by Lauren Oyler
Searching @THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_BUGGED_ from my own phone, I got a sense for how popular he was: tens of thousands of followers, hundreds of comments on each post, immense gratitude for his being one of the rare few to not only admit the truth but also strive to expose it for the benefit of others. Instead of outrage or hurt feelings I felt suddenly, magically free. I wanted the relationship to end. I didn’t want things with Felix to be significantly different, as in better, than they had been for some time, or for the uneasy not-niceness of our relationship to transform through no effort on my part into copacetic peace; I wanted riddance and finality, a cessation of concern. I may have gruesomely hoped he had been cheating on me, but this was more conclusive: operating a popular Instagram account that promoted (and maybe devised) conspiracy theories meant he was no mere betrayer of trust or casual manipulator, but rather a person of impossible complexity whose motivations I was now liberated from trying to untangle. He might make sense, by some twisted logic, but I would not be the one to determine how. Because Felix wasn’t a wayward soul down on his luck, uneducated and left behind, who had turned to conspiracy as a way to explain his pain; he did not believe the government sprayed trails of chemicals from high-flying aircraft for unknown but surely nefarious reasons, causing in the innocent and unsuspecting population below cancer and Alzheimer’s and flu-like symptoms and malaise. He did not believe the world was governed by a small group of highly influential Zionist conspirators or that ambient Wi-Fi eroded miscellaneous but important “cells” that impact sleep and cognitive functioning and immune response. He did not believe that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were carried out through internal U.S. government missions aimed at justifying the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. I knew these things about Felix as much as I knew anything about Felix, which in retrospect I suppose was not that much. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure he was Jewish, so it would have been strange for him to be authentically propagating anti-Semitic conspiracies—possible, but strange. He was annoyingly logical, always asking for sources and proof even when shooting the shit after many drinks in the early hours of the morning. He was resistant to health trends aimed at eliminating harmful substances like toxins, which he thought were fabricated to sell things, the only science they appealed to being, he said, the one used to dress up petty feeling. We once got into an argument about organic milk. (I’m in favor.) BUGGED was also not a word true internet conspiracy theorists used—it was a knowing appropriation of the past, a wink, a clue. One of his photos, posted nineteen weeks earlier, was a triptych zooming in on a fuzzy form apparently latched on to the side of an ashy World Trade Center building that, in each image, became progressively hazier; in the last photo the indistinct thing was circled and exposed as a DEMOLITION SQUID. An inside joke masquerading as a relatable typo. He usually slept with his cell phone, as you know, under his pillow.
As I sat on my couch gleeful and frenetic, many options appealed. I could stomp into the bedroom and throw him out, with or without explanation. I could get back on his phone and cause mischief, through the account itself or through his email, text messages, etc. I could do nothing except begin to insert provocative phrasing into our conversations, suggesting but never confirming I knew something he didn’t want me to know. Or I could procrastinate: put off leaving him until I could approach the endeavor with the calm dignity befitting the partner of a person who needs help. I don’t think I would have cared if he got help, really; this was the final straw in a relationship that had always been porous and insecure, and the weightless feeling of righteousness this gave me was something I wanted to enjoy, a secret of my own, and one far more original than your typical “When I say ‘I love you’ I no longer mean it.” I imagined the satisfaction of saying, falsely curious, “I went through your phone and discovered you were operating a popular conspiracy-theory account on Instagram, and I just wanted to know . . . why?” But I wasn’t sure that was the absolute best way to play my hand, and I wanted to play my hand in the absolute best way. My last boyfriend I had dumped cruelly, clumsily, and nakedly (literally), blurting out that I had something to tell him as he used his underwear to wipe semen off my stomach, a postcoital ritual I now view as sweet. I wanted there to be no question this time of any mishandling or callousness on my part; this was my chance to be purely and entirely the good one. I checked my Twitter account for notifications and decided to wait.
