by Bruce Wagner
“Of course!”
The mood lightened, becoming almost festive.
“I don’t know if it’s an HBO thing or whatever . . . but I would like the proceeds to go to Hyacinth. And I want to do it hand in hand with you, I need you to be my partner . . .”
This time Livia couldn’t restrain herself and began to weep. Dusty went to her and the two cried together.
“It’ll be frickin’ scary but I think it’ll be amazing. I know it will be. I even reached out to Laura Poitras—the gal who did the Snowden movie? She’s amazing. I’m not sure she’ll do it but I think she’s definitely intrigued . . . The timing might be good because she’s kind of taking a hiatus from the heavy shit. Did you know she spent years worrying they were going to break down the door and arrest her? Though maybe the critics will arrest her, after she does our little film!”
“I think it’s going to be really important, Dusty.”
“Right? Ya think?”
“I’m just so honored.”
“I’m gettin’ butterflies! You’ve pretty much been my therapy all these years, Liv. You and the foundation totally paved the way for this—I really think meeting all those kids was like . . . a rehearsal for meeting her. And . . . some part of me thought she’d walk through those doors one day—I think that was in my head, for real. Isn’t that funny? That I thought for sure one day I’d bump into Aurora . . . did I ever tell you that was her name?”
“No,” she said, with a mother’s tenderness. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Strange. That I never told you that.”
She said the name again aloud, like a conjurer.
—
Tristen, twenty-three, a slight-of-build outlier type with acne scars on his neck, but cute—nonstandard-edition cute. A Crossroads alumnus who ran with the Brentwood/Palisades crowd before getting outclassed, outlapped, outed, and outrun.
(His folks, fringy showbiz aspirants/below-the-liners.)
Back in the Ritalin folly of youth, a genius troll who called himself “AssDoxxtorFill” online—definition of doxx (short for documents) being “to search for and publish the private or identifying information of individuals on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.” He became a bandit anarchist on the 4chan imageboard’s wild and woolly so-called /b/forum, part of a rowdy nihilistic gang of hacks who called themselves “/b/tards.” In the electronic havoc of finding others, he found himself.
Do not ask for whom the /b/tards troll; they troll for thee . . .
Tristen made his bones in mayhem and sundry Web motherfuckery way back in 2006, not too long after All Souls’ Day, when a coke-bingeing teen 100-mph-joycrashed her father’s Carrera into a toll booth (troll booth soon enough) on an Orange County highway, becoming a legendary Internet phenom after CHP dispatchers adventitiously leaked official photos of the gory results to the Web. Nikki Catsouras’s goopy face, a work of abstract, accident-scene art in a pre-hashtag-days atrocity exhibit, had spookily retained its luxuriant hair, the superglued coiffure of a demon; her teeth cornrowed in the cranium’s middle like a double helix. The steering wheel, a warpy airplane travel pillow, collared around her neck, her skull resembling a child’s papier-mâché version of one of those spiritual bookstore half-bowl anthracite crystals. The dead girl was Tristen’s christening, his ritual coming of rage as a player in the genre called “RIP” trolldom—using a filter to deepen his voice, he rang up her grieving parents and impersonated an official who claimed to be spearheading an investigation into rumors that unholy acts had been perpetrated upon their daughter’s corpse by lady sheriffs and various family members of the coroner, and to assert that the body had been further, if virtually, desecrated by kinky Comic-Con aficionados, supposedly given access via premium morgue-camera pay-per-views.
Why did he do it? “For the LULZ”—definition of lulz being the trickster’s version of for laughs, i.e., same as LOL, but with the pirate flag of motherfuckery flying.
The Catsourases were too stunned to hang up, which Tristen thought awesome, because it implied no one else had called, not yet anyway, and meant he was surfing the first-wave riptide of pranks that would keep pulling the bereaved under until the Internet End of Days. He spent a week lovingly accessorizing a mannequin’s head Fangoria-style before sending it chez Nikki, having already mic’d a windowsill so that when Mrs. Catsouras opened the hatbox left on the porch (with a flowery card that implied it was a condolence from one of her daughter’s anguished friends), she flipped as hard as Brad Pitt at the end of Se7en. Tristen posted the wailing soundbite, a caprice that, to his dismay, caused him to receive a small but significant amount of shit from his comrades, whose self-touted fearless amorality apparently had its limits. Poseurs and hypocrites—they were turning into body-snatched TEDxTeen pussies before his very eyes . . .
