Agents of the Internet Apocalypse

by Wayne Gladstone

  Tobey packed his weed into the hookah before fitting three of the tubes with mouthpieces. Then Jynx came back with the beers and a pitcher of water.

  “See?” Tobey was gloating.

  “Here are your Anchor Steams.”

  “Thanks Jynx,” Tobey said.

  “And here’s your water.”

  “Thank you,” I said, before watching Jynx fill the bong and head back to the bar.

  “Hmm … technically, I still won that bet,” Tobey said.

  The night went pretty much the way you’d expect. They’d announce a game, some stupid hashtag like #WorstThingAboutFirstTimeSex (Eve is selfish in bed) or #FilmPrequels (Honey, I Think We Should Have Kids), and they’d give prizes for the best one in each round, usually in the form of free food or beer or tobacco. We had a good enough time, but it was starting to bother me that we hadn’t won yet.

  “Well, if you want to win,” Tobey said, “you have to know how to play the room. You published at McSweeney’s, you get it,” he said.

  “Okay,” Jynx said, stepping on the six-inch-high pallet that served as a stage. She was now wearing a T-shirt based on Magritte’s Son of Man, but instead of an apple in front of his face, there was a WiFi symbol. “This is the final hashtag of the early show,” she said. “The winner gets one free beer and this T-shirt.” Jynx proceeded to take off the shirt, revealing that ornate, maroon bra underneath and enough tattoos to never be naked. The crowd cheered and wolf-whistled, but in the way friends and gay men do at burlesque shows where you’re sure it’s safe and no one’s getting raped.

  “Okay, your final category is #21stCenturyYoMommaJokes. Go!”

  Tobey hookah’d it up while Jeeves sat back pondering and scratching at his stubble. I looked at Jynx and, remembering Oz, had the scary thought that maybe she wasn’t real. Tobey scribbled “Yo’ Momma so dumb, she consults WebMD for a computer virus.” Tight. Jeeves took a little too much pride in his submission as he slid his paper across the table for view: “Yo’ Momma so boring, the NSA didn’t even read her e-mail.” That wouldn’t win. This was a crowd that liked LOL funny and would always give wry second place unless it was wry mixed with the absurd.

  “Times almost up, Gladdy,” Tobey said. Jynx was already collecting the slips.

  “I got it,” I said, handing my paper directly to Jynx while doing a sensational job of maintaining eye contact.

  “Cool hat,” she said, and headed for the stage.

  Somehow, I knew I’d won it, just like I knew back in college that I was going to win a complimentary copy of Speed at my college-town video store when I dropped my name in a box. It was only the second time in my life I’d felt something so strongly. I had a superpower, but only for things of no consequence. Tobey’s and Jeeves’ submissions got laughs, but mine did better: “Yo’ Momma so gay she can get married in an increasing number of states.”

  “It’s Gladstone, right?” Jynx asked the crowd, but didn’t wait. Instead, she came over to me with the cheers at her back and took off my hat before placing it on her head. “Time to claim your prize,” she said. I took off my Miami Vice jacket, revealing the scrubs underneath. “Here you go, Doctor,” she said, pulling the T-shirt over my head before returning my hat. “Perfect.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been dressed by a woman. Then she hurried back to the stage.

  “Tobey, help me out here,” I said. “Is she…”

  “Real?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course she is. Don’t be so surprised. Not every Suicide Girl is all doom and gloom.”

  “Yeah, but I think she … likes me.”

  Jynx returned to the stage and said, “Thank you all for playing, and remember, you can buy that T-shirt and others at my boyfriend’s site. ThisFuckinShirt.com. I mean, when the Net comes back.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tobey said. “She was too tall for you anyway.”

  “Tall chicks dig me,” I said. “They’re looking down from above. It’s a slimming perspective.”

