Selfie, Suicide

by Logo Daedalus

  Persistent Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder was the diagnosis he received- & with that on top of his persistent accumulation of other mental health disorders over his life, he was given a sentence of three months of monitored living in the institution. He took a plea deal with Flöskel, who charitably cut down their estimation of damages by half after they received Cairey’s testimony regarding his authorship of “Blue Moon,” the painting which had triggered his manic episode. The rest of the money was taken from his meager savings. He was also fined for lease breaking after Abigail got a restraining order against him & moved in with a friend. This was the path of least resistance, & he allowed these contingencies to be taken care of by others. All he did was sign what the lawyers brought him, with the blue pens they would give him, & then he would return to his Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. For the first time since his Youniversity days, he took up filling notebooks in ballpoint pen with sketches of knights, princesses, & black crowned satyrs. He planned to create a masterpiece- a comic book about the lost lake of his dreamworld.

  He seemed to be getting better & was eventually released from the institution with disability benefits, & a requisitioned tenement. Provided that he maintain his dosage schedule & make his appointments with his therapists, he would be taken care of for the rest of his life. Sinflate did not offer him his position back, so when he was set free again, in the Autumn, he lived, once more, as meagerly & as tenuously as he had when he’d first graduated. He never looked for a job.

  Sometimes, he wanted to. He thought about regaining normality in his life & becoming a productive member of the 21st century socio-economy- & a part of him did want this- but internally, he knew that his only options were the creation of his masterpiece- his dreamworld & paradise- or a responsible suicide which would keep him from leeching any further on the innocent. The former option proved difficult, far more difficult than he had imagined. He faced an onslaught of self-doubts, as he was still unsure whether or not he believed in art, or in his own dreams anymore. He decided to end his life almost every day, after spending hours tracing & retracing random panels of the comic book masterpiece he’d envisioned in part, only to crumple them, shred them, & bemoan the sheer pointlessness of it all. A month into this, he’d even procured a helium tank, as he’d read that this was the most painless method of suicide, but still he let his indecision rule, & procrastinated on a commitment to either option, opting instead to drug himself to sleep.

  Instead, he passed his time like he had when he was child- distracting himself with anything he could find. He figured, eventually, that he would decide one way or the other before his savings dried up entirely, as he could not survive, he’d done the math, on his monthly allotments alone, as he still had his tuition fees to pay. Nor, he thought, could he bear the pressures his bank exerted on his social-credit score. He did not want to grow old like this. After his thirtieth birthday, he decided that if he received some revelation of purpose, an idea which could constellate the knight, the princess, & the black crowned satyr, that he would reconsider his inevitable end. Months passed, & this revelation never came.

  Instead, he spent more months as frivolously as he always had when free- watching pirated television serials, old movies, browsing the internet aimlessly, learning all about the structures of immiseration he could not change, subsisting on frozen food, rice & beans- generally killing time until his inevitable killing time arrived. The only true respite from his failed attempts to create his masterpiece was the back-catalogue of Symon. It stirred a long lost joie-de-vivre when he watched it, & rewatched it, as he considered it to be “True Art.” He began to think that Simon LaFeint was just born to be a much better artist than he could ever hope to be.

  He watched & rewatched it hundreds of times. He analyzed it, & read thousands of pages of amateur analyses of it. But when the last season drew to the inconclusive open-end he’d witnessed in person, he considered this a sign that he would have to make the decision he’d put off for so long- & it was then that he’d decided he’d try- why not- a third option, just to see how it would go. He decided he could enter the humdrum reality of the real world again. He would do this, one last time, before committing to his departure. It was then that he registered for the dating app. It was thus that he matched with this fraudulent third Abigail, whose name he had taken, initially, as a presentiment of the revelation he sought. This decision spurred all of the events that lead him, here, to the bathroom stall outside the main exposition of the Museum of Expressive Humanism, where he was sprawled against a toilet paper dispenser, with a waning bout of derealization, reflecting on his life.

  Here he is now. Here is his ugly face, marked with every variety of human sputum, looking back at him from the toilet bowl, begging for a final judgment.

