Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  “Tape something for your diary by dinner, promise?”

  “Promise,” Anna exhaled.

  “Cool. I’ll meet you downstairs at six.”

  This time when he shut the door behind him, he didn’t come back. Anna slumped against the pillows and looked at the clock again: it had been almost thirty-seven hours since she last checked her e-mail.

  22

  Anna sat down in a chair in front of the AVCCAM and the issue of what to do with that flab of fat that disappears when you stand instantly manifested itself. She stared at the blinking red light, feeling the same way she did when staring at the (1) in her in-box and waiting for it to change to (2). It’s not like she was Simone, engineering her life so as to maximize nudity and scandal. What was there to say, really? But if she didn’t say something, she wouldn’t even be able to tell Taj she’d tried. I tried. That could be her gravestone epitaph.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said to the AVCCAM, thinking only of her stomach, its folds. Then an idea came to her. This was supposed to be a diary about her Internet addiction, after all.

  “Tiny bubbles of discontent surround me,” she said, “because I’m as lonely as a shark in the deep blue ocean.”

  But the words just hung awkwardly in the air and nothing new suggested itself. Thinking of Simone again, she decided to take her shirt off to see if that might help. Going topless didn’t seem to help at all. After floundering for another hopeless minute or two, she went over to the camera to review the footage, then set the camera back down, disgusted. Hadn’t she and Taj decided they didn’t believe in titillation without the plus? Now look at her: only six minutes into her diary and she was already taking the easy way out, choosing boobs over content. Time for a break, she decided. She flopped on the bed and picked up the remote control. Did watching TV violate the terms of her parole? Soon this question of what does and does not constitute the Internet would be moot, Anna thought. Soon everything will be one endless continuum: airwaves, brainwaves, microwaves.

  She clicked listlessly through the channels—a curling match, C-SPAN, the closed-circuit ravings of some imam—and settled on a laugh-track sitcom. For fifteen minutes, she watched the actors lurch to and fro, displaying an almost preternatural lack of humor. She thought of Simone and imagined replacing the soundtrack’s bursts of stale laughter with bouts of hysterical weeping or angry catcalls. Imagined changing everyone’s face to an ominous black dot. She had to stop thinking about Simone. She had to stop lying here. The day was slipping away from her.

  Outside! She would go outside, offer her starved neuroreceptors some much-needed vitamin D, carpe her diem. She grabbed the camera, pressed it to her eye, and filmed her awkward, camera-encumbered egress, her procession down the piano-wide hall, the trip down the elevator, none of it interesting. She breezed through the lobby, past the concierge and the cluster of cold-eyed trendocrati perched on the uncomfortable furniture, stopping only when another of those horrible little plaques caught her eye. This one was by the front door. Anna zoomed in.

  There’s really only one not-so-fine line. Everyone is so proud of their own insignificant little boundaries. Scrupulously they vow, I would never do that! And perhaps they wouldn’t. More likely, they’ll never have to. Anyway, that’s them, that’s fine.

  —JOHN O’BRIEN (1960–1994)

  Then it was outside onto the still-wet sidewalk, where a hipster was smoking a cigar on the curb, just like a cartoon hipster. The rain had ended but the sky was still luminous and gray. She turned right, away from Simone’s gallery, and began to walk. In Brooklyn it was possible to feel nostalgic for six months ago—the deli-turned-fetish-shoe-store, the shuttered gallery, the dog run paved over to make way for a bocce court—she could tell this was the same kind of place. A landscape of permanent transition. Suddenly she felt herself strangely at home. At the stop sign at the end of the block someone had stenciled dithering under the word stop. Not dithering, she turned boldly left, panning over the cracked sidewalk, planets of crushed black gum, a starburst of ambitious crabgrass. She remembered that she was forgetting to speak. But what to say when her only thoughts were of herself and Taj? Taj and Simone? Taj and Taj? She forced herself to concentrate, to cut through the static of the day’s events and isolate the brutal, PowerPoint essentials of what it was that she was feeling, as though commanded to do so by Chad Brohaurt himself. She had to admit: a cold tapeworm of doubt was winding its way through her gut. She was afraid of where this whole thing with Taj was going:

