by Kevin Nguyen
It only got worse from there. The reporter interviewed several parents to ask them if they knew what their children were doing when they used a computer. None of them had firm answers. The reporter wasn’t subtle in her attempts to drum up parental fears about what their kids might be doing on the internet.
At the end of the segment, Brandon appeared on camera to defend Phantom. He was in rare form. Usually confident and well-spoken, he looked totally unprepared. He stumbled over his statements, leaning on vague responses and the occasional clumsy question-dodge. Finally the reporter asked, “What kind of commitment can you make to combating the bullying problem on your software?”
“At Phantom, we are wholly committed to stopping bullying wherever we can,” Brandon said.
“But what does that mean?”
Brandon appeared only to have canned non-answers. “We’re going to do everything in our power to take this problem seriously.”
The anchor pressed, the slightest hint of a grin forming at the corner of her mouth the moment she realized she could go in for the kill.
“You’re not saying anything meaningful.”
“No, we—”
“Tell us one concrete step you will take to ridding your software of bullying.”
I was surprised when Brandon answered coolly and eloquently. He’d practiced the nuclear option. “We’re dedicated to the safety of our users, which is why we’re going to start monitoring Phantom for inappropriate messages.”
As the video clip came to an end, we all knew exactly what it meant. Emil had won. We would start saving user messages. At Phantom, nothing would disappear anymore.
* * *
—
JILL WAS TALLER THAN I’d expected, though I didn’t know what exactly I had expected from the tiny black-and-white author photo on the jacket of her book. It reminded me of an online avatar, a small square picture meant to represent an entire person.
But Jill was tall, nearly six feet. Her posture was slightly hunched in the way someone is when they’re self-conscious of their height. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair; an array of light freckles; white, clear skin.
We made pleasantries. It’s nice to meet you. How is your day going? Let’s do anything to circle around the fact that we’re both here, at this bar, because our mutual friend is dead.
“I’m going up to get a beer. Can I get you anything?”
“Just a water,” Jill said. “I don’t really drink.”
I’d asked Jill if she wanted to meet at a bar, and, like an asshole, had not even entertained the possibility that the stranger I was meeting up with could possibly be a nondrinker.
“I should have asked. Honestly, I’ve been trying to cut back too. We can go to a place for coffee instead if you’d like.”
“This is fine. Really. Also I don’t know what café would be open at nine p.m. around here.”
I ordered a beer and a water and returned to the table.
“I’ve actually never been to this bar before,” Jill said. “You can tell I don’t go out a lot. I picked it because it’s the closest one to my apartment. I didn’t expect it to be so…grunge-y.”
She waved her hand, ironically gesturing toward the bar’s interior as if it were a game show prize. It was a fake dive bar, deliberately disheveled to make the upper-middle-class patrons of Brooklyn feel more casual or whatever. But the bar was dirty. The floor was sticky with filth, foam peeking out of cracked barstools, gum caked the underside of every table. Jill and I were the only patrons. Maybe it was just early.
She came out with it.
“When you sent me the photo of Margo, I admit, I was kind of stunned. I had no idea she was black.”
“Well, my entire relationship with Margo was informed by how she saw the world as a black woman,” I said. It was surprising how that came out, the almost self-righteous tone of it. Part of me felt the need to assert that I’d known Margo better.
“We talked about certain kinds of personal stuff often, but we never really talked about race,” Jill said. “It didn’t come up.”
“So you just assumed she was white?”
“I did. Is that shitty?”
“It’s not. It’s just…”
Jill took a moment. Maybe she felt guilty. White people often did. She collected herself, then continued: “When you write a novel, you have this opportunity to describe your characters—physically describe them. So as you write, you make this conscious decision whether or not to define their race. Are they black? Asian? Latino? White?”
“I think if you don’t tell people, readers will just assume the character is white.”
“That’s true. And that’s something you have to reckon with. But also, when you don’t define what a person looks like, you let the reader decide.”
“So I could imagine the family in Adult Contemporary as Asian?”
“Oh, you read my book?”
“I did. Well, I’m halfway through. I started yesterday.”
“That’s so flattering.”
“I like it a lot.”
“Even more flattering.”
“But I imagined the family was white.”
“You don’t have to, though. There’s nothing in the book that says they’re white. I didn’t impose those rules on you. You’re free to believe the family looks however you want.”
“How did you imagine they looked when you wrote the book?”
“Well, white,” Jill said.
She pressed on: “So you read some of the conversations Margo and I had?”
“Just some of them,” I lied.
“Fuck, that’s…that’s weird.”
“Sorry, I didn’t—”
“No, it’s okay.”
I gave an unconvincing nod, followed by an even less convincing “uh-huh.”
“Before Margo and I met in real life, we were friends on a music forum.”
“Could you tell she was black?”
