastic,” he said, his words barely escaping his smile. “But, y’know, I work. You’ve seen me out in the park.”

“That’s not work.”

“You’re right. It’s not.… To not having bosses.” He raised his cup.

“Aren’t you afraid that will all go away if the Net comes back? You’ll lose your niche.”

“I’m okay. I’m famous now. The Net comes back, I’ll do a podcast or a YouTube channel or something. Write an e-book. I can live out the rest of my life fake-famous and tethered to a PayPal account. Besides, look at me. My needs are few.”

“That’s true. I guess you’ll have more than enough to keep you in ponytail ties and prog-rock concert shirts.”

Jeeves checked the time on the TV and rose from his seat.”I should be going. I must gather my minions.”

“Aww, can’t you sit with me a little longer? One more drink?”

Jeeves looked down at me. There was wonder and concern.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said.

“Not much of a drinker?” I asked.

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

*   *   *

I must have passed out because I woke up the next afternoon on top of the sheets still in my clothes. Jeeves was nowhere to be seen. One bottle was kicked and another was close to joining it. The room, however, still seemed pretty much intact except for a note taped to the door, reading, “Look in your jacket pocket.”

My body moved faster than the hangover wanted it to. My head darted around the room for further signs of intrusion, but there were none. Just that note that scared me more than I could understand. I reached into my pocket slowly, relieved to find the comfort of my flask. But when I removed my empty companion, I felt the hard edges of a note, folded and square. I turned away, sensing it from the corner of my eye as I slowly unworked the folds, but it wasn’t a threat or a ransom. Just a note from Oz.

Dear Drinky,

I couldn’t wake you, but I stayed long enough to make sure you didn’t choke to death on your vomit, rock star. I’ll be back later. Be safe.

Miss you,

Oz

P.S. I haven’t found my friend yet, but these Christians are a hoot. Tell you later.

I closed the note and returned it to my pocket where it seemed to belong. My remaining hours alone are a bit cloudy. I remember the longest shower of my life. A liquor store run. Some room service, and not much else.