  • Emotionally

  • Creatively

  • Financially

  She squatted down to document a dead pigeon on the sidewalk. Was her fatal flaw really a fame deficit, as Taj had suggested? Somehow she thought not. Maybe her fatal flaw was that she started things the wrong way. In such a way that made them unlikely to continue. Or was it that she gave too much, like the fortune-teller had said, leaving nothing to the imagination? Maybe this was what made women like Simone so attractive to Taj, and men like Taj so attractive to her: this quality of unknowability. But how to make herself unknowable? Mysterious? Elusive? The answer was itself elusive. She could find someone to teach her how to blog, but who would teach her to be less knowable? Especially with memories of their ATM tussle pinging her nipples erect every other second? The physical hunger alone was enough to make Anna lay everything out on the table: her bank statements, her Pap smear results, her Gmail password. She suddenly regretted not bringing that Fatal Flaw book along with her. Maybe she could hire Lab Coat’s expensive consulting firm to anonymously poll Taj, see if she could confirm her hypothesis about her lack of elusiveness?

  But for now she continued down the street, filming, the breeze warmed by the occasional gust of exhaust. Everywhere she looked, Anna saw metaphors. A pool floatie in a moss-limed pool. She was a pool floatie. Floating on what? A pool of metaphors. Skaters falling off their skateboards in an endless loop. An umbrella, broken and abandoned in the gutter. She glanced inside a café, each table occupied by a solitary coffee drinker. They looked like little islands of loneliness in a greater archipelago of sorrow and self-doubt. Then life began pulling her back inside. The promise of food, Taj, rest. Anna went back to her room at the hotel. She picked up the phone to call Leslie or Brandon, only to realize she didn’t know anyone’s cell phone number by heart, and decided to flush away the day’s toxicity with a little self-makeover instead. She tweezed her eyebrows and gave herself a rice-bamboo dermabrasion facial. That done, she carefully applied a set of Crest White Strips to her crooked incisors and lay down on the bedspread to rest.

  At 5:30 she went down to the mostly empty hotel bar, where happy hour was under way. Taking a seat at the bar, she ordered an optimistic Bloody and looked around. Throughout the room, hipsters were slumped singly or in pairs over their drinks, prodding unappetizing appetizers. An Elliott Smith song was playing—the jaunty sound of suicide—but not loud enough to mask the death rattles of caipirinhas. In all honestly, it looked more like sad hour to her.

  “Anyone sitting here?”

  Anna turned around to find the cartoon hipster she’d seen smoking a cigar outside earlier hovering by the seat next to hers. She moved her purse and he sat down.

  “You must be Fucked,” he said, nonchalant. “I’m Tim.”

  “What?” She had taken exactly one suck of her Bloody—she was hardly even buzzed.

  “Fucked? You know, the fest? Sorry, I saw you here earlier with Zero and Simone and just assumed—”

  “Oh, right. The fest,” Anna said, recovering. “Ha.”

  “It’s weird to see Zero at Gilman’s fest, you know, after all that stuff,” he said, motioning for the barkeep. “Especially so chummy with Simone. Did you see her new piece? I heard she attached a microphone to a speculum.”

  This was Gilman’s festival?

  “So what’s their deal, anyways?” Tim continued, sotto voce. “I mean, Zero and Simone.”

  “You tell me,” Anna said. Thin
king fast, she offered a half-truth. “We just met yesterday.”

  “Fucked threw you together, huh?” He chuckled. “The fest has a crazy way of doing that. Last year I ended up at karaoke with Laurel Nakadate.”

