Agents of the Internet Apocalypse

by Wayne Gladstone

  “No,” she said. “It’s too late, and … what the hell happened to it?”

  The boy’s blood was visible. “I was at that explosion at the Farmers Market. I helped a boy not bleed to death,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. I do things. I’m doing something here, but that’s not the point. I came here for you. Why else would I be in L.A.?”

  “I dunno. Sounds like you came to lead a revolution?”

  “No. I came for you.”

  “Then why aren’t you with me?”

  “Because you said no.”

  “Yeah, and that was enough?” she asked, and opened the door.

  “What else am I supposed to do?” I asked, but she started to walk away. I shouted. “What else am I supposed to do?”

  She stopped short, but came no closer. “I don’t know, but Jesus, maybe if you weren’t saving the world you’d think of something.”

  * * *

  Tobey drove past the Beverly Hills Hotel and turned right on Sunset Boulevard. As the sun started to set, we reached the Sunset Strip. The lights and billboards reminded me a little of Times Square, but I didn’t hear Gershwin the way I sometimes do when New York hits you just right. I heard eighties hair metal. Paradise City and just before it got worse and turned to Mötley Crüe, Tobey said, “Viper Room.”

  “Oh, shit, that’s Book Soup,” Jeeves said. “I’ve heard of that place. I’ve always wanted to go to a reading there.”

  “Yeah, and we passed the Hustler store,” Tobey said. “I’ve always wanted to see if you could get a vintage pocket pussy shaped like Amber Lynn.”

  * * *

  “Don’t go,” I said, and Romaya paused in my doorway. “We can do this. We can make it work.”

  Romaya looked at the floor. “She’s not there,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever it is you’re looking for. She doesn’t exist.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. “Romaya, what are you talking about? You’re right here, in my doorway.”

  “No one calls me Romaya but you,” she said. “That’s not even my name.”

  It was true. Romaya’s name was Beth, but she hated it. Or at least she used to. She couldn’t reconcile something so straightforward and all-American with the spice and fire that came with a last name like Petralia, and one day she simply crossed out Beth on her high school yearbook order form and wrote Romaya in its place. And just like that, she was Romaya. At least to me, when I met her in college. I liked the name, but I loved the audacity of the girl who renamed herself, and I never called her anything but that or Babe.

  “Good-bye Romaya,” I said, but she was already gone.

  * * *

  We passed the Comedy Store and Tobey told us he’d done a mic there, and about the mechanical bull at Saddle Ranch bar. Jeeves soaked it up, but I was losing more and more interest in this tour and even in where we were headed. All my thoughts were with Romaya.

  “We should get a drink at Chateau Marmont while you’re in town, Jeeves,” Tobey said.

  “Isn’t that too swanky?”

  “You’d think so, right?” he said. “And there are plenty of stars who live there months at a time, but it’s still sorta weirdly undiscovered. Maybe people think they can’t even try?”

  We continued on as Sunset started to lose its glitz. Taco places, a Wendy’s, a Ross Dress for Less. Oddly, it got worse and worse the closer we got to Hollywood.

  “Check it out,” Tobey said when we hit Highland. “Hollywood High School.”

  I looked at the school and its sign flanked by palm trees. I thought about the baby growing inside Romaya. I wondered how that child would know me if I weren’t married to its mother. I wondered if it would grow up to go to school someplace where they shave trees to keep the rats away.

  * * *

  I didn’t bother getting up from the floor when Romaya left Tobey’s. It didn’t seem possible. I was untethered—only in my body when angry and without the concentration even to maintain that anger. My thoughts fired intermittently through vapor.

  That’s the mess Jeeves found only minutes later. Tobey slept through Jeeves’ knocking. When I didn’t answer, he came in through the door Romaya had left ajar. He was wearing a Tool T-shirt; long, loose jean shorts; and flip-flops.

  “You okay?” he asked, offering his hand, and I took it because refusing assistance would have required more words.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Don’t I look all right?”

  “You’ve never looked worse.”