He got bored, vaulting over Nikki’s cadaver to whitewater-raft the BitTorrents of spring—“spring” going by the name of Matthew, a thirteen-year-old who inexplicably hanged himself in Rochester, Minnesota. Valiantly struggling to process the senseless death, imponderable at any age but a jarring novelty to tweens, a clique of pubescent Matthew survivors crafted a poignant memorial page on MySpace, extolling their friend with charming ineptness, as if he’d been martyred to a cause. When they clumsily called him “an hero” (the eulogizer’s heart, if not indefinite article, was in the right place), an inspired meme was born: to RIP trolls, the boy hadn’t killed himself, he’d “an heroed”! So genius! The coinage should have been Tristen’s—envy soaked the un-Google-able recesses of his encrypted heart. In consolation, he designed GIFs on MyDeathSpace of a Matthew-faced Casper doing a floaty jig on a grave while being violated by a Sambo-looking golem. For sheer technical wizardry of slapstick execution, Tristen received high kudos from the very merry band of shit-disturbers—all older than he, and handsomer in their own ways—that had recently shunned him. The sins committed against the Catsouras mom were now forgiven and forgotten.
Yet another period of ADHD boredom ensued, and after all his crazy lone-wolf shit, Tristen was disgusted that he’d subsequently allowed himself to be seduced into hacktivism by the older, more-handsome-than-he manboys. (Their energy and scent was responsible for his acquiescence.) Dutifully, he became a mouse in Anonymous—a rat—all the while hating on the do-gooder, high-dudgeon politically correct exposés he got conscripted into: the sight of a Guy Fawkes mask was enough to make him gag. So he bailed again, holing up in his room at the parents’ to explore newfound Web-sex thirsts (how he met Jeremy), his doxxing dormant but for sporadic video-design work, hyper-real porn goofs for a seditious, star-baiting website called Celeb Jihad . . . carefully crafting a Kate Upton/Kaley Cuoco-bukkake-facial here, an Ariana Grande/Aubrey Plaza-jerking-themselves-on-the-bed there—
Then came the quantum leap, for which he’d remain forever, happily unattributed: the creation of an event whorizon, the great celebrity selfie-porn scandal of August ’14 AKA “the Fappening.” (Impishly named after fap, the onomatopoeic root of jacking off.) Tristen’s luck and good fortune astonished—so many others might have laid claim to that prize! So many others had tried . . . Embedded in the lining of the net, the Fappening’s birth had been inevitable, yet fate and history had chosen him to summon the lava flow of exposed taboo bodymaps—Jennifer Lawrence’s and lesser cousins’—that verily swamped Old Reality, engulfing the pristine, elitist coastal cities of the lascivious, clay-footed gods of TMZ. JLaw herself! Jennifer too had been chosen, but couldn’t wrap her head around the perfection of being the figurehead on the evolutionary supership’s bow, couldn’t fathom the ultimate privilege of signifying that dichotomy. Vain and addled, she’d mistakenly believed that Dior and Katniss and David O. Russell would confer immortality, immunity . . . they all thought they could be private whores behind the gates of gilded Beverly Park playpens. But more than their arrogance, what enraged him was the grotesque ignorance of it, the world’s denia
l of spiritus mundi and the shitstorm audacity of what was coming—what he, Tristen, had ushered in. They were all his age, yet still clung to the idea they could “own” their images, passwords, thoughts! The entitled, alt-precious, starfucking Lena Dunham even delivered a warning (to her constituency of Girls and girly men) that to view the cell-phone images he’d unleashed would be at one’s peril, for the act was equivalent to a sex crime. Her self-righteous Brooklyn shit was über-Orwellian: chubby, people-pleasing, exhibitionistic Little Sister Is Watching. Couldn’t they see it was the HBO Medusa’s gaze that would turn them to stone? And leave them in the dustbin of history?
