by Helen Razer
Obviously, this fantasy was baneful and unsound, but it did achieve two things. First, I was so disgusted by myself I had a long shower. Next, I made a date for that evening with the only other user who had not yet urged me to die in a fire.
*
RedHot, so called for his birth in the former Soviet Union, was nice looking and functionally literate. He was also, as his profile had it, ‘completely down to fuck’. He told me I was pretty and promised me a ‘ride’ on his ‘Big Slavic Cock’.
These were not complicated or long exchanges. The ecstasy of communication was not provided here. But perhaps it was better not to be drawn into such tosh. One falls in love with writing itself and, as seen in the Sandra correspondence, or in the data centres of Google, we all tend to leave an embarrassing document behind if we are not especially careful.
John was the kind of person that could only entice a literature of humiliation from me. I would spend time writing to him and find myself quickly transformed into an unpublished E.L. James.
No one should write when they are horny. There ought to be a law.
I would fix my unhealthy relationship with words and go to meet a man who didn’t care for words very much at all. We would leave no written record. We were completely down to fuck.
‘Words must serve me,’ I wrote on an open document. ‘Not I, them’. This happened to be written, I noticed, beneath words that I had served up two nights before:
When the dazzling smile of youth goes dark, it’s time to turn to the high-wattage magic of an adult tooth fairy. Say Bibbidi-Bobbidi BOO to unmagical teeth as the Whitening Wand restores the light for only $39.95 for your first session!
This shit that had met the bills should have been so easy to write. But this discount copy had come to slash my happiness by half. That’s 50 per cent off the everyday price. A person less afflicted by the worship of words would just have damn well written words and not sustained so many workplace injuries from them. But I had, in fact, been fairly wounded by words. Words had abused me, I thought. Which was not something I could report to my union.
I knew that I liked to use words for their own sake and had been told often that I loved the sound of my own voice. Which is true; my religious ecstasy is communication. It was not true that this allowed a practical approach to online dating. Or to anything much, really.
So I tried to forget John’s ephemera and anticipate the real Big Slavic Cock instead. A Big Slavic Cock that would not make me write things. One that would permit undocumented pleasure.
Sex, and not words, in black and white. No shades.
I would meet RedHot that evening. Wordless and waxed. The appointment with Eleni was made.
9
Forty-seven hours and two privacy violations since she left
It is still the case that on bad days I blame John for problems he did not actually cause. Which is not to say that he would not cause me some actual problems. He would. (Did you really think I’d not pursue with the stubborn force of US foreign policy someone who sent me a sex terrorism message like his? Sometimes I don’t think you ‘get’ me at all!) But the problem for which I would briefly blame him that day really wasn’t his fault.
It is possibly true that if John had answered my messages within a reasonable period instead of making me wait an actual hour while he selfishly enjoyed the beach I would not have gone out to the shed again and checked the ex’s Facebook account more thoroughly. But it is certainly true that I would have found out about C’arter at some point if it hadn’t been that afternoon.
Now, I can’t say why the ex hadn’t changed her password and, again, I want to remind you that I once sent money to Edward Snowden, or some other noble person exiled for their commitment to internet privacy. But you try discovering that someone with a name like C’arter is associated with your just-departed ex and see if you can’t help looking.
I was charmed to learn, thanks to the unforgetful internet, that C’arter was very recently known as Carter, and so she had not been catastrophised by her parents but had embarrassed herself.
Naturally, I was delighted by this artless apostrophe. But I was somewhat less delighted to learn that the fortnight C’arter had spent speaking with my ex was sufficient to inspire a declaration of love, gifts from Amazon and a minute-by-minute account of all my elasticised farts.
Everything. Everything I did that could be observed had been reported by my ex in real time to this pretentiously punctuated stranger. There were thousands of words, many of them even more passionate than those exchanged with Arty Sandra. Those that did not optimistically describe the pair’s glorious imagined future described my real and miserable recent past. And they did so rather impatiently, sometimes cruelly, and almost always as-it-happened.
