by Sam Byers
‘I’ll … I mean, I’ll have to think about this, Silas.’
‘Think about it? Are you fucking insane?’
‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer, it’s just that … The Record? I mean, seriously? They’re everything I loathe. Literally.’
‘Which is weird, because they love you.’
Silas was talking, Robert felt, directly into the cavernous void in Robert’s centre, his voice echoing through the inner emptiness, searching for something onto which it could cling.
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Oh God,’ said Silas. ‘Are you serious? You were all they talked about. Did I think you’d come with me, did I think you’d be interested, what did I think you might write about, blah blah blah.’
‘So …’ said Robert, shuffling forward a little in his seat. ‘What exactly is it about my work that you think attracts them?’
‘Well, it’s direct,’ said Silas. ‘It’s forthright, it’s principled, it’s fresh. It has a really rapidly growing tribe around it. It’s hot, basically. What’s not to like?’
‘I don’t exactly think of The Record and think—’
‘You know what, though, Rob? The Record know that. And they want to change it. Like, that’s exactly what’s at the heart of their new mission statement. All these old ways of doing things, the old left, the old right, some clapped-out old socialist arguing with some lumbering old Tory. They’re over. You think anyone gives a fuck about those distinctions any more? It’s all about personal brand integrity. It’s about people who aren’t afraid to break it down. It’s about people who call it like they see it without getting bogged down in all that outmoded identity crap.’
‘You sound like Hugo Bennington.’
‘You think someone like you makes a whole career off a few columns? You think that’s sustainable? You get yourself in The Record, Rob, and I promise you: other things will happen. Big things. I’m talking TV and radio. I’m talking you as a full-on public intellectual. You’ve got to follow the money, Rob. That’s where all these other trumped-up little idealists go so wrong. You want to get read? You want to get noticed? Start hanging with the big bucks.’
‘But I mean, if I choose to stay at The Command Line—’
‘What do you mean stay at The Command Line? There’s not going to be a Command Line.’
‘But—’
‘How the fuck can there be a Command Line without me? The Command Line is coming with me to The Record, Rob. I’m taking my whole platform to them. That’s the point. That’s always been the point. You think our business model was a lifetime of being the punky outsider? Our business model was punky outsider to rich-as-fuck insider in under five years. That’s the fucking Tao of Command Line, baby.’
‘So there isn’t really—’
‘Anything for you to think about? No, not really. Well, yes, there is. You can take this massive fucking opportunity the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain is tossing your way, or you can go back to plying your wares across a series of struggling websites for nowhere near enough money to live on.’
‘And I could write about whatever I wanted?’
‘Of course you could. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily run it, but how would I stop you writing it?’
‘So you’d decide—’
‘Think about it more this way: you know how to write, and I know what people want to read. I will guide you. You want to grow, don’t you, Rob? I mean, somewhere, way back in time, you must have had some sort of life plan, and that life plan must have been a fraction more ambitious than just knocking out blogs.’
‘You always said they weren’t blogs.’
‘OK, they weren’t blogs. But they weren’t not blogs either.’
‘I’ll be the laughing stock of the internet. Jesus, can you imagine this news on Twitter?’
‘Of course I can imagine this news on Twitter. That’s exactly why I’m suggesting you do it. People will go fucking insane. By the time your first column runs, your readership will include all the existing Record readers, all your loyal readers, all the people who hate-read The Record, all the people who hate-read you, and all the people who specifically want to hate-read your move to The Record. That is a fucking hell of a lot of people, Rob.’
‘It’s a hell of a lot of hate, is what it is.’
‘I know,’ said Silas gleefully. ‘Jackpot, right?’
‘I don’t know what to say, Silas.’
‘Say: why of course I want to bring my ideas to The Record and get paid like four times as much money for them, Silas. What an excellent plan. Thank you so much for suggesting it to me.’
‘I—’
‘What are you going to do, Rob? Take a stand against everything that’s happening on your own? Deal with death threats on your own?’
Robert said nothing. Maybe, he thought, he could just continue to say nothing until the situation resolved itself. But that, he reminded himself, was not his job. Out there, in the rest of the country, in the wider world, millions of people were saying nothing. Anyone, he thought, could say nothing.
He tried, in the few seconds he felt Silas might allow him to come up with something, to re-establish a connection with what he thought of as his principles. He had, he felt sure, started out with some. Strong ones too. But looking inwards, he could find only the hollowed depression where they’d once rested, in which had gathered a stagnant puddle of bile. He thought again about boundaries, scales, hierarchies. So Julia Benjamin or Byron Stroud had made a website. What was that compared to a column in The Record?
‘OK,’ he said.
‘Sorry, Rob. Your voice went like, weirdly quiet there. Try that again?’
‘I said, OK. I’m in.’
Silas nodded, a smile splitting his face.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That’s the Rob I know and, well, don’t love, exactly, but certainly have a degree of warm feelings towards. This is going to be amazing, Rob. You and Bennington. Tag team. Left hook, right hook.’
‘Wait. You’re … You’re keeping Bennington?’