  “Oh. Well … you’re not checking out my good side,” I said, turning slightly.

  He put his hands on my shoulders and then grabbed the sides of my face, hard. His fingers around the back of my head.

  “Gladstone,” he said. “How sad do you have to get before you stop making jokes?”

  “I’m not sure, Dan. You gonna stick around to find out?”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Never.”

  Jeeves kept hold of my head and looked at me a little longer, making sure there was enough of me left behind my eyes, before saying, “Wake Tobey up. It’s almost noon, and I have news.”

  Despite the directive, I promptly went to the fridge for a beer and sat down on the couch.

  “Fine. I’ll do it,” he said, and in a few minutes returned with a very tired Tobey, who plopped himself down on the couch next to me.

  Even Tobey could see the state I was in. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, but I just pointed to Jeeves standing over us, signifying the approaching lecture.

  “That phone book you gave me to research?” Jeeves asked.

  “Yeah?” Tobey replied.

  “Well, that went kind of nowhere. I mean, I cut it down some. Checked the obits, found out who was dead, looked for connections, but that got me only so far. Even the people who are no longer with us, perhaps their secrets passed to another in a later iteration of the phone book. After a couple of days, I got pretty frustrated.”

  “Cool, so maybe I’m not an asshole,” Tobey said. “Glad you got me up for that.”

  “Anyway,” Jeeves said, “this morning I decided to take a break, and I thought I’d look into the history of the Hollywood sign, the way I’d mentioned.”

  “Oh my God,” Tobey said. “Couldn’t you just narrate this into your dream journal while I slept?”

  “I’m getting there ADD boy. So those letters, they go way back. Started as part of some real-estate development, and they were never built with the intention of lasting.”

  “Isn’t that everything in L.A.?” I asked.

  “Until 1978, when a man gathered a group of investors to preserve the sign with corrugated steel. Know who that was?”

  We didn’t answer.

  “It was Hugh Hefner,” Jeeves said.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  Tobey and I looked at each other. “That’s interesting,” I said.

  “I didn’t even get to the interesting part yet,” Jeeves said, but then he took a breath and stopped. “Wait, why is that interesting?”

  “Because we were at the Playboy Mansion yesterday,” I said.

  This time it was Jeeves who asked “Really?”

  “Yes really. Special invitation.”

  I was about to tell him about Hamilton when Tobey interrupted.

  “Yeah, I met that dude from High School Musical. He’s a badass now. He did lines off Sasha Grey! Oh, FYI, she does porn that’s not all about dudes blowing each other.”

  “Thanks for the heads up,” Jeeves said, and looked at me disappointedly.

  “Oh, I wasn’t at that party, Dan,” I said. “I spent my time talking to Hamilton Burke.”

  “You’re joking. That’s amazing.”

  “What kind of porn does he do?” Tobey asked.

  “Shut up,” I said. “You know who Hamilton Burke is from the journal.…”
/>   “Not just from the journal,” Jeeves said. “From, y’know, the world.”

  “All things being equal,” Tobey said, “I’d rather be the dude doing lines off Sasha Grey.”

  “Please stop being yourself for a second,” Jeeves urged. “We’ve hit upon more than we know. My point was that Hefner got eight donors besides himself to sponsor each letter with a contribution of twenty-nine thousand dollars. They were Terrence Donnelly, Giovanni Mazza, Les Kelley, Gene Autry, Andy Williams, Warner Brothers Records, Alice Cooper, and…”

  We didn’t guess.

  “Hamilton Burke,” Jeeves answered. “Hamilton Burke sponsored the ‘D’ in Hollywood.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I already knew Burke was a friend of Playboy, and he’s got the cash. What’s so surprising about that?”

  “Because,” Jeeves said. “Once I learned this little tidbit about the sign, just out of curiosity, I cross-referenced those nine names against the Internet phone book, and guess who was the only person there?”

  “Hugh Hefner!” Tobey said.

  “No, fuckwad,” I said, turning to Tobey. “Hamilton Burke.”

