Khalil had been dying to make this point, and I was happy not only to receive such a logical argument, but to have given him the chance to articulate it.
“I’m sold, Khalil,” I said. “But tell me more about these robots.”
Khalil hunched over with a laugh that creased the midsection of his lovely shirt. It was nice to end on a high note.
* * *
Tobey and Oz were already in the lobby when I arrived, and it was clear that after some time here even Tobey didn’t believe Park51 was the hotbed of terrorist activity Glenn Beck had led him to believe. And even if it were, we hadn’t found any trace of the Internet. We were about to grab our things and get wrecked at the Heartland Brewery when we heard it. Something I hadn’t heard in at least ten years. An old-school modem with all its crackles and buzz.
“Fuck, I knew it!” Tobey said.
“Knew what?” I said.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t hear that modem. That’s the sounds of the Internet.”
“Yeah, I heard something, but why would anyone be using a dial-up modem now?”
“Dial-up?” Oz asked.
“Yeah, that’s what that terrible crunching beeping noise is.”
“I thought Chef Abdul was just mashing some more dates?”
“It’s coming from outside,” Tobey said.
We looked out through the glass of the lobby doors to see twenty soldiers in riot gear. The black stormtroopers from the park had returned. And that modem we’d heard appeared to be merely dispatcher crackles over walkie-talkies. But I didn’t process that then. At that moment, all I could think of was the force of twenty troops plowing into the lobby, flowing like violence and filling it with screams for everyone to hit the floor.
Oz broke for a side door and was taken down instantly. I sprung forward as if the knee pressing into her back were actually driving mine, but a trooper blocked my way, screaming, “Get down! Now!”
Before I could even decide to comply, another guard screamed, “He’s getting away!” I looked and saw Tobey slipping through the door that Oz had failed to reach before sprinting uptown with two troopers following after. They labored under the weight of their riot gear, but Tobey bounced off pedestrians all legs and elbows like an ‘80s video-game character.
I heard a familiar voice in protest. “What is the meaning of this?”
It was Khalil, standing right beside me and demanding an explanation from one of the troopers.
“Hit the floor. Now!”
“No, sir. I will not,” Khalil said. “Under what authority do you come here and do this?”
It was a fair question, but not one the trooper was prepared to answer. It wasn’t one he’d even thought to ask. He searched for an answer in his memory, in his training, but, ultimately, found it in the butt end of the rifle he jabbed into Khalil’s face. Khalil dropped to his knees, pressing at the blood that flowed through his useless fingers onto the lobby floor and his pretty white shirt until the trooper restrained him from behind, cuffing him and laying him flat in the mess he’d made.
It felt like my moment. Greatness being thrown upon me by inequity. But that’s only because I was looking through my eyes. In another instant, I was thrown to the floor just like everybody else. My own trooper for my back. My face inches from Oz. She looked at me, hoping for something I could not give, and I watched them drag her to the car outside and take her away. Her hand on the glass. Reaching for me or maybe waving good-bye.
Interrogation
Arrests weren’t just something for other people, and narrating events into my journal didn’t keep them from happening to me. After the raid, my journal and the things in my backpack were confiscated, along with my flask. I was placed in a van and taken to what seemed to be a conventional downtown office building. I didn’t know why I was under arrest, or if I was under arrest, actually. Once sequestered, my cuffs were removed and I was asked to sit in a tiny conference room. The door wasn’t locked, and when I poked my head outside, a woman at a cubicle politely requested that I sit back down. I looked at the exit sign over the stairs. There was nothing keeping me here.
“Please, sir. Have a seat. The agent will be with you in a minute. Can I get you some water?”
I closed the door on myself without a response and sat back down. After another twenty minutes a man in his early forties, devoid of body fat or whimsy, entered the room. He had my things.
“Mr. Gladstone,” he said, pulling a chair from the small conference table between us. “My name is Agent Rowsdower. Do you mind if I have a seat?”
“Am I under arrest?”