  Our strong finish and Tobey’s winning personality had brought people (some of them women) to our table, but I wasn’t looking for company. Neither Jynx nor any of these Californians were my type, or the woman I’d crossed the country and feigned sanity to see. I also wasn’t in a position to be the wingman Tobey wanted. My thoughts were on Romaya, so Tobey used me in book form, pulling copy after copy of my journal out of his backpack and giving them away.

  After about thirty minutes of downing Anchor Steams on Jeeves’ tab, someone made a plan to go the movies, specifically, the ELO-scored Olivia Newton-John vehicle Xanadu. Tobey and Jeeves argued first about whether it was a good bad movie or a bad good movie, but I couldn’t really follow. Winning that shirt made me feel special, and I let myself think about all the things Jeeves had told me back at the apartment. And maybe because I was in no shape to, I started putting together the pieces of a new reality. One that had more parts than I’d been accepting. Back in college, Romaya had a poetry professor who would cut up students’ poems without mercy, chopping away all the pretense and bombast and leaving only those phrases that worked. I could see the value in that, but she hated it. Why not teach us to write the bigger poem we’re failing at, she asked. Build a better home instead of trapping us into one tiny, immaculate room?

  I realized that Dr. Kreigsman had done that to my life—reduced it to a simple story that worked and made sense, but could never capture all the moving parts and ill-fitting corners of a real existence. There was more. But even harder than figuring out what was real was deciding if certain memories were worth the risk of reclaiming. After all, there are worse things than an immaculate room.

  Tobey and Jeeves ultimately agreed Xanadu was a good bad movie, but there was no meeting of the minds as to whether the soundtrack could be called progressive rock. Jeeves had solid points against such a classification: no odd time signatures, no extended solos, and of course, the presence of Olivia Newton-John. Wisely, Tobey countered with, “Yeah, but robot voices and laser sounds!” I tried not to fill my head with too much of it. I couldn’t even comprehend what theatre would be showing a 1980 film today, but apparently, it was Hollywood Forever—a graveyard that projected films upon a mausoleum wall while spectators watched picnic style. And although it sounded like it, this was no apocalyptic creation. Hollywood Forever predated the Internet, and it sounded great, but I declined because proximity to Jeeves would only invite further conversation I wasn’t ready for.

  I pulled Jeeves away from the crowd. “Bring it in here, big guy,” I said, and wrapped my arms around him. And when he grabbed me too hard and placed his chin over my shoulder there was some part of me that wanted to cry.

  “Thank you, Daniel,” I said. “I’ll friend you on Facebook when the Net comes back, and let you know when I’m back in New York.”

  He pulled back from the embrace and held me close at the elbows. I noticed for the first time that he had really long eyelashes that actually made contact with his glasses. “First, it’s Dan, never Daniel, and second, I don’t see it coming back without you, Gladstone.”

  “I’m a mess, Dan.”

  “I know, but you’ll get stronger.”

  “Oh, did you have a vision of that?”

  He smiled. “You don’t have to be psychic. Everyone who keeps going gets stronger.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, put it in my hand and kept it there. “This is my number. A landline.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “You’ll see me again, Gladstone. Just, y’know, keep going.”

  I made no promises. I just watched him join Tobey and the gang as they headed off to a cemetery to see a movie about roller skating muses. I stopped Tobey long enough to tell him I’d see him later and score one of the copies of my journal for myself. Then I called a cab to take me back to that sports bar in Santa Monica, the only bar I knew. I was hoping to read the journal’s words again, this time as if they weren’t mine. To use my newly formed mind to
separate facts from disease.

  “You’re back,” the bartender said, as I reclaimed my stool from the afternoon.

  “Maybe,” I said, and asked for two fingers of The Macallan.

  It was meant to be a reward. Two months of drinking out in the world of New York City had forced me to seek booze from a lower shelf. It had been Jameson over and over and that was okay. I liked Jameson fine, and even though it was Irish whiskey, it actually tasted more like The Macallan than some lesser Scotches I’d tried. But now, I felt I’d earned the real thing. Not just with those two months of hospital-based sobriety or the couple of days of occasional cheap beer at Tobey’s, but because I had important things to consider. Scotch things. Beard-stroking, pipe-smoking things.

