by Alex McElroy
Blood ran over their wrists. They grunted with serious hurt, trying to prove—I couldn’t tell what. That they could handle more pain than I had anticipated? That they would happily sacrifice themselves if it meant hurting me?
“Snap your pencils in half if you haven’t yet broken the point.”
They poked themselves with the jagged wooden heads. They grinned feverishly, prepared to continue for hours, days. I was disgusted with them, but even more so I was angry at myself, gummy with guilt for proposing this plan. I had already watched too much of this. I fled into the woods. The men cheered my retreat.
I couldn’t return to the cabin—not without an explanation. This is exactly what we’re trying to prevent, Dyson would say. We didn’t bring these men here to hurt them. For a short while, I hid behind a tree watching Dyson swim, taking comfort in the choppy rhythm his arms made in the water. Deeper into the forest, I crossed brooks, heaved heavy stones, petted lichen, punted a mushroom, stared into the eyes of a fawn. When dusk shrouded the forest I returned to the cabin, knowing Dyson would be giving the lecture by then.
The cabin was a cage. I paced from toilet to couch, glancing out the porthole window over the sink every time I passed. I rinsed my hands. Dried them. Rinsed them again. I wiped the kitchen table. I flipped through Dyson’s movies, but nothing appealed to me. Each task distracted me from thinking about the enraged lecture I feared he was giving the men: the gasoline poured over their burning sense of injustice. Barney trailed me through the cabin yowling for attention. I lifted him into my lap and scratched behind his ears, under his chin, and eventually the consistency of his purring settled my nerves.
The alone time freed me to drain the hot spot and check my email. There were fewer threats than normal—only two emails after a few days offline—and I was excited to find a message from Roger Handswerth. Cassandra told me you’re an independent thinker, he wrote. I thought you might want to research DAM on your own. He linked to a bright web page where DAM appeared in black block letters. Beneath it: Defense Against Mistakes. Beneath that: A Roger Handswerth Project. The Investors page described DAM as a “Revolutionary Web Browser Extension That Guarantees Users Preventative Atonement.”
DAM planned to launch in three months.
I searched for photos of Roger online, hoping to attach a body to the emails. The person I found was a tall, enthusiastic-looking Black man who wore clear glasses and tailored suits. The more I searched, however, the fewer results appeared, even when I restarted the search. Soon the only photos remaining were too hazy to discern his features, zoomed to a pixelated porridge, but those, too, began disappearing—poof—and I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t hallucinated them.
Dyson’s footsteps crunched through the forest. I slapped my laptop shut and turned off the lights, scrambled upstairs, and slipped beneath the covers. I breathed deeply and loudly as if I were sleeping. He unlaced his shoes at the door. “Sasha,” he said, his tone unnerving and patient. I’d never had any reason to fear Dyson, not once in my life, but as he repeated my name, louder each time, I imagined shrinking my body small enough to hide among the skin flakes and mites in our sheets.
“I saw the lights shut off from outside,” he said. “I know you’re awake.” The rope ladder groaned under his weight. He crouched at the foot of the bed, shaking my leg. “Sasha, we need to talk about this. Whatever you did. Because—Jesus. I would never force them to… it sounds so… the way they described it… Sasha… you showed them how foolish it is to chase pain, how abundantly absurd to think pain brings you anything other than pain. They spent their lives indoctrinated by that mind-set. No pain no gain. When the truth is: no pain no pain. I’ve been stressing that to them for months and you made it so obvious to them in one afternoon. Sasha—your mind. Your techniques. You’re—How else can I say it? You’re brilliant.”