Rowsdower sat and smiled. His teeth were too small or there were too many. Maybe both. Not sure. Something was wrong and less than human.
“Why? Have you done something wrong?” he asked.
“Good one. Where’s Oz?”
Even a man with a deficient sense of humor would have quipped something about the Yellow Brick Road, but Rowsdower seemed to have removed any trace of the impractical by sheer force of will. He unzipped my backpack and tossed my journal on the table.
“Oz,” he said with a smile. “Would that be the Australian webcam girl you write about?”
“What gives you the right to read my journal?”
“What gives me the right? What’s the matter, Gladstone? Bright guy like you doesn’t read the papers?”
“I used to get my news online.”
“Right. Of course you did. HuffPo? Slate? Oh, probably something international for a less biased point of view. BBC. Al Jazeera, perhaps? Anyway, you might want to acquaint yourself with the NET Recovery Act.”
He pulled my flask from the bag. “Here. Go ahead,” he said. “You’re not gonna like this.”
I took a swig and felt the numbing warmth tingle to my arms while Rowsdower proceeded to tell me about the National Emergency Technical Recovery Act. Drafted by Obama’s White House and passed by an overwhelming majority in both houses across party lines, the government had been granted additional state of emergency powers if used “in the direct furtherance” of restoring the Internet. This power allowed officials to interrogate and even detain “persons of interest” indefinitely without charges or representation by counsel.
“And how the hell did I become a person of interest?”
“Well, you tell me, Gladstone. Do you think in the last few days most New Yorkers have been consorting with Anonymous at covert 4Chan gatherings and visiting downtown mosques amid rumors of terrorist Internet chatter emanating from downtown?”
“Still doesn’t make me a threat to national security.”
“The government, not you, decides what makes you a threat.”
I wasn’t naïve. I’d worn a suit. Worked in an office. Voted in several elections. I knew the way the world worked and the dark things people accepted in silence. But Rowsdower was talking about them in a brightly lit room without a trace of shame. I must have looked very young to him.
“By the way, this Oz,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have her real name, would you?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t worry, Mr. Gladstone,” he said, turning vaguely avuncular with his established power. “The government tends to believe you. I ran your background check. Law school dropout. New York Workers’ Compensation employee out on psychiatric disability for the last two years. Not exactly the prime suspect for hijacking the world’s technology.”
“Two years? Check your stats. More like two weeks. No wonder Anonymous kicked ass in your counterintelligence wars. You guys are a mess.”
Rowsdower remained calm. I was fairly certain everything he’d ever attained in life was gained from this ability not to react. To not say the things a more honest man would say. But there was something else at play I couldn’t discern. Not quite empathy, but something. He took a breath.
“Am I correct, Mr. Gladstone, that you wouldn’t want to talk to me about your wife, Romaya?”
I thought of Romaya in the hospital. An I
V in her arm and red and wet eyes that dripped tears each time she blinked. Somehow, I got it in my head that pulling the IV could stop the tears, but I didn’t do it. I just held her in the bed and placed my face against her wet cheek so she could hear me whisper, “I’m so glad I married you.”
“Gladstone,” Rowsdower repeated. “Am I right, you don’t want to talk about your wife?”
“I’d prefer not to,” I said.
“And why’s that?”
“My wife is dead.”
A pulse rippled across Rowsdower’s face, beneath the skin.
“Right. That’s what I thought,” he said, zipping up my bag. “You’re free to go, Mr. Gladstone. I’m sorry for the disturbance. I’ll let you find your own way out.”
“Out of a prison?” I asked.
“Prison? You must have noticed this is just an office building. Under the NET Recovery Act, the government is empowered to commandeer private property for the purposes of interrogation.”
Rowsdower left the door open behind him. I was free to go, but I was alone.
6.
DAYS 29–31. DETOX
I stumbled out from the interrogation, searching for the closest landmark, but New York looked strange without my friends. And, of course, the world was still changing. Many businesses were closed and the streets were half-empty. Still, mailboxes overflowed with letters, and newsstands were overrun with porn. And not half-obscured brown-paper-bag-covered porn, but big stacking piles beside the gossip mags.
