Distortion

by Gautam Malkani

  Ramona stares at the remains of my Old Man’s Big Mac. Her hands around my clenched fist like we’re on some kinda rock, paper, scissors thing. “Hey, on the bright side, at least I finally understand why you never want to introduce your family to me.” Flexing a smile to make sure I mimic it. Through the window, the light inside Liverpool Street Station is like the light in a shopping mall – wouldn’t even know for shit if it was daylight or night outside. “And at least his mad rush deadline explains why he chose fast food instead of taking you for a proper pizza or something.”

  I tell her I thought pizza was fast food. All them Saturdays straight after they split when he took me to Pizza Hut so that he could get me back home before on the dot. Cutting off the crust just to hurry me up. All them times we went for even faster food and them times he didn’t wanna risk no untried and untested unchain restaurants cos he was scared shitless of taking me home with an upset tummy.

  By the time Ramona’s finished making everything okay again, I’ve come up with two more reasons for why maybe he wanted to meet in Maccy D’s: Firstly, for the same reason people eat in McDonald’s when they travelling in countries where they wanna take the safe option – places where you drink Coca-Cola cos you don’t trust the water.

  Secondly, maybe he wanted to meet in McDonald’s cos that’s where we’d left off.

  20

  “SEE, DIDN’T I tell you?” Botched-Botox man standing in front of me like he’s some human pop-up ad. Nodding at the essay on my screen. Still donning his dickhead biker jacket, but this time with some piss-take preppy necktie. “I told you to just focus on your degree.”

  I’m studying in the office instead of data-entering. Popping Pro-Plus tablets instead of munching a Pret a Mortgage sandwich. Takes me a second to remember this guy’s now the Acting Head of IT in this place. I play along – apologise for doing degree stuff in the client’s office and on the client’s time. Tell him I’m falling behind at uni.

  “I told you that you would.” He starts walking away but then doubles back to re-inspect my screen. Scans the other desks of data-enterers, digitisers and Website Functionality Enablers. “We’ll continue in my office, Dillon. Just give me a minute to go get a sandwich. And then why don’t we continue in my office.”

  And once again with the walking-away-and-then-turning-back routine. As if he doesn’t realise that same shit is pulled by every limpdick line manager on the planet. Always forgetting their wallet/umbrella/scarf so they can catch what their undergimps get up to when they gone. Except this time when he turns back, it ain’t to scope out my screen. “Can I get you anything, Dillon? A soup or a sandwich? Some chocolate chip cookies?”

  Ramona had wanted to link up for lunch today, but thing is, sometimes I bail on autopilot even when I’m properly down for seeing her. Even when I’m done with all my involuntary morning vomiting malarkey. Even when I done whatever Mummy needs doing. Even when I been daydreaming about Ramona during my sleep dreams. Young Carer’s Playbook #472: Of the three forms of social exclusion – self-exclusion, forced exclusion and officially sanctioned exclusion – the first one typically leaves the largest deficit in a young carer’s personal development.

  Fine, Ramona said. She’d grab lunch with some other J. Doe instead. One of those brand-new oldest best friends.

  The botched-Botox man ditches the bread, just eats the sandwich filling with some plastic fork. Apologises for eating while chatting – packed schedule, etc. “Four days I’ve been doing this job and dealing with these people, Dillon, and already I’m sick of the digital archive.” Stool he’s got me sitting on is on some proper wobble. Maybe cos he’s just the Acting Head of IT, they given him an acting office. A name on his door and on his brand new business cards, but I figure that’s just some acting name. “As if they don’t even realise that everything’s a digital archive now. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a newspaper or a person or a grocery store – supermarkets are archives of product info and whining customer reviews.” Nods to himself like he’s nodding on my behalf. “Searchable archives. That’s the key. Everyone’s now a searchable archive of their own search histories. The logic of the database, Dillon – searching is the most performed activity in the digital world. So easy to do it that there’s no excuse not to.”

  Figure ain’t no point in me even trying to swipe away all these lectures of his. The man’s digital media sermons been hooking me in just like actual digital media does – like as if he’s on some mystical-knowledge-type shit. Like how everyone keeps going on social media to share articles about the effects of social media. Fuck it – people been logging onto the internet to read about the internet from jump.

  I tell him that the archives are just some side effect of custom-tailored personalisation/advertising/surveillance. Or is it other way round?

  He looks at me like why’s he even wasting his time with this.

  “Tell me, Dylan, you wear braces?” He’s now on sandwich number two. Raw steak that actually bleeds into the bread. Swallowing half of it whole before once again ditching the bread.

  “On my teeth?”

  “Over your shoulders – to hold up your trousers. Folks back home call them suspenders. Imagine the kind of transatlantic confusion that causes.”

  I tell him I don’t wear braces or suspenders.

