by Alina Simone
He was the last person she saw before racing from the room, standing inconspicuously at the back. He did not turn at her approach. His face was definitely older, pouchier. He had grown a thick beard, probably to distract from the balding pate. Still, it was undeniably him. And as Paul Gilman rose to his feet, as he brought his hands together in rapturous applause, never taking his eyes off the other Anna, the one on-screen, she could see that there were tears streaming down his face.
23
Bouvet is a glacier-covered speck of land of nineteen square miles that lies halfway between Cape Town and Queen Maud Land in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is the most remote island on Earth. In Norwegian its name is Bouvetøya, the little slash through the second o emphasizing its stark remove, the nullification of life itself. Brandon had sent Anna the link to Bouvet’s Wikipedia page, subject line, “You could always move here…” And even though Anna didn’t trust Brandon, sensed he saw a movie in all this, she clicked on it anyway. Of course she clicked on it. “The center of the island is an ice-filled crater of an inactive volcano,” Anna read. “Bouvet Island has no ports or harbors and is therefore difficult to approach. The easiest way to access the island is with a helicopter from a ship. In 1964, an abandoned lifeboat was discovered there although its origin has never been determined…” Viewed from above, the island looked like an ad for Swarovski crystal: all pincushions of ice. There was no telephone service on Bouvet, no postal distribution or access to the Internet. The only evidence of human life was an unmanned weather station.
Anna made a photo of Bouvet Island her screensaver.
She was sitting in front of her laptop at the kitchen table surrounded by the molted skins of microwaved burritos. There were a few other things going on in the room—the window had developed an annoying rattle every time the wind blew, the plant on the table might have died but looked so realistically embalmed she was loath to remove it—yet her attention remained on the screen, where six tabs were opened to sites hosting what she’d come to think of as her video, The Ballad of Anna K. YouTube, New York magazine, Gawker, The Observer, Vice, and, of course, Squeee!, which she was now perusing.
When she first got home, she hadn’t been able to so much as open a browser. It felt as though she’d been exiled from the one country she’d ever called home. But where else could she go? So she’d asked Brie to google The Ballad of Anna K. for her while she sat across the table repeating, “Is it bad? Tell me it isn’t bad…”
“Not too bad,” Brie said. And even though Anna could hear the lie in her voice, she still felt grateful.
Of course, nothing could prepare her for the brutality of the comments section. The first time she saw herself referred to as a “fat cunt” the rush of blood was so intense it blocked out all sound. The words beat a timpani in her head. Fat. Cunt. Fat. Cunt. She’d shut down the computer and retreated to the couch, where she let the horror of Taj’s betrayal grope her brain like a dirty old guy at the back of a bus. A man fitted with an array of “nanny” cams procured from the Sharper Image catalog and the back pages of spy magazines—cameras hidden in pens and key chains, in chunky glasses and no-brand baseball caps, in his very own dick for all she knew—had turned her life into an unwitting reality show. He had enlisted his friends, his wife, Anna herself to create a film so brutally intimate that no one could believe she hadn’t knowingly taken part in it herself. How does one recover from that? She felt as though she were living through a transitive version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, waking up one morning only to discover that Taj was a cockroach. In this, she had Brie’s wholehearted agreement. “Total ego rape,” Brie had called it, wrapping Anna in the blue Vellux slanket she’d unironically purchased from a Montel Williams infomercial. “I can’t believe he cared more about a hypothetical goldfish—its hypothetical fucking loneliness—than he did about you, a real fucking person.”
Brie’s solidarity came as a surprise, filling Anna with a bottomless gratitude. For it was Brie who souped her, Brie who put her to bed when she arrived back in Sunset Park, scraped raw and ready for the pot. In fact, Anna knew that if it weren’t for Brie she never would have been ready for the comments section again the next day.
