“Who also just fired you.”
“Yes.”
“And then tried to rehire you.”
“Yes.”
“To make himself not look as bad.”
“Yes.”
“Well okay then, as long we all have our eyes open here.”
Or: The instant the door clicks behind him, Suzanne wheels around to Eliza with her eyebrows raised as high as eyebrows can possibly go while remaining attached to a human face. “What the fuck?”
“Listen, he just showed up here! And like, I was already drinking, I am very tired. I didn’t have the energy to send him away.” She pauses. “Can you do it?” She hiccups.
“He’s still my boss! You do it!”
“But you’re—you, I dunno, you can always say anything you want and people thank you for it. How do you cultivate that superpower?”
“Why did he say he was here?”
“I think he thinks he’s protecting me? I think he feels bad.”
“Yeah, no shit, he has manufactured literally every situation you’ve found yourself hip deep in, at least all the ones in the last seventy-two hours.”
“Listen, if I keep him on the hook, I can get something out of this. If he keeps feeling like he made this bad, he’ll feel like he owes me.”
They both stop talking abruptly when Preston walks back in the door.
Or: The instant the door clicks behind him, Suzanne wheels around to Eliza with her eyebrows raised as high as eyebrows can possibly go while remaining attached to a human face. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know, it’s kinda sweet.”
“Sweet? He keeps showing up at your house unannounced!”
“Well you showed up at my apartment unannounced.”
“I didn’t fire you, did I?”
“Listen, I don’t super want to be alone when everyone knows my address. It’s like I can feel them watching me. It’s horrible.”
“No doubt, but like, he fired you. He’s my boss. Wait.” Suzanne puts her hands on her hips again. “You don’t like the guy, do you? Like, like like him?”
But before Eliza can answer, the door is creaking open. Instead of using words, she swats Suzanne on the arm.
“He knows,” Preston says. “He won’t send anyone up, not even a delivery guy.” He walks into the kind of silence that only exists after stumbling into a conversation about one’s own self. His eyes dart to each one of their faces and he holds his hands at his sides like they are rubber ducks taped onto wrist stumps: awkward, unmovable, weird. What does one do with rubber-duck hands? His feet want to shuffle, but they are as embarrassed as the rest of him. His eyes, having gone to all the reasonable places and found them embarrassing, settle on the ceiling.
“Anything interesting up there, buddy?” Suzanne asks, smirking smugly. Or she ribs, jokingly. She is mean, Suzanne. Or: She is sharp, Suzanne. Or: She is funny, Suzanne.
She’s a lot.
“I—er. I— Does anyone want a snack? I can make a snack!” He shoots into the kitchen, and glances, woeful, at the half wall that won’t hide him from the women in the living room.
“Well. I don’t like talking to pigs, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m calling the police,” Suzanne says.
“I didn’t want to,” Eliza protests. “It’s been—so much. Plus it’s only pizza. Japanese food.”
“From the looks of it, also Thai,” Preston says, looking out the window, frying pan in hand.
Suzanne’s smirk morphs into an openmouthed sneer. “You don’t have to call. I will. This shit is creepy.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
@theinspectre: do you want a pizza too, @yrface?
@theinspectre: @yrface i bet i can find you
@theinspectre: i havent yet, @yrface, but i will
Chapter Sixty
Suzanne: its like the police have never been on the internet
Suzanne: felt like they were two steps from asking me what a twitter was
Suzanne: the only reason they didn’t was, like, cnn puts our new presidents tweets on the news
Suzanne: never forget, the police are white nationalists. theres been studies
Suzanne: devonte?
Suzanne: you cant be asleep already its early
Suzanne: they wont take a report over the phone
Suzanne: they need her to come down to the precinct to do it
Devonte: sorry, feeling weird. like scattered.
