Followers

by Megan Angelo

  “In 2016,” the bot said, its voice dull and stiff, “the web was open-publish. Anyone could post whatever they wanted on it. People made up their own passwords, often from meaningful dates or pet names. Sunglasses off, please,” it added as Marlow passed. “Just ahead, you’ll be walking through our retina scanners. We like to know who’s visiting us for security purposes—and so we can customize our museum experience to your interests and needs.”

  Another retina scanner. Marlow hesitated. With the hunt on, she couldn’t risk being tagged here. Then again, if there was as much of the old internet—of her parents’ old lives—inside this building as advertised, she might be able to find out who her real father was.

  She shuffled toward the red beam. People were crossing it casually here, not pausing their conversations to look straight into it. Children slipped beneath it easily. The secondhand bots all had their backs to it. The scanner seemed like more of a suggestion here than it had at the airport—and so, as she approached it, Marlow pretended to drop something, then ducked beneath the line.

  When she straightened up on the other side, nothing happened. No one came to push her back to be counted. No one seemed to notice her at all. Marlow felt a rush of pride; was she good at this, being a renegade? Security behind her, she slipped her sunglasses off for just a moment and wiped the sweat from her face.

  By the time she put them back on, the teenage daughter from the line was staring at her.

  “Mom,” the girl was whispering. “Mom—” She cupped her hand to her mouth and leaned into her mother’s cloud of hair. After a moment, the woman’s eyes slid toward Marlow.

  The girl poked her mother, hard. “Stop that,” Marlow heard her mother say. “Our tour leaves in five minutes. Hustle.”

  “But—” the girl said. She reluctantly followed her mother.

  Marlow went the other way. She shook herself free from the slow-moving mass and hurried to the right, following a sign that pointed her to “General Searches.” Flanking the long hallway on both sides were lines of security bots, all male, all run-down and funnel-shaped, with tight waists and broad shoulders, rendered in a thoughtful variety of skin tones. They wore identical eggplant blazers. Marlow moved through them like a debutante, avoiding their stares as they tracked her, en masse, every pair of eyes rolling left to right until each chin had to follow.

  At the end of the hall was a bot with a beard so precise, it could only be software-designed. Its name tag read Mateo. A moment after Marlow passed it, it peeled off from the ranks and trod after her, keeping six feet or so back.

  Marlow felt a jittery seed of fear in her stomach. It could be nothing, she told herself. It could be a random security measure. There was no reason for any bot to want her. Bots didn’t care about scavenger hunts.

  The wide maw of a giant dark room rose up in front of her, and she walked through it, toward one of the lilac squares that beckoned with a graphic: W W W. Marlow settled onto the stool in front of it. Mateo found a spot to rest its back against the wall.

  “Welcome,” came a crisp voice. “Which year’s internet would you like to browse today?”

  Marlow hesitated.

  “Or would you like to search for a person or place?” the voice continued.

  “Floss Natuzzi,” Marlow said. “And Aston Clipp.”

  Instantly: “There are 46 million results for Floss Natuzzi and 51 million results for Aston Clipp,” the voice said. “Here are some tags you can use to narrow your search.”

  In front of Marlow, illuminating the dust in the air, bright boxes with phrases inside them appeared—so many phrases that they crowded the space, forcing each other to shrink. Aston Clipp New Album. Aston Clipp Lyrics. Aston Clipp Instagram. Aston Clipp Twitter. Aston Clipp Rwanda Comment. Floss Natuzzi Instagram. Floss Natuzzi Brow Tutorial. Floss Natuzzi Paulina Kratz. Floss Natuzzi Dating. Floss Natuzzi Aston Clipp. Floss Natuzzi Flosston Public. Floss Natuzzi Haircut. Floss Natuzzi Anna Salgado. Aston Clipp Fire. Floss Natuzzi Wedding. Floss Natuzzi Pregnant.

  Marlow held her breath, waiting for her own name. But the tags stopped there. Of course. This version of the internet ended at the Spill.

