Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  Vanya went quiet as she worked toward inbox zero, leaving Will to quietly process the everyday aggressions of the word actually.

  Later, as Will was reading twenty blogs, someone knocked at the back stairwell; it was Linda, on a crutch. Will had told Vanya that Linda was staying downstairs, but they’d never met, and with apprehension Will observed this encounter between the two scariest girls he knew. Vanya, soft and sylphlike and porcelain, flashed a peace sign at skinny-sexy-hoarse Linda.

  “Hate those stairs,” Linda said. “Can I borrow your mixer?”

  “So nice to meet you! Ooh, girl, I love your ink!” Vanya said. “I googled you before but you, like, don’t exist online. You’re so cute! You want to be famous?”

  “Not for being cute.”

  Linda averted herself from Vanya’s lapel camera. There was Vanya’s type of hot girl, who loved cameras, and Linda’s type, who didn’t. “Don’t worry, it’s off,” Vanya said. “I’m just practicing wearing it. Oh, listen, I’m so sorry about your accident. Any interest in doing a spot about recovering from an accident?”

  “Vanya,” Will said.

  “What? I just think she’d be an amazing online personality. A spokesperson.”

  “For accidents?” Linda said.

  “Will says you’re into reading, yeah? We might need a Books editor. You could do video reviews.”

  Will was worried that Vanya was going to go into her spiel about how dead-tree was obsolete and how the five-paragraph essay would give way to the three-minute video clip and how books were paywalls, and Linda would combust.

  “So I’d do, like, video blogs about William Blake?” Linda said.

  “Or something.”

  “Retweet links to hot new Melville apps.”

  “I know, you’re being snarky, but yeah, you get it. If it traffics, we might even pay.” Vanya handed her a slim business card, emblazoned with only her name, framed in a search box. “We’re always looking for creatives to join ship. The teeth would have to be fixed, though.”

  “Vanya,” Will said again.

  “Baby, I’m sure she’s planning on getting them fixed.”

  “Will, can we talk?” Linda said, beckoning.

  Will followed Linda as she clopped down the back stairwell. He admired the ass sculpted in black leggings, the black bra through diaphanous ivory blouse. They reached the downstairs studio, where Linda had been staying, joined last night by Henrik. Peeping through the door window, Will expected to see flames and shattered glass, but Henrik was asleep on the couch in skintight borrowed sweatclothes.

  “Your girlfriend’s very realistic-looking,” Linda said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to bum a smoke.”

  “I told you, no smoking indoors.”

  Will took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket anyway. Linda hadn’t worn makeup since the accident, and with the oily gleam and orange-peel pores near her nose, she looked mortal. Her hair was just long enough to knot, and an oniony sprig of it popped vertically. Will looked through the door’s window. “How’s he doing?”

  “I gave him all my Valium and Xanax. Homeboy does not want to be conscious.”

  “Are you getting along?”

  “Misery loves misery,” Linda said. “Now will you tell me who he is?”

  Jesus, Linda was still pretending not to recognize Henrik. Last night, when she’d let him in half-nude and he’d locked himself in the bathroom, Will had been too drunk to deal with it, and had no idea what was happening, except that Henrik was in trouble.

  Will asked Linda if she perhaps remembered being engaged to him, and she shook her head. Will asked if this mightn’t be an idiotic ploy to avoid confrontation. Linda shrugged. Irritation rose from Will’s chest into his head like bright sparks up a flue. “Cut the fucking shit!”

  “Yo, look at my teeth. You’re suggesting there’s something convenient about all this?”

  Will inspected her with silent, finalizing disgust. He lit his own cigarette, and soon they were in a curly white booth of smoke. “Not convenient. Opportunistic. You know that lady-tears will make Henrik accept anything you say. To be honest, it might not be good to have you around him.”

  Linda made a gesture indicating the expansion or explosion of her head. “I don’t even know this jamoke! My situation isn’t as bad as his?”

  “Stop talking. Now, I need you to do a major tangible. Actually, I command you. I cracked his Walgreens password and filled his bipolar meds. Go pick them up and make him take them. Here’s cash.”

  “Wait, he’s what? Bipolar?” Linda’s eyes biggened. She really could ham it up. “Is he, like, unstable?”

