Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “Screwing around on Myspace—”

  “Multitasking. And everyone moved to Facebook a year or two ago. Stop being old, Dad.”

  “Maybe you’d do a little better with the job search if you went out and knocked on some doors.”

  “It’s not like when you were a kid—”

  “You’re twenty-five!”

  “—everything’s done online now. You don’t just go up to people and talk to them: only crazy people do that. If you show up at some company unannounced, they call security.”

  “I still see Help Wanted signs in windows.”

  “I didn’t get a college degree from Livingston State so I could get stiffed on tips when the diners hate the baba ghanoush.”

  “Graduate school?”

  “In debt enough already. Also, I’m not a sucker.”

  Woody swallowed back what he was about to say next. Then he sat down on the floor near the recliner, looking up at Rebecca. His shoulders slumped, and he suddenly looked drained: oddly tired and childlike, strangely unfatherly. “I just want you to do something,” he said. “Other than sit here and string together babysitting jobs and give up. I feel like you’re giving up.”

  “Maybe Emerson’s times died with Emerson,” Rebecca said, hating herself for slinging his words back in his face like that. But why let an English degree go to waste?

  Then the front door slammed: Mom was home. “Woody!” they heard from the foyer. “I have been training this new hire at the library all day today. He’s autistic! Granted, he can shelve books like nobody’s business, but otherwise: whoo!” Her voice moved into the kitchen. “Man alive. He drove me to drink. Literally. As in: first I drove home, and now I’m drinking. Bam.” They heard the rumble and clink of the icemaker’s dispenser ejecting cubes into a tumbler: next would come the cranberry juice and the vodka.

  From the recliner, Rebecca looked down into her father’s upturned face. “How, my dearest, only daughter, do you bear the burden of our parentage?” he said. “It must be intolerable.”

  “I do my best.” She forced a smile.

  “We only want the best for you.”

  “I know.” She reached down and gently placed her hand on his shoulder; he placed his own hand on top of it.

  Dad’s problem was that he didn’t understand the nature and the purpose of the blackout season, never having had one. Really, “blackout season” was just Rebecca’s label for it: there was no real name for that phase in the life of many suburban millennial Americans during which they moved back in with their parents after college for a while, and waited—maybe for a few months, maybe for several years—until an opportunity came along to take up the mantle of adulthood.

  In Dad’s day, when you graduated from a four-year school, you magically found a forty-hour-a-week job that let you take on a mortgage if you wanted. But the paths to success were not so well marked out for Rebecca’s generation, and so with diplomas in hand they returned to their old bedrooms for a period that was part extended adolescence, part premature senescence. The period did not have a name, because to name it would be to acknowledge its existence, which would in turn lead to an admission of failure—of the promise of higher education, or of methods of parenting, or of such vague concepts as the System or the American Dream. If you did name it, you kept the name to yourself, and you only spoke it in confidence. (Rebecca’s BFF Kate would say, now and again, that she was in her “twilight time”; their college friend Jen would occasionally blurt after a couple of ladies’ night mojitos that “this is the best time of my life,” but Rebecca would hear the pose of defiance in her voice, and the desperation beneath it, and know what she really meant.)

  Rebecca looked for jobs, like everyone did—during the first few weeks after graduating from college she’d really thrown herself into it. But there was a certain dispiriting monotony and automation to the process. You filled out online forms. It was presumed that the forms were examined by humans, but probably not—what probably happened was that an automated routine searched for keywords in the submissions and flagged certain ones with signs of priority, or, more often in Rebecca’s case, lack thereof. You could probably beat the system if you knew one of the people controlling the switches, but she knew no one who could speak her name at a meeting, or place an appointment on a superior’s calendar. (It was about here that Rebecca realized that she might have missed out on at least some of the point of college. She’d spent most of her time there mooning after boys and partying—she hadn’t really networked, or joined any of the college clubs that were the ersatz versions of the nameless real-world clubs that really mattered.) So there she was with her laptop, auto-completing fields and attempting to guess the secret words that would open the doors.