I opened my eyes.
eighteen
JOB TRAINING CONSISTED of Dyson reading from PDF summaries of For Dummies books on subjects of the men’s choosing, including but not limited to Video Editing and Web Design and Graphic Design and Carpeting and Embalming and Air Conditioner Installation and Air Conditioner Removal and Professional Blogging and Entrepreneurial Elocution and Chinese and Spanish and French and Husbandry (Bovine) and Husbandry (Poultry) and the most popular subject: Acquiring Wealth in the Digital Age.
nineteen
MY RELATIONSHIP HISTORY was littered with jelly-brained lunks: men who quoted Joe Rogan at dinner, who blew their savings on collectible knives, men who brewed IPAs in their best friends’ basements, who proposed marriage at basketball games and would fight anyone who didn’t think the first Lethal Weapon was a classic. I fucked them because I liked predictable men, the guarded and repressed. Sensitive men couldn’t be trusted; they assumed their sensitivity made them special, deserving of praise. Most sensitive men were, at their cores, narcissists who constructed elaborate expectations for how relationships were meant to evolve. When those expectations weren’t met, the façade of sensitivity deteriorated into a petulant rage.
What I knew about sensitive men I learned from Blake Dayes. I met him after a fundraiser for K.L.I.C.K., an organization that paired underprivileged children with digital cameras. Cassandra brought me along as her plus one. This was six months before my appearance on Wake Up! America, six months before Lucas Devry’s death. Cassandra’s meditation practice wasn’t any more popular than ABANDON—she had three thousand fewer followers, actually—but she knew powerful people in powerful places who threw powerful parties to honor their power. She reveled in wielding her influence for me. “It’s absolutely crucial,” she said, “that people with privilege use it to advance the careers of people like you.”
She drifted away from me as soon as we entered the party. I was approached by Sy Cunningham, an acclaimed podcaster who had recently completed a month-long silent retreat in a derelict boathouse. “I developed a profound admiration for my pulse,” he told me. I got the sense he isolated himself only to later tell people about it. We stood amid a crowd of bright, beautiful people with cocktails cooling our hands. Sy wore a tuxedo the color of matcha. Product weighed down his curly black hair. A mole poked out of his lip and it took everything in me not to touch it.
“Have you listened to Sylence?” he asked.
“You’re that Sy?” I said, like I didn’t already know. People like Sy preferred to reveal their identities, like superheroes peeling off masks for the public.
Sylence consisted of sixty minutes of silence—plus two segments from sponsors—and on rare occasions, it was rumored, Sy could be heard breathing into the mic. His most committed listeners argued for the authenticity of these moments with the enthusiastic paranoia of alien abductees. Syphers, they called themselves.
Sy placed his empty glass on a passing tray. “These parties are such an illusion,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to sleep with me or I was trying to sleep with him. “They don’t mean anything. Never have. I don’t know what keeps bringing me back.” His words dripped with the cultivated weariness of familiarity. He’d been born on the Upper East Side, the only son of a hedge fund manager and a hedge fund manager’s wife. He’d been raised in parties thrown by people who hated parties. His indifference was a brand on his back, proof he belonged among those who spoke the language of strategic confessions and origin stories.
Where I grew up, weariness and indifference arrived in the form of soul-bruising lethargy, in phrases like What can ya do? Indifference resulted from being treated indifferently. At events like this, talking to people like Sy, I felt as if I were crossing a rickety wooden bridge, clutching the frayed rope handles, stepping over rotted slats in the bridge, and waiting to plummet into the canyon beneath. But the topic of weariness bored me, and, when our conversation lulled, I asked a question I loved asking strangers: “What’s your least favorite city?”
“Party questions,” he scoffed, then excused himself. The bridge cracked under my feet.
&nbs
p; On a white steel stage at the front of the room, an acoustic guitarist tapped the mic. He was tall and conventionally pretty, like an old church, with long maple hair pulled back in a ponytail. His posture was as stiff as a telephone pole. “I’m Blake Dayes,” he said. “And I have one question for everyone here: What have you done for love today?”
Instead of listening to him sing, I wondered what I had done for love that day, wondered what Blake had done, always returning to him, the center of gravity in the room. After three songs, he disappeared into an unmarked door in the corner. The crowd gave him a bewildered ovation.
Claire Lance, the founder of K.L.I.C.K., stepped onstage. She was as trim and sharp as her name and wore her platinum hair in a bob cut with a saber. Her appearance had the permanence of a mountain. She lived outside of time, outside of judgment. In addition to K.L.I.C.K., she’d founded dozens of orphanages in sub-Saharan Africa so stylish and modern—the orphans dressed immaculately—that no one criticized her for having a white savior complex.
