Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  At least it was funny, they both think.

  Back at her dorm, she can’t sleep. Insecurity proves as contagious as yawning, and she wonders why it didn’t work—was it timidity, or did she fuck it up—and this queerness, this sensation of her internal organs somehow latching to his, and the urge to see him again right this minute: Has she become dependent on him, or dependent on fucking with him, or is it just relief that he’s not the kind of creep she’s used to, mingled with fear that she may only like creeps?

  Still awake and still drunk at two A.M., she gets up and walks back to his house without understanding why until she gets there. From the curb she squints to see whether the light in his window is on, not knowing why she needs to know if it’s on, why it matters, but it is, she does, and it does.

  CHAPTER 10

  . . . No One’s Business

  I know no speck so troublesome as self.

  —George Eliot

  Vanya had always given herself the chemical edge. Her medicine cabinet was filled with glossy brown bottles of unregulated nutraceuticals. There were naturopathic supplements with Tolkienesque names: valerian, tyrosine, eleuthero, melatonin; and there were the more Philip K. Dick synthetics: L-theanine, CDP-choline, 5-HTP, ALA, GABA. But when scheduled drugs started showing up in her purse—the Xanax, Ambien, Adipost, and Adderall—Will secretly counted them daily to make sure she wasn’t abusing them. The cornflake crunch of her grinding teeth at night was keeping him awake, and he noted how she’d been speaking rapidly with unmoving eye contact, and drinking enough vitamin water to put a hippo into renal failure.

  “Cancer,” he said over dinner.

  “Something’s always giving us cancer,” Vanya said. “And you smoke cigarettes, so don’t cancer me.”

  “I’m concerned. It’s a lot of pills.”

  She rolled the elastic from her wrist and secured her hair in that absentmindedly expert way. “It’s not like I’m drowning my sorrows. Even if it shortens my life-span, I’d rather be focused and productive. Quality over quantity.”

  “Okay, but is it legitimate?”

  Vanya released a glassblowing breath. “How can a mental state not be legitimate? Don’t feed me any moralizing horse apples about ‘earning’ your emotions, because it’s all just neuro-transmitters swirling around. It’s this reactionary Cartesian sentimentalism to see our brains as these special black boxes we’re not allowed to hack. If it helps me access my full potential, I’ll do it. My body, my choice.”

  “What if it alters your personality? Or your feelings for me?”

  “Oh sheesh, that’s insecure. And also just wrong. Caffeine and nicotine alter feelings too. We were both schnockered when we met. Does that make our relationship a lie?”

  “No—”

  “Because there’s no philosophical difference. You’re always who you are. Think about what ‘artificial’ means, all right? Your glasses are prosthetics. So’s my wheelchair. Storing info in your phone, that’s artificial cognition. We’re all cyborgs. Progress is unnatural. There’s nothing but the body. When bionic legs are chic and functional enough, I’ll use them. Will you stop loving me then?”

  “No, but—”

  “And feelings are totally artificial. Love is literally a drug. When we touch, our brains release oxytocin and we bond. I wouldn’t mind if you took Viagra.”

  “Um, what?”

  “I’m saying hypothetically, if you needed it.”

  “I don’t need it. I have you.”

  Yes, he had Vanya at maximum strength, and the long-term effects of relationship abuse—marriage and kids—were calculated trade-offs. Will considered doing a Cory-style lament about how Vanya’s drugs were all bourgeois palliatives for capitalism. But that was too academic for his purpose now, which was to make Vanya do what he wanted her to do, while making her think she was doing what she wanted to do, by doing what she wanted him to do.

  “I saw this talk on prospect theory that’s totally relevant here,” Vanya said. “If not taking Adderall diminishes your productivity, isn’t taking it a no-brainer?”

  “No.”

  “You’re being contrarian.”

  “Yes! I’m being contrarian!”

  She waved him off as if he were an odor. “Okay, well, if I get cancer, you win.”

