Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  Nodem looked, from the outside at least, like a sex shop from the eighties: the measures it had taken to preserve its anonymity had formed their own distinct identity, one that was about as subtle as a flashing neon sign. Once inside, the only surprise was how busy it was. Robert had always assumed that, aside from a few paranoid weirdos, Jess and Deepa were the only customers. Today, though, the place was heaving – populated not, as Robert might have imagined had he pictured the place populated at all, with ivory-pale, goateed goths and twitchy, eye-contact-averse geeks, but, if one excepted the unshaven, wild-eyed man in the corner mumbling something about fields, with regular-seeming members of the public. This was the most observable effect of The Griefers he’d yet encountered: the desire for secrecy had gone mainstream. Even casual users of the internet now felt they needed to operate behind an extra layer of protection. But then, he thought, a degree of romanticisation was almost certainly at work. Everyone wanted to believe that what they were doing was worthy of observation, that it merited protection, because everyone wanted to believe that what they were doing was important. No-one wanted to accept the drab reality of their online lives: that there was little or no need for privacy because nothing they were doing was of any note or merit.

  This, of course, was where Robert differed from everyone else. He had purpose. The work he did was vital, and what he was about to do depended very much on secrecy and anonymity.

  He was, he realised as he made his way to the counter and was directed to a recently vacated terminal by a scruffily bearded youth, experiencing the world at a greatly increased distance and sense of remove. This, he told himself, was what it felt like to be a mover, an impetus. He felt, following his experiences reading both Julia Benjamin’s webpage and Hugo Bennington’s Record column, as if everything related in some way to him. Everyone, he imagined, was talking about him, reading him, forming an opinion about him, and so he was, in that sense, more involved with the people around him than ever before. But at the same time, he was no longer, or so it seemed to him, an ordinary person. He was, in a whole new sense, a subject.

  He made his way to his appointed terminal, sat down, booted up, and observed the resulting slow-motion chaos on his screen. If he was to get through this experience without pulling his hair out, he was going to have to radically downgrade his expectations of immediacy. He tried to relax, pause a moment, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head while he waited for the spinning timer to disappear from his screen. The sense of ease, however, was short-lived, replaced by a panic so acute that his previous enervation felt like a warm bath by comparison. There, right in his eyeline, was Jess.

  He’d considered the possibility she might be here, of course, and he’d already planned what he might say should he find himself having to explain his own presence, but her face had been obscured behind her terminal when he’d arrived, and after completing a scan of the room and failing to see her, Robert had entirely relaxed, meaning he now, on feeling her gaze lock briefly with his, felt undefended, and panicked. He looked down at his screen, wondering if he could pretend not to see her. On finding himself unable to resist looking back up again, he realised that all he had achieved by looking away was to appear guilty.

  Chastened by his own awkwardness, Robert now felt unable to confirm whether Jess was looking or not. As a result, he had no option but to assume her observation, so that his every routine keystroke and page navigation became freighted with awkward implication. He couldn’t just do what he’d come here to do, he realised. It would look too quick, too furtive. He needed to make it look as if he’d come here to do many things, all of which lay ranged along a scale of significance.

  He took a few minutes to faff around with his emails, sending another one off to Byron Stroud. Given that Robert had never once heard back from him, this was somewhat presumptuous. In light of the way things were playing out with Julia Benjamin, though, it was also important. Support from Stroud could turn what might be seen by some as a petty little tantrum into a fully legitimised resistance movement.

  Emails done, he turned his attention to the real task at hand, already, in his mind, justifying what he was about to do as if he’d already done it. For a moment, he wondered whom his silent justifications might have been aimed at. Certainly not himself, he thought. He had already, not minutes ago, confirmed that there was nothing for him to justify. To Jess then? He didn’t even know if she was looking. If she was, she wouldn’t actually be able to see what he was doing. No, his explanations were directed elsewhere, to some more nebulous force. The state of feeling himself to be watched, he realised, had only highlighted the extent to which he already felt watched, regardless of whether Jess was sitting in front of him. It was an extension, he thought, of being read, being discussed. The gaze under which he operated was diffuse, but unwavering. Observation had become a kind of higher power, towards which he directed all his unspoken explanations, his reasoning, his excuses. Everything he did, he now imagined himself defending afterwards. In doing so, he was able to form a defence before he even did the thing he thought he might have to defend. What this is about, he heard himself saying in an interview sometime in the near future, is the principle. Sometimes, in defending a wider principle, you have to set aside a few smaller ones.

  It really was that simple, he thought: a matter of identifying what mattered most. How many people, he wondered, were genuinely able to do that? How many people, in trying to tackle an issue, ended up bogged down in the shrapnel of smaller distractions? And how many people, finding themselves in that situation, lost sight of the issue completely? Not him, he thought. He would not make that mistake. The success of his work highlighted the accuracy of his eye. He had identified the right issues all along! All he needed to do now was trust in the ability for which he’d been recognised.

