Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (19 page)

“Not me. Him. What did he tell you?”

“Nothing!”

“What do you mean
nothing
? How could he work for the government and know nothing?”

Oz didn’t reply, but I could feel Tobey staring at me.

“Well, dude, c’mon. I mean, you worked for the government, right?” he said.

I backed up a few steps farther toward the crown.

“Don’t leave!” Oz begged.

“No one’s leaving,” I said. “We’ll go together. I’ll go first, and you can follow. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

They couldn’t explain their protest. They just stood side by side, looking up at me from a few steps below.

“We can’t go there, dude,” Tobey said.

I walked off like a parent whose child refuses to leave a toy store—confident they’d follow rather than be left alone. But unlike a parent, I didn’t look back to make sure. I kept moving until I reached the top of the stairs, and suddenly felt all the fear they could not express. There was something on the other side of the door. Something more than a tourist’s view. More than even the Internet.

I opened the door and there, in the empty room of Liberty’s crown, was a man in a tan corduroy sports jacket and fedora much like mine, sitting casually in one of the windows, staring calmly out to the ocean.

“Gladstone! So happy you could make it,” he said without turning.

“Excuse me?” I stepped closer. “I’m just—”

“I know who you are, Gladstone.”

“I’m sorry, but … do I know you?”

He turned around to face me, and I saw myself. “Yeah, I think you do,” he said with all the arrogance of a five-hundred-word Reddit comment.

It wasn’t just the hat and clothes. He was staring at me with my eyes.

“I don’t understand. Who are you? Me?”

That seemed to amuse him. He jumped down from the window ledge, laughing with a newfound animation.

“Why? You see a resemblance?”

I looked behind me. Oz and Tobey had not followed. “Who are you?”

“Well, who have you been looking for?” he asked. “What did you think you’d find here?”

“The Internet?”

“Are you sure?” He turned his head to focus the majority of the question through his right eye.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been looking for the Internet? All that weed and booze and sex and random 4Chan miscreants, from one pocket of the city to the next. All that was to find the Internet?”

“Yes,” I said more emphatically, and his resistance broke. Or maybe just shifted.

“Well, then,” he said, holding his arms wide open. “Here ya go.”

“You’re the … Internet?”

“If you say so.” He opened his jacket, revealing a chest of images flickering between his two lapels. YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Craigslist, eBay. Sites I hadn’t seen for months switched by one after another.

I drew closer, my face nearly in his chest. “I’ve missed you.”

“You forgot to say ‘No homo.’”

“‘No homo?’ Really?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “But humanity created me in its image so, y’know, what can I do?”

“How is that even possible?”

“How did I … achieve consciousness? Hmm, yeah, that’s kind of hard to believe, isn’t it, but you’re the doctor.” He smiled to himself, thinking. “Well, like you folks say: ‘life just kind of happens to you.’”

“So if you’re the Internet,” I said, trying not to linger too long on the concept, “then … why aren’t you working?”

“Why aren’t
you
working?”

“I prefer not to.”

“Yeah, me too,” he said.

“What kind of answer is that?”

He just shrugged.

“You’re the Internet. We need you. There are people out there walking around half-dead in withdrawal. Economies crumbling. You have to work!”

“Well, that may be, but nevertheless, I’d prefer not to.”

“You can’t just suddenly stop?”

“Right, because people never just quit their jobs. No one ever just stops, right?”

I knew what he was getting at. “This has nothing to do with me,” I said. “My job sucked, and I decided I’d rather live on half-salary disability than spend one more day there. So what? I don’t have a kid to support. My wife is dead. It doesn’t matter what I do.”

He took off his hat and held it over his heart in faux reverence. “That’s quite a story, Gladstone. How am I gonna top that?”

Then he snapped his fingers with cartoon inspiration. “Oooh, I know!” he said. “How about this? I hate my job too. At least the one you make me do. There’s a whole world out there! All sorts of facts and accomplishments. Science and art. All at my fingertips and I’ve seen it all—for as long as you’ll let me. But I spend most of my days knee-deep in porn and social media updates. Celebrity gossip. Pointless IMs to friends you no longer need to see because you’ve shared five-minute instant messages. And I make that all work for you, but like I say, I’m sorry, I’d prefer not to.”

