Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  “Though that’s not how we’re segmenting it—we’re really going after Condé Nast, Viacom, Gawker. Land, sea, and air. Disability transcends markets, and it needs healthy images. Old media reinforced stereotypes; new media is redefining them. In the digital age, we can succeed because of our disability focus, not in spite of it. And that, aside from fun and profit, is my business.”

  Will golf-clapped and wore the printed smile that he’d iterated throughout their relationship. He considered giving honest feedback—like, how would she “transcend” the disability focus when it was the site’s distinguishing feature? Why “redefine” stereotypes instead of eliminate them?—but it didn’t matter what he thought. The substrata of Vanya’s ambition had formed eons before they’d met. “Really engaging.”

  “While I’m in New York I’ll be speed-dating for hires,” Vanya said. “Also reconnecting with my Chi-O sisters. They’re kayaking down the Hudson.”

  “When’s that happening? I’ll come along.”

  “No, I’ll be totes swamped. You’d just end up watching movies on your laptop in the hotel room, like our Prague trip. And don’t even pretend like you’d enjoy kayaking; you can’t even swim.”

  Will wanted to point out that she couldn’t swim either, but telling Vanya what she couldn’t do was a fast way to get killed. “Why go to New York when all the tech VCs are here?”

  “Ellen’s contacts are there. Besides, my company is bridging old and new media, so I want East Coast connections—Silicon Valley’s so incestuous. Baby, I’ll only be gone for three weeks. Hang out with your college friends,” Vanya said, though she’d never met them, because when he’d started dating Vanya he’d scaled back on everyone else.

  “Cory and Linda? They’re flakes. And Henrik’s not picking up his phone.”

  “Baby, do I really need to plan your life for you?”

  Careful not to snivel, wan smile wan smile wan smile: “It’ll double as a vacation. Two birds with one stone.”

  “Baby, if I only get one stone, I’m aiming at one bird, okay? When it’s time to decompress, I’ll loop you in.”

  Will flexed the patience muscles in his jaw, and kept them flexed as he executed supportiveness over the next two weeks. He evaluated her wireframe UI, nodded along to n-teen more pitches, researched SEO and AdWords strategy. He ironed her tailored sit-down dresses, booked a hotel and a cheap flight, and blew out his wrists massaging her shoulders as she roadmapped her growth plan.

  The night before Vanya left, the fucking was above average, and average was stellar. She lay with her legs stilled on the bed, slenderer than any vanity. A spire of lust skewered up into Will’s chest. At close range he cultivated important-seeming analogies about her body parts—her nostril-shaped navel, her teeth with their nacre glassiness, her air-colored eyes, each breast as clean and touchable as an egg. The sense that she somehow smelled better than everyone else. Will resented the influence that this type of moisturized prettiness had over him, but it was an appetizing substitute for dignity. Though, being accustomed to sex at an electronic remove, Will found that this same beauty made it hard to focus—Vanya in the proximate flesh seemed like a mirage formed out of his desperation that would be pointless to embrace. If he shut his eyes he could usually make it happen, but tonight her imminent departure was putting him off.

  He had a fantastic idea. He reached into his nightstand for his digital camera, activating it with a whir and a sprinkling chime.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making a souvenir.”

  Vanya snatched the camera like a mongoose. “Baby, I’m not insane.”

  Will was disappointed that he didn’t make her insane. “But you’ll be gone for weeks. These are wartime measures.”

  “Nope. Nuh-uh.”

  “You don’t trust me? I’ll use 256-bit AES steganographic encryption, stored on—”

  “Sorry, baby, no times a million.”

  “But I don’t think you understand how strong this encryption is. It would take decades—”

  Vanya kissed him. “Don’t worry, you’re not gonna forget this.”

  So Will relented, and Vanya gratuitously delivered. In the past she’d proposed handcuffs, watersports, breathplay, and tonight it was facefucking: grasping the sides of her head, her ears; sputtering and squelching as cheeks bulged and caved, hairband knocked askew, liquid eyeliner tears running to blacken the wagging suds of slobber dangling from chin and hair, eye contact unbroken. It wasn’t that she didn’t have a gag reflex; it was that she didn’t care. How incredible that this was allowed! How bittersweet to let it pass unsaved! What could be more mature, more considerate, than objectifying yourself to meet the vile hard-charging demands of mainstream penetration?

  But there was still the question of whether she enjoyed it, could enjoy it, or whether it was only tedious appeasement. She couldn’t feel below her waist. “Sex is about giving pleasure too,” she’d once insisted, “it’s sexy and empowering.” Well, that sounded like bullshit, but what did Will know about how sex went for paraplegic women? For any woman? “I get off on watching,” she’d also claimed. Really? Watching him spasm, bleat, and hunch? Will figured he should be grateful that performance anxiety was moot, although he was also aware he was being denied the very pleasure of pleasure-giving that Vanya claimed was half the point.

  Afterward she calmly licked up the mess. Her eyes were pink. Will lay his arm across her and nudged a bend into her knees with his own. He felt he should say something to affirm their couplehood, to cover everything the sex had left out. Sex, even explicit sex, wasn’t very explicit. In fact it was downright vague.

  He said, “Well, I enjoyed that.”

  “Right?”

  “Sorry about earlier. I shouldn’t have asked you to do anything uncomfortable.”

  “It’s fine, I’m flattered.”

  “What about just a few still photos?”

  Vanya’s eyebrows crossed their arms, and Will backed down. All through the next morning, he was her unfaultable, inexchangeable boyfriend: making a French omelet, driving her to SFO, hefting her luggage onto the check-in scale, accompanying her to the security checkpoint, kissing her dryly. His anxiety overwhelmed any wistfulness he might’ve felt as security personnel steered Vanya into a screening room. He smoked four cigarettes on the drive home, parked in his garage, and checked his phone to see if Vanya had texted. But the battery was drained, and he only saw his scowling face in the dead gray crystal.

  II. Regression

  As Vanya filled her time with work and ambition, Will killed his. The saturating pall of loneliness was returning: its cold pinkie wending into the heart, its nauseating pressure at the temples and nuts, pulp of the teeth, root of the tongue, causing those shuddering hiccups that you didn’t suppress because no one was around to hear them. His loneliness was ambidextrous and trilingual and weighed six hundred pounds.

  Moderation would save him; the cardiovascular meal-cooking habits Vanya had taught him. The morning after she left, Will did his three miles on the treadmill and his accelerometer-paced crunches, flossed and showered, worked in styling cream, put on his vest and tie, and went to his bedroom to work. Any asshole with JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Ruby could print his own money, so his design and security consulting gigs were steady. He preferred never to meet his clients in person—ROI-obsessed, feature-bloating cretins, always chasing yesteryear fashions, these send-button sphinxes with their buzzword riddles.

  pls use on-brand “eye-kicking” color palette signaling range/depth of integrated offerings to mission-specific users, req. touchbase at next availability thx

  But the workflow was frictionless and the money invisible: click-tap, click-tap, invoice out, direct deposit in. Will lowballed the standard rate but still netted $5K for thirty billable hours. There was no way he was worth that much. Still, it beat real work.

  After lunch he drove to Vanya’s Bernal Heights apartment. He was impressed by her heavy accumulation of mail in a s
ingle day, a shoebox’s worth of student loan bills and disability association circulars and hand-tooled letters from childhood friends, whereas Will received only Amazon packages. He watered her English ivy and fed her tuxedo cats, who wiped their faces on his shins and mewed. Vanya had toilet-trained them, so all he had to do was flush. Keeping animals indoors was stupid. The indoors was for humans.

  On his way out he lingered at Vanya’s bedroom. On her squat bookcase, amid photo albums and travel guides, were her five slender brown diaries. Vanya wasn’t secretive about them; she journaled in front of him, and sometimes asked dubious questions (“Baby, what’s the difference between pathetic, pitiful, piteous, and pitiable?”), but he suspected nothing underhanded.

  He selected a journal and opened it. The entries centered around work goals, to-dos, exercise, disability, things to discuss with Will, and the last was dated to four months ago, when she’d fully migrated to blogging. Will was annoyed that she hadn’t mentioned the night they’d met, but found a bit later:

  Tmrw nite date: boy from Lani’s party

  —Will (get last name for goog diligence)

  —Stanford

  —Works in tech!

  —Asian (Thai)

  —Smart, cute

  —8PM (hard stop @ 11PM for AM mtg)

  Through slews of affirmation and epiphany, Will riffled into her past until hitting an entry from 2/17/05:

  Surgery: Apr 16

  —St Francis Memorial

  —No solids 12 hrs beforehand

  —New clothes + higher salaries here I come LOL

  That Vanya had never mentioned any surgery made Will flash-fantasize an abortion. He flipped ahead to 4/17/05:

  Recoop

  —Feeling good! 1 wk bedrest

  —Wear sports bra + keep dry

  —They’re HUGE!

  The thrill of forbidden knowledge was dampened by the feeling of having been excluded. Maybe she was ashamed, which was cool—but how did he miss it? They were huge. He felt fine about it, he supposed. Physical perfection seemed unreasonable to demand until you’d had your standards deranged by artisanal tits. He didn’t like them because they looked real; he liked them because they looked good.

  Come to think of it, he’d never seen pictures of Vanya predating 2006, but he’d assumed it was because that was when she’d joined Facebook. Retrieving his laptop from his bag and sitting on Vanya’s bed, Will opened his photo library and stared at his thousands of Vanyas, lovely from all angles—moues and pouts, effortless bikini shots, suck-cheeked mirror selfies, cumulative miles of cleavage. (After seeing Vanya’s pictures, Linda had said Vanya looked like Roman architecture, all grand arches and cunningly supported domes.) Most of her pics were online; hundreds of other losers probably downloaded and consumed them the same revolting way he did.

  There weren’t many pictures of them together, since Will usually held the camera. And now that he’d scrolled into the pre-Vanya era, he’d drifted into his own pictures. Last year he’d had his parents send him all of his hardcopy photos to digitize: vacation snapshots washing out to umber and pastel, school portraits and yearbooks that chronicled his travesties of hair gel, board shorts, black nail polish, lime-green contacts, obvious bids to distract from his chrysalis of acne, oversize webcomic T-shirts draping from chubby boytits . . .

  God—if these ended up online! It was one thing to amuse Vanya with humiliating anecdotes of his past as if he’d outgrown it, but these? A visual primer of internalized racism and its hysterical overcorrection, the lifetime of imbecilic swerving across the center line because he wouldn’t participate in the toxic alpha-male rat race that he was anyway excluded from but didn’t want to be pigeonholed as another Asian castrato either. Anyone who saw these pictures could make a thousand racist assumptions and be dead right: he really had been a short repressed inarticulate lecherous unfuckable number whiz with strict parents. It hardly mattered if he was anything more. Even taking photos was stereotypical. Even being photographed was stereotypical. He couldn’t even be smart. The only thing tangibly refuting his stereotype was Vanya. Had he grown around the trellis of stereotype or was he maliciously complying with it? At this point the chicken-or-egg questions were irrelevant. The choice was between inauthenticity and archetype. The latter he deemed acceptable, so long as nobody saw it.

  With a quick select-all, Will deleted the photos and sanitized them in raw memory. His parents might be angry, but he was his to undo. He saw nothing worth saving. When he got home he set the hard copies on fire.

  VANYA HAD BEEN gone two weeks and Will sat by his open bay window, drinking Fernet and smoking. A muscular blackfly made steely timpani noises against the screen. The barometry of Noe Valley made the clouds sit just above the roofs, cantaloupe-colored with perishing sunlight.

  Will’s split-level was a piece of Bay Area orthodoxy, with cornices and crown moldings, dramatized by the matte enormity of a seventy-two-inch flat-screen mounted on a bare wall, facing his tender blue recliner with its elbow-dented armrests. Some hidden low frequency constantly vibrated the apartment, so all standing liquids jittered. Two rooms stood unused. Food was delivered. In-unit laundry and treadmill. It was self-sufficient as a Soyuz capsule, and he owned it. After graduation, his parents (most likely believing it would help him attract a wife) had fronted his down payment, in the way that immigrant parents compensated for their former deprivations with savage pampering. He humored them by taking the gratuitous checks they mailed to him each month, and since he rented out the first-floor studio, he was basically being paid to live there.

  He checked his phone again. Vanya had stopped answering hers, checking in only via text:

  amazing mtg!!! :)))) so many posi vibes

  baby I have 100x things to do brb

  omg this hat I’m wearing!!! lol

  Then she’d stopped replying to his emails, calls, and texts, which didn’t deter him from sending them. All those buttons that thanked you for pressing them, the soft keys glowing to be stroked, were the root of so much daily suicide. You pressed them, heeded the calls to action, because you could.

  He considered going out to distract himself, but the only one answering his phone calls was the electronic lady who told him to leave a message on Henrik’s voicemail, and who said Cory’s answering machine was full. He had other friends, technically: in the year after college Will had aggressively lurked at house parties, weekly dance nights and karaoke, street fairs, even Cory’s fundraisers. He’d been a regular everywhere, and made lots of friends, but only the kind you ran into at other parties, who were glad to chitchat in a group setting but would never spare you individual time and would be sad for maybe five seconds if they heard you’d been tortured to death: which was to say, online friends. He had thousands. As a linking node, a degree of separation, Will succeeded.

  Cumulatively his social network contacts numbered in the high hundreds, phone and email in the low thousands. He’d written a script to auto-sync all his phone, social network, and email contacts to a master spreadsheet because he distrusted the cloud. Each entry was tagged by date of meeting and relationship: Friend, Family, Client.

  Filtering the spreadsheet, he sifted the ashes of his 239 Friends for someone to call. Besides Henrik, his Friends were virtually all women who’d rejected him, implicitly or otherwise. It took only one glance at their names, vintages from his cellar of shame, to evoke the years of overaggressive texts, simpering emails, defensive Craigslist ads (I don’t belong here, but), desperate dating site PMs (eighty attempts with only one reply: Yuck). But like a trail of blood drops ending, a mile-long string of zeroes terminating in a one, the entries ended on 10-09-2006, Vanya’s entry: Girlfriend. No more Friends after that.

  The spreadsheet’s completeness gratified him. Metadata were honest. His rejections, in sheer volume, were not insignificant—in fact they were statistically significant. He got up to refill his glass of Fernet and returned with the bottle. Everyone expected Asians to quantify the subjectiv
e, so why not go there? Beside each female Friend, he entered the date of his encounter, approximate date of rejection, and her height, age, race, ethnicity, and estimates of income, weight, IQ. The doorbell rang and he ignored it.

  On a Likert scale he rated his subjective attraction and fondness, postrejection heartbreak and its duration. He downloaded a data visualization app and plotted the entries into dynamic line graphs and best-fit clusters, coaxing them into meaning. Some of the results intrigued him: the intensity of his remorse trended with height. And high intelligence correlated to his subjective attraction, but smart girls rejected him quickest. The data were glaringly silent on the most interesting questions—where he lacked in general, and what in particular. Was it pointless to pursue older, taller, poorer girls? Will leaned back and squinted, seeking the error in his error, dependencies between his dependencies. He reweighted the factors, diddled the confidence . . . It was garbage. All women appeared equally likely to reject him for any reason, which seemed pessimistic even by his standards.

  Until he realized later, lying in his recliner with the ceiling cartwheeling above him, what the crucial factor really was: himself. Most women would exclude him for being five four, some for being Asian; lesbians took off another 10 percent, his standards another 50. His atheism, his dislike of the outdoors, the tongue-thrust that made it hard to say thesauruses, past, present, personality, inexperience—insignificance. Death by a thousand denominators.

  These weren’t startling data-driven insights; they only quantified what he knew. He let out the chesty belch of a veteran bachelor, got up from the recliner after a few attempts and walked back to his computer desk, overwrote the spreadsheet with a seven-pass erase, and deactivated his social network accounts. No more of that. No more knowing.

  III. Screen Kiss

  Will sat in his bathroom, wondering how he’d gotten there. An hour earlier he’d tried getting out of bed, but realized he wasn’t in bed: he was under it, which was why he’d hit his forehead on the bed. He realized the quesadilla-like crust covering his face was his face. He realized he didn’t have a hangover: he was a hangover.