Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  As he crawled out and took to his knees, a pincer gripped his temples. He felt like he’d swallowed an unmeltable icicle. His first steps toward the bathroom triggered a mass displacement of fluids: salty gunge from sinus to throat, acid vomit from stomach to mouth, obligingly reswallowed. A reek of moldy collard greens emanated from behind his tongue, which felt like a strip of ass-wiped biltong. If for some insane reason he ever wanted to feel this way again, he would give himself a concussion and eat a live cat.

  With a suffering shamble more inclined to kick aside stray beer bottles than step over them, he made a trembling grasp at the bathroom doorknob, a lurch for the sink, and held his face under the foamy column of low-flow faucet water, suckling the spout until he puked. This was the toll for mixing Fernet with brandy with rye with tequila. He sat on the tile floor to meditate, which is what he called sitting when he could do nothing but. Then he wondered how he’d gotten there.

  His stillness was interrupted by a tingle at his hip, presumably the first of many organ failures, but instead it was a text from Vanya: video chat nownownow!!!!!

  Taking one more minute to be sad, Will groaned back to his bedroom and logged in, his hangover making every keystroke feel deliberate. Vanya’s chat request came in. Her hair was angled in a new Cleopatra bob, and her lovely oval face was blanched by the lightsaber glow of her screen, her complexion flawless with low resolution and high contrast. Her voice anticipated her lips by a quarter second. “Are you there? Hey, baby! Oh-em-gee, did you see the news?”

  “What news?”

  “I just posted it, you didn’t see?”

  Will read her status while she paraphrased it. The investors loved loved loved her presentation, said her pitch was dynamite. They’d more or less guaranteed her seed funding; then they’d said what the hell, and gave her seed funding.

  “One point five mil,” she whispered with brute excitement, enlarging dramatically as she leaned in. “That’s pocket lint for them, but for us it’s serious F-you money. Tranches of two hundred K every quarter for two years. We’re backed!”

  “Oh. That’s awesome.”

  “Every time we met, they wanted more than I’d even prepared, so we just improvised all these concepts, it snowballed—baby, it could not have been more productive.”

  “Cool, cool. So, uh, when do you—”

  “Get this: they want me as a spokesperson. They saw my pageant work and video portfolio online and said I’m this mesmerizing presence—they’re like, ‘We think you could be the disabled Oprah Winfrey,’ and attaching my face to the project would make it more than just another blogazine. And I’m all like, wouldn’t it be way too much work to edit and produce and star in a show, but then they were like, ‘No, you’d just be on camera all the time: the life of a young disabled female tech entrepreneur, twenty-four-seven.’ Lifecasting! Isn’t that genius? Real life from the seated perspective. Getting paid to do interesting things. Like a reality show, but real. God, I’m just, like, amazed!” Vanya knocked her laptop monitor askew, and Will stared at her ceiling, adjusting his own monitor as if that would do anything, before she reoriented her camera—“We even came up with a name for the show: WHEEL and DEAL with Vanya Andreeva.”

  “That’s amazing, congrats. We’ll celebrate when you’re back. Thursday?”

  “Okay, so, let’s discuss that.”

  “Discuss what?”

  Vanya corrected her eyeliner, using her video inset as a mirror. “I can’t leave the East Coast yet. I have to hire and train while I’m here.”

  “Why are you recruiting there?”

  For a moment Vanya sounded echoey and processed, and her face scrambled into uneven flesh-tone rectangles, an eye up here and a nose way around there, some sectors moving sinuously, others blurry and frozen. Then her beauty was redrawn. “We’re doing virtual office across both coasts. The investors are super hands-on. New York’s great, though. I love the pressure.”

  “How long’s that gonna take?”

  “Two more months. I’ve already canceled my return ticket.”

  Will buffered his anger with tasks. He opened and closed his calendar app, checked his email, and turned on his TV, a news report on some wildfire. Under his desk he unscrewed the liter of scotch that had permanently migrated from the liquor cabinet to his desk. “What about your apartment?”

  “I’ll sublet to the Chi-O listserv.”

  “Cats?”

  “I thought you could look after them, but if not I’ll fly them over. There’s this airline for pets now.”