  “Because the trouble with the so-called ‘belt-and-braces’ approach is people then neglect to fasten the belt as tightly as they otherwise would.” He munches another forkful of sandwich filling. The steak now so raw it’s like a lump of liquid, like it’s travelling back in time right in front of me – all the way from well done, to rare, to flesh tissue, to inseminated egg of a cow. “Or to take an example closer to your home, it’s like neglecting to wash your hands before making her breakfast just because you’d worn latex gloves. You see, in my case, the belt was me taking this fucking ridiculous job to overhaul the management of the digital archive project. The pair of braces was that terribly tragic accident in the external storage facility that closed off access to the physical stock of back issues. You’d think those two measures would have been sufficient. But, apparently not … ”

  Accident had been in the news all week – not the accident itself, the row about the road closures above it. Oh, and also the victim – the woman who got crushed by papers when the tunnel collapsed. I been checking for bulletins, updates, refreshing every page. This story has been amended since its original publication to reflect the fact that the victim isn’t critical.

  Correction: Actually, readers, it turns out that she’s dead. This story has been amended accordingly since its earlier amendment.

  Clarification: Not dead, just dying.

  Allow all that crapfuckery – if she dies, she’ll just stop producing new data is all.

  “By the way, I understand that right before your little expedition to the external storage facility last week, you walked into a hardware store and purchased a flashlight. I need to know why.”

  “Case it got dark.”

  “The place was fully lit. Backup generators, power couplings. Anything goes wrong, the dehumidifiers cut out but the lighting always stays on. Plus your cellphone has an inbuilt flashlight. All three of them.”

  Figure if I just stay hush, probly he’ll answer his own question. Or at minimum vomit out more intel. Dude’s proper addicted to mansplaining. Real question is why.

  “Well, I apologise for being remiss. I could have just given you a flashlight, Dylan. I appreciate that the micro-targeted ad for it kept following you around everywhere, popping up in every story you read, but, still, twenty-five bucks for a single-function flashlight is pretty steep for a student. Plus, I feel like I really ought to be giving you something – some kind of tool. How about I give you a single-function digital camera to make up for my oversight? Or a single-function watch or alarm clock? Maybe a single-function voice recorder?”

  “A dictaphone?”

  “Well, I usually just dial with my fingers.”

 
He longs out the silence while waiting for my non-response.

  “Okay, look, Dylan, I know you’ve been desperately distraughtly distressed about the fate of that security woman down there. You need to forget about her. Move on. You’ve got enough bearing down on your conscience as it is.” Next, he starts slapping out some drum roll on his desk. “Cried for her mummy, she did. While the paramedics were trying to free her. Pissed her panties too, apparently. Though that may have just been bladder compression rather than fear.”

  Check my face as he says this. I’m like the ghost of a goth with a sun allergy. How the fuck did I have the balls to hook up with my dad yesterday when I been warned by this maybe-actual-badass to stop poking the fuck around? Meeting him in broad train station daylight, even. Problem is, being told not to search for something is like being told not to think of something. Even more so now that you can reach into your pocket and look up anyshit you can think of. And because you can track down answers so easy, ain’t no excuse not to. And so you basically have to. Meantime, the time between wondering someshit and knowing the answer is shrinking all the time. Even if you try and block it or blank it or just long it out.

  Botox man pulls out his string of beads, starts meditating or mindfulating or whatever.

  “The fuck is with those beads of yours?”

  “Calculator.”

  “You what?”

  “It’s a single-function calculator, Dillon. Very early model, of course – pre-Casio. Pre-abacus, even. Anyhow, as I was saying a few moments ago, my failsafe belt-and-braces approach seems to have come undone. In its infinite cost-cutting wisdom, this company has now decided to reverse the decision to get rid of all you freelance data temps. They claim it’s too expensive to bring the digital archive project in-house. In other words, too expensive to hire enough staff. In other words, too expensive to do things properly. To dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and check all the fucking facts. Idiot blubbering bean-counters. I should’ve had myself drafted in as Acting CEO.”

  Man lets rip a fart like he’s signal-boosting my sigh of relief. My relief ain’t got shit to do with what he just said, though – it’s cos he clearly ain’t wised up to the fact I linked up with my dad.

  “Of course, the company’s U-turn means you’ll now get to stay on this project. Should you wish to. Though it also means that my job now entails making sure you don’t wish to. You see, I can’t just have you thrown off for performance-related reasons because the Managing Editor now has a sob soft spot thanks to all your young carer problems. And I can’t plant porn in your browsing history because, let’s face it, what could be more disgusting than the sob-story post-surgical porn you’ve already downloaded with apparent impunity. So you’re going to have to help me out here, Dylan. Because I wasn’t trained to deal with corporate compassion.” Anyone striding past his office will probly think we’re on that trendy reverse-mentoring crap, where the young digital native has to school up the C-suite dinosaur. “And to confuse me even more, I’m no longer even sure that even I want you thrown off.”

  When I ask him why not, he shrugs and comes out with some bullcrap about me not having much of a client roster – says I could use this place for references. “But in return for keeping you here, I want you to agree to something: I want you to continue doing exactly what you were doing when I walked up on you earlier – use the office facilities to help you with your studies. You’re smart enough to get a first if you put your whole mind to it. If nothing else, a first-class degree should land you a better position in the dole queue. You’ll need all the help you can get, seeing as how your parents’ generation have gang-banged the economy.” And again with his nodding on my behalf bullshit. “In any case, kid, you really need to stop feeling so guilty about studying. You’ve been acting like it’s a felony since primary school and, well, frankly, it’s getting irritating.”