Devonte: preaching to the choir re: white nationalists
Devonte: dont go tonight
Suzanne: well no shit
Suzanne: people showing up here in the dark
Suzanne: imma stay here, even
Devonte: ill meet you tomorrow we’ll do it tomorrow just, like, let me chill tonight
Suzanne: k
Chapter Sixty-One
Have we mentioned it is almost Christmas? Usually, Eliza loves Christmas, especially Christmas in New York City. Any other year, if she’d had a day free like this, she’d go for a walk in Central Park and pretend carriage horses weren’t being treated cruelly as she watched them clop by. She’d wear her fancy coat and a faux fur muff and she’d stroll about by herself, pretending to be in a different era. She’d maybe Instagram one photo for us and resist posting a million more of her beautiful day, her beautiful life.
She’d come out by the shops—look in the windows at Bergdorf Goodman, Saks. She’d go into Tiffany’s and lament that she didn’t have a reason to buy herself a necklace or a bracelet or something pretty. But she’d go in just the same because everything about the inside of Tiffany’s felt like Christmas, gilded with red-and-gold ribbon and smelling of pine. She’d pop into the glass cube Apple store and play on computers, installing things at the command line and futzing around, even before she’d taught herself to code in earnest. Coding is the closest thing to having magic. You know the right words and you can make things happen. (That’s what she used to think; so naive.) Perhaps she’d buy Christmas gifts. Perhaps she’d buy one for herself.
Today, though, we find her filing a police report instead of doing any of that. Preston leaves in the early hours to go home, shower and get dressed for work. Eliza is surprised he doesn’t want to come to the police station, given how insistent he was the night before. But she realizes with a jolt that he can’t be seen missing work to file a police report with her, and certainly not this early in the morning. It dawns on her, slow, like the coffee is kicking in sluggish: no one can know he spent the night. No one who doesn’t already, at least.
Devonte shows up with bags under his eyes, something ill or haunted in his face.
Suzanne hasn’t looked at him but two seconds before she asks, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Eliza says. “Shouldn’t you both be at work?” She hasn’t eaten breakfast, barely slept for a second. Preston had been there, hot as a space heater or a napping dog. Eliza stared into the darkness, wondering what Suzanne was thinking on her couch. She’d spent the long hours wishing desperately for a baseball bat.
“I called in sick,” he says, and he puts air quotes around it. It’s not as though they won’t know where he actually is. It’s not as though we don’t know where he actually is.
While Eliza talks to the receptionist, or whatever one calls the officer who sits at the front desk of a police station, Suzanne pulls Devonte aside. Eliza is aware of it, but dimly. Background noise in comparison.
“Your person?” she asks. “Your hacker?” She drops her volume so the word “hacker” is mouthed.
Devonte sets his mouth in a line so severe his lips all but disappear. He shakes his head. “Won’t help.”
Suzanne tilts her head to the side but doesn’t press, not here. They turn their attention to the thick, bald police officer with a tattoo of New York State on his neck. “But do we know where they are? Do we have physical locations for these people?”
“No, they’re sendin
g me messages on Twitter.” Eliza hands over printed screenshots. “This one says he wants to behead me.” She points to the paper as his eyebrows furrow. “This one says he wants to post an ad on Craigslist asking someone to come rape me.”
“Do we know who these people are?” the police officer asks, his face puckering up like he’s bitten a lemon. “These look like fake names. Who is actually harassing you?”
“I don’t know what their names are in real life, Officer”—she squints at his name, the tag printed clean and rigid on his left breast pocket—“Hunt. These are screennames.”
“We would need names, at the very least, to file a report.”
“What about a phone number?” Devonte pipes up from behind Eliza. “She has a phone number too.”
“These people have called you?” Officer Hunt is interested, leans forward. “What did they say?”
“They left me a recording of ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away.’”
“Is that another internet thing?” Officer Hunt asks, his eyes unfocusing and staring at the wall behind Eliza.
“No. It’s a song. Do you want to hear it? I haven’t deleted any of them.”
