Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  He’d accidentally killed a week and didn’t know what to do with its corpse. How to overwrite feelings and ideas, the necropolis of streaming teens and throbbing integers and data rubbing against data. The silent tyrannized horde of his memory.

  II. Progress

  Will smoked rapidly as he walked, as if to form a personal nimbus in which to travel undetected. He resented each step up the boutique length of Twenty-Fourth Street, in weather that someone else might call lovely. But nothing was lovely when you were inconvenienced.

  He’d obviated most errands when he’d started ordering everything online—small-batch bourbon subscriptions, Virginia-stamped cigarettes, crates of produce each Wednesday. But he now found himself suffering the outrageous indignity of mailing a letter: an invoice to a client who hadn’t adopted e-billing yet. He was trudging to a metal mailbox four blocks away to deposit a piece of paper inside another piece of paper for a metal truck to trundle to some brick building and the piece of paper to be hauled in turn from one tract of earth to another, all to do what some excited electrons could do in a thousandth of the time it took to have this thought. Understanding that this was a problem of extreme privilege only made his irritation itself irritating.

  The same enraged wind that had overturned the curbside recycling bins earlier in the day was now whirling bits of dried leaf into Will’s eyes. He reached the mailbox, clankingly thrust in the envelope, and spat in after it. Then realized he’d forgotten the stamp. He didn’t even own stamps. Fuck the paycheck.

  He killed his cigarette and dropped it under his next footfall, lighting another and wondering whether there was a service that mailed his mail to the mailbox. Reality took forever—the underwater way people walked and sent their voices wobbling through the air, how printed words lay inert like bugsplat, all manifesting the basic duh of the physical plane. By the time he decided to go anywhere he wondered why he wasn’t there already. As soon as he sent an email he felt he should already have the reply. And learning any fact, he was annoyed not to have known it already, because whenever anything happened, the conversation around it had already trended and backlashed and been reexamined and swallowed and shat and reswallowed and reshat in a thousand places online, until all thinking felt redundant. We needed brain-to-brain; only then would we catch up to real time. Right now everything progressed so slowly that by the time we arrived at the future it was the present again. Everything would be annoying until the senses were surmounted and all media fell to the liberated message.

  Will checked the time. It was now, as usual. Last week Cory had called asking for computer help, and though Will was sick of being anyone’s Asian tech support, he hadn’t seen Cory or the sky in a while, so he’d agreed. But Cory refused to go from her place in SoMa to Will’s in Noe Valley. She liked drawing ugly contrasts: in SoMa, she’d say, men in track pants scooted backward across the street in wheelchairs; in Noe Valley, women in yoga pants spanned the sidewalk with four-axle strollers. SoMa had panhandlers, Noe had accordion buskers. In Noe people stooped to pick up dog shit off the sidewalk; in SoMa people living on sidewalks stooped to shit on stoops. In the land of Have Not, even the tallest streetlights were smashed; in the land of Have, the garage lights came on when you walked by. Et cetera.

  Will arrived at the half-empty Revolution Café and was not surprised that Cory hadn’t shown up yet—like most Californians, she considered punctuality anal and passive-aggressive, and had groomed him to expect tardiness since college, when they’d lived together. That was around the time Will had returned from his suspension for his stupid physical altercation to find that Linda had turned his and Henrik’s room into a sexual eruv. In spite of the bedsheet curtain Linda tacked up next to the bed, Will’s sleep was ruined by their cooing and humping night after night, and the floor was gritty with cigarette ash and hybrid hair bunnies. Will decided he was completely over it after they appropriated the whole box of condoms he’d bought freshman year out of tragically misguided optimism.