Maybe it seems to you damning that I would go back to bed with someone who could do such a thing, that I would not be repulsed enough to immediately throw him out of my house and life. If he were spreading misinformation in a more usual, deceitfully earnest way, in an editorial published online, say, he would be condemned, and anyone who didn’t condemn him would be questioned, if not condemned themselves. The more ethical alternative—engaging the to-be-condemned person in a frank conversation about what he is doing and why—was also unappealing to me, particularly at the time, when I was feeling nihilistic and base. That said, I understand the reasoning I provided above isn’t quite good enough. I don’t know why I put down the phone, opened the door slowly so as not to wake him, laid myself on my side of the bed, and pretended to unread everything I’d seen. I didn’t have trouble falling asleep. The next day I woke up calm. Now sometimes I fantasize about what might have happened if I’d raged into the bedroom and shaken him awake—he hated being startled during sleep, always acting as if he were personally offended by sudden noises made when he wasn’t conscious—and demanded he tell me what the fuck was going on. In the fantasies, whatever he has to say for himself, half-asleep, worried, mad, doesn’t suffice, and holding his phone in my hand like a love letter from a secret girlfriend I kick him out into the night. Sometimes in the fantasies I throw the phone down the stairs after him; other times I just keep it. I believe the latter would be a more empowering outcome.
Or maybe I’m being misleading. Maybe there were lingering feelings of tenderness toward Felix I’d like in retrospect to obscure, given what my association with him must say about me, and I’d rather say I was strategizing than admit I was conflicted about what to do. I’m sure that’s true, though it doesn’t feel true. And I’m sure some of you might say strategy is immoral. Regardless, a few days later, we went on what would become our last date, to a restaurant on the Lower East Side, a new venture by the owners of another place popular among people in the art world, and the serenity of my upper hand turned me into a gracious conversation partner. Everyone was going to Japan right now, I agreed, looking over the menu and citing the Instagram accounts of a colleague and a friend of my brother. It was too bad, I added, because it meant that now you couldn’t go there without looking like a trend-following dabbler, and I also wanted to go. Felix had been and thought it was exciting but preferred South America, which to him was “grittier.” Mmm, I said, in agreement, though I hated grit and objected to the appropriation of it. He had a thick beard, trimmed neatly, that he pulled at with one of his meaty hands as he made this pronouncement. The music was ambient, the plants were bountiful, the menu was a mix of Spanish, Italian, and French influences, and though the cocktails were egregious the wine was reasonably priced.
I still recommend this restaurant to people; I harbor no complicated feelings about this restaurant. Soon after we sat down, Felix told the waiter, a smooth and beautiful gay man, that we were there to celebrate my acceptance to a PhD program; the waiter, when he heard where I would be studying, raised his eyebrows and said congratulations. Felix smiled across the flickering table at me. This is another reason I knew Felix was not at his core a paranoid misspeller known on the internet as @THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_BUGGED_: I had not been accepted to any PhD program, much less one at Harvard, but Felix liked to tell strangers little, inconsequential lies and build slightly alternate realities out of them, a game with no objective except to delight himself and fluster me. We had once been in on it together, or at least I’d thought we had, and it had felt good-natured and fun, but now it just seemed like a way to assert i
ntellectual authority over un- and never-to-be-witting strangers. Would I have even found out about a PhD acceptance by early January? The timeline seemed ill-considered, though I had no idea. I practiced being alone by flirting with the waiter, whose name I’d learned was Dean, about burrata, such a great cheese, before Felix one-upped me by saying we would have champagne, “to celebrate the genius.” When Dean whisked back I downed the bubbly dramatically as soon as he poured my glass, the kind of social display I knew Felix hated, and smiled a smile I imagined imbued with smug superiority. Dean, shaking his head as if we were old friends and I were simply always adorably like this, declared me “an inspiration!” He refilled my glass as I wiped some liquid from the sides of my mouth. Later he brought us dessert on the house and Felix did not eat any of it.
