Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  She took off her sunglasses and shook her hair out in the quiet orange breeze. Will suspected she was hyped on low blood sugar and due for a crash. He felt sad that he had to police his tendency to ruin things, and sad again that there was so little in the world he could enjoy nonvicariously. “Call me if you have more dumb questions.”

  Cory hugged Will and pecked him. “Remember how you used to wipe off your cheek? Like a widdle baybay.”

  “Never say that again.”

  “Bye, dear.”

  Will left, and when he glanced back from a block ahead, Cory was still on the corner facing east down the hill, where the sinking light was flushing the low properties of the Mission royal purple.

  III. First Exposure

  Will looked at the calendar on his phone and counted days on fingers in his head. Vanya was gone until January, and the question was how to make her less gone, how to make the distance less long. Will had killed plenty of time; now he would kill space.

  He fought noon traffic to the Best Buy downtown, turned left across a double yellow line to cut into the parking lot’s inlet. Among the retail shelves was some problem decomposition to bring Vanya to him; he prowled them, looking for solutions in the conjunction of dongles. He emerged with two bags of boxes and the feeling of mild letdown that followed shopping.

  That afternoon he littered his apartment with burst packaging and the sprayed sweetness of freshly opened electronics. The webcam was zip-tied to a plastic mount and clamshelled, encased in Styrofoam braces under a cardboard partition and a baggie of manuals, within the support cardboard, within the taped-up product box, shrink-wrapped and bagged. Tearing through it, he realized he’d bought the wrong converter—as usual, a male-to-female compatibility problem. He went back to the store and hated everything all over again.

  Before his scheduled nine P.M. video chat with Vanya, Will kicked aside the mess in range of his webcam, made sure his tie lined up with the buttons of his red cardigan, and pulled a licked comb through his hair. The call came in. Vanya’s bun was impaled by a pencil, and she bobbed as she did curls with her pink six-pound dumbbells. “Hey, baby! What’d you want to show me?”

  “I’ve figured everything out.”

  He demoed the webcams, one for the living room and one for the bedroom, autoswitching the feed to whichever had more movement in it. Hook them and an omnidirectional mic to one of his porn towers, then connect that to his wall-mounted flat-screen with a DVI-to-HDMI adapter and voilà: a persistent telepresence window.

  Vanya set down her weights and applauded. “Baby, that’s so cool! How much did it cost?”

  “Not much.” It had cost about $400: not much. “You can set one up at your place,” he said.

  “Here? I can’t be chatting all day.”

  “You can disable it whenever. And soon you’re going to be on camera all the time anyway, right?” A polite lobe of Will’s brain questioned whether this invaded Vanya’s privacy; Will’s swaggering majority lobe fired back, IT’S A RELATIONSHIP, BRO! And a relationship was nothing but a profound invasion of privacy: invasion, followed by occupation. Pissing while the other flossed, farts under shared sheets. And what was less private than sex? “It’s ambient,” Will continued. “Easy to hook up. I’ll ship all the equipment to you, preconfigured.”

  Vanya screen-kissed. “Okay, I’ll do it. You’re nice, mister.” Vanya decided things quickly and without cumbersome afterthought. “Anything else to show me?”

  The engagement ring still sat in his jacket pocket. He recalled those online videos of failed wedding proposals—men rejected onstage with maximum pomp on live television, stammeringly repeating their proposals as if their girlfriends’ silence was a mere issue of latency. Will shook his head, and after another cool LED kiss they disconnected. He overnighted the telepresence equipment to Vanya.

  For the next two months, they lived on each other’s flat-screens in the evening; Vanya called hers the Baby Monitor. The setup was more passive than he’d expected—her webcam was mounted like a security camera, so she rarely faced him, and she muted his audio while she worked. But at least Will could verify that she was in her apartment and not auditioning his replacement. Occasionally she waved to him, and on his end he cranked the volume loud enough to hear the airy roar of traffic outside her Crown Heights sublet, and he liked being able to bless her whenever a sneeze detonated from his subwoofer.