  She plunged her fingers into the tags. She called up stories and pictures, trying to keep the dates straight. She was looking for men around her mother, for hints that their genes might be swimming inside her. The more she looked, the less reasonable the task seemed. There were hundreds of men, dozens appearing regularly, and virtually all of them—even the ones she suspected were gay—touched her mother, in pictures, like they’d slept with her. Then again, Aston seemed to always be nearby, not bothered, and not bothering to overplay his claim on the girl they all wanted, because she wanted him.

  After a long time looking, Marlow leaned back and rubbed her eyes. The room was beginning to empty of tourists, who trudged off looking worn out by their days. Marlow planned to stay until night, and then what? She had no idea what she would eat, where she would sleep, how she would escape the gaze of everyone on the street who had heard about the hunt.

  She had at least a few more hours to kill before it got dark. She decided to try another tactic. She told the hologram to give her her mother chronologically. She went back to the beginning.

  A vaguely troubling series of images kept resurfacing: shots of angry young people behind metal bars on a city block, and a visual Marlow didn’t quite understand—a short burst of text, next to a little square photo of a young woman, and under that, a photo of an apartment building’s double doors. Marlow squinted at the words. Twitter, she realized. This was Twitter, the thing Floss had told her about. This is where that skank who hurt Paulina lives, if anyone wants to drop by and beat the shit out of her. C’mon world. Don’t hold back. After that: an address.

  The skin on Marlow’s arms went taut and cold when she read that. She dug into her bag for the paper from Grace and turned it to the side Grace had written on, then realized that she didn’t have a pen. She rummaged through her bag for something to scratch with, pushing the folded swimsuits and prenatal vitamins to the side. Then she felt something she hadn’t packed: a clear vinyl case. Alone in the dark, Marlow smiled. This always happened. Despite the fact that Marlow never wore anything but a smoothing balm on her face, Floss was always tucking makeup into her bags or her bathroom drawers, as if Marlow might become a new person entirely if Floss only found her the right shade of something.

  There was an eyeliner pencil in the kit. Marlow uncapped it and copied the address down, squeezing it in beneath Grace’s printing. 303 W 21st St.

  The black tip of the pencil crumbled as she wrote. FACE BY FLOSS, it said in copper-colored letters on the side. Her parents’ home was crammed with boxes of these old products—mascaras fully fossilized before they could be opened, serums that had long unclotted themselves into thick layers of oil and sediment. All Marlow knew about the line was that it had launched to total silence a year after the Spill. The basement had been filled with back stock for as long as she could remember, her old bikes leaning against the crates stacked to the ceiling.

  She put the slip away. She was on the earliest page of search results, lined with the very first glimmers of her mother becoming someone. Marlow reached forward to tap the earliest story. Up popped a soft-focus photo of Floss brushing her eyebrows just the way Marlow always saw her do it: mouth open, eyes stretched wide. The headline read: “Sooo What Does The World’s Most Expensive Brow Gel Actually Do? One Instagram It Girl Finds Out.” It was strange, Marlow noticed, her eyes drifting down to the space beneath the headline: the name of whoever wrote the piece was missing. After “By,” there was only a bar of white space, like something had been erased. Next to it was a tiny headshot of a half-smiling woman. The nameless author, Marlow thought. She leaned closer to the story, the tip of her nose dipping into the hologram. The woman looked familiar.

  Marlow went back to the red-carpet photos of Floss and f
ound the woman almost immediately. There she was—next to Floss, but not really. The woman slumped in the shadowed edges of the pictures, waiting and holding two purses while Floss pouted in the center of the shot. She was thin by normal measures, but her waist was still thicker than Floss’s, and she was paler, almost gray-looking, next to Marlow’s mother. She seemed, Marlow thought with a stab of pity, like nothing but a point of comparison—a reminder, recurring in dozens of photos, of how dismal normal looked next to beautiful. “Floss Natuzzi and guest,” read some of the captions. “Floss Natuzzi and friend Orla,” read others. Marlow found a video clip in which the woman briefly stood with Floss on the carpet. Floss, twinkling in a gown made of champagne-colored scales, put one of her hands on the woman’s shoulder and cupped the other at her mouth. She shouted something toward the cameras, but Marlow couldn’t hear it. She was supposed to have her device on—that was how everyone else here was getting audio. She took a step back from the display, frustrated, and squinted at Floss’s moving lips, trying to read them.