  “Not compared to you.” Will wished he had the integrity to disdain hot women effortlessly. “Either look after Henrik or leave. You’ve already been here six weeks.”

  “I can help,” Linda said, tucking her lips, nodding.

  “Go to the pharmacy now. And see if they have anything for lying sociopaths.”

  UNTIL RECENTLY, ROOPA had been annoying but harmless—obnocuous, Barr might say. But the common-cause camaraderie, the enemy-of-my-enemy amity, had vanished, and fights became regular. One evening Cory came home from work to find Roopa knitting naked in the common area, all her surfaces porpoise-sleek, with the word SLUT written across her chest in purple shimmer paint. It was an experiment, Roopa explained, in rehabilitating nudism as a “refutement” of body-shaming through embodied sex-positivity. “Plus it’s reclaiming the word ‘slut’?”

  Roopa, of course, was refuting nothing with her perfect body. Mostly to spite her, Cory said, “New word definitions don’t just erase older ones. The B-word, the C-word, the N-word, they’re all still toxic.”

  “At least we’re creating safe spaces to use them.”

  “Who wants to use them? I’d rather we just didn’t.”

  “I think maybe, as a white cultural elite, you should be careful about policing language?”

  “Oh, I police language? That time I called 8-Ball ‘him’ and you scolded me because he identifies as questioning, even though I didn’t know he was trans?”

  “If you’d ever talked to zim once, you might’ve known. Marginalized people need to empower and define their identities against their oppressors.”

  “The real ‘marginalized’ people don’t have access to these rarefied discourses of gender identity—which by the way come from the academic tradition you call bourgeois—”

  “All the more reason to keep raising awareness. Cory, don’t you identify as queer?”

  “Yes,” Cory said, becoming magma.

  “And doesn’t that—”

  “I know! Okay! Fine! Yes! I know!”

  Later that night, while Cory worked on her Rec & Park proposal in Iniquity’s common area, Roopa was doing pelvic tilts, still nude, while talking about a screenplay she was working on. “It’s a dark satire about Columbus’s arrival. You know how he called Native Americans ‘Indians’? Well, since the Norse came to America before him, my indigenous characters call the Spaniards ‘Vikings.’ Isn’t that funny? It’s called BC: Before Chris.”

  Cory closed her eyes so she could roll them. “Columbus landed in the Bahamas. I’m pretty sure the Norse landed in Canada, centuries earlier. It’s not like they’d remember, or call them Vikings.”

  Roopa shut her red notebook and made an affronted stutter. “Cory, you haven’t even read it. It doesn’t have to be a million percent historically airtight; it’s art. It’s satire.”

  “What are you satirizing? Spanish explorers?”

  “Columbus was a murdering rapist slave-trader who made Hitler look like a toddler. Is there a problem with debunking his myth?”

  Cory slid her pencil into her notebook’s spiral binding, obliged to humor Roopa’s humorlessness. She was shriller than any workaday activist, like one of those trumpet novices who could blow a high-C precisely because her chops weren’t slack with practice. Why were idiots so tireless? Was stupidity a privilege?
But Roopa wasn’t exactly stupid, not even ill-intentioned—just unconditionally confident, which was sort of worse.

  “It’s been debunked,” Cory said. “Everyone already knows it’s bullshit and they still don’t care. That’s the real problem. You’re just taking a sanctimonious potshot that wouldn’t offend anyone but historians.”

  “I’m not sure what I did to earn your random hostility today,” Roopa said, “but it is not cool having this negativity in the house. I know you’re stressed and all, but what’s the point of tearing down someone’s work?”

  Righteous irritation aerated Cory’s bloodstream. What, Cory thought, did Roopa know about work?

  “Roopa,” Cory said, “what the fuck do you know about work?”

  Roopa took her notebook and rose with a collected lack of haste, her face a freshly stretched canvas of restraint. “Namaste,” she said, and left.

  Cory was glad to get Roopa out of sight and mind. But Roopa made a big sonic footprint in Iniquity, especially at the hour of night when Cory craved the silence to hate herself. The hard vast emptiness of the warehouse acoustified the skiffles and bumps of Roopa’s body against Henrik’s. Stage-moaning followed by twenty minutes of pro wrestling. Roopa giggling like a smug piccolo. To her it was a sport, played in weekly exhibition matches, and she gloated over every boink and tee-hee, her scenic routes to climax, where it stood in this season’s bracket.

