Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  Dedication

  For my parents—

  back then, right this moment, and indefinitely

  Epigraph

  In respect that it is solitary, I

  like it very well; but in respect that it is

  private, it is a very vile life.

  —Touchstone, As You Like It, act 3, scene 2

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Incorporation of Cordelia Rosen

  Chapter 2: His Own Devices

  Chapter 3: No Synthesis

  Chapter 4: Intro to Basics

  Chapter 5: Technical Support

  Chapter 6: She Can’t Resist

  Chapter 7: Transfer to Transfer

  Chapter 8: The Interior Drama

  Interlude: 2003

  Chapter 9: Everyone Else’s Problem

  Interlude: 2004

  Chapter 10: . . . No One’s Business

  Interlude: 2004

  Chapter 11: DIY

  Interlude: 2005

  Chapter 12: The Plan to Quit

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  September 2007

  They were on a day trip, a nothing, the four of them in the hot car speeding north. All the passing and now-passed road looked faint through the filthy windows, which threw dull light onto their laps. It was ten A.M., any promise of an early start already squandered, and look, peach weather. In Sunday traffic it would be another fifty minutes, sitting still, rushing forward, all facing the same way. A fleck of fuzz stuck in Linda’s eyelashes. The searing of leatherette in succulent air, a baguette rebaking in its paper sleeve, green grapes beginning to wrinkle, disks of lemon browning in iced tea. Nobody was getting enough sleep. They drove on to light and green water, sun, rest, afternoon. Last weekend before fall.

  So then what? Why, Linda thought, of every possible experience, the beach? It was a failure of the imagination, budgeted and scheduled. They’d get there, trek miles down the shore until Cory deemed a spot quiet enough to lay their towels, even though by noon it would be as crowded as anywhere else. They would lie still among pasty bodies and feel tired. Will would bitch about the glare on his phone while everyone waited for him to sober up and drive them back home. And nobody had told her Henrik would be here.

  Linda picked at the white fray of her cutoffs. Already she missed New York—the city all others merely quoted, that tremendous vile heart pumping bedlam through its boroughs, whereas San Francisco was more uterine: passive, nonvital. Here the raindrops were smaller, the hustle slower, everything tolerated. And cities that tolerated everything tolerated mediocrity.

  Which was why, unlike most Stanford grads, who’d followed the pollinating winds to San Francisco or Mountain View after graduating, she’d moved to New York, where she’d worked as an independent dominatrix, slapping, berating, and denying orgasm to ibankers five hours a week. Afternoons she’d spent swatting cigarette ash off books, and at night she’d gone to parties, where her Stanford Domme shtick gave her cred for a checkered past she didn’t have: what was really checkered was her future. Her tattoo sleeves had vined out and joined between her shoulder blades, her hair went whitely afloat with bleaching, her voice turned permanently hoarse. Two years of bars and shows, dancing and reading. A bright catwalk of youth.

  Then, without really meaning to, she’d stolen a miniature steel sculpture from a group show her roommates were hosting in their apartment, and was blamed for it, even though nobody could prove anything and she didn’t even remember taking it. She was kicked out, and then for a few weeks she’d gone a little too hard; sure, she’d made some other friends, who were more cool than interesting . . . So after she’d gone to the ER for a hemorrhaged septum, her mom had tried forcing her into rehab, and she’d indignantly refused until she realized that it’d be hilarious, actually.

  With begrudging pledges from each of her separated parents, she’d checked into a recovery center on some forested acreage in Santa Cruz. The idea at first was to see how many people she could alienate as quickly as possible—during the icebreaker, when she was asked to name her favorite book and describe her worst date, she’d said, I guess my worst date was the time I was raped. Oh, and my favorite book is Moby-Dick. But when she realized that rehab counselors saw this sort of snide pushback all the time, she decided not to resist, but to cooperate. In dryout couture (hoodie, ball cap, big sunglasses), she eased into a calm routine, reading until noon, affirmations after lunch, Bikram yoga, dishwashing, and nightly group discussion. She felt gratified to be the youngest resident by far, and embraced the gooey recovery bromides with perfected camp. When a starved-eyed oxycodone addict testified about seeing the afterlife during his overdose, Linda described her own bodily ascent to heaven on the backs of two angels. At group prayer, she seized people’s shoulders and babbled in tongues. You’ve come so far on your journey, her counselor told her at the end of the month.

