by Lauren Oyler
I saw now that my previous experience with rashes had been quaintly disconnected, the cause always a mystery to be solved. Had I rubbed my elbow on something? Was I allergic to latex after all this time? I’d been so innocent to have thought I knew what a rash was. Only this, now, was a rash. When I got home I tripped getting off my bike and almost fell over; the pedal scraped the other side of the same calf and it started to bleed. I looked at the rash and saw pimply white bumps had risen from the red. A man in a hip outfit—short jeans cinched near the waist with a braided belt, funny hat, geriatric shoes—was smoking a cigarette outside the café next door, ignoring me completely. I sniffed and wiped my face. Everything was terrible, life a series of vindictive matryoshka dolls revealing smaller and more personal horrors until finally you got to the last one, which was you, a tiny pathetic wooden toy that a baby could choke on and die. A clumsy metaphor, maybe, but I was distressed. I imagined the existential matryoshkas had evil slanting eyebrows and black witchy outfits. I locked my bike, went to my front door, paused, went back to make sure I’d correctly locked my bike, went back to the front door, heaved myself against its weight to open it, and ran up the stairs and into the bathroom. I turned on the water in the tub, the cold tap, rolled up my pants, and awkwardly stuck my leg under it. Around the faucet were a few thin hairs, in German blond and American brown, plus a layer of wet dust. I watched for a change in the rash, willing the universe to alter its course so I would not have to go to a German doctor. Nothing happened, but putting water on it was soothing. Eventually I turned off the tap and, finding myself unprepared for the situation, dripped across the floor into the hallway and to my room, where I got the towel I’d used that morning and patted myself dry like I was a pile of delicate berries. Frieda knocked, I said come in, she said there is water all over the floor? I said yes I’m about to clean it. She said, Oh, you have a rash, and I said yes, I brushed up against a plant and it happened. She said, Oh, that’s . . . how do you call it in English? She slid her phone out of her back pocket and tapped around. Stinging nettles. Nasty stuff. I said what and she said stinging nettles? You don’t have them in the U.S.? I said, No, we have poison ivy. She said, Oh, I don’t think we have that one. Anyway it will be fine.
· · ·
A LITTLE AFTER NOON THE NEXT DAY THE RASH WAS GONE AND the sky had turned bright and quartery. My room, always in shadow around this hour, got darker, and from my hunched position at my desk I looked to the ominous window. At first it was hard to tell whether the sound came from the rain or the rustling of the leaves that anticipated it. The slim birches swayed as the first few drops warned the roof. From an open bathroom window across the courtyard I heard gargling. There was thunder, and then the downpour began.
OkCupid was frenzied with activity, and I spent much of the day copy-and-pasting the same bad joke to various men: “I’m sure your inbox has been FLOODED with dates!” Videos from the day were linked and shared. The aisle of a city bus became a riverbed, and travelers lifted up their feet as they continued to text or film the scene. Laughing figures in bright hoods toted yoga mats across a washed intersection. The videos were astounding in a wholesome way; they didn’t seek pity for the drivers of submerged sedans or soaked teens watching in awe as waterfalls formed on the steps descending into U-Bahn stations. There was the sense that it would all be OK, eventually taken care of. A shirtless man swam a competent freestyle against what would have been the flow of traffic under a bridge. Upon completion, he stood up and cheered.
While I was eating dinner Genevieve texted, “Wow! Of course don’t try to come up tomorrow! Have a nice weekend and stay dry :)” and more hours of nothing in particular stretched out before me. I got into bed with my computer and maneuvered among my reading material—a short story that I’d been trying to finish for a week, a long piece on refugees in a small German village written by a man I’d seen read at a bookstore, a pair of op-eds about how mainstream Democrats could adopt the more progressive agenda favored by millennials, @HelenofTroyWI rejecting both op-eds on the grounds that mainstream Democrats saw their relationship to reckless millennials as fundamentally parental and they only liked children as status symbols of their self-victimization—until a little parenthetical 1 appeared on a tab to indicate I had an email. It was from my friend Orin:
Hey—sorry to take so long to get back to you . . . Work sucks, as you know, but really the problem was that . . . my mom is getting remarried?? She met some guy at a sensory deprivation tank?? (Her ‘float studio’) He’s in his 40s, anti-vax, and when I tell her I think it’s a bad idea she just says it’s not like they’re going to be having any children, so she doesn’t know what I’m so worked up about. It’s maddening! I feel so cornered by the inadequacies of others lately . . .