He was consumed by the architecture of that consensual edifice called reality. Months after Tristen conjured his fake GIFs on Celeb Jihad, the net of the Fappening (there were many fishermen now) trawled an actual video from Aubrey Plaza’s iPhone of her masturbating in front of a bathroom mirror with one leg propped on the counter—the real and the sham, the already-happened, the inchoate, and the never-was were simply different sides of a Möbius strip. He thought of the Baudelaire story of the man who delighted in giving counterfeit coins to beggars—was there really a difference? In the moment, joy was spread to giver and taker. He found the story in the I Ching (Hexagram 18—“Correcting the Corruption”) even more instructive. In the dead of winter, a dying emperor asked for fresh roses. The armies scoured the entire country but found only one flower each day; the ruler’s health returned overnight then plummeted in the morning when it began to wilt. Finally, the court magician presented him a rose that would never die, and the emperor lived to an old age. It was artificial . . .
Privacy wasn’t dead, reality was—but it sure was tough to kill. His screen-refreshable quote of the moment belonged to P. K. Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” It would take generations before the swashbuckling daring and seminal importance of the Fappening could be properly measured.
Someday, even his father would see, and be awed, and would know.
—
The Dusty Wilding kiss-off threw Larissa into a deep funk.
It wasn’t the type of thing she could gossip about with friends. Most of them, anyway. Maybe eventually . . . She didn’t have much of a career but didn’t want to get blacklisted either. Could happen. It wasn’t just that, though; it was pride. I got dumped. Of course, it wasn’t so simple but that was how it felt. Dumped! By a movie star! After losing my virginity!
As if life wasn’t fucking hard enough.
Her take on the actress had been so wrong that the heart-stomped stand-in began to question her judgment in general. She chastised herself for letting all those fantasies run wild. At the height of her crush, she imagined becoming part of a celebrity threesome—bellwether of a next-generation cultural trend of ménages à trois “marriages” soon to follow the humdrum glut of gay celeb conjugal couplings. (She even saw herself getting movie roles out of it.) Some of the reason those head-riffs were so compelling was the element of husband-payback. She could just see Derek, alone in bed after being ditched by his nine-year-old girlfriend, flicking on Hollywood Tonight! to catch Larissa leaving a paparazzi-swarmed restaurant with her crazy-famous lovers. Of course, she’d be famous too . . . how frickin’ great would that be? The thought of her daughter’s shock and embarrassment on learning the news wasn’t enough to dismantle the scenario—after all, her dad, with his dalliance, had thrown the first, unsavory punch, and because Larissa’s new friends were women, she was certain Rafaela would be more understanding. She had dreamed of the girl finally meeting them and loving them and being loved in return; a new, extended family that would heal her wounds.
Now everything was fucked.
New York Post headlines of her spurning intruded instead:
CAMERA-DOUBLE TROUBLE!
STAND-IN STOOD UP!
GIRLS GONE “WILDING”!
HUMPED-Y DUMPED-Y
DUSTED!—
The whole debacle was enough to drive a gal to Tinder.
Back when she was married, she heard hair-raising stories from girlfriends about their online exploits—one gave her the name of the hotel she was about to tryst at with a complete stranger. “If I don’t text you in two hours, call the police”! Larissa was glad to be dodging that bullet.
But that was then, and this is what now looked like: only last week she found herself hooking up with a thirty-two-year-old gaffer, in an attempt to wash her brush with greatness (and greatness’s hot young wife) from her system. When they kissed, she felt Allegra and Dusty’s tongues fencing with hers, like out of some erotic horror movie.
The sound of a key in the lock interrupted her reverie. Now that Sylvia & Marilyn was over, she was back to worrying about her troubled son 24/7. Yoga class helped a little but the shame of being played for a fool in an on-set romance made her more susceptible to unease—about the boy’s rootlessness, his reckless otherness, his deathwishy life.
Whenever he came to sleep in his old room, she regressed.