BACKSTORY
THE STORY OF HOW WE MET IS FUNNY, ENOUGH THAT IT MAY help answer one of the questions you probably have so far: Why was I with him? Keep in mind that right now, at the outset of this paragraph, I don’t completely know the answer—that this writing is as much an effort to better understand myself, the person I can’t help but feel is the most important figure in this narrative (if not, apologies, the most intriguing), as it is an effort to enchant an audience, promote certain principles I feel are lacking in contemporary literature, interpret events both world-historical and interpersonal (perhaps at the same time), etc. Keep in mind, too, that once you get with someone it’s easier to stay with them than to leave them, and that once you dedicate a certain amount of time and effort to a relationship or hobby or whatever, it feels as if that time will have been wasted if you stop. One of the best lessons I ever learned comes from the single lecture of ECON 101 I attended, in which the concept of sunk cost was explained, but this is another thing I’m better at advising other people to take advantage of than utilizing for myself.
Anyway, June 2015: I was on vacation in Berlin, where I’d been followed by a couple of Brazilians I’d met at a hostel in Vienna. They were so happy, repetitively thrilled, to learn that I was not only heading to where they were heading, I was going to be staying down the street. They insisted on taking my phone number and synchronizing our sightseeing plans. Since I hadn’t made any sightseeing plans, the synchronization was pretty easy. I nodded along and expressed interest in their suggestions, most of which had the word underground in their marketing. At first I found the two of them sweet, their accents charming and their enthusiasm fresh; on that trip I’d been trying to open my mind to the beauty of new people and experiences. Is this not what travel is all about? I asked myself, eating a schnitzel. That Berlin is not an uncommon city to be heading to from Vienna only made cuter their excitement at what they considered our fated acquaintance; maybe Prague-to-Berlin is a more common trajectory, but the Brazilians and I had both narrowed down our itineraries to German-speaking countries only, though none of us spoke German. “Prague . . . it is like Disney,” they said, rolling their eyes. They resented their parents for sending them to an American international school instead of a German one; any asshole can pick up English—everyone speaks it!—but now because of their stupid parents any German they managed to learn would be deficient. Were they trying to learn German? I asked. No—there was no point now. Once we’d all arrived in Berlin, them on an overnight train and me on a plane (the ticket prices were more or less the same—we agreed this was incredible and that they should have researched transport options as thoroughly as they had investigated all the activities that can be partaken in former bunkers), I instantly regretted my friendliness, in this context seeming detrimentally American, and wondered if I would be coerced into clubbing (not the cool kind). I should have let their messages float unanswered. I could have pretended to be a flaky person, someone who just doesn’t check her phone very often—there’s a certain nobility in that—and if I’d run into them in the street I could have made something up to counteract any spur-of-the-moment invitations: meeting an old friend, tickets to a play for which I was about to be late. Don’t usually see plays, but I thought, When in Europe!
Instead they dragged me on a pub crawl sponsored by a tour company, first by disabusing me of my belief that we “don’t really do pub crawls in the U.S.” and then by seeking to frame me as a sleepy Puritan, even going so far as to ask if I was afraid I’d miss my “boat home, the Mayflower.” “It’s only eight ay-or-ohs,” they said, sexily, “and you get all the beer for one hour!” An hour of beer for eight euros sounded like a good deal to me, someone who had never before been to Berlin and so didn’t know how much beer could not cost there. I also felt guilty about the one-sidedness of our mutual cultural awareness—I have no idea what the Brazilian equivalent of the Mayflower is, much less the kind of familiarity with the country’s history that would allow me to use it in a joke at a native’s expense. Finally, my journalistic curiosity—I was a journalist, sort of—pushed me over the edge. I told them all right, I’ll go. I wouldn’t have understood most of the plays on anyway.
