by Alina Simone
Brandon had helped her set up the screencasting program without even asking why she needed it. Now she typed in the URL and the green light next to her webcam instantly flicked on. A lo-res version of herself, a person she didn’t recognize at first, filled the square viewer on the bottom of the screen. She spent a moment adjusting, finding the just-below-the-chin angle of the webcam dispiriting, then decamped for the bed, where she lay down, balancing the computer on top of her knees. This would make it nearly impossible to type but at least it helped slim her face down a bit. She glanced at the clock on her screen—10:07 p.m.—and clicked NEW GAME.
Looking for a partner, please wait.
A youngish man with a goatee popped into the partner screen. “Connected,” the screen said, “feel free to talk now.” Anna tried to feel free. The man waved at Anna and Anna waved back, her hand sloughing off blurry pixels like some kind of cyberleper. The man bent his head, typing a message.
STRANGER: slm
YOU: slm?
STRANGER: hi
YOU: oh hi.
STRANGER: nerden from
YOU: nerden from?
STRANGER: turkiye
YOU: oh! America.
STRANGER: were are you
YOU: Texas
STRANGER: 78stanbul
YOU: Nice!
It was the lying that worried Anna the most. She hoped that the mask would help her fulfill some measure of the lying requirement, but had also decided that she would pretend to be from Texas or California or Minnesota, states she’d at least visited with her family when she was young. These weren’t such great lies, but what if she claimed to be from Vancouver and the other person was from Vancouver, too? Next they’d want to know about her neighborhood or grammar school and Anna would be caught lying. But it made no sense. Why should it even matter if she was caught lying when she was supposed to be lying, was probably being judged on the quality of her lies, their audacity, the confidence with which she told them? Besides, these people weren’t even real people, but a bunch of Rorschach tests composed of sad, anonymous pixels.
The Turkish man typed: “name?”
“Clarissa,” Anna replied. Everyone else’s lies would be better than hers, she thought, suddenly panicking and hitting NEXT GAME. The Turkish man vanished.
A black man with a ukulele and a pair of tweenage girls flashed by. She waved at both of them; both disconnected. Then three men playing cards around a table who never once looked up at the screen. Here was something: a faceless man masturbating with a cabbage leaf. He held each end of the cabbage leaf delicately between thumb and forefinger, running it up and down his considerable package. Anna couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the ridges on the cabbage leaf’s pale rubbery skin and the guy’s scaly, weathervaning cock—all that Georgia O’Keeffe anthropomorphized flora shit made literal. Kudos to you, Anna thought. It’s not easy to eroticize a cabbage leaf.
“Hello,” Anna typed. And to her great surprise, the cabbage leaf actually stopped moving. Slowly, one hand drifted over toward the screen, bobbing over the keyboard.
STRANGER: you have a pretty smile
YOU: Thanks
The hand went back to the cabbage leaf and resumed its business. Anna waited some more, but that appeared to be all. Reluctantly, she hit NEXT.
She needn’t have worried about the lies. There turned out to be very little lying required. The chats were short and circular. There were men with broken English, and headless men jerking off. The women always NEXTed her. She regretted not setting up some food next to the computer, some celery hearts and a thing of cream cheese. Her stomach was growling.
“Hi,” a torso typed.
“Yes,” Anna typed back.
STRANGER: I’M here to play fun and safe
YOU: You are upside down
STRANGER: would like to have fun too?
YOU: That depends
STRANGER: wanna see a big black cock?
YOU: you don’t look very black, no offense
STRANGER: is that enogh proof?
YOU: It’s pretty amazing that you can type and do that at the same time
STRANGER: can I cummm for ou?????
Connected, feel free to talk now
STRANGER: Hey
YOU: Hi
STRANGER: How old are u?
YOU: 108
STRANGER: hahah naah:;d
Anna was getting tired. She badly wanted to open a new tab and check HuffPo. She badly wanted to open up many new tabs, actually, and check Gmail, and Facebook, and her twitfeed, too. She wanted to get up, stretch, go take a piss, then do something physical and mindless for a good fifteen minutes, like pick the clothes up off the floor or scrub the ring of dead skin around the bathtub or lint-roll the bedspread. She wanted to bury her head in the refrigerator and eat and eat and eat. She even wanted to call back Leslie, who’d left a sad-sounding message about her failed IVF round that Anna had listened to for only three seconds before deleting it.
Every few minutes that she sat there, waiting to connect, she kept getting this little psychic hitch. Like, What am I doing again? Why am I doing this? It was the opposite of déjà vu, a kind of jamais-vu disbelief that she had even engaged in this stupid exercise to begin with, let alone that she was really still there, still herself. She was wasting her time for Taj. Because Taj had told her so. But who was Taj? She didn’t know exactly. She didn’t even know why she wanted to know, but it was true that she did. Then again—could this really be it?—maybe she just wanted to wake up tomorrow and have something to do, someplace to go. I have a shoot tomorrow, she’d said to Brie, careful to keep her tone light but secretly thrilled by the velocity of this strange new word leaving her mouth. Was it that simple? Well, if she wanted to go on the shoot, she would have to do her best on the assignment so as not to lose out, as she so often did, to the invisible “everyone.” She thought of “Béla Tarr” and wondered if it wasn’t time to take things up a notch. Time, as Brandon might put it, for some serious, next level shit.
