Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  Open one of your mind’s eyes cautiously. Is he gone? He is? Thank god for that. Now we can get back on track and work on relaxing without such a powerful distraction.

  Finally you feel the elevator come to rest. After a moment, the doors are going to slide open and you will look outside. But before they do that, wait a moment. Don’t let the doors open yet. Listen to me first. Only if you want to of course, nothing is mandatory. But this is important and if you’ve bothered to come this far, you might as well hear what I have to say, don’t you think? Because I want to warn you about something.

  Beyond the open elevator doors is the place that you have been longing to go but didn’t even know it. What is it like? I can’t tell you that. It is whatever place makes you feel like you belong there. That will be different for each of you. Once I tried this exercise with a man who, when the doors opened, saw his own office with its desk and chair and telephone. He was a lawyer and it turned out that what he really liked most in the world was to be at work, with the clock of his billable hours ticking by nicely while he prepared divorce papers or personal injury suits or last wills and testaments. At home, with his beautiful wife and three small children, he was always slightly on edge; he felt like he was an actor playing a father and flubbing almost half his lines and most of his entrances and exits. He would come into his office on Monday and experience a great surge of relief, but it was not until he opened those elevator doors and saw his favorite place—as he had always in his heart of hearts known it to be—that he could admit this to himself. He was happier after that; it changed his life but only because he was honest.

  What I’m telling you is this, and I hope you’ll listen to me because I am after all the one guiding this meditation: be honest. It might be that your favorite place is a lovely, bosky forest glen with the smell of pine trees and a crystal-clear blue lake beyond with a waterfall emptying into it in the distance, blah, blah, blah. There might be deer grazing amid the shafts of sunlight and a breeze ruffling the leaves. But really, the number of times I’ve gone around the “sharing circle” after a class and someone has talked about a place just like that, or about being on a beach with golden sand, or about a garden full of blooming flowers like one they saw when they were a child, well, please: if I got paid for each time that occurred, I would not have bothered to make this recording because I’d be too busy shopping. And for at least half of those people, I knew that they were not telling the truth, that they were telling me about a place they thought they were supposed to like, what they’d seen in advertisements on television. Not the place that really, deep down in their hearts, they truly longed for.

  You can make up something like that if you want. There’s nothing I can do to stop you because it’s your mind and your desire and only you can know if you have really told yourself the truth. You may not even know you are lying to yourself when you look out of those elevator doors and see a Disney-style castle with white spires and banners waving and liveried footmen and a red carpet leading you inside. Or a boat the shape of a swan filled with silken cushions and all the chocolate you can eat. You might really believe that is the place you long to be. And perhaps you will be right. But I don’t think so.

  It is much more likely that the place you really want to be above all others is not like that at all. It is likely to be a place that no one else could possibly guess, that other people may not find beautiful or even remotely appealing. To give you an example: my place is a supermarket parking lot. There, I’ve told you. When I was a child, my mother always bought me an ice-cream cone after she was finished with the groceries, and when I think about my happiest memories, they are of walking across the asphalt to the car after my mother and her rattling cart, taking the first cold bite. It meant that all was right with the world and that week my father wouldn’t open the cupboard door in the kitchen and say, “Why the hell isn’t there any food in this house?” and my mother wouldn’t throw something or storm upstairs to cry. When I think about that parking lot I feel one thing: safe. And for that reason it is beautiful to me, the way the parking spaces make their golden grid on the black asphalt, the way the cars slide in and out of their spaces fitting in like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, like they were meant to be there.

  So now you know. That’s all I have to say. You can go ahead, when you are ready, and let the doors slide open. Look at what is outside. Step through the doors. Walk forward and explore this place that you have come so far to find. Look around and listen and touch things and, above all, do not be afraid.

  Oh, one more thing. There may be some of you who, when you tried to make the weird man inside the elevator disappear, did not succeed. When you looked again, he was still there, waiting in the corner, not speaking, looking at his shoes, which you had just noticed were unnaturally large even for so tall a person. The shoes were thick-soled and looked like they might have steel toes. Also, there was a bit of spittle at the corner of his mouth, whitish and congealed. This unnerved you even more and you felt your heart beating and you could not wait for the elevator doors to open so you could get out of there and run away from this weird, rumbling, ugly creature.

  As I said before, I don’t know what you should do about the man. Now that the elevator doors are open, you could, as you planned, run away from him, into the place you’ve dreamed up and perhaps you’ll lose him among the giant ferns or bookshelves or whatever might be out there. But you might not. He could come after you and find you. He might be able to run fast in spite of all appearances to the contrary.

  So I suggest that you don’t run away. I don’t think you have too many other options at this point. If you can’t make him vanish from a fantasy that you yourself created, then there is really only one thing left for you to do. Obviously, you don’t have to follow my advice; you are in charge, you are the one that this is all about, the important one, the person that we are doing all of this to try to help. This is only a suggestion, nothing more.