The group convened in Mitte and was wrangled by a young but enforcing Polish woman with a clipboard and a tall guy of ambivalent affect who kept putting his hands on his hips and then crossing them and then putting them back on his hips again. He had thick brown hair cut into a normal male shape, a little rectangular with some movement at the top, and was wearing, like his coworker, a red polo shirt embroidered with the tour company’s name, the sleeves hitting him too low on the arm. The sun had only just begun its slow summer descent and reflected orangely on the nearby tram tracks. As other tourists approached the pair to fork over their eight euros, he flirted with each man and woman in turn, responding in a game-yet-contained way to their jokes and questions, like a middle-school teacher with a naughty inner life: when he’s on the clock it’s just a subversive source of confidence to him. They asked about where the Reichstag was in relation to where we were, about the route our tour would take that evening, about which bar was his favorite, about whether he would go to the bars we were going to even if he didn’t work for the pub crawl, about whether where we were standing was in the former East or former West. When it was my turn I looked him in the blurry eyes over the top of my glasses—I am tall but not as tall—and offered a closemouthed smile that I hoped conveyed my skepticism about the experience we were about to undertake together, wagering that he probably hated his job and if he didn’t then it wouldn’t matter if I had expressed skepticism because I would abandon my interest in him and move on to someone who also believed organized pub crawls were but one of innumerable humiliating excesses of desperate post-globalized economies. He gave a closemouthed smile back, not perfunctory but not innuendo either, and because I returned just then to an upsetting experience from college in which I used my twenty seconds at the front of a line to try to banter with a renowned author while he signed my copy of his novel, I retreated without attempting any little comments. When it came time for him to give an introductory spiel, he hopped to the top of some stairs, introduced himself, and outlined the terms of the evening with practiced gestures: four bars on foot, then eastward by S-Bahn to a club, do not bother the Germans, they do not like you. Kasia introduced herself as such and tried to smile. Most of the non-native-English-speaking participants did not seem to really understand his sarcastic comments, which gave him a certain creative freedom that surprised and attracted me, and as we trooped down the street and across a green space I thought miraculously large and empty considering we were in the center of a major city where drinking outside is legal, I found myself, Brazilians at my heels, trying to get closer, not walking exactly next to him but in proximity. He was talking nicely with a couple from Slovakia who, I would later learn, were on their honeymoon, and although that was very depressing it seemed a good sign that he could manage a chat without insulting them. We arrived at a row of empty, hut-like establishments along the river, the Spree; a few casual drinkers, seeing the chattering horde of accents approach, dispersed from their idyllic spots in the grass, forfeiting direct views of the r
iver and the grandly European-looking Museum Island. A keg, flanked by stacks of plastic cups, was set up outside one of the squat, dark bars, and we were instructed to enjoy all the beer for one hour as an unspeaking presumed German watched from the doorway, unmoved.
I took a seat on the ground with the Brazilians and confessed my interest in our guide. It was a strategy I often used with my mother: offer some tidbit of what most people would consider intimate information but which you do not care about sharing with others—anything romantic is what I choose—and the person thinks they are close with you, that they know some essential thing about your character, and you can get whatever you want from them, including to be rid of them at your leisure. The Brazilians cooed and shrieked and said I had to talk to him. I replied, in my gossip-girl voice, I know, but what about? I was not in the habit of hitting on men, I admitted—they usually came on to me, ha ha—but something about him was compelling. They said to ask him what I should do in Berlin. This was a terrible suggestion, I thought, so I told them, Good idea. Though I had no international data plan and so could have received no updates, I looked at my phone out of compulsion, took a sip of beer, and stood up.
If I thought of Kasia as competition it only helped me. She and Felix were talking to three American study-abroad students who were in town from Spain and looked like they must be cheerleaders, an initially daunting but easily surmountable task. As I approached the group I shifted into what my friends in college called “conquest mode,” making my face warm and a little smug, collecting my hair against one shoulder to expose my neck and delicate earring; the latter I assumed he would not notice but the women would. Instead of grandly entering the conversation I integrated myself into the circle, with one person, Kasia, separating me and my target, so I could look at him but not directly, and began nodding along to one of the girls’ descriptions of her host mother, who only allowed showers between 6 and 8 p.m. and inventoried the trash can every day to query any inappropriate disposals. I did not look over to see if he was laughing or seeming bored, hoping to establish that I was a social and fun person who had come over merely to mingle equally with men and women alike, though I don’t know if I have ever intentionally mingled with women in my life. He asked if they had been to Seville, where he had spent a month before moving to Berlin. Etc. Just as another of the Spain girls was beginning to cite her (to me, surprising) enjoyment of Leaving the Atocha Station, Kasia, to my right, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, turned to Felix and asked, “So what did you think of the exhibition?”