  He flushes it down the drain.

  He feels, once again, the relief of knowing that he is absolutely insane- a potential danger to himself & others. He is proud of himself for reigning in his destruction. He resolves to finally end it all, & remove himself from the world. He believes this is the best thing that he can do. He is glad he has limited his destruction to himself alone this time. But then remembers her. She’s somewhere out there, waiting for him.

  & what was her real name?

  THE REPOSITIONS

  Ophelia Drost looks up from her phone to see that the sound that had provoked her was the bathroom door opening- but it is another false alarm. Again, she thinks that maybe he’s left, & left with her coatcheck coin at that. Someone else has exited. She’s seen this fellow- & knows his biography, at least in miniature from the exposition. It was sad. She had guessed that he’d lost his wife at sea, tragically, from the way his presentation had gone. He looks like he’s been crying. He is the second man to have entered & left the bathroom. Neither of them had been Cairey.

  This is where he said he’d be, but he could have lied- but he did not seem to be much of a liar. In fact, she thinks their date has been going quite well, & for him to just leave- well, it seems out of the question- & if he were to come out- right- now- she’d regret her suspicions. He did look sick. He looked very sick, anyway. Must have been the brunch. Maybe he was already sick. Maybe he’d been trying to cover it up for her sake. That’s it- she thinks, he’s been sick the whole time & that explains it all.

  It has been twenty minutes since the end of the exposition. She’d gone right to the bathroom, expecting to find him, but he was not there, waiting for her, as she’d expected. So she waited, frustrated by the fact that he had no cell phone. What sort of person, she wonders, doesn’t have a cell phone? He’s one of those artist types, she thinks, an artist with a flu. She thinks of him wrapped in a blanket, on a sofa, with a box of tissues nearby- & she’s bringing him some warm soup, & he says “thank you.” She says to him- “Do you remember when we first met? You were so sick but you came anyway, & we went to the Museum…”

  She’s always getting married in her mind these days. It’s new for her. It suddenly came over her, like a sickness, in the last year. She had never even considered it before, at least, not really. Hormones or something, she guesses. Getting old. Her friends are all married now. Having babies. It just started happening, all at once, & she feels so jealous of them. She used to only feel pity.

  She’d never even “dated” before, not really. She’d done her fair share of wooing & screwing, but she’d always been more satisfied with her ability to capture than by the quality of her captures. They were always falling in love with her though. It had been terrible. They tried to tie her down. They spewed compliments & devotion until her rebuffs made them turn sour. Then she was no longer their sweet angel, but a demonic little whore. Typical hypocritical boys.

  & they always talked too much anyway. & they were always talking about themselves. Especially the handsome ones, the successful ones, they always showed her their resumes as if they were engagement rings. & the sex had gotten worse. They’d ask for a performance review, only to greet her feedback graceless
ly. Useless, really. Boring at best, all these boys she’d toyed with so easily for so long. She’d sworn them off a year ago, after her sister had her second kid. Now she wants a husband.

  She wants someone nice, someone less needy, less insecure, less neurotic, more- the only word she can think of is “chill”- which means to her: dependable, static, calm, easygoing, content- perhaps, unambitious? She wants someone who will view their relationship as their greatest ambition. She wants someone to hang out with. She wants a relationship like her sister has with her brother in law. Their lives just seem to make sense to her, organized as they are around the routines of domesticity, a son & a daughter, school schedules, holidays.. But maybe without the kids… But then maybe that could come along, after the wedding. She tries it out: Mrs. Ophelia Turnbull.