  Turn to face the weird man in the corner. Try looking at his face if you can stand it. Then try holding out your hand to him. Open, palm up. Go on. He might take it in his own hand, which turns out to be enormous, oddly shaped, maybe with the wrong number of fingers, but warm and dry and strangely comforting. Then, without letting go, try stepping forward, leading him gently out of that back corner of the elevator into the light and space. What does he do? Will he follow?

  Good. See, he’s not so terrifying after all, just ugly and a little sad. But even though he’s not the companion you might aspire to have, he’s the one you created for yourself, so don’t let go of his hand. Keep leading him forward. Now you are not alone anymore. Now you have a friend. Now you can go out and look around together.

  Viral

  None of the parents had any idea what was coming. All of them said the same thing. Sondra Patel from Boston told me: He was not an unhappy boy as far as I could tell. He played soccer on the school team. He had friends. And he was a DJ, too, you know. People came to hear him play.

  Lorraine and Kenneth Mueller from Burke, Virginia, insisted that their daughter Kelly had not been depressed. We had her tested many times, Mrs. Mueller told me. We kept an eye on her. Any sign of something wrong or different, we’d make sure that she went to a psychiatrist right away. Mr. Mueller added: That’s right. We had her thoroughly checked out. Not one of them ever told us there was anything wrong with her. In fact, a couple of them told us we should stop bringing her in at all.

  One man even suggested that we should consider seeing a counselor ourselves, if you can believe that, Mrs. Mueller said. She snorted at the absurdity of it. Then she began to cry.

  Sarah Weinberg and Clifford Jackson from Brooklyn, New York, held a photo of their son Damian up for me to see. In the picture he was grinning broadly, proudly showing the camera a new electric guitar and making a peace sign with this left hand. A birthday present? I asked; Ms. Weinberg nodded. She looked around the room at the other parents.

  I don’t know, she said. I don�
��t feel like we have anything in common with these other people. We’re not really part of the mainstream of American culture and we don’t buy into its capitalist consumerist ideals. Of course, there are stresses associated with being a biracial family but we were conscientious about discussing those openly with Damian, helping him to process his experiences. I just keep asking: why us?

  Although most of the conference attendees were Americans, there were some parents who had made the trip from abroad: a couple from London, another from Istanbul. Some Australians and some Germans. A Japanese man told me through a translator that when he went into his daughter’s bedroom to wake her for school in the morning and found her gone, his heart plunged into his stomach. My life ended that day, he said.

  I told him, as I’d told the others, how sorry I was for his loss. He nodded and said something to the translator. What about you? Why are you here? the translator relayed. I told him I was covering the conference for a newspaper and showed him my press card. He looked at me, doubtfully. Is that all?

  Well, I said, I had a niece . . . Her mother isn’t here.

  Ahh, so desu . . . he said. He nodded again, like I’d confirmed something he’d guessed already.

  The story was the same all over the big, brightly lit, fabric-lined hotel ballroom. All the men and women who were attending the conference told me in their own way that they had been caught completely by surprise by what had happened to their children. By what their children had done.

  They insisted that they were good people, that they were or (here several of them corrected themselves, sadly) had been good parents. They’d tried their best to be vigilant against threats to their children’s well-being. They had warned them about strangers and predators and drug pushers. They had encouraged regular exercise. They had been attentive to signs of unchecked mental distress. They had kept up on the latest dangers that loomed up, out there, in the world ready to blight and blast young lives before they had a chance to grow. . . . Mrs. Mueller began to hyperventilate and had to be escorted from the room by her husband. They had done their best.

  They were victims themselves as much as their children had been.

  Who in your opinion were the perpetrators? I asked. Several of them looked at me aghast and wouldn’t speak to me again.

  This was the end of a long day that had begun in the morning with a plenary session addressed by Ms. Carolyn Williams, the driving force behind organizing the conference. She told the assembled attendees that bringing them all together had brought her life meaning after the terrible events of May 17th and that she hoped and prayed that they would find solace in one another’s company, that they would cry together and heal together. That they would find hope to begin to rebuild their lives. Tears streamed down her face.

  After that there were break-out groups, then lunch, then a series of panels of people from various disciplines—psychology, sociology, communications, technology—who had studied the phenomenon of 5/17 and tried to illuminate the reasons for its occurrence or to develop reliable methods for preventing something like it happening in the future. The session that I attended was chaired by a psychoanalyst who claimed that the problem was that this generation of children had been raised to view their lives as renewable; cyberspace had fundamentally confused the development of the self-protective ego instincts. The children believed they could simply restart the game when it was over, and so the concept of death had become abstracted to them, vacant; it had ceased to have any sense of gravity.

  A man stood up in the back row.

  Are you telling me that I raised a son who didn’t know the difference between a video game and reality?

  Perhaps not consciously, the psychoanalyst replied. But, yes, somewhere deep in his unconscious, there was a flaw, a fatal error, buried and forgotten, waiting to explode . . .