  The bartender got distracted by a large party of people crowding up against the bar, and I flipped through the Tobey-printed copy of my journal while I waited. He’d written “Gladstone” in the bottom right corner and beneath that “Illustrations by Brendan Tobey.” I was instantly pissed off that the fucker had doodled all through my book, but as I turned the pages, I noticed really only a handful of drawings, and all of them good. He’d used a fine felt pen and scratched out sketches on inserted pages in a kind of style that married a New Yorker cartoon with a dime-store noir novel. Back at the workers’ compensation office, people referred to such efforts as “adding value to the team.”

  The bartender brought my Macallan on a napkin. A nice coaster would have been more fitting, but at least the place was relatively quiet for a sports bar. I took a slow sip, letting the ice stop at my teeth and the Scotch flow underneath. The smoke and warmth I’d remembered were almost there, but cut by a medicinal taste that distracted me. I’d forgotten how to drink good Scotch. My brain focused on the wrong things. The months of Jameson had left their mark. Going cheap had ruined me.

  4.

  What came next should have arrived in a day, but it took a week. Every morning I woke and got dressed in some incredibly stylish number I’d picked up from Old Navy and went outside with the intent of continuing on to Romaya. But I didn’t want to see her again with a tightness in my chest. The gasping in my lungs could turn to hurt and then anger if not met with comfort. I waited each day to feel good, but I never felt good. But not all decisions are fated—some are just overdue. So one week after seeing her for the first time in L.A., I made myself see her again.

  I knew you couldn’t hail a cab here, even if people like to pretend L.A.’s a real city, so I headed to the promenade where tourists being dropped off for shopping meant there might be one around. The taxi would get me to Romaya, and when I arrived, I’d have to get out because I wouldn’t be allowed to hide behind someone else’s metal and glass.

  There was no text, no IM, no Facebook message. Romaya didn’t know I was coming, and there was no reason for her to be home. Maybe I was counting on that. A knock on an empty door. But she was home even if her greeting wasn’t everything I’d hoped for.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. I saw some panic I didn’t accept.

  “I’m sorry. Is it a bad time?” I asked.

  “No.… No,” she said. “I’m just working on my résumé and looking for a job. Would you like to come in?”

  “Thank you.” I stepped inside. It didn’t smell like our old apartment. “I got you something,” I said, and pulled a picture frame from my Jansport. It was like the one she’d broken. I picked it up from CVS on one of the days I couldn’t bring myself to visit her.

  “Oh. Thank you,” she said.

  Her futon was nicer than the one we used to call our bed, but not as nice as something I expected a grown-up to keep in her living room. It had a crafty, hippie, knit blanket-rug-shawl thing draped over it to class it up. I sat down and stared at her tiny dining room table with actual newspapers spread out across it.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s fun.”

  “Yeah, classifieds.”

  Romaya continued to make the coffee she had started before I got there. “They say you can pay a fee to Monster.com and they will do searches for you and mail you potential hits, but there’s a turnaround time and also…”

  “It’s fucking stupid?”

  “Yeah, basically.” She laughed. “Do you want some coffee?” I nodded and she added another scoop before sitting down at the table, far away from me. “Seems there are certain advantages to being over thirty. I remember how to print résumés and check newspapers.”

  I thought about Tobey and how résumé printing must be good for business.

  “I mean, I might do Monster for the long term,” she said. “You can ask them to put you on a tickler for certain companies or jobs and they’ll buy all the papers and check them for you if something pops up, but I’m not waiting for that.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Yeah. Google!”

  “You found a job listing for Google in a newspaper?” I asked. I wanted to call it ironic, but spending my youth shaming Alanis Morissette had taught me that word was just too dangerous to use. “What does Google need with a pharmaceutical copywriter?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m applying. It’s Google. They ride Segways and stuff. It’s cool.”

