by Lauren Oyler
Fake Accounts
FAKE ACCOUNTS
A NOVEL
Lauren Oyler
Catapult New York
Fake Accounts
Table of Contents
Beginning
Backstory
Middle (Something Happens)
Middle (Nothing Happens)
Climax
End
Acknowledgments
About the Author
BEGINNING
CONSENSUS WAS THE WORLD WAS ENDING, OR WOULD BEGIN TO end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media. People looked sad, on the subway, in the bars; decisions were questioned, opinions rearranged. The same grave epiphany was dragged around everywhere: we were transitioning from an only retrospectively easy past to an inarguably more difficult future; we were, it could no longer be denied, unstoppably bad. Although the death of any hope for humanity was surely decades in the making, the result of many intersecting systems described forbiddingly well, it was only that short period, between the election of a new president and his holding up a hand to swear to serve the people’s interests, that made clear what had happened, that we were too late.
I didn’t believe all this, necessarily, though as the news got worse and more bizarre I wavered. I’ve always been drawn to pragmatism, just not exactly a natural at it; as my brain says, “Calm down,” my heart says, also weirdly calmly, “A paradoxical comfort can be found in drama.” It was and still is my official position, if you were to ask me at a party or something, that the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population’s quickness to declare apocalypse finally imminent despite its permanently delayed arrival. We don’t want to die, but we also don’t want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires, so the volubility with which certain doom was discussed made a tedious kind of sense: the end of the world would let us have our cake and eat it, too; we would have no choice but to die, our potential conveniently unrealizable due to our collapse. Until such time, the idea that everything was totally pointless now was seductive, particularly as a mantra you could take advantage of when it suited you and abandon when life actually started to feel alarming. I myself was soon using it to indulge some of my naughtier impulses, by which I mean that in the first hours of a morning in early January, when the sky was still dark and the government still inevitably hurtling, I decided to snoop through my boyfriend’s phone while he was asleep.
I’d never really had the urge to go through another person’s things before. After a few disappointing experiences with high school boyfriends’ instant-message histories, I’d learned that poking around the by-products of other people’s thoughts usually yielded the mundane, the predictable, and the unattractive. Even with men I respected intellectually, I never found myself caring enough to breach their trust; before Felix my boyfriends exuded the wholesome, loving, deep-down reliability of hot dads on television shows, despite being, as far as I knew, not hot, nor dads, nor on television. Another way of putting this is that before Felix I had good taste. (With the exception of a water-polo player I once showered with in college, a handful of celebrities, and anyone else I may find myself dazzled by in the future, I avoid obvious physical attractiveness because I believe it presages suffering.) But over the year and a half we’d been together, Felix had revealed himself to be completely unrevealing, insisting over and over as I baited and nagged and implored him to tell me his innermost hopes, fears, and childhood-formed biases either that there was nothing to tell or, conflictingly, that he’d told me everything already and it wasn’t his fault if I didn’t remember. It was humiliating and typical, and per the usual narrative I assumed he was hiding something, probably other women.
He almost always slept with his cell phone under his pillow. At first I’d thought this was just an arbitrary thing he did, or that it was related to some concern about emergencies transpiring in the night or a previous lack of side table, but after he started acting different—not strange, but different—I became certain he did it because he feared I would read his emails and text messages. That his bedtime cell phone habit predated his change in behavior from funny, somewhat reserved guy to slightly less funny, somewhat more reserved guy didn’t matter: regardless of motive, it was weird to sleep with your phone under your pillow, and I’d failed to think about that until his subtle shift in comportment had me examining everything he did in a new light. There wasn’t much to go on, but that didn’t matter, either. Sometimes, lately, when we were texting each other, little ellipses would appear in the chat to indicate Felix was typing to me for an extended period of time, perhaps an entire minute, but then the message would never arrive: he’d have typed whatever it was and deleted it, and instead of sending something less delicate or elaborate in its place he would just stop texting me, as if we were fighting. This seems like a relatively small thing until it happens to you twelve or thirteen times.
His password, numerical, was long and, as far as I could tell, random, and I was only able to figure it out after weeks of surreptitiously watching him tap it out whenever I could, acquiring new numbers out of sequence one by one. He frequently bragged about not being addicted to his phone, so this took longer than it might have otherwise, especially because we didn’t see each other as often as I understood other couples of our status to see each other. (About once a week, when it should have been at least twice.) I was resentful about this—my sense that I was being wronged was more powerful than my growing ambivalence about the relationship, which was surely related to the distance between us he’d created but not entirely—so part of it, the snooping, was also about revenge. I briefly considered trying to place his thumb on the circular recessed fingerprint sensor (which is, as I write this, already becoming obsolete, replaced by facial recognition, which is of course even worse) while he was asleep, but I’m not a reckless person—my risks are calculated, and my dishonesty is dignified.
