by Lauren Oyler
I went outside three times that week: once to go to a restaurant and eat French fries, once to walk around the block (architecturally unpleasant, emotionally wearisome) because I had suddenly become very hot and sticky in the bed and had to leave, and once when Jeremy forgot his keys and I had to meet him at an “LPQ”—Jesus, I said, call it Pain Quotidien—to give them to him. It was always helpful, being outside, to remind myself that reality did not consist entirely of the single event that was redirecting me at that moment, but it wasn’t enough to dissolve the dread I felt when I thought about leaving the house again. Otherwise I looked at my computer so often I felt sick, refreshing Twitter constantly between attempts at reading articles or sending emails. I googled “boyfriend died” and turned up several personal essays in which the aching sadness produced by the accident or rare cancer was always unspeakable, taking years to get over. That I found these unrelatable seemed an indictment of both me and the essays. I will not deny that there was some guilty laughter. I’m not trying to be cavalier; I’m trying to say I may have been at times a little cavalier. I could find no example of the normal way to react to the death of a semi-serious boyfriend about whom you felt ambivalent at best even before you realized he was pretending to be a conspiracy theorist online. It’s not very rigorous to seek out and prize relatability, but it can calm you down, and like expensive beef jerky this was something I thought I’d earned.
The company I worked for gave me three bereavement days for the death of someone who was not an immediate family member, and after two I called my boss and quit over the phone. I didn’t do it because I was sad—I was not only sad, or even mainly sad—but because I was helpless to avoid learning all those death lessons people learn and the prevailing sense I got from them was that I shouldn’t work for this horrible company anymore, that the unwashed hours I’d spent refreshing various websites in bed had been no more a waste of my precious time on earth than the more hygienic hours I spent doing the same in an office. Though I had imagined her begging me to stay, offering me more money, or at least expressing dismay at the loss of my talent/gumption/etc., my boss replied to my quitting announcement with, “Oh, that’s too bad. Let me know if you ever need a reference.” A drunk coworker had once let me know that I’d established myself as a somewhat retrograde cynic, a toxic presence in the office but ultimately safe from firing because, among other skills, I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked; my leaving was a wash. Later that day my phone lit up with congratulations from my coworkers, who had presumably been alerted. They hated working there, too, though most of them maintained they felt ultimately “lucky” to have writing jobs in media, even stupid ones, when so many were evaporating into the industry-wide pivot to video.
What was I going to do? It was not something I worried about, and I loved having a good reason not to worry about it. On my seventh day in D.C. Jeremy brought home champagne, cheap, and then said sorry, you can stay as long as you want but my mom is coming next week and will need to sleep in the guest room, so actually you can’t stay as long as you want and should probably leave. I apologized for having been annoying and said I would leave tomorrow or the next day. I tried not to sound disappointed but I must have seemed it anyway, because when I asked him if he would come as my date to the “celebration of life” in Los Angeles I’d been invited to, he got a sad or pitying look in his eyes and said, “Darling”—to my knowledge not an endearment he’d ever affected before—“I’m gay.” I replied, “Darling, I’m ironic.” Imagine me muttering: also a marginalized identity these days.
That night I spent an hour trying to ascertain whether sending funeral e-vites was something typically done, “Best 25+ Funeral Invitation Ideas on Pinterest” indicating the affirmative. If the bereaved finds him- or herself overwhelmed by logistics, tips for getting to the invitation step abound as well. Step 1: Decide Whether the Funeral Reception Is Formal or Informal. Step 2: Write Out a Guest List for the Funeral Reception. Step 3: Determine the Details of the Funeral Reception. I tried to project myself into the mind of the kind of person who would need such instructions but not require help with the socially nebulous and actually difficult aspects of funeral planning, and I failed.