The following morning Anna found the names hurt less. Two weeks later, they didn’t hurt at all. “Attention-seeking fame whore.” “Talentless self-mythologizer.” “Wallowing narcissist.” She scrolled through today’s epithets with a total absence of feeling. This is what she did now. It was her job. Whenever she left the computer, she found herself flitting in and out of reality, falling off little cliffs of memory into deep gorges of self-pity. But so long as she could sit here, with her tabs open and her search terms saved on Twitter, following comment threads as they ground down into ever dustier and more obscure cattle trails, the center would continue to hold.
She finished reading today’s Squeee! comments and switched over to Vice.
NormanMailerLives
Is anyone bored? I’m really bored. The same sexually explicit, messy, quirk-centeric, diaristic crap smeared on an Internet cracker. There’s no growth here, nothing to learn, no one transcends anything. I resent sites like Squeee! publishing this stuff and shoehorning it into our consciousness. You’re turning us all into a bunch of voyeurs and gossips, with one eye pressed up to the hole in the bathroom stall. (As I hit “unsubscribe.”)
CleverURLsSuck
It’s wrong to view the “Ballad of Anna K.” as the unfiltered vlog-vomit of a confession junkie. This is a raw and moving portrayal in the tradition of Mary Gaitskill and Sadie Benning. Long live the anti-ingenue! I cried.
JacquelinHandy
Except, sorry Clever, this has nothing to do with privileging the female gaze. Anna K. says she didn’t make this video, which means it has more in common with surveillance footage from your local bodega than Anais Nin.
HeroinHeroine
How do we really know who made what? Whether it’s even nonfiction? Why should we believe Anna K. when she says she didn’t know? Why should we believe Taj/Zero that this was “found” footage? Maybe it’s all just a joke on us.
FuckADuck
The only reason anyone does anything is to get famous, even if they don’t know it yet, LOL. Plus, could anyone be so dumb?
NotAHater
Anna was Taj/Zero’s collaborator and muse, natch. They were in it together. The manufactured controversy just a PR move. My theory.
SquidNapkin
Simone Weil rip-off.
Masshole
Simone Weil is a Tracey Emin rip-off.
Toasty4Eva
The road to Simone Weil leads through Tracey Emin’s vagina.
ASeriousFilmBuff
The only reason anyone cares about Simone is Gilman. That guy so much as blows a fart in your direction and you’re the new It Girl.
Toasty4Eva
Nowism = Thenism.
Burp
Why is everyone so angry?
NotAHater
“The Ballad of Anna K.” touches on something universal. Just the fact that we are all here, talking about it, feeling something together.
CrazyLikeZelda
Ich bin Anna K.
LollyCats
That’s retarded.
Obviously NotAHater was Taj, but it didn’t matter; he never responded to Anna’s entreaties in the comments sections. He existed only on the Internet. Brie had made Anna promise not to call him, to turn back at the threshold of that final humiliation. Of course, Anna went ahead and did it anyway. There was nothing else she could do—she couldn’t help it and couldn’t stop. She left messages of excruciating specificity about the hotel bill, including the charges she’d incurred for the overpriced nuts he’d taken from the minibar (as though the $1,746.30 she would gain by taking him to small claims court could ever plug the hole in her heart). Meanwhile, she couldn’t help replaying the events of the past weeks over and over, trying to isolate the exact moment she doomed herself. But like a VHS tape recorded over too many times
, the facts had gone blurry; it was impossible to untangle the narrative from the metanarrative. She even half-managed to convince herself Taj was right; she really had known all along she was being filmed, really was his collaborator and muse. Especially because the movie itself—she had to admit—wasn’t bad. Not the “Michelangelo of nut sack” perhaps, not Paul Gilman, but still, it had its own odd shuffling magic.
Ultimately it didn’t make a whit of difference what Anna thought; The Ballad of Anna K. had taken on a life of its own. The consensus was formed in aggregate, gang-pressed through the unsolicited opinions of anonymous thousands. Half-truths morphed into whole untruths, until finally the truth was just abandoned, thrown joyfully in the air and left to dangle from the wires above some anonymous street like a dirty pair of Keds. People would believe what they wanted to believe, felt it was their right.
“It is what it is,” FuckADuck wrote, quoting Gilman. A comment that earned ninety-one likes.