  She shakes her head at herself, having gone through this visionary disappointment thrice in the month already- imagining her life as Ophelia Dorner, Ophelia Pratt, & Ophelia Kraft, only to get ghosted in the sketching phase of a second date, dissolving their suburban house with two kids & a dog, their small but tasteful rural house with a swingset in the yard, & their brownstone which would have had a hanging garden… But this date was different, at least, it has been different so far. This Cairey’s such an odd character, a little rough around the edges, but that was manageable. Boys are easily cleaned up. What struck her was that he was so modest, so agreeable, so intent to listen instead of talk. Not once has she been interrupted- & this she has noted as an extreme anomaly. & his exposition, how mysterious! She knew he was an artist of some sort, but he never brought it up. All those drawings, & that quaint little house by the lake… Well, the security footage was… interesting… but it intrigued her. She wants to know the story behind it, & besides, her own exposition was far from spotless. She wishes he’d seen it, but she’d describe it to him later, that is, if he hasn’t already left.

  She recalls it to herself again. Spring showed her with her family on Easter, hunting for eggs, her in that little pastel bonnet. Summer showed her in high school, beaming in braces in her field hockey uniform. Fall showed her in college, taking pregame photos with the girls- oh she missed them! & Winter showed a photo of her from last year’s unofficial office new years eve party. She was pretending to kiss the lips of a ghost at midnight. It was a long running inside joke amongst her closer coworkers regarding a fictitious entity who caused minor inconveniences in the office. He misplaced pens, crashed email servers, & never made a new pot of coffee when the last one had finished. They called this spirit “Hamlet,” which they always said in a posh British accent. Over time, he’d become “Ophelia’s boyfriend,” because one time she’d answered with his name, as a joke, when a coworker had asked if she had any crushes on any of the office’s available bachelors.

  She’s forgotten the words that went along with the photos, aside from the last one, which she sort of remembers: Winter: Fantasy something… But the message seemed clear to her, with the theme of searching in Spring meeting with belonging in the Summer, & the same mirrored in Fall’s relationship to Winter… It obviously implied that she would find a husband. Maybe she already has, but he is missing, poor Cairey, in the bathroom. Maybe he is her Hamlet? But then she realizes that she’s back in the loop of her marriage thoughts, & she’s alway getting disappointed with them, so she flicks out her phone again.

  Jeremy posted another picture of his cat, this time he’s sleeping soundly on top of his refrigerator. She likes it. Charlie is upset about the results of an election in his home state, at least, according to the meme he’d posted which showed a cartoon of the conservative candidate shutting a door on a kindly looking cartoon of a young immigrant girl whose t-shirt says “The Future.” She scrolls past this one. She doesn’t do politics. Abbie posted her feet up on their coffee table with the caption “when the roomie is gone”- an inside joke between them which she responds to with several semi-ironical fuming-angry emojiis. Then it is back to posts she’s already seen- her cousin’s picture of her baby with a french fry up his nose; her college friend’s post promoting her boyfriends midafteroon “chillbeat” DJ set at the Sunrise Cafe; & then one of the ponderable posts of a girl she went to elementary school with who had clearly gone more than a bit off the deep end. Her post reads “Capricorn be like fuck your drama until she be like fuck yeah, drama” along with a cry-laughing emojii & the quoted comment “YAS.”

  So she flicks off her phone again. She checks the bathroom door again. Then she flicks on her phone again. She opens the web browser this time, which goes to her homepage, a site called “The Daily Affirmation.” She’s already seen today’s- a user submitted story about how the Daily Affirmation had “saved her life.” She flicks to her news aggregator, a popular one amongst her friends, who are generally, just to the left of the political center, whatever that means. The headline story is the surprising electoral loss that Charlie had commented on with his reposted meme. Below this are stories about protests in Latin America & Estonia, the Civil War in Tachikistan, another accusation of sexual misconduct directed at Yung Ko6ruh, a video from a Scottish zoo in which a lion cub is nestled amongst ewes- this one she clicks, watches, & then returns to the feed- next is an Op-Ed about the next industries that will be disrupted through automation, then celebrity wedding photos, which she almost opens but doesn’t, then the lackluster release of a sneaker which had a PR nightmare upon announcement due to its slogan “The Final Soleution” being deemed insensitive & potentially White Supremacist, despite a spokesman’s insistence that it was about their newly patented “smart foam” soles (the slogan was changed to “Mending Soles,” the article concludes), then a viral video sensation is covered for the trend of teenagers asking their teachers about the “The Sugondese Revolution,” then there is an article titled “Hypostasis of Dissimulation: Symon’s Endgame” speculating on the next move of Simon LaFeint after the lackluster finale of his television serial. She opens this one.