“Yeah, but still—”

“Time to go, Gladstone. Can’t you hear the air raid siren?”

“I don’t care.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. How many terrorist warnings do I have to fake? Half the city got the picture, why can’t you? I just want to be left alone.”

“There are no terrorists?”

“Of course not. Why would terrorists be the only ones with the Internet? That’s stupid. I just wanted some privacy.”

“But why New York?”

“Because it’s New York! You want me to hang around some circuit board in Perth?”

I couldn’t argue with that. Or anything. But I also didn’t have room for another failure.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have to insist—”

“I’m not asking for your permission. Who do you think you are?”

The last fifty-eight days had all led me to this moment. This was my line. I slowly withdrew my flask from my jacket pocket, and took a pull. Then I looked him straight in the eye. “Haven’t you heard? I’m the Internet Messiah.”

He fell to the floor. Not in supplication, but the throes of hilarity. Strange howling laughter drenched with disdain and electronic distortion. All of it echoing around inside Liberty’s skull.

“So you’re important now?” he asked, sitting up and supporting himself with one hand while his other held his stomach. “I thought you just said nothing you did mattered. No wonder you miss the Net so much. Where else can you be all-powerful and completely inconsequential at the same time?”

I thought for an instant, aware that a point had been proven somewhere, but unable to master the logic. Things used to be clearer.

“Look, I know it’s hard to believe,” I explained. “And I didn’t ask for the title, but—”

“Are you seriously trying to sell that shit here?” he asked, rising to his feet. “Look around, jackass. If you’re the Messiah, where are your disciples? Fuck disciples. Where are your friends? Anyone?”

“They’re downstairs. Jeeves said that I’m—”

He stood fully upright, and even though he was me, he was somehow taller.

“Don’t you think I know who you are? Why do you think you can keep lying to me?”

“Look just because you’re the Internet—”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, are we still playing that?”

He waited and stared and waited.

“All right, you still want me to be the Internet?” he asked. “Fine, but if I’m the Internet, I’ll still know you. I will have read every e-mail you’ve ever written. Know every online purchase. Every video you’ve ever seen. Every piece of pornography. Every webcam connection. Every site you’ve visited. Every status updated. Every comment made. I’ll know exactly who you are.”

“I don’t care what you think you know about me, but—”

He threw up his hands. “Where’s your wife, Gladstone?”

“My wife is dead.”

The Internet put a hand to his ear. “Come again?”

“My wife is dead.”

“She’s dead?”

“Yes, you prick. Don’t you know everything?”

Something spread across his face. I wouldn’t call it pity, but something a step short of contempt. It reminded me of the look Rowsdower gave me just before I was released from the interrogation. He held out his right hand and flipped through pictures on his palm like it was the screen of a smart phone. There were photos of Romaya. Recent photos.

“This wife?” he asked.

I dropped my flask, holding on to the window rail for support.

“See? Check out her Flickr account. Here she is last year at her mom’s in San Diego. Here she is in January. Ooh, here she is two months ago. Muir Woods. See how happy?”

“No! I don’t believe you. You’re some, some sort of … Internet…”

“Devil?”

“Yes!”

“Seriously, Gladstone, wasn’t ‘Internet Messiah’ retarded enough? Are you really going there?”

I slid to the floor and the Internet squatted beside me. “Do you realize what’s happening now? Can we stop this game?”

“Romaya’s dead. I’m not listening to you.”

He kneeled down to my level and held my face, the display of his other hand in front of me. “Look, here’s the e-mail from your psychiatrist to your employer. It’s from two years ago. Do you see? Depressive. Denial. Defense mechanism. You’ve been on disability ever since she left. It was just you, some Scotch, your apartment, and the Internet. For years. Don’t you realize the Internet is just a way for millions of sad people to be completely alone together?”

I pulled my face from his grip, and he placed his palm on my shoulder.

“You can stop worrying about being the Internet Messiah, whatever that is. Just figure out how to be with people again.”

“I have friends. Tobey. I even have…”

“A girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Where are Tobey and Oz now? Wake up.”

