by Etgar Keret
“You’ll be able to tell,” said the dealer. The acid had drilled miniature tunnels in the four yellow peanuty squiggles. Tycher and Asaf ate it while still in the car, staring at the brake lights of the vehicles up ahead, drinking orange juice. They parked next to Tycher’s building and walked straight to the beach to watch the sea.
Like every time they took something together, Asaf was gripped by a strong need to explain.
“There is this awesome group of people on the Net running experiments on themselves.” The drug softened his speech and his words came out sweet and delicate. “It’s called microdosing. Each day every person in the group takes a microscopic amount of LSD and then reports the effects online. They do it that way because it’s illegal to experiment with these drugs on humans.”
“So now you’re the Explainer again?”
“Turns out it has terrific effects. Their moods are improving, their mental stability, their immune system is getting stronger. They report an increase in mnemonic activity, their relationships are better, their sex lives are better, they are capable of concentration on levels—”
“That’s enough,” said Tycher.
“The most interesting part,” continued Asaf, “is that they report an increase in coincidences. It’s as though when you’re on this drug the whole world changes a little bit and you—for example—suddenly run into somebody you were just thinking about. All the time. Which is the most exciting angle of this whole thing: without planning to, they discovered that consciousness is probably—that you’re like a router for consciousness—that it isn’t limited to—”
“Look,” said Tycher. He was pointing at something like a star that was vibrating over the sea. “It’s like there’s a war on that planet.”
* * *
When they got back to his apartment, Tycher lay down on the floor and Asaf on the couch and they spoke like they hadn’t since high school. As the conversation progressed Tycher felt himself growing more self-assured.
“I feel like calling Mika right now,” he said. “I don’t talk to her enough. Not like this. Not with courage. Not like who I really am.”
“It’s important to have balls when you speak to your children.”
“It’s the most important thing,” said Tycher.
When the effects started wearing off they went out to look for a bar in the rippling streets. They walked into one they didn’t know and stayed because the bartender was black and sang to herself. As they sat, cooling their hands on two pints of Goldstar, a song played in the background that reminded Tycher of the writer’s case. The song was so ridiculously unbelievable that he was convinced he was hallucinating the lyrics (“Someone out there has my boner picture!” somebody screamed over the blaring of horns). He laughed with surprise, and when Asaf asked what he was laughing about, it suddenly made sense to tell the story.
He began by stressing that no matter how hard Asaf was going to nag, he had no intention of disclosing the identity of the client. But he could say this: he was a writer. “A very well-known Israeli writer. We met two years ago”—he opened with an intentional lie, instinctively covering his footprints before he even began walking—“and when I first saw him, I thought he was a relative of mine. He seemed so familiar. It took me a minute to figure out he was familiar because I’d seen him on television and in the papers. That he was a celebrity. When he came in he got his tape recorder out. He said that because he was also a journalist, he was going to record our conversations, and that if I objected, we would have a problem.”
“So now I know he’s also a journalist,” said Asaf.
“So he presses record and starts talking. A few days earlier he got this e-mail from somebody calling himself “The Name.” Under Sender it said only one word, in Hebrew, Hashem—you know, The Name. There was a video attachment. A webcam-quality AVI file showing the writer sitting in front of his computer jerking off.”
Asaf raised his eyebrows.
“He wasn’t aware he was being filmed, and so in the video he’s looking just a little below the camera, watching something—obviously porn, you can tell by the audio. And the e-mail came with a blackmail note. Sort of. It said: I am the Internet. Thank you for jerking off in front of me. If you do not continue to jerk off in front of me daily, I will spread this video around.”
Asaf made an ashtray from a beer coaster, carefully folding the cardboard circle into a square. “So what did you do?”