  Anna nodded as if she knew who that was and for the next half-hour Tim filled her in, starting with the Herzog seminar that reunited Simone and Gilman after the “James Franco” affair (it turned out the world of po-mo, mumblecorish, DIY art film involved the same twelve people traveling the same Möbius strip of festivals, fairs, and workshops) and the now-famous tweet—purchased for a record sum by an undisclosed Middle Eastern buyer—heralding the birth of Nowism. There was the fertile period of manic productivity, followed by the fallow season of personal recrimination and scandal. Zero loved Simone, loved her to the point of self-harm, but Simone loved Gilman, whose tongue was firmly adhered to a roulette wheel of Hollywood starlets. A great toing-and-froing ensued. Simone fled the country. Zero followed her around the globe. Gilman didn’t give a shit; by then he’d discovered Buddha and blow. Zero zeroed in on Simone in Berlin, where for a few months she alternately tolerated and indulged him before leaving him for good—for Marina Abramović, according to some blogs. Anna listened and ate the complimentary nuts until there was nothing but salt left in the bowl. The bar was already filling up with a different kind of crowd. But just as she thought Tim was done, he pulled out his iPhone and began diddling it.

  “The reason I can’t believe he’s here, though, is this. Have you seen this?” He handed her the phone. She glanced at the screen and shook her head. It was a YouTube video called From Zero to Sixty in Less Than Two Minutes, by P. Gildaddy.

  “Gilman premiered it at the first Fucked Fest.” Tim chuckled. “Rumor is he stole Zero’s Moleskine diary—though he swears Zero gave it to him—and had some homeless guy narrate it. Check it out. It’s hella wicked.”

  The homeless man did look “hella wicked.” Cinematically toothless and wild of hair, his skin tanned and windburned to a luggage-like consistency, he held the Moleskine far away from his face, hinting at a tragic lack of prescription lenses, and began to read in a cracked voice.

  “‘Acceptance from Yale Art came today. I let Simone burn it, but not before pissing on it first.’

  “‘Sometimes I just feel powerful. POWERFUL! Like Rarrrrwww, superhero-roar powerful. Why can’t a person feel powerful?’

  “‘I’ve decided I’m only going to date hot girls. There’s no point in wasting life on the non-hot.’

  “‘Idea: calculate the Gini coefficient of inequality for the art world, comparing it to Brazil, Africa, other third world countries. Fucking brill. Marry economics background with art, Gilman says people love that shit. Simone says, especially when you’re brown. (Or, better: the Gini coefficient of jealousy?)’”

  The bum was skipping around. Flipping pages. Pausing to let out the occasional tubercular cough. Many of the entries were appallingly egomaniacal, others, like “standing serenely in a sea of wooden swords,” simply made no sense. All of it sounded grotesque coming from the vagrant’s mouth even though Anna had to admit he was a surprisingly good reader. For a second she wondered if this was another of Gilman’s tricks and the beggar was really an Oberlin grad. But she was jolted out of these thoughts by a familiar phrase.

  “‘Things are getting blurry,’” the hobo read, scratching the back of his neck. “‘Nothing ever feels right when it’s supposed to.’” Things are getting blurry. Hadn’t it been Brie who’d said that? Could she have been quoting Taj? Or was “blurry” just the way people felt now, Anna wondered.

  “‘People shouldn’t ask, What happened? A better question, What didn’t happen?’

  “‘Gilman, Simone, I feel like they’re on some definite road and I’m just manning the tollbooth.’”

  The bum flipped to the last page. “‘I’m a comer. Got to remember that. The Young Turk. Keep telling yourself. Rising star, rising star.’” The homeless man stared straight at the camera as he’d obviously been instructed to do. Then he began to laugh—a wet, horseradishy, ugly sound Anna wished would stop as soon as it started—before closing the book.

  “‘Fuck you, world,’” he snorted. “‘I’m a fucking comer.’”

  The movie had ended but Anna kept staring at the screen.

  “So what’s your thing?” Tim was asking her, plucking the phone from her limp hand. “Film? Performance?”

  “I’m offline,” Anna murmured, her thoughts still faraway. Spotting Taj across the room, she slipped off her stool.

  “Interesting.” Tim nodded.

  She began to thread her way through the crowd. Poor Taj! Finally, it was all starting to make sense: Gilman had fucked him. Fucked him at his own fest, no less. Simone had never loved him. Both had surpassed him. Café Schadenfreude, indeed. Tears actually sprang to her eyes at the humanity of it. And so now she knew what it was—aside from their dual interest in China—that she and Taj had in common: they were real people. People who tried things and failed. People who occasionally changed their minds and, OK, names and personas, to forge new and uncharted paths. Brave people who took that plunge, even when their Life Maps ended up full of winding roads that didn’t lead to any strategic destination. People whose maps were still sketched on napkins, even. Vulnerable to gusts of opportunism, insecurity, lust, and sheer boredom.