  “I’m so into Henrik,” Roopa said the next morning, across the long communal dining table. She seemed to have forgotten their fight, which meant she’d won. “I wish you’d introduced us earlier. He was such an awkward turtle at first! But he, like, legitimately gets how to physically communicate. Last night he almost gave me a nipple orgasm. I told him afterward how amazing he was, and he was like, ‘I guess I have to be good at something.’ I love self-depreciating humor.”

  “Self-deprecating,” Cory said, abandoning her breakfast and leaving Roopa alone with her almost-orgasmic nipples. The next morning, she moved her soap, pillow, blanket, and toothbrush to the office. At this stage, she would not let the scale of her concerns be diminished by piddling twenty-something drama. Only sacrifice mattered now.

  THE MONTHS RUNNING up to the launch of WHEEL & DEAL with Vanya Andreeva were the sort of busy that Vanya would approvingly describe as “slammed.” From January onward, Will and Vanya went out every night, a social decathlon unpleasantly similar to Will’s bachelor yesterlife. They held meetups, camped in line for the MacBook Air, made appearances at DEMO, the Crunchies, SxSW, Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo. At afterparties in Mission apartments, he wiped the street grime off Vanya’s wheels and piggybacked her up stairwells; when they entered, some white guy would invariably call out to Will, mistaking him for another Asian guy.

  As the recession dwindled Will’s freelance clientele, he went full-time at Sable. Officially his title was CTO, but his duties spanned the whole org chart. He made coffee runs, tested camera lighting umbrellas, vetted press releases, built the brand database for social intelligence monitoring, and filed Vanya’s 2007 taxes (which, thankfully, had yet to include venture capital income and business outlay). He advised the UI designers to blow up the headers and push static content into extra-long footers. He adapted Vanya’s notes into blog posts: “Five Easy Hairstyles You Can Do with One Hand”; “The 14 Worst Accessibility Design Fails”; “Watch This Deaf MC DOMINATE a Rap Battle (Wait for It!).”

  Prep notes for the show landed in Will’s inbox:

  From: va@sablemedia.com

  To: wn@sablemedia.com

  Subject: Best Practices for Will

  May 21, 2008 7:09 AM

  Hi baby :) Here’s some personalized ground rules for W&D on-air personalities moving forward. Email if you have questions, I’m too slammed for f2f atm.

  BEST PRACTICES FOR WILL v1.0

  •“Active” schedule is 6 AM to 10 PM, so we’ll probably want to get to bed around 11 PM unless we’re at an event. Take melatonin to help transition.

  •We get four 15 min. blackouts a day while we roll ads. Use them whenever, but time bathroom breaks accordingly.

  •No swearing. Hit the dump button immediately if you mess up. Practice alternatives (shoot, freak, jeez, etc.).

  •No smoking. Like it or not, we’re role models now, and it’s bad for our lifestyle focus (and yr health):)

  •Enunciate. You mumble and talk too fast. And use strong active verbs.

  •SMILE! Your default face is grim! I’ve also noticed you pick at it a lot—stoppit:)))))

  •Copying this into a shared doc & will update.

  <3 u baby xoxoxxoo

  VANYA ANDREEVA

  va@sablemedia.com

  Sable Founder/CEO/HBIC. Maker. Serial Entrepreneuse. Idea Bot. Fashion Victim. Former Little Miss. Queen of the Internet.

  Sable—What’re *You* Looking At?

  Will replied and asked what he would do if he happened to need the bathroom more than four times a day (Plan ahead), what to do if he got sick (Please don’t), and the gas issue (If you really need to, separate your cheeks so it’s quiet). It was demeaning, but Vanya never erred on lifestyle—she’d been right about not wearing black with navy blue, and quitting video games, and cleaning his ears with Q-tips instead of compressed air.

  Once the Series A funding went through, Vanya expensed thirty new dresses, a mani-pedi, porcelain veneers, and nightly business dinners. On her wheelchair’s backrest she stenciled the word DIRECTOR. She groomed until she came to resemble her smiling photo on the About page, an attractiveness unto abstraction, like millions of photos of herself averaged out. Style is strategy, she advised in another email. I want to be a projection screen. Help others be themselves by embracing every aspect of myself. When they see me, they should think: I could be her, and she can be anything.