* * *
She must have fallen asleep at the table. The solar-powered flower was bobbing up and down, which meant it was morning.
“Where’s my computer?” Anna said.
She blinked up at Brie sitting across from her, calmly spooning her yogurt, and pain shot through her neck. Wait—Brie was never up this early. Then Anna remembered: Pom had given her the promotion. Getting paid real money probably meant working real hours.
“It’s gone,” Brie said. “I took it.”
“Ha-ha. Not funny.”
“No.” Brie nodded in agreement. “But we really have to dial down the level of dysfunction around here.”
“I need my computer.” Anna scanned the room for a telltale glint of silver. She could hear the hysteria edging into her voice.
“Mm.”
“I do,” Anna lied. “I’m expecting an important e-mail today.” She imagined today’s comment threads silently unspooling on a half-dozen sites somewhere far out of reach, reproducing and metastasizing like some malignant tumor. Her throat tightened; the panic was real now.
“Like from your friend? The one who wants to buy my baby?”
Anna blanched. Had Leslie called her? She’d forgotten about that whole thing.
“No,” she said, quickly. “A job.”
“Oh well.” Brie shrugged. “Sucks to be you.” And Anna fought the urge to reach across the table and slap her face.
“I’m being serious.”
“You do realize that no one cares about this shit except online?”
Anna stared at her. What did that even mean?
“Yeah,” Anna said, “no one except everyone.”
Brie stood up and tossed her Fage container in the trash. She had started to show, wore her blouses untucked now. “It’s so gross not being able to eat anything but white foods,” she sighed. “If I ever see another saltine, I’ll kill myself.”
“I need my computer back.” Like Anna was supposed to give a shit about Brie’s morning sickness, her fucking cracker preferences?
“I threw it out, Anna. I threw it in the Gowanus Canal.” Brie smiled her maddening smile.
“You didn’t—”
“It made a cute little bubbling sound when it went down.” She walked over to the door. Anna couldn’t let her leave.
“Brie, I mean it—” Anna tried getting to her feet but sank back suddenly into her chair—both legs were asleep.
“Blub, blub, blub,” said Brie.
“Brie.” Anna began to cry. A fat tear rolled past the corner of her mouth. “Please?” This last word but a husky whisper.
“I have to go, Anna,” Brie said, not without sadness. “Bye.”
The door clicked quietly shut behind her.
* * *
Outside everything looked different, as though she were viewing the world through a cheap-ass Zi8 at full zoom. Too jittery and close, too real and too sad. The clouds hung low over the buildings; it felt like a lid on her brain. Anna walked down Fifty-Sixth Street, wending her way past her former selves, her would-be selves, the occasional real, live Mexican person, conscious of a sense of downward social mobility. How much money did she have left? A few hundred dollars? And that was after selling the AVCCAM to Brandon. The plane tickets to LA and hotel fees had nearly cleaned her out. Even the CanadianPharmaPharm people ripped her off; her phentemine had never arrived.
Brandon told her she was crazy not to “use this as an opportunity.” An opportunity for what? she’d asked. FAME! MONEY! He’d typed back. 1107 comments on Gawker? There are formulas for monetizing shit like that. Views. Comments. Clicks. Eyeballs. You need to brand yourself. Engage with your public. Can I just remind you that your roommate is practically a publicist? Why not get her to do something useful for once in her life?
But Anna couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even start the new Twitter account—AnnaBallad—Brandon had suggested. Because it would mean becoming her, wouldn’t it? Accepting she was now “Anna K.,” not Anna Krestler. Slipping out of her skin and taking up permanent residence in this new, shadowy zone, a place full of “friends” who found one another “pinteresting” and occasionally made arrangements to meet up and shoot one another in the face. OK, this was probably just paranoia stemming from those links her mother wouldn’t stop sending—more craigslist murders—but it didn’t sound like taking the “fame bus to happiness” either.