  It was a pretty decent story, and more or less true. But when she’d told it to her friends just now, everyone was silent except for Cory, who’d only said, Jesus, Linda.

  She wasn’t trying to impress them or anything, she was just trying to make this whole trip less boring. Seeing her college friends after two years made her sad. It was clear now that they’d all avoided experiences, capitulated on their desires, afraid of disturbing their little routines. Linda had always had older friends, since she’d skipped two grades, and though she’d just turned twenty-one, really she’d been twenty-one since she was fourteen. But her friends were in such a weird hurry to turn thirty—not older, just old. When she’d moved here a few months ago, she’d thought Will and Cory would show her around, but she’d had to drag them to parties instead, where they’d form a sullen huddle and complain about how loud the music was, until either they left or Linda ditched them. It was super inconvenient, since by two A.M. she’d need a place to crash—she hadn’t yet told them she was technically homeless—and she’d have to go home with some desperate creeper.

  We could be doing something fun! Linda thought. One day we’ll be dead! So why this? She wished they’d at least do drugs. That would make them interesting. Auden had his bennies, Milton his opium, Huxley acid, Baudelaire weed, Freud coke, Balzac fifty coffees a day—and Linda did all of those, plus Xanax. Even hangovers were good, sipping Bloody Marys alone in a dive bar, the slow crawl back to sentience feeling almost like accomplishment. Ugh, but there was her problem, accomplishments. She wasn’t totally convinced that her current experience jihad was useful for her writing, and she wanted to be convinced. Of course, eventually party had to deflate from verb to noun, but there was no renouncing indulgences you hadn’t exhausted.

  She hadn’t written, much less published, anything since college, and for this she partly blamed San Francisco, this little ukulele-strumming cuddle party. A They Might Be Giants song set in concrete. Its last influential artists were the godawful Beats, and now it was nothing but a collapsed soufflé of sex kitsch and performance readings, book clubs, writing workshops. Haight-Ashbury radicalism had been flushed out in a thunderous enema of tourist cash; the Mission was annexed by Silicon Valley. City Lights was a good name for something that obscured stars. The little journals and bookstores were on a drip-feed of pledge drives, and the only thing to say about the McSweeney’s tweehouse of interns was that they had nice packaging.

  What was she even doing in this car? Why reaffirm dead friendships when she could be writing, or at least thinking about writing, instead of thinking of not thinking about it?
She pinched two Xanax from her coin pocket and dry-swallowed them behind a fake yawn, put on her sunglasses, and rolled down the passenger’s-side window to smoke as they passed through the northern terminus of Highway 1, where the street grid unraveled.

  THE LOUD INRUSH of air flapped through the open window into the backseat, cutting into Cory’s reverie about how to talk about the upcoming municipal elections. It was San Francisco’s first instant-runoff mayoral vote, and emissions regulation and library fund renewal were on the ballot—but when she’d casually mentioned this a few minutes ago, Will said he didn’t know there was an election this year, and Linda hadn’t even registered to vote, and Henrik was asleep. They’d tuned her out, because political engagement somehow made you a boring caricature of the earnest liberal. She knew she risked coming off as a judgy proselytizing nag, but if she didn’t bother them like this, they wouldn’t be aware at all.

  Usually she’d disguise her rants by talking about her job as an event promoter for a nonprofit, Socialize. They threw fundraising events for good causes, hiring local bands and drag queens to perform at their rallies, events that were totally every bit as good as Linda’s stupid parties. Though, yes, throwing parties for money was somewhat cynical, and presumed that young people cared about progress only insofar as they could still have fun. Did people think it was enough to “be liberal”? To feel bad but do nothing? That was of a piece with America’s double exceptionalism: how you judged your nation as the most godblessed or goddamned on earth, but also stood apart from it. The body politic had become so fat, so lumpen, that it needed morality incentivized.