Speaking of . . . hope you’re OK. I mean, as much as you could be . . . I don’t really have anything to say except . . . wow? I’m sorry if it’s weird for me to be bringing it up, but I worried people would feel too weird to write you, and I didn’t want you to feel like people were avoiding you. I have no idea what you must be feeling, but it shouldn’t be that . . . though I don’t really have anything to say, I’m on chat for a while if you want to talk.
Like the rash, this email felt immediately disorienting and possibly life-changing. Orin was acting like someone had died. I opened a chat window and typed, “hey. what are you talking about?” Orin replied, “what do you mean what am I talking about?” I said, “i mean: what?” He said, “what do you mean what?” I said “i mean: what? what? what? what? what?” I sent each of these as an individual message, to convey the drama of the confusion I felt, so it looked like this:
i mean:
what?
what?
what?
what?
what?
Many people wouldn’t take the extra half-seconds to include the question mark in a casual conversation like this, particularly under such urgent circumstances, but I found the rhythm of holding the shift key with my pinky while my ring finger hit the ? meditative. As I waited for Orin’s reply, possibilities for the category of news quickly eliminated themselves: no one would feel uncomfortable talking to me about politics, no one would associate me in particular with happenings at the website, Orin didn’t know anyone in my family or their names. Felix? Felix. Felix had actually saved tons of money and left it to someone nefarious? Someone had figured out his identity and exposed him as the promoter of conspiracy theories? He’d written a hateful manifesto that was discovered and published? Was I associated with any other questionable figures? I couldn’t think of any; Felix overshadowed them all. As I waited for Orin’s reply, I searched Felix’s name, but the results appeared as Orin’s message flashed in the unopen tab. “can I call you,” he’d written, without the ? I said yes, and my computer started to ring.
Orin was a sweet, tentative person, though not boring or unfunny. We’d met at a reading shortly after college while he was getting a PhD at Columbia; he was friends with someone I knew from work, and he’d been at the reading in order to think seriously about the aesthetics of alienation. After he finished his dissertation he took a job doing research for a poorly organized nonprofit, which I always told him he should quit. He would nod painfully before saying the incompetence there was so encompassing that he couldn’t quit; no one would buy toilet paper or refill the pods for the environmentally unfriendly coffee machine, and it was for such a good cause. I would say that he had a PhD and that if he valued the life of the mind he should not be buying toilet paper and replacing coffee pods because by doing so he was depriving the world of his knowledge of literature. He would nod and then we would talk about our love lives, his always involving some kind of near miss of a date on which I would offer too-late advice. He’d had a long relationship with a woman who left him for a domineering Swedish lesbian; she (the ex, not the Swede) calls or emails him each year on his birthday in order to taunt him with news of her volatile but nevertheless enduring love. Detrimentally trust
worthy, he categorically rejected the films of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, albeit I suspect regretfully, and was a designated driver in college; a woman who would go on to catalyze significant plotlines on a reality TV show once puked in his car. His eyebrows had a pitying look about them, a naturally furrowed upward curvature, and in the winter he wore the same high school swim team sweatshirt every day. I’d never known him to date anyone seriously besides the one woman and had only cursorily imagined what our relationship might be like. (The ex-boyfriends say this is because I don’t like nice guys, but they would say that. They should really just sit back and enjoy their coming vindication.)
I answered his call and heard in return, “Hi, how’s it going?” I said it was fine; shouldn’t he be at work? He said he was taking a sick day. I said, “Ah . . .” He said, “Yeah . . . so you just kind of disappeared! People were worried, but then it was like, she can take care of herself, maybe she needs space . . . Yeah. So, uh, yeah . . . yeah. Yeah. Are you serious?”
I said what did he mean, was I serious?
He said, “You don’t . . . you don’t know.”
I said I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. Orin hadn’t turned on his video camera, so instead of initiating the big reveal I put off what I dreaded would become humiliation by asking if we should turn on our video cameras. I thought if I could see his face it would help me believe I was not being cruelly pranked, though I guess either way this story involves me being cruelly pranked. I just wanted to see his face. Without waiting for his reply I turned on my camera, to pressure him to reciprocate; it translated the dreary lighting in my room into fuzzy shadows that made me look alluringly consumptive. Yet no Orin appeared. He said, “Um . . . I don’t want to turn my camera on, if that’s OK. I’m doing a face mask right now.”
I didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I laughed. I asked him what kind of face mask he was doing and he replied, “Please don’t mock me, this Felix thing is really crazy.” I said, Oh, so it was Felix?
Orin paused. “Yeah . . .” he said, finally. “What’s that sound? Is it raining?”