  Bullshit, said the father in the back row and left the room letting the door slam behind him.

  There seemed to be similar disgruntlement with the other professionals who spoke. I passed a group of mothers who were all talking angrily about a social psychologist who had told them that the problem was the isolation in which people now lived. The anxiety of parents about their children’s safety had caused them to curtail the freedom of their children to roam and to have “unstructured” time. As a result, the only genuine playing that these kids did was online, where they built extensive and elaborate networks of trust and interaction stretching far beyond the boundaries of their physical communities. These kids had been conclusively demonstrated to feel pressure to conform and to gain the respect of their peer group, as they did in conventional “real world” peer groups. But the rules for how to do this were different in these widely dispersed networks and worked on a consumerist model—the only model these kids were familiar with. Since the usual measures of social value in American society (wealth, beauty) were stripped away by the medium, the only thing left by which children could measure success or failure was simple: quantity.

  So they felt that they had to have more friends than anyone else; and then they needed to show that these weren’t just names on a list but real, genuine bonds, people whom they trusted and who trusted them back. People to whom they were connected in some deep and ineradicable way. What could they do to demonstrate this bond? Well, the evidence was before us all . . .

  The mothers were outraged. They absolutely rejected the man’s explanation of their children’s deaths. He was disrespectful, unfeeling, a crank, a charlatan.

  It occurred to me that, really, people didn’t want an explanation of what had happened. They wanted it to remain a mystery now and forever. This was understandable. Any theory that thoroughly and adequately accounted for the May 17th Fires, as they were known in the press coverage afterward, would reduce all these people’s particular children, whom they had loved and cherished as unique, to something standardized, identical, the same. It would erase the individuality of each child, which was all they had left now: the way, for example, Annabel, my niece, loved the word “exceedingly” when she was a child, how she pronounced it as if there were four e’s in it—exceeeedingly. Or how she used to show me her gymnastics every time I visited. Or how she used to climb up the tree in her backyard and hide among the branches until someone came to find her. That was before she turned into an almost-teenager who spent all her time in front of the computer in her room.

  Any wholesale explanation for 5/17 would mean that, as far as it affected the most important matter of their young lives, all these different children might as well have been the same child, raised by the same parents. No one wanted to accept that.

  This was why, I think, the conference fell apart at the end of that first day. The chaos broke out when the poet Lisa Romini-Malone got up to read the long poem she had composed for the occasion. She was not herself a Parent of 5/17 but, she said, she had close friends among those who’d lost their bright hopes for the future and she felt she could channel some of their pain through the profound act of empathy that was writing.

  The parents sat attentive. Ms. Romini-Malone began to read. I think it was at the line: Burning forth in a magnificent fire / Their young and precious hearts that the trouble began. Or it might have been when she said: Planning in secret / The message passed from hand to hand like signal fires. There was a murmuring in the hall that grew until it began to drown out the speaker at the front. Ms. Williams stood up and asked the audience for quiet. A woman called out from the third row: She’s celebrating this, like it is something great that happened! Like it was something beautiful, and after that there was no quieting the room. What the poet said was lost in the angry, undifferentiated roar that came from the until-then polite and contained audience. It was a sound like the ocean rising up in a storm to burst over the land, unreasonable, unreasoning and bottomless: the sound of grief. As if united into one force, the parents rushed toward the podium and toppled it and then kept going, out into the carpeted halls of the hotel, knocking over ficus plants and tables, smashing
lamps, tearing the deliberately inoffensive art down from the walls.

  I stayed sheltered in a recessed window of the room with some other journalists until the main energy of the riot had made its way out into the corridor and the main lobby downstairs. Then I followed at a distance, watching from the mezzanine balcony and taking notes for the story I would write and file later that evening. Soon, from outside in the street, there came the undulating sound of sirens as the police pulled up in front of the hotel.

  As I watched them storm in through the doors and push the mass of rioting parents back with their big, Plexiglas shields, I remembered, suddenly and vividly, the May morning, almost two years earlier, when the telephone woke me with its bleating and it was my sister on the other end screaming how something had happened to her daughter. I remembered how I turned on the television to the news and saw those first, terrible images that everyone knows now so well.

  And I remembered how a few months earlier than that, when my sister was concerned that Annabel was spending so much time with her computer instead of with her friends, I told her not to worry. Annabel was just shy like I had been at her age, she would grow out of it, she would be fine, I said. You have a tendency to over-parent just like Mom, I said, feeling pleased with myself for speaking plainly to my older sister, standing up to her. Leave Annabel alone. She’ll be okay.

  Then May 17th arrived. All across the world, children executed what they’d organized in secret, never speaking of their plan out loud and communicating only with a network of others whom they knew just as words and images onscreen, by email, on discussion boards, through cell phones, in coded messages and downloaded, encrypted files, so that just before 11 p.m. EST, they left their homes and climbed whatever they could find that was tall enough, carrying those useless homemade parachutes that one of them, no one would ever know who, had designed.