When she came home from a long day of fielding her boss’s calls in the PR department, she hurried past the emptiness and the construction to her tiny studio with its white walls and glossy white concrete floors and exposed ductwork. It was faux fancy with cheap appliances and countertops made from re-purposed black floor tiles, but she liked the sterility — a blank slate for her inchoate life — although the floor-to-ceiling windows and the noisy HVAC system disturbed her, provoking her brain to matrix meaning onto passing shadows and white noise. She remembered how she’d always see faces in the floral wallpaper of her childhood bedroom in Ohio. She would sleep steeped in sweat, her face burrowed beneath the flannel sheets because she didn’t want to imagine anyone was watching her.
“I like that picture of you in the yellow dress.”
If you searched her name in quotation marks, she wore the dress in the second image result, directly after her LinkedIn profile image. A couple years ago, when her family friend Kayla had gotten married, she’d taken snapshots with various friends and included them on a public blog with their names in the captions. The years she and Kayla had known each other had been spawned by their fathers’ work relationship. Those evenings, the parents drank wine and whiskey in the living room and ordered the girls to play, and Cleo had nervously obliged, feeling a deep admiration for the leggy girl who stood three inches taller than her. They pretended to cook with a plastic toy kitchen and played games like Uno and Operation — sometimes Cleo would touch the tweezers to the metal edge of a body cavity and light up the cartoonish man’s red nose just to see Kayla gleefully clap her hands. When Cleo’s father found a different job with a different company, the playdates ended, even though Kayla lived just down the street. At school, she was polite, but she didn’t seek Cleo out at recess, and Cleo didn’t have the nerve to ask why. In retrospect, Cleo’s father was the intended wedding guest, probably added to the list by Kayla’s father, and Cleo was a necessary extension of that invitation. But in the wedding photo, Cleo looked like a close friend of Kayla’s, arms encircling each other’s waists, even though they now only spoke briefly every other year, usually by Facebook messenger. The image was more flattering than any selfie or snapshot that Cleo had ever taken. It didn’t even look like her. Her chin was strong and raised. She looked bold and assertive. After years of tending toward obsequiousness, this photo’s persona was the one she still struggled to cultivate in her day-to-day life. Who cares, she finally decided, if the Twit ter pest found a perfectly respectable photo of her that any idiot could find in two seconds?
The brain likes to discern patterns when there aren’t any. Evolution had rewarded the quick recognition of allies and potential threats, faces and approaching footsteps. When the AC kept clicking and knocking around, she recalled the persistent messages and imagined she heard someone walking in her room. Her pulse quickened, picturing someone pausing to leer over her bed. She recalled a Henry Fuseli painting she’d seen in a textbook in high school where a demonic spirit sits on the torso of a woman lying supine, her arms flung over her head and dangling from her chaise. The demon scowls directly at the viewer as if to say,you’re next, and, perhaps a greater oddity, a white-eyed black horse observes from the shadows. Now, in her sterile studio, she imagined the demon on her chest, and just like her childhood self, she played dead, but this time, she enacted a digital death. She deactivated her Twitter account.
As she drifted to sleep that night, she thought about Dan030506 (or whatever name they would use for resurrection) trying to pull up her Twitter profile and instead finding the words, This account does not exist. She reassured herself that this would be the end of it. She grew smug, lying on top of her sheets, her fan stirring the air so that she could feel each pulse of coolness on her exposed skin.
The next day she sat at her desk, filing expenses for her boss — receipts for drinks and dinners with celebrity clients. It gave her a simultaneous thrill of importance and wave of resent ment to see the A-list names and the cost of their outings. No one covered her drinks, professional or otherwise. She’d never attracted that kind of attention. A montage cascaded in her mind’s eye — attending each homecoming with friends as friends, being rejected by her calculus partner when she asked him to prom, and numerous flashes of men approaching her at bars and asking her to introduce them to her apparently more attractive acquaintances. She decided Bob/Cindy/Dan must be a bot after all. Or maybe some teenager getting off on pranking strangers without a lived sense of what it meant to be truly alone in a city, left to wonder who would find your body after reading stories where only the stench led neighbors to find the corpse, its face eaten by a starved and ruthless pet. That old cliché was real.
Of course, she didn’t have any pets. She didn’t even have any neighbors. Not next door anyway. So far, only one other unit was occupied on her floor, three doors down, and she hadn’t met the guy; she’d seen him at a distance, collecting mail in the front entryway. Each time she’d spotted him, he’d worn nice blazers with torn jeans, and the scent of weed wafted from his apartment each night. Three doors down, he might never smell the decay.