I said yes, it was the storm of a century. He didn’t say anything. I said he wasn’t saying anything. I tabbed back over to the search results for Felix’s name. I’d searched his name many times before, but this time what had come up looked completely different: a series of boxes labeled “Top stories” with variations on one indeed unbelievable headline. “Did you google it?” Orin asked, needlessly; I imagine I wore the light frown of a person who is both aghast and uncertainly impressed. “Which article are you reading?”
Orin waited patiently until I got to the end of the post and finally told him, “New York Observer.” He’d made himself known the day before, at a party. “I’ll just wait till you’re ready,” Orin said, and I hummed in appreciation, my face clearly working through another report. According to an article on an art website that had been aggregated by several other websites, including the one I’d worked for—Why had none of them told me? Because they thought I already knew? Because they wanted to believe I, supposedly their friend, still read the website, even though they knew I thought the website wasn’t very good? Because they were embarrassed on my behalf? There was, I knew, a German word for that—he’d shown up to a happy hour hosted by his old company and integrated himself into a conversation with some former colleagues, who were so stunned they couldn’t explain to those who didn’t recognize him that the crasher was a ghost, at which point Felix himself explained, saying, according to one attendee, “I faked my death.” Whether he’d said this smugly or sanguinely or flatly or remorsefully or in a tone that made him sound as surprised as anyone, the blogs didn’t say; they were just news posts, a couple hundred words, though they did link to his website, which I don’t believe he’d had before. I opened it in a new tab but kept reading the articles. Did he apologize, if not for the hoax then at least for the fright? The articles didn’t say that, either. He didn’t respond to requests for comment, but the art blog included quotes from a colleague, whose name I recognized; here was the ladder-climbing sycophant Felix had always complained about, expressing anger and dumbstruck admiration for Felix’s project. At a time when millions of people documented their every move on social media and monitored everyone else’s, the colleague said, when unearthing obscure gaps and inconsistencies was a popular self-aggrandizing pastime, how had he managed it? “It’s kind of a brilliant critique,” was the kicker.
I briefly thought of the logistics—the thousand dollars was easy; it surely came from him, from a PayPal account attached to a new, fake email address impersonating that of his mother—but what I wanted to know first was how I’d missed the news. These articles had been posted seven, eight hours ago, in the East Coast morning when they’d get good traffic, and I’d been on Twitter all day during the storm. I tried to remember if I’d seen “A Man Died Five Months Ago. But He Missed His Favorite Bar” headlines and scrolled past them, or if I’d seen the photo illustrating the articles—the same dark, grainy shot of Felix holding a draft beer with his arms in a sort of shrugging position, taken by a phone held at a low, surreptitious angle—pop up in my timeline, something I may have ignored as a digital version of the many Felix look-alikes I’d seen walking around Berlin, no longer worth the double take. Maybe I could blame an algorithm—I’d never been served the story. Being in a different country altered the algorithm, as did the posts I engaged with, and I rarely engaged with tabloid anomalies, finding the headlines the most delightful part. I checked and found, to my surprise, that I didn’t even follow the Observer. I followed them. Then I looked at his website: it had a white background with his name in black sans serif font in the upper-left corner. The only thing on it was an “About” page that said he was an artist who lived in Berlin, and when I read it I felt both hurt, like he should have called me, and undeservedly affronted, like this was my city and I couldn’t believe he would dare enter it. How long had he been here? Had I seen him somewhere, at a bar or in the street, and assumed he was his own doppelgänger? Returning to the search results, I saw the story had been picked up pretty widely, though just as a brief general-interest item, a quirky fluke. Searching related terms on Twitter, I saw a few people I followed had posted about it, but they weren’t the kind of people I paid attention to; it hadn’t become a topic of the day, the sort of story everyone could comment on to reliably generate attention for themselves; politics had been too dramatic for another story to take off, and Felix’s lack of preexisting notoriety meant he didn’t catch on. I guessed my actual friends had stayed silent about it out of respect for me. Someone I didn’t know had tried to make a meme out of it, to no success. Felix hadn’t said anything absurd or stupid enough to make that work. He took himself too seriously.