  The reporter, Afton Selinim, had dug into the assets owned by the LaFeint Trust & found a throughline between its patronage of the MEH; its investment in the Virtual/Augment Reality Gaming corporation, Finalest, which had become a household name in the last year due to the extreme popularity of Violent Delight…; & its major investment in Sinflate, some sort of AR pornography service. The reporter believes that the triangulation of these assets hints at what could be the quote-unquote invasion spoken of by Symon at the end of the show. He hypothesizes that his promise of total libidinal liberation could be the seedbed of some sort of Symon alternative reality game. The reporter then warns that the political consequences of this could not be ignored, considering Symon’s much-discussed links to “radical ideas” spawned by a peculiar sect of cyberaccelerationists, known or suspected mystic-techno-fascists &- here she swipes back to the aggregator, as she always does when a journalist warns about some great political danger as a means of harvesting clicks & ad-revenue. It’s another video game, she thinks, big fucking deal. TV writers are always making that leap these days. It’s just where the real money is.

  Her eyes glaze over the rest of the articles, so she switches to perusing sales from her favored clothing outlets. She scrolls, scrolls, scrolls through the virtual closet she peruses every day. No new items are on sale. She scrolls through the next, & the next, & the next- getting lost in her window shopping. Then she thinks she hears the bathroom door open- but when she looks up she finds that it hasn’t & Cairey is still nowhere to be seen. Fifteen minutes have passed since the last false alarm.

  Should she be worried? She decides to ask the next male she can if he could check up on Cairey, but in the mean time, she goes back to scrolling. She gets a text from her roommate asking “How’s the date?” to which she replies “Not bad but I might have lost him lol.” “What?” she is asked, “Long story she replies, then adds, “I think he has the flu or got food poisoning or something”- “oh no lol” - “right?” - “your luck smh”- “well” she replies, “we’ll see.” She clos
es it but opens it again to ask: “How’s the writing?”- she’s been working on a children’s book of her own, after years of editing others for the publisher they work for. She receives the reply “Don’t remind me, I’m procrastinating lol.” She replies “Well, that’s ok. No rush.” Then she receives: “It’s just” then “like I can’t figure out how to tie this one thing up” then “it’s starting to not seem like a children’s book really” then “maybe young-adult” then “idk, it’s not going well lol.” She replies “Awh, well, I’m sure it’ll turn out great.” She receives: “thanks.” Then she goes back to scrolling, but she can’t find an unexhausted feed to distract her. She’s already used up her typical timesinks. She sighs & flicks off her phone. Then she turns it on to check her reflection through its camera lens. She is disappointed with the breakout she thought she’d covered up. She zooms into it in high definition, inspecting her clogged pores & blemishes as she stretches her facial muscles in the warped poses of makeup application. She pulls the foundation & coverup from her purse & reapplies, with some satisfaction. She switches on the enhancement filter & admires herself- winking, making frowns & other goofy faces.

  This is who she thinks she is. This is her true face, she thinks, the one she wears inside. It is unjust, she thinks, that she must be tied to this flesh with its decay & aging. Someday she will be very old. The thought horrifies her. Her disgust sends shudders down her spine. She isn’t even thirty yet. She calms herself. She’s not eighteen, but she’s at least not thirty yet. There is plenty of time. Men still find her attractive. She has no shortage of matches on any dating site. She’s on a date right now. She’s a seven, at least. She isn’t hideous. Maybe she’d been an eight before, but seven is still better than six… much better than five! Her sister was prettier. She was maybe a nine, but she married an idiot, & he was getting fat, & she never recovered from the first kid. Now she’s a six. Their pictures are nice though. He is nice enough, even though he’s boring & dumb. They will have nice pictures to look at when they are old. The pictures would remain. That’s nice.