Before my trip back to New York I woke up with, ahem, morbid curiosity about the Details of the Funeral Reception and researched flights to Los Angeles using the bus’s spotty Wi-Fi; luckily they were too expensive to justify, especially for a newly unemployed person and especially because as soon as I started to envision the possibility of attending a not-funeral populated by the sort of wide-hatted culture-industry Los Angeles people I suspected his mother would invite I wanted to die myself. Everyone would be squeezing my hands and shoulders and making eye contact meaningfully, assuming they couldn’t understand my complicated pain while silently critiquing my outfit. On the bus, I received another email from the realm of Felix’s mother, via PayPal, telling me I had been sent a thousand dollars (by her). I’d been told many times that she was a bizarre woman as well as very wealthy, which also explained why she’d had her assistant patch her through to give me the news that her son had died, so I didn’t object; I came to think of this as a refund for the remainder of our relationship. Maybe she reasoned that a thousand dollars was the amount of money Felix would have spent on gifts and dinners out for the rest of our time together. Maybe she didn’t relate the sum to any pecuniary effects of Felix’s death whatsoever and just thought I could use a thousand dollars. Having resolved in college to accept charity from people with more money than I had whenever it came my way, I didn’t try to return it.
Back in Brooklyn I mostly lay around in my bedroom, leaving only to pick up Thai food, reading quarters of books, and staying up late portaling from one social media account to the next. The frequency with which I would find myself back at @THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_BUGGED_ was natural but dizzying, and occasionally enraging: the account itself, if taken at face value, was boring, consisting of doctored photos and lengthy captions that hinged on one thing being not quite what it appeared but in fact a link in a chain of involvement of larger and larger entities, all the way to the very top. The formula seemed too stupid to be genuine, and indeed I believed it was, so I kept close-reading for clues, fixating on some misused word or strange reference to the state of Pennsylvania as the “Cassandra of the United States.. [sic],” only to realize that I’d been tricked, that inspiring spun-out overinterpretations was surely the point of the exercise. I could write off any departure from acceptability as contrivance for fiction’s sake, but that he didn’t promote or acknowledge theories involving children—Pizzagate, Sandy Hook—seemed an ultimate indication of his intent to deceive but not harm. Still, I searched the account name everywhere, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, Meetup, GitHub, Medium, Quora, Yahoo! Answers, forums for Berlin expats, software developers, Instagram influencers, various podcasts, cheating partners, Second Life users, home chefs. I looked, even, at DeviantArt. I sensed but couldn’t be sure that I lacked the technical skills to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, that enlightenment would remain off-limits unless I learned to code. The username only showed up on sites besides Instagram when someone else would refer to one of his posts, taking minute issue with it or, more commonly, promoting its mind-blowing genius. That I didn’t know what I was looking for only reinforced my need to find something, the disappointment heightening the importance of the next session yielding fruit. Searching his actual name gave me little of what I hadn’t already uncovered in the early days of our relationship, but I did find a sparse memorial Facebook page, featuring tributes by old friends I’d never met, one of which was written as a letter to Felix that began, “Hey man.” Whether this was an admirable greeting for a dead person I did not know; it acknowledged the casual nature of mortality, which can happen to anyone, but it was also plainly eerie, suggesting that Felix might google his own name in the afterlife. The message wasn’t particularly passionate, but it was appreciative of hi
s “special outlook on life,” which despite the phrase’s vagueness was something I understood. I clicked on the guy’s profile, but it was totally private.