Once she’d bought a box of frozen coconut-crusted shrimp as a treat. Nearly all her food came frozen from a bag or a box. She heated the shrimp in the oven, poured herself a glass of wine, and sat by the window, alternating bites and sips. On the street below, she noticed an old man with a knife scraping at the sidewalk like he was shucking stale bubblegum, picking up chips of something and inspecting each piece before tossing it aside or depositing it carefully into a canvas tote bag. She was so enthralled, so curious, that she ate a shrimp whole and felt it sit dumbly on the back of her throat, fully blocking her airway. So this is what choking is like, she’d thought. She had recalled that one couldn’t cough when choking, and now she knew it to be true. Curiosity turned to panic. She considered running down the hallway and banging on the neighbor’s door, but what if he wasn’t even there? She had read that one could perform the Heimlich maneuver on one’s self using the back of a chair, but she had only tiny, backless bar stools with a two-top to maximize the space of her tiny studio. She began pounding on her own diaphragm. She was just about to dial 911, even though she knew she wouldn’t be able to say a word to the operator, when the coconut breading finally grew soggy enough to deglove the shrimp and ease the obstruction another inch or two down her throat, allowing enough air to pass so she could cough. Afterward, she had finished her wine in three long gulps and then laughed to herself, thinking of her parents pausing their current network TV show, probably a crime procedural, and receiving the news that their daughter had died so pathetically.
The bosses left for lunch and the office grew quiet. The other assistants already knew each other and liked to eat at the cafeteria together. She was still new and unknown, so she ate at her desk, spreading out the contents of a protein pack from the coffee shop that faced the main gate of the lot. You had to walk past the security booth to get back in. Normally she hated the inconvenience of scanning her card to go back inside, but to day she liked the protective exclusivity. Surely the studio ran a background check on anyone with a pass. She was nibbling carefully on an overcooked egg when she got the email from [email protected]. Subject line: Hey Cleo, remember me?
She pushed her food aside. Her skin tingled with heightened awareness, not unlike the sensation of embarrassment, but she knew logically that any shame was misplaced. Regardless, the effect was the same. She wanted to hide, to remain unseen, even as she found herself clicking on the message, needing to know its contents.
I’ve been thinking about the way your left lid hangs lower than your right. There’s something about it. Makes your smile seem more real. Do you mean it, when you smile?
Nauseated, Cleo stared at the smear of peanut butter and crumbled egg yolk that still sat in her cardboard lunch tray. She heard laughter and hurried to minimize the screen before the first wave of lunch goers rushed back into the open cubicles. Her neighbor Jill scooted in her
roller chair toward the shared table that divided their workspace and placed a croissant next to Cleo’s keyboard. Cleo was sure that men would ask her for Jill’s number. She wore silk blouses with bold prints and knew how to wear fuchsia blush without looking like a clown.
“They gave me an extra pain au chocolat at the pastry cart,” Jill said.
Jill was the only coworker who had tried to make small chat with Cleo. She was Miss Congeniality, always retweeting her coworkers’ accomplishments with extra emojis or surprisingly perfect GIFs. Whenever Cleo felt jealous about a Twitter post declaring a career milestone or major life achievement — a pro motion, a marriage, a dog — she would inevitably see Jill reply with something adulatory soon after. They were in PR. Maybe this was all part of building her brand and network. Maybe Cleo was in the wrong field.
In tenth grade, Mrs. Farmer had found Cleo crying in the back of the theater after the auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mrs. Farmer was always wearing bright, asymmetrical earrings that she made herself out of clay. She sat next to Cleo, a childishly crafted dolphin spinning from her ear. “Better luck next time, my dear,” she’d said, clearly not knowing Cleo’s name. Cleo told her she’d never even auditioned. She was upset because she couldn’t bring herself to. That was when Mrs. Farmer told her words to live by: Pretend. Pretend you are ready for the things you want, or else you never will be. Cleo wanted to know how to please people. She tried drama. She tried debate even though she puked the morning of each tournament. At a career fair, one of the moms — a cheerleader’s mom — gave a talk about her PR firm, and that was it. What power, Cleo thought, to make the world see things the way you want it to. But now someone was messaging her, forcing her to see things the way they saw them — the way they saw her.
“I already ate,” Cleo said.
Jill’s smile grew a bit stiff. “You can just throw it away if you don’t want it.”
“Sorry, I appreciate it,” Cleo registered Jill’s displeasure and struggled to course correct. “I just got a weird email,” she confided.
“The one from Ted? You’d think he’d know better than to force his diet on us. I heard he came in late last night to switch all the yogurt and cheese snacks with nonfat versions.”
“No, I don’t know who it’s from.”
Jill leaned in expectantly. Then, after an awkward pause, it dawned on her that Cleo was done explaining. “If you’re worried about it, you could probably ask IT to see if they can trace the IP. It’s a long shot, but you never know.”
But Cleo didn’t want to share that message with anyone. It felt too intimate. At the end of the day, after she locked her boss’s office, she returned to the email. Why, she wondered, would someone seek her out in this way? In college, she had earned As and Bs, but she never drew attention to herself with a prestigious award or a riveting social life. Freshman year she was one of only three girls on her floor who never joined a sorority, and when the dorm emptied on Fridays, they would play Scrabble or Monopoly and eat pizza. It was true that she could not remember their names now, even though it had only been a handful of years, but that wasn’t by choice. Those girls had immersed themselves in their other majors, their new friends, and off-campus lives. The closest friends she had were from high school, from debate team and study groups, and they had dispersed to various parts of the country. She had stayed at the local college, living with her parents for the final two years of her degree. Surely if she had offended anyone, she had done so ages ago for reasons she could no longer recall. She had spent her adult years combatting her tendency toward lackluster invisibility. She was never given the chance to seriously offend anyone. That would require knowing a person well enough to disappoint or betray them.