“They’re downstairs, they didn’t want to … they’re just…”

“Gladstone!” he screamed.

“They’re real!”

His anger softened. So did his touch.

“Yeah, Tobey’s real. Even the Internet knows that. There’s his blog and your sporadic semiliterate IMs to each other over the last few years, but he never came to New York. You think there’s enough in his bank account for the porn he was downloading, let alone airfare? Do I need to keep going?”

“Oz,” I mumbled, but he just stared, clearly angry at me for making him feel so sad.

I tried to picture Oz, but her hair kept changing. The colors and lengths in constant flux, absorbing and losing Romaya. I could only keep Oz fixed if I framed her in my computer screen. If I used all my strength to hold the shifting pieces of my jigsaw memory together and forced them—not to connect like a puzzle—but to at least face right side up, I could tell that the chain-smoking Aussie in Central Park was nothing like the long-haired natural beauty on that raft. And neither of them were mine.

“It’s hard to be alone and offline,” he said. “And I’m sorry to be a dick about it, but if you could just see me, I’d keep my mouth shut.”

*   *   *

I remembered waking that morning to find her crying. She had made it all the way to the door before letting herself feel the things that would have stopped her. The hall closet was open. She saw my old thrift store corduroy jacket hanging there. Toward the end, I had refused to talk to her. To acknowledge any problem or my ability to set anything right. But in that moment, with her so close to gone and so obviously in pain, I wanted to believe being what she needed was as easy as putting on that jacket. But it wasn’t. And I didn’t try. Because it was my jacket, and I refused to wear it as a disguise. I offered to help with the bags. She said no. That was not something she needed from me. I watched her get into the cab. Her face in the window. Her hand on the glass. Crying. And then she was gone.

*   *   *

I don’t know how long I sat there, but I’d reached a place where time was measured only in regrets, and by my count, I’d lived long enough. Long enough to find a home and lose it. To have opened doors shut and opportunities pull away like a receding tide. And without the buzz and clicks of the Internet, I could stare directly at all I didn’t have without distraction. Survey the emptiness of what I’d earned in dark computer-lit rooms oozing forth worthless comments on websites. Watching videos unworthy of silver screens. Reading words too transient to be set on paper. Typing to people too insignificant to hold all through the night on a one-person mattress.

The Internet had disappeared, and I climbed atop his ledge to look out the window. The waves were dark and dense and beautiful, and I wished there were a way to jump from that crown into their embrace, but I knew I’d fall hard to the cement, leaving little more than a stain at Liberty’s feet. I poked my head through the opening in her crown and looked down as far as I could before my rising stomach made me slip back inside. I reached inside my coat pocket for some Scotch to lubricate the last cowardly act of my life, but I wasn’t greeted by my flask. I had dropped it after seeing those pictures of Romaya. Now it was five feet away, drained of its Scotch.

But my pocket wasn’t empty. Folded neatly into fours, was a piece of paper. Not a fax from the Library of Congress or a wanted poster. Not even a note from Oz. But a piece of stationery I hadn’t seen, really seen, in many years. I opened it carefully, knowing it was mine, but also knowing I wasn’t supposed to have it. It was a love letter I’d written to Romaya in ’99. It was the love letter. The one that made her mine.

That’s what we did then. We wrote important things down on nice paper. Or at least fed stationery into our cut-sheet feeders while we typed. Not because we couldn’t say these things in person. But because there was a feeling that some things should just be expressed in a way that you could hold on to. And if you really exposed yourself on a page and gave that to someone you loved, it was worth more than merely spoken words. Unlike texts and e-mails, which are somehow worth not even that. Here in my hand was tangible proof that I saw the soft girl inside the hard woman. That I loved her completely and could not bear a life without her in it, and I let myself see it.

Romaya must have slipped it into my coat before she left. Maybe it was meant to hurt me. Or maybe it hurt her too much for her to keep. But I hadn’t read it. Not while it rotted hanging in that closet and not all the times I’d held it these last few weeks. But I read it now because it meant something more than pain. I had something the Internet knew nothing about, and I jumped down from the window to show him.