by Sam Byers
‘What are Green doing?’ said Kasia.
Trina shook her head in disgust. ‘Covering their backs. I think they’re waiting to see how it shakes out.’
‘But you have rights.’
Kasia said this weakly, clearly aware it wasn’t true.
They ate their noodles. Trina’s urges were battling each other. A sense of mounting urgency, of the need to be active, was pulling her away, but a sense of easy familiarity, of being somewhere safe and known that protected her and knew her back in turn kept her perched beside Kasia on the edge of the picnic table. Everything that was swelling and rising online, she thought, would wash rapidly into everything she valued offline. These quiet, unnoticed interludes would be her only breakwater.
‘Hey,’ said Kasia, ‘you want dick update?’
‘God no,’ said Trina.
Kasia got out her phone with a grin.
‘I said no,’ said Trina. ‘You know the word no, right?’
‘I know what’s good for you,’ said Kasia with a distinctly sadistic grin. ‘When life gives you lemons, look at dick.’
‘Is that a traditional Polish expression?’
‘Ta da,’ said Kasia.
Kasia’s anonymous correspondent had upped the creativity factor considerably. Where before his dick had simply been photographed in proximity to a conveniently scaled object, now a small domestic scene had been created: a dining table set with a bunch of sunflowers, napkins in little wooden rings, dinner plates, and a full set of silver cutlery. In the middle was a silver platter ringed with glistening roast vegetables. In the middle of that, resting on a neat green bed of what may have been parsley, was a dick.
‘Oh my God,’ said Trina.
‘Right?’ said Kasia.
‘I mean … What am I even looking at here?’
‘It’s a charming domestic scene.’
‘What is he, like, lying under the table, with his dick through a hole?’
‘He is like, come on darling, table is set for dick.’
‘His dick is enormous,’ Trina said, peering more closely at the image. ‘I mean, look at it in comparison to that dinner plate.’
‘Optical illusion,’ Kasia said. ‘Must be.’
‘You think it’s a fake dick?’
‘Or fake plate. Fake everything.’
‘Oh no. Hold up. You’re saying this guy took the time to craft everything on that table so as to more effectively show off his dick?’
Kasia shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Doesn’t that seem … I don’t know, insane?’
‘Men and their hobbies,’ said Kasia.
‘You do know,’ said Trina, more seriously, ‘that men’s primary hobby is fucking up women?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning are you sure you’re OK with this?’
‘OK how? He sends dick. I laugh. Everyone’s happy.’
‘Has he ever asked for anything from you?’
Kasia rolled her eyes. ‘Your paranoia is making me paranoid,’ she said.
Trina nodded, let it go. She realised that this would, now, be another thing she would need to pay attention to: the extent to which she forced her fears on others. Paranoia was one thing, infectious terror something else entirely. If she wasn’t careful, she thought, she could wind up toxic, isolated. She needed to contain what was happening and keep it from the people she loved.
She patted Kasia’s thigh.
‘Fair point,’ she said. ‘Sometimes a dick is just a dick.’
*
There was nowhere to park near Nodem. This struck Jess as odd but failed to occupy more than a fleeting moment of attention. She found a space a few streets away and walked from there.
She was several paces into her journey before she noticed the comparative lack of people, and several paces further on from that before she began to experience a sense of unease. Maybe, she thought, it was simply her own feelings catching up with her. She hadn’t given adequate air time to her internal doubt, perhaps, and so now, displaced, it was manifesting around her as an emotional mirage. Only when she rounded the corner did she realise that the source of the atmosphere, unlike her still-humming post-thinkpiece enervation, was not inside her at all, but real and external, all too tangible in the street ahead: three men – squat, shiny-headed, thick-necked. Their insignia, stitched neatly onto their black bomber jackets, was grimly familiar even at some distance.
She watched as they waved at a passing old lady.
‘Afternoon, madam,’ one of them said.
The woman didn’t reply, instead pushed on, scarfed head turned down towards the pavement. As she passed Jess, she muttered under her breath, ‘Thugs.’
As Jess approached, the men stepped back to allow her room on the pavement. They were wearing utility belts, she noticed now – black webbing straps lined with pouches and clips. She wondered if they were armed, or simply giving the appearance of being armed; if those sinister, unknowable pockets held blades and foldable batons, or cigarettes, shopping lists, breath mints.
‘Afternoon, love,’ said one of them as she passed.
‘Fuck you, fascist,’ she said in response.
The men exchanged looks. She toyed, briefly, with the idea of leaving it at that, but it was not the kind of day and she was not in the kind of mood for leaving things at that.
She said, ‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’
‘You haven’t got anything to fear from us, love,’ said one. ‘We’re just here to keep people safe.’
‘Don’t call me love. I’m not your fucking love.’
‘Feminist, is it?’
‘I’m amazed you even know the word,’ she said. ‘You Nazi scum.’
‘These are dangerous times,’ one of the men said. ‘We’re here to protect women like you.’
This last was too much. She walked away in disgust, shaking slightly.
‘You’ll come around,’ another of the men called after her. ‘You’ll be glad of us soon.’
