by Lauren Oyler
These questions were so powerless that I suddenly felt like I didn’t care, like my capacity to care had been colonized by fortifying thoughts of myself. Again I began to think, or perversely hope, that this was somehow about me. Maybe my joke to Orin was right: Felix had so hated dating me that he couldn’t bear having another conversation with me, even if that conversation promised the sweet relief of the end of our time together, so he decided to fake his own death to get out of having it. For a moment I wondered, horrified and nauseatingly flattered, if maybe I’d been the only one fooled, if it was a test of my love I’d clearly failed, but then I remembered the angry and awestruck colleagues, the Facebook page, the blog posts, Orin—you couldn’t just fake your death for one person. No—it was crucial that I look this mortifyingly contorted disappointment in the eye. If he’d done it for the usual reasons, financial or legal, he wouldn’t have come back so soon, and I couldn’t imagine what financial trouble he would be in, with his parents being so wealthy, though I reminded myself that I actually knew nothing about his finances or his parents. Where had he hidden when he was playing dead? Where did his money come from? Who had helped him? How long did it take to plan? Who were his influences? How much did he plot out in advance? Answers to any of these questions might have provided clarity, but even if they were resolved, they would do little to really fill out his character, to show why he’d done it. I knew the most obvious explanation was probably the correct one, that this was intended as some kind of performance art or commentary, but that wasn’t gratifying at all. In framing his fake death as a work, he’d built a hermeneutic barrier between himself and the world. One was obligated to think critically through the gesture without psychologizing, even if the gesture was ill-conceived, inelegant, and ugly; otherwise, one would look unserious, personally motivated, biased, obsessed. Fuck, I said aloud. Shit! The intent of his project was obvious, but still I had to spell it out. He had rejected the techno-utopian vision of paranoid collectivity, for which we’d sold our souls and privacy, through the ultimate act of opting out: suicide, but one that managed to evade the usual accusations of selfishness by disguising itself as an accidental death. Would he now out himself as the guy behind @THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_BUGGED_? The statement he was trying to make would have been better publicized by a famous or at least esoterically notorious figure. If he’d had more patience, he could have developed an online presence before killing himself off, though maybe his anonymity was the point. A couple of people who had tweeted about the story wondered: Who is this random guy? By being no one in particular, he’d effectively exposed the tenuousness of the supposedly unprecedented connections linking us now. Who cared about him? No one. Yet were we not all supposed to be at least a little important online? The memorial Facebook page used the certainty social media encouraged to make the lie more believable; though people were more suspicious than ever of fake news, bias, spin, scams, and self-promotion, the thing that allowed them to proliferate was the same thing that was seen as a very capable guard against them. Lots of people had posted to the Facebook page; anyone who glanced at it would assume it was legit. A faked death seemed like it would be difficult to pull off, a feat of planning, but it may well have been straightforward precisely because of that appearance. “Let Me Google That For You”—a good joke because increased access to information hasn’t really increased our willingness to access it. No one would think to fact-check this random guy; the person most likely to do so was probably me, but he knew I wanted to break up, and he also knew my weaknesses: that I wasn’t curious, that I was prone to lazy nihilism, that his death would only exacerbate those qualities rather than send me on some kind of quest for truth. The cynical way he’d revealed his project was entirely self-promotional, a sure means to inflate the follower count on his new Instagram and drive people to his website, but the strategy could easily be folded into the entire statement as a criticism of the inescapable narcissism of social media. Or as a criticism of the appetite for passive destruction the internet promoted in place of engaged inquiry. Regardless, the more popular he got after the stunt, the more right his project would be.
No: What I found interesting about this was not the artist statement, but the artist, even if I hesitate to call him that. You had to be a certain kind of person to fake your death, and I had no idea what kind of person that was. I was overcome with a pathetic urge to understand him. My face was hot, my chest was tight; it recalled the feeling of arguing online with someone you know is never going to get it, someone whose name you might not even know but who is suddenly able to wield power over you. I’d been lured into an intellectual trap and could only blame myself for getting stuck there. There had to be some internal pain or lifelong struggle that had led him to do this! “Why add more suffering to the world,” he’d once asked me during an argument about his guardedness, “by handing mine to others?” I saw now that what he’d presented as realistic generosity was actually a hard bargain: if he expected nothing from anyone, he wouldn’t have to give them anything in return.
Sitting there, the rain unceasing but easing, I wanted to express all this in an email.