“First I asked him if there was any chance the video was a fake. I knew it wasn’t, but I wanted to give him a chance to say it was. He said no, it was totally real. I asked: Could you have taken the video yourself, by accident, with the laptop webcam, and it was automatically saved to your hard drive, in some temporary cache folder or something, and then someone stole it? He said no, no, no. He had it all figured out: someone installed spyware on his computer. A spyware that uses the built-in camera on top of the screen. Whenever he went to a porn site, the spyware started streaming the input from the camera and recording it on a remote server. Whoever did it must have filmed a bunch of people, and at the end of each day he reviewed all the recordings until he found someone he recognized, someone rich and famous he could blackmail.”
“Now I know he’s rich too,” said Asaf. “I’ve accumulated quite a bit of information about this writer already.”
“He said the day after that he covered the camera with black duct tape. He tried to convince himself that someone was just messing with him or that he was going insane. But then, just five minutes before midnight, he realized he wasn’t willing to take the risk of this video being spread, so he removed the duct tape, went into a porn site, and jerked off, just in case. He said the moment he was finished he felt like an idiot. He realized he was deteriorating toward real psychosis. But the next day he got another e-mail from the same address. The Name. With another video of him jerking off, wearing what he wore the day before, and another note: Thanks. Same deal tomorrow. I am the Internet and you must fertilize me. I am the Internet and you must fuck me.”
“Wait, how long did it take before he came to you?”
“A week.”
“So for an entire week—”
“For an entire week he jerked off in front of his camera, and it ate him up. And every day he got an e-mail with a video of himself jerking off from the previous day, along with a letter. The letters became crazier and crazier. I am the Internet, give me Internet babies. I am the Internet and I am the omnihuman.”
“The omnihuman?”
“Fuck with the Unseen and do not cheat with the Seen.”
“Hard-core,” said Asaf.
Tycher closed his eyes and sipped his beer. “He said he couldn’t write, couldn’t work, couldn’t do anything. He kept thinking about that person, out there somewhere, who had a video of him jerking off.”
“How come you never came to me with this before?” Asaf asked. “What, don’t you feel comfortable asking for my help? Through the company I could, like, produce a report of every spyware that was on the Net while this happened. When was this?”
“Back in 2006.”
“All right then. I can already tell you that if we’re talking about 2006 there’s a good chance it had to do with Eden Robinov, or Kobinov. You know him?”
Tycher shook his head.
“Eden Kobinov. He was a Russian hacker from Netanya. Seventeen years old. His nickname was Trumpel-dog. He was into the whole Jewish, Zionist, nationalist thing. Against sex culture and all that. He broke into Israeli porn sites, and into all those matchmaking sites—you know, the ones with the banners saying, Get Laid Tonight, or, 700 Women in the Herzliya Area Want Your Cock. That kind of thing.”
“8,000 Women from Ramat Gan Longing for Have Sexes with You,” said Tycher.
“So he took over those websites and censored them. Planted shitty fig leafs, drawn in Microsoft Paint, over all the cocks and tits. And he was phishing too. Got users’ e-mail addresses and threatened to expose them if they wouldn�
��t pay. This dude actually met people on the street and took cash from them, because in the end, when it comes to money, it’s always easier to do it outside the Internet, where nothing is recorded.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never heard of anybody recording people on their own webcams, though.” Asaf lit a cigarette. “But it’s the same kind of vibe.”
“Yes.”
“And he was arrested a year ago. Do you think the writer jerked off daily up until a year ago?”
“I dropped the case. At first I tried to check out that e-mail address, but it wasn’t an actual address. Just the words The Name. So I searched the usual things. Were there other similar cases? There weren’t. Did anybody know a technology that made your webcam start recording without your consent? They didn’t. You know what I did? I went to religious repository bins all over Tel Aviv, the ones they have next to synagogues and chevra kadisha branches, where religious people throw out garbage that is too sacred to be mixed with regular trash, and I rifled through them. I was thinking, if this guy calls himself Hashem, like the name of God, he might be serious about that, experimenting with practical kabbalah or something. And if so, he probably has a thing about writing the tetragrammaton, the explicit name of God. And then, if he really believes, he would never toss anything bearing that name in the garbage, and he would have to dump it in a religious repository. I don’t know. I only had those kinds of ideas, and they led nowhere. In the end I told him he would probably be better off talking to someone who specialized in online crime. I didn’t want to take too much of his time, because I knew every day I didn’t solve the case was another day he was being filmed jerking off in front of the Internet.”