  “Right,” Jeeves said. “Burke, not Hefner, is in the phone book.”

  “Who cares?” Tobey asked.

  “Who cares? What are you talking about?”

  “Hear me out,” Tobey said. “How much money did Hefner lose due to the Internet? I mean there are actual bona fide porno mags on the stands now. There are DVDs. Video killed the radio star, but the Internet killed magazine and videotape tits.”

  “Not familiar with that song,” I said, “but it sounds catchy.”

  “It’s not a bad theory, Tobey,” Jeeves said. “But, y’know, you’re ignoring the good evidence.”

  “You don’t have shit,” Tobey said. “You found an Internet phone book full of rich guys, and one of those rich guys did a rich-guy thing like sponsoring a Hollywood letter. Who gives a shit? Am I missing something?”

  Now Jeeves sat down on the couch, weighted by his confusion. For the first time since I met him at Central Park, he was at a loss for words. Back then he was overcome with surprise and unable to express, calmly, that I was the Internet Messiah. But this time he was just confused like a normal person.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I don’t separate my logical mind from my psychic one.…” He paused. “God, I hate to say this, but Tobey’s right. I guess that’s all I found, but in my gut, it feels like more. It feels significant.”

  “I don’t want to gloat,” Tobey said, “but are you admitting that the fact that a guy in the Internet phone book purchased the ‘D’ in the ‘Hollywood’ sign doesn’t help us find the Internet?”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “That wasn’t what Jeeves was researching. He was helping us narrow down the Internet phone book so we knew where to find the latest iteration. The version that has the fewest names, and therefore suspects. Or at least to find a way to narrow down the phone book we have.”

  “No, I know that,” Jeeves said. “But does it really help us in any way? All we know is that Burke paid for a letter in the Hollywood hills.”

  And just like that, Jeeves, a man I’d met in Central Park months earlier, a man I was never supposed to meet again, brought another candle to my life. The bubbles sprang up and I screamed, “Son of a bitch!”

  “What?” Tobey asked.

  “Fucking Burke. He does know where the phone book is. And your feelings are right, Jeeves.”

  Tobey and Jeeves both moved closer, and even Tobey was open to the possibility of wonder.

  “I know where the phone book is. The last thing Burke said to me? Happy hunting. There’s gold in them thar hills.”

  “And?” Tobey asked.

  “And let’s get in the Matrix. Hamilton likes to fuck with me. The Hollywood sign. It’s in the Hollywood Hills.”

  * * *

  Highland became Cayuga and suddenly we were in a valley. But climbing. Jeeves looked out his window without any of the earnest cynicism or momentary confusion he exhibited in Tobey’s apartment earlier. It felt good to see Jeeves open and naïve, and I wanted some of that, but I couldn’t hold it. Not while I was treading life, weighted with so many new Romaya memories. I just tried to see the phone book in my mind. I thought about bringing it to her. Showing her my progress and accomplishment. Surely the man who could deliver this could find a way to create a happy life with her.

  We kept going, following the road that overlooked the city until we made a right at Dark Canyon up top. And then we were there. The Oakwood Apartments. The rest of the journey would have to be on foot, but Oakwood’s parking lot provided an excellent hiking access that would lead us all the way to the Hollywood sign, where I was sure Hamilton had buried the latest phone book. Under the “D.”

  11.

  Minutes into our journey, we were all bleeding. Not that we were stupid. Tobey and I were wearing jeans, and while Jeeves was only in extra-long shorts, he did squeeze into a pair of Jynx’s nearly knee-high black combat boots she’d left at Tobey’s place. Still, those defenses weren’t enough. The sticker bushes were merciless, especially when you were losing your footing on tiny gravel saboteurs. California provided natural ball bearings in the hundreds to ease you back into its finest fabric-piercing thorns.

  After taking his third sticker bush to the knees, Jeeves asked, “You sure you know where you’re going?”

  “Yeah, I told you,” Tobey said. “The month I moved out here from Michigan, I hiked this with some hippies.

  “I thought you hated hippies,” I said.