“Thank you for coming tonight,” she said. “Your generous donations this evening will help put cameras into the hands of over five hundred malnourished children.” As everyone clapped, I surveyed the crowd for Blake, convinced he was the only interesting person at the party. “When I started K.L.I.C.K., I never dreamed of a day like today. We have done so much for these children. But the fight must continue until all underprivileged children have access to documentation.” More clapping. “This evening, it is my profound honor to unveil the First Annual K.L.I.C.K. Silent Auction, sponsored by Sylence: The Podcast. Soon, you will have an opportunity to bid on photos taken by actual K.L.I.C.K. children.” Purple drapes were drawn back from the wall behind her to reveal a grid of framed photos.
The photographs were familiar to me, with their dim living room lighting, the cabinets full of bulk off-brand junk food, the tables cluttered with colorful bills, the harried mothers on couches clutching their feet, the fathers dunking their heads in their gnarled hands, the dismantled automobiles on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, the carved-open Sheetrock in half-remodeled bedrooms, empty change jars in kitchens, inflatable mattresses deflated on living room floors. The photos reminded me of the apartments I’d shared with my parents before they split up; I saw in these houses the houses of aunts and uncles who lived in the impoverished wake of shuttered factories in Pennsylvania, aunts and uncles and cousins I hated to visit out of an unspoken fear their misfortune might infect me. Though I knew enough to feel embarrassed of my upbringing—at least, compared to the other guests here—I never considered myself poor. My parents were just well-off enough to fear the shame that poverty carried. If they couldn’t afford something, they bought it on credit, and every few months they opened new credit cards to pay off the old ones, constructing an elaborate ouroboros out of their debts. All that effort landed them on the wall: alien enough to be bought, studied, commented on. More than anything: pitied. Farther down the wall were starker depictions of woe, photographs taken by children who lived on the streets, refugee children, the children of addicts. Bidding on those started at twice the amount of the photos familiar to me.
“All proceeds support the continued efforts of K.L.I.C.K. to ensure our mission will thrive far beyond our lives.” She smiled. Flashbulbs erupted. The crowd applauded volcanically.
The photographs beamed on me like a spotlight from a guard tower. I split the crowd for the exit and didn’t look back, fearing my expression might betray shame rather than pity.
Cassandra gripped my wrist. “It’s devastating,” she said, hand on her heart. “The lives of these children make me want to weep for a week.”
I told her I didn’t feel well.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “How could anyone feel well around photos like this?”
“It’s not the photos.”
“I’m lucky I haven’t fainted. I want to take every one of these children into my home. Oh, dear, I wish there was more to do for them than bid.”
“Bidding won’t do anything for them.”
“Pessimism is poison, Sasha. I’ll loan you some money. Pay me back whenever you—No. I’ll give you the money.”
If she didn’t know why the photos unsettled me—after all, I’d called off work to join her here—then I didn’t want to tell her. Instead, I accused K.L.I.C.K. of fraud, knowing she would be swayed by righteousness. “We don’t even know where the money is going,” I said. “Does it all go to the children or back to Claire Lance’s hair-dying fund?”
“I pulled a lot of favors to get you on the guest list.”
“I can’t participate in this,” I said.
She reluctantly agreed to leave on ethical grounds. Outside, she said, “Word of advice: open up to tolerance and forgiveness. You’re so quick to refuse things, to find reasons not to participate. You hold so many grudges. But you need to accept the world with all of its flaws.”
“Why leave if that’s what you think?”
“If the fundraiser made you uncomfortable then I want to show my support.” She draped her hands over my shoulders, leaned close, clouding me in the scent of mint and lavender. “I say this because I love you, Sasha. Your intensity can be very off-putting. People just feel it. Sy Cunningham told me about you.”
“He mentioned my name?”
“You’re always wanting something. You’re always trying.”
“I don’t think I even told him my name.”