  He googled, clicked, opened a message. It was strange, seeing addresses and names he recognised from the from section of Jess’s emails suddenly active in the to section of his own correspondence. But that was life, he thought to himself whenever guilt tugged at his sleeve. It was fluid. There could be no absolutes.

  *

  When Jess glanced up from her Nodem terminal to see Robert skulking guiltily into the café like a man on a sex holiday plucking up the courage to buy a blow job, she knew instantly, with one hundred per cent certainty, that whatever he was doing was awful. When he sat down at his own terminal and looked up and briefly caught her gaze before darting his eyes downwards in a parody of nonchalance that would have been comical were it not so sad, she knew that whatever he was about to do related, directly or indirectly, to her.

  Within the context of the café, she decided to ignore him. She wanted, in an interpersonal sense, to communicate to him his own irrelevance. She also wanted him to think she wasn’t looking. In reality, in the virtual context in which they were both now operating, her gaze was forensic.

  She killed time by checking the emails of her personae, beginning with Stroud. His inbox was predictably full of requests. People wanted his hot take. He’d reached the kind of critical mass in the opinion-sphere where his silence on a given subject was felt as an absence. Nothing could truly be said to have happened, she thought, until all the usual subjects had commented on it. This was particularly true, it seemed, of The Griefers’ most recent threat, with which the majority of emails to Stroud seemed to be concerned. What was Stroud’s interpretation of the scrolling facial lottery? Could Stroud say, with a certainty both missing and longed for elsewhere, what it meant?

  She clicked her way through, weighing things up, trying to kid herself into the kind of egocentric excitement Stroud would experience at the idea of his own critical indispensability. It was something she’d become more adept at channelling, this distinctly male intellectual entitlement, this assurance that the world required your explanatory insertion in order to understand itself. Today, though, it evaded her.

  An email from Robert. The subject line: Unity.

&n
bsp; Byron, said Robert, I hope this email finds you well. I know I emailed you recently and you have not yet had a chance to reply, so forgive me for writing again, but this is about a separate matter, one I hope you will agree is important.

  I don’t know if you’ve been following my work at The Command Line, where I’ve been writing about the plight of a soon-to-be-decanted housing estate in Edmundsbury called the Larchwood. In case you haven’t had a chance to catch up, you can read some of the key pieces here, here, and here. Again, I’m not sure how up to speed you are with my work and the hugely passionate response it has received, but if you take the time to look through the comments you’ll notice that one commenter in particular – Julia Benjamin – whose most unpleasant comments you can read here, here, here, here, here, and here, not to mention here, and even here, has taken it upon herself to challenge and undermine my work at every opportunity. This, of course, would be concerning enough were it simply confined to my own writing, but in fact many other writers have been targeted, including Stefan Ziegler, Jacques DeCoverley, and the radical anarcho-theorist collective Rogue Statement.

  I think you’ll agree that this is a matter of grave concern. The outcome of this situation has very real ramifications for both quality of debate and freedom of speech. Myself, DeCoverley, and Rogue Statement are all in agreement that some form of stand must be taken and this conspiracy to dismantle and destroy vital intellectual work must be stopped. We feel that the best way to achieve this is through unity.

  Byron, I have checked the comments on your pieces and I have noticed that Julia Benjamin has not yet targeted your work. Believe me when I tell you, though, that this is merely a temporary luxury, as she quite clearly has it in mind to target all successful and notable male commenters. I was therefore wondering, and I speak here on behalf of the others, who I believe will also be emailing you, if you would offer us your public support. This is an issue with implications for all of us, and one against which we need to take decisive action before the threat becomes overwhelming.

  In solidarity,

  Robert Townsend.

  These frightened little men, she thought, organising against some phantasmal image of a woman simply because she’d threatened the imagined sanctity of their ideas. And all the while, outside, in the world they claimed both to consider and to depict, events were occurring that shrank their fears to irrelevance. Perhaps that potential irrelevance was why they were doing this: because their biggest fear was that their biggest fears were insignificant; because their biggest fear was insignificance itself.

  Except, she thought, they weren’t simply these men. Not any more. One of them was Robert, and in fact had always been Robert. Could she still dismiss as forcefully the ideas and behaviour of someone she knew so intimately, even if that behaviour no longer quite aligned with the man she knew?

  Through the distaste she experienced at Robert’s responses, she tried to find again the flavour she’d once enjoyed – one that had once been strong enough to mask the sourer notes beneath. He’d erred. Wasn’t it, in the end, really that simple? Couldn’t anyone, including her, find themselves caught up, out of reach of their own best judgement?

  She minimised the entire web browser, her screen returning to the comforting all-black backdrop of the Nodem desktop. Then she sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes with her fingers for a few seconds, mentally minimising first the café around her, then the street outside the café and the street where she’d encountered Brute Force, then Edmundsbury, taking with it her home, her office, Robert, and finally the world, leaving only the comforting blankness of whatever reality remained when life’s deceptive overlay was removed. Here, in this space, when everything that existed to her had been temporarily erased, there were no connections. Nothing related to anything else. Nothing meant anything. There was only silence.