  “I do, but who else would want to take mescaline with me under the Hollywood sign?”

  We kept hiking up the back side of Cahuenga Peak getting farther and farther away from the somewhat convenient access point of the Oakwood Apartments parking lot we started from. We couldn’t see our destination yet, but we did notice signs for Panasonic’s “cutting edge security network.”

  “Huh, I never noticed those before,” Tobey said.

  “Really? Did you take the mescaline before the hike?”

  “Maybe, or maybe I just didn’t care then. I was getting high with hippies, not going on a covert mission as the co-Messiah of the Internet Reclamation Movement.”

  “Okay, two things,” I said, literally pulling a sweating Jeeves up the hill behind me. “First, you’re not the co-Messiah, you’re the Tobey. And second, if you read the signs a little closer, you’ll see they say the network of cameras is streamed for surveillance to recreation center headquarters via … fiber optic cable. So, yeah … oops.”

  That calmed Tobey for a while, but even after it left my lips, I knew that was no cause for comfort, as there was every chance a closed network could exist in the Apocalypse. Still, nothing was going to stop me now, so I was glad the techno-talk worked, and soon we were also distracted by the terrain. Things only got harder when we crossed the access road. I’m not sure at what point a hill becomes a mountain, but we started climbing side by side because single file would have meant taking a falling rock to the head. I didn’t think Jeeves could make it, and I was thankful my three weeks in captivity had helped me shed those ten pounds that had bothered me for a decade. Jeeves was wheezing heavily, but the complaints were actually coming from Tobey.

  “You better be right about this, Gladstone,” he said. “I was twenty-five the last time I tried this and yes, come to think of it, you’re right. We were already tripping balls by this point. What sober person would do this?”

  Sometimes you reach a point where the only thing that keeps you going forward is the fear of the road behind you. Sure, it was downhill, but that also probably meant falling. We’d have to face it at some point, but all I could tell myself now was that even though I was thirty-seven, there was no way I would fail to do something a high twenty-five-year-old Tobey had done. But that wasn’t enough to propel me. And neit
her was the bullshit twinkle in Hamilton’s eye, his goading clues or feigned interest in my existence. It wasn’t even finding the clue that would bring us closer to knowing who had the power to steal the Net and, therefore, return it that kept me moving forward. It was the need to win. To claim a prize. A golden ticket. I wanted this phone book, and I wanted to hold it over my head like a boom box and prove to Romaya that my time away from her was not wasted. That I could get the job done. That I was strong enough to face anything.

  I don’t know what sustained Tobey and Jeeves. Maybe it was my newfound focus, but I do know it helped when we reached the top and saw water below. It looked darker than the surroundings, the sun having now set.

  “Hey, that’s the Hollywood Reservoir,” Tobey said.

  It doesn’t seem possible that something man-made in the middle of Los Angeles could provide such comfort, but the climb leveled out and we could stand straight again. Sensing that freedom, we all sat down for real and rested. Tobey cracked open his backpack which, according to him, he hadn’t opened since he first took this hill with the hippies.

  “Anyone want some Faygo?” he asked, pulling out a half-decade-old soda bottle.

  “Faygo?” I replied. “Were they hippies or Juggalos?”

  “Shut up. I was broke when I moved here. Ralphs had a sale.”

  We sat for about twenty minutes, drinking Faygo (as well as the water Jeeves and I were smart enough to pack) while we watched our blood dry. There were eagles and condors overhead. All the masculine birds. And then we walked again until we could see the back of the Hollywood sign clearly below us. The letters were easily fifty feet tall, obscuring Los Angeles from directly below all the way to the ocean.

  “It just occurred to me,” Tobey said. “I mean, I think you’re nuts, but you think we’re at the hiding spot of the critical piece of evidence that will tell us which few people have the power to steal the Internet, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And you also think we don’t have to worry about all the security cameras because there’s no Internet, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I know I’m just some dumb shit who gets high all the time, but did it occur to you that maybe if you’re right, the people who were powerful enough to steal the Net might want to protect their secrets?”