One of the many strange aspects of the Instagram account was that in life Felix had never tried to sell anyone a philosophy; his charms had not reached their apex in a holistic vision of the world but rather in disparate strategies for dealing with its particular circumstances. He had ideas about things, of course, and topics he cared about more than others, but in his intellectual life he didn’t appear to tail principles like KINDNESS or TRUTH or MONEY or ART or even LOGIC, which he was happy to reject if he thought it was the right thing to do. Yet his smug zen was frustrating, not something that was ever going to inspire feelings of safety or long-lasting love. You could only pin him down by virtue of not being able to pin him down, his sociability entirely calculated and his flirtatiousness equal-opportunity; he was like one of those people who look different in every photo, whom you need to meet several times before you can recognize them in the street, except instead of his face it was his personality that always evaded what you’d had in mind. At first I’d found the task of interpretation fun. He had a seemingly endless supply of unlikely anecdotes and random skills, the sort of things that signal a broad and varied life but that never cohered into anything resembling a character, not even one that could be described as “broad and varied.” If I ever thought something he said sounded outlandish or not quite true, he’d turn around and prove it. A photo of him with Howard Dean, the pair of them red-faced and laughing, surfaced when I expressed skepticism that he had snuck into a private dinner with the former governor and impressed him with a dirty joke. About a year into our relationship—a year!—I learned he was great at the harmonica because he got into an argument about the politics of the South with a woman at a party, who doubted he possessed the appropriate foundation to discuss the topic; when I expressed surprise at not only his talent on the blues harp but also his sudden willingness to draw attention to himself in public, particularly through such a brash, avant-garde social maneuver (the woman did not get the joke), he told me that it was all about CONTEXT: it was OK to act out at parties. That was what parties were for. Where had he learned the harmonica? YouTube. Also, he added, the harmonica was developed in Europe, with ancestors from China.
By the time this happened I was coming to see him as disrespectful of other people and their energy, especially me and mine; my time would have been better spent analyzing my own unrevealed ordeals. I often felt he lorded his patience and reasonability over me even as he abandoned those qualities when it came to his own problems (pointing this out was one of my favorite rhetorical strategies); if an issue didn’t affect him directly he could just let people be plodding and prosaic without even privately ruing them, not because he had generous thoughts such as Life is hard and everyone is trying their best—this was, anyway, patently untrue in many cases—but because he just didn’t care about other people very much. Or maybe he did care, but he didn’t want to be associated with an intensity of feeling to anyone he knew, so he had to project himself into an earnest online alter ego. Late one night I found a mean-spirited archived county paper article about him scoring an own goal when he was an eight-year-old soccer player. The team was not able to turn it around by juice-box time. It made me very sad, but I didn’t think this was his original trauma, the answer to the meme that goes: Who hurt you?
A couple of weeks went by this way until one day, at who knows what time, I couldn’t stand looking at the same four websites anymore, so I went to a different website, where I bought a cheap one-way ticket to Berlin for the end of February. I hadn’t thought about doing this before, but it felt like the right thing to do. As I waited for the foreign website to process my credit card information, failing twice because I had included in my address unacceptable versions of the abbreviation for apartment, I realized that the thousand dollars from Felix’s mother had probably been intended to cover my travel expenses so I could go to Los Angeles to celebrate her son’s life. I decided that if I ever had to answer for my absence, I could say I was so distraught that I didn’t think about it, which may have been true, but I doubted she would contact me again.
For a few days I didn’t tell anyone I’d decided to go to Berlin, and I was surprised at how easily I could not only keep the secret but forget about it entirely. I’d missed many protests against the new government during this time—they were held almost daily in the weeks after the Women’s March as liberals and journalists warned the general population not to become complacent or normalize the situation. When I took the bus home from D.C., I arrived on Canal Street just as thousands of people were streaming uptown from a rally in Battery Park where a friend told me everyone was talking about impeachment. Who was everyone? I wanted to know. The people who spoke, she said. Great weather. Felix would have said, albeit in a wistful tone that may or may not have been perfunctory, that protests “never really accomplished anything except making people feel useful”; he could discourse about the horrors committed by any number of governments for hours, from a developed leftist position, getting angry, insulting opponents, but at the end of the day he could set them aside and say, all right, well, I have to get back to work. I was as inclined to agree with him—minus an allowance that making people feel useful is as worthy a justification for doing something as any other—as I was to be moved by the display and by the personal stories of those affected by various policies being protested. In Jeremy’s guest room, distracted by feeling, following the announcement of a travel ban, a de facto Muslim ban, I’d looked at photos of heavy-coated people—the weather was less great than erratic—swarming JFK and Dulles and O’Hare, their signs hung over the railings of parking garages, their yelling bodies pressed up against arrivals-area barriers, of groups of lawyers sitting on tile floors in circles of urgent typing, and I’d felt very bad, and not inappropriately. Yet whatever was achieved by a group of people congregating peacefully for a cause almost always seemed too small, not so different from what could be achieved by incrementalism. And the group, regardless of its size or passion, could always be dismissed as not representing everyone else, a group that was always unfathomably larger.