“Was it Shimon Adaf?”
“Fuck you,” said Tycher. “Don’t even try to guess. And no.”
“Gideon Tzuk?”
Tycher didn’t have to say anything. The severe hardening of his jaw and a couple of sharp wrinkles shooting up along the corner of his brow told Asaf he’d nailed it.
“Ha-ha, it’s like you’re on truth serum.”
“Good to know that I’m surrounded by friends who know how to abuse it,” said Tycher.
“This changes everything.” Asaf’s face sobered. “If it’s Gideon Tzuk it isn’t funny at all. You know what a king that guy is? Did you read his books?”
Tycher admitted he hadn’t.
“He is a king. He saved my life. Mirror Tigers saved me when I was in the army. In a way it was because of that book that I left the squadron.”
“I thought you left because you didn’t want to bomb anything.”
“I didn’t want to bomb anything because of Mirror Tigers,” said Asaf.
“I thought you left because they caught you flying a plane while tripping on shrooms.”
“I flew a plane while tripping on shrooms because of Mirror Tigers,” Asaf explained. “That book is crazy. Like religious crazy.”
“Now I really feel like helping him,” said Asaf after several moments of silence. “Are you still in contact?”
“No.” Tycher knew he could easily find the number, but he didn’t feel like getting back into it.
More than anything, Tycher didn’t want to meet the writer again. The man’s presence made him uncomfortable. When he told Tycher about what had happened, the writer seemed unsure whether he had actually experienced those things in reality or whether they were a hallucination. He was struggling hard to get the words out of his mouth. But what was there to sweat over? It was as if, while he spoke, the writer had cast an ancient spell, known to few, through which he turned madness into reality, and Tycher sat there and nodded while this was happening in front of him, taking down the story, fastening it tighter to reality, and then went on an investigation, all the while feeling it, both existent and nonexistent, in the dark.
At times, when he was alone in a room with the writer, he thought, Now reality is made up of nothing but what I say and what he says, and understood how insanity could be contagious. When he recalled this he got that same feeling again, the feeling you have a moment before taking a test in a dream.
* * *
After the bar, they walked back to the beach to watch the sunrise. Tycher asked Asaf for a cigarette.
“Why?” asked Asaf, gesturing toward the sunrise. “Look at it. Isn’t it enough?” But still he gave Tycher a cigarette, and when he leaned in for a light Asaf changed his mind and took the cigarette back and said, “I’m sorry I said that. I don’t know why I said it. I’m going to get in a time machine and go back, blu-blu-blu-blu-blu-blu, and I’m going to give you a cigarette again, like a human being.” And he gave Tycher a cigarette again, and Tycher put it in his mouth, and he lit it, and Tycher smiled.
“Rabin’s dead,” said Tycher. “You’re in 1995.”
“Too bad. I’m not even half-tired yet.”
They had sandwiches at the little shop on Shenkin Street and then went for coffee at the Minzar. The drugs fed on their exhaustion, turning it not into wakefulness but rather into a persistent exposure of electrical wires. From the outside the place seemed closed, but when they went in to check, they found a few people inside, their faces still unripe with morning, wrapped in newspaper epidermis.
Right by the beer taps, sitting on a barstool, was Gideon Tzuk, alternating between coffee and beer. He looked paler and fatter than he had when Tycher last saw him, but also more focused. His eyes were fixed on a book that rested open on his knees.
“That’s him, right?” Asaf whispered. “That’s the kind of coincidence I was telling you about.”
Before Tycher could stop him, Asaf took a seat next to the writer and said, “Excuse me, Gideon Tzuk? I’m sorry to disturb you.”