Tristen walked in.
—
She met Laura for an early dinner at Mr. Chow. She hadn’t invited Allegra, not because of their recent hassles, though maybe that was part of it. Her “project” was really just too new, and still felt dreamlike and precarious. So far, Livia was the only one she’d told—she needed to take baby steps.
“I know better than to ask why you’re in town!” said Dusty, with a laugh. She knew the filmmaker probably found all the cloak-and-dagger jokes tiresome, but she couldn’t help herself.
“HBO. We’re sort of putting something together.”
“I love Sheila.”
“She’s great. Steven’s kind of brokering the deal.”
The word was said ironically; Laura was fun. (A little guarded, yes, but fun.) Though her imposing career had been defined by the keeping of indictable secrets, Dusty found her warm, open, accessible. She was rangy and right around the actress’s age, with a downturned mouth like Jeanne Moreau’s. The overall effect was of an elegant pioneer woman and fearless soul sister. Dusty loved her on sight.
“Don’t you live in Berlin?”
“I do.”
“Would that be a problem? If we—if you decide you want to do this thing?”
“I’m back and forth for a while.”
“You know, I was actually kind of shocked you were interested—if you are interested, maybe you’re not!—I was shocked that you called me back. Look: regardless of what happens, I’m just so thrilled to be having dinner with the amazing Laura Poitras.”
“Well, thank you. That’s lovely.”
“I mean it. I am not worthy!”
“Oh come on now.”
“I’m serious. After I saw your movie, I thought: She’s the one. (I’ve been working up to all this for a while.) It was, like, everything—even my courage to finally decide to do this—everything came together. Of course my next thought was, There is no friggin’ way! She’s Laura Poitras! And I suddenly felt delusional. You know, Oh, right! Like, she doesn’t have better things to do! I mean, important things.”
“This is important.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, but everything doesn’t have to be—my fundamental interest is in people. I don’t think of myself as a polemicist or even as someone who makes documentaries. I make movies. I’m interested in all kinds of stories.”
“We don’t even know if this is a story. Yet.”
“That’s okay. I do a lot of my work like that. Shoot until something crystallizes. And if it doesn’t . . .” She smiled and shrugged.
“The other thing I thought,” said Dusty, “was that people would think it was overkill. You know, that having you do it would be like using an elephant gun on a—whatever the phrase is.”
“Mosquito.”
“Mosquito! That’s me.”
&nbs
p; “Hardly.”
“And because I’m so . . . codependent, I got worried about you.”
“How so?”
“That people would say, Are you serious? You know, Why? ‘Why on earth would she . . .’ ‘—Oh man, from Edward Snowden to her?’ You know, from this . . . revolutionary—to . . . famous-mom-searching-for-long-lost-daughter Lifetime movie—that people would think you were slumming or sold out. That it would ‘damage your credibility’—”
“I’m not concerned.”
“—because you were bitten by the ‘celebrity’ bug. Seduced!” Laura laughed and Dusty got embarrassed. “I’m sorry! I know! I’m crazy. But this shit does go through my head.”
“I get it. But I don’t think you should trivialize what you’re up to, the journey you’re beginning. The search. People will always have their . . . perceptions. I’ve never cared what others might think of my work and my choices. I can take care of myself.”
“I know!” she blushed. “I know you can! You’re Laura Poitras!”
“Look. Here’s the deal. I like to film all kinds of things. I can’t control what people think of me, or my work. I want to make the movies I want to make. So after we spoke, I thought: hmmm. Okay, that’s kind of interesting. I let things come to me and, when they do, I pay attention. The truth is, Dusty, you’re one of the most political people around, always have been. What you did by coming out—and coming out when you did—took an insane amount of courage. You’re a warrior. And I really remember that moment. It was a huge one for the culture and a huge one for me personally. A lot of things shifted in my life because of what you did. That’s why I’m here. And I have a feeling that what you want to do now is just as brave, just as powerful, just as healing—just as political, in its way—and that got my attention. Whether I can do this logistically or timewise is something else, but let’s see. Does any of that make sense?”