  The wind battered Cory’s hair around, and she held it out of her face, lamenting its impossible tangles, not dreadlocks exactly—more like anxietylocks, kelpy and worry-wadded. How could her friends know what it was like to stand on a corner, asking strangers to spend ten minutes and a few bucks on political issues that affected everyone, and getting eye-rolled for it? All the wave-asides from finance dicks and stroller moms, all the goddamn white earbuds that let people pretend they couldn’t see or hear you, making her feel like equal parts panhandler, streetwalker, and soapbox preacher. Every weekend for two years she’d been schlepping around in her orange company T-shirt and fanny pack in Dolores Park, wiping her sideburns of sweat before delivering her rap to young people languishing on blankets: Hey guys! What’re you doing this Saturday? [Beat] Cool! Well after that, you should totally come out to [EVENT], [LOCAL ACT] is headlining, [LOCAL DJ] is spinning, it’s going to be rad. Eighteen bucks at the door, and half goes to [CAUSE]. Hope I see you there! Peace out!

  At best they’d nod at her with closed-mouth smiles, taking a flyer without looking at it. And at worst? Well, she’d gotten spit on by a pro-lifer once, but that was actually validating; the worst was when, after she’d canvassed a birthday picnic, a drunk girl ran up and kicked Cory in the ass so hard her sandal came off, and the whole party laughed through their beer and smokes, knowing that Cory was professionally handcuffed to politeness, fucking hipsters.

  For all the debasement, though, she never felt like the job was beneath her—activism was all about responsible cringing. But why the hostility? Sure, canvassing was cheesy and irritating and a far cry from revolution, but it wasn’t lazy fatalism either. Her hair and clothes probably alienated people, but wasn’t she basically like them? Didn’t she work on cool projects, ride a bike, smoke weed like everyone else? . . . Yes, in fact, her event turnout had only appreciably improved once she’d started attaching little joints to her flyers. She couldn’t afford much weed, so she cut them with Italian seasoning, and she streamlined her rap: [Offer flyer] Party Saturday. [Leave] For that, Cory was promoted from promoter to outreach manager, and all at once she was proud of her cleverness, relieved that the company was solvent, and furiously disappointed in humanity.

  Will’s swervy driving and the exhaust blowing through Linda’s window were making Cory ill. She asked Linda to roll it up, and Linda complied with annoying slowness. Cory had assumed her friends would go on to redeem their privilege after graduating; instead they’d disappeared up their own asses. Will was some Internet douchebag, and Linda was back to getting shitfaced and thizzed and droed only weeks out of rehab. Undergrad Linda, her tea-drinking, Deleuze-reading, sweatpants-wearing college roommate, was now buried under a landfill of affectations: that wifebeater with the bra showing through the armholes and Day-Glo satin headband, all inked up like some community mural, high-waisted shorts like denim diapers. It was so depressing when women depoliticized themselves with hotpants.

  Henrik, though, napping beside Cory? He was nice, considerate, sincere, even sexy in his big-bear way, and he’d never oppress you with narcissistic drama. Though in college, he’d decided to date Linda. He was a man; men liked Linda. Anyway, even niceness wasn’t enough. Nice: from nescire, to not know. People should know! They knew they should know, and didn’t! It was one thing to try to inform annoyed pedestrians about marriage equality, prison reform, the Ellis Act, minimum wage—but her friends? They’d all agree war sucks, Bush is evil, whatever, but try getting them to canvass their own goddamn corner on a Saturday afternoon.

  Cory had nothing against leisure per se—she’d taken the job at Socialize precisely because it seemed to reconcile fun with purpose, but the company’s struggles only seemed to demonstrate that the two canceled each other out. Her generation’s failure was not of comprehension but of compassion, of splitting the indifference; its juvenile taste for making a mess; its indignant reluctance to clean it up; its limitless capacity for giving itself a break; its tendency to understand its privilege as vindication. And they weren’t even happy.