Eliza pulls out her phone and plays a few bars, listening to the voice rise in pitch like it’s filled with helium. Goosebumps erupt on her skin. The word for that, we know, is “horripilate.” The erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear or excitement. Which is it, Eliza? We want to know. She taps the pause button on her phone.
Officer Hunt shakes his head. “We don’t know what that means. It’s creepy as fuck—pardon my French, ladies—but technically not a threat.”
“But it is!” Suzanne can’t keep silent anymore. “She told me on G-chat that the song freaks her out. It’s a threat.”
“What’s G-chat?”
Suzanne purses her lips, tries to lock a sigh inside her lest it escape and ruin the chances for a police report. “It’s an online chatting service. You type to each other and have a conversation. It’s not public, not like Twitter. He hacked into her account and got the conversation—”
But the officer shakes his head again. “It doesn’t directly threaten her. Listen,” he says. “You can file a police report right now, this stuff is harassment regardless. But with an unknown perpetrator we’ll have to close the report right away.”
So she does. Eliza fills out every piece of paperwork they give her. Devonte runs to the bathroom to splash water on his face—he hasn’t slept well, and he is tired. Suzanne types on her phone, her fingers moving frenetically, bumping letters and numbers she doesn’t intend. “How to track phone.” Or, “how to track phone number only.” Or, “how to hack.” Or, “how to exorcise spectres.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
Preston goes to work on Sunday as if he isn’t familiar with Eliza’s plight or her body or her apartment mess. He knows calling in sick isn’t an option, and that if everyone is working overtime, he must do the same. Christmas is coming, and the already-established marketing plan for the holiday season needs to be changed in response to the situation. And there’s Brandon’s personal investigation of who leaked the records. And, of course, the Vive. We suspect that, with all else going on, virtual reality is an afterthought for Preston, but certainly not for Fancy Dog. It is finally settling down—more and more of us are posting play-throughs, videos, reviews of Guilds of the Protectorate on Vive as the beta list grows and grows—Eliza is no longer the only press Fancy Dog is getting. It only took a few days to catch up. The verdict is in: we love it. It’s amazing. All the locomotion problems somehow smoothly solved. Those who can fly feel like they’re flying; those who run at superspeed watch the world blur by; those who shape-shift change size and height and perspective. It is, in short, creation. A whole new world, a whole new plane of existence.
What’s insane, truly, and all of us agree on this, is that life—human existence—is completely different after the Vive announcement; everything. And that’s not an exaggeration. Perhaps people in the larger world, the “real” world, don’t think so because it’s a game. But we are literally seeing another planet created. It’s like Aslan making Narnia over here. We cannot stress enough how important this is. And how strange it is to be watching anything else. But it is the human way to stare at strife, to speculate and construct and talk until we could take off with the buoyancy of our own hot air. But we digress. And see how strange it is to consider what is perhaps the biggest game changer of the decade, of the century, a digression. The small versus the big; human drama versus history made.
Preston Instagrams the erroneous name on his Starbucks coffee cup—Peter—with the comment, “I come here literally every day. Sometimes twice or three times. #theyrefuckingwithusonpurpose.” He thinks he is pretty funny and is smiling when he walks into his glass office. When he finds Brandon sitting in a chair by the window, his smile evaporates. We should come up with a different word. “Evaporates” sounds like something gradual. This is instantaneous—a smile, then not-a-smile. Binary.
“The investigation’s finished. You aren’t going to like it,” Brandon says.
“I know I’m not going to like it. It doesn’t matter who it is, it’s internal, it’s one of my—” He stops his sentence short, eyeing his glass wall. He frowns. “Perhaps we should go somewhere else to talk about this.”
Brandon’s mouth jumps to one side. He is so twitchy. It’s no wonder his hair is grey. “Why?”
“People tend to—know things. After I talk about them in here.”
“So? Let them know. Transparency.” Brandon pauses and clears his throat. “Besides, they’ll know soon enough anyway.”