I started going out more when my roommate’s boyfriend dumped her, rendering her suddenly in the apartment all the time, too. She cried more and louder than I was sure I had ever cried in my whole life, so much so that I sought to differentiate myself from her; it’s always nice to have a foil. At one point we were drinking wine at the kitchen table, weeks uncleaned, and I told her, “At least he isn’t dead,” and she replied, “At least you didn’t love him,” and decamped irreproachably to her room, taking the half-empty bottle with her. I was giving up my room at the end of the month, so it didn’t matter if we hated each other, but I was impressed by the retort so the next day I acknowledged that what I’d said had been insensitive. She nodded and made some semi-ironic comment about the enduring relevance of Sex and the City, which she was watching on Amazon for the first time. What happened was this: her now-ex-boyfriend had found out she was sleeping with a famous journalist who worked at The New York Times. How did he find out? One of the now-ex-boyfriend’s good friends worked with the journalist’s now-ex-girlfriend, who must have done some phone excavation because one day she posted a photo of the cheating journalist on social media along with a screenshot of a sexy text message exchange, recipient respectfully blacked out, perhaps as a feminist statement, and the disclaimer “WARNING: DO NOT DATE THIS MAN. HE IS A PATHETIC UGLY LIAR AND A TRASH PERSON.” This created ripples of gossip that eventually overtook my roommate. She made all her social media accounts private, not because she was being overtly harassed by strangers but because she became unsustainably paranoid that she was being judged and disparaged in private messages, which she surely was. It’s convoluted, I know, but that’s how these things are. It’s too bad it happened when I was woozy from grief because at another time I would have delighted in the spectacle, an
d I wanted to ask her if the infamous text messages had been hers. (The language was fill-in-the-blank, huge cock, cum on face.) Instead I silently connected the incident to the social media pursuits of my own ex-boyfriend and peered into a horrifying future for us all. I envied the recklessness of the journalist’s now-ex-girlfriend, her willingness to sacrifice appearances to both personal and professional contacts for the quick hit of petty vengeance. I had fantasized about several brutal lines I might post online about various enemies, including Felix, whose anti-eulogy might even be appended in my savage alternate internet reality with a sardonic RIP, but I always resisted, assuming being messy would cause me harm in the long run and also knowing deep down that it was just not the right thing to do; some people on Twitter seemed to believe every problem could be solved with publicity. I even began to pity my roommate, who ordinarily annoyed me to the point of searching for new apartments on Craigslist and whom I’d advised several times to make some kind of choice, break up with her boyfriend or stop seeing the journalist, before things ended badly for her. She’d been hopeful that the journalist would help her get her pitches accepted at a big publication, if not the Times itself, but she wasn’t a very good writer, and now that her name was circulating as that of a home-wrecker it drew further attention to her bad writing. What’s more, my roommate’s now-ex-boyfriend, a normal guy who worked in comms and who she’d always insisted would forgive her if he ever found out about the journalist because they were soul mates, “just couldn’t” speak to her, which made her feel that she’d squandered three opportunities, one professional, one passionate, and one enduringly personal, though really she’d only lost the last two, and I questioned the mutuality of the second. “He said we should start a podcast together!” she wailed of the journalist at the kitchen table, and I thought, He probably says that to all the girls.