  Picturing Romaya on a Segway made me happy. I could see her learning tricks down corporate hallways. It seemed to make her happy too, but she was careful not to see it too clearly. Wanting things was dangerous.

  “Maybe I’ll apply too,” I joked, and she laughed.

  “With your search history,” she said, “not only wouldn’t they hire you, they’d call the sex police.”

  “Good point. Maybe I’ll call Bing. My porn history’s immaculate there.”

  “You still on disability?” she asked.

  I couldn’t pretend that wasn’t meant to shame me. “Yes. Free money,” I said. “But there’s more.”

  Now she was listening.

  “I’m not sure if it made the news out here, but a couple of months ago, did you catch stories about an ‘Internet Messiah’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some dude in New York they said would bring back the Net.”

  “Oh right. Yeah?”

  “Well…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence, deciding instead to open my arms and let context make it easier.

  “Well what?” she asked.

  “Me. I’m the Internet Messiah.”

  “What does that even mean?” she asked.

  “I just explained. I’m the guy who’s bringing back the Net.”

  “You are?”

  “No, I mean I’m the guy they say is going to do that.”

  “Yeah, well why do they say that?” she asked, and I wondered why I hadn’t been expecting questions.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said, reaching into my backpack again, “but I have a copy of my journal. It’s not long…”

  Romaya went to get the coffee. “You want me to read your journal?”

  “Well, it’s more of a book. I dunno. I was in a bad way. I know that. I’m sorry. For a lot of things actually, but it might help explain. When the Net went down, I had nothing else to do. I started to sorta just look for it.”

  “Under rocks and stuff?”

  “I know. It’s weird,” I said, and laid a copy of the journal down beside me. “But please don’t make it harder. It wasn’t much of an investigation, I admit, but here’s the thing—that Jeeves guy? The psychic?”

  She lit up a bit. “The dude who predicted O’Reilly’s death?”

  “Yes! Him. He swears I’m the one who will return the Internet. And there’s this guy from 4Chan who’s asking about me too.”

  “4Chan?”

  “It’s just a shitty Web site where terrible people do awful sometimes hilarious things, but it’s also tied up with Anonymous sort of.”

  “You know this sounds insane, right?”

  “Yeah, I know it’s crazy that people could ever believe in me, but, y’know, they don’t know I’m a fucking asshole, s
o I fooled someone, I guess.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that anymore,” she said. “Do you want your coffee or are you leaving?”

  “Please read the journal,” I said. “I think it will help you understand.”

  “That you’re the Internet Messiah?”

  “No. Just me. I think it will help you understand me.”

  “Why now?” she asked.

  “Because I want you to come with me.”

  “What? Where?”

  “I want you to help me look for the Internet. I mean California makes more sense anyway. Silicon Valley. Google. All that stuff.”

  “Wow, you’ve really studied up on this,” she said. “Google and all that stuff. What do you even know about the Internet?”

  “Well, not a lot at first, but I did actually read a bunch about it when…”

  I reached out for the coffee she was holding so I could take a sip and reorganize my mind.

  “Look,” I said. “You’ve got a three-month severance. Come take an adventure with me. Tobey too. It’ll be fun.”

  “You want me to drop out of my life and go on an adventure?”

  “Not drop out. Seems your life already kicked you out.”

  “Right, and I’m going to fix that.” She pointed to the classifieds as proof of her good intentions. Evidence that she did not deserve the fate of the unemployed.

  “Great. Fix it. I’m not asking you to open a detective agency with me, but I’m going with this. Because I can. And now, for a little bit at least, you can too. And I’d like you to come with me because it’s not about rent or getting pregnant or figuring out life. It’s just an adventure. An honest-to-goodness, California, behind-the-scenes adventure. Why shouldn’t you be there? We deserve an adventure.”

  Those were the wrong words. I should have steered clear of the miscarriages, but I stopped knowing the right words long ago—and besides, the wrong words had to be better than silence. I’d already tried that. Romaya came closer and picked up the journal, flipping through it dispassionately. Then she placed it alongside the classifieds.