  He’s now having some serious struggles trying to open a can of Diet Coke. Keeps fat-fingering the task. “By the way, Dylan, how come you don’t ask me why I’ve gone to all these elaborate aggravations and shenanigans? Even when I first took this job here, you just acted as if all this is to be expected.”

  Ring-pull now busted, he pulls a pocket knife from his double-breasted biker jacket and just cuts into the Coke can. Drinks straight from the stab wound. Laying the knife on his desk like as if he’s trying to show me it’s actually a surgical scalpel. Instead of shrivelling my testes as no doubt intentioned, the sight of the blade just morphs my balls into some same grade of stainless steel. I tell him that if he was gonna clue me in about what the fuck this is all about, he’d have already told me by now.

  “Come on, Dylan, just look at my fucking face. Because contrary to Hollywood and literary stereotypes, deformities and scarring don’t actually indicate villainy.” He chucks his sandwich wrappers and the uneaten bread in the bin. Followed by the stabbed-up Coke can. Followed by the scalpel. “And in any case, you don’t even really know what you’re doing, do you? Which makes me wonder why the hell you’re persisting in doing it. I mean, okay, sure, kid, I don’t need a flashlight or magnifying glass icon to see that you’re trying to make things right. But you got no idea what it is you’re trying to rectify. You already know that there’s no point trying to make sense of what’s happening here. And you know that exercising your intelligence without being in full possession of all the information is worse than ignorance. You know this. Yes. It’s known that you know this. After all, you’ve read all those stories about Oedipus.”

  Thing about Oedipus is he weren’t being foolish. Dude was actually acting proper rational, logical, flexing his brain cells. Got the hell outta Dodge to dodge the oracle’s prophecy of marital relations with his mum. Assumed he was innocent even when others started getting sus. Accusing all the haters of treason. Problem was he just didn’t have all the info.

  That’s all for today about Oedipus.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” I go. “Why keep longing out all these lectures? Why can’t you just fart out whatever the fuck it is you wanna say?”

  “I am telling you everything, Dylan. I’m telling you that you’re telling us everything. I’m telling you everything because you’re telling us everything. You people are so blasé about just giving it away. You give it away so easily because it’s invisible. If you could actually see all your digital data printed out on paper, it would be a very different story. Facebook alone probably has thousands of pages on you. Google maybe twice as much. You keep talking about my flatulence. Well, let me tell you that across the entire population of America, there are more Facebook likes per minute than then there are human farts. Every millisecond, Dylan. Every pixel of every moment. They should call it bigmouth data. No wonder you people binge on eight-season boxsets, six-volume autobiographies and overwritten novels.” He stops talking just long enough to decide not to stop. “And of course if you’re reading those overwritten novels on a handheld digital device, then the story is also reading you. Every page you skip, every paragraph you linger over. All of it adding it to your very own digital archive to help the algorithms determine what you read next. But, of course, you don’t read novels, do you, Dylan? Should give them a try sometime – I promise they don’t all read as if they were written by writers.” Next thing, he starts busting out some personalised book recommendations but then checks himself and clicks back to sermonising. “Or maybe you people act blasé because you’re lulled into a false sense of fluency by the term ‘digital native’. Of all the idiotic buzzwords. Absolves adults of the responsibility to tell you the things that I’m trying to tell you. Makes grown-ups dependent on you youngsters. You show them how to use their smartphones so that Mummy and Daddy can make their own way out there in the world – their faith in all this stuff based solely on your faith. Meanwhile, you outsource your faith in your gadgets to the gadgets themselves. It’s as if technology believes in itself on everyone’s behalf.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” I give it. “All this
fronting and badassery and basically you just some jumped-up Media Studies teacher?”

  “Come on, Dylan, you’ve already figured out that this isn’t about the media or online privacy – or even digital data. It’s about what your data does to you when it’s crunched up and processed and fed back to you.”

  He stops to let his breath sink in.

  “You chatting about Oedipus again, ain’t it? Predictions and recommendations and prophecies? Like how all our own digital archives are side effects of surveillance, predictions are side effects of the archives.”

  Starts scratching his face now – his Botox, his stubble. Same old salty dandruff (or ash or pixels or whatever). I still get dandruff in my knuckles from being so extra when washing my hands. Now an ad for hand sanitiser – antiviral as well as antibacterial. A story about people with OCD.

  “You saying they was right, then?” I ask him. “I mean Google and that. But if they was right, then that means that I was right too – to do what I done.”

  “Wherever you’re going with this, Dylan, I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Look, even if they were right, the predictions and recommendations and stories could’ve changed as a result of the teeniest little thing. Like if, say, I hovered my cursor over some story about Oedipus for just a couple seconds less, then the algorithms might have decided something different about my personality – about who I am. And then the predictions and recommendations would’ve been different. Wouldn’t have dragged me out so far.”