My life had become the material for an awful live and private blog. I saw that the ex had paused at the traffic lights on the drive to her uncle’s Christmas dinner to write C’arter a message while I was sitting beside her.
‘I have the Butthole Surfers turned up max so I can’t hear Helen droning on again about federal politics,’ she wrote, as Locust Abortion Technician sounded even louder than my complaints about tax concessions to the rich.
‘I guess I should be nicer to her,’ she wrote. ‘Because when I leave her for you, she’ll never see this family again.’
‘Helen is in her blue flannel nightdress *again*.’
‘Helen doesn’t want to go out to the pub *again*.’
‘Helen is asking me to turn down the Goa trance so she can do her dumb work *again*.’
‘I swear, she enjoys being a martyr.’
(For those up the back: this last statement was not made entirely without recourse to reality.)
It is unpleasant enough to snoop. It becomes intolerable when the snooping reveals that you have yourself been snooped on. She’d had me under steady surveillance and kept a sedulous record of my faults.
There was some general moaning to C’arter about the tiresome quality of my kisses and my cooking. She found my gardening too methodical and my attachment to disposable disinfectant wipes extreme. Between these tedious facts lay a few fancies. Many of these fibs concerned finance, specifically that I lay about most of the day while she worked much harder for the money, etc.
In her fictional reading of things, I was terrible at sex and at yard work, and this was possibly true. And that I was a terrible provider, which was absolutely not. It’s perhaps the only thing I’ve ever been much chop at. I have never made my lady rich, but I always kept her in tolerable ease.
It was awful to be called a bad wife and a bad husband, but the thing that troubled me more than anything was the assault on my blue flannel nightdress.
I really loved that blue nightdress. I’d even named it—Elsa, after a domesticated lioness that is not keen on leaving her cage for the wilderness at the end of an old film about gamekeepers. I’d had Elsa for several seasons and she’d just hit the perfect soft spot between baby harp seal and total collapse so that I couldn’t bear the thought of replacing her with something more appropriate to summer. But as I was wearing Elsa now, I found that she no longer provided great comfort. Along with all my most intimate secrets, Elsa had been shredded with C’arter.
Our life together had been diminished and edited and upcycled for this ardent thread.
I wanted to log off. Until the unlikely appearance in this long conversation of a particular word modified in my guts to the texture of ash and I kept reading.
It’s a silly word. I feel silly telling you about it. But it’s possible you might find some personal use in being told about this silly thing.
The ex and I had, as couples do over time, developed a range of ridiculous names to address each other when no one else was listening. Those things that intimates call each other, like ‘Sugar Bear’ or ‘Fluffetina’ or, I don’t know, ‘Beyoncé my Fiancée’. I saw that the most private one of ours had been disclosed.
The ex had come to call me ‘Bunnum’, a po
rtmanteau, I guess, of ‘bunny’ and ‘possum’, and look, there she was using it to address C’arter, a young American woman who she had not yet met beyond electronic networks. ‘I think I love you, Bunnum,’ she wrote.
Even as the hand-me-down donation of this name conferred a kind of vindication—I was, as far as I knew, its original bearer—it was also, in my view, the most fatal violation. We were over. Over. Didn’t matter how.
Well. I say that we were over and I imply that I had arrived at a wise conclusion. And perhaps some portion of me had become terribly wise and resigned. But this portion was deep beneath layers of me, who is, as we now know, nothing if not a dick. So I stayed for a few more rounds of ‘truth’ on the internet.
There I learned that C’arter was twenty-five, had ‘skin like a teen angel’ and shared a keen interest with my ex, recently turned forty, in the Myer–Briggs Type Indicator—a form of widely discredited personality testing that makes the work of L. Ron Hubbard seem almost scholarly by contrast. They were both ‘INTJ’, or something, and therefore among the rarest and most special test-takers on the planet. They had met on an ‘INTJ’ page, which was full of people congratulating each other identically for their uniqueness.