I hadn’t bought a dirty magazine in over fifteen years, but I felt compelled to flip through a Hustler in front of a newsstand by Water and Wall Street. I remembered the feel of high gloss beneath my fingers and the smell of ugly maroon inserts reeking of colognes I’d never wear. But now the girls looked like girls. No longer the dark and dangerous sex creatures I’d hoped to meet as a man, but the kind of lost young women I wanted to save. And I felt bad because that didn’t stop me from thinking of them exactly in the way I was supposed to. I put the magazine down and headed for the hotel.
* * *
Rowsdower had me thinking about Romaya. I held her behind the locked bathroom door, and tried to stay calm and strong while she hovered over the toilet and pissed on a pregnancy test. My law school suitemates were oblivious in the living room, and on this side of the door we weren’t discussing anything that didn’t need to be discussed until we knew what two weeks late meant. I fidgeted in the shower, and then it was there: two blue lines against a background of white.
“That means pregnant, right?” she asked, checking the box.
We hadn’t decided what to do. No point in making decisions without all the facts, but now there were facts.
“Marry me,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“Marry me.”
“You want to marry me?”
“Since the night we got drunk and turned Clue into a drinking game.”
“That was our second date.”
“I love you.”
I surprised even myself with how sure I was, but I was sure. Marrying Romaya felt right. It felt real. Law school was a delay from actual living. And if I kept going, in two more years I’d be a lawyer, and then what?
* * *
Tobey and Oz weren’t at the hotel when I arrived. That didn’t worry me at first. After all, Tobey probably didn’t want to return to his last known address with agents after him. I was more concerned about Oz. What if she were still detained? Deported? I wanted to go back to the interrogation office, to Park51, to Central Park, to anywhere I’d ever seen her. But even with the population leaving in droves, this was still New York City. How do you find just one person? I sat on the bed drinking, and trying to think of a plan. Occasionally, I’d flip the pages of the Hustler I didn’t remember buying and wonder why the twenty-first century seemed to prefer ass to the omnipresent tits of my youth.
And that’s when I realized Rowsdower had drugged my Scotch. I couldn’t think of a reason the government would do that, but I also couldn’t believe I bought a porno mag without remembering it. Maybe they wanted to follow me. See if I led them to clues in my compromised state. Guide them to Tobey or the Internet. I didn’t know. All I knew was that suddenly the room was too big, even when I pulled the covers and grabbed the pillows.
* * *
I’ve spent the last three days in my hotel room. Too anxious to write. Too anxious to do anything other than take comfort in the Hustler that speeds my heart and then slows it with release. There’s a girl on page forty-two with a dolphin tattoo beside her absurdly coifed pubic hair who particularly excels at that. But then the fear returns, and I remember I still don’t know where Tobey and Oz are or what to do without them. All I know is that if the government were hoping to find dirt on me in my altered state, they lost. For three days, it’s been just me, the Hustler, and order-in food. Except once, I did leave to hit the corner liquor store for more Scotch. And even though the dude behind the counter asked if I was all right, I think the effects of the government’s drugs have worn off by now. I think it’s safe to look for Oz without compromising our operation. And even if it’s not, I can’t be alone any longer.
I figured if she were free, she’d be looking for work, and that would narrow the search, that is, unless she’d found that friend she was looking for, but I didn’t know who that could be, and I couldn’t think about that. I showered and shaved, but I still couldn’t rid myself of the Hustler Drakkar Noir samples that had entered my pores by osmosis. I wasn’t worried though. There were worse smells in Times Square.
DAY 31–37. PORN IN THE APOCALYPSE
When you manage worker compensation claims for over ten years, you start to know people. Which wounds can heal, and what breaks someone forever. I said from the beginning that losing the Net wouldn’t mean returning to a simpler time. Shatter both of a man’s kneecaps in an industrial accident, he won’t take comfort in crawling. He’ll undergo extensive surgeries, splints, physical therapy, and, ultimately, walk with crutches if that’s the best he can manage.