  Some people did care, though. Like her boss, Taren: compassionate, hardworking, a bit out of touch, but never alienated by conviction. Cory could do the easy thing and hang out only with people with matching political tastes, but she didn’t want to give up on her friends like she had on her father—an objectively evil libertarian, who, after Cory had gone vegetarian in eighth grade, had snuck animal products into her food, not out of misplaced concern, just for brute enforcement of status quo—he’d laughed as he told her. (Cory had gone to the bathroom and made herself retch loud enough for everyone at the dinner table to hear, and then refused to eat for days until her father made vaguely credible threats about nose tubes.)

  Dating was no easier. She always got dumped for precisely her best qualities—dedication, intensity. Like when she’d skipped her own lunches to deliver surprise sandwiches to her last boyfriend’s office and he said she was smothering him. She wanted to try dating women, but she didn’t have time to figure out the Bay Area dyke scene, which was cool but sort of cliquey and mannered. She hated thinking that moral purpose asphyxiated relationships, but there it was.

  Maybe she was wasting her effort on these particular friends, but you had to involve people even when they weren’t grateful, even if you had to provoke and repeat, glib the message, glaze it with irony. It might annoy everyone, but if she tried and they couldn’t be bothered to care, then they’d all have earned their damned futures and deserved to be lost.

  ALL MORNING WILL had been irradiating the car with silent rage. He was unaware of how violently he was driving, and of the seat belt chime that had been dinging the whole ride because he refused to buckle up. He felt his brain turning red. Vanya should have been sitting next to him in the passenger’s seat, right where Linda was sitting, but they’d spent all morning fighting. This trip was supposed to be his birthday celebration, which they’d already postponed for weeks now, and she’d promised for days that she’d come to the beach even if her boss called. Ellen, Vanya’s boss, had texted Vanya literally an hour ago to be in at the office pronto, and when Vanya said yes, Will said he knew Ellen would pull this shit, and Vanya replied: “Baby, here’s an idea: go without me! You haven’t seen your friends in forever! Do you want us to turn into one of those conjoined-twin couples who do everything together?”

  Not much Will could say to t
hat—because that was exactly what he wanted, but admitting that would look needy. What if he’d manned up and stood his ground? Vanya, a promise is a promise, so go get your fucking towel. No, he’d just send her rolling into the arms of one of those white techbro jags who were always leaving flirty comments on her Facebook and demoing their beta apps for her at parties while Will stood by flexing a red cup in his hand.

  But he wasn’t competing with other guys so much as with Vanya’s entire life. She’d recently gotten the startup itch, and every hour she spent on biz dev webinars and skillsharing brown-bags was an hour stolen from Will. It was tough to say whether he resented the richness of her life or the blandness of his own: day drinking, blog reading, working from home with no ambitions to speak of except Vanya herself. She’d never scale back. After a year together, though, how much alone time was she strictly entitled to? True, Vanya gave Will an equally long leash, but that wasn’t fair, because all he wanted to do with his free time was spend it with her.

  So he’d said, fine, if you’d rather work than come along like you said you would, that’s on you. And now he was on this stupid trip, which was her idea in the first place, out of sheer spite. It was easy to imagine another twenty-four years passing before he met a girl of Vanya’s caliber, one who was moreover willing to date a short Asian guy. Before Vanya, it’d been a pathetic year of scurrying from bars to parties, getting stood up and shot down, girl after girl backing away in exotic fighting stances. And before that, twenty-two years of virginity. People assumed that longtime celibacy lowered your standards, but really it made you crazy to prove that you wouldn’t settle for anything less than what was supposedly out of your league, which really fucked with your whole concept of the attainable.

  He’d met Vanya at a house party last summer, when he saw her sitting alone in the corner of the living room, texting while people were dancing. He’d been too drunk on Fernet to be properly intimidated, and he’d approached her and said something like, I bet you’re a better dancer than Michael Jordan. She laughed, and he said, Whoa, I can see all your teeth and they’re all great, and then he made the best and least deliberate move of his life, to just assault her with a kiss. And she kissed back! And then, when Will took her hand to lead her somewhere private, she didn’t get up, but instead hung on and . . . rolled. He’d been so drunk he hadn’t noticed she was paraplegic. Perfect.