At the end of the street, she could see the blacked-out windows of Nodem and she kept them as her focus. When she stepped through the door into Nodem, she was once again icily calm. Once inside, though, she was briefly thrown. Even when she volunteered for the refuge, which had seen a marked uptick in visitors in recent months, she had never been in Nodem when all the terminals were taken.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said to Zero/One at the counter. ‘What’s all this?’
‘It’s The Griefers,’ he said. ‘People are scared to go online. They’re coming in here just to do their shopping. It was bad enough after the screening thing, but now, what with these letters …’
‘Letters?’
‘Take it you don’t really look at your snail mail.’
‘Who does?’
‘Well, everyone, now. Go home and see for yourself.’
She wanted to ask more, but stopped herself. She wanted to target her energies, shape something narrow and attentive from the noise.
‘I’ll find you a terminal as quick as I can, yeah?’ said One/Zero.
Jess nodded. She almost said no rush but there was, she felt, actually a rush.
‘You want a brownie while you wait?’
‘Sure.’
He passed her a floppy disk with a square of brownie perched on top.
‘On the house,’ he said. ‘To keep your energy up while you wait.’
She picked at the edge of her brownie, watching with vague, distanced interest while a man in grime-streaked chinos bearing what appeared to be a hastily assembled bundle of possessions – a bulging holdall from which clothes protruded, a laptop trailing its charging lead – babbled at Zero or One, gesticulating desperately as Zero/One attempted to steer him gently towards a quieter corner.
‘Like, you guys are running a great show here. OK? That is totally noted. It’s admired. No-one’s trying to throw off your show. But what I’m saying is there are things you need to know. There are things you don’t know tha
t you really need to know because if you don’t know them—’
‘Hey,’ Zero/One was saying kindly, laying an arm across the man’s shoulder. ‘That’s cool, man. That’s totally cool. But maybe if we just—’
‘No,’ said the man, shrugging off the proffered arm and stamping his foot to emphasise the word. ‘No. You have to listen. You can’t—’
‘How about a brownie?’ said Zero/One. ‘You look like you could use a brownie. And maybe a coffee? Anything you want, dude. Seriously. Just come over here and we’ll talk about it.’
As Zero/One led the man over to a relatively out-of-the-way corner and continued soothing him, his partner took over counter duties and caught Jess’s eye.
‘Weird energies,’ he said simply.
Weird energies indeed, Jess thought. At what point had the velocity and mania of physical events begun to match that of their online counterparts?
A terminal became free and she settled herself at the screen, executing her basic sequence: firing up, logging in. The moments of reflection as Nodem’s in-house operating system ground into life stretched out just beyond the comfortable, leaving her to contemplate the counterintuitive state of reversal that Nodem engendered: emotional hyperspeed buffered by a digital crawl. This, she thought, was probably how things were supposed to be: feel first, execute later; delayed communication as self-protective procedure.
Her screen teemed with indecipherable windows and boxes – the system running its own little executables and micro-programmes, chasing and unpacking itself with unstable efficiency. The timer vanished, appeared again, became a slightly different timer, and then, finally, a cursor. She ran her programme of habitual clicks. Web address, email account, username, password. It was the work of a few brief, semi-conscious moments to become Julia Benjamin. Through rote actions, Jess brought herself up to Julia’s speed. Ordinarily, having revved up, she was able to roar straight out onto the open highway of Julia’s voice. Today, though, her velocity propelled her not onwards, but suddenly, violently, into a sheer brick wall. The moment Jess became Julia, the moment she opened up Julia’s notifications and began composing, in her head, the latest of Julia’s by now quasi-famous comments, Jess’s anger slipped from her grasp and, turning and shifting, became something else instead: a kind of depressed frustration, a disappointment, a drained and dissipated force.
It was a feeling that had been tugging at her for some time, but now it centralised, and it did so, she thought, because Julia Benjamin had centralised. Once, Julia Benjamin and Byron Stroud and all of her other personae had felt like an expansion. Now, increasingly, Julia dominated, and her domination was reductive. Yes, through Julia, Jess was able to express her anger. But where, Jess thought, was she able to express her knowledge? For all the web’s gilded rhetoric of open discussion and pluralised voices, wasn’t this, the demarcation between the body of an article and the comments that were literally and figuratively beneath it, the most stringently policed and least porous and ultimately most telling border of all?
She thought again of her bodily fear and brewing potential aggression in the presence of Brute Force. She thought about how, simultaneously, her work in the face of this undeniable physical manifestation felt inadequate, theoretical, and yet so necessary, so vital. She was angry with an intellectual boys’ club for both exacerbating and ignoring an all too real threat. But how did supplementary bile in the comments sections go any further towards dismantling the connections she knew existed? Her work, she knew, would help make this clear. But was this, any of this, really her work?