And it’s the same with porn. We need it back. But not the peep shows and smut peddlers of the ’70s and ’80s. We want all the ease, variety, and anonymity of the Internet. So sure, within weeks all the DVD and sex toy stores that Giuliani had pushed to Ninth Avenue in the ’90s crept back to Times Square proper, but there was more. Capitalism has risen to the challenge of creating Internet porn in the real world, because drunken frat boys and men in raincoats will always buy movies and mags from smiling Pakistanis in brightly lit stores, but the real money to be made was in servicing the millions who indulged in the privacy of their homes.
In addition to the proliferation of standard porn stores, a surprising number of costume shops have popped up. Seemingly legit Halloween stores, but since this is June, it doesn’t make sense. And though I was supposed to be looking for Oz, I had to investigate. I walked inside one on the corner of Forty-third and Eighth and was struck by its size. There were a few anemic shelves with cheap masks, despite the handful of quality costumes that had been in the window. An Orthodox Jewish man purchased a pirate disguise, and then a business-casual dude bought a plastic Spider-Man mask held on by a stapled rubber band. But instead of exiting with their purchases, both men headed toward a back door. The Jewish guy removed his yarmulke with one hand while reaching for the door with the other. I followed.
“Sir, you need a mask?” an employee asked.
“I’m not sure.”
I caught the door before it closed and ventured inside only to find a much bigger pornography store filled with men of all shapes and sizes. All wearing masks, and free to peruse the aisles without any fear of being seen or recognized. And if they’d been caught in the store’s antechamber before purchasing their disguise? Well, the shops were still good enough for plausible deniability.
Other than that, though, the store was pretty standard. Movie aisles were separated by categories. Big circular antitheft mirrors hung in the corners nex
t to surveillance cameras. Aside from the masks, the only other difference I noticed was the proliferation of fetish porn and the disproportionately high clusters of men in those aisles. Businesses were adapting. Anonymity was profitable, and the more I cruised, the more women I saw too. All in disguise. After a few hours and several visits to similar stores, I went home—without Oz, but with several cheap masks and a variety of porn I would never admit to purchasing in real life. I almost wrote that down as “IRL,” but no need. This is the only life we know.
* * *
The morning came and the piles of magazines and DVDs didn’t make my bed any smaller or quiet the razor as it roared across my stubble. I was conscious of my toothbrush. Even the corduroy of my sports jacket. Every sound of morning was deafening, clearly defined and unmuted by another body to soften the tin-can room. A tree that falls alone in the forest still makes a sound. It just wishes it didn’t.
So as soon as I could leave, I fled to Times Square again. It was a good and loud distraction, and looking for Oz forced me to talk to people. I wish I could have Googled “NYC strip clubs” and “peep shows,” but, instead, I just wandered the city following the smut and trying to avoid the Apocalypse’s newest Internet zombies. Unlike the others who moved in circles re-creating their departed websites, these men roam the streets in file like a string of suddenly naked Rockettes, their flapping dicks as overt and nonsensical as their desire. Of course, I’m talking about the Chatroulette zombies. I could call them flashers, and I guess that’s all they are, except I’m not sure they would have come to this if not for the Internet. The website was like a gateway drug to their perversity. But at this point, who am I to judge?
I keep pretending I’m making progress, but when the Scotch runs out, the panic fills its place. Without Romaya, without a job, without the Internet, or even my companions, I have become too aware of time. And too aware of my attempts to kill it by describing a post-punk Aussie to random smut peddlers and strip-club bouncers. No one has seen her, and I wonder if she’s found a real job. A place to live. Her friend. But then why wouldn’t she leave word at the hotel desk? Could I really just be forgotten, defriended, blocked like some random name on the Internet?
Notes From the Internet Apocalypse Page 6