  The camera was curbing his masturbation, which was probably good. Instead he fed himself on the cookie crumbs of Vanya’s web presence. He got push notifications on her social networking activity, search alerts on her name, an RSS feed on her blog. It was as preoccupying as porn, but with no finish.

  During the final weeks of December, while Vanya toured Europe with her parents—instead of spending time with him like she’d promised—Will evicted his downstairs tenant, visited Linda in the hospital, hired a cleaning service, jogged, and smoked.

  Waiting for Vanya at baggage claim in January, Will was so anxious to see her face that he almost didn’t want to. She was easy to spot leaving the elevator with her large carry-on bag in her lap, wheeling a straight path through the crowd, some giving her berth, others aggressively tailgated. She looked like an ad for herself, the new 2008 model, with fresh highlights under a Maserati-red plastic headband and the parabolas of her chest agonizing a lace-collar blouse. Taking Vanya’s bag from her lap, he gave her an airport-appropriate but nonetheless French kiss.

  “The TSA practically disassembled my wheelchair,” Vanya whispered. “They think I’m a terrorist? Kind of ridiculous.”

  Her face was somehow altered; some finessing of angles, its bevel or cant, ratios ineffably more golden. Her smoky eye, bangs sliced to the brow—still the same. What was different? Her ears, her teeth? No, it all looked same and good except . . . her nose? Had it been rescaled, narrowed, planed? Had she gotten work done in New York?

  “Did you get work done in New York?”

  Vanya yawned largely. “Work’s never done.”

  THEIR SEXUAL REUNION made for a gory spectacle, as Will temporarily became a carrion beetle—he lapped and nibbled, slurped and squeezed in from every angle. In his precious minute of sanity following orgasm, Vanya made him an offer over the pillow. She’d been talking him up to the executive board in New York, and they were impressed by his cheap telepresence setup and portfolio; how would he like to be Sable’s chief technical officer?

  “Not just a CTO,” Vanya said. “You’ll be on the lifecast anyway, so you might as well cohost, right?”

  Weighing the unseemliness of becoming his girlfriend’s employee, Will inquired about duties. Vanya took her laptop from the bedstand and opened her notes, hair still plastered to her forehead with fuck sweat. “You’d oversee operations and throw together cheap, stable livecasting solutions. I just sent you our current setup, take a peek?”

  Will opened the attachment on his phone. Too many cords and converters, weak battery. He met Vanya with a lordly smile. “I could do this way better.”

  “Do it! Do it!”

  “Sure. Yeah, why not. Is this interview over?”

  Will started kissing her but she nudged him back. “Actually, there’s more to discuss regarding your presentation.”

  “I have to do a presentation?”

  “I mean, your image. You’ll need some media orientation—camera etiquette, style reboot, that kinda thing. Reworking the optics. You gotta get back on social media, obviously. And I was thinking maybe, like, tweak your name.”

  “What? My name?”

  “It’s impossible,” Vanya said. “Will N————————. It’s chowder.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “We’d just change it on the website.” Vanya rubbed Will’s shoulder. “To make it SEO friendly. It’s standard showbiz practice. Look”—Vanya splattered keystrokes across her laptop—“like how Freddie Mercury was Farrokh Bulsara or Jon Stewart was Jonathan Liebowitz.”

  “What about Beyoncé? Or Björ
k?”

  “Short and catchy. Yours is neither. Baby, it’s just for the show, it’s not even legal.”

  “So I’ll be what? Will Williams? Will Smith?”

  Vanya smacked Will on the arm, pretty hard, he thought. Her Texan accent was becoming faintly unsuppressed. “Don’t pretend I’m trying to whitewash you. Didn’t your family change its name when they immigrated to Thailand? Because of that law?”

  She was referring to the law that required all Thai families to have unique surnames, so they got longer and longer over time, with the consequence that now Will carried around a bulging diaper of syllables. At least his first name was unremarkable and not one of those octogenarian names Asian guys got, Albert, Arthur, Bernard, Chester, Eugene, Joseph, Harold, Howard, Norman, Victor, Vincent, Walter . . . though even those were better than some of Will’s relatives: Phuk and Klit, Bing and Thong, Ing, Eh, Aah, the Wannatits, the Kissaporns. (This cut both ways, as any tourist named Jim or Dawson learned.)