  Looking down at his keyboard, he said, “Vanya. Two months is, you know, ulgh. And long distance? I don’t know. I mean, come on.” His English was turning ersatz—some cheap Asian knockoff.

  “So you’re saying the biggest opportunity of my entire life can’t happen.”

  Will sprang a defensive sheen of sweat. He wanted to look meaningfully into her eyes but you couldn’t do eye contact over video chat. “Let’s get married.”

  “Oh, ha-ha.”

  “Town hall, quick and simple, no big deal.”

  “It should be a big deal! Are you seriously proposing to me as a bargaining tactic?”

  Will felt sullen and furtive, like a spanked kid. Good thing she’d turned him down, though. He spammed his mental keyboard, [CMD+Z]: Undo. “All right, I was kidding. But I’m not thrilled.”

  “I recall you saying once that mutual independence is the key to a long-term relationship.”

  He’d only said that because he’d wanted to seem independent. Now he gamely struck [CMD+S]: Save. “Tell me you love me.”

  “Baby? Switch off the self-pity for one second and be happy for me. We’ll spend winter break together.”

  It was idiotic to challenge Vanya’s five-year plan, her hero’s journey: humble beginnings, trial by fire, sages, endowments, returning covered in glory, sing hosannah. She was about to graduate from the lowly phase she called Eating Shit, a.k.a. Paying Doo-Dues: gathering favors, hustling, suffering debasements from Mount Olympus. She’d bemoaned her college summer internships as modern slavery (“Though slaves didn’t have to make rent”), and gotten hired after graduation as an online community rep at the Foundation for Independent Living, quitting after two months in frustration at her lack of executive power. Her superiors were mere nine-to-fivers, everyone was older than her—so embarrassing.

  Then, through Chi Omega, she was introduced to Ellen Stokes, a dot-com-bubble survivor, who set the pace for Vanya’s ambitions: being a fast-tracker just made you a trained seal for the establishment, whereas if you made incremental backscratches and accepted no payday until your big break, you’d build a disruptive organization with your personality in its DNA: a Virgin, an Apple, an Amazon. She was currently in her third year of Eating Shit, a phase projected to last five years tops, and by no means into her thirties, when she should be making bank.

  Will had structured his life to avoid eating job and family shit, though he ate plenty of Vanya’s. He leaned out of frame to breathe deeply, then returned to [CMD+M], Minimize, and [CMD+Q], Quit. “Okay. I guess two months is okay. I’ll find you a subletter.”

  “Awesome. See? Teamwork. Hey, I gotta bounce. Gimme a kiss.”

  Will felt a ping of irritation that she didn’t ask how he’d been, though he had so little to report that it would’ve sounded pathetic anyway. He leaned in and pecked his laptop screen as it went dark in the enormous lewd umbra of Vanya’s lips.

  Quitting the chat, he used his eyeglass chamois to buff away the flecks of saliva that magnified the pixels into tiny rainbows. Her absence could play in his favor. If her lease lapsed, she might move in with him when she came back.

  Will finished his scotch, took up his keys, and drove downtown, returning three hours later with a $20,000 engagement ring. He left the velvet case in his jacket pocket, which he hung on its hook before standing in the hallway between his bedroom and bathroom, deciding where to spend the rest of his day.

  CHAPTER 3


  No Synthesis

  For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it.

  —Susan Sontag

  I. No Job

  Linda had been in San Francisco for three months, subsisting on not much more than her sense of humor. She’d worn out welcomes, crashed on floors and couches, in SROs—this twenty-one-year-old with the blond blowout and winged eyeliner. From last night she had two scraped palms and a cut lip; to her name she had six Xanax and a gram of coke, a phone, and a fake ID. She would make a tough corpse to identify.

  The plan for tonight was to get an apartment. She was headed to a date at a karaoke bar with Baptist, a boy she’d met three nights ago, exactly the hopeful bewildered type she knew what to do with. When she arrived, it was packed and he was sitting in a big horseshoe booth tinkering miserably with his phone. Linda’s phone number was faintly legible on his upper lip, where she’d written it in a permanent-marker Fu Manchu. He was thin as a surfboard, wore pristine Chucks and a purple deep-V, and his wavy hair trailed down the side of his face in oily dangle-bangs that he kept foofing aside with little puffs from the corner of his mouth.