The question was uncomfortable, how bluntly she asked it. But to be fair, I was the one who’d started this conversation by using Margo’s race as evidence that I was the closer friend.
“Well, on that message board she also went by afronaut3000, so I just sort of assumed. It would be pretty embarrassing for, like, a white dude to go by afronaut.”
“I guess…I should have known from that.”
“Was that not a sign?”
“You never know online. It’s always a possibility. A lot of white guys like to represent themselves with avatars of anime girls.”
“That’s true. It’s one thing for white dudes to be into Asian women. But why disguise yourself online as one?”
“Oh, it makes perfect sense to me,” she said. “They love the stereotype of something small and cute and quiet.”
Then suddenly: “Were you and Margo dating?”
“No—” I was mid-sip and nearly choked, caught off guard. “No, no, no, no. We were just friends.”
“Defensive?”
“Not dating. Not at all.”
“Hmm, even more defensive.”
“I promise you, Margo and I were just friends.”
“But you were, like, in love with her?”
“It wasn’t like that. Not romantically, at least. Nothing ever happened.”
“Nothing happened. You were just madly, deeply in love with her. You could never say it because you were afraid it would spoil the friendship. But in your heart—”
“JUST. FRIENDS.”
I was shocked by how defensive I sounded. How could Jill understand the depth of the friendship Margo and I had? There was no way to explain to a stranger that the closeness we shared was something more meaningful than romantic intimacy. We’d first known each other as anonymous avatars. We’d connected as non-bodies. It almost made the i
dea of being in love sound frivolous.
But now I was shouting—at a perfectly pleasant person, no less—and it just made me unconvincing. I felt unconvincing. Maybe I was just fooling myself. I thought about the conversation I’d had with Margo when the dating site report had deemed black women unfuckable, and how much that had hurt her. Yet here I was, in a conversation with a white person, explaining how I did not want to sleep with a black woman.
“Okay okay, I’m teasing. I believe you.” Thankfully, Jill was not picking up on the levels of this. She was just having a good time. “It’s funny you got so worked up.”
“Thank you,” I said, pissed. “I’m glad this is working for someone.”
There was a pause, and I could tell Jill was building toward something. She took a long sip of water, then placed the glass back on the table. Then took another sip.
“Everything okay?”
“You mentioned in your message that she had been hit by a car, but I didn’t know if there was more to it.”
“It’s not even a story. It wasn’t dramatic so much as it was sudden. Margo was leaving a bar in Manhattan and a taxicab was speeding down the street and I’m pretty sure it was all in the obit I sent you…”
I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence, unable to make eye contact with Jill. I just stared down at my beer glass, which was nearly empty. All that was left was the last warm sip.
“Was she drunk?”
“Knowing Margo, almost definitely. But she’d been drunk many times before and not fucking died. So that just didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “There’s no way. There has to be more. Something else.”
I could feel a pain in my gut, a gut that was used to being furnished with more cheap beer than it had been recently. Jill looked uneasy.
“That is so fucking sad. So sudden. And she was, what, twenty-six?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five years old, Jesus.”
Jill stood up and went to the bar. She returned with another beer for me and a shot of tequila for herself.
“I thought you didn’t really drink,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said, a second before emptying the contents of the shot glass down her throat, standing up, and ordering a second.
* * *
—
A FEW DRINKS LATER, we were playing an arcade game that involved aiming an orange plastic shotgun at stiffly animated forest life—rabbit, deer, occasionally a moose. When they scurried by, you unloaded a digital blast of buckshot into them. Jill was having trouble coordinating the pump-action mechanics on the gun.
“Why can’t I murder this stupid moose?”
She was yelling. Also, surprisingly, the bar was crowded now. People had started trickling in as the hours passed (what time was it?). The music had gotten louder too, a deafening fury of distorted guitars on a heavy metal soundtrack (who listened to this?).
“You have to pump the gun to reload.”
“What?”
“Pump the gun to reload.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“If you want to keep shooting, you have to reload the gun.”
“This game sucks. I hate it.”
“Yeah, it’s really not fun.”
“Do you have any more quarters? I want to play again.”
I went up to the bar to get change. From my wallet, I fished out a twenty-dollar bill.
“Are you sure you want twenty dollars’ worth of quarters?” the bartender asked. “That’s, like, eighty quarters.”
“We’re going to play eighty more games of the stupid hunting game.” I laughed. “Also two whiskeys please.”
We did not play eighty more games. After a couple more attempts, Jill got frustrated. I gave the game a go, but found it hard to concentrate. It was overstimulating. There were animals everywhere, coming in from all angles of the screen. Every time I fired the gun, the game made a loud pop and the screen flashed, startling me. I had never gone hunting before, but wasn’t it supposed to be a quiet, solitary activity? This game was like shooting fish in a barrel, except all the fish were deer and annoying as hell.