  So he’d arranged to switch rooms indefinitely with Linda and live with Cory, even though he’d previously known her only as the girl who did hunger strikes, chanting loudly by her red tent in the Main Quad. And in fact they had nothing in common except the peevish indignation of having both been friend-orphaned—but at the time, that sufficed. Together they observed Henrik and Linda’s mating ritual with disinterest, agreed that couples were inherently selfish, encouraging vicarious egotism and demoting friends to second-rate conveniences. They joked about how Henrik was like Linda’s kid brother, always conforming and deferring, never contesting her, not even for laughs, no matter how much she humiliated him. “He’s, like, a fearminist,” Cory would say, releasing a billow of pot smoke. It went without saying that Will and Cory had no attraction to each other, and they ignored the subtle pressure to pair off; besides, they had a solidarity in solitude that Will felt was purer, more uncompromised, less manipulative than love. It was important to have a friend he could complain about his friends to. Even though she was often late.

  Will bought a coffee and took an al fresco table beneath the open wall’s white canopies, soiled with a smear of mustard and blobby water rings from recently cleared glasses. Lighting a cigarette and balancing it at a secant on the rim of his mug, he checked his phone until Cory coasted along on her white bike, swinging in dismount. “¿Qué pasa?”

  Hugging with double backslaps, Will noted she’d lost some gravity in her jawline—how clearly you could see the passage of time in your friend’s weight swings. Her hair Venned interestingly between morning neglect and political statement, and a pair of white sunglasses sat askew on her head. She wore jeans, even though she’d once said her thighs were the natural predator of pants crotches.

  He kicked out a chair for her, and she unclipped her helmet and dropped her bag with a tired uff, sending out a whiff of sweat and lotion. From her bag, she produced her monstrous laptop, navy blue and scuffed, quite as large as the lap it sat on. “Should we move inside?” she asked. “I’m worried it’ll get swiped.”

  “This thing? This bread machine? If anyone steals this, I’ll buy you a new one.”

  Cory ran her power cord into the café; her computer booted with the roar of a turboprop. She put her sunglasses on because screens gave her a faceache.

  “Click there,” Will said.

  She looked down at the buttons and the flat little rink of touchable plastic. A mangled alphabet, a 4 under a $, an 8 under a *. Twelve kinds of F. Cory blinked hard. Beside her, Will reached over and poked the largest button. “When you press this, it’s called clicking.”

  “Dude, I know. I’m just trying to care.”

  Cory belonged to that final muddy rump generation of college grads who could squeak by techlessly. She wouldn’t take any class that required computers, and her thesis advisor, a kindred tech-hater, had lauded her clean typewritten drafts (“Not like these jagoffs who rip half their citations off Wikipedia. Fuck computers, man! At college I had a record player, bookshelf, and bong—now there’s a fuckin’ video arcade on every desk . . .”). Taren had been cool with it, since Cory’s work was mostly outdoors.

  Will thought it was bizarre how Cory lost all faith and perceptiveness whenever confronted with buttons. She typed like she was using a Ouija board. She couldn’t distinguish a 0 from an O (“They’re right next to each other”) or maintain any conceptual separation between the Shift, CMD, CTRL, ALT, and FN keys (“They’re right next to each other!”). Her effort came across as both naive and senile.

  “I only want to learn basics. Do email, and maybe look at websites.”

  “All right, what’s your email account info?”

  Cory retrieved a leaflet from her messenger bag. “My office manager gave me this. Are these passwords? Do I need a password? . . . Don’t give me that fucking look.”

  “Yeah, this’s fine. I’ll set it up through Gmail, which is a—”

  “Ew, isn’t that Google?”

  “Yeah,” Will sai
d. “Unfortunately for you, Google is capitalism at its finest. If they wanted to enslave the world they’d have done it by now.”

  “They have done it. I don’t want them attached to my name. Ulgh, those creepy black buses. All those startup douches. The rents. It’s cliché to say, but tech companies have ruined the Mission. No offense.”

  “Gold rushes have always been ‘ruining’ San Francisco. Ruining it with money and jobs. It beats earthquakes.”

  “The way tech companies turn services into verbs and products into nouns. Doesn’t it depress you that googling is called googling? That they’re privatizing language? They even took the letters I and E.”

  “Don’t forget ‘You.’”

  “And this doesn’t bother you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re counting on your blasé fatalism.”

  A passing bird briefly interrupted the sun. Will produced a cigarette from nowhere and leaned back. “How can you dismiss something you don’t even understand on a basic level?”