  Sometimes she got interviews, but strangely, she felt the same way during those as she did when she was filling out the online applications: there’d be some human resources person staring at her across a table, not trying to figure out whether she was smart enough for the job, but merely waiting for her to say whatever his manuals or computers told him was the correct answer to an unstated question. (“I’m very self-motivated,” she’d state with an assertiveness that she didn’t quite feel in her gut, and the HR guy would look down at the paper in front of him and then back up at her blankly, as if to say, No, that’s not today’s password. Then she’d follow with something like “I’m also committed to life-long learning,” and the response would be dead silence. A few days later, she’d get a no-reply e-mail expressing perfunctory pro forma regret, telling her the spot had been filled and wishing her the best of luck.)

  In the meantime, she got her beer money from the shadow economy of the blackout season. The little town of Stratton was never short of babysitting opportunities, at fifteen an hour paid under the table. The money to be reaped from a freshly mowed lawn was mostly locked down by teenage boys and bands of landscapers, but every once in a while she’d get a gig from a landlord, cutting a patch of grass behind a duplex. Envelope stuffing and door-to-door canvassing for local political candidates during primary season; customer service for retailers during holiday sales: even if you couldn’t get a steady paycheck, you could always hustle something, if you were willing to suffer the slight abrasion to your dignity, day by day.

  When you’d spent enough time filling out job applications, and you’d had the required amount of family time, then you hung out. Hanging out occurred in coffee shops in the morning and afternoon and bars in the evening, or in parks or forests when the weather was warm. Or you hung out online, reading forum posts on random trivial subjects, or tracing the sprawling webs of social network friendships to see where they led you. It was then that you felt the full force of the blackout season, and what it did to time. It made time pliable; it smudged the lines between hours on clock faces; it sent hands spinning at twice their normal rate or stopped them altogether.

  Sometimes you’d wake up too early, before the sun was up, before it was reasonable to expect someone to take up the task of facing the day, and so instead of getting out of bed you’d lie there for a while, and drowse, and slip into a dream in which, for instance, you were an ice skater. This is the thing you can do; when you slip on the skates you are a doer instead of a mere dreamer. Your blades carve lovely loops and spirals in the ice; when you twirl in midair your body is a blur. A talent scout selects you out of a crowd at Rockefeller Center one December day (easy to do, since amateurs have cleared the field for you to work your magic). Before you know it, you have a free trip to Disneyland, flight and hotel paid for. Once there, you’re escorted to a secret labyrinth beneath the amusement park; at the heart of the labyrinth is a candlelit hall; in the middle of the hall sits a cryogenic chamber in which Walter Elias Disney, the man himself, is kept alive and, horribly, conscious. (“If he leaves the chamber he will die in moments,” the scout says. “It’s a miracle he hasn’t gone insane in all these long years. This form of immortality is a curse, not a gift. But he makes this sacrifice of his ow
n free will for the children of the world. To guarantee their happiness.”) You are ushered before the chamber’s window, and an acolyte with a pair of plastic Mickey Mouse ears sutured to his shaven head wipes away some condensation on the glass, so that the man inside can see you. His eyes widen and his agitated voice comes tinnily through a speaker mounted on the chamber’s side. “She is all the princesses!” he shouts. “She is all the princesses. She is Cinderella; she is Sleeping Beauty; she is Ariel and Jasmine and Tiana. Put her in Disney on Ice posthaste!” “I knew you were destined for gainful employment,” says your father when he suddenly appears; then you wake up to find that only five minutes have passed. The day with all its little reckonings has not come much closer, though the dream has tired you down to your bones.