  “Visitors need to instantly grok you,” Vanya continued. “You need to be conspicuous and memorable. You’re a young, attractive Asian man, and if people could say your name, then they just might. What about shortening it to ‘Will N———’? It’s catchy, and still quote-unquote Asian-sounding.”

  He had no reasonable response to this. But he did have an unreasonable one: “No way. I don’t owe stupid white people any courtesies.”

  “Oh my god, this again!” Vanya said. “I’m white, so I can’t have an opinion? Choosing your own name is empowering. Maybe you’d be less annoyed if people didn’t always trip over it.”

  “I’m annoyed? Remember that cashier last week who sighed at my credit card? I annoy them. They butcher it and then giggle and say all this dumb face-saving bullshit. ‘Boy, that’s a mouthful!’ ‘What a beautiful name!’ ‘Where’s that from?’ ‘What are you?’ It’s all part of—”

  “Let me guess, racism.”

  “—well, yeah! How people are okay with racism against Asians because they’re outside the black-white binary. I’m not even talking about all the slant-eyes and konichiwas. Like, you can still say chink on TV, and when there’s any outrage, people think Asians are being humorless. Trannies, midgets, fatties, geezers, chinks, all fair game. You can outlaw hate crimes, but you can’t force anyone to respect or desire you. So no one thinks we’re oppressed.”

  Vanya loosed a spray of uppercase effs and pees. “Because you’re not! Get over yourself! It’s pure nineties PC self-pity. You’re acting like I’ve never experienced discrimination, when I’m a disabled woman in tech. I’m sorry, but you’ve got it so easy. You’re exempt from both white guilt and racial profiling, Stanford-educated, rich, young, male—and, hello, able-bodied! And dating a totally cute white girl! Asian privilege is the bomb!”

  “So being marginalized and ridiculed isn’t oppression?”

  “Sure it is. And I’m saying you’re not. You just like pretending you’re oppressed because it lets you avoid responsibility. You’re ballooning this tiny first-exposure branding issue into a race war.”

  “Interesting choice of words! World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the tsunami, nothing unites America better than gooks dying by the millions! Shit, let’s just fucking nuke North Korea and China right now! Everyone wants to anyway!” Will touched his stupid forehead. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just saying my name’s a trivial detail.”

  “Um, yeah, it’s totally trivial, which is why I’m surprised that—” Vanya closed her laptop and rested her palms on it, grimacing at the bumpy little curb their feet formed beneath the blanket. “Why do I get so drained whenever I tell you my plans? Maybe because you naysay every idea I have?”

  “I’m—” He almost said, I’m not a naysayer. “I totally support your show. But I’d like some say over how I’m presented, since it’ll be so popular.”

  “Baby, don’t patronize me. This show is my life now, and if you’re going to be on it, you have to accept some tiny concessions. You know, married women have had to change their names forever. Not saying it’s fair, I’m saying they compromised with the culture.”

  Will kicked aside the sheets to air out. Vanya would never take his name; hers was too saturated with brand equity. It’d be absurd to hyphenate or even adjoin them: N———dreeva, Andr————. At least marriage was on her mind. The engagement ring, that circle of high value, was still in Will’s jacket pocket.

  “You’re right,” Will said, though really he felt he was right, and much more mature for not saying so.

  “So we’re settling on N———?”

  “Fine.”

  “Perfect. I’ll handle everything.” Vanya tapped at her laptop; an action item had been consummated. “Baby, long names don’t put people off. Long arguments do.”

  Yes they did—and what put off people put off Vanya. Vanya sided with People, Will with Will. But the less considered re: that the better.

  His name must have released some kind of stimulant from its severed end, because over the following week, Will ate more shit faster than ever, hunting bargains, researching components, drawing schematics. After six days he arrived at Vanya’s place with a tangle of hardware in his shaking arms. Vanya buzzed him in. “I figured it out,” he said.