The writer straightened his spine. His black overcoat made it seem like he’d been inflated from the chair up.
Tycher took a step back and watched from the pub’s doorway.
“Do I know you?” When he spoke Tycher learned that the writer’s voice had also changed. The smeared, alcoholic tongue was replaced with a firm, alert tone.
Asaf said, “No, but I have something important to tell you.”
Gideon Tzuk closed the book.
“I was a pilot in the army,” began Asaf. “At the end of 2008 I refused to bomb Gaza from a plane during operation Oferet Yetzuka, and when they made me do it anyway, I took twenty-five grams of Psilocybe atlantis before getting in the jet, and the whole time we were over Gaza I read Mirror Tigers to the other pilots over the radio. I read the gnostic parts—the parts where the guy realizes the world is the Jewish Holocaust on repeat? And it’s just compressed differently each time? And it’s like, God is the only one who breaks into this concentration camp to save us?”
“Did it help?” asked Gideon Tzuk.
“No, they all turned out to be whores and bombed anyway. No one was listening.”
“Right,” said Gideon Tzuk.
“Because of the radio. They probably muted the channel I was speaking on pretty fast.”
“What kind of jet were you flying?”
“F16-D.”
“So you had a navigator with you.”
“Yeah, but he was cool,” said Asaf. “He was on mexicana.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Put us in military prison for eight months and kicked us out of the army. It was never reported in the media and there was no file, because it was too big of a fuck-up on their part. The fact that they even let it happen.”
“So you got away with it?”
“I own an Internet security company now,” Asaf said.
“They reached a settlement,” Tycher finally intervened. “He was paid to shut up about it.” As he stepped into the dusty light, the writer’s gaze locked on him.
“Bullshit,” said Asaf. “I am so denying that.”
“I know you,” Gideon Tzuk spoke through him, turning to Tycher.
“Where from?” Tycher approached them.
“Oh,” said Gideon Tzuk, “you�
��re all about the confidentiality, aren’t you?” He turned to Asaf and pointed at Tycher. “You see that? That’s some professional-ass private investigating. He worked with me once, but he doesn’t say anything, because he is good. A good man. He crawled inside religious repository bins for me.”
“Did you find any sparks?” said Asaf.
“I never talk about my clients,” replied Tycher, feeling robotic. “It’s a thing I have.”
“Sit down,” said Gideon Tzuk, looking only at Asaf. Once he sat down, Tycher could smell the writer. He smelled athletic. New. For a moment he thought: Perhaps I really don’t know this guy at all.
“What did you say your business was? High-tech?”
“Online security,” said Asaf. “Yeah, high-tech.”
“Did you ever meet a guy named Derek Hammon who owns a start-up? A French Jew, he lives around here, in Neve Tzedek.”
“Sure,” said Asaf. “He made Turn Me Porn.”
“Fucking Familiar,” said Gideon Tzuk.
“Right, sure,” said Asaf, “Fucking Familiar.”
“Made what?” Tycher asked.
“Fucking Familiar. Initially it was called Turn Me Porn. It’s a website and an app,” explained Gideon Tzuk. “Let’s say you want some girl from the office or school or a childhood friend, or just a friend, or a waitress, doesn’t matter. You take a picture of her—you get it from Facebook or whatever—and you upload it to this website or app. It recognizes the facial features and searches the web for porn in which the main character looks like the girl in your picture. And then you can jerk off while watching her.”
“Or him,” said Asaf. “There’s a gay version too.”
“Or him,” Gideon Tzuk confirmed. “And there are all kinds of special features. For example, the website asks you—requires you—to enter the first name of the girl in the picture you sent. At first, of course, your instinct would be to make up a name, but then you realize there’s a logic to it. That it pays to tell the truth. Because the website automatically titles the videos it finds with the name you typed in. And then you get two nice little lists, one of sites that cost money and the other of free streaming sites, sorted by a percentage of how much the girl in them looks like the picture. And let’s say the name you put in is . . . Give me a girl’s name.”