Now she said to Jill, “I don’t know why anyone would do this.”
“There are some real sickos out there,” Jill said, leaning close again. “I’ve had some weird messages myself. And a couple stalkers.”
“But why me? It doesn’t make sense.”
“And it made sense when it happened to me?” Jill said.
Cleo could see Jill’s goodwill melting away, her features closing, hardening.
“I’m sorry,” Cleo said. “I just meant, no one knows me. No one pays attention to me.”
Jill didn’t say anything. She tapped her nails on the desk a couple times and swiveled back to her computer. Cleo let the numbness of rejection seep through her. She had learned to embrace the prickling empty feeling of being embarrassed or discarded. Filing was mindless. She resumed filing.
“Drinks after work tomorrow?” Jill said without looking at her. “I don’t usually go out Wednesdays but sounds like you could use a chat.”
“That’d be nice,” Cleo said, aiming for a casual tone.
She drove home on autopilot. Some lizard-brained part of her was observing traffic signals and picking the usual path without demanding any serious attention on her part. Cleo was oscillating wildly between unease and wild hope. The messages still disturbed her, but now there was Jill to look forward to. Jill laughed easily. It startled Cleo to hear Jill laugh suddenly in a thick bout of silence. She wanted to be jolted. She often felt that she was drifting down a winding creek, reaching for boulders and low-hanging branches but never reaching shore — only the sameness of that soft water carrying her along without any meaningful encounters.
That night, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, noticing for the first time just how asymmetrical the creases of her upper eyelids were. Her left lid began to look droopy to her. She found herself searching online for images of ptosis and then accounts of corrective surgery. Patients lamenting their progressively weakening levator muscles. She tried lifting her eyebrows and assessing the degree to which each eye reacted. It was subtle, but she could tell: the left side failed to achieve the same degree of wide-eyed shock.
She heated up a frozen egg roll and ate it without any condiments. In the street below, the old man was chipping away at the sidewalk, crouched to nearly crawling on all fours. When he reached the streetlamp beneath her window, he unfurled himself, hands cradling his lower back, his face basking in the harsh fluorescence. She withdrew into the shadows as though he could see her. She crawled into bed without brushing her teeth, not wanting to risk another obsessively self-critical staring session. Sleepless and suffocating beneath the sheets, she listened to the rattle of the AC. Each time it reached the thermostat setting, the unit shut down for a few minutes, ushering in a sudden lapse of sound. She strained to hear. Just when she thought she could make out the knife scraping concrete, the AC would kick back on, industrial blasts of air sluicing through the ductwork.
In the morning, before she left for work, she received a notification about the profile she kept on the beta version of a free dating website. She had never gone on a date, through the site or otherwise. She liked browsing through other people’s profiles, and sometimes she liked the strange, desperate conversations users would have with her. She hadn’t checked it since the move, and her location was still listed as Minneapolis. She hoped to find nothing but the usually banal messages. A mass grave of “Hi, how r u?” The occasional and endearing “I like that book too!” Of course, one always had to deal with guys who had studied the manifestos of self-declared pickup artists, the occasional half insult or “You’d be really hot if …” On this day, she would have gladly sifted through a hundred of those messages. Instead she found a message from Dan030506. He’d duplicated his screen name to make sure she’d know. She thought about deleting without reading, but if he had detailed any violent wish, she needed to know.
I’m glad I found you here. But you should change your profile picture. The yellow dress is better. About the questionnaire : I saw that you would rather burn a flag than burn a book. I think you haven’t fully thought this through.
Clearly, he’d read through all of her content on the site. When interested, she’d also read through other users’ Q&As — comprised of a list of questions generated b
y users and ranked by popularity. The answers were used to algorithmically generate matches. Had she matched to him? Had he figured out her real identity by hacking the site? Or did she know him from real life and he had used her basic stats and location to find her profile?
She told Jill all about the messages at drinks. Jill picked out the red vinyl booth in the corner, said it was her usual spot. Cleo liked that she had a stake in something so trivial, a territorial love for the corner of a watering hole. She wanted to have spots that were hers, not by right but by assertion of her will.
“You need to accept that people will feel entitled to your attention,” Jill said, “but you don’t have to give it to them.”
“The issue is more a matter of safety,” Cleo said.
“Ah,” Jill said, sipping thoughtfully on her martini. “Do you think he knows where you live?”
“He, she, they. I don’t know who this person is or how much they know.”
Jill leaned back in her booth, twirling an olive on a toothpick. “Huh. You really think it could be a woman?”
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 17