I’d had a few other opportunities to act before, when he went to the store to buy beer and forgot his phone on the table, when he was in the shower on one of the rare occasions he stayed long enough to want to bathe at my apartment. His phone was always pulling at me, like my own phone did but in a more sinister way. He was private but never thorough, a manner that I guess might have convinced me he wasn’t hiding anything if I hadn’t been so sure he was; instead I considered these lapses either evidence of his incompetence or, more likely, a misdirection strategy. But until that night I’d been hesitant to pick up the phone and confirm my suspicions. Part of it was that I tried to avoid, as much out of elementary-school habit as out of genuine belief in the importance of collective reciprocity, doing things to others that I wouldn’t want done to me. A bigger part of it was that I dreaded getting caught, a tense confrontation in which I’d have to pretend to feel remorse and ask for forgiveness I didn’t really have any use for—the relationship being in my mind already basically over—which is almost certainly what I’d do. I’m not given to screaming fights, especially those that require me to dig in and defend my own questionable honor; I can never come up with any memorable insults, and I tend to come out looking like a shamed child instead of a passionate and self-possessed woman. The righteousness Felix could wield over me if it turned out he wasn’t sleeping with other women—the vindication I’d need for my sneaky actions—was also discouraging. It would hasten the inevitable breakup, which would be a relief, but I would seem totally pathetic.
Serendipity arrived on the wings of the Grey Goose. Felix and I had gotten moderately drunk at a bar down the
street from my apartment, and he came over afterward. “I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m very, very tired,” he sang on the way home. “I’m not even going to brush my teeth!” Such goofiness was uncharacteristic; it put me on edge. When I’d nod my head along with the music in a café or put on some minor performance of impromptu joy, he’d often look distraught or even ask me, glancing around, as if truly uncomfortable, to stop. He did brush his teeth, in the end, and then proceeded to my bedroom, humming the “I’m tired” song and doing a cute, contained dance. Where was this coming from? I felt I was being manipulated, but I couldn’t say how. On my way to the bathroom, I saw he’d left his phone on the bookshelf, where it sat all-knowingly next to his keys, wallet, and stray stick of gum. I got a little nervous jolt, like it had just asked me on a date. In the bathroom mirror my face was flushed.
My skincare regimen is more extensive than I’m proud of. I’d recently learned it was important to let each product “fully” absorb before applying the next, and while I did not spend forty-five minutes each night sitting in the bathroom awaiting transcendence, the layering approach I couldn’t unlearn did give me plenty of time to consider my options. After a swipe of special water supposedly popular in France, I thought, I won’t do it. After I cleansed a second time, with cleanser, per the recommendation of Korea, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. After I used a dropper designed to look scientific to apply serum to my nose to decrease redness and “purify,” I thought, Great social revolutions are impossible without feminine ferment. After a pat of stinging, very expensive foam, the effects of which I was not convinced, I thought, Ha, that’s funny. By the stroke of moisturizer I was dewy and resolved: I had nothing to lose but my chains.
Immediately I began to worry that my chance would slip away, that, though Felix was not on social media through which he could mindlessly scroll in the dark before bed, imperiling his eyesight and disrupting his sleep cycle, he might be overcome with an urge to check tomorrow’s weather or his email or to look up the definition of a word (I don’t know what people without social media use their phones for) and retrieve the phone from the shelf. No. Still there. When I went to the bedroom, quietly past my roommate’s door, he was breathing evenly, his blocky elbow jutting onto my side of the bed. I took off my glasses, got under the blanket, and lay on my back with my arms uncomfortably close to my body to avoid his painful joint. Felix shifted. I stared into the darkness and began to wait, the possessed radiator occasionally scaring me with a shaming clang.
I dozed and woke suddenly, dozed and woke suddenly, until the familiar font said it was 03:12 and I was tapping out his passcode as if in a trance. Bedroom door: I closed it slowly to avoid creaking and did not let it click. Hunched forward on the couch, elbows on knees, the glow of it around me, I noted that it had opened to the home screen, so I should make sure to return to the home screen before going back to bed. At first there was too much information to take anything in; I felt frantic, like I had just entered a Walmart with the whimsical idea that I might get some socks, maybe a magazine, maybe a new kind of frozen burrito, and instead was confronted by the overwhelming vagueness of my desires. I looked to my bedroom door and trusted I would hear the bed creak if he left it. I was so nervous that, though I do not believe there is such a thing as bad people, with the exception of the water-polo player I once showered with in college and a handful of celebrities, I felt a strain, the sense that I must be a bad person, to be willing to feel so awful in order to commit the pretty minor offense I was committing. I suppose my definition of “bad person” might be more self-centered than others’, though, really, worrying about being a bad person is entirely self-centered regardless. Good people do not think in such categorical terms.