  Suddenly, she felt fingers on her shoulder, tapping. She knew instantly it was a bot; the fingers mimicked the rhythm of someone wanting her attention, but the force of the touch was off. Too hard. It was one of those motions bots struggled with, even after hundreds of updates.

  Marlow turned. Mateo was standing there, holding out a basket of plastic blue earpieces. “Happy to help,” it said.

  Marlow rummaged in the basket. “Do these still work?” she said.

  Mateo nodded. “The Archive currently uses them for our guests younger than seven, and our guests whose income indicates that they live below the information line,” it said. “In other words, our guests who do not have devices.”

  Marlow pressed one of the tiny buds into her ear. “Thank you,” she said. Mateo nodded again and put its hands behind its back. It didn’t retreat. “That, um,” Marlow said. “That will be all.”

  “Of course.” Mateo took a few steps backward, never taking its eyes off her.

  Marlow felt the buzz of her earbud syncing up with the content in front of her. Floss was frozen, in the frame she had paused on, with her tongue rolled up in the cave of her mouth, about to unfurl. Marlow pressed Play.

  “My friend Orla Cadden,” Floss cried out. “C-A-D-D-E-N. She’s a literary talent—” The ancient cameras, spitting loud clicks and lightning, drowned out the rest of the sentence.

  Marlow uncapped the eyeliner again to write the name down. “Search Orla Cadden,” she demanded.

  In all her years of taking answers for granted, she had never heard the words the voice responded with. It dropped its sunny ting, like she had ruined the fun. “Error 404,” it said. “Not found.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Orla

  New York, New York

  2016

  Within an hour of Danny’s arrival, Orla did three things she wasn’t proud of.

  First, she took him to a bar. Not one of the dozen within walking distance that were considered of the moment, with their bartenders who knew Orla by name and treated her with discretion. No—she wanted to go somewhere terrible, where people would see her and fuss. They went to a cheap box in the East Forties where tourists ate nachos with half-melted cheese and drank volleyball-sized margaritas. They sat in a cream-colored pleather booth with a tall, quilted back. She knew, as they sat there, that she would never forget the sight of him, there across the table. What she didn’t know was how memorable the booth itself would prove to be. Less than a year later, when the city was still reeling from the Spill, Orla would pass this place again and find the booths dismembered on the curb, junkyard-bound, part of the design exorcism going on in rooms across America. Everyone was trying to forget white padded walls.

  Danny looked up as two girls—both young, both Asian, both with spilled-drink stains on their silk Theory shells—clambered toward their table. They bent, cuddling up to Orla, and extended their arms for selfies.

  “I’m a Floss,” said the one on Orla’s right, sucking her cheeks in as she snapped the photos.

  “And I’m an Orla,” said the other. She had glasses.

  Watching the interaction, Danny touched his face and wagged his head in disbelief. “Whoa,” he said.

  After one round—he followed her lead and had the prickly pear, on the rocks—their eyes swam in their heads. They smiled at each other.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Orla said. “What happened with Catherine?”

  They both groaned theatrically. It was the second thing she felt bad about.

  “The truth?” Danny stirred his second drink. “I’m over it. She’s over it. I know it’s supposed to be more complicated than that, but it’s not.” He took a long sip and sat back. “Oh, and I wouldn’t go to church. Which is exactly what she wanted.”

  “What do you mean,” Orla said, “what she wanted?”

  “Catherine’s smart these days.” Danny dug his elbows into the table. “She’s not the little—oh, who, me?—she was in high school.” He glanced at a table that was staring at them and swallowed. Orla could tell he thought they were looking because he was being loud, but the people were focused on her.

  “She didn’t want to be married to me anymore,” he went on in a lower voice. “But she’s not an idiot. She’s not going to go and cheat on me—she doesn’t want to be the villain. If you’re the one who cheats in a town like ours, good luck at the grocery store.” He took another sip. “So she gets a church instead. She’s at stuff every night, she’s at stuff all weekend, she comes home quoting the Bible and looking at me like, ‘What, you don’t get it?’ Like I’m the asshole, all of a sudden, for not wanting a Jesus tattoo.”

  Orla could see him mentally braking, trying not to fly through the windshield of his rant. He took a long breath. “But I’m lucky, actually,” he said. “You have no idea how many times I wanted to come and find you, to tell you...” His face colored and he waved the train of thought away, like he thought he was wasting her time. Then he grinned, the grin she remembered from when they were fifteen. “I always thought you and me could take over the world,” he said.

  If she had been on her third drink, or even further into her second, Orla might not have felt the sudden sting of intuition: like when he had called her a star at the barricade, this line sounded too planned. But she was not on her first drink, either, so she could push the thought away. She buried the instinct beneath what she wanted. And that made three.

  * * *

  When they got back to the building, Danny trailed just far enough behind Orla that the doorman thought they weren’t together. He looked into Danny’s eyes and flicked his head like the young guy he was, instead of murmuring “Evening” with his eyes down, as usual. He had mistaken Danny, Orla realized, for one of his kind, not hers. Danny shook the doorman’s hand and asked him his name. Orla heard it, filed it away, and forgot it again by the elevator.

  On the way up, she looked at Danny. He still had a better smile than any actor she’d met that year, and theirs were highly tended to—his had just grown in that way, even and bright. But he had gained weight, considerable weight, and his jeans—crayon blue, with too many pockets—made her want to die a little. His hair was thinning, and she could tell that he worked hard to create the illusion that it wasn’t. That hurt to think of, too: him at the mirror, biting his lip, arranging pieces here and there, a man forced to ape grooming motions after a boyhood of effortless looks, of barely a glance in the mirror.

  The apartment was empty for once. Floss and Aston were shooting on location, having brunch on a Tuesday afternoon, when nobody served it. The restaurant had been closed for the occasion, stocked with extras who were told to pretend it was Sunday. Mason had called last night to ask that they be prepared to fight. “We’re finding in edit that we’re a little low on conflict,” he said, his voice fizzing out of Floss’s iPhone speaker. “So if you guys could work somethin
g up, maybe about the way Floss dresses, that girl Aston talked to at the Grammys...” Orla had watched as Floss and Aston both looked at the floor. They used to laugh when Mason asked them to argue, used to have to search for things they didn’t agree on. But they had been bickering all week about the same topics Mason suggested. When their fights spilled into the living room, Orla went still on her side of the fake wall, wondering why she was the one trying not to be heard.

  Danny’s eyes lit up as he came into the apartment. He picked up a mug on the counter, looked at it like it was an artifact, and carefully put it back down exactly where it had been. “It’s smaller than I imagined,” he said. “But they say it’s always like that with TV shows, right?”

  “Sort of,” Orla said. “This is just where we live, though, so it’s a little different.” She ran into her room ahead of him and kicked tangles of underwear-inside-yoga-pants under her bed.

  Danny followed her in, filling the doorway. Because there was nowhere else to go, she sat down on the bed. So did he. Their shoulders came to rest against each other.

  He turned his face toward her. Orla’s heart began to pound. “What’s she like?” he said.

  “Who?” Orla could not believe, could not believe, could not believe they were this close.

  He put his hand over hers, the same way he had in the car, long ago. It was like he had found an old underground wire. The jolt in her skin was still there.

  “Floss,” he said.

  “Oh, um.” Orla tried hard to think. “She’s just like you imagine. What you see is what you get. Prettier, though. If you can believe that.”

  Danny twisted around and nodded at the thick ream of paper on Orla’s desk. Its top sheet was marked up with red pen. “Oh, there it is,” he said. “Your book.”