  “You look different,” Taj said.

  Anna had arrived at the hostess station, eyes moist with sympathy.

  “I did my eyebrows.”

  “They look nice.”

  “Thank you,” Anna said. The compliment spread through her like a gulp of Sriracha. They slid into a booth. “How was your day?”

  “Productive,” Taj said with unexpected gusto. “How about you? How was your shoot?”

  “Good,” Anna said, still trying to shake off the image of the homeless man, the grotesque echo of his laugh. “I walked around a lot.”

  “Get anything good?”

  “Tons of interesting stuff.” Not exactly true, but Brandon had told her there were plug-ins for everything in Final Cut Pro. Even interestingness.

  “Awesome,” Taj said.

  Normally, Anna suspected she radiated a vibe of quiet desperation. But with the discomfiting disclosures mounting on Taj’s side of the ledger, she found herself experiencing an unfamiliar surge of confidence. Everything was going to turn around for them tonight, she could feel it.

  “And how are you feeling, you know, about the Internet? It’s been like two days.”

  In truth, the Internet, its absence, ached like a phantom limb. Unable to play her usual games of call-and-response with Google, she didn’t feel saved at all. She felt stranded. Stranded on a Luddite island here in the heart of Silver Lake. But before she could come up with a suitable lie, Taj pulled up a butt cheek and took out his cell phone.

  “Shit, I’m buzzing,” he said. Then, to the phone, “Hello? What? No.” He held the phone back from his ear and stared at it for a second. “Jesus, I’ve had it off all day, I was—OK, no problem. Where? In ten.” Just as quickly, he hung up and stood.

  “Simone,” he said to Anna. “We swapped phones at lunch by accident. This is hers. I’m gonna run and meet her at the gallery. Order something for me.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Soon.”

  “But—”

  “How about just bring it upstairs?” Taj said, giving her a meaningful look that made her pulse quicken.

  “I’m so glad you said that, Taj, because I want to talk tonight.” She grabbed his hand. She would never blame him for wanting to be loved. “Really talk.”

  “I do, too.” He smiled. Then he picked up his bag and was gone.

  Even though it wasn’t on the menu, Anna requested a custom omelette: three eggs, leeks, goat cheese, hollandaise sauce, sprigs of cilantro—the works. The very thing Taj had wanted that morning before Simone surprised them, and the kitchen miraculously obliged. She had them box it up and took it up
stairs. And because she did not yet know Taj was never coming back, she turned the heat up to 78 degrees and changed into a negligee she’d bought on sale at Agent Provocateur three years ago but had never found an occasion to wear. She lit the fancy-looking scented candle on the nightstand labeled “Moonlit Pearls,” which smelled like a Christmas-tree air freshener, arranged all the lubes and travel-size bottles of massage oil that she’d brought with her in order of size, then put the Japanese condoms within easy reaching distance.

  An hour passed without Taj, then another. She kept the cell phone he’d given her on the pillow next to her head as she surfed the channels. It grew late. She watched infotainers interview welebrities on channels she didn’t know existed, until soon even these negligible entertainments melted into static and test patterns. At one point there was a sound in the hall. A fumbling followed by a hopeful floosh! and Anna flew to the door. But instead of Taj, she found only a dumb flyer about some party in the lobby tomorrow. It was past three a.m. when she finally fell asleep clutching a bottle of Kama Sutra Intensifying Gel in one hand as though it were some kind of talisman.

  * * *

  She woke up the next morning in her lingerie, the room too warm, to the soundtrack of a morning talk-show host getting exercised over massive loss of life in some forgotten glove compartment of the globe. Taj’s side of the bed remained untouched; the antique cell phone lay next to her head. She checked it for messages. Finding none, she tried calling Taj for the hundredth time. Her call went straight to voice mail. She rolled over onto his pillow, inhaling the smell of his stale spit while contemplating the door. What would she say if he were to walk through it right now? What was the etiquette for being abandoned in a hotel in Los Angeles?