‘Are you serious? Of course we’re keeping Bennington. He’s everywhere. I’ve just commissioned an art critic who’s going to compare Bennington’s dick pics to the self-portraits of the old masters. It’s you and Bennington against the world. Get me something in the next couple of days. I’ll get the contracts pushed through and we’re away. Next stop: funky town. Am I right?’
‘Sure,’ said Robert.
‘Catch you later, Robster.’
He vanished with a blip. Robert closed the Skype window, his screen now filled with nothing but the blank expanse of an unfilled Word document, the mucilaginous reservoir of bile burning a hot little hole in his guts. By reflex, he thought about texting Jess, but then realised he had no desire to. She would only, he thought, undermine it, undermine him. That was why he’d felt so uncomfortable about the Record job – because he knew what she would say, could imagine the way in which she’d look at him when he told her. How many of his decisions, how much of his internal guilt, had been filtered through the same foreshadowing of her response? Without that response there, he thought, without having to confront these energies of doubt at home as well as online, his life would be so much simpler. No more tying himself in moral knots, no more justifying over dinner what he’d expressed at his laptop. No more apologising. All the complexities, the guilt, the awkwardness, the inadequacy, had fallen away. Spared the friction of intimate critique, his life would be an easy, unopposed glide. There was nothing further to negotiate. He was a free man: at liberty to do all the things he’d always abhorred.
0000
In the liquid light of evening, the sun low and golden in the sky, Jess became aware of the dirt streaked across her windows – diesel stains, smears of grime and dust. Outside the car, Edmundsbury’s unchanging face moved slowly by. For so long, Jess, along with most other people in the town, had fixated on all the ways the place had changed, how it was always changing, evolving
away from the people who lived in it, clung to it, tracked its yielding to some smooth-surfaced, digital future. Now, numbed by the rapidity with which her life had stopped being her own, Jess felt over-sensitised to all the ways in which the town had remained the same. So much had happened, she thought. Surely the buildings should have reorganised themselves, the streets shuffled over to new co-ordinates. And yet Edmundsbury was as Edmundsbury as ever, the houses in their neat suburban rows, the cars behaving as expected at traffic lights – no flash of alteration, no seismic reordering of small-scale lives.
And yet, she thought, it was a different world. Things she had been sure of yesterday she could no longer confidently assert. She felt herself transplanted, uprooted in space and time. Her emotional topography had shifted. It pained her that the landscape had not kept pace.
‘I just want to go on the record as being deeply sceptical,’ said Deepa.
No-one said anything. Deepa was already on the record as being sceptical. They’d thrashed it out countless times through the afternoon, while they’d worked. Everyone knew everyone else’s position.
‘OK,’ said Deepa. ‘You all just ignore that. That’s fine.’
‘Your scepticism is noted, Deepa,’ said Jess.
‘But we’re going anyway,’ said Trina.
‘I told Zero and One we’d go and listen,’ said Jess, catching Deepa’s eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Beyond that: no promises.’
‘It’ll be pointless,’ Trina said. ‘Norbiton’s glitch-out at The Arbor was next-level. You’ll get no sense out of him. But still, we have to go.’
The mood in the car was difficult to gauge. Certain small battles had been won. Bennington had been comprehensively humiliated. The tension at the estate seemed, for the moment at least, to have dissipated. The Griefers had gobbled up Jasmine and spat her back out to the public. But these passing victories had merely cleared the stage for larger concerns. Rumours were already in the air about Bennington’s successor, Teddy Handler, who in the coming days would be setting out his ‘vision’ for the party. Violence, temporarily suppressed in Trina’s life, could resurface at any moment. The Griefers, having swallowed Jasmine in all her incompleteness, seemed as unknowable and unsatisfactory as ever. Meanwhile, online, Trina was enjoying a slight respite from hostility, but only because that hostility was now directed elsewhere. Vivian Ross, plagued by threats and exhortations to resign, had been forced to close her Twitter account. Energies had been redirected, but not stopped.
Most of Jess’s work on Jasmine had been done the previous night, on Deepa’s sofa, long after Deepa and Trina had gone to bed. Jess, still processing the day’s events and unable to sleep, had itched for something on which she could focus. She’d begun by scrolling through the archive Deepa had created: forgotten and ignored images pulled from far-flung corners of the web, disparate women photoshopped into eerie similarity. Isolating physical characteristics from scattered examples of her digital nameless, Deepa had created a facial template. When this template was applied, the images all seemed to depict the same woman, albeit one who had never actually existed. Because Deepa had wiped the metadata from the images, they were released not only from any sense of personhood, but also from time and place, from narrative. Using discarded networks and histories from her early work constructing her personae, Jess had fashioned for the images a new context, a chronology. Deep into the night, towards morning, as the downward pull of Jess’s eyelids had become almost irresistible, Jasmine had begun to cohere.
She introduced herself to the wider world via a covering letter. She was an ordinary woman, she stressed, a person with nothing to hide and much to dispose of. She had been through a breakup. Now she was resetting.