  “Oh, you condescending butthole. ‘You don’t like it because you don’t get it, sweetie.’ Pat me on the fucking head while you’re at it.”

  “You’re disenfranchising yourself by being ignorant about the tools everyone uses.”

  “By ‘everyone,’ you mean young, affluent, computer-trained—”

  “It’ll get cheaper and more widespread. Technologies like electricity and transport and birth control don’t fall under your rubric because you’re looking at the finger and—”

  “The middle finger pointing at poor people?”

  “—and not where the— Okay, whatever. Does it bother you that your phone calls go through big telecom companies?”

  “Uh, yeah! I hate it all. I hate that I have to know what an iPhone is. I hate that Steve Jobs gave our commencement address. I hate that everyone knows technology and textiles are made by slaves and they still don’t care. I at least want people to stop caring whether I care.”

  Will had those glasses that darkened in the light; the sunlight was bright enough that Cory couldn’t see what he was thinking. He sat with his cigarette arm relaxed over the back of his chair, blowing smoke from the edge of his mouth in a diagonal jet that widened out like a speech bubble, which he filled with these words: “You know the Luddites weren’t successful, right?”

  “Actually they were executed for breaking a law that made machine-smashing a capital offense. That moment when machines officially outranked human life.”

  “They achieved zilch and got fucked by history. You’re the one who wants everyone engaged in community. Now it’s online.”

  “The Internet is a vile, omnivorous privatization machine. A technological vector of capitalist domination. Heidegger.”

  “Yo, you don’t win arguments by saying ‘Heidegger.’”

  Cory dug donuts into her temples. Will’s argument was: If she stood for progress, why not technological progress? Because social benefit wasn’t consumable—people wanted hoverboards and phone cases, not infrastructure, green energy, shit, not even food production. The tech ethos was to do less with more, the false empowerments of consumerism, inventing conveniences for the vanishing middle class, the Marcusian identification with property . . . plus, as technology became more complex, it got harder to regulate and appropriate, so technological progress was regress to mysticism. Ah, and it kept getting thinner. “I’m saying that building communities on private infrastructure is bad. The way I understand it—”

  “You don’t, but go on.”

  “—the Internet’s a shopping mall. A global corporate holding pen masquerading as public commons. The public doesn’t work if nobody’s in it. You can’t protest online; there’s no space. The overlords who turned the world into property are now making property proprietary and virtual. Molding and standardizing human relationships to function as components in the assembly line. And don’t forget, it was all developed with taxpayer money for the military and thrives on government subsidies, like all supposedly bootstrapped free-market horseshit.”

  Fuckin’ Cory—she thought she could tar him as some cryptoconservative just because he wasn’t an activist. Sure, technology was awful; just less awful than most things, and much less than she thought. “People want shopping malls,” Will said, “and they’ll make them, because convenience trumps freedom every time. Don’t blame tech for that. Dismissing the Internet is like dismissing buildings.”

  “You can’t live in a website.”

  “The walking counterargument begs to differ. Are we doing this email thing or what?”

  Cory relented. She felt mentally arthritic as he said window focus and right-click context menu as if those were real things. Would we even have email in five years? Would we have people? “Listen,” Cory interrupted, “all I want is a list of steps.”

  “You won’t need one if you take a minute to learn basics.”

  “Will, why do you insist—”

  A pebble fell from somewhere and bounced painlessly off Will’s skull. Cory laughed.

  “Okay, break time,” Will said. “You want a snack? It’s on me.”

  Cory declined and Will went inside. Accepting Will’s gifts felt like enabling some pathology his money had created. Somehow his ethics of consumption were cavalier and generous and cynical all at once: he kept loose singles in his pocket for panhandlers and flashed his membership card at ACLU canvassers, but only to shut them up. Couldn’t he at least feel bad? She remembered once in Palo Alto he’d made Cory wait while he ducked into an Apple store to replace a $300 gizmo he’d accidentally swallowed (“Don’t ask”). He threw out the receipt and bag and the brick of packaging, scratched his initials into the casing with his car key, and slid it into his coin pocket while walking straight past a homeless guy. He was a great object lesson in how money could make even charity frigid.