  Or: it’s eleven a.m. You have filled out enough job applications for the day and it’s time for a quick break. Check Facebook: Kate wants you to look at a YouTube video of this local band that she’s trying to get a group together to go see Friday night. They’re called the Dancing Axolotls, and they’re some oddball amalgam of Celtic punk and industrial—Pogues and Dropkick Murphys crossed with beats lifted from Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. Who knows where they came up with that name—what the fuck is an axolotl? It doesn’t sound Irish—but they rock! You watch three videos from their live shows (and the dance floor is full of guys, too, jumping up and down with their fists in the air. This could be the best night ever: bare minimum, you hook up with a dude in a ratty green T-shirt that says SLÁINTE!). And in the list of other videos that YouTube seems to think you might also like is one that appears to feature…some sort of animal? It’s underwater and half translucent, with a face like a child’s drawing of a smiling man. Looking at it is like getting kicked in the face with cute. It is so cute that it looks like something is wrong with it. It is an axolotl.

  You have been down this rabbit hole before—once you watch the first YouTube video of a cute animal, there’s no turning back until you’re sated. From axolotls it’s on to potbellied pigs, and cats that paw at the dancing lights of laser pointers. The whole subcategory of videos of cats grows by thousands a day, and they never, ever get old. Here’s one that’s been tinkered with through film-school visual-effects wizardry. A cat is toying with a plastic mouse that has guts of mechanical gadgetry—despite what should have been a series of stunning blows, the thing keeps moving, lying on its side while its legs writhe in the air. Then the cat looks directly into the camera and speaks with a human voice, its computer-generated lips moving in perfect sync with its goofy baritone. “Mousey-mouse should be dead,” it says. “But it ain’t! Why ain’t it dead?” It is hard at these times not to be overcome with a sense of wonder, at all the centuries of technological advancement that brought humanity to a point where a photorealistic image of a talking cat merits little more than a quick glance. What better place to live than here? What better time than now?

  And now you look up and it’s three o’clock: most of the day has gone by. Mom’ll be home soon, mixing the vodka and cranberry.

  Thus time shrinks and stretches; thus your twenties are whittled away.

  There were four women in what Rebecca and her friends called the “core group,” the girls who made it a point to hang out together at a moment’s notice, who understood that girls’ night out was a standing weekly appointment, even if it wasn’t explicitly declared as such, even if the core group pretended otherwise. (A sample e-mail sent from one member of the core group to the others with a couple of extra ladies cc’d, its subject line EMERGENCY: “It’s an emergency b/c I haven’t seen you guys in FOREVER [“forever,” in this instance, being four days] and we SERIOUSLY need to hang out. The Glow Club at 9: don’t be an asshole.” The core group would be there at nine on the dot. But the others would fail, as their cc’d status had implied from the start.) The three girls in the core group besides Rebecca (who, when among them, became Becca for short) were Britt (short for Brittany and not Britney as Britt would insist, taking time to spell out the difference), Kate (short for Kathryn), and Jen (short for Jennifer). Other women came and went, but didn’t have the necessary sticking power: either they didn’t get the core group’s pop culture references and inside jokes, or their own witty sallies fell on dead air, or they got steady jobs or serious boyfriends, both of which placed too heavy a demand on their time to maintain real membership in the core group.

  The core group was into guys, in theory, in the abstract—when they went out to bars or clubs, one of them (usually Kate) would note with approval or disapproval the male/female ratio of the clientele, and whether the guys on offer were of sufficient cuteness or hotness. They didn’t identify so much with the women of Sex and the City, though with them being a foursome of singles, that might have seemed the obvious call—for one thing, they all lived with their parents in New Jersey instead of in apartments with stellar views of the Manhattan skyline, and with a persistent recession under way, even an ironic appreciation of conspicuous consumption wasn’t in the cards. They thought of themselves more as gender-switched versions of the dudes in bromance movies, who shared strategies about picking up chicks while sitting in front of the TV playing Madden. If they were having a long adolescence forced on them by circumstance, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if men appeared in their lives it was on the periphery of the frame, the better to throw the true and inviolable nature of female friendship in sharp relief, to affirm its seriousness and depth. (A chain of texts copied to all members of the core group, beginning with Britt’s: “I wanna go out to a club tonite but fuck guys I just wanna dance.” Becca: “Yeah lets just get in a circle & put our purses on the floor & dance our asses off.” Kate: “& if any guys get up in our grills well tase em!”)