  Soon after this, resigned to defeat and ready to make a home of it, Will attended the Sable launch party, a yacht gala leaving from Pier 40 to sail around Alcatraz. He sat at his reserved table, intercepting every Riesling-bearing caterer while he explained his last name to Vanya’s parents, as Vanya emceed. In attendance were Sable’s investors and board, the president of the American Disability Foundation, friends and Chi-O sisters, the young, the cool, and the maimed. There were talks by Robert Scoble and Ray Kurzweil, and a surprise video greeting from Stephen Hawking. Webcams captured the party from eleven angles, livestreamed and projected onto the ceiling. A fleet of full-accessibility party buses greeted them at the harbor and shuttled them to live-band karaoke at the Marriott.

  Beginning the next morning, they assumed the biorhythms of the New Media elite. A seven A.M. East Coast videoconference, an allergy-triggering tour of the Conservatory of Flowers, lunch at Delfina while Vanya was interviewed by KQED, a trip to the top of the Transamerica Pyramid. Will had never seen Vanya in full-on professional gothic; the camera rig on her purple wheelchair drew onlookers. Her acting skills, insofar as it was acting, highlighted her knack for relentless monologue: “Alrighty, so now we’re taking the wheelchair lift to get on the Forty-Eight bus. I’m always blown away by the lift tech, even though the noise is one of the little head-turning nuisances people with mobility issues always deal with, just begging for a little innovation. But at least you get to know your lovely Muni drivers! See the dude who’s folding up the accessibility chair for me? Gracias, señor! You’re on the Internet!”

  When Vanya spoke to Will at all, it was to frisk him for content. “What’s on your mind, baby? What are you thinking?”

  “Uh. Nothing.”

  “No? Nothing’s going through your head?”

  “Not when you ask me.”

  She sighed and stabbed her dump button. It was too late to worry that Vanya was putting on airs for the Internet’s lidless compound eye, and anyhow, by the only metric that mattered—raw duration of company—they’d never fared better.

  In bed that night, Vanya typed her inaugural blog post while video-chatting with viewers as Will wore a shoe on his head at their request:

  What it do, Sablers! DANG y’all were looking cute today in the Yay Area! You know how there’s this temptation for people with mobility issues to hole up and say they’re “introverts” with “social anxiety”? Well, as a wise uncle once said: CUT IT OUT. It is the actual worst!

  Even with the stares and negative comments, being out in plain view is always worth it, because it makes us part of society instead of invisible minorities . . . check out this list of 20 ways introverts aren’t actually loners, they just need time to “recharge.”

  All you wheelchair potatoes: extend your battery life! Don’t sit out, stand out! Figuratively, duhhh :)

  We hope you’ll visit Sable to share, connect, win the Internets—then go play outdoors! (Our mobile app is dropping soon!)

  S/O to all my Internoodles tryna break a glass ceiling!

  V.A.N.Y.A. <3

  They drew 32,000 uniques on launch day. Over the following weeks, inquiries came in: wannabe correspondents in Seattle and Sydney; top billing on TechCrunch in a roundup of young women in tech; a digital anthropology professor at Amherst who wanted to archive the footage.

  But it was Vanya’s TED Talk (@CCESS @BILITY: Shattering the Able Ceiling with Web 2.0) that gave them the breakthrough bump. Fame arrived subtly—their whole project made paparazzi redundant, but in bars Will thought he saw strangers pointing their phones at them. Vanya took it calmly, presuming nothing, until the afternoon when, waiting for the J-Church, a bearded redhead in a striped T-shirt pointed
at Will and yelled “Baby!” Vanya giddily waved at him, and then twisted nearly fully in her wheelchair to smile at Will. “Baby, he means you! He means you!”

  Was the world their bedroom, or was there no more bedroom? Vanya denied that privacy was a right or even an asset in the attention economy. She wanted sticky content ever-flowing. Sex had stopped, and he’d replaced cigarettes with his own Adderall prescription. His blackouts were becoming speed-orgies of vice and chore, doing squats with a toothbrush in his mouth and rinsing with bourbon; watching porn on the toilet dual-wielding his phone and dick (masturbating on Adderall always felt alien and intricate, like polishing a remote control, and the time constraint added a freakish urgency, like cleaning evidence off a murder weapon).

  The Sable developers licensed a back end that analyzed their video feed and quantified its “interestingness.” When Will’s first try returned a 24.4/100, Vanya reminded him that it wasn’t exactly mind-blowing for viewers to watch him doink around on his computer. The algorithm preferred movement, faces, contrast. Just go out more, Vanya said, even though she knew he hated going out. Some charitable hypocrisy had enabled her to overlook this essential truth about him. But this was the choice of life under glass: to be seen or not to be.