Still, she realized certain decisions about her life had to be made. Brie was moving out soon. She’d overheard her talking to her parents on the phone. They’d come around, evidently, were helping her buy a place in Bed-Stuy. The news hurt Anna more than she’d ever expected. It was silly to think that she and Brie would share an apartment forever, and yet she had no other plan, did she, than to round out her thirties watching Brie flounder from one internship to another, feeling vaguely superior? But now Brie was going off to have a baby, leaving her alone.
For a second, Anna pictured what that would be like. Her laptop carefully positioned on the kitchen table’s coveted sweet spot, where it could be viewed from couch, sink, or stove, and she, rotating around it like a lonely lighthouse beam. Walking to the refrigerator, glancing back. Touching the mouse pad gently. Scrolling. Moving over to the counter. Checking over her shoulder. Straining to see the parenthetical count next to the word in-box. Heating a box of something on high for thirty seconds, but failing to wait thirty seconds before refreshing. Loading. Reloading. Clicking. Breaking away, finally. Down the dark hall and to her bedroom. But only for a moment before drifting back again, remembering something else she forgot to search. That last gnawing thing …
No, she couldn’t allow that to happen, Anna thought, and she felt another rush of anger toward Brie. Not for hiding her computer—for getting pregnant. For getting a promotion. For buying an apartment. No one should be allowed to do those things unless she was doing them, too, especially not someone a decade younger. Someone from the generation everyone had written off as hopeless, clueless, stuck. She raised a hand to her pounding head and imagined the bad feelings circulating, infecting her chi. Dimly, she recognized the truth—that Brie was only trying to help—and all she needed was for everyone, everything to just stop and give her a chance to catch up.
Instead Anna stopped and caught a reflection of herself in the window of a parked car: her hair was still plastered to her forehead from falling asleep on the table, her face puffy and snack-cheese white. She looked exactly the way she felt, disembodied as a jellyfish. She started walking again. Without even realizing where she was heading, she had arrived at the threshold of Lucky Star Nails. She looked through the window at the bank of manicure stations. A woman padded down the aisle like some exotic bird, white tufts of cotton blooming between her painted toes. Sure it was expensive, but according to Oprah and the other estro-mags, wasn’t this exactly the kind of pick-me-up Anna deserved? Besides, her “landing strip” probably looked more like the airport parking lot by now.
Anna went inside and took a seat on the bench by the register while she waited
for Wendi to finish a manicure. Surrounded by the familiar toxic smells, the soothing whir of the foot dryers, she felt her pulse begin to slow. Wendi finished with the woman and nodded for Anna to follow her into the back room, a drab vestibule where two massage tables were separated by a vinyl shower curtain. Anna took off her pants and lay down on the crinkly paper, feeling, as always, a bit like deli meat. She pinched the top of her panties together without being told. The wall facing her was bare save for a mirror with a few gift-wrapping bows stuck to it, a festive touch that managed to suck the remaining cheer from the room.
“How are you?” Wendi said, dipping a popsicle stick in a vat of hot wax. It emerged trailing pink, taffy-like strands. She blew on it—more a bored exhalation—and, without waiting for Anna’s response, set upon her crotch like an eighth plague. Despite the pain, Anna found herself telling Wendi everything. Not that Wendi understood; her English was bad, reserved mostly for berating the management of Lucky Star Nails, her conception of the Internet vague. Wendi was afraid Anna was crying because she was tearing her labia off, but Anna assured her this wasn’t true. She was crying because her life was a total craptastrophy, to use Brie’s term.
“You need wax more often.” Wendi tsked. “You feel better.”
Anna nodded. It was true; she already felt better. Lighter. Cleaner. Maybe Wendi was right. After all, those women who waxed regularly—with their pencil skirts, silk blouses, pearl-drop earrings—women like that never had her kinds of problems. A man like Taj would certainly never make it past the first wall of their defenses. Perhaps their meticulously groomed faces, nails, and crotches formed a kind of humiliation-deflecting armor. What had Brandon said when he sent that stupid movie idea about the girl with the designer dress? A mask doesn’t hide, instead it reveals the true essence, because we are what we pretend to be. Was that the answer? To look more like those women? Like Leslie?