  Baptist’s willingness to show up even after she’d flaked on him for the past two nights meant one thing: license. She found that insane cruelty was usually read as flirtation, so she began by taking her birth control in front of him and making him take it too. She chased it with Jameson and lit his sleeve on fire, which he extinguished with his beer. The KJ called his name, and he did a rendition of “Jailbreak” with choreographed stage moves, though he lacked the talent to underwrite it, and as he failed to get the bar crowd to dance, his air guitar became steadily less sincere.

  While he awkwardly bobbed through the interminable bridge, Linda’s attention ran out across the dim loud bar. All was so douchey, so fug: the Roman sandals and harem pants, feather hair extensions, feather earrings, guys wearing T-shirts of the tech companies they worked for, or that guy wearing . . . cat ears? Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation. Ecosystems needed predators. Yet San Francisco was nothing if not vegetarian.

  At last Baptist blew out his voice in a flannelly falsetto, and the KJ mercy-killed his song. “Let’s get out of here,” Linda said, which made Baptist so sad and grateful, and arriving at his upmarket loft on Shotwell, she went to his bathroom and considered her options as she pissed. Sometimes you could just plead menses, and it depended on the boy, but managing sexual expectations was still touch-and-go—exactly when, she wondered, did BJs become first base? When did P-in-V become second base? Baseball wasn’t the metaphor anymore—contemporary sex was tabulated in triple digits, had endorsement deals and a steroid problem. Sex was football, it was NASCAR.

  But after two years of sexual freelancing, Linda realized all she had to do was be a terrible fuck. Lie there like a French girl, pouting and looking like she was trying to die, break his rhythms, mutter things like Could you just and I can’t, then push him away and deliver the worst blowjob of his god-given life, trading off between low-friction stasis and molar scrapes and pube snags and scrotum tugs, breathing effortfully through her nose to demonstrate her good faith, while ever tightening her grip around the base and crumpling its contused tip against her palate—all wrapped in an extra-thick, a knife-stoppingly thick condom. This technique, which she called the nojob, visited crippling introspection upon its recipient. A few minutes of this and Baptist went limp; Linda said, It’s okay! and fell asleep, leaving him to stare out his bedroom window for the rest of the night.

  Without explicitly telling him, she moved in the next day, and found that he was a born lavisher: of back rubs and pharmaceuticals and his freezerful of weed. By day he was some Silicon Valley wanker, clearly grasping for purchased cool. It was embarrassing to date a boy who bought clothes at the same boutiques she shoplifted from, and he had an annoying hard-on for novelty accessories (flashing grills, mustache tie clip) and decorative skateboard decks. He was three years older than her, but so young. Not a quick wit, that Baptist, and not an initiative-taker, nor a deep reader.

  But what a wallet! He covered every bill without even saying I got it, a fair exchange for the social capital he gained by standing near her at parties. One afternoon he handed her a flight itinerary, business class from SFO to Berlin Tegel, and two days later Baptist was gallantly unsheathing his platinum AmEx all over Mitte. They exhausted themselves at trite little Neukölln discotheques and partied at the abandoned listening station at Teufelsberg, ate döner at the Turkish market by the Maybachufer, and woke in jet-lagged afternoons at their hostel, where Baptist scraped at Linda’s leftover currywurst while watching her turn laps in the pool, and where many a nojob was tendered.

  Occasionally Linda could be tempted to see an easy future with Baptist. She told him she was feeling feelings for him, making it seem like it was one of those jokes that were actually true, when it was really a flat-out lie. But only idiots expected sincerity; anyone with life experience perceived things through a proper corrective filter of mistrust. Unfinessed truth had the grime of rube and cliché; lying was ultimately more honest, so long as you were metahonest. It wasn’t her fault if he believed her.

  Around the two-week mark he began to repulse her. How in public he’d rub the back of her neck and hang his finger in her waistband, proprietary gestures hardly less demeaning than a half nelson. That hateful snowman-shaped bunch in his briefs, the lipless smirk of his cockhole, the rumpled nutsack, his weird pink circumcision. Of what club was the penis a member? Clearly one that excluded women.