“Just let me get coffee in my mouth, okay? Don’t fuck over my day yet, it’s too early.” Preston does his best to slow down and sip coffee, to breathe, to let the tension out of his face. But Brandon doesn’t look out the window or leave the office, as would be the polite response to Preston’s request. He focuses his eyes directly on his co-founder and drums the windowsill with his fingers, one at a time. It makes Preston jumpy. Jumpier.
Brandon didn’t use to be like this. He used to be fun. Shy, quiet, sure, but still a person who could drink a PBR in a seven-person-college-house garage, fantasizing about what his future would be and arguing the finer points of digital narrative, game design. He used to be the kind of friend Preston could rustle up with a minute’s notice, knock on his door at any time and propose anything, from lunch at the university student center to starting an entire, world-changing company. And Brandon, a person who gets things done, would smile and put a paperback book in his back jeans pocket, and say, “I’m down. Let’s go.” Calm. Collected. Optimistic. An easy smile and forward momentum at a steady pace. Now he’s a butt.
Preston finally turns toward Brandon, unable to finish his coffee. It is close enough. “Okay. Who is it?”
“One of your developers. One of your favorites. We found the files on his computer. Didn’t even delete them.” Brandon smirks. “Didn’t even make it hard for me. I thought I was going to be here all night. Hell, all week. I thought, we have a company full of computer people here, but I suppose they’re just as dumb as us business boys.”
He slides a folder across Preston’s desk. Preston looks down at the manila tab. The name on the folder, as we have guessed, is Jean-Pascale Desfrappes.
Chapter Sixty-Three
It’s Sunday, the day of Eliza’s appearance on Last Week Tonight. And she is nervous. She hasn’t slept at all—is being destroyed by an internet mob really as newsworthy as making a game or writing a book? she wonders. She’s just been shat on pretty hard by the internet; she knows it might be interesting, but it feels strange to her. Upsetting on top of upsetting. John Oliver, or his producers, know about our obsession with this drama, want to feed it. Our appetite, a hunger, to lay eyes on her, to hear her words, to laud her or rip her apart in response; we will shred her. The buzz is out: Gamergate, the harbinger of American “fascism.” Lol. We are now a sought-after demographi
c, and in turn, so is she, this antagonist. It almost doesn’t matter what she says; it almost doesn’t matter what we think of her. What we want is to put our eyes on her, to possess her, to be involved. We want to know everything. And everyone wants to know everything about us.
More than a few times she wonders if John Oliver is going to make fun of her—he is a comedian, after all. His entire show is satire. Is her situation funny? She still can’t access her bank account. No one can email her. The Tumblr with photoshopped pornography continues to multiply like worms, reblog after reblog, while Tumblr takes its time to decide if it violates anything. So far, the company hasn’t taken it down. Is this funny ha-ha? Is this funny in the sense we (humans, not us specifically) make better zoo subjects than animals, with our messy contradictions and our mistakes? Eliza doesn’t know. But she is pretty certain that if she doesn’t do something about all this, she’ll crumple into a ball and do nothing forever. So Last Week Tonight it is.
Chapter Sixty-Four
This is what Jean-Pascale looks like after getting fired from his dream job: his nose is swollen, his eyes still bruised from falling face-first to the floor earlier in the week. He comes home and lies down in bed, a deflated version of his former self. He doesn’t bother to turn on the lights; he doesn’t have the oomph to get up and pull the shades down. He doesn’t take his clothes off. He doesn’t get under the covers. Instead, he lies there on his back as the light changes in the room hour by hour. Different shadows grow to monstrous sizes and shrink, their reign of terror over. Squares of light from the windows morph shapes on the walls as his watch clicks softly from his wrist, a metronome for his mourning. He wonders why he still has a watch—he just looks at his phone anyway, he can’t remember the last time he’d shaken his sleeve off his wrist to look at the time. It occurs to him that everyone does that—an entire generation has reverted to pocket watches.
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