Jill took the orange gun out of my hands and placed another quarter in the machine. The game began and she started shooting.
“I know it’s stupid to say this to someone who actually knew Margo in real life when I didn’t.” She sighed. “But I miss her.”
“I don’t think that’s a stupid thing to say.”
“It’s a stupid thing to say.” Jill shot at a rabbit and missed. “Margo and I spoke every day. She was by far the person I talked to the most for the past two years. And now she’s gone.” Jill shot at a buck. It didn’t go down.
“I spend all day by myself, trying to write.” She shot the buck again. The buck model flashed red, to illustrate that it had died. “And at least while I was alone in my apartment, I could talk to Margo.”
At the end of each round, all of the creatures you missed were also displayed with your score, as an incentive for you to play again. The moose trotted across the screen, still alive, as if to taunt Jill.
“Fucking moose. One day I will slay you.”
“You guys are very bad at this game.”
A man had approached us from behind. He was tall, white, dressed in flannel, a full beard—a handsome kind of disheveled that toed the line between deliberate and effortless, kind of like this bar. He didn’t look at me, only acknowledged Jill.
“I’ll have you know, sir, that I am very good at this game. Look, I just killed a rabbit and a deer.” Jill pointed at the screen, which still displayed her winnings.
“I’m not one to criticize a lady’s form, but I believe you’re holding the rifle wrong. You want the butt of the gun up against your shoulder. Here, let me show you.”
He moved in close to Jill, put his arm under hers to position the rifle. I was surprised that she didn’t immediately push him away.
“You seem like someone who’s played a lot of this arcade game,” Jill said.
“I’ve played all the Big Buck Hunter games,” he said. “There’s Big Buck Hunter: Shooter’s Challenge, Big Buck Hunter II: Sportsman’s Paradise, Big Buck Hunter: Call of the Wild, Big Buck Hunter Pro, and Big Buck Hunter Safari.”
“Is the idea here that you’re going to impress me by being good at Big Buck Hunter?”
“I could impress you in a lot of ways.”
Jill let out something between a groan and a cackle. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Dave.”
“Dave.” Jill took a step back and laughed. “Get the fuck out of here.”
* * *
—
EVENTUALLY, WE RETIRED TO two seats at the bar. Jill never got that moose.
The bartender did not love that I was paying for our next drinks in quarters, partly because, by this point of drunkenness, it took me forever to count them. But she was patient, if annoyed, and I appreciated that. I tipped her twelve quarters.
“I don’t think I’ve had this much to drink since college,” Jill said.
“You mentioned that a few times already.”
“Did I?” Jill laughed, amused by her own drunkenness. She was laughing a lot. So was I. I’d almost missed it.
“I’m not sure I’ve had this much fun since Margo died,” I admitted.
“Me neither,” Jill said. “Though I only found out she’d died, like, last week. And that her name is Margo.”
“How come you never asked about her real name?”
“A couple of times, I suggested we talk on the phone. Sometimes she would give me complicated or confusing notes on my story, and I said it might be easier to talk it through on a call. But she just further clarified by text. I don’t know. It seemed like she wanted our relationship to be where it was and how it was. And I
had to respect that. Although…”
“What?”
“We’d never met, and, at least on a few occasions, she tried to convince me to visit Tokyo with her. Like, she seemed obsessed with going to Japan. Did she talk about that with you?”
“Yes, it came up,” I said, which was partly true. Margo mentioned traveling to Tokyo, but never with me. I had other questions, though.
“Why was she helping you with your book?”
“I have no idea. I think about the hundreds of hours she spent helping me—reading pages, giving notes, talking through minute details. She should’ve asked me to pay her, really.”
“It’s okay. Margo was always fine on money.”
“Really? What did she do?”
“She was an engineer.”
“Like a coder?”
“Yeah, like a coder. A kind of exceptional one too. A goddamn genius—good at the nitty-gritty and the big picture. There wasn’t a thing she couldn’t figure out. Not everyone in the office liked her, but they all respected and admired her. She had a way of seeing the world for its composite parts. Everything could be broken down into systems, each with their own rules and consequences. I think engineering data architecture was effortless for her. It was so self-contained. But when she’d look at the world more broadly you could see her trying to piece it all together, but it was just too much at times. Systems of sexism, systems of racism, systems of social class, all interlocking and tugging at each other in different directions. And the engineer part of her brain couldn’t stop trying to understand and solve those things. Too much for one person.”
“Margo carried the weight of the world.”
“No one asked her to, though.”
“Was she…Did she seem happy?”
“Margo was too brilliant to be happy.”
“I know I only saw one small, narrow part of her, but the Margo I knew always seemed joyful.”
“I know she could be. She often was. But so many of the conversations we had were about systems of oppression, and rebelling against them. How could we not talk about that stuff all the time? We were surrounded by it.”