  AFTER A MONTH of canvassing, Cory was so used to being ignored that she was disquieted when opportunities started coming in—the commercial sniffers and cool-seeking missiles. Buzz was finally radiating into significant ears. She got an email query from a guy named Roland Drodzst, who said he’d been following Socialize’s work, and they arranged an interesting phone call, followed by an interesting meeting.

  Entering the café, Roland surprised Cory by being black. He was six foot, spindle-legged like a stork, with a waxed mustache that swept down and out so violently it looked like he’d sneezed it out. They shook hands, and from a puck-shaped container he offered a tablet of miracle berry gum that weirded your taste buds. Cory worked it around her sensitive molars as Roland ordered a fruit plate.

  “I’m surprised you’ve heard of Recreate,” Cory said. “We’ve barely started promoting.”

  “Yeah, it’s what I do. I got that life-event connect. I’m sort of a general marketing ronin. I do UX, brand consulting, event organizing, trendspotting, all that good shit. It’s my job to identify influencers in emerging demos. One thing I do is scout for cool underground creatives and hook them up with sponsors. That way, companies don’t have to throw Astroturf events, and their money supports projects with good causes. The company reps with the community, organizers like you get to throw legit events, the proceeds benefit the world, and I get paid. Wins all over the damn place.”

  “Where do I fit in?” Cory said, wishing his mustache was less interesting, and that his thighs were thicker than hers.

  “I hear you’re booking Dolores Park. It sounds like a good chewy project. Tell me your plans, and I’ll see if I can help. Try that,” Roland said, passing her the Tabasco bottle on the table.

  Roland spoke with remarkable presence while using his phone. In his white linen coat and green knit cap and wood-framed glasses, he seemed to embody one of the emerging demos it was his job to serve. Suddenly paranoid that he might be some kind of corporate saboteur, Cory gave an abstracted account of her plans for Recreate while sampling dabs of Tabasco that tasted like donut glaze.

  “Cool,” Roland said. “Yeah, I’ve done outdoor festivals. It’s crazy you’re doing this by yourself.”

  “I’d rather not do it by myself. I feel like I’m digging a well with my forehead.”

  “Then let me help. PBR’s Bay Area team is closing their books soon, so they’re looking to spend. Could be a good fit.”

  “PBR, like, the beer?”

  “Yeah, and other companies too.”

  Cory drizzled more sugary hot sauce on her tongue while Roland listed the clients he’d worked with (Levi’s, Clif Bar, Greenpeace) and those he’d declined (Microsoft, American Apparel, Target) on the studied basis of their social agendas. He deflected Cory’s concerns about corporate sponsorship by arguing that philanthrocapitalism was a crucial avenue for immediate good, operating at sufficient scale to tackle global issues short-term. If PBR was gonna make it rain on social projects, why not bleed the beast? “Bottom line, I want to be involved. I got this,” Roland said, offering his credit card to the waiter, whom he somehow sensed approaching from behind. “What do you say?”

  “I’m intrigued,” Cory said, truthfully. His arguments struck at her recent doubts that her essentially commercial event was nothing more than yuppified pollyanna bourgeois activism, the simony of the offset. The important thing, the principle that Cory sheltered like a votive against a slanting breeze, was that she wouldn’t profit no matter how successful she was. “It’d be good to collaborate. I’ll definitely consider it,” she continued, aware that she could put some flirty top spin on this, yet erring to professionalism. “Can I ask you something random?”

  “Do it.”

  “Guys like you, you’re always guys. Bronins. Why no female marketing ronins?”

  “Sexism. Or they’re working real jobs in PR, like my girlfriend,” Roland said.

  Cory released a never-ending sigh in her mind. She zinged Tabasco sauce into her mouth and gagged against the surprise burn, aspirating more sauce as she doubled over, coughing until lights appeared. The gum had worn off. Roland slid another puck across the table. “Take more. I oversaw imports for these guys.”

  “Thanks,” Cory said, dabbing at star-filled tears. “I love it.”