Nothing would come of emailing him. He himself would have advised me, I was sure, to preserve my dignity and resist, and I couldn’t deny that he knew a thing or two about winning power struggles. Say something and reveal my hand; say nothing and I could make him wonder as much as I was: Was I mad at him? Had he seriously hurt me? Or had I long ago figured him out and written him off as a selfish hack? Maybe I hadn’t even cried when I heard the news. Not contacting him was the best of both worlds—preserving doubt meant I could remain in his mind both dramatic and mature, petty and the bigger person, righteously incensed and at peace with how things turned out. Contacting him meant limiting myself to who I was in the email. I would have to lie down and go to sleep.
Five minutes later I was clicking on Compose, though I had no idea where to start. “Hello Felix, if that is your real name” was what first came to mind. I would have meant it to be ironic but I couldn’t trust Felix to interpret it the way I meant it, and if he did get the joke he would assume I wasn’t angry, which I was, I think. I typed and deleted, typed and deleted. Eventually I’d written a version of the above analysis, but in a reckless tone that vacillated between dumbfoundedness and contempt. I used the subject line “absolutely totally completely unbelievable” and sent it without checking for typos.
I was laughing again when Frieda knocked on the door. My face must have been red and teary. She asked what was going on, if I was crying or laughing. I said I was laughing but that it was a tragicomedy. She asked what was funny. I said, laughing more, “My boyfriend faked his death!” She made a face unlike any I’d ever seen a human make before—a faked death is often floated as a possibility, but even on TV and in movies it’s almost always proven ludicrous—and replied, “What? I didn’t even know he died!”
His reply arrived when Frieda and I were on our second bottle of wine in her room; I learned a lot about her that evening, including that she had a large reserve under her bed. I’d been going back to my room to check my email frequently, at her insistence, and it was hallucinogenic when I finally saw the preview in my inbox: “absolutely totally completely unbelievable - Hey. It’s good to hear from you. I’m not going to apologize, but I will say this: I assumed yo”
Being drunk surely helped, but it was not as strange as it should have been, receiving an email from him. More strange was the tone. Was “It’s good to hear from you” a common greeting from people who’d come back from the dead? There was that French/Polish movie—I couldn’t remember how the guy in that did it. I was nervous to open it and waited, just looking at the screen, which is not something I’d expect me to do. Finally, Frieda came in and, finding I hadn’t yet seen the message, yelled that I had to read what that arsehole had to say for himself.
There’s no real point in drawing out the reading of an email. It’s not there and then suddenly it’s there; that’s all there is
to it. The dread of opening it is not that interesting. It wasn’t much, but the message was impressively calculated, so much that I was almost jealous. All he said was that he’d assumed I knew.
END
A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, MY VISA STATUS STILL UNCERTAIN, I was sitting outside a café on Friedelstrasse looking at my German homework, swatting at the wasps edging my cappuccino, wanting to look at my phone but telling myself I was not allowed to do so until I got to the end of my vocabulary column. The day after I found out about Felix, I decided, in a fit of pique, to enroll in an intensive German course that met every day, three hours a day, for a month. Having to communicate in basic sentences was appealing; it was challenging enough to distract me from life’s big questions, or any questions besides “Where are you from?” and “What are your hobbies?” After searching various course offerings within walking distance of the apartment, which because of the romantic conditions in Portugal I was now welcome to live in for the foreseeable future, I picked the second-cheapest, a strategy supposedly bad for choosing wine at a restaurant but fine, I hoped, for German instructors. It had a bright green but otherwise professional website that was translated into English well. So far it was extremely tedious. Doing conversation exercises with my classmates was like trying to play tennis against someone without a racket, and who was also a toddler. I pretended to have an overactive bladder so I could get up to use the bathroom frequently.
I was studying vacation words when I looked up and saw, approaching me from the direction of the canal, Felix. He was wearing a pair of jeans and sneakers. Why tell you that? I don’t know. He saw me, too. I felt there was nothing I could do to retain my dignity but exaggeratedly put my chin in my hand, like with my elbow resting on the picnic table, and watch him get closer, his expression increasingly inscrutable but possibly pleasant. I had nothing to be nervous about, I thought. Though I didn’t believe it I told myself I had the upper hand. I was the victim here. Anything stupid I said or did could be excused on account of betrayal. Not being mad meant not caring, which was fine revenge. If I’d been thinking I would have realized I’d already ceded that advantage with my furious email, but he’d appeared so suddenly that I wasn’t thinking.