  Will returned with a clear glass mug of linden tea. “Drink it.”

  Mezzing out for a moment, Cory stared at the shadow cast on the table by the steam, undulating like a sheer curtain. She stirred the fat dollop of honey in the bottom up into a slender cyclone and it vanished. “Let’s get this over with. No abstractions, or I walk.”

  “Fine, Jesus.”

  Will stepped Cory through the click-here, click-there to get to her email. Reviewing her notes, she rolled her tongue and said, “I guess that’s easy enough.”

  She had more than a thousand unread messages, with subjects like following up (again) and Calling the office NOW and ATTN: CORDELIA ROSEN, MESSAGE FROM A HOT WIFE. At the top was Barr’s email. Cory clicked on the message as if disarming it:

  From: fatterpamilias@yahoo.com

  To: cory@socialize.org

  Subject: Datum Daddi

  October 6, 2007 1:13 AM

  Dear Daughter,

  PRAISE PALLAS for your primus passus on the path to (non-)profitable proprietorship! Provided in the proceeding: a pamphlet (printable PDF) of proper preparatory preliminary punctilio. Your proud pater is pals with prominent professionals who’ve proffered prodigious patronage: you’re pardoned from paying a penny.

  BAN ERRORS; don’t be SCARED LOONIER -Pa

  “The fuck is that?” Will asked. “Ban errors?”

  Cory teed her chin on her palm. “My dad’s anagram thing.”

  Indeed, Barr had once bragged that he’d chosen Cory’s name for its vowel/consonant mix. CORDELIA ROSEN: ODOR LARCENIES, DROOL INCREASE—or with her middle name, A RELIANCE ON DRONES. He’d probably spent all evening on this email. She’d stupidly hoped he might offer actual help. “Can you open the pamphlet for me?”

  Will crabdanced his hand across the keyboard. “Oh, Handshake,” he said, reading the file. “Vanya went there. Public speaking, networking, all that biz-dev happy horseshit. Self-satisfaction guaranteed.”

  “Should I go? I’m clearly too stupid and young to run a company.”

  “Bullshit. This is the valley of preteen CEOs. Vanya’s younger than you and she’s starting a
company now.”

  “Oh right, Vanya. How’s she? Is she still, um, hot?”

  “Continuously.”

  Cory lifted her sunglasses and rubbed her face. “Well, thanks, dude. For the help. Want to take a walk?”

  “To where?”

  “Nowhere. It’s nice out.”

  “Ulgh. Can we at least walk toward my house?”

  Cory tossed a crushed napkin at Will, which bounced off his chin and onto his plate. “You’re such an agoraphobe.”

  “Claustrophile.”

  “Don’t you ever want to get out into nature?”

  “Only if I couldn’t.”

  “Just appreciate it,” Cory said. “We just stared at a screen for an hour, you can’t do five minutes of sunset?”

  They bussed their table and strolled west to Noe Valley. “You know,” Cory said, “the inability to enjoy nature without dominating it is a major cause of conflict.”

  “You’re a major cause of conflict.”

  The air was so warm and clean, Cory couldn’t feel it entering or leaving her nose. The evening light seemed injected with a vitreous dye as the sun sank in a hurry. Ah, stay! Enjoy your own colors! Nature was so indifferent to its own majesty. “Look”—pointing skyward—“so orange! And those horsetail clouds. It’s like a piece of salmon!”

  “Or lines of coke on an old bruise.”

  “Will. Don’t ruin the sky for me.”

  Will walked beside Cory. If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life or emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. It was just ugly outdoors. Sidewalks with their stubble-beards of filth; scabby trees pregnant with vermin, weeping sap, stewing in dog piss. Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested—reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes.

  “This weather! I die!” Cory said as they hiked the steep anti-runaway sidewalk on Twenty-Fifth. At the top, she leaned on her bike with her head thrown back and mouth open like she was catching rain. “My headache is poof, gone!”