Connected, feel free to talk now
STRANGER: hihi
YOU: hello
STRANGER: your missing the world cup
YOU: I can say the same about you
STRANGER: and you chose chatxroulette instead
STRANGER: perfect choice
STRANGER: world cup or sexy chat…?
YOU: How about nonsexy, normal chat?
STRANGER: then why have chatxroulette?
YOU: Haha
STRANGER: are we not adults here?
YOU: Ok, tell me all about your exciting sex life. I’m ALL ears.
STRANGER: yeah?
STRANGER: ok
STRANGER: im single now
YOU: Uh huh
STRANGER: for about a year or so
STRANGER: no girlfriend
YOU: sad
STRANGER: a few girls ive gone out with
YOU: yes?
STRANGER: but nothing worth keeping in touch
STRANGER: they were fun
STRANGER: but no serious keepers
YOU: I see
STRANGER: and yours now
YOU: Well, it’s good to see you’ve got such high standards
STRANGER: I do
STRANGER: need a fun smart sexy independent woman
YOU: Maybe you need a personal ad
STRANGER: I do!
STRANGER: ive never tried online dating before
YOU: May I suggest OkCupid?
STRANGER: is that your pick?
YOU: I swear I don’t work for them
STRANGER: im sure
STRANGER: you just get on here and sell memberships all day
STRANGER: its all a scam!
YOU: Haha. Right. When I’m not watching the World Cup
STRANGER: I think that top wants to come off
YOU: Subtle
He isn’t bad-looking, Anna thought, despite the bald spot. And he was at least a little bit funny, sort of normal, even, wa
sn’t he? But it was the way he said it—that top wants to come off—as if her “top” had desires separate from her own. And she couldn’t help but think about her tits, and what they wanted. She leaned into the screen a little to feel the heavy push of them against her forearms, wondering how it would feel to lift her shirt up and feel the cool air there. Wasn’t this what Taj was asking for? This letting go? She could already feel the cycle of fucked-upness accelerating, anticipating what Taj would think when he saw what she had done, what he would think when he knew what she was willing to do. But was she really even pretending to be someone else anymore? What difference did it make, Anna thought, as long as Taj thought she was. She checked the clock: seven minutes to go. It was enough time.
A grim new determination settled over the face of the man in the viewer.
STRANGER: Show me your boobs
And so she did.
9
She had expected skinny guys in faded band T-shirts and sloppy/sexy Greta Gerwig types spilling out of an art-dorm warehouse. But the address Taj texted her was nowhere near Bedford Avenue. Instead, she found herself deep in south Williamsburg, lost in a nondescript neighborhood of cheap taquerias and soapstone-fronted apartments. Finally, she stopped a man pushing a snow-cone cart down the street and showed him the address.
“That’s Morris Martin Houses, down on Krueger. You passed it. Go back and take a left.” The man inspected her dubiously. “You know someone there?”
Anna thanked him and turned back toward Krueger, slightly alarmed. Five minutes later she arrived at a red brick tower set far back from the street with a NYCHA symbol hovering over the door. She was just about to text Taj to reconfirm the address when she spotted a man on the lawn holding a light meter up to the building. He was wearing a beige cargo vest, the kind with a million pockets. She walked over to him and he carefully pretended not to notice her.
“Excuse me,” she said, “do you know where Taj is?”
The man turned to look at her and Anna saw that he was older, maybe forty, which instantly made Anna feel less loserish.
“You are new PA?” The man spoke with a thick Russian accent.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “I think so.”
“You’re late,” the man nodded at the entrance. “Second floor.”
Anna made her way back to the concrete path with the faux-antique lampposts. The doors were heavy and institutional and blammed shut too loudly behind her. Inside, she confronted a metal panel with a Braille-like forest of call buttons. Through the glass pane, Anna could see an old woman scrubbing the floor of the lobby with a wet tennis ball stuck on a metal pole. She waved. The woman saw her and didn’t wave back. Anna tried the handle, just in case, but the door was locked.
Back outside, she approached the Russian man with the light meter again.
“Excuse me,” Anna said, in Russian this time.
“What?” the man snapped back in English, clearly annoyed.
“Is there a code?” Anna said, switching hastily back to English herself.
“I sent instructions to PAs yesterday.” The man continued grimly adjusting his dials.
“Sorry,” Anna said.
“Apartment seven-B. Sam Leung.”
“Sam Leung,” Anna repeated.
“Here,” the man said, and from one of his many pockets he extracted a cell-phone-size two-way radio. “Take walkie.”
Anna took it without saying anything, silently admonishing herself for greeting the man in Russian. Hadn’t casual encounters like these contributed to her undoing in grad school? There was no point to studying Russian. She may as well have been studying how to be black. She may as well have taken ESL classes—Ebonics as a Second Language—and spent her year abroad in Harlem. The sheer ludicrousness of it. This time when she reached the door, it was mysteriously propped open. She was halfway to the elevator when the walkie-talkie beeped, interrupting this train of thought.
“Sasha, where are you?” came a voice. “We’re totally having white-noise issues here.”
“This is Anna.”
“Anna? What are you doing on Channel One?”
“Taj?”
“Ugh. Never mind. Just get up here.”
“Room seven-B?”
“Who told you that? Third floor. Fourteen-A.”
“OK,” Anna said to the already dead receiver.
The third floor looked exactly like the first floor, only with more doors. Same paint, same vinyl flooring, same blurry prints of seashells and white gazebos in scuffed-up frames. The smell of floor polish and Bengay. A folding table with some food was set up in the windowless dead end of the hall. Feeling disoriented, she headed toward the food, thinking some breakfast would help slow time. There were trays of sweaty cheese and sweaty turkey slices and pieces of bread that were already hard on top. She opened a packet of Yogi Berry DeTox tea and threw the bag into a foam cup. This was her new thing: calorieless drinks. It was an interesting theory that Brie had advanced, that by cutting out soda and juice and (here was the tough part) all that carby alcohol, Anna could shave off a good quarter of her caloric intake. She’d gone on CalorieCounter.com and composed the following chart based on her drink consumption that week:
Cranberry Juice, 100ml
120 calories (but a real glass of cranberry juice was more like 200ml, effectively making this more like 240 calories)
Fizzy Lizzy (Yakima Grape), 12 ounces
120 calories
Ginger Beer, 12 ounces
124 calories
Stella Artois Lager, 100ml
221 calories
Lemonade (sweetened), 16 ounces
328.3 calories
Margarita (frozen, fruity), 14 ounces
450(!)
The evidence was pretty convincing, Anna had to admit. Brie had also suggested she try Master Cleanse—apparently Beyoncé had lost twenty-two pounds in ten days—but Anna didn’t feel like she was ready for Master Cleanse.
“Ay!”
Anna turned around to find a pear-shaped man in a green uniform peering at her.
“You with the crew? You need to get your food and get back in the room.”
“Sorry,” Anna said, grabbing a sugary scone despite her better impulses. She slid past him, making her way to room 14A, but the man kept calling after her.
“I don’t get paid for this! I’m not even supposed to leave the boiler room!”
The door to room 14A was closed, but Anna could hear voices. She raised a hand to knock, then thought better of it. What if they were in the middle of a scene? She decided to wait and stood there in the hallway, blowing on her tea. Bored, she examined the aphorism printed on her Yogi tea bag: Your life is based on the capacity of energy in you, not outside of you. Whatever that meant.
There was arguing behind the door, what sounded like a Chinese woman barking orders at someone. Why is it, she thought, that Chinese people always sound angry? That was probably her own prejudice talking. Was there, for example, such a thing as a Chinese lullaby? It would be interesting to know. Now contrast the angry-sounding Chinese with the maximally soothing and self-effacing Japanese. Wait, but hadn’t the Japanese defeated the Chinese in some war Anna couldn’t remember? She tried to picture this: an army of soft-spoken, oppressively polite people subjugating the angry Chinese, but came up short. When she got home, she would google “Chinese lullaby.”
“Ow!”
A willowy woman with a clipboard had thrown the door open and run straight into her, spilling tea down the front of Anna’s shirt.
“Holy hell!” the woman said, slapping at her wet arm.
“Crap.” Anna set her cup down on the floor. “Are you OK?” she said, but couldn’t help thinking, wasn’t she the one with the scalded breasts here? Then Anna realized the woman looked familiar. Maybe one of Brie’s friends from the kickball team, the one who’d brought the marshmallow-topped chicken casserole for last month’s Midwest-themed potluck dinner?
“Anna!” Taj emerged fr
om behind the girl, a giant pair of headphones around his neck. He looks different without the chunky glasses, Anna thought. Better.
“I have my DVD for you,” Anna said.
“Give it to Lauren. Lauren, put Anna in my phone.” Taj handed Lauren his iPhone. “I’ll be right back.”
Anna held her DVD out to Lauren. “I’m sorry,” she repeated lamely.
The woman thumb-typed something into the iPhone without responding.
“You’re thirty-seven,” she said.
“What?” How did Lauren know her age?
Lauren held the screen up to Anna’s face and she could see that she was, indeed, number 37—the last entry on speed dial. Lauren took the DVD, unclipped a Sharpie from the clipboard, scrawled the number 37 on its face, and circled it. Then she strode off toward the elevator without another word.
Now Anna noticed an elderly Chinese woman was centered in the doorway. Had she been there this whole time? She was very short—shorter than Anna—and her face had the pocked texture of an almond shell. She wore a cotton robe over drawstring pants and paper-thin slippers. Flashes of white scalp shone through a bad bottle-dye job. The woman pointed to the dark stain spreading down Anna’s shirt. Anna looked down, brushed the wet spot helplessly with the sleeve of her jacket.
“Get you clean up,” she said, grabbing Anna’s arm. Anna bent down to pick up her cup and allowed herself to be pulled through the door.