Orin asked if I was OK. I said, still frowning and looking at articles, “Uh . . . yeah? I mean . . . he must have really hated dating me! Ha ha. No, ha, uh, I feel like I have nothing in my head,” though it wasn’t exactly true, and I wasn’t trying to hide my true feelings from Orin. Orin said he was sorry in a really meaningful voice and asked if I wanted to hear more details. I said of course. Felix had activated a new Instagram account under his own name. I got my phone and searched it, and it came up immediately: three photos, all of himself, the first posted three days before, the second posted two days before, etc. The first one was a passport photo, white and direct, a fashionable oily shine on his cheekbones, as if death were good for the skin. In the second he was smiling, and it was location-tagged “Berlin – the place to be.” In the third he was making an uncanny pouting face, imitating women. It was captioned, “i’m a pretty girl and i’m always late!!” None of this made sense to me as an artistic or personal statement, but his hair was longer and sexier. He had 4,056 followers and followed two accounts, a popular street photographer and @bodegacatsofinstagram. The comments on his three photos so far were moronic, either entirely supportive of “what he did” or scolding. I felt high. Only after we hung up did
I worry about having done something unattractive on camera that Orin had seen, though I usually spent video-chat conversations constantly checking on my own image.
Orin had heard about it pretty much as soon as the news broke—someone from grad school had sent him a link immediately, because of his interest in the aesthetics of alienation. Orin was indeed interested, until he was horrified; he said he didn’t tell his grad-school friend that he knew the alienated party, though I don’t know if I believe that. I didn’t care, regardless. I looked up @THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_BUGGED_: it hadn’t been updated since January, but it was still there. “Are people talking about me?” I asked Orin, though he didn’t know many people who worked in media, who would be most likely to gossip about my role in this. “Not that I know of,” he said earnestly, and dutifully added, “but why would they? You’re the victim here!”
I thanked Orin for calling me and asked if it wasn’t past time for him to rinse off the face mask. He said shit, but was I OK? I said, “Honestly? I’d been planning to dump him anyway, so I feel . . . vindicated. But it is weird!” He laughed. I felt guilty for portraying myself as aloof and uncaring—I was OK, but I wasn’t going to simply get over it—so I added that I wished it weren’t raining so hard because I felt like running down the street or something. Again the tone was wrong, too chipper and wholesome, but I was suddenly exhausted. Orin laughed again and said bye, I should chat him tomorrow if I needed to talk.
I shut my computer, laughed in the dark, and opened my computer again, though when I went back to Twitter I felt like I’d walked into a room and forgotten what I’d gone in there for. How had I missed it? Not just today—the entire time. When I found out Felix had died, I couldn’t believe it, but I’d thought that was what it was supposed to feel like. Death is inevitable, something you have to come to terms with, resistant to skepticism even as it produces shock. Should I have suspected something wasn’t right? Returning to thoughts of logistics, I saw a flash of my gullibility. Why hadn’t I thought more about the strangeness of his mother’s phone call, the thousand dollars, the ease with which I’d avoided his funeral unquestioned? Wouldn’t there have been a police report or accident report or something from the alleged bike accident that I could have searched for? An obituary? A funeral-home announcement? Why hadn’t I tried to do that? Hadn’t anyone else tried to do that? No—no one cared, and he was free enough of optimism to be able to count on that. How many people had been duped? Felix had always been one of those people who didn’t have many friends—he rarely introduced me to anyone—but he accompanied me to my friends’ parties, and was not antisocial at them, so I’d just assumed his somewhat itinerant past and picky disposition meant he didn’t want many friends. There was a guy named Matt. People from Berlin, people from work. Was that convenient, or by design? Since he didn’t have social media accounts under his own name, it was easier to contain the truth. The person most likely to have encouraged a collective mourning online would have been his girlfriend, and he knew that wasn’t my style; he must have created the memorial Facebook account himself, and who would think to question that? Had he created all the accounts that posted on it? I went back to it. A colleague’s name jumped out, but otherwise it was all strangers. I clicked on one, but his profile was private, like the one I’d tried to look at before. I clicked on another. Also private. I saw now that there was something similar about their names, which all had the off-kilter spellings beloved by creative but entitled parents. I’d thought that was a product of his being from wealthy Los Angeles. He must have hired a woman to play his mother and call the people closest to him—that had been why the call was so strange. Or maybe his mother was herself just strange, the strange phone call genuine, and he’d had someone play a police officer and call her and say he’d died? Knowing whether he’d tricked her, too, would determine whether he himself had organized his celebration of life across the country, to draw fewer people who (thought they) knew him well, or if his real mother had done it. Had there been a celebration of his life? I went back to my email: a “small, intimate celebration, with family only.” So that was for my benefit, and perhaps my unwillingness to attend had meant the hoax would go on longer: there was no opportunity for a coffin-popping surprise. Maybe his parents had died a long time ago, and everything he’d told me about them was a lie.