She looked at the neatly ordered taxonomy of her comment history, struck by the way its polite reverse-chronology masked the increasing violence of its development. You couldn’t consider one future, she thought, without other futures looming into view. What about the as yet unmaterialised realities closer to home? What about her and Robert? One day, surely soon, this glossed-over, secret tension would reveal itself, and all the structures they’d put in place to contain it would sunder. She pictured the inevitable split, felt the subterranean yawn of upcoming aloneness. She imagined reaching for him in their bed, turning at the sound of his voice in the kitchen, or starting at what she thought was his breath beside her ear, and then, always, finding nothing, slamming up against the awful, amputated emptiness of life in the aftermath: Robert gone; parts of her gone with him.
But even as that imagined future emerged from the future she’d imagined before it, another was already becoming visible. The world she’d first envisaged: intellectually and morally void, strip-mined by self-serving opinion, more divided and unreal than ever, and Robert at the heart of it, bloated by his own success, drunk on all the things he’d once professed to abhor. She’d have to live with him, she thought. She’d have to live with the imagined voices of all the people who wondered why she lived with him. And of course, she’d have to live with herself, because the only way of living with the Robert that would inevitably emerge, knowing she had failed to change him, would be to choke back hunks of her own matter.
If they talked about this, it would wreck them. If she didn’t express herself, it would build within her and wreck them anyway. There was no option, she thought, but to go on.
That didn’t mean, however, that she had to go on as she was indefinitely. Her every expressed thought did not have to be a response to Robert’s thoughts. She didn’t need to nest what she said beneath what Robert had said. She could make that break, and from there, over time, edge away.
She clicked out of the page she was on and redirected. It was time, she thought, to get back above the line.
*
Men in mud-clagged boots and reflective vests came to see about the water. They to-and-fro’d, shaking their heads, exchanging glances. They called Darkin chum and left footprints he wouldn’t be able to clean.
‘Backed up, chum.’
‘External.’
‘Not going to be easy.’
‘Not going to be easy at all.’
They spun the tap, flushed the toilet, crawled under the sink and took a wrench to the U-bend.
‘I was hoping it was gonna be something simple, chum.’
‘Isn’t, though, sadly.’
‘Anyone you can stay with for a couple of days?’
Darkin shook his head, unsure if he believed anything they were saying. Their insignia didn’t say anything about Downton, but he couldn’t be sure how much reassurance that implied. Everyone worked for everyone, now. Companies were all tied up with each other.
‘Is it a blocked pipe?’ he said.
One of the men sniffed speculatively. ‘Could be. Could be a leak. Could be several things, to be honest.’
‘Hard to say until we look,’ said his colleague.
‘Can you look now?’ said Darkin.
The men laughed, exchanged glances that suggested everyone thought they could just look now.
‘Look now, he says,’ said the first workman.
‘We wish,’ said the second workman.
‘Well, when?’ said Darkin.
‘How long’s a piece of string?’
‘Depends on the access.’
Darkin was about to ask who needed to give them access but thought better of it. He knew exactly who needed to give them access.
‘Could be out on the road,’ said workman number one. ‘In which case, it’s council. Or it could be down there in the square. In which case—’
‘It’ll be Downton,’ said Darkin.
The men exchanged another glance.
‘Just you here, is it?’ said the second workman.
Darkin nodded.
‘No plans to move?’
‘No.’
‘Lot of people moving from around here.’
‘Not me.’
‘You’ve got just enough coming through for the odd cup of tea,’ said the first workman. ‘Not much more though.’
‘Not enough to flush the toilet.’
‘Shower’s probably out too.�
��
‘It’s going to be tough, chum.’
‘We’ll get it sorted but it’s going to be tough on you till we do.’
The first workman walked over to Darkin’s spare sofa, black scuffs from his workboots marking his progress from the kitchen’s linoleum to the lounge area’s threadbare carpet. He sat down with the sigh of a man who hadn’t sat down in too long.
‘My nan lived round here,’ he said.
‘Did she,’ said Darkin. He didn’t make it sound like a question because he wasn’t asking to know more.
‘You should see the place she’s in now,’ said the workman. ‘Ever such a nice place. Plenty to do. Proper safe as well, like. She loves it.’
Darkin didn’t say anything.
‘Bloke like you could get one of those places easy,’ said the workman. As he said like you, he cocked his head towards Darkin’s stick, as if that said everything anyone needed to know about who Darkin was.
‘They do all these adaptations.’ The other workman was joining in from afar, calling out from under the sink, where he was having a last look. ‘Baths, showers. It’s amazing what they can do now.’
‘My nan toddles over to the day room every evening and has her dinner there. It’s like a bloody holiday, I swear.’
‘When can you fix the water?’
‘Alright,’ said the workman on Darkin’s sofa. ‘I was only saying.’
‘Days?’ said Darkin. ‘Weeks?’
‘I just thought maybe you didn’t know what you could get these days, that’s all.’
‘Not months, surely?’
‘Depends what we find when we get in there. Like I say, though, if you were in one of these—’
‘Tell them I’m not going anywhere,’ said Darkin.
‘Eh? Tell who, chum?’
‘Tell them they can turn off all the bloody water and the electric to boot and I’ll still be stopping here.’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about, mate. All’s we were saying was—’
‘Don’t bother saying it again,’ said Darkin. ‘I heard it fine the first time. Just sort the water out and leave it at that.’