  She was trying, she knew, to strip away the forces that had confused them. In doing so, she had imagined that she would find something fundamental still present – some foundation or core that remained undamaged. But it was lost to her. What remained was not truth at all, or even reassurance. Just blankness – the void she’d filled with imagined meaning.

  When she removed her fingers from her eyes and began to blink away the blur, the process reversed itself. The world, formless and vague, emerged darkly at the edge of her imagination. From there, she built inwards, peopling the town, the café, until Robert was once again in front of her, and in front of him was once again the tightly bordered simplicity of her screen. There was, she thought, no attainable respite or refuge from the tangle.

  The interconnectedness of just about everything, the ultimate illusion of all distinctions, the transparency and porousness of all the borders we erect to keep things separate, were not new concepts for Jess. For the first time, though, it seemed as if their reality was something she experienced not just intellectually, not even emotionally, but physically, as if in this brief instant her body had become both the subject and expression of everything she knew to be true. These were the last collapsing divides: the world and herself; her thoughts and her body. The thing she had spent so much time trying to understand and dismantle was not only everywhere, but everything. It was opinion columns and internet ire; it was politics; it was fascist thugs on the street; it was her relationship; her work. It was the hypothetical and physical space in which all these things existed, in which she existed, and it was, because it was all of these things, also her, right down to her deep tissue: muscular, biological, and real.

  In returning her gaze to her surroundings, she had, accidentally, caught the gaze of the babbling man who seemed to have become a fixture. In the short time since she’d seen him last, he’d clearly slipped into further decline. A rash of stubble peppered his face. His eyes were bloodshot, darting from side to side as if attack might arise from any and all directions. He was bouncing his knees according to entirely different rhythms, humming a little tune to himself in a half-whisper. On what appeared to be some kind of physiological schedule, he took a phone out of his pocket, stared blankly at the entirely blank screen, and then put it away again. She wondered if he was sleeping here, or perhaps out on the streets, nearby, coming here for the coffee and brownies Zero and One were charitably providing him.

  ‘I’m getting phantom alerts,’ he said, taking her accidental eye contact as an invitation to engage.

  She gave him a sympathetic smile, then looked away, wary of a distracting and uncomfortable exchange.

  ‘It’s where you think you’re phone’s vibrating, but then when you look it’s turned off,’ he clarified.

  She smiled again, keeping one eye on her screen.

  ‘I used to work at Green,’ he said. ‘Maybe I still do. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’

  She nodded, still refusing to engage.

  ‘Nothing matters,’ he said.

  She looked over to Zero/One, widening her eyes in the universal shorthand for an unspoken distress signal.

  ‘It’s The Field,’ the man said as Zero/One, with touching gentleness, encouraged him out of his chair and began to lead him towards a back room. ‘Everything’s The Field, so nothing matters.’

  Once he was gone, she returned to Julia Benjamin’s website – waiting, like a spider tense to vibrations along the strands of its web, to see if anything Robert did triggered anything she had in place. She found herself wondering how they had got here. There had been, she remembered, once, an intimacy – one that had existed in the very space they now used as a forum of harm. She remembered how they used to text each other at parties, even when they were standing side by side, maintaining a closeness right under the gaze of the people they were speaking to; how, for a long time, they’d sustained a cautious flirtation over Twitter, each of them thrilling a little at what was both concealed and suggested in that tentative public affection. When, she wondered, had a channel of affinity become a vector of hostility? Text messages and tweets had become open-ended, all-night conversations i
n bed. Then the bed had become a place for sleeping, and the dinner table a place for talking about what happened online, until finally the internet was a place to work out what happened at the dinner table, in bed, between minds that now couldn’t reach each other. Now, here they were, yards apart in a public place, dealing each other deeply private, deeply personal wounds.

  Imagining the trail that she and Robert had no doubt left as they unravelled, she found herself thinking again of those scrolling faces and the hidden activity for which they were avatars, imagining The Griefers now as they arguably should always have been seen: as archivists, keepers of the essential information by which our future selves would come to know the world as it had been. The archaeologists of the future, she thought, would have no need for unearthed remains and the dusty rubble of crumbled buildings. Ruins, currently so aesthetically praised, so anxiously guarded, would be meaningless. Instead, like the spill of mangled debris from a blasted aircraft, there would be a long, scattered trail of personal wreckage: pixellated selfies on half-corrupted servers; the hieroglyphic arcana of ancient blogs in disused formats; a litany of updates and reposts; videos watched; songs downloaded; the record of domestic items purchased and delivered long outliving the buildings and homes at which they’d arrived. For the future historians of who we were, Jess thought, the problem would not be a lack of data, it would be the feedback howl of informational noise. From the distortion, patterns would emerge that, now, as we made them, were dark to us.