How to Find a Flock

by Chris Vola

  He raises his hands as if to ward off a blow.

  “I see what you’re doing there,” she says, shaking her head, her smile opening naturally. “Trying to get the check. Sneaky. Not going to let you give up that easy.”

  “No, it’s cool, I was stretching. A little sore from the gym.”

  She tries to dig her thigh under his, asks him what his intentions are for the remainder of the night, as if she’s giving him a choice.

  A few minutes slip by and a graffiti-bleached truck parks outside the bar’s delivery entrance. Several kitchen workers and the truck driver take turns unloading large boxes with the words “SPRING LAMB” printed on them, stacking piles against the building. One of the men mishandles a box, watches it explode against the pavement, a plastic-wrapped mass of frozen lumps. The driver mouths a curse.

  He doesn’t hear any of it.

  There’s only the animal in its pre-packaged state, sniffing idly at a pair of stainless steel doors, belly full and careless as it plods in the safety of the enclosure. A horn screeches and the doors open to a dimly lit corridor that smells of fresh-cut hay and something sweeter. Tagged ears lift, listen. The biggest male, trotting headlong and determined, hooves carving a trail in the dirt and shit. He disappears into the darkness and there’s a noise that’s loud but brief, then nothing. The rest of the herd pauses for a moment, then moves toward the corridor in a single wooly column, young, ignorant, invincible; unfamiliar with the sound of flesh ricocheting, ninja-star-quick, against thousands of tons of whirring metal.

  An Occurrence at the Only Place You’ve Ever Known

  Roger absorbed Allison’s message, the acknowledgment of his cop-out deflating his confidence faster than the flushed, un-full dick that was still drooped sadly across his knuckles like an ulcer-prone salamander.

  Drawing the blue alien thing and/or palm tree over it in the Snapchat he’d sent her had been a gamble, stupid enough for her to forgo an acronym and use proper punctuation in her Gchat response. He’d done it because Allison had told him about how she, before sending a pic, would sometimes doodle Pac-Man ghosts skirting across her cleavage, how she and her friends would turn their nipples into rabbit noses or penguin eyes or a “titmouse,” her favorite pun.

  Closing his eyes, Roger relived his thoughts and actions of the previous minutes, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong. When he hadn’t been able to find flattering lighting in his room or seated on the toilet, when he’d only managed to achieve the thin-blooded hard-on of a gun-shy flesh rookie, when he’d found it impossible, given the length of his arm, to get a proper dick selfie angle that wasn’t an anatomy-book close-up but didn’t provide too much unnecessary perspective, he’d decided to compromise. Life was compromise. A breast partially blocked by a stick-figure rendition of a woodland creature was still a breast. He could live with that.

  He’d positioned himself at his desk, scrolled through a few of Allison’s recent Facebook photos, worked himself to a state of semi-stiffness, gripped the base, extended his phone and tapped. The image had been fuzzy, the lack of contrast between skin and white tee shirt making for a less-than-enthusiastic representation of the focal appendage.

  He’d used the app’s drawing tool to make a blue outline, expanding its parameters, shading it in. He’d added green palm leaves and/or antennae on top of the head, and two eyes and/or coconuts about halfway down the shaft. Not bad, he’d thought. Open to interpretation.

  There would be neither interpretation nor reciprocation from Allison.

  -Full dick or get the fuck out.

  -you racist against blue dicks?

  -a little. come on roger.

  -fine, fine.

  Roger listened for distractions, hoping his suitemate might need to borrow laundry detergent or ask why the bottle of Lubriderm was missing from the bathroom. He glanced out his window to see if any of the likely green-card-less Asian guys working construction on the adjacent building were having one of their frequent smoke breaks-slash-bullshitting sessions, but the rooftop was empty except for plastic bags doing battle in the breeze. He remembered a movie where a maladjusted loner filmed a similar scene with a 90s camcorder and told his girlfriend that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. To Roger, the twirling sacks reminded him of a sadness he couldn’t quite place, emptiness under the guise of total freedom.

  More importantly, he had no excuses for Allison, whose emojis had gone from tongue-flicking and joyous to crying/barfing zombies.

  Roger removed his boxers a second time.

  *

  She’d gotten his email from the bottom of an article he’d published on an obscure site curated by a former professor. Some drivel about the evolution of celebrity worship syndrome focusing on the potential illuminati symbolism of fingerless gloves worn by Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a diabetes fundraiser. She wrote to Roger that she liked his acknowledging that the “legal framework in post-racial America relies on the myth that racist concepts no longer exist,” and was impressed with his portrayal of Beyoncé, noting that it reminded her of “that slutty girl who you keep around bc she’s a hot mess, makes you feel better about your life and always has good stories bc she’s a pathological liar – who i havent talked to after she got married at age 18 to a guy who needed a visa, just messaged me asking if she could use my email because she lost her pw. wut?”

  He’d given up actual psychological research as an undergrad, and writing was a hobby in the downtime between preparing invoices and market analyses, but it felt cool to have a fan. Even if she didn’t seem like the throws-panties-on-stage type. Even if she didn’t seem like any type.