In the age of connection, Jasmine said, separation had lost its simplicity, its finality. Once, you were alone with your memories. Now, late at night, after a few too many glasses of wine, perhaps with a nostalgic song playing at low volume on the stereo, you could make your way back through it all: the archive of who you’d been. The laughing, sun-pinkened couple on the beach, sunglasses pushed up into after-sea hair, sipping each other’s cocktails and angling their heads towards each other for the shared selfie, still existed. Somewhere, those first tentative emails were still being sent: the one where you said how much you’d enjoyed meeting each other; the one where you suggested meeting again; the one to a friend, announcing, with all the vagueness and symbolism the statement always carried, that you’d ‘met someone’.
As these messages and images infinitely recurred, other moments, rendered as data, joined them. The long, now-unbearable expressions of love. The canoodling passport-booth snaps. The songs and quotes shared on social media. The first concerns, expressed to friends. The requests for advice. The negotiations of separation. The terse disputes about possessions forgotten or lost in the breakup. How could you become the person you needed to be, Jasmine asked, if the person you no longer were was so readily at hand?
Picking her way through all of this, late one night, Jasmine said, she had decided to delete it all. Why torture herself, she’d thought, by poring over it again and again, reliving moments that now were gone and which could not be replaced? She wanted to get on with her life, to make changes. She didn’t want to know what he was doing on social media; didn’t want to see him happy with someone else; didn’t want him to see her, in whatever emotional state she happened to find herself, looking back at him and the people they once were. She wanted, she’d thought, to self-erase, to begin again. But then The Griefers had arrived, and it had struck her that, rather than destroying everything, she could instead release it, give it away. Once it was everyone’s, she said, it would no longer be hers.
The Griefers, Jasmine pointed out, had only asked for one person to submit. They had not said anything about the submission of one person becoming, by extension, the submission of everyone that person knew. She had therefore redacted her archive. Her friends, her partner, her family, remained anonymous. She hoped, she said, that The Griefers and the people of Edmundsbury would be happy with that, and respect her reasons for keeping some things private.
Only when Jess had read it all back this afternoon, when she’d hit the submit button on The Griefers’ website and watched the sliding status bar that signified Jasmine’s disappearance into the world, did she recognise the woman she’d made. It was a paradoxical moment. As soon as Jasmine became familiar to her, Jess became unfamiliar to herself. Was this what she contained? Was this who she was? From this loss of self-recognition, a new fear emerged. Would others, looking at Jasmine, see the Jess she was unable to see in herself? The moment this fear appeared to her, though, the second she reached out and touched it, it dissipated. She pictured Robert, reading over Jasmine’s letter, perhaps composing a quick piece on his thoughts, and she hoped that moment of recognition came, hoped that, for once, he saw her, even if it was just at the moment she vanished.
Jess parked one street over from Nodem, in almost the exact spot she’d used the day she’d run into Brute Force. As they began to walk, the streets quiet, the houses around them no doubt concealing anxious and baffled townspeople trying to parse the day’s events, Jess found herself unable to determine what she was hoping for. A sizeable part of her wanted no further trouble; a not-insignificant part of her wanted nothing but trouble.
They turned the corner into another quiet, unguarded street. Ahead of them, the lights were on in Nodem, thin, glowing shafts slipping between the gaps in the blackout blinds. The sign on the door said, Closed.
Trina tapped on the glass. Zero/One opened the door and, looking past Trina to Deepa and Jess, both of whom he knew, stepped aside to let them in.
‘Trina,’ said Trina, holding out her hand.
‘One.’
From behind the counter his other half waved amiably.
‘Zero,’ he said.
Trina turned to Jess and Deepa.
‘You’re shitting me,’ she said.
‘Welcome to Nodem,’ sa
id Jess.
‘Hey, guys,’ said Deepa.
‘We’re going to head out back,’ said the man who, for the time being at least, was One. ‘I mean, the less we know, the less anyone can ask us, right? If you need us, shout.’
Jess turned her attention to the corner of the room, where the man she’d encountered here twice before was sitting on the floor in a corner, using his jacket as a cushion. He had a laptop and mobile phone beside him, as well as a curling, overly thumbed copy of a self-help book called Stop Whining and Start Winning. He had, quite clearly, gone without sleep for some time.
‘Hey, Trina,’ he said.
‘Hey, Norbiton,’ said Trina, taking in the scene. ‘How’s things?’
‘Oh,’ he said, in a desperate parody of offhand brightness, casting a hand vaguely about his surroundings. ‘You know.’
‘Shit,’ said Trina, visibly softening. ‘I’m sorry, Norbiton.’
‘No-one to really blame but myself,’ said Norbiton. ‘And anyway, I should apologise to you.’
‘Forget it,’ said Trina, walking over to Norbiton’s corner and sitting down on the floor in front of him. ‘Those pricks would drive anyone mad.’
She looked up at Jess and Deepa, who had hung back, slightly awkwardly, and made the necessary introductions.
‘All we need are some beanbags,’ said Norbiton with a sad smile. ‘We could have a huddle.’
‘Why are you sitting on the floor, Norbiton?’ said Trina.
Norbiton held up his self-help book.
‘I’m changing my perspective,’ he said, suddenly enthused. ‘Sometimes, by, like, literally changing your perspective, you also—’
‘I get it,’ said Trina. ‘Norbiton, are those the clothes you left the office in?’