  VANYA GAVE WILL full admin privileges once WHEEL & DEAL’s user forums opened, but if she was trying to impress him with the Sable community’s cohesion, the moderating queue achieved exactly the opposite:

  mmmyeah id rape dat ass. sum1 betta shove a phat dick in her mouf so she stop talking doe

  Posted at 9:22 PM 5-5-2008 by anonymous | Reply

  DA FUQ IS THAT POOPOO PLATTER IN THE SHOW FOR, HE AINT EVEN CRIPPLE. LOL PROBAY RETARDED

  Posted at 8:10 PM 5-5-2008 by pikachoad | Reply

  the asien guy . . . I bet isher (faggot) friend, definately not is a Good actor tho..sounds like revenge of The nerds

  Posted at 7:39 PM 5-5-2008 by anonymous | Reply

  great post, very insightful, check out this link meet AMOROUS moist hotties in your neighborhood http://tinyurl.com/owf3o

  Posted at 7:27 PM 5-5-2008 by anonymous | Reply

  Posted at 6:12 PM 5-5-2008 by WAFFLECOCK | Reply

  > Queen of the Internet

  UGH kys bitch pls

  Posted at 5:59 PM 5-5-2008 by ki11j0y | Reply

  Will was allowed to delete these, as they breached community standards. They didn’t much bother him—all online comments were either gush or spew, nasty nickels clinking into his brain hemorrhage piggy bank. But a week later, something popped up in the queue:

  ok internutz get this. my gf said she went on a craigslist date with the asian guy once. he just awkwardly stared at her the whole time and at the end he tried to grab her tit. LOL FOREVER RONERY. he sent her like 100 butthurt PMs afterward when she didn’t call him back, will deliver screencaps soon. oh and here’s his old online dating profiles for great justice. anon I SUMMON YOU to dox this shitbird. ohhhhh the things we do for the lulz.

  Posted at 4:25 PM 5-11-2008 by alsoTHEGAME | Reply

  Another post followed with a massive paste-dump of his emails. Yes, it was all there, every strained joke, casual typo, and horny innuendo. A cremora of rage exploded in his mind. Vanya refused to let him ban or delete the comment, fearing a Streisand effect. “He’s not violating ToS,” she told him. “Yes, it’s embarrassing, but this’ll ease up once we implement cross-site identity. You shouldn’t have sent those emails in the first place.” After drearily tracking the commenter’s IP and contemplating retaliation, Will let it drop.

  But soon Vanya started to feel the flames. During blackouts, she hosed Will down with misplaced indignation—against users calling her out for dressing sexy (�
��I’m supposed to look good! That’s the point!”), being too white-bread (“Have they not noticed I’m dating you?”), being privileged (“I’m a self-made entrepreneur! So I like wine, so freaking what? Privilege, god! I’m a disabled woman!”). She was even touchier about the swoons and crests of her web analytics, which functioned as line graphs of her mood. She thrilled when traffic spiked from a Boing Boing link, considered it a net win when Valleywag called her an unctuous fameball, despaired as registration plateaued for a week, boosted time-on-site by wearing deeper necklines. The uneven user segments also irked her. “Some members aren’t even really disabled, they’re just old,” Vanya said. “They post all those creepy gifs of babies and angels. One guy says he has ingrown teeth. That’s not even real, is it? Then these temporary disabilities. I mean, obesity? Give me a freaking break!”

  “Well, who did you expect to—”

  “Power users! I don’t just want uniques or impressions, eyeballs are cheap! I want young, cool, engaged, legitimately disabled influencers who’ll bring in other active registered goddamn users!” She slapped her armrest and glowered at her glowering screen. “We only get one launch.”

  It was odd to see Vanya not yet winning. She even committed an outright blooper as they were heading down Church Street to brunch. Distracted while texting, she let her front wheel drop off the curb, and her phone, wheelchair, and body all flew at right angles from each other. Will rushed over and she pushed him away, pointing at her wheelchair and hissing, “Dump the feed!” Will hit their dump buttons and helped rethrone Vanya. “I cannot believe that happened,” she said, fixing her headband and priming the dump button a few more times. Freckles of blood spotted the elbow of her white silk sleeve. Tears rinsed her contacts. “Everything has to be so goddamn hard, doesn’t it. I know you’re expecting me to mess up.” Will chose to assume that she was addressing herself, and he again dumped them both out.