  Allison Anvil. Her name sounded like a proto-feminist but retroactively offensive comic book character, like her online persona was administered by a psoriatic identity thief trolling in his basement for passwords and social security numbers.

  Roger knew she was real, though. As in, not a dude.

  Their exchanges followed a natural progression: Gchats, texts, following, friend requests. Her mobile uploads and posting history formed a more or less complete depiction of her last five years, too thorough to be forged. There were throwbacks of beach trips, a blurry ride on Disney World teacups. Diatribes about Holocaust Remembrance Day and World of Warcraft. A Young Democrats dinner highlighted by a Bill Clinton handshake and an ex-boyfriend Roger he thought looked like a younger version of himself minus fifteen pounds of beer inflation. And the most recent ones – drinking simultaneously with lip-glossed companions from a bowl of neon-infused sludge, their duckfaces straw-induced and therefore permissible.

  The kind of stuff Roger imagined he’d see and read from Jocelyn – the neighbor who did her laundry at the same time as him in their building’s communal basement dungeon and, when she wasn’t buried in her phone, appeared to be around the same age as Allison – if they’d been friends on Facebook or in reality.

  Roger was a man who had done so much laundry.

  He still lived in the first apartment he’d found on Craigslist, stayed put through several drug- and career-related roommate transitions and absurd rent increases, worked as a headhunter at the same IT company where he’d started even though he was mostly bored and there wasn’t much chance for upward mobility. He used the same hair product – “power putty for a windblown surfer look!” – long after his faux-scraggle days had ceased.

  In the nine years since he’d graduated and moved to New York, his only relationship had been brief and on FaceTime with a girl who was still at the school he’d gone to in Maryland, who couldn’t deal with the distance between them and her desire for at least two members of the ultimate Frisbee team.

  That someone who seemed to crave stability would remain single for so long was puzzling to the friends and coworkers who populated the periphery of Roger’s life. He didn’t suffer from a recurring skin condition or extraordinarily gross breath; he was no better and no worse than the majority of his boat-shoed, IPA-swilling comrades.

  There were
women, maybe one or two a month. Bar-hookups, Tinder dates, alumni functions. Connections that lasted a couple hours, or petered off after a few increasingly foggy mornings after, and ranged from the outrageous – the day trader who let him put it in her ass after he bought a $400 bottle of Grey Goose and told her his Kindle sales rivaled James Franco’s, the daddy-funded poet from whom he received a period blood mustache and who later tried to cover it up by asking if he’d had a nosebleed – to the more pedestrian: a texting moratorium, an unrequited friend request.

  It wasn’t that he was incapable of reciprocating passion, that his moments of sensitivity were feigned and served an ulterior motive.

  He was alone because, above all else, Roger loved ideas.

  At age seven or eight, he would sit in Sunday school, listening to a watered-down version of Revelation, thrilled by the cartoon chaos it evoked. He would spend hours in his room creating his own action-figure End of Days – Mumm-Ra as the Antichrist, Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as angelic mediators, Ninja Turtles as the Four Horsemen. But a couple of years later, during a stretch of summer that included the demise of a second cousin, a cat, and a Siamese fighting fish, death became something far more brutal than the easy deus ex machina redemption found in dismembering a villain’s plastic limbs. If there was a god, Roger no longer wanted to be a part of his or her utter fucked-up-ness.

  Instead, he focused on another portal that was mostly reliable and seemingly infinite, where age/sex/location was as malleable as his grasp of geography and his desire to blend in with whatever chatty den of liars and pedophiles his clicks would lead him. His first girlfriend was ninety-eight percent instant messages and two percent hugs before and after school. When she broke up with him in-person before the seventh grade winter formal, using more audible words than she’d spoken to him in the past month, he was only shocked because her messages the previous evening had included the requisite number of extra vowels and punctuations – byebyeee talk to u sooooon!!!! – to make it seem like everything was going smoothly.

  High school nights, holed up in a parental home office suckling on filched Bacardi, he would scroll through his AIM contacts. He devised and honed a system for gathering information, for establishing a connection that seemed more meaningful because it usually played out on his own terms, the rehearsed-yet-casual sequences of manipulation that belied the painfully ordinary insecurity that consumed his non-typing life. He’d start with a simple, hi, hey, hello, wait for the nm u? response. The trick was in dictating the movement, carving its direction. If KatyKay40286 complained about the frumpy patterns rimming her newly issued field hockey skirt, he would commiserate by mentioning how his swim coach had screwed up everyone’s Speedo sizes – yea sucks its a little uh…tight hehe. After her expected LOLish response, he would write that it was probably nothing compared to the sports bras she was forced to endure (KatyKay40286 being a notable subject of bust-related speculation). Roger would then suggest that they play The Question Game. You had to alternate asking each other questions, one at a time, and that while the questions could be about anything, yes/no answers were discouraged. The game would start innocently enough – what life decisions caused Mr. Neary to become the kind of teacher whose coffee mug reeks of Kahlua every other class? – but would quickly veer toward the erotic:

  whats your favorite position?

  how big is/are your [ ]?