He stopped when he got to me, there being no hard feelings on his end, and instead of saying hi, or anything else he might have said, he pointed at the last bit of cake on a filigreed plate to my left and asked, “Are you going to eat that?” I said no, and right after he put it in his mouth I said it wasn’t mine. Ha ha, ha ha. He said it tasted vegan. I said I often wanted to eat food that was left over at cafés or whatever, but I never did. He said well, it could be poisoned, and I agreed. A pause. He was like any other ex-boyfriend I’d run into after six months apart and the rupture had settled and I’d accepted it was for the best. Looking up at him from my place at the table was a position I liked; it made me feel like a trick victim, able at any moment to stand up and assert my true power. It was also a flattering angle. You should always take pictures of yourself with your phone held above you, looking down at you, so that your eyes look big and your nose small. He was just standing there expectantly and I realized I was the one who’d brought him here, by looking at him intently, by reacting to his presence in a way that defied expectation, so I was going to have to start the conversation, but I had nothing to say. The sun was in my eyes looking up like that, and instead of talking I started squinting dramatically, using my hand to shade my face, and maneuvering my head so his body would block the light. He realized what I was trying to do and began voguing around until I approved his station and said, “OK, just don’t move.” He was still. I continued looking up at him, now backlit, his stance a little wide to create my shade, until he began to laugh. He said I looked like I’d lost weight. Seeing him in New York, I realized later, was always strange, because he seemed out of context there, almost superimposed onto the streetscapes and apartment settings, but here, on the cobblestones, a half-drunk beer in hand in the middle of the day, he belonged. The sun was beautiful and not too hot. An elderly man walked a dachshund. The wasps continued to hover and land, hover and land. I smiled mischievously though after what felt like a minute of this I began to get nervous and think I was wasting my chance to get some resolution. I couldn’t ask a general question or repeat any of what I’d said in my email. But I also couldn’t let him go without mentioning it at all, because if I did I would continue to walk around Berlin wondering if I was going to run into him, which I’d been doing since I found out he was there and not dead.
I knew I wasn’t going to get anything real out of him, that it would be pointless to try and get him to sit down and explain. But there’s something I didn’t mention before. I wasn’t going to mention it at all, because it’s embarrassing, the way it reveals my trifling concerns, what I keep track of, what upsets me. But it’s critical to the story, and to leave it out would be self-serving. As a writer you have to think of the reader.
“It’s more of a comment than a question,” I said, my voice low and flirtatious. I was surprised to hear I sounded not shaky or desperate but cool, really cool, like I hadn’t been dwelling on this minuscule detail for the last two weeks, thinking of it and almost nothing else. No, it had just occurred to me then, and since I didn’t really care I didn’t think anything of bringing up this one minor thing that was just curious, not something that would bother me if I didn’t receive an adequate response to it. He smiled and said OK and crossed his arms in front of his chest, still blocking the sun for me.
“That’s one of my tweets.”
“What?” he asked.
That’s one of my tweets. That’s one of my tweets. I had been humiliated so much already by this person—I try to hide it, but no amount of positive thinking can erase all the humiliation from this situation—and now somehow without even saying anything he had managed to humiliate me more, compelling me to utter this dumb sentence not once but twice and then later to write it three times. In my own novel! Trying to maintain the knowing tone to my voice that had so pleasantly surprised me just moments before I repeated that that—I’ll tell you what it is in a second—was one of my tweets. I didn’t care, appropriation was nothing new, and anyway if I’d wanted to preserve that sentence as my own I should have published it in a legitimate form, not on social media. I had no claim. It wasn’t that the content of the tweet mattered. I was just saying.
“‘I’m a pretty girl and I’m always late!’ is something I tweeted,” I said, remaining still because of the sun. “I mean, I don’t memorize my tweets, obviously, but it is something I tweeted. I remember because I was late at the time.” I’d tweeted it from the subway, waiting for the doors to close, late on the way to meet him for a movie, something from the seventies, at Film Forum. I’d felt bad about myself for doing this again, for always doing this, and I was worried we’d end up with bad seats. I hoped he would just go in and get seats as I’d urged him to do in a text message, not to be a martyr by waiting for me in the lobby. At the time I knew or thought I knew that he didn’t have social media, so I posted as if he wouldn’t read what I wrote. He might have thought the tweet was funny, but he also might have found it deeply annoying, particularly if he was already deeply annoyed about my making him late for this movie. By the time I got there the only seats available were at the very front, on the far right, and I could tell he was irritated but holding it back. After the movie he said he’d never gotten my text message and even showed me that he had not; I said, “Whatever,” and that common sense would dictate to get seats. Etc. This is boring. I know that. And I knew reciting it to him would, in addition to being boring, also make it seem like I cared, which would be disadvantageous for extracting any tidbit of information I might be able to get from him. So I just sat there looking up at him and pretending “That’s one of my tweets” was a perfectly withering remark. It occurred to me that I might do a lengthy, searching interview with him and pitch it as an article to the website. “A Chat with My Ex-Boyfriend, th
e Anonymous Online Conspiracy Theorist Who Faked His Death.” It would get good traffic. Inevitably an angry response would follow: “That guy didn’t really fake his death—I would know, because I did it.”