I had heard about this ‘INTJ’ malarkey once before when writing copy for a recruitment company’s website. I was speaking to one of the company’s grumpy MBAs who happened to be particularly cheesed that day by job-selection committees. ‘Why do they rely so often on unproven behavioural tests, like that stupid Myer–Briggs?’ he asked, as though some shit writer like me would have any satisfying answer. He hated Myer–Briggs. He had told me its popularity in the recruitment sector was due to something psychologists called the ‘Barnum Effect’.
The Barnum Effect. Which I will always now misread as the Bunnum Effect.
The promoter PT Barnum famously promised that his shows had ‘something for everyone’. So tests like these, which offer all the one-size-fits-most flattering complexity of horoscopes, do the same kind of thing. One broad and becoming description—either of a personality type or a star sign—worked to validate large numbers of naïve people eager to be entertained. In this case, not by Barnum’s circus but by stories about themselves. So, large numbers of people, including human resources managers who probably should know better, continued to believe in this unscientific crap, the MBA told me. ‘It’s just vanity.’
I looked at the page where they had met. Apparently, the ‘INTJ’ was the very rarest personality type distinguished by ‘complexity of character’ and the ‘unusual range and depth of our talents’. Which is, of course, exactly how most modern people, including me, like to think of ourselves.
C’arter and the ex had great faith in the personality type a few minutes of internet testing had awarded them. Together, they were forging complexity and depth of a type that couldn’t even be imagined by a common personality like mine. Which, they had agreed, was probably ‘ESFJ’.
I didn’t even bother looking that up as I have always had little patience for psychometric bullshit, and in that moment even less for my own pettiness. That was enough snooping.
I finally didn’t care to know more or be further tempted to compare my virtues against those of a Bunnum replacement so dubious even Arty Sandra was now looking both tolerable and sane.
I did think about finding C’arter’s phone number and telling her she was a slut, and a slut who was not rare but quite undistinguished by talent or complexity of character. I did think about facilitating conversation between her and Arty Sandra, whose intimacies with my ex had overlapped in time. I imagined that Rare C’arter and Arty Sandra could possibly call each other sluts.
I wanted to do this not because I had that much active vengeance left in me—my capacity for that was almost as diminished as my appetite for food. I just wanted to do something that would serve as a funeral for my partnership. I wanted to bury it.
Another, more expedient marriage burial rite revealed itself. I was still logged in to the ex’s account and able to hijack her status. I wrote ‘I am a Dirty Pigfucker who enjoyed both actual sex and guilty internet sex in my shed while my ex-girlfriend Helen toiled in a low-prestige job she hates.’
It was over. So over. Facebook over.
The status disappeared almost immediately, as I was confident that it would. Recently she had been as fast with Facebook as she had long been with her beer. It was gone. Then, my phone sounded from the pile of stinking bones. I knew it was her. I just let it go. I couldn’t exhume it.
I do know that I behaved like a stinking lunatic. The evidence of my stinking lunacy, which I would soon write all over the social internet, abides, and I was even somewhat aware that I belonged in a hospital for the freshly deceived. I knew that my ex was entitled to leave me. I knew that I had made it unpleasant for her to stay. I knew that I had been rotten in the past and that in the present I had little control over my libido or my foul tongue, and that poring over her correspondence looking for ‘clues’ was the work of an utter nut-loaf who’d been rising in a hate-oven for some time.
But I did stop looking so closely at the corpse of our marriage that third day. I knew that however hard I looked and whatever ‘proof’ I continued to find about the nature of this homicide, it was me who would remain a bloody crime scene.
‘You can’t solve a case whose probable location is you,’ I wrote in a text to Celine.
Celine: OMFG, are you a divorcée or a really bad episode of CSI?
Helen: LIFE IS A HATE CAKE MADE OF LIES.
I unwrapped the ruins of the chicken, but ate none. For an hour I lay with the cat, who did eat. All was deferred as I sobbed, just once, for the death of my blue nightdress and the theft of my nonsense name, just in time for the dolphin.