  For Will, she expensed a sousveillance rig, consisting of a TLDR-700p wearable livecasting webcam (built-in EV-DO and 802.11n support, 64 GB MicroSD), a pocketable Wi-Fi hotspot, and a dual-port USB battery extender. Vanya also earmarked $2,000 for a style refresh—twill and chambray shirts, three suits, rosewood-framed glasses, all purchased online, since department stores never carried his size. He’d always left his Facebook profile pic blank, but she uploaded one of him in jubilant midjump, which he’d originally taken to make fun of people who did that.

  And he got a haircut. This was traumatic. Already Will’s hair ran to about $800 annually for styling, mentholated conditioners, shape creams, and finishing ointments. His salon in Hayes Valley was all steel and theater silk; the receptionist fixed him a doppio as the bored stylist worked in a tea tree oil conditioner. He specified: no highlights or frost, no bangs, spikes, choppy edges. As she circled his head with considered snips, Will didn’t add what he meant, which was not to make him look Asian. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to look Asian, just not like other Asian men. The otaku ponytail, the laissez-faire buzz cut, the bed of nails, the cue ball, the K-pop swoop, or the fugly center part, accompanying smooth or acned faces, hoodies and T-shirts, jeans with ornate stitch patterns. This syncretic aping of Western fashions was doubly agonizing, for in matters of race you couldn’t join them so you had to beat them, those who aligned you with the stock: good at form, bad at feeling, tech-savvy, word-dumb, cunning drones, uncanny clones, kowtowing kamikazes, the overseas sweatshop that processed dishonor into convenience. But just give it time; eventually the stereotype overran everything, becoming as plural as individuality itself. Until you were not reduced, but particularized to a stereotype. Asian men—it wasn’t that he saw himself in them, but that he resented having to pity them, and resented that to everyone else he was them, and they were him. And they were certainly something, but what? There were no occasions to think or give a billionth of a micron of a fuck of a shit about Asian men unless one was your dad. Ridiculing North Korea, dreading China, resenting Vietnam, fetishizing Japan; the rest a vast, humid resort full of greasy food, smog, death, monks, beaches, and affordable sex. So he was depatriated:
Asian by occident. None of this Asian-American bullshit, the hyphen devised to hitch two cultures to an identity. A hyphen was just half an equal sign, a minus. We knew we’d stolen America from Native Americans, built it with black slaves, given the hard jobs to Latinos, and that Jews had an all-around rough time. Each possessed collective authenticities of oppression. But Asians? Fuck ’em. Not so easy to prove negative bias, indifference, suspicion, condescension, disrespect, against which one could only whine. If you were going to be alienated, you might at least feel the more exceptional for it. Yet the sense of Asian men was of conspicuous arbitrariness in a culture of the special. Whose social modes of being had been enshrined in national policy: internment and exclusion. Conforming yet abnormal. Another and an Other. Asian men lived in the infinite corner of their Chinese room, over there. Asian men wore glasses, or didn’t; either way they looked more Asian. The Asian men you saw everywhere once, in subways, under bedsheets, from the sky. Millions lost in revolution and famine. Those who stood beside, behind the point, except when they murdered you. Asian men were good in a bad way, or bad in a bad way, or in a bad way. What was the point? You never knew, because Asian men never explained why they were Asian, and for some reason we needed them to. Where was the point—geographically, emotionally—when one was least Asian? What were Asian men if not Asian? Asian men couldn’t possibly be human, and they were too clever to be animals; so what were they, so tireless so cheap so networked, so remote so threatening so uniform, so skilled so useful so ascendantly many? Not men, not beasts—but computers. And they, Asian men, were problems, with problems. And the problem’s denial, the allegation that Asian men had created their own problems, had become Will’s problem, though it would be everyone else’s soon enough. Would it be a problem if there were no Asian men? Like Stalin said: no man, no problem . . . There’d be no Will. Would that be a problem? For Will? For what was everyone else’s problem: Was it everyone else, or Asian men, or Will, or his problem?

  Will tipped the girl thirty dollars to make up for his hysterical crying, and left the salon with an upscale variant of his original swoop: not generically Asian, not aspiringly white, legibly hetero, expressing nothing else but what it cost.