  One morning she doodled a little house on his back in ballpoint pen, with a footpath leading down to his buttcrack, and when he came home from work in the evening, he showed off the tattoo he’d had traced over it, his first. “You don’t look happy about it.” Plus she’d been doing coke four times a day and was starting to look spooky and unfresh.

  So it was time to end him. Except for Henrik, an interminable process that felt like donating a kidney, it had never been hard to end boys; you just had to exploit the ol’ masculine amour propre. The sex isn’t working—incontestable after so many nojobs and norgasms. Or Our body types don’t match. Or tell them you wanted a threesome with another guy. She began giving him the slip at parties and spent nights away, usually with other friends, though she ignored his calls and texts to let him assume what he’d assume. But then she discovered that he’d been logging into her email, and he tried to flirt with other girls in front of her, and one night he came home with a bloody nose saying he’d been robbed, and made her drive around the Mission with him to track down the mugger, until she called his phone on a hunch and his pocket rang—“I lied” was all he had to say.

  Thus one evening in his apartment, she told him she felt they were developing apart, which was true; and that they should take a time-out to reevaluate, also true; and so she’d be moving out, but they’d still hang out all the time, which was of course untrue.

  First Baptist groaned—you just didn’t hear an absolutely heartfelt groan all that often. He stood and braced himself against the wall with one hand, covered his weeping face with the other, pigeon-toed and clutching at his shirt. For a moment Linda thought he would rend his garment, but instead he yanked it off, which was greatly more disturbing. His face was pruny with grief. Linda put her hand on his hot shoulder. “I’m just being honest.”

  “You said you loved me. You said those words: in love.”

  “Things are just weird. I can’t be in a relationship right now. It’s not that I’m not attracted to you—our body types just don’t match. Listen, you’re so young. You’ll find someone else. It was just bad timing.”

  Goosed up with rage, Baptist squeezed out his words one cubic inch of air at a time. “You owe me.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Clothes, plane ticket, food, drinks, drugs. Rent. I’m twenty-five thousand dollars in debt. And I owe my dealer two thousand.”

  �
�Well, that sucks, but—”

  “I pawned my guitars. I sold my company laptop; they’re reviewing the building security tapes and having a meeting on Monday. I’m getting evicted. My parents are going to find out their checks aren’t going toward student loans . . .”

  “Whatever, bro. It wasn’t a fucking loan. You spent money to get me to like you.”

  “Oh, okay! So that makes you a prostitute. And a pretentious cunt. It’s all intellectual accessorizing and quippy put-downs with you. Like how you always say ‘or whatever,’ like what you said just accidentally spilled out of your brimming jug of cleverness.”

  “Obviously you don’t—”

  “And all your references! You quote books because you think nobody else reads. You recycle your jokes. You even quote your own college papers, which is pathetic! And you know what? You have no idea how to give a blowjob.”

  This was not chill.

  Linda rushed to grab her purse and jacket from his couch, which is also what she would’ve done if a fire had broken out. “Give me that hat back,” Baptist said.

  Linda was wearing her yellow cap from Berlin with HIV POSITIVE stitched in green. She wasn’t sentimental about it, but she wouldn’t surrender crucial symbolic leverage. “You bought this for me. It was a gift.”

  “Linda: take it off.”

  “Baptist: eat a dick.”

  He approached her with a phoenix of hot blood spreading across his chest. She escaped, shouting back that he had a weird dick and then bursting out the door and down the stairwell, catching her heel on the last step and hammering her knee down on the marble landing, an impact that made two tears fly from her eyes. She stepped out onto the dark sidewalk with her kneecap fizzing with pain.

  As soon as she made it around the corner her phone rang in her bra and she shut it off. She dry-swallowed a pill. Her phone rang again, startling her because she thought she’d shut it off. She passed a man who said, “Can I call you sometime?” Her knee cricked with each step, and at Twenty-Fourth and Valencia she sat on the church steps and lit a cigarette. When her phone rang again she lobbed it into the street, where it skipped off the windshield of a passing Prius and hit the opposite curb with the suddenly cheap-sounding sound of breaking electronics. The Prius slowed and Linda fled from the F-sharp of its blaring horn, pretending she wasn’t hurt.