  If one of them did meet a guy at a club, it would be made clear, if it wasn’t already, that he was a supporting character in the tale of the core group, someone good for a three- or four-episode story arc, but someone who wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) stick around. One-night stands were thus tacitly approved of, if not encouraged—hookups were generally followed by a trio of snarkily congratulatory texts from the other members the next afternoon. Speed relationships were okay, as long as they had a quick, predictable three-act structure (the meet-cute and subsequent hookup; the whirlwind romance tinged with the suspicion that things were perhaps not what they seemed; the breakup and return to the fold, to the three comforters who could always be depended on, no matter how fickle men were).

  The Rebecca Wright of thirty-eight, thinking back to the blackout-season Becca of her mid-twenties, would recall that the assignations of the core group were the performance of love, rather than the thing itself. But for Becca, back then, all romance was performance. Once you realized this, Becca thought, once you understood that the inherent falseness of courtship wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, that it in fact served a useful purpose, then you understood that there was no need for these mating rituals to be long or elaborate, especially in the twenty-first century, when news could travel from one side of the world to the other in seconds. There was no rational reason that a quick wink couldn’t serve the same purpose as a love song.

  And so you got used to, and actually came to enjoy, these love affairs that were compressed in time, from years to days or even hours: the glance across a dance-hall floor, the hand on the shoulder, the third drink, the grind, the makeout session in a darkened booth. Maybe you traded digits, though Kate liked to give out fake numbers (“So he was like, I want to see you again, and I’m like, okay. Here’s my number. Got your cell? Okay. It’s: nine, four, five, eight, nine, one, nine, nine, nine, nine, NINE!”). Maybe you exchanged a couple of desultory text messages afterward (“u doin anything tonite?”), and maybe those led to a couple of one-on-one things. But more than one or two of those would start to attract warnings from the other girls, and it was hard to keep secrets from them. The combination of smartphones and BFFs meant that you didn’t have much privacy—one or another of your friends pinged you every hou
r or two from waking to sleeping, and the group as a whole took silent note if you dropped off the grid. Even a few hours’ absence was cause for curiosity. (“Someone wasn’t answering texts last night. I’m not naming any names, but I’m just saying that if I was in the middle of hooking up with some guy I’d only met at a bar a couple of days before, and my phone rang with our special chime, then I would take a quick break to text back. Because, priorities.”) Two or three days without a text from one of the girls constituted an emergency, and called for happy-hour bonding.

  Because after everything—after the failed job searches; after the harangues from your parents; after the hookups, after the breakups, after every fucking thing the blackout season threw at you—the core group would still be there for you. In troubled, nebulous times like these, it was important to have some dependability, some stasis. And if maybe you got a little bit tired of seeing the same women’s faces now and again, if Britt’s constant management of your social life started to grate a little (but it wasn’t like you had much of one anyway—you might as well let her handle it), if you got a little bit tired of Jen’s constant habit of telling you how long she’d been unemployed, or how she hated living with her parents, or how she couldn’t figure out what to do with her life (though if you ever wanted someone else to complain to, you could be sure you had a willing ear), if you got a little annoyed by Kate’s characterization of their lives as not just adolescence, but a second childhood laced with a wistful irony (though it was hard to turn down a text message that read “yay yaay come and play,” especially when you knew that it would involve vodka shots and potent weed)—if you got a little bored with all this, if you felt a little stuck in life sometimes, then that was a small price to pay for the comfort of a reliable social circle. Dependability was good. Stasis was good.

  Who broke up the core group in the end? Britt, that’s who! She met a dude on the Internet!