  The questions were far tamer than what he’d encountered as a pubescent smut room devotee, but there was a thrill in the forging of textual intimacy, an arousal on par with what he imagined actual physical contact would elicit. If the girl got skittish and stopped playing or signed off, he would resort to another slightly less gratifying pastime: scouring the streaming video landscape in order to check in on which of his favorite starlets was farther along on the oft-tread arc, from casting couches and coy handjobs to triple penetration and rectal prolapse.

  To an adult Roger, Allison was a welcome throwback to that indispensable era, though not in any sexual sense; the need to fulfill unrequited horny-boy urges no longer existed. Instead, they traded the facts – the loan-drowned reality of her recent graduation from a small school in a rust-colored Ohio city, his summer share on the straight part of Fire Island – and the obsessions – her resentment of a single-mother childhood and the sperm donation that led to her creation, his fear of developing colorectal cancer due to chronic Burger King gluttony – that comprised their inner and outer lives. She was fascinatingly ADD, filterless, able to jump in the space of a few lines from her internship at a law firm where she was trying hard not to perpetuate “America’s meritocracy myth,” to her quest to pillage the interwebs for the most awful sounding white baby names (my personal favorite so far is Kamdyn – aka murder capitol of the east coast), to the vitriol she posted on random people’s walls: “You do realize that Native Americans are a marginalized ethnic group that still exist, not a cutesie halloween costume. and your baby isn’t cute, fyi. is this an ad for birth control?”

  For all she confessed, she never demanded the same from him. She could discuss how her roommate was a popular webcam model who got paid to play videogames in an elf costume and how sometimes Allison would try on the ears to not feel lonely, or how her bulimia phase had been so extreme that she wouldn’t go to class unless she was guaranteed a seat by the door and a clear path to a bathroom, and Roger wouldn’t feel compelled to tell her about how he cried constantly for months after he beat a pregnant squirrel to death with a nine iron or how he and his neighbor Timmy, before his mother found out about it, would take turns wiping themselves, post-toilet, as part of a game Timmy called “family time.”

  All he had to do was keep the conversation going.

  He would come home from work or a bar or wake up late and activate one of his devices and know that in a moment he’d be inundated with the same pleasing stream of pathos:

  ugh roggerrrrr im dying

  i took a vicodin

  but i just took it

  whenever i get really bad insomnia i get scared that i’ve developed bipolar

  because that’s an early warning sign

  and this is the age when people show their first symptoms

  like stay awake for a week straight babbling like a homeless veteran

  oh no. katy perry is back on Reddit.

  save me from myself.

  He could absorb her brand of damage until sated, take what he wanted and give back nothing.

  Sounds awful :( gotta pick up a jacket at the dry cleaner. Later

  *

  After a year, Allison started trying to meet Roger in person. At first it was subtle. She was thinking of staying at a friend’s in Hoboken, would he be around if they took the train into the city? She had to come in from her mother’s house near Trenton to get her passport renewed at a Midtown office that happened to be near Roger’s office, would he want to get smoothies?

  His limp excuses – he was sick, he had to attend a company-mandated retreat at a mud-covered obstacle course upstate, he would be starting a juice cleanse that would render him unbearably flatulent – awoke in her a directness that Roger found difficult to combat. They could hang out on his schedule. What weekends did he have free? When was she going to finally meet the famous suitemate who used Febreze as body wash? She would have no problem sleeping on the couch as long as fewer than three sex offenders lived in his building.

  Roger knew that it might go down like this, that she would try to sabotage the idea of herself he had worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. He wasn’t skilled enough at Instagram to keep conjuring images of the places that coincided with his cop-outs, so he tried broaching the subject honestly.

  -Do you ever think that if we met in person it would ruin our internet bond?

  just that once you meet in person, that’s it, it’s no longer an internet friendship and there’s no turning back and reinternetizing it.

  Her middle-finger emojis were swift, relentless.

  He was self
ish. He was a solipsist. He was needy. He was too privileged to understand the consequences of cultural appropriation. He wore the same Third Eye Blind tee shirt in at least fifteen of his pictures.

  Though Roger agreed with most of her accusations, he didn’t feel the sting of her absence until the third day of signed-off silence. His coworkers had left their usual happy hour spot and he had secured a seventh pint. He was looking at a Buzzfeed list of horrible-sounding Trader Joe’s products that “seem vegan but shockingly aren’t!” and wanted to text Allison the link. He tried thinking of someone else whose opinion about the article he would find interesting or worthwhile. The bartender was mostly ignoring him, occasionally glancing at the dwindling pile of singles in front of his beer with increasing trepidation. With Allison he could drink to the point of being a dickhead and send her stupid shit and regardless of her response he would know that they were on the same wavelength for at least a few moments, feeding a deeper need, what he imagined it would be like to have someone worth coming home to.

  Now he was simply another lonely dick.

  When she signed back on (heyyy dummy I still h8t you and im never coming to nyc but hows ur week been??) he decided he would be more present, give a little more of himself, enough to keep her appeased. Even if she only wanted to tell him about sending her ex-boyfriend Photoshopped pregnancy tests or her ideas about the patriarchy’s relationship to anti-Semitism that evolved into a treatise on the shortcomings of biology. He would try.