It was a normal iPhone, with the pleasant rounded corners that had recently been at the center of a (punted) Supreme Court ruling. Lined up according to his inscrutable personal preferences were the little square icons with more pleasant rounded corners, each featuring a nice image someone was paid a lot of money to develop into something recognizable, if not memorable; all were different colors yet somehow of equal brightness, creating an effect that never allowed the eye to focus but didn’t exactly exhaust it, either, making you feel as if you were seeing too much and nothing at all. The manual camera, the color wheel, the maps, the better version of maps, the clock that displayed a real ticking digital timepiece, two ways to call a taxi, the weather partly cloudy yet always bright blue, the notepad. The apps that came with the phone and couldn’t be deleted: the app store, the upsetting health monitor that tracked how many steps you took per day and how much damage your headphones did to your hearing, the wallet that meant you could skip printing your boarding pass, the internet browser that was a compass but also a safari. His battery was half charged; he was automatically connected to the internet in my apartment. I tapped the messages tab and saw it was open to his conversation with me, trying to arrange a time and place to meet. Since we both had iPhones, like everyone else, to send texts we used the app that comes with the phone, iMessage, in which the phone owner’s text bubbles are bright blue and the correspondent’s are light gray. Seeing our conversation in reverse, the one in which I remembered participating hours before, was jarring. The flair I’d thought I’d infused into my punctuation choices was gone; I was only identifiable because I knew the facts of the exchange, that I too had suggested to Felix that we meet at eight thirty at the dark bar with the fireplace so I would have time to get a slice of pizza beforehand. My name at the top of the message history did not seem like my name; it was as if I were only one of hundreds of people that another person might virtually engage with at any given time, and whatever I’d said or not said was no different from what anyone else would have.
The rest of the messages were unremarkable; over the last few days, Felix had texted his mother, a coworker, a friend I hated, his building superintendent, and a pair of artists he had an ongoing group conversation with. There were girls, but I knew at least broadly who they were, and their exchanges were just wilted attempts at flirting, random instances of either Felix or the girl being reminded of the other by something; they consisted mainly of inert hahas and cools. I tapped back over to our conversation so that when he opened his messages it would show up first, as before, and returned, less nervous and less excited, to the home screen, where I went to his email and did the same thing, searching his ex-girlfriend’s name and looking through the Sent folder and Trash. I was about to abandon the project, disappointed at how boring he was and now very tired, when I saw the single icon containing images of tinier icons, situated in the bottom right-hand corner of his screen, labeled no.
Tapping it expanded the little box into a bigger box containing two messaging apps I’d never heard of and a social media app on which I’d been led to believe Felix maintained no account. He’d deleted them soon after we got together, he’d said, in a display of resolve that impressed me even though he’d never been particularly obsessive about the internet in the first place; I didn’t know why he was bothering. I immediately thought of the obvious: expressions of yearning, photos cut off at the neck or the belly button, meetups arranged in areas of the city I’d never known him to visit. I could imagine him fucking stupid women, young women, women he could easily wriggle out of, and assumed this would be what he was pursuing here, maybe even with a pseudonym. I smiled ridiculously in the glow of the phone, though I was also disturbed by the instant onset of joy.
I tapped one of the icons, Instagram, and a familiar layout expanded to fit the screen. A row of circular user photos along the top indicated accounts that had posted Stories, photos that would disappear within twenty-four hours, images I thought, out of an abundance of caution, I shouldn’t view; if I looked, they would later show up at the end of the row without an ombré ring around them, suggesting that someone else had watched them. A new-message tab said 68. Beneath these was the start of his feed, populated by people he followed. Because reading was not what this app was for, it had
always been my instinct to skip over words—captions, usernames, tallies of likes and comments—but as I scrolled down, careful not to tap twice and add Felix’s heart to someone’s post, I found that all the accounts he followed posted images that were dark, fuzzy, and uncultivated, or else they were crude cartoons, their meaning unclear and the user’s purpose in posting them even more so. When I quickly reached a notice from the app—“You’re all caught up! You’ve seen all new posts from the last two days”—I didn’t experience the shame that usually followed when I got the same message while scrolling through my own feed. Instead, it was surprise: Felix must have been looking at Instagram all the time. At the bottom of the screen was a row of understated line drawings, a house, a magnifying glass, an addition symbol, a heart. The rudimentary silhouette of a figure took me to his profile, where I saw I would need to consult the text.
The topics ranged from science to politics to business to national security and were illustrated by images heavy-handed and amateur: crisp blue skies crisscrossed with lines of puffy white; doctored gatherings of Barack Obama with George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jacob Rothschild, one of their arms stuck out at an unnatural angle to point a gun at the viewer; frowning women next to cell phones emitting harmful energies; the blurry Twin Towers in the moments before and after they were struck; all inscribed with warnings in big, artless fonts. The government at fault somehow. The Jews at fault somehow. Incredible, unbelievable facts. I noted the username, tapped out of the app, swiped the app out of the phone’s open queue, locked the phone using the button on its side—thankfully the sound was off—and placed the device back on the bookshelf at precisely the nonchalant angle at which I’d found it. I was overtaken by a sense of purpose unlike anything I could recreate in a workplace environment. My boyfriend was a conspiracy theorist. I could have laughed, but I would have woken him up.