“You didn’t. He described an antsy woman, or nervous woman. And my heart sunk when it dawned on me that it was you. People don’t like people who want something from them.”
“But I do want something from them. I want the same things you want from them: their attention, their support, their money. I need their money. Unlike you.”
“Whoops. Rewind,” she said, then contorted her mouth. She held up her palm as if carrying something and flicked away that invisible something: my comment. All was forgotten, for now. “Only by wanting nothing do we receive anything,” she said, posing, chin up. A red sedan pulled up. The passenger window buzzed down. “Cassandra Hanson?” said the driver. Cassandra slipped into the back seat. Traffic swallowed her car.
I paced in front of the venue entrance, agonizing over her comments about my intensity. The same red car paused at the curb. Cassandra stepped out.
“Did you forget something?” I asked.
“The rest of my evening.” She waved over her shoulder as she entered the building.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” someone behind me asked.
“Do I look like I smoke!” I shouted, before I saw who’d spoken.
Blake Dayes stood at my back, guitar slung on his shoulder. “That’s a relief,” he said. “My grandmother, she died of lung cancer.”
“Mine, too,” I lied. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”
“Smoking is so disrespectful,” he said. “Everyone gets so mad about manspreading, but smoking is magnitudes worse. It’s airspreading. Spreading your air into other people’s air without permission. Give me a manspreader over an airspreader any day.”
“Absolutely,” I said. Something about him made me want to agree with whatever he said.
“You know I saw you from the stage, while I was performing. You have such an arresting presence. I could barely concentrate.”
I apologized.
“Never apologize. If this is going to work, you have to promise me to never apologize.”
“If what is going to work?”
He paused. “Do you promise?”
I promised.
“Good. Now let’s get off the street. I know a great place nearby.”
“I don’t normally drink.”
“You don’t drink or you don’t drink in public?”
I smiled.
“This place is always empty,” he said. “No one will ever know.”
Normally, I resisted pickup attempts like Blake’s, with their mix of presumption and force, but the K.L.I.C.K. photos and Cassandra’s �
�advice” had made me pliable. Blake brought me to an underground dive full of torn black booths that smelled like acetone.
“Blake Bear!” the bartender growled when we entered.
“Get a beer,” Blake told me. “Henry’s the worst bartender in the city. He can barely scoop ice into a glass.”
“Quit hauling around that stupid guitar,” Henry told Blake. To me: “I’m guessing he hasn’t sung to you yet if you’re here. He’s no musician. His voice sounds like a car on fire.”
“I heard him perform earlier,” I said. “It was wonderful.”
Blake pointed his thumb at me. “See?”
“That’s the problem with Blake,” the bartender said. “He’s lovable—worst part about him. It conceals all his glaring and dangerous flaws.”
Oh, Henry! How I should have listened to you.
Blake flipped him off, then leaned over the bar for a back-slapping hug. The bartender’s warning only endeared me to Blake. After a night among grifters at K.L.I.C.K., I was happy to observe their intimate derision.
“Something tells me you’re both awful,” I said.
“Right on the money,” said Henry, laughing. “This one’s very perceptive.”
Over stiff whiskey sodas, parked at the bar’s darkest and stiffest booth, Blake unloaded his life on me like dirt into a grave: he told me about his unwed hippy parents and his twin older sisters and the freight train that passed behind his childhood home in rural Wisconsin—he used to sit on his roof watching the train pass, imagining himself riding it into a larger, exciting world “where I could be who I wanted to be.” It was the cheesiest thing I ever fell for.
It was my turn to spill. I told him about feeling mortified by the photos at K.L.I.C.K.
“I’m never working for K.L.I.C.K. again,” he said. “In solidarity with you.”
“You barely know me,” I said. It occurred to me he hadn’t even asked for my name yet.
“That’s because names are chains to the people we aren’t,” he said. “I wish I could throw Blake Dayes in the river. Every time I say Blake you think of every Blake you’ve known before me. I’m not those Blakes, but those Blakes shoulder in alongside me. I say we abolish permanent names. Everyone we meet should assign us a name of their choosing.”