  Here was Vanya’s sousveillance rig, a six-megapixel wearable webcam with an integrated mic. The primary webcam was a black prism the size of a cigarette lighter, with a blue LED and a lapel clip; a second HD webcam jutted upward from a flexible stand on the wheelchair’s armrest to capture Vanya’s face. Through a zip-tied fascicle of cords, both cameras were hooked to auxiliary batteries and three 128 GB SSDs in a single enclosure, and drew high-speed wireless from redundant EV-DO connections on two cell networks. Raw footage was automatically encoded, image-stabilized, HDR-filtered, and fed out live to the site. Vanya could type and video chat with viewers on her netbook. She was delighted that everything weighed only twenty-five pounds and stowed under her wheelchair. “An able-bodied person would get sciatica hauling this stuff around! I’m sure things’ll get even lighter, but for now, my wheelchair’s an asset. You’re a genius! And I’ve been busy too. Want to see the beta client?”

  Vanya logged in with her fourteen-character password, which Will made a mental note to crack later. The loud stomps of her typing made Will’s wrists sympathy-tingle. The blue LED on her lapel camera flickered awake. Her screen displayed the side of Will’s head, dithered and stuttering. He waved; his image remained still. “Why’s it all laggy?”

  “There’s a six-second delay for filtering content, like on live TV. In case people try to mess with us.”

  Will’s onscreen image waved, then turned to the screen and said in a nasal recorded voice, Why’s it all laggy? Vanya laughed and repeated her reply in sync with her onscreen image. It repeated again in chorus, and Vanya and Will joined in with it until the air glimmered with screechy feedback and Vanya muted the speakers.

  “Isn’t it great?” she said. “We’re feeding out to our live staging site, so technically anyone could see us right now. Baby, say something to the world.”

  Will looked at the blue light on Vanya’s chest. Vanya was facing the screen. He looked at the screen, where he was looking at himself six seconds earlier looking at Vanya, i.e., the camera. “Hello, world,” he said, and waited for his reply.

  CHAPTER 6

  She Can’t Resist

  The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

  —Howard Zinn

  I. Handshake

  Cory was due at the Handshake introduction seminar fifteen minutes ago. She was unshowered, hungry, and her anxietylocks were fraying into full-on hysterialocks, a viny mass with a corona of frizz whose ends were pompommed by stress-chewing. She pedaled awkwardly up Market Street on underinflated tires and in heels. A motorist, missing her by inches with his right turn, slowed to call her a cunt. You almost killed me, Cory thought; then
amended: You ARE killing EVERYONE. How quaint cars would be. CORDELIA ROSEN = NO SIREE OLD CAR. How unbelievable that the world could sustain so many armageddons: Iraq, AIDS, Vietnam, Stalin, the Holocaust, slavery, the whole chronicle of suffering, decline, renaissance, trial by atrocity, all trumped by the very gases she exhaled. Or nukes.

  The seminar was in a brutalist office building near a midsize homeless encampment and had no bike parking; she’d have to bring it in. With her bike sweat and flushed cheeks, Cory followed people in professional attire to the elevator bank. They held the door for her, and after a minute of trying to fit her bike in, she gave up and shouldered it up the stairs.

  Reaching the third floor, she waited on the landing for her Lamaze breathing to subside. Inside, a vinyl banner reading HANDSHAKE WORKSHOPS hung over a row of folding tables staffed with employees. A white placard on an easel next to the door said SILENCE YOUR MOBILE. PHOTOS & NOTES PROHIBITED. Cory stashed her bike in a rear corner and headed to the tables, where she filled out an intake form with lies. Volunteers ushered her into the conference hall with a brochure and a name tag, which she left blank.

  It was half-past but they hadn’t started yet, probably to accommodate latecomers like Cory, who were here precisely because they needed this sort of handicap. Cory took an isolated aisle seat among the rows of pebbly black folding chairs, all facing a rostrum. Two chalkboards stood incompletely erased from some previous gathering whose lingering body heat still dampened the air. A projection panel hung above the chalkboards, displaying that shade of luminous darkness that represented black. Cory’s bra straps chafed and her insoles were slushy.

  The insignia on the brochure’s cover was an Escheresque line drawing of two clasping hands whose wrists looped down and conjoined. The back cover featured blurbs from successful people she’d never heard of, and an introduction that she mentally copyedited: