Fake Accounts

by Lauren Oyler

  *

  A SIMILAR THING HAPPENS WHEN YOU MEET, IN PERSON, SOMEONE with whom you have interacted on social media. On social media, you publish your opinions, your beliefs, your likes, your dislikes. You do this in a more organic way than you do on a dating profile, but the effect is the same: you approximate a character. Or a character is approximated; I’m not so sure it’s fair to say intention is a major factor most of the time, though in the cases of certain reality stars and opinion columnists, the people who are obviously not approaching social media in good faith, who are manipulating it, there’s got to be some amount of intentional sleight of hand. Anyway, I’m not talking about provocateurs or celebrities; I’m talking about regular people. We publish these things because we want other people to read them. If we didn’t care about people reading them, we would just keep a journal or write notes on our phones. Users who are particularly good at getting other people to read their opinions and beliefs acquire a following, become known to lots of other users. We can’t really blame the followers for doing exactly what we wanted them to do, which is pay attention to us and, inevitably, remember some of what we say. In fact, we probably find the fact that they pay attention to us extremely relatable, since we find ourselves fascinating. If we didn’t find ourselves fascinating, or at least want other people to find us fascinating, we wouldn’t publish these things about ourselves.

  *

  ON THE U-BAHN I REMEMBERED I HAD WRITTEN AN ARTICLE IN which I interviewed women about whether they sat on public toilet seats, and I included my own view that it was fine, unless there was visible evidence suggesting otherwise. I could have been lying in the article, but I doubt that possibility would occur to the chain-smoking American, whose kiss I had rejected on grounds of germophobia. As the train approached my stop, I felt bad. What if he concluded that both of my claims were true, and that I thought he threatened more germs than a public toilet seat?

  *

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF PUBLIC CHARACTER BUILDING ARE NOT as fun or useful as the fantasy of social media fame suggests. It’s always odd to encounter one of your followers in the noncomputer world and they say something like, “I loved your tweet about moisturizer!” or “I wanted to ask you what you thought about this subject you think quite a lot about.” How do they know? Because you, thinking this was exactly what you wanted, told them. You told everyone.

  *

  THE SHY READER IS YELLING, “I DON’T FIND MYSELF FASCINATING!” If you don’t find yourself fascinating, then what are you so protective of? And why are you yelling? You just can’t win.

  *

  VIRGO: I ARRANGED TO MEET A FRENCH PROJECT MANAGER, thirty-two, at seven fifteen at the desirable window table, which I reserved, at a tapas restaurant on Weserstrasse. Businesslike and wearing a crisp shirt, which I borrowed Frieda’s iron to press, I asked about project management as if I did not know it was totally bullshit. He said it was entirely about organizing other people’s schedules and streamlining projects, which meant, paradoxically, that his schedule always had to be open, in order to accommodate emergencies or unforeseen complications. I said that this was not an example of paradox but of irony, and regardless, I did not think I would do well in such a job because I would be focused on constantly rearranging the near future until it reached the optimum conditions. I had a problem with optimization generally, I said; I always wondered if there was a better way to do things. This was paradoxical, since by wasting so much time wondering if there was a better way to do things, I was guaranteeing myself suboptimal conditions. Anyway, I said, I was a poet and a bartender, and I liked bartending because it gave me time during the day to write my poems, specifically four hours a day. I told him that the poems all followed a certain pattern that was very hard to explain because I had come up with it myself using math and angles. He said that he was sure his job was a paradox, not ironic, and he thought ultimately that poetry should be more spontaneous and expressive than my description of my process suggested. I stuck a toothpick into the precise center of an olive and then waved the waitress over for the check.

  *

  AN ORGASM CAN BE IRONIC, CERTAINLY, ESPECIALLY IF IT IS DRAMATIC.

  *

  EARLY ON, DURING A LONG NIGHT OF DRINKING AND MAKING out in the corner of a bar, Felix asked me if I had any sexual fantasies. Usually when men ask this they get a horrible smug look in their eyes and become a different person; Felix managed to ask it naturally, to encourage a natural response, partly because we were drunk, partly because we were at ease with each other then, still wowed by our feelings and not yet bothered by each other’s negative qualities, and partly because we’d been talking about some recent viral article concerning a strange sexual fantasy. I turned around—I’d been sort of leaning up against him in a booth—and replied that I wanted to fuck him with a strap-on while he read the novel I was working on.

  *

  MIRACULOUSLY, AT A BAR AND THANKFULLY NOT WHILE I HAD two babies in my possession, I ran into a man I’d slept with a few times in New York just before meeting Felix, a cable news producer who wasn’t looking for commitment because he was too busy being a cable news producer. I had always maintained we both stopped talking to each other at around the same time. Now, something was different about him, namely that he had a long, bleached-blond mustache, a long, bleached-blond mustache so weird and disturbing that when he began approaching me, I didn’t recognize him and felt briefly worried. It didn’t seem like the sort of mustache that would stab me, but it did seem like it would talk to me for many minutes about increasingly sexual topics. It wasn’t until the mustache asked if I recognized it that I did: Jon. I said oh and laughed and put my hand over my heart as if he had startled me. He nodded apologetically. He was in Berlin on vacation, his first in three years! I didn’t want to be obvious but there was no getting around that the main point of interest between us was the mustache, so I asked what the deal was. He said his roommate had bleached her hair the day before he shaved off his beard, and feeling mischievous he got the idea of bleaching his mustache, because he always waits to shave the mustache until the end, just to see how it looks, as many men do. Though the bleaching was time- and effort-intensive—he had to breathe through a straw while it was on his face—he had intended to keep the mustache only for a few hours, just so he could take some pictures and then go back to looking normal. Once he took the pictures and sent them to friends, however, they became dedicated to the mustache’s debut in public, and they dared him to wear it out. Being a little drunk by this point, he agreed. That had been six days before; it was unclear, to both me and him, why he still hadn’t shaved it. People scooted away from him on the subway. A woman in the street seriously shielded her young daughter from his view. The night before, he’d been at a bar where he overheard a group of girls saying, “EW—SHAVE THAT OFF,” and he’d gotten so upset that he’d confronted them, saying something like, “I know my mustache looks stupid, but I’m a real person with feelings, OK?” They asked to take photos with him. He knew now that it was self-aggrandizing to think he would be able to play this character in public and not identify at all with the character. “I sometimes do a persona, you know?” I knew. “But I guess I always assumed I could distance myself from it, because the persona wasn’t me.” I said that when the persona was attached to your face it becomes a whole different thing, and he chuckled kind of wearily. Thinking I should change the subject away from something so painful, I didn’t tell him that my boyfriend had died recently but I did say I’d just moved here, and he said “finally!” and congratulated me: “You always wanted to do that.” I wondered if he was confusing me with someone else because I certainly had not, and also where he found the authority to say I had “always” wanted to do anything. He looked at me in a way I interpreted as pitying. Maybe he thought he had dumped me. Though I had not thought much about him since we parted ways, I suddenly wanted him to grab and kiss me and confess that he had thought of me the whole time, or at least ask me if I had time for a d
rink. He did neither, and after he went back to his seat, I left.

  *

  I’M NOT VERY GOOD AT THIS STRUCTURE. I KEEP GOING ON TOO long.

  *

  A FRIEND ONCE INTERPRETED MY ASTROLOGICAL BIRTH CHART, and she was stunned by the clarity of what she found. Two predictions came out of it that I still think about, one being that I would always “have difficulties with paperwork.” I can’t remember what birth time I’d given her or if I’d contacted my mother to ensure its accuracy, so on top of astrology not being real, it’s possible the conclusions were irrelevant. Nevertheless, the paperwork thing: haunting. But also rewarding, because anytime I do my taxes I feel I have triumphed over my true nature. I suspect my friend resented me for some reason, or was making fun of me for something, because trying to nudge someone toward a lifetime of self-reflexive anxiety about paperwork is mean.