10
Forty-eight hours and two deceits since she left
Eleni, who was now making a big show of blowing on the wax to cool it before it entered my anus, said that I smelled of chicken. I said that this was unsurprising, but refused to elaborate. ‘Why do you smell of chicken on your hair, hands and dolphin-gina?’
I reminded Eleni that she had just told me words were hopeless, so I was doing everything I could to avoid using them. A vow that lasted just until this arrived:
Anticathexis: I didn’t really pull my weight on that last message and for this I can only apologise and roundly blame the weather or the lure of its antidote, St Kilda beach. I fear that I have let things pause uncomfortably. Perhaps, to resume, we could just have a meta-conversation as the young people do, but I’m not really sure what that is and what it might involve. Um, hot innit? J Winking smiling face, perhaps with some animation.
Oh!
MidLifeISIS: A meta-conversation? Is that when our conversation has as its central topic the fact of our conversation? Plainly, I’m not sure what it is, either. But I have recently learned that words uttered for their own sake can be dangerous and that conversation that is too self-reflexive quickly kills promise. How do these things usually proceed, otherwise? Do we talk? I’m new here. It is warm. However, I am currently enjoying an evaporative cooler. This is a very efficient system.
With my dolphin turned up and towards the goddess Eleni, my thumbs shoved the screen at speed. It is difficult to exchange suggestive witty thoughts about the weather when you have access to neither paragraph breaks nor pants. However, I continued:
MidLifeISIS: I trust the beach provided some partial relief. Mildly smug emoticon, wearing sunglasses.
Anticathexis: Helen, the beach was not especially refreshing and nor was the sunburn I found there. I fear the chief benefit was an hour spent in an air-conditioned vehicle. I hope your efficient, evaporative AC was effective in cooling you down. Is it a bit creepy for a guy to go to the beach by himself? I wasn’t there long as I had to leave my keys unattended while swimming. It remains so extraordinarily hot.
‘Hot,’ I said, and Eleni asked me why I looked so happy.
‘Was it good news?’ she asked.
/> ‘Shh,’ I said, as she knows I know and like her sufficiently well to permit such rudeness.
MidLifeISIS: John. Of course it is unacceptable for a solitary man to spend even a moment at the beach. Unless, of course, he has a surfboard, a metal detector or a warrant to arrest a man alone at the beach. I am surprised you find it necessary to ask. After no more than four hours’ experience with ‘online dating’, I have already lost faith in an algorithm that describes you as ‘well mannered’.
MidLifeISIS: Oh. And. Evaporative cooling worked as efficiently as it always does in our dry climate and I was not much troubled by the heat. Thank you for your query and for the opportunity to describe the fascinating events of my go-go day.
I no longer felt the pain of waxing. Actually, I was no longer being waxed. Eleni had moved on to a complimentary head massage.
Anticathexis: ‘Well mannered’? Don’t blame the algorithm: garbage in, garbage out.
I tried to come up with a database-themed gag, but returned little. Probably because my head now felt so good.
MidLifeISIS: I got nothing. No function jokes from me. Frowny face. Perhaps we ought to have continued discussing the relative merits of refrigerant vs. evaporative air-cooling?
Anticathexis: Yes, let’s do. I don’t have algorithm jokes either and I refuse* to use a search engine to support this conversation—a restriction that also limits my capacity to talk about the relative merits of different types of air conditioning. I can talk about the absence of air conditioning, but where does that get anyone? Forward, without the luxury of paragraphs, I proceed. I imagine today you are enjoying your evaporative system, watching the cricket with a couple of tinnies in a vintage Australian World Series outfit circa 1983 (despite the fact it’s a Test Match). I’m obviously doing the same, but without the AC. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! P.S. You asked how these conversations generally proceed and I answer that this is contingent on a range of factors, although a general fade-out of quality and quantity of messages may be the most usual mode. I’ve been told that quite a few females here have been messaged by someone who wants to lick their feet. Has this happened to you yet? *Refusal is based on a passing whim and is in no way binding.