  *

  LIBRA: I STARTED MESSAGING WITH A GERMAN PHD STUDENT, who talked about social media and translating slang in literature. I asked him some questions about his research. He answered them intelligently and asked if I wanted to meet him the next night. After ten hours went by and I still had not responded, he sent a second message: “If I do not hear back from you, I will remember you as the person with a lot of good questions.” I replied as soon as I saw it and we had two drinks at a popular bar called Ä. We talked about the academy; after years of indecision, during which I plagued my friends with endless vacillation, I had dropped out of a PhD program in the States because it had beckoned me to peek into the telescope of my future and what I saw was very depressing. When he asked me what I’d been studying, I had to think of something specific: a subject not too far-fetched but that wouldn’t require me to know any German. I almost said early modern English history—an aunt of mine loved the Tudors—but caught myself. You would be doomed if you were studying early modern England and did not even know how to buy cigarettes. My face got hot. I tried to look away as if pained—the decision to leave had been a difficult one. Gender studies. “Oh, this would be very interesting now, no?” he said. I kept looking at my reflection in the window next to where we were sitting, fluffing my hair, as I discussed my fury about injustice.

  *

  ANOTHER JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS STRUCTURE IS THAT IT MIMICS the nature of modern life, which is “fragmented.” But fragmentation is one of the worst aspects of modern life. It’s extremely stressful. “Fragmented” is a euphemism for “interrupted.” Why would I want to make my book like Twitter? If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter. You’d be surprised how much time you can spend on Twitter and still have some left over to write a book. Our experience of time is fragmented, but unfortunately time itself is not.

  *

  KNOWING THIS I CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL THE BOOKS OF COLLECTED tweets you occasionally see displayed on tables at Urban Outfitters would be better as novels or memoirs that contain no tweets.

  *

  SEX SCENE: LYING ON MY STOMACH ON MY BED READING A BOOK on a summer afternoon as the air conditioner raged in the window, I felt a tickle on the sole of my right foot. Instead of turning around, or laughing loudly and demanding the person responsible stop, I kept my body still and eyes focused on the book, allowing my foot to twitch if it had to but otherwise staying in position. After several seconds of tickling the finger moved slowly and daintily from the sole to the ankle, the inside of my calf, the pit of my knee, and the inside of my thigh. The finger, obviously, paused. I turned the page. The finger began to trace small circles on the inside of my thigh. It moved to the hem of my skirt and under to trace the bottom of my ass. I knew that if I stopped reading I would upend the delicate unspokenness of the sex we were about to have, so I turned another page. There was a full palm on my hip, and then another mirroring it, firmly. The air conditioner shifted to a lower gear, my skirt now hiked up. I was wearing uncomfortable underwear. He asked what I was reading. I told him the truth. As he grabbed my ass and began to massage it, he asked if it was good. I said it was very good and that he should read it. He said not to let him interrupt, pulled down the underwear, and began to eat me out from behind.

  A few years ago there was a video series, called Hysterical Literature, in which porn stars sat at a desk reading aloud from their favorite books while, under the desk and off camera, someone stimulated them with a vibrator. It was shot in black and white. Each of the actresses begins reading carefully, as if they have strategized and practiced, but within a couple of minutes they begin to falter. The pauses, jagged and sudden, increase in frequency and duration; exhales become heavier. They have to stay focused on their books—one of which is American Psycho—and you can see them try to remember this as the exercise goes on. Just keep reading. About halfway through the women begin to quiver perceptibly, and giggle. One woman begins to jiggle a leg. Another stumbles over the word magnanimity. It wasn’t explicitly a competition about who could read for the longest without coming, but I would have treated it as one. Eventually they all give up in one way or another, some theatrical, gasping, moaning, imitating Meg Ryan, others looking down, shuddering yeses and ohs, smiling knowing they are being watched. After I came once he fucked me, same position, flat on the bed, with his hand under me so I would come again, his breathing forceful and humid on my hair, whispering urgent fucks until he pulled out and came. Instead of rolling off to the side he lay on top of me for a moment, heavy and sticky, a kiss on my shoulder, until I said, in a cutesy squashed-baby voice, that I couldn’t breathe.

  *

  ONE MAN, ADVERTISED AS TWENTY-EIGHT, SHORTER THAN I, AND working in Berlin for a year on an exchange through his company, an adult study-abroad student, brought a little baggie of grapes to the park bench where we met during his lunch break. “These grapes are just so good,” he crooned at the baggie. “I don’t want to share these grapes with anyone.” I became jealous and angry. I plucked a grape and threw it into the grass. Then I winked, crossed my legs, and extended my arm across the back of the bench; according to a Scorpio friend, Scorpio is “the sex one,” though intentional sexiness divorced cynically from the act of sex is a quality many women will be familiar with, regardless of their astrological origins. The guy lived in an affluent part of town in an apartment owned by his company, which had even booked his flights for him, and he was taking a mandatory German course for which he never did his homework. I flirtatiously asked if that wasn’t annoying to his classmates, who required his participation to learn, and then flirtatiously asked to hear his accent. He refused to even say hello or goodbye. On the weekends he went to an Irish bar in the Europa Center or clubbing with his mates. I took one grape and found it very good, but I qualified that grapes have a much lower potential for goodness than other fruits.

  *

  WHEN THE THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD EXPERIMENTAL TRUMPET player wrote to me again, I deleted his message without replying. About a month later I realized that he hadn’t stood me up—I’d gone to the wrong bar.

  *

  THE WEEK REPRIEVE I’D GIVEN MYSELF TO NOT THINK ABOUT health insurance passed. For my purposes there could really be no better name for a German health insurance company. I didn’t make it up.

  *

  OF COURSE I WAS NEVER GOING TO FIND LOVE OR EVEN BRIEF satisfaction this way, going on fake dates. I knew that. Not everyone is looking to find love or even brief satisfaction all the time. Yet a small part of me mused that once I had become all the zodiac signs, there was a very slim possibility that I might achieve a complete understanding of humanity . . . and, by extension, myself.

  *

  SOMEONE POSTED ON FACEBOOK: DOES ANYONE HAVE RITUALS for moving house? I typed into the comment box, then deleted before I posted it, “Packing and complaining.” Not what she meant.

  *

  THE BABIES BEGAN WAKING UP EARLIER DURING OUR WALKS, and they were increasingly difficult to keep from crying in the public spaces available to me.

  *

>   SAGITTARIUS: TO ANOTHER PROJECT MANAGER, I EXPRESSED A desire to be constantly in motion, cycling through phases of life and the locations in which I experienced them every two to three years. I would never get married or have children or envision my life more than five years in advance. After Berlin I planned to move to Chile, where I would learn Spanish and read Neruda. I offered to pay for the drinks multiple times, even though he kept reassuring me, in faint, bewildered tones, that we should just deal with that at the end. The man, a neutral Swede with geometric wrists and precise gestures who had enjoyed the translations of Neruda he’d read, was wearing a shirt with an elaborate collar made by a popular designer I recognized, and I asked him how much it cost. He said he got it on eBay and if you bought designer clothes anywhere else you were an idiot. I laughed, and then said I had in my past racked up nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in credit card debt, which began innocently enough with some bill-paying issues but then escalated because I was taking too many taxis and buying too many dinners out, and then I started doing a lot of coke. I had wanted to spend time studying philosophy, so on top of all this I kept the amount of time I spent working for pay to an absolute minimum. I decided as I watched him watch me skeptically that I wanted to have sex with him and made a very straightforward comment about how difficult it must be to take off his unusual shirt, but because I had been so obnoxious the innuendo made my personality seem even worse and he left after the first glass of wine.